This is a bit of a rant, but please try to stick with me through the whole thing
So recently OSRS (Old School Runescape) has joined a list of games that have replaced “Male or Female” with “Body Type A or Body Type B” with you selecting your pronouns secondary.
And it made me furious, but I had to sit down and ask why such a small meaningless thing that I only see during the character creator pisses me off. After all, isn’t this giving a seat at the table for Gender Non-Conforming/Non-Binary individuals?
So I tried thinking about this issue from the perspective of a Non-Binary individual. See I myself am female (Transgender MTF for what it’s worth), so the only thing I’m ever going to pick is the female option unless I’m doing a challenge run where I try to roleplay Guybrush Threepywood (Mighty Pirate!) while playing Fallout 3…
That’s when I realized why I absolutely hate Body Type A/Body Type B
This is not a solution to a problem, this is highlighting the issue.
As a woman, I look at “Body Type A or Body Type B” and think “Well, I’m a woman, not a Body Type B, and isn’t it kinda misogynistic that the secondary option is the female one? Like A+ for Men, B- for Women?”
As someone is very much not cisgender, I look at it and go “Well, isn’t every FTM going to pick Body Type A with male pronouns while MTFs like myself go with Body Type B with female pronouns? Who outside of a Far Right Troll trying and failing to be funny is gonna pick the buff bearded dude and select the she/her pronouns?”
It was only when I went “Let’s pretend I don’t exist in a male/female binary and see how I feel about it.” that I realized why I absolutely DESPISE Body Type A/Body Type B
Because when I look at it from that angle, I realize that if I am a non-binary individual, my options are to look like an overly buff dude but occasionally NPCs will refer to me as a They/Them, or like an overly curvy chick who again sometimes gets called They/Them…
That’s when I realized why Body Type A/Body Type B doesn’t do it for me.
Games that do this aren’t being progressive or inclusive, they’re changing the color of the cup that my drink comes in and pretending it’s an entirely new beverage.
I realized that if the choices in Body Type were something like
A - Buff Dude
B - Slim Dude
C - Fat Dude
D - Skinny Androgynous Individual who doesn’t need a bra/binder
E - Fat Androgynous Individual who doesn’t need a bra/binder
F - Skinny Androgynous Individual who requires bra/binder
G - Fat Androgynous Individual who requires bra/binder
I - Curvy Chick
J - Buff Chick
K - Fat Chick
L - Slim Chick
Maybe have also an option for a big buff masculine dude who has big tits, because that’s just how he rolls, I dunno just thinking aloud here…
My point is that gaming could abandon “A/B” in favor of something more like an actual spectrum of Height, Weight, and Gender Presentation instead of just awkwardly renaming the binary? I wouldn’t get so up in arms about gender replacing body type.
I don’t know what more I have to say on this. I guess it’s just a revelation I had about something in gaming that bothers me…
So, wider gaming community. What do you think? Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?
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One thing that always irks me with character customization is how often games have more customization options for girl characters. I have always assumed that developers only allocate so much time and resources to character creators and call it a day.
Not always true; I was quite disappointed with the lack of labia options in Cyberpunk 2077.
I was disappointed that I spent time crafting my sausage but at no point in the game was I allowed to waggle it around to show dominance.
I don’t even know why you can choose between circumcised and uncircumcised in that game. It feels like they wanted to add more sex things but didn’t get around to it
Hah that’s true. I thought it was odd that they mentioned how you could customize genitalia and then they had 2 options for penis’s and only one vagina option. It definitely seemed like an advertising strategy more than anything
Starfield did this the right way, just as you are suggesting. it’s the only game I’ve seen so far that does it, but your character body exists on a wheel of buff, slender, thicker, etc. you can adjust every little part of this to get a truly unique character. i believe there were also at least 4 voice options. the rest of the game was meh, but maybe other games will start doing it that way. i think inclusion is still a very new concept in gaming, everyone is trying new things, and i appreciate the effort. it’ll get there.
The Sims 4 actually added a similar approach to character creation about 2 years ago, but very different kind of game with a very different market
Off the top of my head it has options for male presenting body type, female presenting body type, sliders for fat and muscle (and you can generally reshape most of the body) and the available clothing and hairstyles got sorted into masculine and feminine with I believe more traditionally gender neutral stuff getting placed into both, then for biological purposes there’s “can pee standing up/cannot pee standing up” and “can impregnate/can be impregnated” It defaults to Male/Female defaults but makes it easy to customize, and a good mix of default townies (NPCs) are all over the spectrum.
They also recently added more complex relationship and romance preferences, so sims can be sexually bi but romantically straight for example, but also expanded to allow various levels of openness to relationships as well as poly relationships
I definitely have to say, Body Type A/Body Type B definitely feels like a groan-worthy growing pain that will be ironed out sooner or later. It’s just disappointing that we have to resort to such awkward terms that mislead players about how much variety across the gender spectrum is actually being offered. It almost feels like a vegan menu that still heavily uses animal byprdouct.
This almost makes me want to buy Starfield to support a proper way to revamp gender selection, but it’s going to need the same amount of work that FO76 getting it from how it was at launch to the awesome experience it is now for me to dip my toes in that…
shattered space might be a perfect time to try it. that dlc is just 1 planet so it’ll most likely be made how previous bethesda games were
As someone is very much not cisgender, I look at it and go “Well, isn’t every FTM going to pick Body Type A with male pronouns while MTFs like myself go with Body Type B with female pronouns? Who outside of a Far Right Troll trying and failing to be funny is gonna pick the buff bearded dude and select the she/her pronouns?”
Me! What do you have against bearded, manly ladies? They’re awesome!
It is kinda lazy to have “full masculine” and “full feminine” as your only choices while pretending they aren’t just “male” or “female”, but at the same time, I think it’s a step in the right direction. Today the options might be “not-man” and “not-woman”, but the future might have “not-man”, “not-woman”, “man-woman” and “woman-man”!
My point is that gaming could abandon “A/B” in favor of something more like an actual spectrum of Height, Weight, and Gender Presentation instead of just awkwardly renaming the binary? I wouldn’t get so up in arms about gender replacing body type.
Okay, but an in-depth character creation system that lets you pick and adjust individual features is a lot more work than just manually creating two models and asking the player to pick one. Adding that means something else gets cut.
Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work, but devs who only offer two player models to choose from in the first place probably aren’t putting that much thought into character creation.
Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work
Body types no but you also need armour and clothing for everything. You quickly get a combinatorial explosion which you can then reign in with shape keys (“sliders”) which make all assets harder to develop.
In the context of Runescape this is just a hellish mess, because its ultimately a codebase from the late 90s with graphics created everywhere from the early 00s to the mid 20s. Oh and as an MMORPG anyone who was a player but stops playing is a lost sale so no pressure at all
Don’t they already have scripts to re-size cosmetics based on height/weight for basically every game with a height/weight option?
You can’t automate generation of shape keys. An artist needs to go over every single asset and make it work for every single extreme point on every slider, then make sure that the automatically derived in between points look good and fix those if required, in all slider combinations.
And it’s probably still going to clip during some animations because going over absolutely everything is just prohibitively expensive.
true, but it might also open up some creative new things like character too skinny/fat for a certain armor etc.
That would be a fun can of worms
skeleton race
S L I D E R S
Fucking Saints Row 2 had this shit figured out
PS: I like when the game just shows you a bunch of presets and says “pick one”. It’s more elegant than “which of the two body types do you want”
What if you found a portal to a parallel universe? What if you could slide into a thousand different worlds? Where it’s the same year, and you’re the same person… but everything else is different? And what if you can’t find your way home?
I get this reference
^ This, I much prefer this… I mean something about “Body Type A/Body Type B” just feels too “corpo” for my tastes… but Saints Row sliders not so much.
Heck Pokemon even figured this out by just showing you pictures of characters and saying “Hey, which one of these do you wanna play as”, didn’t even have to use words.
I’ve had this exact thought in my head the past few days, including the idea that having 3 or 4 different types would actually fulfill the goal of avoiding “Male/Female” choices - something that only Saint’s Row has done, AFAIK.
The issue is that they only changed the label and Body Type A and B are still clearly Male and Female, but for some reason people praise it as not being gender locked because…?
Its even more ridiculous in games like Monster Hunter Rise for example, where you get the Type A and Type B body options…and then you still get gendered outfits where one is fully covered and the other is baring their midriff and wearing dresses! Wow, I wonder which is supposed to be which!? /sarcasm
I’ve heard that for Monster Hunter Rise “Type A/Type B” was decided upon by the localization and that in Japan (the country of origin for MHR) they just use Male/Female. Meaning it’s not the dev being lazy, it’s localization earning themselves a “You Tried” ribbon.
At least, that’s what I’ve heard.
As a cis male, fwiw, I personally wouldn’t even think about it if the male body was option B or 2 or whatever, but what do you think about a feminine to masculine slider? I think Elden ring did that and it seems pretty clever. After that I think there were other sliders for options such as weight or fitness or whatever.
That’s morph targets and you just increased the budget for the character model and every single set of clothing and armour by a whole magnitude. Might even influence animations, though I guess with Elden Ring being the game that it is those are the same for everyone.
I was not aware of this slider, as I don’t really go for Souls-Like games, but it sounds like a perfect solution.
lol you should see what the slider does. it’s not great. max femme makes you turn cartoonish puffy and red
So max femme makes you look overly and cartoonishly feminine? I’m sorry I’m not understanding the problem. I’d imagine any slider pushed to one extreme end would give you an extreme result.
Oh wow, I could never put to words why I didn’t like the body type system either, but you nailed it. Yeah, I also wish that games could just give you sliders and/or more presets or something to have actual variety. If a game will only support curvy girls and buff dudes, but won’t also let people make, for instance, cute androgynous cat boys, or anything else a person might fancy, then what’s the point of it?
As a woman, I look at “Body Type A or Body Type B” and think “Well, I’m a woman, not a Body Type B, and isn’t it kinda misogynistic that the secondary option is the female one? Like A+ for Men, B- for Women?”
This really pissed me off, I have to say. Why are you calling the “secondary” option “the female one”? To me that seems a bit presumptuous.
If I have body type B with he/him pronouns, are you saying something about my body? Is it too “feminine” for you?
Honestly, you seem to be looking for something to complain about. The developers have taken an extra step to try to be accommodating and inclusive and your complaining about the order the choices are listed in… Smh
yikes, OP wasn’t calling this secondary any more than Simone de Beauvoir was when she published The Second Sex… it’s an actual problem that deserves recognition, and shitting on someone for recognizing it? you’re the one reinforcing the problem now!!
OP was merely gesturing at another instance of patriarchal culture treating the feminine as secondary by putting it second. not a controversial revelation tbh quite trite really
As you can see from OP’s response to you, my primary issue is that OP is still calling the option the “female” or “feminine” one. The developers specifically removed those labels to be inclusive and OP is adding them back. The complaint about the order was the secondary issue.
Oh come on, now you’re just feigning ignorance. The body types correspond to both modes of human sexual dimorphic presentations. Just because you take away the names doesn’t mean the dimorphic traits are absent. It IS a sexually dimorphic character creation system. So within that, let’s look at who gets to be the default and who gets to be the “second sex” (highly recommend reading de Beauvoir, again). OP is taking issue with not just the veiled binary but also the hierarchy within it.
Let me put it this way. Imagine if the body types were no longer sexually dimorphic but had varied skin tones. And despite the fact that we know skin tones present in a variety of ways, they only offered light peach skin tones and dark skin tones. And they made the secondary one the darker skin tone. Maybe you or I would have a problem with it, maybe we wouldn’t. But could you understand why someone might take issue with that? It’s a fair objection to make, whether we can conceive of a solution or not.
And hey I think OP’s solution would apply pretty well here: let us create characters with a variety of presentations! Or maybe just take away the “light” and “dark” options? A lot of people in this thread responded with great rationale from game dev standpoints, and that stuff is valid. I can see why devs do things the way they do. But I can also see why OP doesn’t like it.
I said the developers removed the labels to be more inclusive and OP (and now you) added them back.
There are technical reasons (pointed out in many comments) for why they might not have full sliders to make any body type you want.
Exactly.
I’m not saying that women are inferior or that anyone with tits is a woman… I’m saying that by labeling the feminine option as the “B-Grade” option instead of just the “Feminine” option there is an uncomfortably misogynistic implication that needs addressing.
What if you’re a dummy thicc femboy with boyboobs?
You might think this identity is just a meme, but it’s not. And while some percentage of that is queer people secure in their identities, some of it is also questioning trans girls who aren’t comfortable selecting “female” yet but will try out exploring femininity through the “femboy” meme.
As an enby, I’ll pick body B most of the time, but I don’t like being called female. I’ll put up with it in an old game, but if a studio decides to not misgender me, I’m nothing but happy. I agree 100% that more options would be nice. But assuming that game companies aren’t going to spend money on artists to make diverse bodies, why yuck the yum I experience when a game at least tries to not misgender me?
A good option that I think could work could be “fat distribution”, instead of body type.
Selecting chest, abdomen and/or legs would be great for binary and non-binary people depending or their presentation.
God I’d love to redistribute the fat from my belly to my hips and tits
Right? Both traditional genders have a characteristic fat distribution, allowing to customize them independently (sliders!) would be a win-win for binary and non-binary people.
Crazy talk, and you’re onto something… that’s been solved already.
First part: you hate that a 10+ years old game is only getting cosmetic changes instead of a rehaul of the whole character model. That’s crazy, nobody’s going to do that, not the ones expecting a profit, and not the modding community doing it for free. If you feel it’s a silly change, you’re right, but realize that it’s the only change they could do.
You’re onto something: body feature sliders. Male, female, giraffe, and turtle bodies, have some structural differences, that however mostly match to the same bones having different shapes. The solution is a body shape slider, or 50. It’s something that existed, in some games, since at least the 2000s. Others were lazy and didn’t do it.
For reference of how far this could go, the following all have the same bones, only change in shape, size, and muscle placemen:
Hold up…
Runescape has a mod scene?
Well, there is an OpenSource client, and private servers with custom rules. That makes every modification possible.
I really appreciate your points and this comparison, but the pictures are giving me Attack on Titan vibes lol
It’s indeed low effort comparing to your proposal, but I think it’s still better than the previous one.
To me, the obvious answer is to do away with the concept of “gender” altogether. It’s a societal construct that doesn’t really need to exist in video game character creation, anyway.
Everybody is born one of two biological sexes: male or female. There. Those are your choices. Call it “apparent sex” and include a pronoun option to allow for players who want to roleplay gender nonconforming characters.
OOPS sex is a social construct too
How so? Biological sex is a quantifiable fact. Every sexually reproducing species on the planet has two sexes, easily identified by gamete size - males have small gametes and females have large gametes.
I don’t wanna start a flame war, but the science on this is sound. Sure, in science, nothing is absolute, but there’s never been any evidence of more than two sexes.
Biological sex is far more complicated than small and large gametes. You can choose (somewhat arbitrarily) to define biological sex by one or more of
- chromosomal sex (which has a variety of variations beyond just xx and xy, so you’re fucked for choosing a binary here)
- hormonal sex (which has a variety of variations beyond just “male hormones” and “female hormones”, so you’re fucked for choosing a binary here)
- reproductive sex (which is gonna leave you defining a lot of people quite incorrectly compared to the other criteria listed)
- how receptive their cells are to particular hormones (which will vary wildly from person to person, so good luck shoving this into a binary)
The only people who think biological sex is a simple categorisation are people who don’t fully understand the biology of sex.
Man, I thought I’d found my people in this community, but my perfectly civil comment discussing scientific definitions of ‘sex’ was removed. That shows that this is likely just another echo chamber that can’t abide civil conversation around scientific facts when said facts make people feel icky.
The worst part is I’m on your side. I’m all in on inclusivity and representation. I’m trans. I’m bisexual. I’m just open-minded, seemingly unlike whichever mod removed my comment.
You, apotheotic, seem civil enough. I was looking forward to discussing biological sex with you, maybe expanding my understanding in the process, but it’s not worth trying to have a conversation if I have to worry about my responses being unceremoniously removed. For what it’s worth, your reply has inspired me to do some more reading on the subject.
Reddit mod practices seem to have bled into every corner of Lemmy. Community: blocked. Good riddance.
I think it may have been removed because it was a misrepresentation of fact.
In case you still want to understand, here’s a good place to start:
But like, not everybody is born one of two biological sexes, so if we’re doing away with societal constructs we may as well get rid of this nebulous concept of a rigid biological sex binary.
Technically there is an extremely small amount of people born as both sexes (intersex), but they tend to have appearances that favor one sex over the other, so from a game development perspective, they’re covered by having two sex options.
I think you’ll find a good many intersex folk would have something to say about being “covered” by being entirely excluded by your arbitrary choice of categorisation.
Eek, this reads like a white person getting upset about someone using “black” instead of “African American”
Who’s being excluded here? My suggestion was to change ‘sex’ in video game character creation to ‘apparent sex.’
You said in your comment “they tend to have appearances” which in itsself alludes to the true fact that there’s some who won’t be “covered”. I was more upset by your dismissal of their experiences than I was by your game design suggestion.
Its runescape, the difference between the body types is like 2 polygons
