For me personally genderlocking is not the problem. I do mostly Play female and male chars. What I do not like is, that often a genderlock to male also means a kind of romance Lock. Either there is no romance or you can only romance females.
Every author has the right to write what they like, but readers follow that guide too, they read what they like. So as long as I know before I read the game that it is genderlocked, I can decide properly, If I want to play it.
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Force? Well its not like authors or the company force you to play a game, for example when the drag queen game was released i really dont liked the idea of buy it or play it, so i didnt, we can choose what games we want to play, no one is forcing you to play them, if your story is well written i dont see any problem if the MC is a female to be honest.
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I agree with you. Admittedly playing as male isn’t my cup of tea so I just keep away from games like the Infinity series. It’s not like @Cataphrak would come and actually force me to play his game so while I shared my opinion here, I don’t see the point in going to camplain about the genderlock at the playstore reviews and give a poor rating bc of that. And looking at the reviews it seems people keep the same attitude when it comes to male genderlocked games hence why it annoys me as hell that people aren’t as respectful when it comes to female or non-binary (is there even a nb genderlocked game? Well if there were I’m sure people would get whiny about that too) genderlock.
Edit: Also another thing about gednerlocking what I’m not a fan of regardless of the genderlock is when the reason the author gives is something like “I’m a man so I don’t know how to write women” or vice-versa. Then how do these people write female NPCs? Also it’s not like they have actual first hand experience with supernatural forces, space travel, mediavel era etc., how do they write that? So if that’s all the reasoning they give then it just falls flat.
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Do these reviews come from forum goers or from non-forum goers?
Idk. Probably non forum goers. But imo a genderlock doesn’t justify a one star review if otherwise the writing would be good (taking off one or two stars would be enough to make their point). Also if something isn’t to your liking bc of such obvious reasons than there is always the option to just walk away and look for something closer to your interests. And once again I’d emphasize that strangely enough I only saw them on female genderlocked games review page but never on those with a male genderlock.
Edit: Also back to the cons of genderlock @Kaelyn makes a good point about how those games tend to be more heteronormative than those with a genderchoice, looking at you The Courting of Miss Bennett (I still believe at least one female RO, that friend of Elizabeth whose name I forgot, could have been worked in).
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I’m not surprised if that’s the case. Ah well. You do you and all that, as the saying goes.
I do agree with Kaelyn as well.
Gender locking on its own doesn’t seem like a bad thing unless the author gives a reason that isn’t well received. Subsequently, sexuality/romance locking the game would obviously be a big no-no since its a cornerstone of the company brand that you can play as other sexualities, besides straight.
It’s why Bioware got so popular, after all. That’s ignoring the Anthem sized elephant in the room, however. 
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I think it’s the companies choice too if they allow games with straight only romances under the HG brand. I’m sure those games weren’t added to the HG repertoire while tricking the CoG staff claiming it has more than that. At least we know we won’t be disapointed this way if we download a game released under the CoG brand.
About Bioware it’s great they try, but they still have a long way to go until it can actually be said that both straight and gay players are treated the same way… Tho I guess that surely isn’t easy with straight (mostly guys) whining about every scrap of inclusivness for gay players. Uhh… I guess this is what you meant under the “elephant in the room”.
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Oh, I wasn’t referring to the official company policy when I said that.
I was referring to how it’s a marketing cornerstone since pretty much every game’s starting bullet point is “Play as gay, straight, bisexual, etc. etc.”.
And the elephant I was referring to was Anthem, the game. Bioware announced that there would be no romances for this FPS and a huge chunk of Bioware’s LGB fanbase jumped ship to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey as a result.
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Oh, my bad. I’m not that familiar with the really new Bioware games or their release plans. Sorry.
About the marketing line. I think those games with sexuality locking don’t have that line in their description so there is some clue.
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Hmm. Interesting. I’ve never noticed that before.
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(I can’t speak for everyone, but I can tell you my experience)
In novel form, I’ve done female protagonists, as well as female “NPCs” (I’m male). I’ve done romance/sex-scenes with/for those protagonists too. Apparently (I’m told) I did okay. However, I had far less confidence that I had done so (before I was told) than I would have done with male protagonists.
I think I am saying … be gentle. While I appreciate readers have the right not to read, there is nothing to read if nobody writes.
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I still stand by my opinion. Even if you’d say the setting you have would make it hard and add a lot of extra work to include a female protagonist (going by my before used example the Infinity series I guess including a female MC would mean writing about how MC is crossdressing or something and more work than a simple pronoun change so in the end it’s up the author if they want to go that extra mile) would be better explanation than “I’m excluding players bc I don’t understand them”. Once again that reasoning would make me question how well some NPCs would be done by that author.
Also if you aren’t confident you could always do some research or/and ask some people of the gender you don’t fully understand to test read your game.
If an author says something like I don’t write [insert gender] protagonist bc I’m [insert opposite gender] than it comes off to me as simply too lazy to even try to understand others and going about it the rude way.
Also I think the author and the readers need eachother, unless the author is writing purely for their own fun but then what’s the point in sharing their work?
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So before we swerve off topic, I think your onto something @Cari-san.
Particularly, the reasons why the author would try and justify a gender lock. Some are kind of dumb and others aren’t so dumb.
I do disagree with your last sentence however. If the author is enjoying writing their story, well… then laughter is contagious, as the saying goes. You can’t please everybody and I don’t think there’s anything wrong about writing for pure enjoyment (hey, that’s what fan fiction is for) and then sharing that fun with others.
Sure, not everyone will like it, but who cares about them? Live and let live. People will always find something to complain about before they move onto the next thing to complain about. Don’t tie yourself in knots of stuff like that.
I believe I can understand where @KickinTyres is coming from. It is intimidating writing new things and it can be incredibly discouraging if your first attempt is met with figurative boo’ing and ‘get off the stage’ rhetoric.
Speaking from my own learning curve, Tyre? My advice would be to just write the character’s personality first. Don’t even think about their sex. Save that for last. Once you’ve got a personality down, then roll out a dice and let chance decide what sex the characters going to be. Or any other nitty gritty detail like ethnicity, sexuality, etc.
And if you’re worried about turning your characters into stereotypes, then pay a visit to TVTropes and look at what not to do. Or, like Cari suggested, ask others for advice about what you should avoid doing in the context of your story.
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Lazy and rude? That seems unnecessarily harsh. I would argue anyone who decided to genderlock their story owes no one any explanation at all. It’s their decision, it’s not required, and that should be the end of it. If you as a reader find that insufficient, you always have the option not to partake. You can and probably should make it known that the somewhat ill-advised decision to genderlock was a factor in that decision. But only in a polite fashion, and once you’ve done so it’s time to step away.
The research thing always struck me as an odd argument; people are primarily writing these for fun and non-monetary personal enrichment. Especially if they’ve decided to genderlock, since we already know in most cases that means monetary enrichment sure as heck isn’t likely to be forthcoming. If research into writing from other viewpoints is actually considered as a prerequisite for doing a story, that can turn it into the exact sort of drudgery authors might well be using their writing to escape from in the first place.
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What I meant that even those writers who go all “you can go read something else if you don’t like my work” are somewhat curious of what the readers opinion is about their work or they wouldn’t share it in the first place. You can’t jist say readers would have nothing to read if noone writes bc while that’s true I guess, the author also wouldn’t be better off if noone would read their work, especially those who do the writing for money.
Let me argue against just this one. If authors would write these for non-monetary porposes then we wouldn’t pay for these games right? Or we’d pay for the company which releases it and the author would get none of it? I get that it isn’t that much what authors get out of these, assuming based on how most authors have other jobs beside writing, but still that little amount is more than nothing.
My assumption is that the trick is the balance between writing for the authors own enjoyment so they wouldn’t lose the passion midwork and pleasing at least some readers.
An author is never going to be a wizard, or the son of a dark lord, or a dragon rider, but that’s never stopped writers from exploring those protagonists before. Yet the excuse that (generally) many cis-male authors give for never writing a female protagonist is because “I have trouble writing women.” And that definitely feels like a cop-out when there’s tons of resources out there, and in this case, an entire forum of people willing to correct your missteps.
I just really think that any author who doesn’t feel comfortable writing women or other minorities, but might feel more comfortable writing a 900 year old space wizard, or the world’s greatest spy, or even as an actual alien not of this Earth, needs to think very deeply and examine why that is.
4000 years ago, someone sent in this complaint. Even with that distance in time, their thoughts and feelings are relatable and understandable; if even time can’t stop you from relating to this long dead person, then why is gender such an obstacle?
Your fellow humans are not so different from you as to make them unknowable, you need only take the time to recognize them for what they are: you, slightly different, but fundamentally the same.
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It’s funny you should mention this because when I started writing, I really was under the impression that I didn’t understand women well enough to write them (which partially explains the almost complete lack of them in Sabres of Infinity). That was something I’ve worked through over the past few years, and hopefully, something I’ve gotten better at.
I’m monitoring a lot of the discourse around this topic carefully, especially in regards to genderlocking a story to a female MC because that’s actually something I plan on doing in the intermediate future. If anything, the sort of double-standard I see in regards to how genderlocked male stories get more a free pass than genderlocked female ones makes me think that it’s more important that they be written and accepted in the IF space.
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Just shut up and take my free time!
[insert fry.jpg]
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That actually kind of confuses me. From literally every comment on the forum, I’ve seen, it’s pretty much that if a game has a female mc, it’s fine, but not if its a male mc.
Not trying to go after anyone here, just saying that I haven’t actually seen much evidence of this. Like, pretty much everything points to the opposite.
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It depends on the audience.
Forum goers object to male locked stories for a multitude of reasons.
Step outside the forum culture and you’ll see the exact opposite reaction. Pretty much everyone objects to locking a game to a sex besides male.
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