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).
It is a flaw for monosexuality. How are you going to account for non-binary players or characters? Do you just make all characters playersexual regardless of the player’s presentation, if the player is non-binary, but not if they’re a binary gender? Do you give them weird hyper specific preferences? There isn’t a proper way to implement it, and if we’re going to acknowledge that the gender binary is stupid (like we SHOULD) this calls into question the idea of making monosexual romance options in the first place when you have games with characters that can be any gender identity. If you need to explore these different themes, it might be more dev time efficient and less risky to just make a game about that specifically?
Edit: meh don’t think I agree with my own comment here anymore, I’m tired. Game design is a big field and there are plenty of solutions and probably dozens of models between playersexuality and set sexuality we haven’t discovered yet.