How much control do you prefer over your character's background?

General
41

Oh, stop it, Tech. :sweat:

From my understanding, intersex refers to biological gender.
Non-binary refers to gender identity.

(Someone, correct me if I’m wrong.)

Hermaphrodite refers to an organism that is both fully male and female by biological definition.
Intersex refers to a person or organism that is ambiguous by biological definition.

Intersex is a general term that can relate to various conditions and is now used as the non-discriminatory alternative to “hermaphrodite."

(Again, someone correct me if I’m wrong.)

I can understand if you didn’t know that the term “hermaphrodite” is offensive.
We all make mistakes, even at our best.

But, please, don’t defend your use of offensive language.
A little apology will make a big difference, and you’ll be on your way.

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42

@pyla8 Again, I don’t want to derail the discussion - especially since I think this is a very helpful topic for writers - but I find your assertions to be biased and most probably Americentric. However, it is clear that neither of us is likely to change their mind and any further dialogue would surely only lead to discord so let’s just leave it be as cordial disagreement.

43

True. It does get a little confusing but it’s nice when a writer knows that there may be people outside the binary playing their games. Representation is important when you’re making games I guess, mainly it makes your players feel included and also it can attract others to play if you’re into using it to attract them.

Plus, it’s nice to play a game where you are included.

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44

Yeah, even if something doesn’t seem like it will matter, I way overthink options. I can get stuck filling in the perfect name. Which is my problem, but if it turns out that what tattoo I got is irrelevant, I get annoyed about why they asked.

45

I think I’m going to change my answer to benefit the thread and diversify. I want no choice as to my character, just for one game. I was zero custimazation because every game here has at least some. It would be neat to see a game randomly generate a character for the player, and see how they do.

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46

Personally, I think that extensive customisation draws from pc games where you can actually see your character, and therefore any markings like tattoos are visible. Of course choicescript games, most of them being text only are a completely different matter.

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47

I can think of one game like that: Alter Ego, although it’s less of a game than it is an educational sim. Good luck if you happen to be born as a female in an economically disadvantaged country, and there’s always the chance that you’ll get eaten by wolves or something right after your birth. It can get pretty depressing, but it’s still stupidly funny to play.

48

Also, thank you (again) for the replies! To be honest, I wasn’t too sure about adding aesthetic options, but I like the ideas that have been thrown out a lot and I’m going to do my best to incorporate them in. Perhaps certain physical characteristics could help the player disguise themselves as another character, or even, like others have said, small changes to the story, like scars being received or limbs or long hair being lost in particularly grueling battles.

One thing I’ve intended to add from the start is tattoos, though. I’m obsessed with tattoos in general, and in the (still pretty crude) system of magic I was thinking of, tattoos could be used as power-enhancing bits of magic or summoning seals-- or you can just get them for decoration, if you like! So they will definitely be an important part of the game.

As for the discussion of gender and sexuality options in CoGs, I agree that adding the option for non-binary identities are an important part of immersion, which of course is the point of any interactive fiction. One of the things that drew me to CoG is the inclusiveness of its games; in a video game culture dominated by heterosexual cisgender macho man archetypes, it’s nice to get to play as a gender and/or sexual minority, and to customize whichever character I’m playing to a comfortable degree, instead of being railroaded into a certain character type.

Despite identifying as LGBT, however, I’m admittedly still uneducated on a lot of topics concerning gender identity, and my biggest concern is adding these to the story without accidentally offending anyone. (My second biggest concern is making sure the coding is consistently grammatically correct, so other characters don’t refer to you with “They is standing over there”.)

Whew! Sorry for the long post, but I tried to address as much of the thread as possible. Also, on an unrelated note: I’m currently dorking out over Monster High, @Sashira; can’t wait to see where you go with it!

tl;dr: Thank you all for replying, and hooray for game inclusiveness!

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49

@Alopax, I actually used to have that game. Sure I never played through the whole thing, but I thought it gave you a choose over gender, and I don’t remember ever being eaten by a wolf

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50

I thought Alter Ego you did get to choose your path. I was wondering if you meant Real Lives? http://www.educationalsimulations.com/ I also downloaded some ‘game’ fairly recently that was similarish if extremely simplified, it created these random characters using world wide statistics, you got a few points to boost their stats and generally they’d die in poverty only I can’t remember it’s name.

I love the idea of a character with tattoos that works as some sort of magic system. However, that also seems something that’d be very visual-based. I suppose if you have a character description on the stats screen, or just a list of the tattoos and what they do it would serve a similar purpose.

The coding on gender issues likely won’t be as much difficulty as you think. Since games are written in second person, it generally doesn’t come up. And you can easily write around it anyway I’m sure if on the off chance it does. There’s a fair amount of games where your gender is never mentioned at all.

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51

Whoops, you’re right-- I always get the two mixed up. But yes, Real Lives is somewhat more realistic, although I remember a specific instance where I was orphaned at like four years old and the game was urging me to get a job and a house despite not allowing me to do either since I was, you know, four years old.

@FairyGodfeather, I think I’ve played something similar to that, but I can’t remember the name either. Do you remember where you first found it?

I was thinking of doing a short biography in the stats screen that would describe the attributes of the player character and specific things they’ve accomplished in the story; for example, something like “You are an alchemist currently living in X Town. You have a seal tattooed on your forearm you can use to summon John Cena. After leaving your hometown you defeated a dragon and took his treasure. Then you met John Cena.”

(You can’t actually use a summoning seal for John Cena. Everyone knows you invoke him by chanting the lyrics to a New Titantron song.)

And yes, I think I’m going to be a bit lazy with gender coding and have NPCs use gendered pronouns in reference to the player as little as possible. Although I think if I just change “(s)he is” and “(s)he was” to “they are” and “they were” I’ll probably be okay on the grammatical issue.

Also, sorry for the late reply; Internet’s sucky where I am.

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52

@Alopax Aha! My tablet actually keeps a record of games I’d previously played even though I removed them. The game’s Privileged Privileged

Heh. :slight_smile: I had to google who John Cena was but that still sounded awesome.

And no problem.

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53

If it affects the game and how NPC’s interact with you, then I’d like to choose everything from gender to background and family roots. But I do not care for choosing my name for some reason. But if it doesn’t change anything in the game aside from the people calling you Sir or Ma’am, then I’m fine with anything. And on the non-binary thing, despite myself fitting into the classic separation of Male and Female, a third option helps appeal to more people, even if they are in the minority.

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54 
 Ideally, a lot of background customization that heavily influences the story would be great. For example, if the player could choose from having both parents or a single parent, their relationship and job, a single parent who is a neglectful drug dealer would respond differently from involved parents with succesful jobs. However, this would require writing multiple versions of the parents and having them all fleshed out which would be harder on the writer.
 
 Realistically, it may be easiee to give the player a short list of premade background options that impact the stats. For example, a drug dealing family would increase street smarts while a CEO family would increase wealth.

 I don't like predefined characters if the character is not someone I relate with. It would be fine if you made the MC an orphan or chose general family that was necessary for the story, but I like to choose my personality and gender. If I had to be a paladin, realistically there are some things I shouldn't do or it would be out of character. It breaks my immersion when a game tells me how I feel about a situation and that is not how I feel. I would feel conflicted if I was given a husband/wife/ bf/gf , and I wanted to persue someone else because I wouldn't want to be a cheater. More choices made by the player is better.
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55

Tin Star did something like that. I loved it. If you think you can pull it off, it sounds like a great idea. As for pronouns, if you set these:
${pronoun_contraction}
${pronoun}
${possessive_pronoun}
${direct_pronoun}
then you can switch directly from “She’s getting away!” to “They’re getting away!” with one set of curly braces.

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56

Sorry to interrupt, but the pronoun thing is something I find myself struggling with as well. I don’t think I fully understand what you mean by using curly brackets? Could maybe give a practical example of code, if it’s not too much trouble?

57

Re: background, I think it’s fine to do a pre-defined background. What you can make variable is how people react to their past and history. Maybe they’re proud of being the noble war hero, maybe they’re ashamed of all the lives they lost, maybe they played dirty and people whisper about their ruthless nature. Same background, different handling of the events.

See, I don’t see that as a problem. Here’s why.

Once upon a time, SwanMaiden was a little girl playing Pokemon games. It didn’t matter if the main character was male or female, but for a while, the character was always male. And while that was disappointing, it was okay maybe, videogames tended to have male protagonists. Then one day Pokemon Crystal came out with an option to be female, and IT WAS THE BEST FEELING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

If you’ve never had your identity excluded from the videogame world, I can imagine you’ve never had that feeling, that finally someone was acknowledging you play videogames and enjoy them just like everyone else. That’s why I am very pro-inclusive options. Sure it’s arguably more work, but if it means someone gets to have that moment of AMAZING FEELINGs, even if it’s just one someone, then it’s work worth doing.

PS: Shout-out to @bagelthief and @Sashira for being amazing and generous with their advice and time in that regard.

8 Likes
58

I have no problems with being given an entirely fixed character, and being told to get on with it. That being said, I do appreciate some customisation options, PROVIDED they have an impact on the story. If I choose a particular past, and that means some small shuffle to my stats combined with an appearance by a character from that past, then great, I really enjoy that. I’m totally uninterested in physical customisations like hair colour - I prefer to leave those to my imagination.

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59

@SwanMaiden Since the gender of a pokemon trainer doesn’t matter for the plot or their abilities or how other characters treat them, I think it was a bad idea to not include a female option in the early games, but that’s not what I’ve been referring to.

My point was that in some games, a genderlock is justified while a freely selectable gender for the MC would have been inappropriate. @jeantown has explained the reasons for it here, and I agree with her.

What you’ve pointed at is the problem that genderlocked MC far too often means male MC. Hosted games is not an exception: there are 6 released games and some WIPs with a genderlocked male MC but only two WIPs with a female MC, and none with an always non-binary MC. I hope there would be more games with an non-male genderlocked MC, both on hosted games and in general.

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61

First you have to create the variable in startup. Let’s call it “pronoun”; this one will fill in the proper term for he/she/they/etc.

*create pronoun “unknown”

Then, once you set the gender of the character, send it to a bit of code that defines the pronouns (I use a gosub, so I can send every male character to the male set of pronouns, and so on.)

(Max has just been defined as male)
*gosub male_pronouns

(Joe has just been defined as male)
*gosub male_pronouns

Then the gosub bit looks like this:
*label male_pronouns
*set pronoun “he”
*return

Then when you want to refer to Max later, use curly brackets and a dollar sign to fill in the pronoun you set. An extra exclamation point capitalizes it.

Max is a bully; {pronoun} never thinks about other people. !{pronoun} is a jerk.

Here are a few other pronoun variables to set (create in startup, set under a gosub):

  • possessive pronoun - e.g. his/her/their
  • direct pronoun - e.g. him/her/them
  • pronoun contraction - e.g. he’s, she’s, they’re

Add more as needed.

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