I’ll start by saying ultimately it is down to the author and what they want to do, what they feel comfortable with, and what they feel they have the time/energy/expertise to do.
Genderlock is easier from an author’s point of view. You’re not writing a quantum-state character who could be this or that at any given time and having to account for each state in your writing.
I wholly disagree that this makes the character inherently ‘better’ in any way, however.
Ultimately it’s a matter of the effort you put into writing them. Writing one character takes a certain amount of effort, writing one character with multiple possible branching deviations takes more, and ensuring that the representation and reaction to all of that makes sense and is coherent in each branch takes more. You could choose to invest the added effort into the one version of a character and potentially create a stronger one, or you could take off that extra effort entirely in order to avoid scope creep without reinvesting it elsewhere.
From a player’s point of view, authors often seem to get overly fixated on their own idea of what a character needs to be. In a book, that’s neither surprising nor problematic. In an interactive medium where the player might hope to feel some ownership of a character, that can be problematic. “Ah, this character can’t work unless they have GREEN EYES.” Why? I bet if you interrogate that notion, it will prove less true than you think. This is true of most things about a character. Their name, their gender, their superficial features. If you put enormous weight on any of these things as the backbone of a character… I don’t know that you’re writing a particularly compelling one. If you strip those features away, a well-written character should still function. Their depth, their agency, their relationships, and their moral or emotional trajectory should remain intact. Good character writing is orthogonal to these surface traits. Treating them as the backbone of identity often reflects more about the author’s insecurities or assumptions than about any inherent truth of the character.
But similarly, none of these should be dealbreakers for the players. It will, however, serve as a potential roadblock for certain relationships. There are players that are only interested in playing characters of a certain sex/gender/orientation and only interested in romancing characters of a certain sex/gender/orientation, and every variable you fix in place cuts out a portion of the potential player base.
That’s fine if you want to do it. It’s not wild or crazy or even uncommon. It’s just a choice.
I’ve seen this critique regarding gender selectable characters before and I don’t get it. The player can choose the genders. If you have a one gender cast, that means the player actively chose that and and could’ve chosen not to do that, so why would that have any bearing on whether characters should be gender selectable or not?
I think this person may have been more precisely referring to gender-variable characters whose gender is determined by the PC’s orientation, rather than characters whose gender the player gets to select individually. Take one of my favorite games, The Play’s the Thing, which has seven gender-variable NPCs, six of which are determined by the PC’s orientation. Let’s say I play a self-insert, a woman romantically interested in men. Suddenly my character is one of only a couple of significant women in an overwhelmingly male cast. The only way I can have a fairly even mix of men and women around my character is to play as bi or aro-ace - which makes the character that much less “me.”
That, and even if they are individually selectable, I’m often not going to know which RO route(s) I’d be interested in beforehand, so unless it’s quite obvious right away, I’m liable to flip them all to male.
I wouldn’t call this a problem, as that is still my personal choice, but it can produce that effect given a small cast.
Personally, I like both approaches (or mixes thereof) just fine. People of any gender can have the same personality traits, interests, styles, quirks, etc.; what makes a character interesting is generally independent of gender. But sure, there can be a good reason for a character to be a specific gender, and “that’s the way I see that character” is a good enough reason itself! When I write, there are characters who feel like I wouldn’t want to change their gender too, after all. I just happen to agree very much with the camp that a flipping character can be as well-written and as strongly defined as any other. And I always resent statements that a certain trait means a character was “supposed” to be a man or “supposed” to be a woman; there will always be many real people who are like that!
I guess I’d say the only time I end up struggling with reading a gender-flipper character as changeable is when I code dive and see that one version of the character’s name was chosen for the variable. This happened with Slammed!, I believe, which used ${Evelyn} throughout the code, which made it harder for me to keep reading the character as Evan during my playthrough. So I’d suggest not labeling variables for changeable names that way, personally
Yep, precisely what I meant. Thanks for conveying it. I don’t like Poly routes that much, there is appeal to them, but I’m just not the target audience. I would like my RO to be the gender I’m attracted to, but it would be weird if all my friends were also a part of this gender, don’t you think?
