Introducing gender (especially RO gender) organically

Game Development Writing and Content
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Personally, I’ve always found myself slightly pulled out of immersion when I choose the gender of all ROs at the beginning of the game or when they align to my sexuality automatically because it feels like I’m twisting the world to my perception and (sometimes arbitrary) preferences–which, I mean, I am. Randomization of gender or gender-locking can fix this problem, but it can also create the additional problem of potentially no interesting RO who is available for the player’s sexuality/the best ROs not being available for the player’s sexuality, and it is still a game meant to be about player choice.

I take small issue with choosing the gender of ROs in game too, but mainly because in practice that usually means choosing what you notice about them, whether they are masculine oriented, feminine oriented or androgynous which is synonymous for non-binary in that case out of pure necessity. While it is more organic in the sense that, upon meeting someone, we would be able to notice how they present themselves and/or how their facial features and body shape appears, it is still a somewhat exclusive and unrealistic approach for a number of reasons. A. It completely ignores that presentation and/or sex-based physical characteristics does not equal gender. B. It completely ignores that androgynous does not equal non-binary and that not all non-binary people will present themselves in a “neutral” fashion. And C. In no way would we actually be able to read the mind and heart of people we meet and pick out who is cisgender, non-binary, trans or anything else by sight alone.

That said, I also can’t think of a hypothetical satisfying solution to this quagmire if there even is one. And from my experiences in reading IF, it puzzles many others too assuming the issue came up for them. So the question is, how do you think IF games could introduce gender in an organic, confirming manner without completely enforcing pre-assumption upon the characters, forcing all the ROs to conform to player sexuality from the get go or randomizing/genderlocking all ROs? Is there a way at all? Are there examples you can think of where authors weaved RO gender into the choices and narration artfully? Any general thoughts?

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Player Choice or Preference =/= Quality Character (interesting RO) =/= Gender Presentation. Scales with Gender Presentation.

It’s like that artists’ triangle on cost, quality, and time.

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I honestly have little idea what this comment is communicating. Could you explain it in a different way because I’m having trouble grasping it as is? It might be the lack of sleep.

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I received quite a bit of positive feedback for how I handled this stuff in my games so far (I think I could do better, though)

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Your WIP is the only one, where I played as genderfluid, I liked the option to decide in a daily basis If it was a she or he day.

I must admit that in my own writing I tend to @Szaal 's solution. I am coder first so I stick to the easier solution, because that causes less programming or writing.

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I think what @Szaal was trying to communicate here is that a player’s preference on a character’s gender should not affect the quality of a character (and nor does it equal to gender presentation since gender presentation probably isn’t a focus of the game if it has gender-variable characters) and I think that’s pretty true.

I do understand your small issues with gender-variable characters, I prefer my characters to have fixed genders as well (but mainly because it reduces the coding and other reasons).

EDIT: Grammatical errors

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Well, if that is the case, I definitely agree. But quality of the character isn’t my issue. A character should be written well, that’s a given! I also did mention that gender presentation does not equal gender. :smiley: But how to establish said character’s gender in a non-contrived or artificial manner? That one’s a bit tougher.

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I think big deal of the problem is perceived roles and cultures. If I say for instance a nurse has attended you in the infirmary 99% population will expect a woman.

If I say a Old general will hear your request of aid for your village 99% would adress to the grumpy old man in the room.

Players have expectations. And that goes in so many yarring gender asking games. Even if being fair that is being solved and is not so horrible as it used to be.

I remember a wip that if you choose being a female you directly was adressed as PRINCESS EVERYTHING WAS PINK and you have to go buy groceries with mom like a good girl…

I have the luck in my game that you and your companion are Androids that can be change to appear gender humans but they are by creation Agender. So change gender is fluid you can change from mission to mission however, with time you can feel that you really are X opossed to Y or NB… or still being agender or fluid.

In my opinion, is easier to do when you are Pc alien or Android. With humans… The cultural heritage and patriarchy messed up with something should be organic.

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Thank you for responding. I was just trying to communicate what I think Szaal meant, it wasn’t exactly a direct response to your post.

I feel like there may be no sure-fire way of guaranteeing a perfectly natural way of selecting the genders of characters. Because the player will mostly be aware that they are directly modifying characters, it is likely that maybe gender-variable features are artificial at its core (and also for some of the reasons shown by @poison_mara), but they hardly ever feel contrived though.

I can’t exactly give a full solution, but I can at the very least offer a few and point out other problems.

The most natural way of assigning genders to gender-variable characters (at least for me) is like in Psy High, wherein the genders are determined by the player’s orientation (opposite gender if straight, same gender if gay/lesbian, randomized/selected if bisexual, etc.)

However, it may make the cast of a story feel… weird. Like, a male + straight player could question the game why all /most of their friends are girls? Why can’t he have any bros? This can be resolved by having a few fixed characters in your cast or by having a strong and diverse “supporting cast” (I guess?) or “non-RO cast” though.

An author can also allow the player to select the characters/randomize them (kinda like Creme de la Creme). In which case, I think the wording and descriptions regarding those characters is the key to making it less artificial. Simpy wording the choices like “his hair is black/her hair is black/their hair is black” already does a good job at that instead of “That person is male/female/non-binary”

With this though, an author may also run into the problem of “This character feel more like this gender instead of the gender I chose.” An author though, can simply give them universal traits like “smart, kind, etc.” to resolve this, but this may make a character shallow.

An author could painstakingly do a lot of *if statements. But this may run into the problem of “I wish this gender variation of this person was a separate character” if an author makes each gender variation too different from one another.

Another problem this may run into is what you mentioned. A non-binary gv (I’ll just call gender-variable characters gvs) is usually androgynous, which isn’t exactly a good representation of non-binary people. An author can of course add options like “they have black hair and they present themselves femininely/masculinely/androgynously” or something like that, but it may feel a bit weird, I guess.

Again, I can’t offer a fool-proof silver bullet to the issue. But I hope that this post helps in any way and feel free to add more to this or correct anything in it.

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I ended up choosing the following method in Creme de la Creme if the player doesn’t choose for characters’ genders to be randomised or to all be a particular gender. The choices are more related to the character’s actions, or some other aspect of their appearance that’s non-gendered, because I wanted to avoid the choices suggesting anything gendered about their appearance. It’s not perfect by any means (and there are flaws in Creme regarding non-binary characters mostly having an androgynous gender expression - that’s something I’m working on for future stuff), and isn’t totally immersive, but I’m not sure there is a perfect way of doing it with English-language limitations.

So you have:

"I'm fine," says the uniformed student. "Honestly. I just need to find somewhere to sit—and, look, here's somewhere! Goodbye. I'll write, I promise."
*fake_choice
	#His tone is rather irritable.
		*gosub_scene startup freddie_male
	#Her tone is rather irritable.
		*gosub_scene startup freddie_female
	#Their tone is rather irritable.
		*gosub_scene startup freddie_nb

And the gosubs lead to labels where the pronouns etc are set.

There’s also the option of having a set of choices where the player chooses what pronouns the character introduces themselves with. Again it’s not perfect because then the player is controlling what someone else is saying, but that might help to reduce the idea that someone’s gender can be discerned from the way someone dresses or their physical appearance.

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In an interactive story, sadly not everything can happen organically.

I choose to have a section right at the start when the reader can set game-related things (like revealing or hiding achievements) and there I introduced the options about the RO’s genders:

This game contains options to choose the genders of the two main romantic options (RO's for short). You can either choose this as you encounter the character in question, preset both of them to a set gender, or randomize their genders.

During playtesting, readers had different views on whether they wanted it in the story, before the story, or just random because they hadn’t met the characters yet so I tried to include everything.

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And thank you for explaining! I was kinda responding to Szaal too using you as a proxy, I apologize :joy:

Sadly, you’re right no matter how in denial I seek to live. Curse my unhealthy, people-pleasing desires and equally unhealthy levels of perfectionism.

Some gender-locked, some not or gender-locked and wide cast of characters does seem a more natural solution to me too often times. Unfortunately, it also means a ton more work widening the cast. Ah, the struggle, lol.

This leads me to my next question, actually. I’ve sometimes seen in mixed bag games solely gender-locked men, women or otherwise all gender-locked. I haven’t yet seen solely locked non-binary characters in games where other characters are gender-flipped male/female. I think it would be easier to do it that way with making non-binary characters non-stereotypically androgynous/vague for the sake of coding, but I also don’t want readers to feel singled out if only non-binary ROs are gender-locked. Anyone have thoughts on that potentiality?

Yeah, that’s the true kicker. It really is too bad English can’t magically be another language just this once for we who labor so underneath it. I’m reminded of the post from the other day about what to call the non-binary child of a person’s sister/brother/etc. that you also responded to. We have child and sibling, how come we literally have zero common words for “my sibling’s child”? It’s beyond frustrating how many of those walls I have hit up against attempting to write seemingly basic sentences.

I may run with that too, I honestly don’t know. It probably satisfies the widest audience because theoretically, all besides those who don’t want to be asked at all can have their wishes granted. My mind is a gigantic pendulum bouncing between ideas and settling on nothing. Drastically conflicting reception reading reviews of how others’ games handled gender selection certainly hasn’t deterred my internal battle much. I suspect (read know) I will have to swallow that indecision and simply go for it. Either way, thank you for your side.

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I assume ultimately it is a question of how much work a writer wants to have with coding and mapping for gender and sexuality for possible ROs versus how much choice a player would like to see with that. I would also think that approaches to gender and sexuality must be varied depending on how many characters the player can romance and how complicated each of those romances happen to be in relation to the wider game. As Hearts Choice’s library grows and we see more games with different numbers of romances and games with specific focuses for gender and sexuality I think it’ll be something each writer will have their own take upon…

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I’m afraid I don’t have any kind of real solution to the problem—my approach is just to genderlock all my characters, which I know isn’t the most popular decision, and it’s probably not what you should do if your biggest aim is to please people—but I will say that I heartily dislike the “set every character based on my orientation” approach, not only for the reasons @MonkeyLottery brings up (if I play as a lesbian, which I usually do, suddenly every character in the cast is female), but also because I just feel like it (usually unintentionally) sort of creates this implicit feeling that I intend to romance every single one of them, that they’re my own personal harem—designed for romance, and nothing more.

The alternatives aren’t perfect either, obviously. In games where you pick characters’ genders as you meet them (which is otherwise the approach I tend to prefer), I sometimes find myself unsure of what to do because you often end up making that choice before you really know anything about the characters besides their most obvious character trait. Which, as others have mentioned, is its own can of worms. (Am I picking this character’s gender to fit into my preconceptions? Specifically to buck the trend? Is it even possible to make that decision completely independent from societal expectations?)

I guess one thing I’d say is that I don’t know how much the immersion of the player matters in this regard. It’s gotten to the point where everybody knows what a sexual/romantic orientation choice means, so I don’t really agree that it’s the most “natural” way of doing things, at least not in practice. (If anything, my immersion immediately breaks at this point because I have to pause and roll my eyes at the fact that I’ve just turned the entire main cast female.) Choosing characters’ genders on a case-by-case basis is artificial, but once it’s done, it’s done, and I get to imagine it was this way the entire time. When I’m surrounded by women vying for my attention, that’s harder to do.

I suppose I’m not really adding that much to this discussion other than to echo the idea that there’s unfortunately no perfect solution, but in light of this, I do think it’s probably worth considering and making sure you understand what your priorities are here. If your game is primarily romance-based, letting the player’s orientation decide the ROs’ genders honestly makes sense (as much as I might personally bristle at it). If you’re hoping to make the setting immersive and potentially diverse, letting the player choose one-by-one is more likely to encourage this mindset (even if the player in question ultimately decides on their own to give them all the same gender).

And of course, if your biggest goal is to appeal to the largest number of people, I think you’re correct that just letting the player choose how RO genders gets decided is probably the best approach. That said, this is also arguably the least “organic” way of doing things, so…it’s all a mixed bag. :woman_shrugging: But I think the important thing here is to make sure you have some idea of what you want before you fall too deep into the rabbit hole of what other people want.

EDIT: Regarding the specific point you bring up about the implications of choosing a character’s gender based on their apparent presentation, I’d contend that trying to justify the choice based on appearance is itself an unnecessary step. I honestly think @HannahPS’s approach of just letting the player pick a pronoun (independent from gender presentation) and stick with it is fine—consider that the player is already aware at this point that they’re warping the world; no amount of “this is why you conclude that this person is X gender” is going to change the fact that verisimilitude is actively being defied in this moment. If you’re gonna go the route of deciding a character’s gender at all, I think it’s sometimes okay to just say “you magically know their pronouns” and move on.

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Too much difference between gender variations of the same character also tends to bother me a lot because it ends up making a lot of assumptions about “male people are like this, female people are like that.”

“Nibling.” It’s an uncommon word, and I’m not sure how many will recognize it, but it’s useful enough. It’s been around for several decades, too.

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I try to write my protagonists as neutral as possible so that they can be male or female depending on what the characters want and I’ve found problems come from unexpected areas:

How other characters address the player is the main one, for me. There are plenty of terms of informal address terms that are heavily gender based. For instance, where I’m from, you’d use the word ‘duck’ when talking to people of the opposite sex (whether you’re male or female) but never the same sex. Also, words like ‘mate’, ‘pal’, ‘lad’, ‘son’ and ‘bastard’ pretty much exclusively apply to males, and sometimes there aren’t female equivalents.

I’ve also never had a conversation in my life with anyone who’s asked me what gender I am, so- for me- I’d certainly find it would remove immersion and not realistically reflect my own experiences if that came up.

Even just establishing whether the main character wants to play as a male/ female is difficult enough without losing immersion (if you don’t want to make this a clear choice at the start). I’ve only been forced to do this recently (when things can get a bit NSFW)- and I decided to establish the character’s sex with a radio transmission from an unknown caller beginning “Sir? Madame?” and the player’s response (“Sir’s fine”, “Actually, I’d prefer Madame”) basically decides key parts of the chapter.

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UGH, amen sis :weary: :weary:

seconded

that is, ultimately, the biggest crux and the biggest relief about the main question of this thread, imo. we can (and should!) strive for the best way for our individual games to approach this, but there will just never be a perfect way for everyone.

there it is!! that’s the reason!! i’ve never been able to put words to it, but that’s why ROs automatically being set by sexuality bugs me!!

i think there’s a tendency to lose sight of the fact that while these are undoubtedly stories or even novels in many cases, they are, fundamentally, still games. crafting stuff in this format, i think, requires a balance of understanding when to be a coder and when to be a writer. i’m not sure how much we should be worrying about breaking immersion when it comes to certain elements. in video games, is it immersion-breaking to have to do character selection? are text tutorials immersion-breaking? maybe…? but after a certain number of games, it’s a part you come to expect and, for me at least, just part of gaming.

unless someone finds a really horribly ignorant or clumsy way of providing these types of choices, the break in immersion for me is really miniscule because, as Corvus put it (in regards to case-by-case selection, but I do think it applies broadly):

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While I would hesitate to call this a solution, I’ve opted to do something slightly different from the other options I’ve seen in this thread with my latest project. The PC gets to choose the genders of several characters (one of whom is a best friend but not an RO), and here’s an example of one of the choices:

"Well," Charlie continues, "I have a younger ${f_sib}, ${frankie}, and an--"
*fake_choice
  #"--older sister, Alberta."
  #"--older brother, Albert."

The PC chooses the gender of this RO through dialogue with the RO’s sister. So it’s basically like using pronouns as cues for gender that some of you have mentioned earlier, but I think removing the character/RO in question from the present scene makes it feel more organic. Yes, the PC is manipulating the world around them, but it doesn’t necessarily feel that way when the manipulation isn’t immediately visible.

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ooh… sneaky, i like it

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That is absolutely true. I read so often in reviews “my character felt too girly/manly” and I often wonder why they saw the actions of that character as being especially gendered at all. I understand that culture does frequently impact how we as humans behave, think, dress, etc. However, femininity, masculinity and how they are expressed (when present) is a sliding scale. I identify as a cisgendered woman, but I frequently behave in ways that have been called “masculine”. It’s never as simple as “that’s girly/manly” for anyone. The world is awfully bent on gender roles though as you mentioned.

I am rather excited to see more from the HC library in particular. Gender, romance and all the nuance that comes with them are often sidelined in CoG/HG games because it’s simply not wholly relevant and might feel too squeezed in.

Personally, when reading these games, I tend to love gender-locked ROs best for this exact reason among others. It’s part of why I’m so conflicted on how to write ROs myself while balancing player choice. What do I focus on is my main question which you pretty much hit the nail on the head with:

And yep, you’re definitely right here too:

I do have more to ponder now, but it probably will boil down to “okay, you’ve tried your best, now swallow the fact that you can’t make game mechanics literally mirror real life”.

I usually find more enjoyment when there’s clear differences, even if they’re sometimes a little presumptive, just because culture and gender identity are so massive that it can come off to me as a little odd or “suspension of disbelief” breaking if there is nothing separating them at all and it’s merely pronouns vs. overt acknowledgement. Of course, those differences need not be rigid, gender-role based ones and preferably all characters will be as rounded with their self-expression as they are in general. That said, I can certainly understand this perspective on the issue. There’s so many factors to consider, alas. I might want to sit on all this for a while and readdress it later. :joy:

Honestly, this one is entirely my own bias, but the word “nibling” bothers me. Likely on some level due to my time spent reading copious fan-fiction back in the day and it being way too close to “nibbling”. I’d also be hesitant to use it because it doesn’t seem too common as you said. Hopefully, over time, another word will arise or that one will become so a part of the norm that I get used to it.

That’s a pretty fitting idea. I’ve also been attempting to integrate that choice with the writing, but we’ll see how it goes because I want the reader to be able to fill in their own pronouns and that scenario wouldn’t mesh with my previous version of the MC gender customization introduction. Just gonna have to find out alongside my characters as I write, I suppose. I’ve always been more of a “pantser”.

True enough. I’ve been wrestling to find that balance always having been more a writer/reader than a coder/gamer. I appreciate all of yours and others’ insight on this forum so much because of that.

You clever one, you! I never would have thought of something so inventively roundabout.

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