This discourse was going around twitter today apparently and im curious takes from here.
Which is it for you?
For me i prefer playersexuality. I want to be able to romance any romance option regardless of my charachters gender. I dont want to be stuck with only Arcade Gannon if i want to do m/m
I agree that sexuality can be important to a charachter. But if you wanna do that, seems like the charachter can just not be a romance option.
That said. In RPGs devs can do what they want. You want a charachter to be monosexual and a romance option, have at it. (Unless theyre all straight, then fuck you).
I do kinda hate what The Sims did by adding monosexuality. Felt like such a virtue signal that made the game less fun. All Sims being pansexual was always more fun for me. Especially since i usually play that game as a pansexual slut. Unless i decide my player Sim is mono, but thats on the player's end.
Monosexual townies in the Sims should at least be optional (is it? Idk havent played Sims 4 since this update).
I think it's honestly better to view it through the lens of it being a game design tool moreso than a philosophical debate. If you want to emphasize player choice and freedom, playersexual. If you want to emphasize characterization and worldbuilding, set sexuality.
If you're going to incorporate dating sim components into your game, it's generally better to lean towards playersexual. Otherwise, you run into a sort of zugzwang where you can
a) lock romance options to het (e.g. Persona) and alienate queer people, even worse when you don't have a gender option which also alienates 50% of said hets, or
b) have set sexuality and allow some queer relationships with certain characters (e.g. Fire Emblem: Three Houses) but have people annoyed about the arbitrariness of it, especially when there are no characters that cannot be romanced in a heterosexual way but limited queer options.I think there's space for set sexuality, especially in linear, narrative-driven RPGs (e.g. Final Fantasy, Undertale, Zelda). Set sexuality really works when you want to emphasize relationships between characters that the protagonist/player character is not party to (e.g.
) Furthermore, set sexuality, when there is a romance mechanic, best works when you establish a boundary between player and character.Ultimately, it's a choice of what you want to grant to the player, as well as the distance between the player and the protagonist. If you want to let the player choose between characters to romance in the game, and that's an aspect that is a design component within the game, you're usually better off sticking to playersexual, unless you want to take a hyperrealistic angle to it. If you don't want to incorporate that aspect into your game, there's genuinely no need, stick to set sexuality. If you want to establish the protagonist as a character that exists outside of the player embodying them, lean towards set sexuality.
I honestly am just tired of romance being attached as a weird afterthought to certain RPGs. It's sterile when it's not handled with a modicum of care, and it definitely cements the whole unease-inducing 'escapist power fantasy' vibe you get in RPGs that take this approach alongside emphasizing openness. If you're gonna let me date, let me date. If not, why bother?
Now I feel weird because the discussions here are great, in depth, and nuanced, but the way I feel about this is kinda boring and uncomplicated? Am I missing something?
If I'm playing a customized character that I made, I prefer characters to be playersexual, allowing custom relationships to match my custom character.
If I'm playing as a written character and experiencing a set story, it is better for all characters to be written well, and have realistic sexualities, as part of the story presented.
As far as representation goes, I think both can have problems, but neither are inextricably problematic.
basically i want good queer characters whose queerness isn't ignorable and is a notable facet of their lives. i think playersexual characters are often a copout, where they write a heterosexual character and then let them date the mc, but if they're textually bi or pan or ace or something than it's fine by me. just make sure they aren't consistently het except for the mc i hate that shit
like i see people talking fire emblem. dorothea is into women! it's very simple to make the playersexual thing work, just have good writing
I actually can't even remember the last time a video game character was actually bi or pan rather than just player sexual and that sucks.
as mentioned, fire emblem three houses! dorothea openly talks about being into women and is constantly flirting with them, and has an ending where she's explicitly in a relationship with another women that isn't the player character (and who the player character can't romance as a woman, but can as a man. it's definitely not perfect!) similar things for plenty of other characters, as laid out by orannis62, where queerness is a part of the world and different places and people have different relationships with it. adrestia seems to be much more chill about it, given dorothea can openly say she's looking to marry a woman and monica's whole deal, whereas faerghus is incredibly restrictive and several characters in it are implied to be queer but repressing or closeted because of social pressures
this is the kind of thing i want more of in games, to acknowledge how characters' queerness affects them and how their environments shape their queerness. and i don't necessarily want every game to do this. in a perfect world there would be some stardew valleys as well, where it's just everyone is bi and that's not a big deal it just means you can choose to date anyone who's dateable, and it wouldn't matter because there would be plenty of games that seriously think about it.
3 Houses is also interesting in that, like, you can make a solid case that Ingrid is gay but is restricted by her society's expectations for what it means to be a crested noble, especially a woman crested noble. The subtext with Felix and Sylvain is also pretty strong and along the same lines, as with why Gilbert left his family. Then there's Hubert and his devotion to a queer woman who wants to tear down the system causing people to repress like this.
There's a lot of writing just under the surface that has interesting things to say about queerness and what it means to dismantle the systems that suppress it that I wish had been much more explicit.
yeah! it's not all explicit, but they make enough stuff explicit that i definitely believe the rest is intentional. i wish they had actually dug a little deeper though, it might have made a lot of the discussion around the game more related to the actual events of it and it would have definitely made me happier as a player
In Wrath of the Righteous, the one female love interest only available to male PCs is a flesh-eating serial killer, which should be the standard for romancable heterosexual characters.
BG3 but every character has a lil bi flag badge
Surely I'm not the only one who finds "romance" options in games to be profoundly weird, though? I feel like the game-y mechanics do not rub up well against what is meant to be a relationship...
Not every game does them well. Bioware is famous for them, but honestly i think only DA Origins ever did it well of the ones I've played. It had some extremely game-y mechanics, it just had better writing to go with it.
I like both for different reasons. If it's important to a character's design and story or if the devs want to represent a specific identity, fixed is obviously the way. If it's not, then playersexual is fine I guess. In the case of a playersexual character though, people should feel free to project their identities—after all, they're working with what is pretty much an open canvas. A character might be playersexual in the broad sense, but that doesn't mean I can't interpret them as a lesbian, for example.
I also think that if what you're aiming for is realism, NPC identities should reflect that in various ways. Getting rejected by Panam (straight) in Cyberpunk 2077 only to recover and go on to date Judy (lesbian) added a lot of depth to my Vi.
Every character should be Bi-winning if you play a woman and gay if you play a man. Just to really piss off the Gamers.
In a perfect world where more game writers weren't annoying dipshits who see writing gay or even bi characters as beneath them, romance options with defined sexualities would be no issue.
In this world I have been burned one too many times playing a game with romance options where the heterosexual romance options are with the characters who are plot relevant and have the most content and the gay and bi options are the side characters who have less content, sometimes explicitly because they're the ones who can get killed off for fun (THIS IS ABOUT YOU BIOWARE I AM SPECIFICALLY TALKING ABOUT YOU, YOU PIECE OF SHIT HACK FRAUDS FUCK YOU)
yeah no, just give me playersexual characters every time, even in ths cases where the devs make it clear they were written with straight relationships as the implied default (Stardew Valley....)
(THIS IS ABOUT YOU BIOWARE I AM SPECIFICALLY TALKING ABOUT YOU, YOU PIECE OF SHIT HACK FRAUDS FUCK YOU)
i remember they did it right with jade empire, and even included male bisexuality and throuples. then they got scared of fox news and cut gay carth from mass effect
They've still done it as recently as Mass Effect Andromeda, the original gay male options were a choice between either a genuinely HORRENDOUS side character storyline and a cool side character with no content.
They only added in a gay male romance with a plot relevant character in a god damn update patch.
straight relationships as the implied default (Stardew Valley....)
Well, there's at least one way to solve that problem...
spoiler
Kind of hard for straight to feel like the default when your romance options are 12 buff furry dudes.
Can you expand on SDV feeling like het was the default even though you have the option of not being? I never personally got that feeling so Im curious.
It's more that the NPCs themselves don't have a lot of mentions of being attracted to people of the same gender, especially compared to the reverse. The game acknowledges your relationship with them (ie you can be a gay/bi awakening in some cases), but not so much when it comes to the NPCs as individuals.
Like yeah Leah does have acknowledgement, but at the same time the game does that trick where her ex changes gender depending on the player's gender. ...Okay that's probably because you can punch her ex but I still have mixed feelings about it since I'm not sure there's acknowledgement that she's bi if you're playing a dude, but I might be wrong.
Ah ok I get you. Yeah that thing with Leah is a bit annoying.
I agree that characters with deliberate and well-written sexualities would be ideal, but on the other hand “bisexual chaos world” also sounds pretty rad. Is it possible to have both?
Technically BG3 is that. On some forum like 15 years ago, Ed Greenwood said that bisexuality is the default in the Forgotten Realms setting.
The problem with accepting word of god is that also means that people bang their siblings all the time in this world too
tbh from what I've seen of search statistics for porn leads me to believe it's not all that uncommon IRL
Dont worry. I dont think most of the people watching stepcest porn on the hub literally want to bang their sibs. Theres stuff im into id never want to cary out the real version of.
Either can be good, I did like how in DA:I you can flirt with Cassandra as a woman and she awkwardly takes you aside after a while to tell you that she is in fact straight (and crushed my heart forever
) the same with Dorian, though he's the aggressive flirt in that case.Then in Mass Effect it just doesnt really even make sense, honestly. Like you're completely different species, in some cases you cant even kiss properly for fear of allergic reactions and you're still stuck on some arbitrary gender binary romances? Live a little, goddamn.
I think this problem exists primarily in the shadow of games historically being written mostly by and for straight men. Games that break this trend, like Baldur's Gate 3, are right now remarkable for it, but once this is the norm the problems of both choices mostly disappear.
But while we are stuck in the present with everyone being bi, I wouldn't mind the characters actually saying "I am bisexual" once in a while.
In games where PC has a well defined personality and is distinct from the player it makes sense to have their sexuality fixed as part of the story, but in open ended RPGs that try to give the player as much choice as possible and blur the distinction between the player and the character, a set sexuality just comes across as lazy writing. I can set myself up as a fire-breathing lizard person with the highest cheekbones in history but the male characters are totally claws-off? That's dumb.
I don’t understand your reasoning here. Are you arguing that the player character should be flexible if it’s an RPG? If so I agree. But if you’re arguing that all NPCs should be flexible just because you get to be a flexible, fantastical character, I don’t understand that logic. The character is YOU, other characters should have their own preferences. I don’t see how it’s lazy to add restrictions to other characters instead of letting everyone be potentially attracted to you
I largely don’t care about which design is present, but I find the arguments against fixed sexualities to be unconvincing.
I agree with this. If the character is the sum of the choices that you make, then you should decide the sexuality.
It depends on the goal of the game and the narrative it is trying to portray. It the character in the game is supposed to be a representation of the player in the game world, then it's only fair for the player to decide their own sexuality. If the character is a set character in the game with their own narrative/backstory, they should have their own sexuality and the player should not be able to change it. This requires competent writing though, which is rare in video games.
As for the NPCs which the player can romance, again that depends on how in depth and good the writing is. If the writing and lore is shallow, just let the NPCs be bisexual or pansexual and let the player romance who they want. If there is in depth narrative, good writing and worldbuilding with regards to NPCs, they should have a set sexuality that the player must respect.
just let the NPCs be bisexual or pansexual and let the player romance who they want.
i think this is a slightly incorrect way to look at it if we describe character attributes within the diegesis, which i think we usually do. a playersexual character might be straight or gay depending on the player's gender choice but for the fictional world, the woman who talks about her ex girlfriend if you play a woman and has a different line about her ex boyfriend if you play a man isn't necessarily bi as far as the story or the other characters are concerned.
Hell, you could do the opposite and have an anti-playersexual character so that the story is about being a supportive friend and clearly not about pursing romance.
An alternate universe JohnBrownNote who loves what i'm not into doesn't change my orientation.
Hot Take maybe; Player-sexuality as the norm is probably inevitable as more of these games tend towards adding mixed and diverse gender options. No developer wants to be the one deciding what combinations of body types, genders, pronouns, voices etc etc falls under 'available to lesbian romance option' or 'available to straight male flirting'.
That said, my preference is still set sexuality. Especially the more grounded a setting. Judy from Cyberpunk (recency bias am I right) for example likely wouldn't feel as real a character to me without the history of messy lesbian situation-ships thing she has going on.
That said, my preference is still set sexuality. Especially the more grounded a setting. Judy from Cyberpunk (recency bias am I right) for example likely wouldn't feel as real a character to me without the history of messy lesbian situation-ships thing she has going on.
she could be bi if the PC is male and still be a lesbian if the PC isn't and the distinction matters. the world where you picked the other gender in character creation doesn't exist during the game so i don't understand why it should affect the narrative (unless the writers are cowards, of course. can't really say "change a thing" and expect nothing else to ripple from that on the dev side)
I just want to be gay with Garrus and lesbian with Tali
