I never played the game, but based on what I read here and the Great Tournament thread maybe it could have worked with just a few extra sentences for a female knight? But I’m typing this based on just few posts I’ve read so…
That matters less to me than not feeling like I’m playing me. I prefer playing characters I define, irrespective of whether it has a real impact on the story (although that will be nice) because then I can attach to that character and become immersed in the story and enjoy myself.
Games like Diabolic that are gender undefined are less fun as a result.
There is no reason why in a work of fiction targetting a CYOA market why the player character cannot be gender flexible - male, female, non-binary.
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According to many “market as a whole” analytics I’ve seen 54% of the video gaming market is Female. The only analytics I’ve seen that differ from that was the one by Obsidian Entertainment when they were gathering stats to help decide the direction of future games/dlc’s.
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Clearly males who play as female MC’s in games, depending on whether it’s a choice to like a Falllout game or an established one like Clem in Walking Dead or Max in Life is Strange are going to vary in their reasons for doing so. Case in point that I love playing Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn predominantly because its a great world with a great female character who is her own thing, but even I will admit that I aware of the fact her behind sways in a way I assume straight males like me would be, ahem, interested in. So everyone’s different.
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Since I its my forum anniversary today and I have a piece of cake by my name, I figure no one is allowed to yell at me or upset me in any way on my special day!! sooo…I will wade in and just say…
I don’t see how readers/players struggle to connect with MCs of an opposite gender (or no stated gender at all), but are still able to connect with MCs who are dragons, cats, elves, orcs, undead lawyers, animal/human hybrids, etc. Surely the later examples are longer bridges to cross than is mere gender, right? I mean, we are all humans.
I’m a straight middle-aged white guy and I am 100% fine reading/playing an interactive novel with a protagonist who is much different than me. Protagonist can be female, or a dragon, or an alien, etc. If the story and premise are interesting, I would let down any inhibitions and “go with the flow” and enjoy it. I embrace the suspension of disbelief or creative muse or whatever you call it.
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I wish I have your open mindedness. When it comes to CoG and HG, it just break the immersion for me when I don’t play my own gender. I don’t much of a problem if I play a guy in video games though but recently, I’ve been playing games with gender choices as of late like Story of Seasons and the recent Fire Emblems series. 
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I’m tempted to look up a rather recent story on the very topic, but long story short things have a lot to do with society, privilege and systematic oppression, aka the reasons the world sucks and we’re stagnating so violently.
It’s the message the ‘majorities’ get in (western) society that if a story does not cater to them, it’s declaring them worthless. This is the way the rich stay rich and powerful while others suffer 
It sucks, and there’s a lot of cleaning up to do.
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To me, characters of unstated gender just end up being mapped as “me” in my head. There is an immediate disconnect then compared to the reality of my existence. That disconnect then allows me to be easily distracted/sidetracked and the game loses its hold on me - at which point I’m not having fun and have wasted my money.
I prefer not to play male MC’s because video gaming as a whole has largely been “straight white male wins the day” for such a long time that its a breath of fresh air to play something else. I also seem to attach more easily to female characters in games I play for some reason. I also like to make them lesbian where able to. No clue what that says about me but I have fun that way.
Male-locked characters both in CYOA and wider video game market as a whole increasingly feel like the developer(s) are being lazy. For CYOA that gives the impression that the author(s) just want to get the game done and shipped asap - which suggests they’re not really feeling what they’re doing, and in the case of more traditional video games it suggests they either don’t have or won’t invest the resources to be more inclusive. Both impressions will sour me towards the game.
With CYOA’s I just flat out won’t buy gender-locked male and given my experience with Diabolic I will be less likely to buy/play gender unspecified games.
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Like many others here, I’m just over having to play the same old dude character in every game there is. It’s not that I can’t identify with a male main character or that I won’t enjoy it, but the game needs to have some really strong arguments for me to be willing to slip back into the same tired old role.
(I also definitely simply enjoy female characters more, not gonna lie.)
With CoG and HG, I am at a point where I trust the majority of games to allow me to choose a female main character and due to knowing I’ve got more than enough choice, I don’t feel like I have to give gender-locked-male games a shot just to get more reading material.
It’s honestly a really nice feeling. Never used to have a big amount of choice when it came to which games to play if I wanted to be a gay female main character.
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But why should I go with the flow? A male locked flow is not especially uniuqe and interesting since sometimes it feels like the majority of story goes that way. It certainly doesn’t capture my interest.
And then there is also the fact that I expect better from COGs and Hosted. I came here because COGs and Hosted offered my a choice to not be who I has to be in almost all games. If I want to play a straight man I certainly have my pick outside of this company. Mean while if I don’t want to play a man, I have my pick amongst the many COGs and Hosted, I already own.
Also, on a very personal note. COGs and Hosted games helped me with my genderfluidity, the sheer relief of not being alienated is impossible to describe. I really do just not want to get back to having no choice.
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Tiny sidenote here:
Do you folks reckon it better or worse (in lack of better words) if a game IS genderlocked or if it isn’t but is so obviously and stubbornly written with a certain gender to the MC in mind that it feels entirely off.
Depends on what ‘off-sounding’ means. Some people say that SoH sometimes feels off when playing a female ronin because the character still acts rather masculine (and especially as a straight female ronin), which I understand, yet what sounds off for the character they have in mind fits perfectly for mine.
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@MeltingPenguins, well as someone who has always felt that all gender is off, I lean towards the latter. (But I am not entirely objective here, I admit).
- It can be hilarious. (Choice of Broadside is a good example.)
- Sometimes it is good to throw people off.
- Most times people are not going to agree what is off. (Ninja’ed by blackrising. Witht this one.) And it is always better to give people a choice.
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Meant mostly in the sense when toxic stereotypes etc are reinforced. Like, when you have female NPCs that are portrayed as less and seem only be there for the male gaze or something.
That can happen with a female protagonist too, sadly.
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Isn’t it probably fair to say that both writers of any COG will write a story to some extent with a specific gender in their head, even if the game is ultimately featuring both genders (and possibly more)?
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I’m sure there are dozens but I’ll use the bthree I know.
Lord’s of Aswick/ the infinity series: It’s about the duties and responsibilities of men to carry on the family name and line. A male must ensure the Dingledorff line continues while a female is just there to support her husband the master of the house ( in those settings) in one of the infinity games you meet the equivalent of a suffragette who wants women soldiers. You can’t really have that as a plot if you’re a woman soldier.
That supernatural game with monsters like the creepy kids who pretend to be Human but want to kill you: since ivan carves “property of Ivan” into your chest if you are too disobedient if you played a female the writer may have been tempted to make him do worse.
I generally play lesbians in every game I play so gender locked to male rarely interest me. The infinity series is extremely well written though.
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Most unfortunately.
I mean, I’m guilty of tiny things myself. I write my game’s plainstory with a cis woman protag in mind, and yeah, sometimes reminding oneself that ‘yeah, a guy would maybe not really call a teenage boy ‘dearie’…’ or such.
But when it’s big things like, (no specific example here) the MC acting as if the most vile stereotypes for a gender/sexuality/etc are true and written in stone… Though I think stuff like that might not even get published here.
Eh, there’s more than ‘both’, and the difference is, does a writer fall into stale stereotypes or do they try to create something more.
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It’s about half and half when it comes to games in general, but that doesn’t take into account things like price, genre, or amount of time spent playing. For example, an article I found recording the percentage of female gamers by genre came up with this result:
From this chart, it shows that the only two game genres that have more female than male players are Match 3 games (things like Candy Crush and Bubble Witch) and Family/Farm Sim games (like Hay Day).
I think the majority of these types of games, particularly Match 3 games, are free mobile games, rather than big budget-console games. From this study at least, the majority of story-driven games do tend to still have more male players.
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The reason behind these stats can also be that the majority of the story-driven games are still written mainly for male audiences.
Edit: Even if a story-driven game does include a female protagonist option there are still many times that it feels like the player is still better off with the male protagonist option (for example difference in the number ROs for different genders, if the game includes romances). And this leaves even less games where female players where are allowed to play as their own gender and they feel like they get the same amount of fun out of the game as male players do.
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