still kinda sucks though…but I’m trying to get myself into more male ro’s now (I’m bi) 
I just don’t like how ro’s are based on authors sexuality, I think that’s why I like night market (especially gabriel) so much because they aren’t.
I guess it’s a question of what a writer is comfortable with versus the hopes and expectations of the reader? I find as a reader that one major advantage of the idea of an entirely RO gender specific game is that the characters can stand out more easily from each other since the writer is not required to factor in a gender neutral background and risk a RO character seeming unusual if displayed as a certain gender - this is something that the Choice of Romance trilogy famously struggled with.
I notice that some writers get around this by altering more subtle elements of a character based on the gender selected, for example Nat/Nate in Wayheven where both versions are defined as quite tall but Nat is established as not as tall as her male counterpart but is still tall as a woman. So I don’t think it’s impossible to get around such things.
I haven’t played any of the M/M or F/F specific games since they don’t interest me so I can’t comment on their approach but I am certain they all tend to have quite distinctive characters since they are exclusively male or female (possibly with some non binary characters as well).
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Isn’t this just saying that you want your romance interests to be designed within, and reinforce, social and physical expectations of the Western gender binary?
I’d be super interested in hearing exactly where this comes from if not that. And I guess if that’s what it is, then we both have very different priorities, but I’d insist it’s not about writing quality at that point - it’s about personal preference.
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“Would you play a BioWare game?”
Good gods, yes. Those were my gateway drugs. (Playersexuality wasn’t a thing in all of them, but that hindered others more than it did me.)
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Pretty sure height differences between men and women is a universal thing, not just a “Western gender binary”
And there is nothing wrong with people being interested in ROs that fit within gender stereotypes just like there’s nothing wrong with being interested in ROs that don’t conform to them.
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Sure. But it is also interesting to think about where preferences are coming from and what they mean to you.
(I know a lot of men who are shorter than the UK average and women who are taller than the UK average. I don’t see why a female version of a character needs to be shorter, or wear makeup, or have longer hair, to be considered legitimate (if that’s what’s being said?), and I don’t understand what height or those other things have to do with how a character is written.)
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I am pretty sure thinking about that says more about your own expectations of IF than my own, but I wasn’t suggesting that no. If any a game with gender specific ROs probably allows for a greater range of characters and their own romantic preferences, just not catered to gender.
It’s should always be down to the writer ultimately and what they are both comfortable and capable writing of course.
(If you were also asking about height aspects in that example I personally happen to have a thing for the tall woman short man trope myself, but everyone is different.)
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Oh, sure, personal preferences are of course a thing. I’m just flagging up, I guess, that criticism of gender swappable characters being ‘less distinctive’ or ‘harder to get to know’ sometimes turns out to be about those preferences.
Perhaps for some people (not all, of course!) it might be not ‘I prefer non gender swap characters because they’re more distinctive’ and instead more ‘I am most attracted to romance interests that fit this specific social construct of the gender binary, and gender swappable characters often don’t do that’…?
Of course sexual dimorphism is a thing - but NPC X isn’t ‘the entire plurality and average of their biological sex’, if you see what I mean? Expecting a character to follow all statistical means for their sex assigned at birth feels kind of reductive to me. I enjoy being surprised, or characters going against expectations or stereotypes, whether that’s to do with family background, occupation, style, sex, orientation, etc etc etc. (Not every character has to be a pure rebel against society, of course. But gender swappable changes seem to often conform to those assumptions.)
Like I said, this is different from how I view gender swappable characters, so it’s great to see a little more clearly how others see things - and that clarity can be really helpful for us authors.
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The best way I could describe it is that, as an author, writing a gender-swappable character feels like I’m creating a sketch of a character and then leave it up to the players to color it in. There is an inherent disconnect there, and it applies not just to the character’s gender, but anything that is not set in stone. Like, if the character’s name is up to the player to decide, then that character would feel less real to me. Ideally, I prefer to have as much of a grasp on the character as I possibly can, whether it be their gender, appearance, background, etc.
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The only advantage I see for me, personally, to a gender-locked RO as compared to a gender selectable RO, is the meta knowledge when there’s a RO of a gender that matches my sexual orientation who is my kind of RO that the RO in question was(probably) intended to be that gender in the first place, instead of maybe originally having another gender or a non-specific gender. That knowledge does make me feel slightly more seen.
But the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages to me. My preferred ROs are female ROs who are at least somewhat non-genderconforming, particularly warrior women and similar kinds of ROs. And it’s much easier to find ROs who are like that when they are gender selectable than when they are gender locked. In fact there seems to be a number of HG and COG writers(more the former than the latter, it seems) where things like occupation/character class and interests and/or personality, to a greater or lesser extent, is divided according to traditional( whether real-world or fictional) gender divisions and gender roles, like the warrior and “harder”/tougher ROs in general, tending to be male and the face, healer and “softer”/nice and friendly ROs tending to be female. This means less female ROs who are the way I like, which I think is a shame, but also less female and male ROs for others who like female and male ROs who don’t fit in with more traditional gender roles and gender divisions, which I think is even more of a shame.
Gender-selectable ROs mean that you need a significantly smaller number of ROs in order to have to have a high enough number of ROs to make everyone feel there are enough ROs to choose from. This is good both for us who read/play these COGs and HGs and can be good for writers, since this means that they can write fewer ROs without people being unhappy because of it.
Also, like others have already mentioned, with gender-locked ROs, there is the risk of there being an clear imbalance in the number of ROs of each gender. Particularly so, it seems, when the writer in question isn’t bi and pan, since they then will have a preffered gender when it comes to romance, which may in turn lead to them becoming much more, shall we say, enthusiastic when writing about ROs of their preferred gender. As far as I can tell(though I may be wrong), this seems particularly prevalent among straight or at least straightish women, though I by no means thinks that this only applies to them. For most COGs and HGs so far, this has just lead to a slightly higher number in male ROs than female ROs or vice versa, but there are WIPs being made where the number of male ROs being planned are four times or more than the number of female ROs being planned, which isn’t a good distribution whichever way you look at it. And of course, this may lead to there being no non-binary ROs or them just getting one token RO, if the writer in question don’t feel enthusiastic enough about making non-binary ROs a part of their COG or HG.
I don’t think that gender-selectableROs tend to be any more flat or forgettable than gender-locked ROs. I have tried plenty of COGs and HGs with gender selectable ROs who felt deep and memorable and out of the COGs and HGs I’ve tried that had flat, bland and forgettable ROs, as many of them were gender-locked as gender-selectable.
And since I do prefer female ROs who are at least somewhat gender-nonconforming in the first place, if some other readers should feel that they “read” male, I consider that a feature, not a bug, and a sign that the writer has done something right, at least unless AFAB character should be doing something that should be biologically impossible or in a similar vein.
I suspect the reason that some people have a clear preference for the ROs being gender-locked when they’re playing/reading has a lot to do with metaperspectives and metaknowledge. I do, for instance, get that for some people it can hard to adjust to the fact that the same character could, at least theoretically, by male in some playthroughs and female and in other playthroughs(and maybe also non-binary in other playthroughs). I personally have no problems, for the most part I’m quite good at going along with the flow of the story and the world, as long as I otherwise enjoy the story and the concept behind it. However I also view every playthrough as being, in some sense, its own separate world, with all playthroughs being equally valid, kind of like alternative worlds, instead of there being one “canon” playthrough(at least unless I find an ending I particularly like and which I don’t know if I will get that easily again). And maybe if you think there’s one canon playthrough, it’s harder to also accept that your chosen RO isn’t really locked to a specific gender? I do wonder, anyway…
One last thing, though. I was under the(maybe mistaken) impression that you, like me, liked female warrior ROs and similar types of female ROs @derekmetaltron. But I think you know as well as me that if gender-locking the ROs should become more popular , the number of those ROs would likely be fewer. So if, I understood your preferences correctly in the first place, I wonder why gender-locking the ROs means more to you than getting a certain kind of (female)RO more often. I hope I don’t come off as a rude, because that wasn’t my intention, but I am really curious about that.
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I wholeheartedly agree with this. If someone reads a character and thinks “this feels written as XYZ gender”, it’s valuable to examine what’s making them think that. Not because All Characters Must Be Gender-Nonconforming (though I personally enjoy it when characters buck real-world gender roles or explore their gender presentation in interesting ways!) but because it’s interesting to think about what’s behind one’s own responses.
And this! I’m sometimes picky about whether I really love a character, but I wouldn’t be able to definitively say “this was because they were gender-selectable/gender-set”.
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I don’t really have a type per say, though many of my favourite fictional characters are from comics and could I suppose click the ‘warrior woman’ type like Wonder Woman or She Hulk. And gender locking games would probably appeal more with the games where sex is an actual factor over ‘fade to black’ scenes and so the writers don’t have to create four different versions of the same sequence and only have to consider two instead. Nothing against gender selective ROs of course, many of them are my favourites but I think games where they are a little more spicy likely benefit from specific characters and genders.
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That’s exactly why Heart’s Choice games (which are predominantly romance-focused) tend to have ROs with set genders.
It’s definitely more complicated to do so, but in Heart of Battle I had adaptive Spicy sex scenes with gender variable PC & LI plus tone shifts for Dom/sub players so it’s absolutely possible. I’m very commited both to customisable intimacy scenes and gender variable LIs 
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It depends I’d say. One of my favorite Ro’s have been both gender selectable and set in stone (Finn from A study in steampunk, then again the MC is always male or N from wayhaven who is both player sexual and gender changeable) I tend to completely ignore characters who have a set sexuality to them, I totally understand why some authors prefer to write characters like that, all the power to them. There is just something really freeing about exploring a characters romance regardless of your MC’s gender, it’s a restriction I don’t feel is necessary in a choice game. In all honesty it all boils down to the quality of the romance and writing, I can be persuaded to anything as long as the characters feel like they belong to the world and are given enough time to flaunt their charm. There are plenty of ifs who fail in that regard no matter if its gender selectable/player sexual or sexual preference/ gender set in stone.
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Wow, that’s some impressive dedication! Kudos! 
Must have been an absolute nightmare to code though… 
I was originally going to have my second WIP be spicier, but I wanted to have them gender selectable. I thought all the variations would be too much. I also don’t know anything about nonstraight sex scenes, so I wouldn’t be comfortable writing them. So I had to choose between badly written scenes, no player choice (romance wise, at least), or fade to black. I chose the fade to black option, but I might try a more illusionary version once I get to it. A nice middle ground would be nice
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I love a lot of games with gender-variable ROs, but I’m more likely to feel instantly warm towards a concept that has explicitly female and/or nonbinary characters. 99% of the time, the ROs are the bulk of the cast — and I want to see more non-male characters in my fiction, so I want more female/nonbinary characters. I can’t help but always feel some disappointment when there’s an imbalance by even just one man.
I Googled it, and: Four times more male characters in literature than female, research suggests & A new study shows that girls write fewer female characters as they get older. I guess I’m pretty dissatisfied with those statistics, personally.
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Shepherds of Haven does this to a very good degree. Some ROs are locked to gender, and some get a starting boost to their opinion of you depending on the origin you select.
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And, as someone who RPs straight female MCs almost exclusively, I have to say the ROs that fit that mold in the HC games I’ve played are too boring for words (which, I believe, may be because the author is trying to appeal to everyone at once, which is impossible). Or they feel decidedly feminine, which is not appealing to me at all.
And I think that’s where I end up having issues with set gendered ROs–it seems that, in games where the genders are set, most of the male ROs end up being gender non-conforming or bland as tepid water. Call me old-fashioned, but I like men who can match my strong female MCs and give them a run for their money… not ones that blush and stutter and hide in a corner if my MC flirts with them or, even worse, have the personality of a pile of toenail clippings. 
I get what you’re saying, but I’m speaking only about male ROs. The male ROs in the HC games I’ve played are bland and boring, IMO. But, again, it’s my opinion. Your mileage may vary.
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