adam smasher is an actual trans icon though disagree with me all you want because i don't care, but it's simply true edit: i'm also just saying this because the cishets are usually really upset whenever i come up with this LOL adam smasher is trans and it's canon to me
i have a question.... why ur excited cuz of top surgery scar and all? trans itself isnt an identity, it just means your identity differs from ASAB and you must transition your body to fit who you are. ngl i find it a bit weird u being "its so trans" cuz it feel like u dunno 100% how it means to be (ik tons and tons of trans people and rlly rarely i see a trans person who just have trans as their whole personality) idk.. its just confusing cuz most people suffer cuz of their differing body and isnt fun to transition (though seeing the results over time of your body slowly fitting you is cool), theres lots of therapy meetings, theres the hormone change and surgeries and tons of stuff. you glorifying the top scar surgery for example seems like ur happy to reminder someone of ur ASAB instead of who you are and rub on their faces you transitioned. idk why or how some took transitioning as an identity if transitioning is the action of modifying your body to fit your being. if you do like this kinda of stuff and do identify with this, i dont think trans is the name.
"Do you want to be a powerful boy elf or a hot girl elf" is such a great way to distill sexualization in video games. even in character creators -- you can make a man feel more or less powerful and you can make a woman feel more or less hot. incredible line and really interesting video! i learned a lot :)
Man it hits hard, knowing one could literally be a 6-pack-having heroic sword-wielding elf boy, and still be considered "not sexy at all" by you. Have you ever considered that your standards for attractiveness in men are totaly out of whack?? I dont know what you would want in order for a boy to be considered hot or sexy instead of powerful.
The SWTOR character creator comes to mind. They had body options for each gender: petite, average, muscular, and... big. The big option for male characters was a Chris Farley shape seemingly played for laughs, while the big option for female characters was a volumptuous bombshell. Reminds me a bit of how for years the only black hairstyle games ever offered was an oversized 70s afro. If it doesn't appeal to the target demographic, then it's just a joke option at best.
I'm a 5'4" cis man so it's weirdly difficult to make male characters that are my remotely height using character creators, even if you're given the option of choosing your height.
Same, im 5'2" and nonbinary but even if i choose female frames for the shorter height, the height of characters in BG3 or the Sims for example is still way taller than me
I'm sorry but you can only choose one: tall man or short woman, What? The binary sex-gender system didn't told you that before getting born? That's no excuse! How dare you be born outside my made up and old fashioned rules! 😠 It's a joke, you don't even have to be non-binary to realize gender as a whole it's... Reductive.
My girlfriend has expressed her anger about this before. She's pretty tall and she likes that in heels she's taller than most men, so she's expressed anger before that so many RPGs force her to be shorter. Despite all the choices RPGs try to offer us, they always seem to leave out height sliders
spoilers but in BG3 I played my very first run as an orc woman which is taller than Astarion. For certain body types Astarion will do his little move where you jump into his arms during your first night together but as an orc HE jumped into MY arms. I gasped out loud. The game absolutely has areas to grow but that was one of those thrilling moments of What Could Be for me
I just mostly play women in games because I'm not 😅 Or rather because that's what I enjoy putting pretty clothes on, and for some reason I find roleplay easier or more engaging. Maybe a core point is that I want my game characters to be not-me, as opposed to trying to recreate myself in the game
I am 181 cm girl, I know plenty of women above 170cm. Its not as uncommon to be a tall girl as people think so I don't know why developers are so defensive about women being short
i’m a trans guy, but i stopped growing before i started hormones… at 181cm too. my friend in my form class in high school was a cis girl taller than me. like yeah, women on average are shorter, but that doesn’t limit the maximum any more than men??
My childhood friend in middle school got her growth spurt before everyone else. While we all still were tiny kids, she was towering everyone including all the boys at that age. I have a vivid memory of us all standing in the lunch line in our school uniforms, her sticking out because she looked like she belonged in high school and standing at least two heads taller than everyone else. By the time we were out of high school she was 6 ft or 182cm. Both of her parents were quite tall
Yep also a tall girl here! It’s also important to remember that in some places people in general are bigger or smaller than American standards. Yes, I’m well above average, but it isn’t that strange to the people around me. It’s like a lot of women are pretty small and a smaller proportion of women are pretty tall (but some men can become even taller than most tall girls). In the neighboring country most women aren’t taller than me, but there are way less who are smaller. Now, I haven’t been to America, but statistics show that women are even smaller there on average and in Japan it’s even smaller than that. These differences make it a bit alienating to play games with standardized heights. I would say about half the women I interact with (irl) are about my height and the other half is way smaller than me. Even though the average height of men is way taller than me, most men I interact with are my height or shorter than me.
@@gariden maximum is a bit shorter generally for women. 272 cm for men and 260 for women. I guess the theoretical gaussian share the same min and max but as we live in a finite world, we are still waiting for new records...
As a butch woman, everything you said about Baldur's Gate 3 was spot on. I wanted my character to be a flat chested, shorter, boxy person with a feminine face (as I am in real life). Unfortunately, if I wanted a boxy figure, I had to choose the masculine body type. That meant no shortness or feminine faces. The opposite happened with a feminine body. Sure, I can be shorter and look feminine, but I was then required to have a large chest and curvy body. It seems like games that don't care about gender have the best customization options.
The gender thing is very shiny keys to jangle at people in the LGBT+ community and, sadly - listening to some of my friends - it works. They are so fucking desperate for representation that they'll take this pandering garbage. I'm okay with baby steps and I'm old enough to remember when playing pokemon crystal gave me such joy, but it's still bullshit.
I had a similar problem back in Dragon Age: Inquisition. I had a specific original character I wanted to play as, who is a scrawny male mage, but Ieventually abandoned the run out of frustration because I was so unhappy with his model. The male bodies were all super muscular - because we all know that men are naturally born with chiseled abs, unlike women who are soft and short and pretty. Doesn't matter if he is a backline spellslinger and she has a broadsword and is wearing half her weight in armor.
@@EllisephaI tried to find work arounds with choosing a feminine face and going from there but the body still being locked to types is annoying, just have one body that you can add or do with whatever with. I want to make a weak fail sexy guy but it gets into a twunk into bg3 where all males have abs for some reason
It's interesting that you say that because I felt the opposite. I wanted my character to have big boobs and more of a curvy figure, and I felt annoyed at how peite all the body types were. even the even the larger female body just felt like it made it was more masculine, not a larger women. Also before you say anything, I myself am a large woman with a curvy figure and I like playing as that in video games. I'm also bi but that's besides the point.
yeah honestly with how much bg3 was praised for its gender options it was pretty dissappointing that it was actually just your average gender locked character creator. still enjoyed bg3 but i was unable to really make an androgynous looking character like i wanted
You touched on this as well, you can’t even make your characters OLD in video games, they are all permanently stuck looking like they’re in their 20s - 30s. In D&D races can live for hundreds of years, but when I tried to make my 300 year old gnome D&D character in Baldur’s Gate 3, nope, she had to have an athletic young body with a few crows feet as the only indicator of age. Let us have our wizened old hags!
This. The fact that I can have negative modifiers to STR, COS and DEX in favour of high mental stats to make a frail old but extremely powerful flameball-casting wizard (gender neutral), but I MUST have an athletic body nonetheless is so annoying.
@@NaoyaYami Its... not hard at all in TTRPGs? What do you even mean? The whole *point* of TTRPGs is that there are no constraints on creativity and imagination. In TTRPGs, age is a number on a paper, the appearance is a line of text, maybe a reference image, and the stories are entirely collaborative with the GM and other players. If you want to go full old-man-Sifu monk, you absolutely can. Hell, I've played a couple older characters before, my favorite of which was a centuries-old glassblowing artificer gnome, and one of my friends had an amazing young warlock boy. These kinds of characters are only hard to introduce into a game if you refuse to look beyond societal norms and adapt to the fiction of the story being told. Hell, sometimes the story doesn't even need to change that much. Sometimes the old hag witch might just want to fuck around with some youngin's for a bit of fun and adventure. This can even lead to some more fun, interesting character dynamics than aren't normally explored in a TTRPG. (at least, not amongst the PCs themselves) Sure, this creativity doesn't need to translate to EVERY video game with a character creator. Not every game is even going to _want_ to cater to that kind of creative freedom. But with a game as open to choices and player expression as BG3, the limitations and constraints on the player characters are noteworthy, even if somewhat understandable from a technical standpoint.
@@NaoyaYamiI was in a D&D campaign where I was a literal child with a demonic cat patron, and my magic was so powerful it was almost always unstable. It made the party had to use me as a “this bomb WILL explode but let’s have it be behind enemy lines” type role play (I incinerated an entire college with one cast of Fireball). It’s not “standard” by any means, and the context can be just as attributable to normal adult players, but it wasn’t a hindrance to gameplay-it enriched it and made it interesting. The way you do this is by adding the cosmetics of age, and negative aspects in combat. Maybe you move slower/can’t move as far in combat situations. Deal less physical damage. Can’t dodge attacks well. But you can cast a mighty powerful spell. Or heal for much more than usual because you can do it in your sleep. The “try and play it in an actual game” excuse doesn’t hold up because it’s JUST as engaging, if not more so, and extremely possible to do without thinking “but it’s tooooo much woooooork”.
Orcs to the rescue! Played one for my first full run of Baldur's Gate and I got to make her pretty old looking :) Some options are really hidden behind complexion and additional sliders. Not much to be done about the body type though, unfortunately. You're just gonna be athletic :/
Saying that sexualising men always feels gay is so real. I have a male-presenting character and a male version of that character. When I draw him in a way that accentuates his body, my friends would say "he looks really gay". Admittedly, those friends are bi or homosexual men who are attracted to him. But I didn't draw him to appeal to them specifically, because the character wasn't made to be gay or for gay people. He's just supposed to look sexy. It feels strange to me that this is the pattern of behaviour for male characters, while when I sexualise female characters, I don't hear people say "she looks so lesbian". It's so normalised to sexualise women and not men that to do it to a man feels a bit taboo to people.
That's because men don't s3xu4lize themselves like that, if you want to seduce a woman, a man needs to be attractive and act in subtle charming ways, you can't get under a woman's skin by showing cleavage, sticking your bum out or wearing shorts to slowly cross your long legs... That works far more with other men. This is why when women write seductive men, they don't focus on him showing his body but doing certain actions and gestures while his body is almost always fully covered in a suit or other masculine clothing
That's because straight men don't do that, if they want to seduce a woman, he needs to be attractive and act in subtle charming ways, you can't get under a woman's skin by showing cleavage, sticking your bum out or wearing shorts to slowly cross your long legs... That works with other men. This is why when women write seductive men, they don't focus on him showing his body but doing certain actions and gestures while his body is fully covered in a suit or other masculine clothing that shows its overall shape, suggesting how strong and fit he is.
That's because straight men don't do that, if they want to seduce a woman, he needs to be attractive and act in subtle charming ways, you can't get under a woman's skin by showing cleavage, sticking your bum out or wearing shorts to slowly cross your long legs... That works with other men. This is why when women write seductive men, they don't focus on him showing his body but doing certain actions and gestures while his body is fully covered.
That's because straight men don't do that, if they want to seduce a woman, he needs to be attractive and act in subtle charming ways, you can't get under a woman's skin by showing cleavage, sticking your bum out or wearing shorts to slowly cross your long legs... That works with other men. This is why when women write seductive men, they don't focus on him showing his body but doing certain actions and gestures while his body is fully covered in a suit or other masculine clothing that shows his overall strong and fit physique without revealing what's underneath yet.
One thing I hate about the binary stuff (besides the fact that my character can never be tall) is that most of my female characters always run and jog super weird. I have never seen a woman actually run like that and it looks so fake that I often switch to male characters just to never have to see that running animation again.😐
yes..the run and walk animation is so important to me even over wht the body tipe is . wish games let you choose what animashons styles you like instead of it being tied to gender
It reminds me of how some of the Dark Souls player-character animations have two versions. Man is strong and confident, but the woman has a slightly daintier pose to her arms and knees. There's literally no point but weird sexism, since male and female characters use the exact same rig, and the same animations in every other context. There's even a ring in Dark Souls 3 that does nothing but swap the male and female animations.
Reminds me of Star Trek: The Animated Series, where the male models that they painted the characters over had separate Walk and Run animation cycles, but the female character models only had Walk animations, so whenever a woman has to run in the show they just show her walking in fast forward... it's fucking hilarious if you don't think about how sexist it is :(
That whole segment of "sexualised men in games appear gay" never crossed my mind before, but I think it's a really good point that I haven't heard before. I'd love more organic character creators as well. One the one hand, because I don't think any option available now will get lost. You still get to be the sexy hot fancypants elf if you want to be, but the world could also be saved by a grumpy, fat old dude with a glory belly large enough to hide a body in. And on the other hand because I'll admit I'm down to creating characters _for_ me. A bit of muscle (not much, but more than is usually available esp. for female bodies) has never looked bad on anyone, imho.
Hey, I'm a guy, comfortably masculine and incredibly boring, and I suppose since developers and movie makers always put men at the forefront of their concious when making games, I didnt think much about any of it. Everythings been comfortably made for me so i assumed there wasn't an issue for anybody else. I suppose a lot of men think that way, considering how they react to active attempts at inclusivity. This video was incredibly eye opening. You explained the male gaze in a really strong way and I really appreciate what I've learned from this. I doubt I'm the target audience for this video, but youre a perspective I clearly needed to hear from.
i would argue you are a perfect audience member for this video. we need more people like you who are willing to listen to experiences outside of their own, even and especially if they assumed everyone had it as good as they did. :)
No my friend, you are exactly where you belong. This video was made to educate as well as to discuss and everyone is welcome as long as they stay civil.
@@orangejuice782 Really. The only thing this video can give me, a person who's put a good lot of thought into their gender and how it's portrayed, is validation. Education is far more valuable.
Me as a woman... am glad videos like this reach men like you. You're exactly who needs to see this for this world to change for the better. Thanks for giving me hope haha.
And (iirc) it's been that way for WELL over a decade at this point! Like! How is it that a solid DECADE of other games have failed to match that level of Getting It?
Oh my god!! Thank you for pointing out the height! I made my character as tall as possible bc im a tall asfuck cis girl and SHES NOT EVEN TALLER THAN NEVE OR LUCANIS? It made me so upset. Why do I always have to be dainty? I WANT TO PICK UP LUCANIS
Trans girl here, I always play Qunari in Inquisition and Veilguard, you are taller than basically everyone except some male Qunari. You usually stand at about average male Qunari height if you max the female height slider. So Iron Bull is still gonna be bigger than you, but there's always a bigger fish. To clarify I agree with everything you said, it's just advice for a potential next playthrough from someone who always tries to min/max female height in RPGs.
@@strawberrycelia no problem, some people have a problem with how the horns bulge, but don't be discouraged, you can make them look pretty smooth with just a little forehead tweaking. Also bonus tip for BG3 since it came up in the video a lot, biggest women I could make were tieflings. Them and I believe elves get a 3rd body type for both men and women that is very tall and beefy(used for karlach and halsin)
I was upset about this playing as a femme Au'Ra in FFXIV. Turns out the sexual dimorphism is enormous in any of the more beast-like races in that game. I was really hopeful that the female Hrothgar would be better, and they're *okay*, but where are my lanky lion boys and beefy tiger women?
@@GAHAHAHHWhy even make body shapes for the player character that need two distinct sets of animations then? It would be less work to just make one if that was the real reason.
Splatoon probably falls more on the Mx. Blobby side of the spectrum but I just love how the developers ditched the concept of gender in between games. In Splatoon 2 you have to choose between “girl” and “boy” but in Splatoon 3 those roles are abandoned. The gender differences are no longer tied to the concept of gender, because the only thing that really changes is your eyebrows and eyelashes and everything else is no longer gender-locked. The “boy” and “girl” hairstyles became universal, player animations became customizable rather than gender-based, and the gear that used to be a dress or smock based on your gender has been split into two separate items which you can obtain both of. Also there are canonically gender-neutral bathrooms in the background of a stage (barnacle and dime). It’s very fitting for a game themed around chaos via all sorts of cultures and characters coming together, in my option.
I do wanna note that the voices are still connected to gender. And clothing can change between models. Although I only know this bc I'm a huge splatoon fan and I enjoy how gender fluid it let's me present as!!
I have to disagree! Splatoon still very much has “gendered” body types…while you can choose the hair and outfits, their voice, eyebrows, walking and idle animation, breasts and hips are still all tied to whatever “style” you pick iirc. I still do really appreciate that they didn’t limit hair and clothes to any one gender but also, I never experienced splatoon 1 or 2 so the gendered differences in the player characters feel more distinct to me.
@ I’ve never tested it but I’ve never noticed a difference between the “female” and “male” bodies in splatoon? part of the reason I wanted to bring splatoon up specifically is because the body is pretty much a neutral canvas in my experience, they’re very boxy. I can’t say that there isn’t a difference but there’s never been one large enough that I’ve noticed
i had a professor in university who said "the differences between genders are much smaller than the differences across the same gender" and that has stuck with me ever since.
Meanwhile I am a dude who grew up playing female characters almost every single time I am given the chance not because I thought they were sexy, but because I thought they were cool and had cooler fashion, moves, designs, etc. Which always got me the side eyes and mockery from my cousin who would always go "why would you ever play a girl!?" I do share your issues with character creators tho, I wanna be able to make a tall and muscular female character, but never any luck. That or an androgynous male... about the best luck I had there was a female dragonborn body in BG3 (which lacks default breasts) though that ends with them wearing a bra in many of the outfits... Also, I do ask what would be a proper, non-gay aimed female gaze? I can never get an answer to that as every single option either gets classified as gay-aimed or power fantasy
If you want non-gay female gaze look at shojo or josei anime/manga or games explicitly for women like reverse harem. Look at kpop idols as well as book tok. There's definitely a different type of guy there and they don't have to be in super revealing clothes to be sexy. I mean Astarion has many women in a literal chokehold if you want another example
Tastes vary wildly, but dadbods seem to be popular. The kind that radiates calm and comfort. Less "large and in charge", more "fluffy and fine with that". Which, yes, also describes a lot of gay bears, but I think straight people don't generally read bears as gay. For clothing, though... I'm not sure it's possible to do skimpy clothing that properly sexualises the male body and not have it read as gay against the background of our current culture, because straight men in our culture refuse to wear such clothing, because they consider it gay (and I suspect also because they'd be hella uncomfortable getting looked at, even by women, the way they look at women). Closest I can think of is like... male strippers for female audiences (bachelorette parties maybe?).
part of that is how there is more of a "spectrum"/freedom for male heterosexuality while everything else is condensed down (I mean, look at how pop culture is barely starting to recognize non-butch lesbians)
Yeah, that seems to be a major question for the male gaze idea. It seems like a lot of the writing I've read/ heard on defaults to "Shirtless man= power, shirtless woman= sex." Never mind that's an enormous assumption, basically drawing strict gender and body type lines before anything else is done- "Cause we know human sexuality is a shallow binary." Not to mention that, for many people there is a lot of overlap between the former category and latter. "Nope, there isn't any overlap, and we can 100% tell that the developers fit into either one or the other thought processes with all their characters." Sounds like a shallow binary.
16:42 the "women are on average shorter" justification is just funny when you consider that she is also an orc or thiefling etc. As in a creatures that doesn't exist at all. But somehow her HEIGHT is the unrealistic part.😂
Also, that you're playing a literal hero adventurer, a character who is not only a break from the norm, but explicitly exceptional per the narrative. Like, yeah, ok, averages exist. So what, this character is on the tail of the bell curve in many, _many_ aspects, lol.
And the thing people don't get about averages is that they're averages! Despite the average being different, there is still a 100% overlap between the possible heights men and women can have!
The averages thing is ridiculous, in my home country its not uncommon for men to be near 6' and women to get up to 5'9. Im only 5'2" and in the country im living in now the men and women are actually around my height, so theyd be totally dwarfed by women in my home country
excellent video. its really tiring watching everyone pretend like the gender disparity in gaming ended sometime in the 2010s. also the subtitles are greatly appreciated!
This video is FASCINATING From my own more niche perspective as a gay nsfw game developer this really puts into so much perspective "He is you, she's FOR you" as i was baffled why so many straight male friends of mine opted to play as female characters in games. The point of "audience AND camera" really brings attention to what players can and do look at
It rocked my world years ago when a male gamer friend of mine told me the reason he plays female characters in WoW was so he could look at their butts all day. Somehow it had never occurred to me--I always thought of the protagonists I played as someone to pretend I WAS, not someone to lust after. Of course, I'm fine if people want to play as sexy characters so they can stare at them. The problem, as verily already well pointed out, is that we're not given a choice--if you want to play as a "femme" character, you're going to be curvy and short, and that's that.
yeah unfortunately I've heard so so so many creepy cishet men saying "I made my character a girl because I can stare at her ass while I play. make a male character? ew no I'd be staring at a man's ass then, and that's gay. yucky!" literally constantly
I don't really care if some game creators want to make sexy characters and basically just stick to a masculine/feminine binary, but I do care if they try to find some way to advertise their game as being inclusive to all genders when it really isn't. All I want is for people to not lie about their games (or stretch the truth about their games to an unnatural degree) since I feel like that is often more damaging to trans and gender non-conforming people than just making a game that doesn't represent everyone. And not every game needs to represent everyone and that's okay. Honestly, the way a lot of these big game companies advertise their "one tiny insignificant pixel of trans and non-binary inclusive content, kind of" feels a lot like the Disney LGBT "firsts" bs.
I think it is easy for people to forget how hard complicated software is to make, like some of the examples used in this video. Many small things combine to be a huge thing, especially if we remember take into account QA and bugs. We have to remember that trans people are a clear minority, and we also have to remember that most games won't get significantly better with dev time being spent on features like this, and I would rather have devs focus on making games as fun as possible, which won't mean absolute inclusivity for most games and by that I mean that there is a lot of lower hanging fruit to improve the median experience of playing most games. When a game is advertised for being inclusive things change quite a lot, because at that point is sort of a promise from the developer that they have considered inclusivity and then the implementation being half-assed seems like false advertising. I guess gamers have to be quite used to false advertising at this point though. :/ I also do have a bit of a personal annoyance with games and other software locking hairstyles behind gendered choices. I don't think big dudes having long flowy hair is even really against the norms but for some reason long hairstyles tend to be rather limited in my experience for male characters in character creators, while I have a ton of balding options for some reason.
@@valtarijunkkala I would like to add, not only is it technically complicated but its complicated in terms of story. I would actually like games where your character is not a blank slate. So many ideas that seem like easy pickings aren't fleshed out since we need to make everything not contradict the blank slate. With limited dev time, I want story of the assassin who is also a mother ala Kill Bill. Give me the old man who is at the end of mafia career. The nonbinary superhero who has to have secret identity even when their cape is not on. If you want represent them then just write the darn thing and put your energy into making ONE great thing instead of five okay things.
@valtarijunkkala I agree, I don't know why so many games, especially western games, feel like they have to spend like half their budget and development time on some massive character creation feature when no one really seems to care about it in terms of the overall game and story by the end. A game like animal crossing makes sense to have it concidering the whole point of that game is dress-up, but a story driven game where your blank-state character has no impact on anything else except to be a convenient plot device just feels like a huge missed opportunity for a better story and character development.
@violetsonja5938 Honestly the blank-state character often times makes the games feel even less immersive since the player just feels like they're witnessing the events unfold around them and it doesn't feel like they are actually a part of the events. Not every game needs a character creator, and it seems like more people identify with an engaging story than a bland oc that juat so happens to look a bit like the person playing the game
This is one of the better discussions of gender representation (trans, non-binary, cis, etc. - doesn't matter) that I've ever read or listened to. Thank you for putting forth the "sexy binary" issue so well. I have tried explaining the male gaze issue in games to guys so many times without much success, but I think the way you put it is incredibly spot on and hard to dismiss.
yeah, I tried too, many times. and it's usually a "but there are also sexualised men" (they can be shirtless) or "but I you are objectifying the women more than I do by criticizing their sexy design instead of looking at the character behind it". really damn tiring, but guess I at least got a few people to think about it more.
Opposite end, I’ve tried understanding but I never really got it. I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever had anyone really point out to me ‘the male character is meant to be you, the female character is meant to be for you’ before and I still have some trouble understanding it. It was very formative, and great, and amazing.
@@sociallyineptsnapper I understand the male gaze and I disagree with it. There is a fundamental confusion around male sexuality and a futile attempt to equate it with female sexuality.
The height thing seems so ridiculous, even the god damn mii maker for the Wii lets you have maximum height on a male of female mii, or of course minimum height on either
Height is unfortunate but unlikely to change any time soon, the reason why so few games have height sliders and when they do they are typically slight changes at best is due to how height interacts with animations. Tall people and short people legitimately walk differently, stand differently, and that only gets more complicated when you have animations that involve multiple people. For example in Baldur's Gate 3 every single possible character needs to be able to dance with Wyll, kiss Karlach, pet scratch and more. Larian already spent an absolute ton of effort in making each other these animations work for every existing height and body type, having a height slider would make that exponentially more complicated. Miis can be any height because they barely have animations. I do believe we will see better androgynous representation is later RPGs as we are currently in the era where games are still designed around the gender binary only for some gender non-conforming elements to be added later. I am sure we will see a less gendered system in an up and coming RPG.
@TheNotshauna your explaination falls flat on the fact that bg3 still has tall male character animation tho. you dont need a slider, you could just copy paste the female model on the male one to make it taler and have roughly the same animation. it wouldnt ad a slider, just a "choose between those heights" option. but thats still an improvement, and still pretty easy to make.
@@TheNotshauna Animation is getting smarter. There's a lot of active detection of the environment starting to go on to ensure that models are making contact with other models and the environment in realistic ways that avoid clipping problems. The only issue is that generalized ray tracing is really expensive and requires powerful equipment to do, so it's not really accessible to most consumers yet and consequently not valuable for most developers to be including in their games. But the ability for character models to "see" each other and figure out how to interact regardless of what shape or size they are is already being worked on. It'll probably just take a while before the technology is cheap and efficient enough to be expected in any given game.
@@TheNotshaunathey could just make all player characters a height that is roughly average across all genders then, it would be less weirdly sexist. I feel like if you compare it with people in real life, the differences in games feel bizarrely overexaggerated (which makes sense considering everything this video is about)
You touched on the body diversity issues and that reminded me of the fact that, both of the 'skinny' body types in BG3, regardless of your gender, would weigh 75 kg. I'm a 70 kg woman. In NO UNIVERSE can a 75 kg woman look like that. But they wouldn't give the female body type more muscle or fat to make up for that, no. Not even close to what the skinny men get. You just weigh as much as a more slight man because balance, while looking nothing like what a person who weighs that much would.
I doubt many people will bring this up (mostly because it was abandoned and forgotten), but I think the Mirror's Edge series has a surprisingly well done female protagonist. The game not only discourages fanservice by being in first person (and having a main character with normal body proportions lol), but it does everything it can to immerse you into her shoes, going as far as having a dynamic breathing system while you run, a fully rendered body and having you constantly talk to people over the radio. It's like they're not only making you play as a woman, but also making it an integral part of the gameplay and constantly reminding you of it while you play without having like weird sexy scenes or suggestive camera angles. It's even more impressing considering the fact that the game was released in 2008. I think that's pretty cool. Big fan of mirror's edge
I've been ranting about bulge sliders since saints row 4 had the sexyness slider, where on women you could make ridiculous gazongas, but on men the bulge remained quite realistic, on the highest setting. Maybe slightly off topic, but weird that that's still a thing after all these years.
they had the same animations for both genders and no different voicelines, boss is just boss (they/them), and the triangle body slider, but the separate sexy slider is bullshit ikr 😭
Lol. I remember that. Thing is, Saints Row 3 introduced the Sex Appeal slider and had a way bigger range for males. The 100% in SR4 was the 50% in SR3.
Surprisingly, the game's that come the closest for me when it comes to breaking the gender binary, such as by making giant, shredded women and short, slender men, is Dragon's Dogma. Despite coming from a time before these sort of discussions were really around, the game allowed you to make a female character who was 210 cm tall and weighed well over 110 kg. All the while with different arms, legs, and hips to match which direction of the spectrum you'd like to be at. I wish more games would let you mold your character as much as this character creator did.
Yes, thank you. I loved that character creator because I could use the 12 torso, 10 arms, and 11 hips and get a body that looks quite similar to mine(as a cis woman). No other creator has ever matched that level of different body types, not even Dragon's Dogma 2 - which is a depressing simplified version of what was almost perfect.
It's honestly so tragic that Dragon's Dogma didn't go as far as adding trans or enby options. The character creator is literally perfect for body type diversity but I can't actually have my character that looks exactly like me yknow.. be me, canonically. Still fun to run around as a photo perfect avatar of myself for the first and only time in gaming, though! And to not have my damn arms clip through my body like every other game with fat people! 🥳
@@Bunni89 It was 2011... in Japan. So that makes sense. The real travesty is that modern games with trans and NB options have such limited customization options. You can't have dwarf characters, or short scrawny men, or big buff women, or manly faces on fem bodies and vice versa, or non-average proportions in the limbs and torso. Everything is one size with like a 5% rate of change. Games have come so far yet also not at all.
I was going to mention Dark Arisen! (I haven't played the new one). Even though you can't change voice/pronouns, I was able to make a very androgynous looking character, more so than any other game I've tried.
Yea i never got the whole “women are always smaller”, while mostly true it makes tall women irl feel so alienating. Omd a tall woman?? How special 😭 i also hope the body customisation becomes a spectrum too instead of checkboxes, because well, that’s a binary 💀
It’s crazy how the option of “Male, Female, Non binary” is a ternary which defeats the purpose of being non binary which is that you are anywhere between or outside of male or female NOT JUST A THIRD CHECKBOX
I know some in-development indie games are using androgynous bodies as a base and making sliders to go between male and female. Like Paralives and Vein. But I think the Vein sliders don't change the body enough though. I feel like the slider needs to go further in either direction so I can get some hideously exaggerated Chad body or an exaggerated Venus of Willendorf body. Unless you can do that stuff by changing enough of the detailed options.
It.. is.. rather special? I prefer shorter women and somehow, frequently bedded women my height (5'10) or taller. They are not common, and pretending like they are is weird. A tall woman stands out and there's not really any getting around it at all.
I love Fallen London. The game never uses pronouns on the PC, just a title that you pick. Such as Sir, Madam, or Citizen. You can change your title at any time and unlock new titles by completing some stories. Their newest game, Mask of the Rose, also has options to give your character a trans backstory. The sudden upheaval of society caused by The Fall allowed you to be yourself for the first time in your life.
It's always funny how a gender binary society affects everyone. I'm a cishet guy, but I'm average height, kinda slender, small waisted, kinda androgynous face, with a middle to high pitched voice. For sexy binary games I might as well be a girl!
THEY SAID WHAT ABOUT "PROTECTING" LARA? Insane! As a lil gay some of my first memories ever are playing early PC games with my dad, and we would talk about what a badass Lara was. When I used to play, I saw her as the one protecting ME xD She's the one shooting, flipping, running into danger in the front, the camera (us) is behind her, like... I can't 😭 I'm really glad I got to experience Lara's world as a kid.. I can see how understanding the motivation behind the character design would be heartbreaking. I always saw her as a strong, protective, friendly figure.. also, because I didn't speak English back then any suggestive comments were lost on me... hmmm.. Now I feel I was really lucky for this experience
I understand calling that heartbreaking. It's such upsetting information even without having a Tomb Raider history myself. The idea that the notion of boys as being unable to relate to girl characters much goes THAT far is deeply painful to comprehend.
Yet another reason why old school Lara is better. I've never heard anything about her needing to be protected. She's just too badass. She also has a bit of roughness in her character that just isn't allowed in many modern female characters, because they're meant to be good role models and shit. Meanwhile, modern Lara is so generic I don't know who she is.
I do work teaching organizations about trans people, how to treat us in the workplace and as people, and we have a whole section about how to apologize for misgendering somebody. And that Veilguard example is literally *WORSE than our 'what not to do' example.* We advise the quick apology for the simple reason that it recognizes fault, while not putting any emotional or conversational weight on the trans person. An action or response bigger than a 'sorry' and moving on just puts more onus on the person being misgendered to accept that apology and coddle the feelings of the person who made that mistake, rather than actually addressing (or even acknowledging) the feelings of the person who was wronged. Veilguard's approach is one by people who don't care a lick about trans people: what they actually care about is cis people being able to pat themselves on the back for being accepting of The Other.
OMG, literally. When I saw that scene I felt so freakingly uncomfortable. It makes the misgendering about the person who did the misgendering. Brings so much fucking attention to it. Just say sorry and try to learn from it, don't make a spectacle 😭. And as Verily said, it doesn't make frigging sense in this fantasy world that had stablished a different gender scenery. It is just there to be all "look at us, we're soooo inclusive" without caring at all about gender inclusivity. It's performative.
OMG YES! I once was misgendered by my boss and he made like this huge deal out of it to the point that he told my supervisor to apologize for him again the next day and when you're apology rolls around to the point of annoying and uncomfortable that I'd rather you call me a slur instead it better come with 100 bucks...or at least a bottle of wine.
While some of the gender exclusivity in Fallen London was built in from the beginning, much of the naturalness of the non-binary representation was very intentionally built in by the current team of developers- it's part of the advantage of running an online game that can be constantly updated. FL has gone through significant content changes since its inception, including removing dialogue that very explicitly othered the non-binary character (there was a long period of time where your non-binary character would be referred to as "Si-, er, Mad-, er, yes" by default, while the default for a binary gendered character was a standard gendered honorific.) There has also been a significant amount of retconning the way female characters were treated and sexualized in the game's earlier years. There used to be a number of non-optional quests where you had to choose to seduce either a male or female suitor (with no non-binary options), and your character had to continue with this romantic plotline to gain essential qualities. There have been many significant changes made as the leadership team at the game studio has developed, but it's relevant to know that the game's current level of non binary representation is absolutely not how it started.
Wow, I'd never critically considered the male gaze that is inherent in most of the games I play. This was an eye-opening exploration of something holding back games from good representation. Delighted Saint's Row got a mention: I was thinking about their character creator right up until you mentioned it! Thank you for the lovely video!
i'm glad you flashed the witcher 4 trailer, it was so infuriating to me that it got picked up in the culture war as "woke" for having a female protagonist while the trailer literally began with long, loving shots of a naked woman's body. a woman who ends up being a damsel for the player to save. just because the avatar is a girl this time it's okay?
Ugh. As much as I enjoy the Witcher series (I've played all 3 game and listened to the audiobooks), the male-gazy-iness in all the relationships makes it so creepy as a woman. I often have to look away from the screen when the "romance" cut scenes happen because it makes my skin crawl. Not to mention how utterly blind the fanboys are to all the extremely creepy gross stuff surrounding intercourse in the series.
@@agilemind6241 Imagine acting so childish and immature towards two characters expressing desire and attraction for each other in a way that isn't sanitized like in romance movies.
Just ignore that shit. People calling the witcher "woke" have never laid eyes on any of the books or games or even the netflix show. You could tell them Ciri's been basically the deuteragonist from day 1 and they'd go "still woke though"
As a trans person, I adore fallen london and failbetter's other games, gender isn't *quite* an after thought, but it's comfortable to be non-binary or trans in the games. Sunless sea deciding if you wanted to give birth to your heir, for your partner to give birth, or if you adopted them honestly felt like a comforting thing, as you had access to all options regardless of avatar or chosen titles (the closest thing to gender you could choose).
Your gender options when creating a character in Fallen London are still my favorite in all of gaming. Your choices are: "A Lady" "A Gentleman" "My dear sir, there are individuals roaming the streets of Fallen London at this very moment with the faces of squid! Squid! Do you ask them their gender? And yet you waste our time asking me trifling and impertinent questions about mine? It is my own business, sir, and I bid you good day."
"man? woman? my god there are squid things running around and you care about me?" or something like that, its been awhile since i played fallen london much less made a new character lol. edit: can you tell i was browsing the comments early while watching the vid?
@@comyuse9103 the exact quote is "My dear sir, there are individuals roaming the streets of Fallen London with the faces of squid. Squid! Do you ask them their gender? And yet you waste our time asking me trifling and impertinent questions like that? It is my own business, sir, and I bid you good day"
oh my, you really opened my eyes... you explained the whole "male gaze in games" thing so concisely. i've always been confused why those gamer bros always complaining when a female protagonist/character didn't cater to their very strict, gendered ideals of beauty, because most of the characters they complained about either 1) looks pretty to me or 2) reminds me of actual people no wonder they complained so much, to them those characters need to specifically caters to their gaze... anyway thank you so much for this video, i really like the way you expand on things in games that many gamers overlooked simply because it didn't bothers them that much...
A long ramble/rant: As a cis/het (and yes, liberal) guy, I don't think I need to be coddled by media anymore. My mind's not gonna break if I roleplay a female or nonbinary character. Also, if I can play male characters and not get bored, I can play female characters I'm not attracted to and also not get bored. It's weird, because a bit of my old explanation from when I was a teenager remains true. (That I'd rather look at (and hear) a lady for a whole game than a dude.) But the more important thing is, I can care about a character I think is hot, I can care about a character I don't, and I can identify with and care about a female character regardless of attraction... both, either, or in the case of a too-flawed protagonist, neither. (I can still enjoy the story even if I can't really identify with the character at all.) As for character creation systems, I'd like to see an emphasis on not linking all these aspects that really don't need to be linked. (It may be more work if the system is already barely there, but when it's robust, surely it's more work to limit the player, no?) I want this for the people I care about, who feel left out, but I also want it for me. Some of the cutest, most endearing (in personality) women I've met were my height (almost 6 feet) or taller, and frankly, I'd love to be able to create and play a tall, muscley "Amazon" type with a (secret or not-so-secret) heart of gold, or a big and tall woman with a kind face, who gives and receives protection from the people she cares about. (These are a couple occasional tropes, but it's just to illustrate my point.) Further, I get really annoyed when I spend the time to create a female character with a bit of (in-world or head-cannon) backstory, who couldn't be arsed with heels or lots of makeup, but then I get to those options, and... Wait, heels are the ONLY shoes?! WTF?! All the makeup is very obvious? So, I guess I'll just go no makeup?... Test Drive Unlimited 2 really annoyed me with the heels... Like, you gave me lots of clothing options, but all the women's shoes are heels?... You know she's/I'm gonna be racing cars, right? Why are you trying to break my immersion?! At the end of the day, much like Hollywood, triple A games tend to come across as pandering, rather than actually caring about inclusion in the workplace and/or storytelling. It's just soulless business, and business doesn't care about humans. That's the general feeling I get. This video did a great job of tying in other issues/aspects though, and gave me a lot to think about. I remember being a dumb teen and finding Lara Croft hot. I still find her attractive, but I didn't keep playing any time I've gone back to the series. The new games seem to have fun mechanics and thankfully lost the archaic control scheme, but I found myself just as uninterested in Lara as a character as always. Maybe, after the first new game, the storytelling gets good/interesting. I just know the first one turned me off of actually playing these games I already own. I want human characters. I want female characters. I want non-binary characters. I don't play games to drool over boob/butt physics. I'm not opposed to that, as an outlier, but I really don't want a "hot" character to be a necessity on some dumbass checklist. Again, I want HUMAN characters. Give me a story and characters I can care about. Focus on that first... I mean, besides gameplay, of course. And yes, this is all about me, but who else can I speak for. I just wish these huge companies would actually listen to their storytellers and other employees. Men don't need to be coddled. We ALL need better storytelling, world-building, and role-playing options. It's good for everyone, and cis/het guys like me lose nothing from the changes people are asking for. So, why the f**kin' hesitation?
Totally agree. The problem seems to be a really loud minority that opposes inclusivity. Unless there truly is such a majority outside my social circle that still can't be comfortable with anything outside their mainstream gender stereotypes which would be really sad, but honestly also not that unimaginable considering some people I know.
Making a robust character creation is costly. Have you used skyrim's bodyslide mod? Its challenging to make clothes fit the bodytype you want. All this stuff costs time and money, that needs to be supported by increased sales. You were going to buy the game anyways. A more improved character creation system costs more money and doesn't increase the amount of sales to justify it.
Also the difference in animations between "male" and "female" bodies in games drives me CRAZZZYYY. I'm nb but if I have to choose I play AFAB bodies in games but dear christ the animations are so stupid sometimes. AMAB bodies just move like people, but AFAB ones are usually animated to stand, walk, run in this weird artificially dainty kind of way that's just ridiculous. Totally take me out of the immersion, especially since cis women don't even move like that. I truly get the feeling sometimes that the people making these games have never seen women in situations where they're not performing or objectified.
As an animator, there is something to be said in the different ways that one holds their body both due to its physicality (Which can be influenced by many things like sex and age and disability and whatever) and by socialisation (Which can be influenced by many things like culture and upbringing and gender and whatever). AFAB characters tend to walk differently due to the weight on their chests and hips and having different centres of gravity, HOWEVER, this should NOT be treated like its the only factor in how they walk. Becaaaaause- ITS NOT A BINARY. ITS NOT 'male walk' OR 'female walk'. EVEN WITHIN SEXUAL DIMORPHISM, THE HUMAN BODY HAS A VERY FLUID WAY OF PRESENTING. BTW, DOES ANYONE KNOW WHY CHARACTERS WITH DISABILITIES OR CHILDREN ARE BEING AFFECTED BY ARBITRARY SEXUAL CHARACTERISTICS?? IF YOU CAN ONLY MOVE WITH A CRUTCH, YOU AREN'T BOOBING BOOBILY DOWN THE STAIRS, YOU ARE MOVING IN A METHODICAL WAY LEANING ON THE CRUTCH AS YOUR MAIN SUPPORT. BECAUSE THATS THE WHOLE DAMN POINT OF A WALKING AID. *TITS BE DAMNED, YOU'RE STILL FLESH AND BONE.* The 'gender/sex first' approach to writing is stupid, reductive, hurtful, boring, and CRIMINALLY uncompelling.
Memories of the "animation-swapped" Batman and Catwoman scenes spring to mind while reading this. Even though that is a situation where the characters are very archetype "stoic masculine brawler" and "elegant femme fatale acrobat" people, seeing it so starkly contrasted really outs it in perspective.
I've come to realize that I just prefer games with a fixed design for the protagonist because I don't have to spend 30 minutes creating a character I will be unsatisfied with
Okay, I don't know if you're ever going to see this or if someone else has already said it, but Saints Row 2022's character creator wasn't actually as much of a progression as you might think - it was returning to (and marginally upgrading) the amazing way the character creator worked back in Saints Row 2 from _2008!_ This was something the fanbase had been asking for through Saints Row 3 and 4. 3 and 4 allowed you to pick voice, hair and clothing options that were feminine or masculine without regard to your body type, but they also fell into the "powerful male, sexy female" category. Androgyny in those games isn't possible. But in SR2 there wasn't a binary choice - just sliders! SR2 also let you choose how you walked - so you could choose a feminine bounce or a masculine strut and like 8 other options. You could even switch between them as you liked! It's a game from 2008, so it's a little difficult to make a character that stands up to today's standards, but Saints Row was trans-inclusive all the way back in 2008! (In fact, if you make a female character she's canonically trans! Saints Row 1 only let you make a male character, so in order to keep continuity they're just like "yeah all that happened exactly the way you remember playing it, but if you're a lady then you had some work done". ) Something else interesting about Saints Row is that in an effort to not use gendered terms when referring to the player, there are actually a couple times in 3 and 4 where you're actually referred to as they/them. I don't get a lot of chances to talk about Saints Row these days but I love doing it.
I remember a friend showing me the character creator from Saints Row 2. The level of customization was wild. And needless to say it inspired great lengths of creativity...
Thank you so much for making this! For the most part, I was really happy and grateful to play as a nonbinary character in Baldur's Gate 3, but I was SO DISAPPOINTED at those super gendered body options! I hope video games keep moving forward into more inclusive options.
In all seriousness, even as a guy, I gave up on creating characters that look like me cause I’m short. I genuinely like being a gnomish lil guy, and I’ve been shorter than most women I’ve dated. It always breaks my immersion when I have to be a tall hunk cause, like, it isn’t me!
@@zufalllx everyone plays differently. I created lots of OCs, but sometimes I want to play as my sona doing my choice. Roleplaying is fun so long as you don't get gatekeeped, and unfortunately preprogrammed electronic games are based on a lot pf limitations for creation.
One of my best friends got frustrated with Elden Ring for somewhat similar reasons. He's a heavy-set Black guy with soft features, and even adjusting the skin tone and weight as far as possible, you end up with a chiseled Caucasian-looking dude with a tan
I really liked this, you got out a lot of stuff I didn't know how to say. I also think there's a problem with a bunch of binary sliders because nonbinarity (I dunno if that's a term) isn't just the space between male and female. On the most basic level it's got a dimension of how much gender you express, and all pronouns that aren't they/them, but that's still kinda basic. Nonbinarity isn't something you can glue on because it isn't an attachment to the binary world, it's a rejection of it.
"It isn't an attachment to the binary world, it's a rejection of it" - that is very well expressed and as a trans woman with admittedly skewed view on gender outside of the binary, I never thought about it in that way. It's not really the 'third' gender option that you see generalized in all the bureaucratic paperwork, but instead it's something different that doesn't correlate like the options 'male' and 'female' do. Fascinating!
This "She's not him, she's FOR him" logic also explains why there's such a huge backlash to characters like Aloy from Horizon: Zero Dawn. If she's not conventionally attractive the way they want her to be, then clearly she's not FOR him. And if she's not for him, then he's supposed to identify with her as a character, and that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
Characters like her also show how gooned out and defective the male gamer's brain is because she's not even ugly. Like most of the "Ugly" characters they show would be conventionally attractive irl, they just aren't top 1% genetics irl anime girls with perfect makeup infused into their skin.
Shaun's newest video does a great job of breaking down exactly this issue that gamers™️ see with Aloy. Absolutely wild how much some people demand pandering in media
To think that a lot of this started because when the first video games were being sold, they were considered toys, and every toy needed to be either for boys or for girls, so they put video games as a toy for boys and we ended up here.
19:29 I noticed this in Assassin's Creed Valhalla! All the women would come on super strong in the main story but you had to be the one to initiate anything with guys (except that one really gay guy in that one village in the middle of nowhere)
In AC Valhalla you're canonically a woman called Eivor. You can assign the skin of Odin / Havi to look / sound like him because his conscience also lives inside your mind, but everyone in the world addresses Eivor like a woman.
i remember discussing older dragon age games with my brother's friends and they all were creeped out by Zevran and Anders actually flirting with the player character first, because they felt awkward to say no 😭
You Can't Have Both. You litterally cannot tell the story of someone's struggle to be accepted in a world that is already accepting. Unrelated extreme example to illustrate how impossible this is. Imagine if Zootopia, the movie where everyone was an animal, wasn't about the little character wanting to be accepted in a Big character world. Imagine if it instead started in the city and there were already ribbit cops but Judy keeps her desire to be a cop secret because she doesn't think the city will accept a rabit cop. YOU CAN'T HAVE A STORY ABOUT THE STRUGLE IF YOU REMOVED THE STRUGGLE BY SHOWING AN ACCEPTING WORLD.
You can, if you present it as a contrast between the serious things, and the asinine details that don't matter in the bigger picture. Portraying racism as absurd, for example, is a lot easier when you compare judging someone's morals by their actions, or the concentration of melatonin in their skin.
You absolutely can. Your Imagination is very limited. There's millions of ways this could be achieved, starting with, all rabbit cops are treated and laughing stock and are often taken as desktop officers, whereas Judy wanted to be a field officer. Or, bunnies are treated as little more than mall guards with a badge, only ever posted on secure positions and Judy wants more. There could be few, there could be a foundational scene where she sees a bunny cop and opens up about wanting to be a police officer and the bunny officer just goes, pfffft, bad idea girl. Further driving the wedge by showing that even those already institutionalized are mistreated.
Yes you can. In Stars and Time does it very well. The leading religion of Vaugarde is super inclusive and accepting, and yet there are still struggles to be accepted there, but in a very different way. I recommend you play it, since I don't want to spoil the context for this
I mean, if this is about Veilguard, there's clearly not full acceptance, especially since Taash's mother doesn't know what non-binary means (since the Qun only really tolerates binary trans people and only if they accept their gendered role in society).
@@gabrote42 Looks like one of the many games that falls outside of my emotional range so I just went ahead and looked up the spoilers. Looks like you're saying they achieved both because the main cast don't know each other so there's the fear of not being accepted by each other.
I clicked on this video thinking it would be a silly video from the thumbnail but instead got a really insightful discussion on a topic I’ve never put much thought into. As a cis woman it’s really cool to see another perspective on androgynous character customization in video games
This is not a defense of the set height differences. As a tall woman, it also pisses me off, but I think, at least for the Sims 4 because the animations are set a certain way you literally can’t change height without it starting to look really weird, and there are certain mods that do change the height of Sims, but the animations do not adjust so when they cook, there’s just a floating spoon and their hand is empty.
I'd wondered about this. Additions to the character creator can introduce all sorts of programming complications. These can always be worked around, but add a cost to development time. I also assume the height difference in other games is because the base model that the sliders deform from is just shorter. And then the reason for the binary in the first place is because they didn't want to solve the problem of a base model interpolating between the two. Which we've seen can be done. Hopefully more games using better character creator practices will create new standards and make working through these problems go smoother overall.
Thank you so much for making this! This is legitimately one of my favourite topics because of how, even after all this time, character creation & personal identity is still missing the mark. And every time some big game is called out for how well they do it just makes what's missing that much more obvious. No matter how far society wants to claim it's finally done it, make the ultimate representation, it's still built around a binary framework that will always find a way to exclude non-binary folks
Honestly the best way I've ever heard the male gaze explained. The gendered gaze is so wild, thank you for speaking to the nonbinary experience in this.
From my experience too, it's way more normalised for a male player to play a female character than for a female player to play a male character. Obviously lots of male players play female characters for the reasons you've listed but I remember people being super confused by my sister playing any type of male character in a game. Super weird
As always, what a solid video. I feel like this is really the definitive summary of the conversations that exist around these character creators, and I love that you reached beyond just the character creator of a single game to consider a much wider history of gendered gaming and discrimination, weird little fellas, and wordlbuilding that just doesn't put in the work the way it feels like it should. I spend a lot of time in fandom spaces where the focus quickly becomes extremely narrow and the forest is very lost for the trees (and often vitriol about them), so watching this play out back to back with BG3 and DATV and the point get totally drowned by people who just didn't like the games and wanted to score points for dunking instead of engage in a real conversation about the state of gender inclusivity in gaming has been... frustrating. It's really, really great to see those individual pieces finally assembled so deftly into a full picture. And man. The betrayal I felt throughout BG3, the first CRPG (my favorite genre!) where I could be nonbinary (me!!!) when I couldn't be short with a flat chest and all the clothes were so painfully fem was... woof. I love that game and I'm sincerely glad that I could play a petite nonbinary character, but it fell incredibly short in so many ways and from minute one I knew I was still playing Around the game instead of in it, just a little less than usual. The sexy gender binary was so bad that I actually never took off the starting armor for my class because it was the only clothing I had available that felt like I was binding my chest! Shout out to default paladin armor for carrying me through the game...... I love you. And I hate that I never got to use fancy gear with good stats lest the sexy gender binary rain on my parade.
Having words like "trans" and "non-binary" feels really lazy to have in a high fantasy game. It's so jarring, like if your elf warrior started talking about skibidi toilet. While the same types of prejudice might exist in your fantasy world it doesn't mean the same language and historical factors have been the same. There's a reason fantasy things don't generally use modern-day slurs or talk about nazis. All of these things have deep-rooted basis in very real-world concepts like Christianity and Europe. If you're making up a fantasy world and want to talk politics and gender stereotypes then you also need to figure out how these large abstract social concepts work in that world per race/locale/religion.
I absolutely agree, as someone who is a big Dragon Age fan. Our modern, western, conception of gender is incredibly specific to the time we're in that it doesn't translate well to a fantasy setting. I at least appreciate the (clumsy) effort to address it, unlike BG3, where gender binaries have been previously established but suddenly mean nothing to the characters in the game. For example, would a trans female Drow not make some serious waves? Why is Minthara just fine with that?
The problem of course is that we construct the cloth of these fictional worlds out of our experiences with the real one. There is no way to "naturalistically" figure out how sex and gender would be understood in Thedas/Par Vollen/etc because these worlds aren't real, they're constructed. I think the real problem isn't that they used the specific words "trans" or "non-binary," but rather that they didn't integrate the concepts very well. I.e. for a term like "non-binary" to feel natural, the term binary would have to have been made present and feel natural. And they just...didn't do that. I really would have preferred they axe the awkward and actually kind of questionable scene about "pulling a bhurv" and instead actually showed a scene where Taash was talking to the Shadow Dragons in Minrathous, or the Lords in Rivain and finding an identity label that fit for them.
It doesn't even make any sense that it's there, either, when LGBT characters exist in the Dragon Age series in the previous three games and none of them needed to be described by modern terms for the narrative to make it clear that's who they are. Taash could have been firmly nonbinary without using that term at all, or even coming up with a fantasy term (like the character Krem in the video), and for some reason the writing in Veilguard for the specific concept of gender identity dodged subtlety like bullets in the Matrix. I desperately wish I knew why this game acted like it had to reinvent the wheel that the series had already gotten rolling.
I LOVE the character creator in Street Fighter 6 as a cis woman because it lets me live out MY power fantasy - getting to be an insanely tall and built woman who can punch someone into the next dimension. The height thing in particular has always pissed me off in these ‘sexy binary’ games (as you’ve so wonderfully put) being tall myself, and in games like BG3 and cyberpunk it sucks to have to choose between playing a sexy dainty character who identifies as my gender or a tall muscular one who doesn’t. In that way I think you nailed it when you described this issue not as necessarily trans specific but one that comes from a deeply sexist culture. Thank you for the great video!
I actually really enjoy the androgyny in sky children of the light...it is a very family friendly game and is set in a world where there are basically no gender norms, hell we don't even know if the concept of gender exists or not..i think it's one of the games that best does the "androgyny blorb" archetype
my only ever complaint about sky is that you can't be fatter like some of the spirits in game. no thicker builds only skinny sky kids :/ genuinely wish there was like. a spell or mask to have the build of some of the spirits. brawny skinny cubby. all should be options. hope that comes after friendship 2.0? or in a future season maybe
I feel so stupid on my part but I feel like its worth bringing it up. There's this recently open access game that came out called Atlyss which is kind of a pseudo MMO RPG game with anthropomorphic characters. On the surface, its definitely meant to be hella suggestive with its body sliders, character designs, certain emotes and clothing, but I bring it up because of the sliders in character creation when it comes to gender. When you first make your character, the male and female gender technically have presets of heights and body shape but you're allowed to alter them anyway you like. As far as I can tell, there is no male/female model, just one model per race. So your character can be female and still be as tall as the tallest male. The only thing that limits your height is your starting race, the imps being the smallest of the 5 choices (I guess they're sort of the halflings of the world,) while the "kubolds" are the tallest." Its also probably worth mentioning that while it doesn't have a gender neutral option, you can choose to between male and female and then choose whether or not you want breasts. You're also allowed to change your character's gender and overall look at any point in the game provided you have the resources to do so, with race and your name being the ones you can't change later on (Though you can do so easily by going into the game files.) Anyways, Idk if this was really worth bringing it up but after the segment about how genders are height locked in most games I just sort of had to go see for myself if that was the case for atlyss, which it isn't as far as I can tell. I do think because the characters are "furries" they fall under the category of "blobs" category more than anything but they still have sliders so idk, maybe it was worth bringing it up???? Anyways, fun game for early access lol.
i think the max height and some of the build is actually different between the "genders" in atlyss, atleast for the poon (rabbit like race) but its not very noticable since they're all so small and with such cartoony proportions
I actually have a somewhat more optimistic take on this issue. All of these games were being made during the time where cultural awareness of trans people was growing. They'd already crafted their entire systems based on the old model as the new one emerged, and had to adjust mid-development. The next set of games with character customization are the ones to keep our eye on though, because SOMEONE is likely to raise the bar once again.
Great point. Baldur's Gate 3, last year's game of the year, went into pre-production in 2016. That's the same year Overwatch (a prime example of games designed for the male gaze) won game of the year.
@@AnisaThePunk300 this video felt more like it was scratching the surface of a larger issue with gaming using the transgender character creator as a vehicle to have the conversation. i do agree that even as frustrating as these character creators are theyre still indicative of heading in the right direction, and that to get better we must criticize them. i would love a longer video on the problems with male gaze in video games bc its fascinating
The lack of androgyny hurts me despite being cis, because I really want to make a twink character and so many of these games force me to look like a gigachad. Also, i feel like baldur's gate even failed for the male gaze. Like, I can have top surgery scars, but god forbid the female character i want to play as have anything bigger than an A-Cup chest.
It's crazy -- there's jiggle physics for the penis but not for boobs? Which, like, I'm not gonna complain about dick jiggle physics, but the lack of boob movement in comparison is kind of distracting LOL
I never thought I'd see a FFIX reference in one of your videos! Incredible dive into this, you put this so well. Sexy binary meaning Tom Holland and Zendaya can't even be made shows how warped they are. And yes, having known many a gamer guy, them choosing to play as the female characters is never to connect with them as characters it's for those other reasons
I'm curious what you think about Rust, where there is no character creator. You get assigned a randomly generated character and that's it. On one hand I'm kinda uncomfortable playing a character that is quite literally the exact opposite of me, but also it is totally normalized. Many of the big Rust RUclipsrs have women as their character models and it's just the norm. I also don't think the player models are sexualised in any way, regardless of gender. It's still binary, but I'm moreso curious what you think about hte other aspects.
I found this video really great! Especially in regards to how character creators are still often so *painfully* binary and how the games often frame the people that dont conform to that. One thing I wanted to mention though, about Taash specifically, is how I really appreciated their approach. Not that everything was handled seemlessly, but how Taash and the implied qunari culture interact. Taash starts the nonbinary journey because their mother is trying to hint that they are a man. And Taash's frustration with yhat is that they know they *arent* a man. But their mother still follows the qun and thus the binary gender options that they have. Qunari can be man or woman- but not *neither*. And that mindset is one I know I struggled with a lot in my own gender journey, with the options seemingly being "you are either a woman or a trans man, there is no inbetween". So their story on the whole didnt feel as contradictory to me as it came across here.
As a guy with boobs, it's irked me for a long time that character creators almost always tie them to gender, as if women without breasts and men with them don't exist, so I'm glad someone else has pointed this out, plus all the other weird binarisms that come with it. Like, when Sims 4 did it's big gender update, I was excited to make and play as intersex characters, only to be immediately disappointed that I couldn't do something as simple as that.
The sims 4 is lackluster af, but you can kinda fix the breasts thing with the Traits.equip_trait Breasts_ForceOn/Off cheat. You can also do some crazy things with mods if you're on PC
The video is on point and I fully agree with your analysis, but as a programmer myself I must add that a lot of this stuff happens because of economic priorities. Yes, games are more inclusive now than before, and some of them try to give some options to trans and nb players, but game development is a very slow and expensive process, and if they have to choose between "classic editor that makes it easy to create hot characters with some cheap gender nonconforming quirks for trans players" and "complex character editor that allows full player creativity but makes it hard for the core demographic to create an idealized, hot version of themself", they choose the first and sacrifice the second. In fact, not so far ago the standard was having only the male character, they had to add a female option eventually to appeal women and adapt to a broader demographic. Following the same business logic, these companies enjoy the praises and free advertising they earn by adding genital sliders and gender unblocked hairstyles, but they are not willing to consume extra resources to give a full, real representation of all kind of bodies, because they consider that it's not worth the money. In summary: capitalism sucks.
I understand that a lot of things cannot be done without expending lots of time/money. But how is it that complicated to have a "yes/no" on breasts (with a breast slider from cup size A to G for example when you click yes) or to make a body shape slider like one of the example games in the video (Saints Row) where muscular/curvy/slim are on a three point triangle? I mean I literally just pointed out a game managed it, so surely it can't be that hard/expensive? In addition with a height slider, you have all 3 parts that make up most body types.
It's not capitalism though, not really. Because there isn't evidence that abandoning the gender binary is a bad cost-benefit trade off. That's based on the same weird sexist assumptions that underlie lots of the other decisions, not based on economic fact/evidence. A good example here is "Boob physics" in an absolute ton of games they add in special animations and physics/parameters so that boobs bounce when female characters move around, this obviously has significant development costs associated with it and I serious doubt it has any bearing on the success of a game - (are there seriously any gamer-bros who wouldn't buy a game because the female character boobs don't bounce enough?). Similarly, when female options were added for player characters in RPGs they didn't just reskin the male models (cheap & easy), they added tons of new animations to enforce a sexiness and often daintiness to the female options. So no, these studios do not base these kinds of decisions on cost-benefit trade-offs.
@@danmeifan Ehhh its slightly more complicated And generally if you consider the variety of engines and tools saying "X did it so it must be easy" is painfully naive ^^ Generally height sliders are quite hard and bad to implement due to the... variety of effects height can have on animations. Though games with such a slider exist (Dragons Dogma (both) for example) its pretty hard and... generally not worth the tradeoff, especially as most of the time you would need to implement it fromt he gorund up.
@@danmeifan As someone who dabbled in game design and burned out let me explain a few things as well. The taller your max heigh in character creation, the more vvariations of clothing models you need to be able to fit them onto the character without textures getting stretched. Aka, you need to invest more time in making equipment. The same for "boob- nonboob- middle size boob" the more options, the more variable your textures can be. There's a reason that to my memory there wasn't a boob slider in BG3 because yeah, that would add dev time. This way they can make like 16 models (8 races iirc and 2 genders) of each piece of clothing, plus maybe companion exclusive versions though iirc their body types aren't that different either. That's also usually the reason you don't have a chubby slider in games, it would stretch or warp clothing materials, and this is also usually why you don't get much variety in clothes wearing npcs. And BG3 already suffered from a lot of clipping issues. Clothes and hair would clip all the time, swords would clip through clothes, etc. That wasn't a priority for larian, to game was already big. Is it a shortcoming nevertheless? yes. Did we get trans rep, did we get the option to chose pronouns independant of body type? also yes. In my experience of gaming this is a huge step in the right direction, and I wouldn't ever dream of it being perfect on the first go around. And I do say that myself being trans. Old games, and still some jrpgs go so far as to lock classes to genders, see "lost ark" because this way when you find a piece of equipment you can only equip it if you are say a mage, and then no one has to worry about making two gendered versions. This is an even extremer example of saving costs. Also saves on voice acting, only one voice actor per class. Usually taller bodily physique also means longer arm, which means higher reach with weapons. This can cause a desync between hitboxes and animations, or if hitboxes are adjusted to height cause one of two outcomes: The optimal is chosing the smallest character option possible because you are harder to hit, or the tallest option because you can attack from farther away. You never want a player to feel like they missed out on something after character creation. This is also usually why small races such as dwarf permanently run when everyone else jogs so you aren't slower than if you had chosen something else. Now: I am not saying these are unfixable problems. But when you have a game dev staring at a wall of expenses, this is a part that is scarily easy to cut down on. Because LGBTQ+ is a minority, it's rather easy to factor in the loss of customers into the bottom line and say "Ah, not so bad." There might even be an incentive to NOT add these options purely because a large demographic of gamer guys hates the "Alphabet mafia" and won't play games with "Pronouns" in them. So a company might even consider LGBTQ+ representation as a bottom line negative, and will usually only do it if for example they already have a large following in that demographic. Ergo, most roleplaying games that allow us to live lifes we never got. personally for example DnD allowed me to "pretend" to be a woman, only for me to realize I really badly want to be one. There's a reason you will be hard pressed to even see character customaization in call of duty. There's no reason, the guys that play that game want to be guys and will gladly harass anyone else out of their space. Just look at what happens when a girl speaks on coms. ...I may have rambled on for a bit, but this is my personal experience with the space.
7:51 The thing that amuses me about including Nier: Automata in this is that Yoko Taro, the game's creator, will just straight up tell you "I gave 2B a big butt cause I think that's hot. I told the art team to make her butt perfect or they'd be fired." I'm not saying you don't have point, just saying that if you pointed this out to him, he would nod and say "Yes, quite correct."
This just popped in my recommended videos and I can't believe I've never heard of this channel before! This is such a great video! As a woman who plays videogames I've never had a problem identifying with male protagonists, but I've always found it difficult doing the same with female ones and I've never knew why xD Edit: Grammar. English its not my first language sorry if I misspelled something
So I happen to be someone who models and rigs 3D characters, not in a professional dev studio, but enough that I understand the work flows that game devs go through. My most favourite thing to try and include in my work is implementing customisation options, as much as possible. But it's got to be said, it's far harder than I think most people realise. Eg, regarding that line, "Games are just computer programs, the developers can make them do whatever they want", whilst a lot of the critiques and commentary here (on character creation) does just come down to oversights or failures in design, it's also really not that simple. Even remarkably basic mono gender character creation features add a significant burden on dev time, let alone bi-gendered, let alone all the nuanced complexities and expectations that genuinely non-binary or trans elements brings into things. Not that any of it is insurmountable, but the more layers of customisation you add, the more they start to exponentially complicate one another and every other game system they interact with. ( I'd say more, but ran out of time.)
Please do say more (if you have the time and the inclination)! My only experience with games is from an environment art angle, so I'd be very interested to hear how this all works from a character art standpoint.
I think that I understand what you mean. Getting a system set up that can realistically transition from a masculine chest to having large breasts without it looking odd is probably quite a challenge, especially given that breasts are sexualised and the game would need to cover them or risk getting rated for adults only. At which point do you need to cover them, or do you want to force characters without breasts to cover up as well? I suppose that the only solution I can imagine is to have a model that's composed of modular parts, so that breasts and chests can be selected independently of other characteristics, but that's going to be prone to some tearing or weird proportions around the seams between body bits.
@@casanovafunkenstein5090 As someone with experience making 3d models, I imagine the more difficult part is on the ends of rigging and texturing, rather than censorship or seams. Games like BG3 already allow full nudity for both male and female characters, so censorship wouldn't be a problem in their primary markets, but you can only push the polygons so far before textures start getting distorted or having models clip through themselves during animations. Many games that have high degrees of customizability run into these problems, and even some with fairly limited customizability. For a pretty simple and widespread example, look at games like World of Warcraft where the armour's texture is flat against the character model and you have a few humanoid races/species to choose from. Textures look good and even on the human-scale races since that's what they're originally textured for, but on larger fantastical models like the Draenei or Tauren the textures often look a bit distorted and stretched out the more they deviate from human-scale proportions. Having a binary choice for "male" and "female" or "Body type 1" and "Body type 2" would allow the developers to have two sets of textures for the clothing, one for characters with breasts and one for without, and a check to see which one of those textures to apply, which prevents the textures on clothing from looking distorted. If there was just one body type with a "breast size" slider you would have to selectively texture each piece of clothing for either flat chests or large chests then just accept that characters with the "wrong" sized chest would make the textures for that specific piece of clothing look shrunken or stretched, with the severity of the distortion being based on how extreme the difference between the smallest and largest options are.
I have a little game building experience and I cannot even imagine how challenging it would be to make clothing/armor that would fit infinite base models
@@Semisomnambulant The real challenge isn't so much that there's loads of different bases you need to fit things to (that's tedious work but simple), but typically that there's a small selection of bases with an insane amount of variables to account for, that EVERYTHING needs to be designed likewise to account for. Eg, if you do something that is comparatively simple and common like a breast size slider, then every single asset made for that base now needs to have the same ability to morph. You have to pick a default state to start working from, and the further you go to either end of the scale, the more issues start cropping up. So lets say you start with an average realistic size. If tying to give it the necessary morphs to make it fully flat, both the clothes and the body itself will be incredibly difficult to look good. You'll have unnecessary excess topology that will mess up your shading, there'll be pinch points around the centre where geometry had to be shrunk too small, and you'll suffer obvious texture distortion. and on top of that, a masculine flat chest and a feminine flat chest aren't really even the same shape. If you want to allow the other end of the scale, then you run into issues where the poly count is visibly too low and there's not enough geometry to account for the additional folds in the clothes. Certain details will stretch or become too large, and god forbid the outfit has any solid objects like buttons, badges or equipment on it. And you can only weight paint the model based upon the middle setting. The more complex the clothes the more this becomes a roadblock. The physics for either end of the scale will also need to be dynamically adjusted to match. This would be why breasts especially are so often locked to "body A" or "body B" even in the more open ended character creators. If you include changes in body thickness or proportions, then any equipment items stowed or holstered on the character will need a system to adjust their position accordingly. I've run into this myself, where I included support for fairly simple body weight and hip width etc into a model I made, only to end up having to scrap that feature anyway when I realised it conflicted with half the other things I was doing, which would have required spending time re-doing work I'd already completed, adding extra animator layers, hurting performance further, etc. Any change in height or limb length tends to be one of the most awkward customisation options to add, since it can interfere with basically every animation or interaction the character ever does. Eg, if you have two fixed height models, making them do a handshake animation is simple. Each has their own anim clip, and that's about it. As soon as you add in variables, you now need to do the animation dynamically via inverse kinematics. And this is stuff I'm covering is just really just basic conventional character creation stuff that we've all seen before, let alone the more ambitious super free form kind of stuff. But it all adds together into such an incredible time sink, and endless potential for bugs.
Woah, had this video on my "watch later" for a rainy day and I am so happy I sat down and watched it. This is so insightful and wonderful to hear being talked about. As a non-binary person I have long felt isolated from the gaming community (which I've always tried to be a part of) because I HATE HATE HATE the way that characters look. I don't want to choose between big muscle man or sexy skinny woman. I just want to look like a human being. I just want to look like me. Thank you for this video
Personally speaking, I remember being individually disappointed at BG3, Cyberpunk 2077, and Dragon Age Inquisition due to the inability to actually play a character like myself. I had to download a mod for a flat chest and curvy body for BG3, I was uncomfortable and putting myself through dysphoria with Cyberpunk's refusal to allow flat chests on feminine bodies and I played a twink male elf in Inquistion. I think the limitations go both ways basically, not only are tall women not allowed but neither are short men. You cant have boobs on a "A" frame nor can you remove them on the "B" frame. Its so annoying.
if it helps there's two different flat mods for Cyberpunk now: one by user PinkyDude and one by user Hyst, both on the Nexus. i'd link them but i think youtube would eat my comment
I absolutely love this video !! I have kinda given up trying to create a " myself" in many games with character creator. As a nonbinary and fat person, I simply can't have both at once. I can be fat, but usually then I need to be an older man. Or I can be gnc and have no fat on my body at all. More and more I feel myself connecting to the "mixed blob" like characters, and in games where everyone is like that (Animal Crossing, Webfishing etc) I am more likely to make something that resembles myself. Trying to use a character creator that cant seem to fathom the possibility that a person can have a double chin and still be desirable usually simply gives me body terror blues.
i really love acnh's approach to gender and presentation! im nonbinary too (genderfluid, to be exact) and i love how changing genders does.. basically nothing to how you present. it was the first time ive experienced true gender euphoria since it allowed me to be myself
You bring up the point of "the male gaze" and the such, but even as a straight guy I'm not satisfied BECAUSE the definition of appealing design is so slim. "She's for you" Yeah, I'll put her beside the last dozen+ versions of nearly the same build. I go out into the real world and I find builds of much wider variety, all just as appealing, and yet I can't find them in gaming. If it's all about "she's for you", and "it sells", can I get sold a wider variety please? Of course, feel free to gender flip and even gender remove my issues. So many of them men in a ton of games are built largely the same. What about stocky? What about short? What about so ungodly tall that cameramen have to scratch their heads to figure out how to fit them in frame? Laios and Senshi from Dungeon Meshi have tons of fangirls! Yet in gaming, it's "here is out narrow designs for men, and our narrow designs for women, and our even narrower designs for androgynous. Don't ask about the rest." "It sells" Well SELL MORE THAN JUST ONE THING!
I think Verilybitchie kind of messes up the part on the male gaze, by leaving the vast spectrum of different sexual preferences in both womens' and mens' bodies. Yes, many video games do this too, with buff wrestlers for the men and thin women with big breasts and hips, but it's really disappointing when much of a video on the limited nature of the gender binary, spends much of it's time reducing current reactions to media representation into... a limited binary. Men represent power, women represent sex. Because no one on Earth finds muscular wrestler style bodies hot on men, or skinny bodies with big boobs and hips powerful./s I know these are generally overrepresented, but Verilybitchie's wording comes off as seeming incredibly binary, while, in actuality, being incredibly vague. "Men represent power, women, sex." So does it mean some men and women, or all men and women, or most men and women? The statement; men represent power, women represent sex." is a declaration that sounds rigid and factual, but where is this information coming from. How many men or women? In my experience there is a subgenre of fetishes that often mix sex and power together in different ways, so why are they treated as mutually exclusive? How can one tell the difference between these two categories when they're sometimes mixed? A man could be sexy and powerful, as can a woman. So is this a binary of an orgy of different levels, or even two perpendicular things that go up and down independently? Nope, it's a binary, and I wonder where this idea came from, cause it sounds like a restatement of the original view of the woman who made the male gaze idea, Laura Mulvey, back in 1973. Is it supported by experimentation? Have any changes been made to it? That all media representation can be reduced down to a sex based binary of two attributes that seem utterly independent of one another. Wait, I thought human sexuality was complicated?
I feel like a good counter example to male gaze games is actually the Metroid series. Despite being an attractive woman, Samus is rarely ever presented as such in the gameplay, instead she's almost always in armor, not even showing her face. She doesn't really speak directly to the audience, in fact she doesn't really speak much at all. And the Prime games, they put you into first person, taking any separation from you and her. Hell, whenever there's a flash of light on the screen, HER face reflects back onto YOU. The game basically screams to you that YOU ARE SAMUS.
Erasure is still sexist, making it so you just don't know the gender of the main character so the player can assume it is a male character then going "surprise, it's actually a sexy-woman" is just a different type of sexism.
@agilemind6241 I only really agree for the first game. Everyone already knows that Samus is a woman by the time the first game dropped, and they've tried to make her armor more gendered while not sexualizing it. I wouldn't really say it's sexist for her appearance to be obscured.
@@slumburger1145 You can say the same more or less for the other games aswell. The games constantly hiddes her gender behind the armor, to the point you can barely tell you are playing a woman, nothing of it is reminding you you are playing a woman, and the fact that she is heavily sexualized (or at least clearly shown to be a clearly attractive woman) when out of the suits also matters.
Thank you so much for putting this into words so eloquently. I actually wrote a paper for a queer anthropology class once about how this plays out in medical transition where nonbinary people are expected to have transition goals that exist within binary ideas of gender expression, and this reminds me of that. another thing I wanted to mention, I use Heroforge to create character models for dungeons and dragons, and you can add extra arms and have the head of a rat and the lower half of a snake but you can’t be fat. And despite having extensive options for eye shape, angle, and even number, it’s impossible to have an epicanthic fold. There are a lot of presets and sliders for the eyes but no matter how much I mess with them, it’s impossible.
i was literally thinking about this when i started baldur's gate 3. why was every character made to be super beautiful? like there is such a lack of anyone who's even mildly fat or has a face that isn't supermodel-esque. it was such a strange experience that the character creator had so many preconceptions about bodies and faces when it was purported to be so open and free for roleplaying in other areas.
My guess is that, at least with the body, they didn't bother to model every armor and item to look good on any type of body. It's honestly lazy, but it's telling.
I'd assume it's because the lifestyle the main characters lead would require them to be somewhat fit, maybe excluding Gale but you still generally travel a lot
@@qisty3017 i think they're also talk about just fit plus sized people. my mum is fit but because she doesn't have a thin body and is naturally chubbier, she isn't able to play a representation of herself in a lot of the games she plays which sucks.
It is seldom i comment on youtube but your video essay really touched me. I wholeheartedly agree with many of your points and as a transgender man balacing a little bit on a line of binary i wish there are more not only better written Trans characters set in a solid worldbuilding but also less gender comforming character creators. Thank you for this video!
YES YES YES YES. so much modern representation is just putting feebly inclusive new features on top of a fundamentally unchanged gender binary. it’s such a peculiar balance and i’m so glad you talked about it
I also have been frustrated with character creators as a nonbinary person. Both Tiny Tina's Wonderland and Baldur's Gate 3 I was intiially like, "oh cool, I can play a trans character!" and then realized that I was still extremely limited. In BG3 I ended up playing a half-elf even when I wanted to try another option because it was the only way I could get the flat-chested body with a face that gave me the type of androgyny I wanted. I haven't seen many other people talk about it so it's great to hear you dig deeper into it.
Was in the middle of watching your "How Bisexuality Changed Gaming" video and was surprised to see a whole new video from you in my home feed. Edit: Finished watching. Such a great double feature with the bisexual vg video.
at first when i clicked the video it was just supposed to be background noise. i just started paying full attention after the 10 first minutes, like transfixed to the screen LOL great video!!! i LOVE how you pointed out everything, including height and how characters are just supposed to be conventionally attractive despite the tool of you having to customise them. it's fake liberty!
Thank you for this video. As a gay cis man I didn’t even consider most of these thoughts. But I will say, it behooves me how men will play as female characters when I always play male. It kinda mirrors straight boys being able to play with naked male wrestlers but I can’t play with Barbies. This vid offered some thoughts on that! Being you/being FOR you. Bravo.
I think something that is interesting about the idea of sexualizing men (by drawing attention to genitalia) is that I'm not really sure you could have the same effect as sexualizing women for men. Now I could absolutely be incorrect as I've not really encountered many gay men but when it comes to women, I'm not sure I've met one that actually *Likes* male genitalia or finds it sexy. This experience could well be because I'm friends with only 2-3 straight women, the rest are all LGBT+. However, whenever I hear about attractive features of a man, it is NEVER about genitalia (outside porn) and more about chest, height etc. I must admit hearing about the idea that you don't play as female characters like Lara Croft was insane to me, I'm not *helping* Lara, I'm playing as her, so that whole comment from the dev made absolutely no sense to me. I am conscious that my own experiences with people will likely not match the same trend as the entire population but it is just so weird to hear some of the ideas surrounding female characters in games. Final notes: Seeing now that the new Dragon Age game was trying to educate players, it makes sense that is crashed. The way they went about it lacked any tact and was illogical for that character as well which are both recipes for disaster when you have a legion of people calling woke on anything that even *seems* DEI.
Personally, I care way more about being able to interact and have a relationship with a male character than seeing what's in their pants and I think that's the case for many. I'm a trans guy, but I think my perspective is still valid. Men are very focused on visuals and sex, while women want romance and intimacy.
Someone else brought it up in a different comment but usually when artists want to sexualize men in a masculine way, the pecs are often greatly emphasized to the point of almost seeming like breasts. I'm probably speaking for myself as a bi man but this does seem to be more appealing towards queer men than heterosexual women. And on the total opposite end there's "femboy" character designs (usually restricted to anime-adjacent media) who are pretty much just sexualized in very similar ways to women, though the genitalia emphasis sometimes applies (I get it, at the same time I personally prefer just emphasizing the actual body type or presentation since transmasc femboys exist).
@InfinitySevens yeah I've seen that sort of thing. I'm Omnisexual myself and admittedly tend to lean more towards attraction to androgynous body types which strangely presents itself as feminine men and more masculine women so I may just be a bit odd anyway. I definitely think the body type as a whole is more important than traditionally sexual features. Though I also don't really get why people are so obsessed with nipples, I think it's silly that we have the topless double standards in the west. Thanks for the insight though.
I'd moreso say straight women are not socialized to think about male junk in a sexual way. Since even straight porn is more focused on the female body there are not a lot of ways straight women can come across sexualized male junk. I find a lot of us straight woman turn to gay porn if we want to see some of that and straight woman watching gay male porn is not unusual but definitely not the norm overall. Tldr.: male junk has not been sexualized a lot in media. Straight woman have therefore not been socialized to sexualize male junk but rather secondary characteristics
completely agree! the problem is that primarily straight male developers don't know that, they just assume that everyone else feels sexual attraction the same way they do
god Fallen London was SO ahead of its time!! glad to see it get some love 🥰 it was actually my very first introduction a teenager to the very idea of non-binarism and I still remember the surprised delight I felt over it! I also remember playing Pyre and using they/them pronouns for myself for the very first time. I had NO idea being referred to like this, even when it wasn't Me me but just an avatar, would affect me this deeply. So even these now-seeming small changes to videogames like pronouns and the ability to choose whatever hair/facial hair you want still feel pretty significant to me!! But you're so right that the issue is baked within the very DNA of videogames (and mainstream culture in general.) I can only wish amd hope things will be even better in ten years 🤞
Wanting to play Cyberpunk as a transman was awful. Like.. I don't have a deep voice and huge muscle man body.. I would like to be smol and still respected as a man thank you. I will say though, trying to have a flat chest with jiggle physics is kind of hilarious to me.
Which is why mod support should be mandatory for most triple A games. We cant really rely on others to give us what we want, so they should enable us to modify the game into what we want, and with AI tools, you can relatively easily import your voice into the game, change the body in any way you want. And for some games even change the animations into something more to your liking or fit to the character who's height scale has offset the animations too much. You can do most of this in games like Cyberpunk and Skyrim especially
The uncomfortable truth is that most people like the sexy gender binary. Developers should make character creation more inclusive, but they may not be aware of the demand for options outside the binary or feel incentivised to put in the work to satisfy a small minority of gamers.
I believe the reason a lot of games don't let you customize height is due to animations. Animations are usually fairly static and if change the height of a character, animations no longer line up with the world. IE: If you make your character shorter and they reach for something on top of a box, their hand will clip through the box rather than line up with the object on top of it. For this reason, many games will have two sets of animations, one for a female (Short) character and one for a male (Tall) character... Or some of them just make both male and female the same height. The solution to this is further implementation of procedural animations (Or animations that can adapt to the world in real time). It takes more work though, and I think that's the reason many developers don't bother with it. There's also the issue of voice acting and pronouns. Most games will have two sets of certain voice dialogs that include gendered pronouns. There's of course no reason aside from "It's more work/money" as to why they can't just include a third set of voice dialogs with they/them pronouns.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
"Cyberpunk 2077 - A Gay Bar for Straight Men" is up over on Patreon! www.patreon.com/posts/gay-bar-for-men-118362479
adam smasher is an actual trans icon though
disagree with me all you want because i don't care, but it's simply true
edit: i'm also just saying this because the cishets are usually really upset whenever i come up with this LOL adam smasher is trans and it's canon to me
FINE I'll subscribe this is so for me
i have a question.... why ur excited cuz of top surgery scar and all?
trans itself isnt an identity, it just means your identity differs from ASAB and you must transition your body to fit who you are.
ngl i find it a bit weird u being "its so trans" cuz it feel like u dunno 100% how it means to be (ik tons and tons of trans people and rlly rarely i see a trans person who just have trans as their whole personality)
idk.. its just confusing cuz most people suffer cuz of their differing body and isnt fun to transition (though seeing the results over time of your body slowly fitting you is cool), theres lots of therapy meetings, theres the hormone change and surgeries and tons of stuff.
you glorifying the top scar surgery for example seems like ur happy to reminder someone of ur ASAB instead of who you are and rub on their faces you transitioned.
idk why or how some took transitioning as an identity if transitioning is the action of modifying your body to fit your being.
if you do like this kinda of stuff and do identify with this, i dont think trans is the name.
CP2077 so disappointing that i can't do a perfect Dr. Mrs Girlfriend simulation.
Do you talk about Claire Russel in that one?
"Do you want to be a powerful boy elf or a hot girl elf" is such a great way to distill sexualization in video games. even in character creators -- you can make a man feel more or less powerful and you can make a woman feel more or less hot. incredible line and really interesting video! i learned a lot :)
Man it hits hard, knowing one could literally be a 6-pack-having heroic sword-wielding elf boy, and still be considered "not sexy at all" by you. Have you ever considered that your standards for attractiveness in men are totaly out of whack?? I dont know what you would want in order for a boy to be considered hot or sexy instead of powerful.
what about playing tall powerful woman elf who is on a quest to save a dainty boy elf?
@@kitsunekaze93 i mean this in all sincerity does this game exist? bcs i will play it that sounds so fun
There are totally hot boy elves. But powerful girl elves?
The SWTOR character creator comes to mind. They had body options for each gender: petite, average, muscular, and... big. The big option for male characters was a Chris Farley shape seemingly played for laughs, while the big option for female characters was a volumptuous bombshell. Reminds me a bit of how for years the only black hairstyle games ever offered was an oversized 70s afro. If it doesn't appeal to the target demographic, then it's just a joke option at best.
I'm a 5'4" cis man so it's weirdly difficult to make male characters that are my remotely height using character creators, even if you're given the option of choosing your height.
Same, im 5'2" and nonbinary but even if i choose female frames for the shorter height, the height of characters in BG3 or the Sims for example is still way taller than me
It is so weird, right?
Same for when the breast sizes range from far-too-large to definite-spinal-injury.
I'm sorry but you can only choose one: tall man or short woman, What? The binary sex-gender system didn't told you that before getting born? That's no excuse! How dare you be born outside my made up and old fashioned rules! 😠
It's a joke, you don't even have to be non-binary to realize gender as a whole it's... Reductive.
As a 5’10” cis woman I feel your pain!
I'm a 5' 3" man, I feel you
I love playing tall women because IRL Im not. Let me live vicariously through fictional characters.
me too!
Ah, yes, the inverse of Karen from GGO. Based.
My girlfriend has expressed her anger about this before. She's pretty tall and she likes that in heels she's taller than most men, so she's expressed anger before that so many RPGs force her to be shorter. Despite all the choices RPGs try to offer us, they always seem to leave out height sliders
spoilers but in BG3 I played my very first run as an orc woman which is taller than Astarion. For certain body types Astarion will do his little move where you jump into his arms during your first night together but as an orc HE jumped into MY arms. I gasped out loud. The game absolutely has areas to grow but that was one of those thrilling moments of What Could Be for me
I just mostly play women in games because I'm not 😅
Or rather because that's what I enjoy putting pretty clothes on, and for some reason I find roleplay easier or more engaging.
Maybe a core point is that I want my game characters to be not-me, as opposed to trying to recreate myself in the game
I am 181 cm girl, I know plenty of women above 170cm. Its not as uncommon to be a tall girl as people think so I don't know why developers are so defensive about women being short
i’m a trans guy, but i stopped growing before i started hormones… at 181cm too. my friend in my form class in high school was a cis girl taller than me. like yeah, women on average are shorter, but that doesn’t limit the maximum any more than men??
my best friend is a cis girl and shes legit taller than most of the guys in our class, shes like 5'10 and half the guys are like 5'6
My childhood friend in middle school got her growth spurt before everyone else. While we all still were tiny kids, she was towering everyone including all the boys at that age. I have a vivid memory of us all standing in the lunch line in our school uniforms, her sticking out because she looked like she belonged in high school and standing at least two heads taller than everyone else. By the time we were out of high school she was 6 ft or 182cm. Both of her parents were quite tall
Yep also a tall girl here! It’s also important to remember that in some places people in general are bigger or smaller than American standards. Yes, I’m well above average, but it isn’t that strange to the people around me. It’s like a lot of women are pretty small and a smaller proportion of women are pretty tall (but some men can become even taller than most tall girls). In the neighboring country most women aren’t taller than me, but there are way less who are smaller. Now, I haven’t been to America, but statistics show that women are even smaller there on average and in Japan it’s even smaller than that. These differences make it a bit alienating to play games with standardized heights. I would say about half the women I interact with (irl) are about my height and the other half is way smaller than me. Even though the average height of men is way taller than me, most men I interact with are my height or shorter than me.
@@gariden maximum is a bit shorter generally for women. 272 cm for men and 260 for women. I guess the theoretical gaussian share the same min and max but as we live in a finite world, we are still waiting for new records...
As a butch woman, everything you said about Baldur's Gate 3 was spot on. I wanted my character to be a flat chested, shorter, boxy person with a feminine face (as I am in real life). Unfortunately, if I wanted a boxy figure, I had to choose the masculine body type. That meant no shortness or feminine faces. The opposite happened with a feminine body. Sure, I can be shorter and look feminine, but I was then required to have a large chest and curvy body.
It seems like games that don't care about gender have the best customization options.
The gender thing is very shiny keys to jangle at people in the LGBT+ community and, sadly - listening to some of my friends - it works. They are so fucking desperate for representation that they'll take this pandering garbage.
I'm okay with baby steps and I'm old enough to remember when playing pokemon crystal gave me such joy, but it's still bullshit.
I had a similar problem back in Dragon Age: Inquisition. I had a specific original character I wanted to play as, who is a scrawny male mage, but Ieventually abandoned the run out of frustration because I was so unhappy with his model. The male bodies were all super muscular - because we all know that men are naturally born with chiseled abs, unlike women who are soft and short and pretty. Doesn't matter if he is a backline spellslinger and she has a broadsword and is wearing half her weight in armor.
@@EllisephaI tried to find work arounds with choosing a feminine face and going from there but the body still being locked to types is annoying, just have one body that you can add or do with whatever with. I want to make a weak fail sexy guy but it gets into a twunk into bg3 where all males have abs for some reason
It's interesting that you say that because I felt the opposite. I wanted my character to have big boobs and more of a curvy figure, and I felt annoyed at how peite all the body types were. even the even the larger female body just felt like it made it was more masculine, not a larger women.
Also before you say anything, I myself am a large woman with a curvy figure and I like playing as that in video games. I'm also bi but that's besides the point.
yeah honestly with how much bg3 was praised for its gender options it was pretty dissappointing that it was actually just your average gender locked character creator. still enjoyed bg3 but i was unable to really make an androgynous looking character like i wanted
You touched on this as well, you can’t even make your characters OLD in video games, they are all permanently stuck looking like they’re in their 20s - 30s. In D&D races can live for hundreds of years, but when I tried to make my 300 year old gnome D&D character in Baldur’s Gate 3, nope, she had to have an athletic young body with a few crows feet as the only indicator of age. Let us have our wizened old hags!
This. The fact that I can have negative modifiers to STR, COS and DEX in favour of high mental stats to make a frail old but extremely powerful flameball-casting wizard (gender neutral), but I MUST have an athletic body nonetheless is so annoying.
@@NaoyaYami Its... not hard at all in TTRPGs? What do you even mean? The whole *point* of TTRPGs is that there are no constraints on creativity and imagination. In TTRPGs, age is a number on a paper, the appearance is a line of text, maybe a reference image, and the stories are entirely collaborative with the GM and other players. If you want to go full old-man-Sifu monk, you absolutely can. Hell, I've played a couple older characters before, my favorite of which was a centuries-old glassblowing artificer gnome, and one of my friends had an amazing young warlock boy. These kinds of characters are only hard to introduce into a game if you refuse to look beyond societal norms and adapt to the fiction of the story being told. Hell, sometimes the story doesn't even need to change that much. Sometimes the old hag witch might just want to fuck around with some youngin's for a bit of fun and adventure. This can even lead to some more fun, interesting character dynamics than aren't normally explored in a TTRPG. (at least, not amongst the PCs themselves)
Sure, this creativity doesn't need to translate to EVERY video game with a character creator. Not every game is even going to _want_ to cater to that kind of creative freedom. But with a game as open to choices and player expression as BG3, the limitations and constraints on the player characters are noteworthy, even if somewhat understandable from a technical standpoint.
@@NaoyaYamiI was in a D&D campaign where I was a literal child with a demonic cat patron, and my magic was so powerful it was almost always unstable. It made the party had to use me as a “this bomb WILL explode but let’s have it be behind enemy lines” type role play (I incinerated an entire college with one cast of Fireball). It’s not “standard” by any means, and the context can be just as attributable to normal adult players, but it wasn’t a hindrance to gameplay-it enriched it and made it interesting.
The way you do this is by adding the cosmetics of age, and negative aspects in combat. Maybe you move slower/can’t move as far in combat situations. Deal less physical damage. Can’t dodge attacks well. But you can cast a mighty powerful spell. Or heal for much more than usual because you can do it in your sleep. The “try and play it in an actual game” excuse doesn’t hold up because it’s JUST as engaging, if not more so, and extremely possible to do without thinking “but it’s tooooo much woooooork”.
Orcs to the rescue! Played one for my first full run of Baldur's Gate and I got to make her pretty old looking :) Some options are really hidden behind complexion and additional sliders. Not much to be done about the body type though, unfortunately. You're just gonna be athletic :/
BG3 just lets you put wrinkles onto a 20yr old 😂like, nice try? But laughably underwhelming for what you're attempting
Saying that sexualising men always feels gay is so real. I have a male-presenting character and a male version of that character. When I draw him in a way that accentuates his body, my friends would say "he looks really gay". Admittedly, those friends are bi or homosexual men who are attracted to him. But I didn't draw him to appeal to them specifically, because the character wasn't made to be gay or for gay people. He's just supposed to look sexy. It feels strange to me that this is the pattern of behaviour for male characters, while when I sexualise female characters, I don't hear people say "she looks so lesbian". It's so normalised to sexualise women and not men that to do it to a man feels a bit taboo to people.
RIGHT
That's because men don't s3xu4lize themselves like that, if you want to seduce a woman, a man needs to be attractive and act in subtle charming ways, you can't get under a woman's skin by showing cleavage, sticking your bum out or wearing shorts to slowly cross your long legs... That works far more with other men. This is why when women write seductive men, they don't focus on him showing his body but doing certain actions and gestures while his body is almost always fully covered in a suit or other masculine clothing
That's because straight men don't do that, if they want to seduce a woman, he needs to be attractive and act in subtle charming ways, you can't get under a woman's skin by showing cleavage, sticking your bum out or wearing shorts to slowly cross your long legs... That works with other men. This is why when women write seductive men, they don't focus on him showing his body but doing certain actions and gestures while his body is fully covered in a suit or other masculine clothing that shows its overall shape, suggesting how strong and fit he is.
That's because straight men don't do that, if they want to seduce a woman, he needs to be attractive and act in subtle charming ways, you can't get under a woman's skin by showing cleavage, sticking your bum out or wearing shorts to slowly cross your long legs... That works with other men. This is why when women write seductive men, they don't focus on him showing his body but doing certain actions and gestures while his body is fully covered.
That's because straight men don't do that, if they want to seduce a woman, he needs to be attractive and act in subtle charming ways, you can't get under a woman's skin by showing cleavage, sticking your bum out or wearing shorts to slowly cross your long legs... That works with other men. This is why when women write seductive men, they don't focus on him showing his body but doing certain actions and gestures while his body is fully covered in a suit or other masculine clothing that shows his overall strong and fit physique without revealing what's underneath yet.
One thing I hate about the binary stuff (besides the fact that my character can never be tall) is that most of my female characters always run and jog super weird. I have never seen a woman actually run like that and it looks so fake that I often switch to male characters just to never have to see that running animation again.😐
yes..the run and walk animation is so important to me even over wht the body tipe is . wish games let you choose what animashons styles you like instead of it being tied to gender
It reminds me of how some of the Dark Souls player-character animations have two versions. Man is strong and confident, but the woman has a slightly daintier pose to her arms and knees. There's literally no point but weird sexism, since male and female characters use the exact same rig, and the same animations in every other context. There's even a ring in Dark Souls 3 that does nothing but swap the male and female animations.
Reminds me of Star Trek: The Animated Series, where the male models that they painted the characters over had separate Walk and Run animation cycles, but the female character models only had Walk animations, so whenever a woman has to run in the show they just show her walking in fast forward... it's fucking hilarious if you don't think about how sexist it is :(
May I ask what game you’re talking about?
@@armouros Warframe
That whole segment of "sexualised men in games appear gay" never crossed my mind before, but I think it's a really good point that I haven't heard before.
I'd love more organic character creators as well. One the one hand, because I don't think any option available now will get lost. You still get to be the sexy hot fancypants elf if you want to be, but the world could also be saved by a grumpy, fat old dude with a glory belly large enough to hide a body in. And on the other hand because I'll admit I'm down to creating characters _for_ me. A bit of muscle (not much, but more than is usually available esp. for female bodies) has never looked bad on anyone, imho.
Hey, I'm a guy, comfortably masculine and incredibly boring, and I suppose since developers and movie makers always put men at the forefront of their concious when making games, I didnt think much about any of it. Everythings been comfortably made for me so i assumed there wasn't an issue for anybody else. I suppose a lot of men think that way, considering how they react to active attempts at inclusivity. This video was incredibly eye opening. You explained the male gaze in a really strong way and I really appreciate what I've learned from this. I doubt I'm the target audience for this video, but youre a perspective I clearly needed to hear from.
i would argue you are a perfect audience member for this video. we need more people like you who are willing to listen to experiences outside of their own, even and especially if they assumed everyone had it as good as they did. :)
No my friend, you are exactly where you belong. This video was made to educate as well as to discuss and everyone is welcome as long as they stay civil.
@@orangejuice782 Really. The only thing this video can give me, a person who's put a good lot of thought into their gender and how it's portrayed, is validation. Education is far more valuable.
You are 1000% the audience if you've learned something from it, I'm glad you've gotten something beneficial from it
Me as a woman... am glad videos like this reach men like you. You're exactly who needs to see this for this world to change for the better. Thanks for giving me hope haha.
in fallen london i was expecting something like "other distinguished guest" but that long "prefer not to say" rant is honestly hilarious.
It's funny, but at the same time, can i be nb without being a canon asshole? :,,
And (iirc) it's been that way for WELL over a decade at this point! Like! How is it that a solid DECADE of other games have failed to match that level of Getting It?
I loved it so much
@@benniewanders4388 What gave you the impression that we care about you or your problems?
Oh my god!! Thank you for pointing out the height! I made my character as tall as possible bc im a tall asfuck cis girl and SHES NOT EVEN TALLER THAN NEVE OR LUCANIS? It made me so upset. Why do I always have to be dainty? I WANT TO PICK UP LUCANIS
Trans girl here, I always play Qunari in Inquisition and Veilguard, you are taller than basically everyone except some male Qunari. You usually stand at about average male Qunari height if you max the female height slider. So Iron Bull is still gonna be bigger than you, but there's always a bigger fish. To clarify I agree with everything you said, it's just advice for a potential next playthrough from someone who always tries to min/max female height in RPGs.
@beverlyshields2399 omg thank you so much!! My next playthru will definitely be Qun now 💖💖
@@strawberrycelia no problem, some people have a problem with how the horns bulge, but don't be discouraged, you can make them look pretty smooth with just a little forehead tweaking. Also bonus tip for BG3 since it came up in the video a lot, biggest women I could make were tieflings. Them and I believe elves get a 3rd body type for both men and women that is very tall and beefy(used for karlach and halsin)
I was upset about this playing as a femme Au'Ra in FFXIV. Turns out the sexual dimorphism is enormous in any of the more beast-like races in that game. I was really hopeful that the female Hrothgar would be better, and they're *okay*, but where are my lanky lion boys and beefy tiger women?
@@GAHAHAHHWhy even make body shapes for the player character that need two distinct sets of animations then? It would be less work to just make one if that was the real reason.
Splatoon probably falls more on the Mx. Blobby side of the spectrum but I just love how the developers ditched the concept of gender in between games. In Splatoon 2 you have to choose between “girl” and “boy” but in Splatoon 3 those roles are abandoned. The gender differences are no longer tied to the concept of gender, because the only thing that really changes is your eyebrows and eyelashes and everything else is no longer gender-locked. The “boy” and “girl” hairstyles became universal, player animations became customizable rather than gender-based, and the gear that used to be a dress or smock based on your gender has been split into two separate items which you can obtain both of. Also there are canonically gender-neutral bathrooms in the background of a stage (barnacle and dime). It’s very fitting for a game themed around chaos via all sorts of cultures and characters coming together, in my option.
You also have one of the main cast of the DLC be enby which is neat.
I do wanna note that the voices are still connected to gender. And clothing can change between models. Although I only know this bc I'm a huge splatoon fan and I enjoy how gender fluid it let's me present as!!
@ AH UR RIGHT I FORGOT ABOUT THE VOICES!! But tbh when they don’t say a whole lot of actual words its an east thing to look over jaja woomy!
I have to disagree! Splatoon still very much has “gendered” body types…while you can choose the hair and outfits, their voice, eyebrows, walking and idle animation, breasts and hips are still all tied to whatever “style” you pick iirc. I still do really appreciate that they didn’t limit hair and clothes to any one gender but also, I never experienced splatoon 1 or 2 so the gendered differences in the player characters feel more distinct to me.
@ I’ve never tested it but I’ve never noticed a difference between the “female” and “male” bodies in splatoon? part of the reason I wanted to bring splatoon up specifically is because the body is pretty much a neutral canvas in my experience, they’re very boxy. I can’t say that there isn’t a difference but there’s never been one large enough that I’ve noticed
i had a professor in university who said "the differences between genders are much smaller than the differences across the same gender" and that has stuck with me ever since.
😮😮😮😮 eye opener
@@CountCocofang it means we can find a lot in common with the "opposite" gender, [ specially if we are not gender conforming]
@@CountCocofang it does actually
Meanwhile I am a dude who grew up playing female characters almost every single time I am given the chance not because I thought they were sexy, but because I thought they were cool and had cooler fashion, moves, designs, etc.
Which always got me the side eyes and mockery from my cousin who would always go "why would you ever play a girl!?"
I do share your issues with character creators tho, I wanna be able to make a tall and muscular female character, but never any luck.
That or an androgynous male... about the best luck I had there was a female dragonborn body in BG3 (which lacks default breasts)
though that ends with them wearing a bra in many of the outfits...
Also, I do ask
what would be a proper, non-gay aimed female gaze?
I can never get an answer to that as every single option either gets classified as gay-aimed or power fantasy
If you want non-gay female gaze look at shojo or josei anime/manga or games explicitly for women like reverse harem. Look at kpop idols as well as book tok. There's definitely a different type of guy there and they don't have to be in super revealing clothes to be sexy. I mean Astarion has many women in a literal chokehold if you want another example
Tastes vary wildly, but dadbods seem to be popular. The kind that radiates calm and comfort. Less "large and in charge", more "fluffy and fine with that". Which, yes, also describes a lot of gay bears, but I think straight people don't generally read bears as gay.
For clothing, though... I'm not sure it's possible to do skimpy clothing that properly sexualises the male body and not have it read as gay against the background of our current culture, because straight men in our culture refuse to wear such clothing, because they consider it gay (and I suspect also because they'd be hella uncomfortable getting looked at, even by women, the way they look at women). Closest I can think of is like... male strippers for female audiences (bachelorette parties maybe?).
part of that is how there is more of a "spectrum"/freedom for male heterosexuality
while everything else is condensed down (I mean, look at how pop culture is barely starting to recognize non-butch lesbians)
Yeah, that seems to be a major question for the male gaze idea. It seems like a lot of the writing I've read/ heard on defaults to "Shirtless man= power, shirtless woman= sex." Never mind that's an enormous assumption, basically drawing strict gender and body type lines before anything else is done- "Cause we know human sexuality is a shallow binary." Not to mention that, for many people there is a lot of overlap between the former category and latter. "Nope, there isn't any overlap, and we can 100% tell that the developers fit into either one or the other thought processes with all their characters." Sounds like a shallow binary.
16:42 the "women are on average shorter" justification is just funny when you consider that she is also an orc or thiefling etc. As in a creatures that doesn't exist at all. But somehow her HEIGHT is the unrealistic part.😂
I want a fantasy setting that turns the whole dimorphism around completely
It's such a basely stupid argument, I'm not making an average character, why would my chosen adventurer be a normal person!?
Also, that you're playing a literal hero adventurer, a character who is not only a break from the norm, but explicitly exceptional per the narrative. Like, yeah, ok, averages exist. So what, this character is on the tail of the bell curve in many, _many_ aspects, lol.
And the thing people don't get about averages is that they're averages! Despite the average being different, there is still a 100% overlap between the possible heights men and women can have!
The averages thing is ridiculous, in my home country its not uncommon for men to be near 6' and women to get up to 5'9. Im only 5'2" and in the country im living in now the men and women are actually around my height, so theyd be totally dwarfed by women in my home country
excellent video. its really tiring watching everyone pretend like the gender disparity in gaming ended sometime in the 2010s. also the subtitles are greatly appreciated!
Yes yes and yesss
This video is FASCINATING
From my own more niche perspective as a gay nsfw game developer this really puts into so much perspective "He is you, she's FOR you" as i was baffled why so many straight male friends of mine opted to play as female characters in games. The point of "audience AND camera" really brings attention to what players can and do look at
It rocked my world years ago when a male gamer friend of mine told me the reason he plays female characters in WoW was so he could look at their butts all day. Somehow it had never occurred to me--I always thought of the protagonists I played as someone to pretend I WAS, not someone to lust after. Of course, I'm fine if people want to play as sexy characters so they can stare at them. The problem, as verily already well pointed out, is that we're not given a choice--if you want to play as a "femme" character, you're going to be curvy and short, and that's that.
yeah unfortunately I've heard so so so many creepy cishet men saying "I made my character a girl because I can stare at her ass while I play. make a male character? ew no I'd be staring at a man's ass then, and that's gay. yucky!" literally constantly
What a niche though!
thanks for always having subtitles, im not deaf at all but i can find videos/media in general hard to follow without them
Having the mouse cursor on-screen over NES game footage is a power play and I respect it. The Nintendo PC is my favourite console.
I don't really care if some game creators want to make sexy characters and basically just stick to a masculine/feminine binary, but I do care if they try to find some way to advertise their game as being inclusive to all genders when it really isn't. All I want is for people to not lie about their games (or stretch the truth about their games to an unnatural degree) since I feel like that is often more damaging to trans and gender non-conforming people than just making a game that doesn't represent everyone. And not every game needs to represent everyone and that's okay. Honestly, the way a lot of these big game companies advertise their "one tiny insignificant pixel of trans and non-binary inclusive content, kind of" feels a lot like the Disney LGBT "firsts" bs.
I think it is easy for people to forget how hard complicated software is to make, like some of the examples used in this video. Many small things combine to be a huge thing, especially if we remember take into account QA and bugs. We have to remember that trans people are a clear minority, and we also have to remember that most games won't get significantly better with dev time being spent on features like this, and I would rather have devs focus on making games as fun as possible, which won't mean absolute inclusivity for most games and by that I mean that there is a lot of lower hanging fruit to improve the median experience of playing most games.
When a game is advertised for being inclusive things change quite a lot, because at that point is sort of a promise from the developer that they have considered inclusivity and then the implementation being half-assed seems like false advertising. I guess gamers have to be quite used to false advertising at this point though. :/
I also do have a bit of a personal annoyance with games and other software locking hairstyles behind gendered choices. I don't think big dudes having long flowy hair is even really against the norms but for some reason long hairstyles tend to be rather limited in my experience for male characters in character creators, while I have a ton of balding options for some reason.
@@valtarijunkkala I would like to add, not only is it technically complicated but its complicated in terms of story. I would actually like games where your character is not a blank slate. So many ideas that seem like easy pickings aren't fleshed out since we need to make everything not contradict the blank slate.
With limited dev time, I want story of the assassin who is also a mother ala Kill Bill. Give me the old man who is at the end of mafia career. The nonbinary superhero who has to have secret identity even when their cape is not on. If you want represent them then just write the darn thing and put your energy into making ONE great thing instead of five okay things.
@@violetsonja5938 Yeah this. Funnily enough I actually find myself unable to project onto most "blank slate" characters.
@valtarijunkkala I agree, I don't know why so many games, especially western games, feel like they have to spend like half their budget and development time on some massive character creation feature when no one really seems to care about it in terms of the overall game and story by the end. A game like animal crossing makes sense to have it concidering the whole point of that game is dress-up, but a story driven game where your blank-state character has no impact on anything else except to be a convenient plot device just feels like a huge missed opportunity for a better story and character development.
@violetsonja5938 Honestly the blank-state character often times makes the games feel even less immersive since the player just feels like they're witnessing the events unfold around them and it doesn't feel like they are actually a part of the events. Not every game needs a character creator, and it seems like more people identify with an engaging story than a bland oc that juat so happens to look a bit like the person playing the game
This is one of the better discussions of gender representation (trans, non-binary, cis, etc. - doesn't matter) that I've ever read or listened to. Thank you for putting forth the "sexy binary" issue so well. I have tried explaining the male gaze issue in games to guys so many times without much success, but I think the way you put it is incredibly spot on and hard to dismiss.
yeah, I tried too, many times. and it's usually a "but there are also sexualised men" (they can be shirtless) or "but I you are objectifying the women more than I do by criticizing their sexy design instead of looking at the character behind it".
really damn tiring, but guess I at least got a few people to think about it more.
Exactly this video blew me away in how dead on it is!
Opposite end, I’ve tried understanding but I never really got it. I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever had anyone really point out to me ‘the male character is meant to be you, the female character is meant to be for you’ before and I still have some trouble understanding it. It was very formative, and great, and amazing.
agreed
@@sociallyineptsnapper I understand the male gaze and I disagree with it. There is a fundamental confusion around male sexuality and a futile attempt to equate it with female sexuality.
The height thing seems so ridiculous, even the god damn mii maker for the Wii lets you have maximum height on a male of female mii, or of course minimum height on either
the mii maker was the best character creator ever. it may didnt have an enby option, but other than that you literally had all the options.
Height is unfortunate but unlikely to change any time soon, the reason why so few games have height sliders and when they do they are typically slight changes at best is due to how height interacts with animations. Tall people and short people legitimately walk differently, stand differently, and that only gets more complicated when you have animations that involve multiple people. For example in Baldur's Gate 3 every single possible character needs to be able to dance with Wyll, kiss Karlach, pet scratch and more. Larian already spent an absolute ton of effort in making each other these animations work for every existing height and body type, having a height slider would make that exponentially more complicated. Miis can be any height because they barely have animations.
I do believe we will see better androgynous representation is later RPGs as we are currently in the era where games are still designed around the gender binary only for some gender non-conforming elements to be added later. I am sure we will see a less gendered system in an up and coming RPG.
@TheNotshauna your explaination falls flat on the fact that bg3 still has tall male character animation tho. you dont need a slider, you could just copy paste the female model on the male one to make it taler and have roughly the same animation. it wouldnt ad a slider, just a "choose between those heights" option. but thats still an improvement, and still pretty easy to make.
@@TheNotshauna Animation is getting smarter. There's a lot of active detection of the environment starting to go on to ensure that models are making contact with other models and the environment in realistic ways that avoid clipping problems. The only issue is that generalized ray tracing is really expensive and requires powerful equipment to do, so it's not really accessible to most consumers yet and consequently not valuable for most developers to be including in their games. But the ability for character models to "see" each other and figure out how to interact regardless of what shape or size they are is already being worked on. It'll probably just take a while before the technology is cheap and efficient enough to be expected in any given game.
@@TheNotshaunathey could just make all player characters a height that is roughly average across all genders then, it would be less weirdly sexist. I feel like if you compare it with people in real life, the differences in games feel bizarrely overexaggerated (which makes sense considering everything this video is about)
You touched on the body diversity issues and that reminded me of the fact that, both of the 'skinny' body types in BG3, regardless of your gender, would weigh 75 kg. I'm a 70 kg woman. In NO UNIVERSE can a 75 kg woman look like that. But they wouldn't give the female body type more muscle or fat to make up for that, no. Not even close to what the skinny men get. You just weigh as much as a more slight man because balance, while looking nothing like what a person who weighs that much would.
I doubt many people will bring this up (mostly because it was abandoned and forgotten), but I think the Mirror's Edge series has a surprisingly well done female protagonist. The game not only discourages fanservice by being in first person (and having a main character with normal body proportions lol), but it does everything it can to immerse you into her shoes, going as far as having a dynamic breathing system while you run, a fully rendered body and having you constantly talk to people over the radio. It's like they're not only making you play as a woman, but also making it an integral part of the gameplay and constantly reminding you of it while you play without having like weird sexy scenes or suggestive camera angles. It's even more impressing considering the fact that the game was released in 2008. I think that's pretty cool. Big fan of mirror's edge
I've been ranting about bulge sliders since saints row 4 had the sexyness slider, where on women you could make ridiculous gazongas, but on men the bulge remained quite realistic, on the highest setting.
Maybe slightly off topic, but weird that that's still a thing after all these years.
Shame. Need cartoonishly large man pecs the size of big woman bazongas.
they had the same animations for both genders and no different voicelines, boss is just boss (they/them), and the triangle body slider, but the separate sexy slider is bullshit ikr 😭
Saints Row 3 and 4 made me so mad after sr2 accidentally had such a fabulously inclusive character creator.
Lol. I remember that. Thing is, Saints Row 3 introduced the Sex Appeal slider and had a way bigger range for males. The 100% in SR4 was the 50% in SR3.
Surprisingly, the game's that come the closest for me when it comes to breaking the gender binary, such as by making giant, shredded women and short, slender men, is Dragon's Dogma.
Despite coming from a time before these sort of discussions were really around, the game allowed you to make a female character who was 210 cm tall and weighed well over 110 kg.
All the while with different arms, legs, and hips to match which direction of the spectrum you'd like to be at.
I wish more games would let you mold your character as much as this character creator did.
Yes, thank you. I loved that character creator because I could use the 12 torso, 10 arms, and 11 hips and get a body that looks quite similar to mine(as a cis woman).
No other creator has ever matched that level of different body types, not even Dragon's Dogma 2 - which is a depressing simplified version of what was almost perfect.
It's honestly so tragic that Dragon's Dogma didn't go as far as adding trans or enby options. The character creator is literally perfect for body type diversity but I can't actually have my character that looks exactly like me yknow.. be me, canonically. Still fun to run around as a photo perfect avatar of myself for the first and only time in gaming, though! And to not have my damn arms clip through my body like every other game with fat people! 🥳
@@Bunni89 It was 2011... in Japan. So that makes sense. The real travesty is that modern games with trans and NB options have such limited customization options.
You can't have dwarf characters, or short scrawny men, or big buff women, or manly faces on fem bodies and vice versa, or non-average proportions in the limbs and torso. Everything is one size with like a 5% rate of change.
Games have come so far yet also not at all.
THE SLENDER MAN???? AAAAAAAAAAHH !!!!
I was going to mention Dark Arisen! (I haven't played the new one). Even though you can't change voice/pronouns, I was able to make a very androgynous looking character, more so than any other game I've tried.
Yea i never got the whole “women are always smaller”, while mostly true it makes tall women irl feel so alienating. Omd a tall woman?? How special 😭 i also hope the body customisation becomes a spectrum too instead of checkboxes, because well, that’s a binary 💀
It’s crazy how the option of “Male, Female, Non binary” is a ternary which defeats the purpose of being non binary which is that you are anywhere between or outside of male or female NOT JUST A THIRD CHECKBOX
to be fair I have a distinct reaction to tall women but it's sure not disbelief or to alienate them lol
I know some in-development indie games are using androgynous bodies as a base and making sliders to go between male and female. Like Paralives and Vein. But I think the Vein sliders don't change the body enough though. I feel like the slider needs to go further in either direction so I can get some hideously exaggerated Chad body or an exaggerated Venus of Willendorf body. Unless you can do that stuff by changing enough of the detailed options.
It.. is.. rather special? I prefer shorter women and somehow, frequently bedded women my height (5'10) or taller. They are not common, and pretending like they are is weird. A tall woman stands out and there's not really any getting around it at all.
According go this game's bulge slider I guess I'm female 🤷.
I love Fallen London. The game never uses pronouns on the PC, just a title that you pick. Such as Sir, Madam, or Citizen. You can change your title at any time and unlock new titles by completing some stories.
Their newest game, Mask of the Rose, also has options to give your character a trans backstory. The sudden upheaval of society caused by The Fall allowed you to be yourself for the first time in your life.
It's always funny how a gender binary society affects everyone.
I'm a cishet guy, but I'm average height, kinda slender, small waisted, kinda androgynous face, with a middle to high pitched voice. For sexy binary games I might as well be a girl!
THEY SAID WHAT ABOUT "PROTECTING" LARA? Insane! As a lil gay some of my first memories ever are playing early PC games with my dad, and we would talk about what a badass Lara was. When I used to play, I saw her as the one protecting ME xD She's the one shooting, flipping, running into danger in the front, the camera (us) is behind her, like... I can't 😭
I'm really glad I got to experience Lara's world as a kid.. I can see how understanding the motivation behind the character design would be heartbreaking. I always saw her as a strong, protective, friendly figure.. also, because I didn't speak English back then any suggestive comments were lost on me... hmmm.. Now I feel I was really lucky for this experience
I had the same thought! "Protecting" Lara. Pfffft. Protect me from her! 😂
I understand calling that heartbreaking. It's such upsetting information even without having a Tomb Raider history myself. The idea that the notion of boys as being unable to relate to girl characters much goes THAT far is deeply painful to comprehend.
Yet another reason why old school Lara is better. I've never heard anything about her needing to be protected. She's just too badass. She also has a bit of roughness in her character that just isn't allowed in many modern female characters, because they're meant to be good role models and shit.
Meanwhile, modern Lara is so generic I don't know who she is.
I do work teaching organizations about trans people, how to treat us in the workplace and as people, and we have a whole section about how to apologize for misgendering somebody. And that Veilguard example is literally *WORSE than our 'what not to do' example.*
We advise the quick apology for the simple reason that it recognizes fault, while not putting any emotional or conversational weight on the trans person. An action or response bigger than a 'sorry' and moving on just puts more onus on the person being misgendered to accept that apology and coddle the feelings of the person who made that mistake, rather than actually addressing (or even acknowledging) the feelings of the person who was wronged. Veilguard's approach is one by people who don't care a lick about trans people: what they actually care about is cis people being able to pat themselves on the back for being accepting of The Other.
OMG, literally. When I saw that scene I felt so freakingly uncomfortable. It makes the misgendering about the person who did the misgendering. Brings so much fucking attention to it. Just say sorry and try to learn from it, don't make a spectacle 😭.
And as Verily said, it doesn't make frigging sense in this fantasy world that had stablished a different gender scenery. It is just there to be all "look at us, we're soooo inclusive" without caring at all about gender inclusivity. It's performative.
OMG YES!
I once was misgendered by my boss and he made like this huge deal out of it to the point that he told my supervisor to apologize for him again the next day and when you're apology rolls around to the point of annoying and uncomfortable that I'd rather you call me a slur instead it better come with 100 bucks...or at least a bottle of wine.
Oh shit! Nice seeing you here 😊
Thank you for your work in the XIV community!
A literal performance
Ah yes, known cis person, Trick Weekes. This is sarcasm, Trick is non-binary themselves and wrote Taash's scenes.
A crash course into the male gaze, gender binary standards, and video game gendered marketing all through the lens of character creators? Such talent!
While some of the gender exclusivity in Fallen London was built in from the beginning, much of the naturalness of the non-binary representation was very intentionally built in by the current team of developers- it's part of the advantage of running an online game that can be constantly updated. FL has gone through significant content changes since its inception, including removing dialogue that very explicitly othered the non-binary character (there was a long period of time where your non-binary character would be referred to as "Si-, er, Mad-, er, yes" by default, while the default for a binary gendered character was a standard gendered honorific.) There has also been a significant amount of retconning the way female characters were treated and sexualized in the game's earlier years. There used to be a number of non-optional quests where you had to choose to seduce either a male or female suitor (with no non-binary options), and your character had to continue with this romantic plotline to gain essential qualities. There have been many significant changes made as the leadership team at the game studio has developed, but it's relevant to know that the game's current level of non binary representation is absolutely not how it started.
Wow, I'd never critically considered the male gaze that is inherent in most of the games I play. This was an eye-opening exploration of something holding back games from good representation.
Delighted Saint's Row got a mention: I was thinking about their character creator right up until you mentioned it!
Thank you for the lovely video!
i'm glad you flashed the witcher 4 trailer, it was so infuriating to me that it got picked up in the culture war as "woke" for having a female protagonist while the trailer literally began with long, loving shots of a naked woman's body. a woman who ends up being a damsel for the player to save. just because the avatar is a girl this time it's okay?
Ugh. As much as I enjoy the Witcher series (I've played all 3 game and listened to the audiobooks), the male-gazy-iness in all the relationships makes it so creepy as a woman. I often have to look away from the screen when the "romance" cut scenes happen because it makes my skin crawl. Not to mention how utterly blind the fanboys are to all the extremely creepy gross stuff surrounding intercourse in the series.
@@agilemind6241 Imagine acting so childish and immature towards two characters expressing desire and attraction for each other in a way that isn't sanitized like in romance movies.
@@agilemind6241 I hate how women treat male s3xual desire as "cr3epy", as if they don't look at the bodies of other people.
Just ignore that shit. People calling the witcher "woke" have never laid eyes on any of the books or games or even the netflix show. You could tell them Ciri's been basically the deuteragonist from day 1 and they'd go "still woke though"
@@Jenna_Talia - People calling anything "woke" at this point couldn't describe what it even means if their lives literally depended on it.
As a trans person, I adore fallen london and failbetter's other games, gender isn't *quite* an after thought, but it's comfortable to be non-binary or trans in the games. Sunless sea deciding if you wanted to give birth to your heir, for your partner to give birth, or if you adopted them honestly felt like a comforting thing, as you had access to all options regardless of avatar or chosen titles (the closest thing to gender you could choose).
failbetter mention! their games r so yummy
Your gender options when creating a character in Fallen London are still my favorite in all of gaming. Your choices are:
"A Lady"
"A Gentleman"
"My dear sir, there are individuals roaming the streets of Fallen London at this very moment with the faces of squid! Squid! Do you ask them their gender? And yet you waste our time asking me trifling and impertinent questions about mine? It is my own business, sir, and I bid you good day."
"man? woman? my god there are squid things running around and you care about me?"
or something like that, its been awhile since i played fallen london much less made a new character lol.
edit: can you tell i was browsing the comments early while watching the vid?
@@comyuse9103 the exact quote is "My dear sir, there are individuals roaming the streets of Fallen London with the faces of squid. Squid! Do you ask them their gender? And yet you waste our time asking me trifling and impertinent questions like that? It is my own business, sir, and I bid you good day"
_cyberpunkdreams_ is a sci-fi game that plays quite a bit like fallen london and very much allows you to play trans and enby characters
oh my, you really opened my eyes... you explained the whole "male gaze in games" thing so concisely. i've always been confused why those gamer bros always complaining when a female protagonist/character didn't cater to their very strict, gendered ideals of beauty, because most of the characters they complained about either 1) looks pretty to me or 2) reminds me of actual people
no wonder they complained so much, to them those characters need to specifically caters to their gaze...
anyway thank you so much for this video, i really like the way you expand on things in games that many gamers overlooked simply because it didn't bothers them that much...
A long ramble/rant:
As a cis/het (and yes, liberal) guy, I don't think I need to be coddled by media anymore. My mind's not gonna break if I roleplay a female or nonbinary character. Also, if I can play male characters and not get bored, I can play female characters I'm not attracted to and also not get bored. It's weird, because a bit of my old explanation from when I was a teenager remains true. (That I'd rather look at (and hear) a lady for a whole game than a dude.) But the more important thing is, I can care about a character I think is hot, I can care about a character I don't, and I can identify with and care about a female character regardless of attraction... both, either, or in the case of a too-flawed protagonist, neither. (I can still enjoy the story even if I can't really identify with the character at all.)
As for character creation systems, I'd like to see an emphasis on not linking all these aspects that really don't need to be linked. (It may be more work if the system is already barely there, but when it's robust, surely it's more work to limit the player, no?) I want this for the people I care about, who feel left out, but I also want it for me. Some of the cutest, most endearing (in personality) women I've met were my height (almost 6 feet) or taller, and frankly, I'd love to be able to create and play a tall, muscley "Amazon" type with a (secret or not-so-secret) heart of gold, or a big and tall woman with a kind face, who gives and receives protection from the people she cares about. (These are a couple occasional tropes, but it's just to illustrate my point.) Further, I get really annoyed when I spend the time to create a female character with a bit of (in-world or head-cannon) backstory, who couldn't be arsed with heels or lots of makeup, but then I get to those options, and... Wait, heels are the ONLY shoes?! WTF?! All the makeup is very obvious? So, I guess I'll just go no makeup?... Test Drive Unlimited 2 really annoyed me with the heels... Like, you gave me lots of clothing options, but all the women's shoes are heels?... You know she's/I'm gonna be racing cars, right? Why are you trying to break my immersion?!
At the end of the day, much like Hollywood, triple A games tend to come across as pandering, rather than actually caring about inclusion in the workplace and/or storytelling. It's just soulless business, and business doesn't care about humans. That's the general feeling I get. This video did a great job of tying in other issues/aspects though, and gave me a lot to think about. I remember being a dumb teen and finding Lara Croft hot. I still find her attractive, but I didn't keep playing any time I've gone back to the series. The new games seem to have fun mechanics and thankfully lost the archaic control scheme, but I found myself just as uninterested in Lara as a character as always. Maybe, after the first new game, the storytelling gets good/interesting. I just know the first one turned me off of actually playing these games I already own. I want human characters. I want female characters. I want non-binary characters. I don't play games to drool over boob/butt physics. I'm not opposed to that, as an outlier, but I really don't want a "hot" character to be a necessity on some dumbass checklist. Again, I want HUMAN characters. Give me a story and characters I can care about. Focus on that first... I mean, besides gameplay, of course.
And yes, this is all about me, but who else can I speak for. I just wish these huge companies would actually listen to their storytellers and other employees. Men don't need to be coddled. We ALL need better storytelling, world-building, and role-playing options. It's good for everyone, and cis/het guys like me lose nothing from the changes people are asking for. So, why the f**kin' hesitation?
Totally agree. The problem seems to be a really loud minority that opposes inclusivity. Unless there truly is such a majority outside my social circle that still can't be comfortable with anything outside their mainstream gender stereotypes which would be really sad, but honestly also not that unimaginable considering some people I know.
Making a robust character creation is costly. Have you used skyrim's bodyslide mod? Its challenging to make clothes fit the bodytype you want. All this stuff costs time and money, that needs to be supported by increased sales. You were going to buy the game anyways. A more improved character creation system costs more money and doesn't increase the amount of sales to justify it.
The need to ensure sexiness in the character creator is an interesting angle I hadn't considered
Also the difference in animations between "male" and "female" bodies in games drives me CRAZZZYYY. I'm nb but if I have to choose I play AFAB bodies in games but dear christ the animations are so stupid sometimes. AMAB bodies just move like people, but AFAB ones are usually animated to stand, walk, run in this weird artificially dainty kind of way that's just ridiculous. Totally take me out of the immersion, especially since cis women don't even move like that. I truly get the feeling sometimes that the people making these games have never seen women in situations where they're not performing or objectified.
i hate the fact that they need to actively choose to spend effort making these ridiculous animations
As an animator, there is something to be said in the different ways that one holds their body both due to its physicality (Which can be influenced by many things like sex and age and disability and whatever) and by socialisation (Which can be influenced by many things like culture and upbringing and gender and whatever).
AFAB characters tend to walk differently due to the weight on their chests and hips and having different centres of gravity, HOWEVER, this should NOT be treated like its the only factor in how they walk. Becaaaaause- ITS NOT A BINARY. ITS NOT 'male walk' OR 'female walk'. EVEN WITHIN SEXUAL DIMORPHISM, THE HUMAN BODY HAS A VERY FLUID WAY OF PRESENTING.
BTW, DOES ANYONE KNOW WHY CHARACTERS WITH DISABILITIES OR CHILDREN ARE BEING AFFECTED BY ARBITRARY SEXUAL CHARACTERISTICS?? IF YOU CAN ONLY MOVE WITH A CRUTCH, YOU AREN'T BOOBING BOOBILY DOWN THE STAIRS, YOU ARE MOVING IN A METHODICAL WAY LEANING ON THE CRUTCH AS YOUR MAIN SUPPORT. BECAUSE THATS THE WHOLE DAMN POINT OF A WALKING AID. *TITS BE DAMNED, YOU'RE STILL FLESH AND BONE.*
The 'gender/sex first' approach to writing is stupid, reductive, hurtful, boring, and CRIMINALLY uncompelling.
Memories of the "animation-swapped" Batman and Catwoman scenes spring to mind while reading this. Even though that is a situation where the characters are very archetype "stoic masculine brawler" and "elegant femme fatale acrobat" people, seeing it so starkly contrasted really outs it in perspective.
@@goranisacson2502 omg omg omg the Quiet and Ocelot swapped models are amaaaazing jfc
You should play Horizon Zero Dawn. the protagonist is a non sexualized woman whose gender is completely irrelevant to the story
I've come to realize that I just prefer games with a fixed design for the protagonist because I don't have to spend 30 minutes creating a character I will be unsatisfied with
40 minutes of work and it only looks good from that one particular angle. Not a preset in sight.
“No second breakfast for you, madam” is one of those lines I will be absorbing and randomly repeating some time this week
Okay, I don't know if you're ever going to see this or if someone else has already said it, but Saints Row 2022's character creator wasn't actually as much of a progression as you might think - it was returning to (and marginally upgrading) the amazing way the character creator worked back in Saints Row 2 from _2008!_ This was something the fanbase had been asking for through Saints Row 3 and 4. 3 and 4 allowed you to pick voice, hair and clothing options that were feminine or masculine without regard to your body type, but they also fell into the "powerful male, sexy female" category. Androgyny in those games isn't possible. But in SR2 there wasn't a binary choice - just sliders! SR2 also let you choose how you walked - so you could choose a feminine bounce or a masculine strut and like 8 other options. You could even switch between them as you liked! It's a game from 2008, so it's a little difficult to make a character that stands up to today's standards, but Saints Row was trans-inclusive all the way back in 2008! (In fact, if you make a female character she's canonically trans! Saints Row 1 only let you make a male character, so in order to keep continuity they're just like "yeah all that happened exactly the way you remember playing it, but if you're a lady then you had some work done". )
Something else interesting about Saints Row is that in an effort to not use gendered terms when referring to the player, there are actually a couple times in 3 and 4 where you're actually referred to as they/them. I don't get a lot of chances to talk about Saints Row these days but I love doing it.
I remember a friend showing me the character creator from Saints Row 2. The level of customization was wild. And needless to say it inspired great lengths of creativity...
Thank you so much for making this! For the most part, I was really happy and grateful to play as a nonbinary character in Baldur's Gate 3, but I was SO DISAPPOINTED at those super gendered body options! I hope video games keep moving forward into more inclusive options.
In all seriousness, even as a guy, I gave up on creating characters that look like me cause I’m short. I genuinely like being a gnomish lil guy, and I’ve been shorter than most women I’ve dated. It always breaks my immersion when I have to be a tall hunk cause, like, it isn’t me!
Have tou tried City of Heroes: Homeconing?
I gave up on creating characters that look like me because why even would i want to do that?
@@zufalllx everyone plays differently. I created lots of OCs, but sometimes I want to play as my sona doing my choice. Roleplaying is fun so long as you don't get gatekeeped, and unfortunately preprogrammed electronic games are based on a lot pf limitations for creation.
One of my best friends got frustrated with Elden Ring for somewhat similar reasons. He's a heavy-set Black guy with soft features, and even adjusting the skin tone and weight as far as possible, you end up with a chiseled Caucasian-looking dude with a tan
I really liked this, you got out a lot of stuff I didn't know how to say. I also think there's a problem with a bunch of binary sliders because nonbinarity (I dunno if that's a term) isn't just the space between male and female. On the most basic level it's got a dimension of how much gender you express, and all pronouns that aren't they/them, but that's still kinda basic. Nonbinarity isn't something you can glue on because it isn't an attachment to the binary world, it's a rejection of it.
We've gotta make "nonbinarity" a more common term; it has a really cool ring to it. I think I'll make a concerted effort to use it often from now on.
"It isn't an attachment to the binary world, it's a rejection of it" - that is very well expressed and as a trans woman with admittedly skewed view on gender outside of the binary, I never thought about it in that way. It's not really the 'third' gender option that you see generalized in all the bureaucratic paperwork, but instead it's something different that doesn't correlate like the options 'male' and 'female' do. Fascinating!
This "She's not him, she's FOR him" logic also explains why there's such a huge backlash to characters like Aloy from Horizon: Zero Dawn. If she's not conventionally attractive the way they want her to be, then clearly she's not FOR him. And if she's not for him, then he's supposed to identify with her as a character, and that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
Characters like her also show how gooned out and defective the male gamer's brain is because she's not even ugly. Like most of the "Ugly" characters they show would be conventionally attractive irl, they just aren't top 1% genetics irl anime girls with perfect makeup infused into their skin.
Shaun's newest video does a great job of breaking down exactly this issue that gamers™️ see with Aloy. Absolutely wild how much some people demand pandering in media
@@caitmonroe9349 While also complaining about pandering
To think that a lot of this started because when the first video games were being sold, they were considered toys, and every toy needed to be either for boys or for girls, so they put video games as a toy for boys and we ended up here.
19:29 I noticed this in Assassin's Creed Valhalla! All the women would come on super strong in the main story but you had to be the one to initiate anything with guys (except that one really gay guy in that one village in the middle of nowhere)
In AC Valhalla you're canonically a woman called Eivor. You can assign the skin of Odin / Havi to look / sound like him because his conscience also lives inside your mind, but everyone in the world addresses Eivor like a woman.
i remember discussing older dragon age games with my brother's friends and they all were creeped out by Zevran and Anders actually flirting with the player character first, because they felt awkward to say no 😭
Awesome video, thank you!! And extra thanks for including subtitles
Subtitles are so underrated in videos, great to see them
You Can't Have Both. You litterally cannot tell the story of someone's struggle to be accepted in a world that is already accepting. Unrelated extreme example to illustrate how impossible this is. Imagine if Zootopia, the movie where everyone was an animal, wasn't about the little character wanting to be accepted in a Big character world. Imagine if it instead started in the city and there were already ribbit cops but Judy keeps her desire to be a cop secret because she doesn't think the city will accept a rabit cop.
YOU CAN'T HAVE A STORY ABOUT THE STRUGLE IF YOU REMOVED THE STRUGGLE BY SHOWING AN ACCEPTING WORLD.
You can, if you present it as a contrast between the serious things, and the asinine details that don't matter in the bigger picture.
Portraying racism as absurd, for example, is a lot easier when you compare judging someone's morals by their actions, or the concentration of melatonin in their skin.
You absolutely can. Your Imagination is very limited. There's millions of ways this could be achieved, starting with, all rabbit cops are treated and laughing stock and are often taken as desktop officers, whereas Judy wanted to be a field officer. Or, bunnies are treated as little more than mall guards with a badge, only ever posted on secure positions and Judy wants more. There could be few, there could be a foundational scene where she sees a bunny cop and opens up about wanting to be a police officer and the bunny officer just goes, pfffft, bad idea girl. Further driving the wedge by showing that even those already institutionalized are mistreated.
Yes you can. In Stars and Time does it very well. The leading religion of Vaugarde is super inclusive and accepting, and yet there are still struggles to be accepted there, but in a very different way. I recommend you play it, since I don't want to spoil the context for this
I mean, if this is about Veilguard, there's clearly not full acceptance, especially since Taash's mother doesn't know what non-binary means (since the Qun only really tolerates binary trans people and only if they accept their gendered role in society).
@@gabrote42 Looks like one of the many games that falls outside of my emotional range so I just went ahead and looked up the spoilers. Looks like you're saying they achieved both because the main cast don't know each other so there's the fear of not being accepted by each other.
I clicked on this video thinking it would be a silly video from the thumbnail but instead got a really insightful discussion on a topic I’ve never put much thought into. As a cis woman it’s really cool to see another perspective on androgynous character customization in video games
This is not a defense of the set height differences. As a tall woman, it also pisses me off, but I think, at least for the Sims 4 because the animations are set a certain way you literally can’t change height without it starting to look really weird, and there are certain mods that do change the height of Sims, but the animations do not adjust so when they cook, there’s just a floating spoon and their hand is empty.
I'd wondered about this. Additions to the character creator can introduce all sorts of programming complications. These can always be worked around, but add a cost to development time.
I also assume the height difference in other games is because the base model that the sliders deform from is just shorter. And then the reason for the binary in the first place is because they didn't want to solve the problem of a base model interpolating between the two. Which we've seen can be done.
Hopefully more games using better character creator practices will create new standards and make working through these problems go smoother overall.
5:33 through the use of humor and the subject matter and a smash cut (my favourite humorous editing tedchniwue) you've earned my subscription
Thank you so much for making this! This is legitimately one of my favourite topics because of how, even after all this time, character creation & personal identity is still missing the mark. And every time some big game is called out for how well they do it just makes what's missing that much more obvious.
No matter how far society wants to claim it's finally done it, make the ultimate representation, it's still built around a binary framework that will always find a way to exclude non-binary folks
Honestly the best way I've ever heard the male gaze explained. The gendered gaze is so wild, thank you for speaking to the nonbinary experience in this.
From my experience too, it's way more normalised for a male player to play a female character than for a female player to play a male character. Obviously lots of male players play female characters for the reasons you've listed but I remember people being super confused by my sister playing any type of male character in a game. Super weird
I think an exception to this MMORPGs, where historically female gamers get a lot less hassle if other players assume they're men
As always, what a solid video. I feel like this is really the definitive summary of the conversations that exist around these character creators, and I love that you reached beyond just the character creator of a single game to consider a much wider history of gendered gaming and discrimination, weird little fellas, and wordlbuilding that just doesn't put in the work the way it feels like it should. I spend a lot of time in fandom spaces where the focus quickly becomes extremely narrow and the forest is very lost for the trees (and often vitriol about them), so watching this play out back to back with BG3 and DATV and the point get totally drowned by people who just didn't like the games and wanted to score points for dunking instead of engage in a real conversation about the state of gender inclusivity in gaming has been... frustrating. It's really, really great to see those individual pieces finally assembled so deftly into a full picture.
And man. The betrayal I felt throughout BG3, the first CRPG (my favorite genre!) where I could be nonbinary (me!!!) when I couldn't be short with a flat chest and all the clothes were so painfully fem was... woof. I love that game and I'm sincerely glad that I could play a petite nonbinary character, but it fell incredibly short in so many ways and from minute one I knew I was still playing Around the game instead of in it, just a little less than usual. The sexy gender binary was so bad that I actually never took off the starting armor for my class because it was the only clothing I had available that felt like I was binding my chest! Shout out to default paladin armor for carrying me through the game...... I love you. And I hate that I never got to use fancy gear with good stats lest the sexy gender binary rain on my parade.
Having words like "trans" and "non-binary" feels really lazy to have in a high fantasy game. It's so jarring, like if your elf warrior started talking about skibidi toilet.
While the same types of prejudice might exist in your fantasy world it doesn't mean the same language and historical factors have been the same. There's a reason fantasy things don't generally use modern-day slurs or talk about nazis. All of these things have deep-rooted basis in very real-world concepts like Christianity and Europe.
If you're making up a fantasy world and want to talk politics and gender stereotypes then you also need to figure out how these large abstract social concepts work in that world per race/locale/religion.
I absolutely agree, as someone who is a big Dragon Age fan. Our modern, western, conception of gender is incredibly specific to the time we're in that it doesn't translate well to a fantasy setting.
I at least appreciate the (clumsy) effort to address it, unlike BG3, where gender binaries have been previously established but suddenly mean nothing to the characters in the game. For example, would a trans female Drow not make some serious waves? Why is Minthara just fine with that?
@@beep3242 I feel like when you have dragons and fireballs and shit you don't really have time to care about gendered bathrooms.
The problem of course is that we construct the cloth of these fictional worlds out of our experiences with the real one. There is no way to "naturalistically" figure out how sex and gender would be understood in Thedas/Par Vollen/etc because these worlds aren't real, they're constructed. I think the real problem isn't that they used the specific words "trans" or "non-binary," but rather that they didn't integrate the concepts very well. I.e. for a term like "non-binary" to feel natural, the term binary would have to have been made present and feel natural. And they just...didn't do that.
I really would have preferred they axe the awkward and actually kind of questionable scene about "pulling a bhurv" and instead actually showed a scene where Taash was talking to the Shadow Dragons in Minrathous, or the Lords in Rivain and finding an identity label that fit for them.
It doesn't even make any sense that it's there, either, when LGBT characters exist in the Dragon Age series in the previous three games and none of them needed to be described by modern terms for the narrative to make it clear that's who they are. Taash could have been firmly nonbinary without using that term at all, or even coming up with a fantasy term (like the character Krem in the video), and for some reason the writing in Veilguard for the specific concept of gender identity dodged subtlety like bullets in the Matrix. I desperately wish I knew why this game acted like it had to reinvent the wheel that the series had already gotten rolling.
I LOVE the character creator in Street Fighter 6 as a cis woman because it lets me live out MY power fantasy - getting to be an insanely tall and built woman who can punch someone into the next dimension. The height thing in particular has always pissed me off in these ‘sexy binary’ games (as you’ve so wonderfully put) being tall myself, and in games like BG3 and cyberpunk it sucks to have to choose between playing a sexy dainty character who identifies as my gender or a tall muscular one who doesn’t. In that way I think you nailed it when you described this issue not as necessarily trans specific but one that comes from a deeply sexist culture.
Thank you for the great video!
I actually really enjoy the androgyny in sky children of the light...it is a very family friendly game and is set in a world where there are basically no gender norms, hell we don't even know if the concept of gender exists or not..i think it's one of the games that best does the "androgyny blorb" archetype
my only ever complaint about sky is that you can't be fatter like some of the spirits in game. no thicker builds only skinny sky kids :/ genuinely wish there was like. a spell or mask to have the build of some of the spirits. brawny skinny cubby. all should be options. hope that comes after friendship 2.0? or in a future season maybe
@@viscera5725 omg yeah i very much agree with that!! i hope they can add a feature that would allow that in future updates!!
As a short, muscular woman I'm also sad my body type apparently isn't supposed to exist :(
I feel so stupid on my part but I feel like its worth bringing it up.
There's this recently open access game that came out called Atlyss which is kind of a pseudo MMO RPG game with anthropomorphic characters. On the surface, its definitely meant to be hella suggestive with its body sliders, character designs, certain emotes and clothing, but I bring it up because of the sliders in character creation when it comes to gender.
When you first make your character, the male and female gender technically have presets of heights and body shape but you're allowed to alter them anyway you like. As far as I can tell, there is no male/female model, just one model per race. So your character can be female and still be as tall as the tallest male. The only thing that limits your height is your starting race, the imps being the smallest of the 5 choices (I guess they're sort of the halflings of the world,) while the "kubolds" are the tallest."
Its also probably worth mentioning that while it doesn't have a gender neutral option, you can choose to between male and female and then choose whether or not you want breasts. You're also allowed to change your character's gender and overall look at any point in the game provided you have the resources to do so, with race and your name being the ones you can't change later on (Though you can do so easily by going into the game files.)
Anyways, Idk if this was really worth bringing it up but after the segment about how genders are height locked in most games I just sort of had to go see for myself if that was the case for atlyss, which it isn't as far as I can tell. I do think because the characters are "furries" they fall under the category of "blobs" category more than anything but they still have sliders so idk, maybe it was worth bringing it up????
Anyways, fun game for early access lol.
i think the max height and some of the build is actually different between the "genders" in atlyss, atleast for the poon (rabbit like race) but its not very noticable since they're all so small and with such cartoony proportions
I actually have a somewhat more optimistic take on this issue. All of these games were being made during the time where cultural awareness of trans people was growing.
They'd already crafted their entire systems based on the old model as the new one emerged, and had to adjust mid-development. The next set of games with character customization are the ones to keep our eye on though, because SOMEONE is likely to raise the bar once again.
Great point. Baldur's Gate 3, last year's game of the year, went into pre-production in 2016. That's the same year Overwatch (a prime example of games designed for the male gaze) won game of the year.
This is indeed an optimistic view. I will adopt it in my mind and hope.
I try to keep this hope too. We’re getting there (fingers crossed)!
you're right to be optimistic, but i don't think the video is un-optimistic. we have to give critique to have better things
@@AnisaThePunk300 this video felt more like it was scratching the surface of a larger issue with gaming using the transgender character creator as a vehicle to have the conversation. i do agree that even as frustrating as these character creators are theyre still indicative of heading in the right direction, and that to get better we must criticize them. i would love a longer video on the problems with male gaze in video games bc its fascinating
The lack of androgyny hurts me despite being cis, because I really want to make a twink character and so many of these games force me to look like a gigachad.
Also, i feel like baldur's gate even failed for the male gaze.
Like, I can have top surgery scars, but god forbid the female character i want to play as have anything bigger than an A-Cup chest.
It's crazy -- there's jiggle physics for the penis but not for boobs? Which, like, I'm not gonna complain about dick jiggle physics, but the lack of boob movement in comparison is kind of distracting LOL
G cup breasts exist in real life...
I never thought I'd see a FFIX reference in one of your videos! Incredible dive into this, you put this so well. Sexy binary meaning Tom Holland and Zendaya can't even be made shows how warped they are. And yes, having known many a gamer guy, them choosing to play as the female characters is never to connect with them as characters it's for those other reasons
I'm curious what you think about Rust, where there is no character creator. You get assigned a randomly generated character and that's it. On one hand I'm kinda uncomfortable playing a character that is quite literally the exact opposite of me, but also it is totally normalized. Many of the big Rust RUclipsrs have women as their character models and it's just the norm. I also don't think the player models are sexualised in any way, regardless of gender. It's still binary, but I'm moreso curious what you think about hte other aspects.
I found this video really great! Especially in regards to how character creators are still often so *painfully* binary and how the games often frame the people that dont conform to that.
One thing I wanted to mention though, about Taash specifically, is how I really appreciated their approach. Not that everything was handled seemlessly, but how Taash and the implied qunari culture interact. Taash starts the nonbinary journey because their mother is trying to hint that they are a man. And Taash's frustration with yhat is that they know they *arent* a man. But their mother still follows the qun and thus the binary gender options that they have. Qunari can be man or woman- but not *neither*. And that mindset is one I know I struggled with a lot in my own gender journey, with the options seemingly being "you are either a woman or a trans man, there is no inbetween". So their story on the whole didnt feel as contradictory to me as it came across here.
thank you soooo much for adding captions, its a super important accessibility feature for me. youre the best
As a guy with boobs, it's irked me for a long time that character creators almost always tie them to gender, as if women without breasts and men with them don't exist, so I'm glad someone else has pointed this out, plus all the other weird binarisms that come with it. Like, when Sims 4 did it's big gender update, I was excited to make and play as intersex characters, only to be immediately disappointed that I couldn't do something as simple as that.
The sims 4 is lackluster af, but you can kinda fix the breasts thing with the Traits.equip_trait Breasts_ForceOn/Off cheat. You can also do some crazy things with mods if you're on PC
The video is on point and I fully agree with your analysis, but as a programmer myself I must add that a lot of this stuff happens because of economic priorities. Yes, games are more inclusive now than before, and some of them try to give some options to trans and nb players, but game development is a very slow and expensive process, and if they have to choose between "classic editor that makes it easy to create hot characters with some cheap gender nonconforming quirks for trans players" and "complex character editor that allows full player creativity but makes it hard for the core demographic to create an idealized, hot version of themself", they choose the first and sacrifice the second.
In fact, not so far ago the standard was having only the male character, they had to add a female option eventually to appeal women and adapt to a broader demographic. Following the same business logic, these companies enjoy the praises and free advertising they earn by adding genital sliders and gender unblocked hairstyles, but they are not willing to consume extra resources to give a full, real representation of all kind of bodies, because they consider that it's not worth the money. In summary: capitalism sucks.
I understand that a lot of things cannot be done without expending lots of time/money. But how is it that complicated to have a "yes/no" on breasts (with a breast slider from cup size A to G for example when you click yes) or to make a body shape slider like one of the example games in the video (Saints Row) where muscular/curvy/slim are on a three point triangle? I mean I literally just pointed out a game managed it, so surely it can't be that hard/expensive? In addition with a height slider, you have all 3 parts that make up most body types.
It's not capitalism though, not really. Because there isn't evidence that abandoning the gender binary is a bad cost-benefit trade off. That's based on the same weird sexist assumptions that underlie lots of the other decisions, not based on economic fact/evidence. A good example here is "Boob physics" in an absolute ton of games they add in special animations and physics/parameters so that boobs bounce when female characters move around, this obviously has significant development costs associated with it and I serious doubt it has any bearing on the success of a game - (are there seriously any gamer-bros who wouldn't buy a game because the female character boobs don't bounce enough?). Similarly, when female options were added for player characters in RPGs they didn't just reskin the male models (cheap & easy), they added tons of new animations to enforce a sexiness and often daintiness to the female options. So no, these studios do not base these kinds of decisions on cost-benefit trade-offs.
@@danmeifan Ehhh its slightly more complicated
And generally if you consider the variety of engines and tools saying "X did it so it must be easy" is painfully naive ^^
Generally height sliders are quite hard and bad to implement due to the... variety of effects height can have on animations. Though games with such a slider exist (Dragons Dogma (both) for example) its pretty hard and... generally not worth the tradeoff, especially as most of the time you would need to implement it fromt he gorund up.
@@danmeifan As someone who dabbled in game design and burned out let me explain a few things as well.
The taller your max heigh in character creation, the more vvariations of clothing models you need to be able to fit them onto the character without textures getting stretched. Aka, you need to invest more time in making equipment. The same for "boob- nonboob- middle size boob" the more options, the more variable your textures can be. There's a reason that to my memory there wasn't a boob slider in BG3 because yeah, that would add dev time. This way they can make like 16 models (8 races iirc and 2 genders) of each piece of clothing, plus maybe companion exclusive versions though iirc their body types aren't that different either. That's also usually the reason you don't have a chubby slider in games, it would stretch or warp clothing materials, and this is also usually why you don't get much variety in clothes wearing npcs. And BG3 already suffered from a lot of clipping issues. Clothes and hair would clip all the time, swords would clip through clothes, etc. That wasn't a priority for larian, to game was already big. Is it a shortcoming nevertheless? yes. Did we get trans rep, did we get the option to chose pronouns independant of body type? also yes. In my experience of gaming this is a huge step in the right direction, and I wouldn't ever dream of it being perfect on the first go around. And I do say that myself being trans.
Old games, and still some jrpgs go so far as to lock classes to genders, see "lost ark" because this way when you find a piece of equipment you can only equip it if you are say a mage, and then no one has to worry about making two gendered versions. This is an even extremer example of saving costs. Also saves on voice acting, only one voice actor per class.
Usually taller bodily physique also means longer arm, which means higher reach with weapons. This can cause a desync between hitboxes and animations, or if hitboxes are adjusted to height cause one of two outcomes: The optimal is chosing the smallest character option possible because you are harder to hit, or the tallest option because you can attack from farther away. You never want a player to feel like they missed out on something after character creation. This is also usually why small races such as dwarf permanently run when everyone else jogs so you aren't slower than if you had chosen something else.
Now: I am not saying these are unfixable problems. But when you have a game dev staring at a wall of expenses, this is a part that is scarily easy to cut down on. Because LGBTQ+ is a minority, it's rather easy to factor in the loss of customers into the bottom line and say "Ah, not so bad."
There might even be an incentive to NOT add these options purely because a large demographic of gamer guys hates the "Alphabet mafia" and won't play games with "Pronouns" in them. So a company might even consider LGBTQ+ representation as a bottom line negative, and will usually only do it if for example they already have a large following in that demographic. Ergo, most roleplaying games that allow us to live lifes we never got. personally for example DnD allowed me to "pretend" to be a woman, only for me to realize I really badly want to be one.
There's a reason you will be hard pressed to even see character customaization in call of duty. There's no reason, the guys that play that game want to be guys and will gladly harass anyone else out of their space. Just look at what happens when a girl speaks on coms.
...I may have rambled on for a bit, but this is my personal experience with the space.
video games only exist BECAUSE of capitalism, wtf do you mean 'it sucks'
7:51 The thing that amuses me about including Nier: Automata in this is that Yoko Taro, the game's creator, will just straight up tell you "I gave 2B a big butt cause I think that's hot. I told the art team to make her butt perfect or they'd be fired."
I'm not saying you don't have point, just saying that if you pointed this out to him, he would nod and say "Yes, quite correct."
This just popped in my recommended videos and I can't believe I've never heard of this channel before! This is such a great video! As a woman who plays videogames I've never had a problem identifying with male protagonists, but I've always found it difficult doing the same with female ones and I've never knew why xD
Edit: Grammar. English its not my first language sorry if I misspelled something
So I happen to be someone who models and rigs 3D characters, not in a professional dev studio, but enough that I understand the work flows that game devs go through. My most favourite thing to try and include in my work is implementing customisation options, as much as possible. But it's got to be said, it's far harder than I think most people realise.
Eg, regarding that line, "Games are just computer programs, the developers can make them do whatever they want", whilst a lot of the critiques and commentary here (on character creation) does just come down to oversights or failures in design, it's also really not that simple. Even remarkably basic mono gender character creation features add a significant burden on dev time, let alone bi-gendered, let alone all the nuanced complexities and expectations that genuinely non-binary or trans elements brings into things. Not that any of it is insurmountable, but the more layers of customisation you add, the more they start to exponentially complicate one another and every other game system they interact with.
( I'd say more, but ran out of time.)
Please do say more (if you have the time and the inclination)!
My only experience with games is from an environment art angle, so I'd be very interested to hear how this all works from a character art standpoint.
I think that I understand what you mean. Getting a system set up that can realistically transition from a masculine chest to having large breasts without it looking odd is probably quite a challenge, especially given that breasts are sexualised and the game would need to cover them or risk getting rated for adults only. At which point do you need to cover them, or do you want to force characters without breasts to cover up as well?
I suppose that the only solution I can imagine is to have a model that's composed of modular parts, so that breasts and chests can be selected independently of other characteristics, but that's going to be prone to some tearing or weird proportions around the seams between body bits.
@@casanovafunkenstein5090 As someone with experience making 3d models, I imagine the more difficult part is on the ends of rigging and texturing, rather than censorship or seams.
Games like BG3 already allow full nudity for both male and female characters, so censorship wouldn't be a problem in their primary markets, but you can only push the polygons so far before textures start getting distorted or having models clip through themselves during animations. Many games that have high degrees of customizability run into these problems, and even some with fairly limited customizability. For a pretty simple and widespread example, look at games like World of Warcraft where the armour's texture is flat against the character model and you have a few humanoid races/species to choose from. Textures look good and even on the human-scale races since that's what they're originally textured for, but on larger fantastical models like the Draenei or Tauren the textures often look a bit distorted and stretched out the more they deviate from human-scale proportions.
Having a binary choice for "male" and "female" or "Body type 1" and "Body type 2" would allow the developers to have two sets of textures for the clothing, one for characters with breasts and one for without, and a check to see which one of those textures to apply, which prevents the textures on clothing from looking distorted. If there was just one body type with a "breast size" slider you would have to selectively texture each piece of clothing for either flat chests or large chests then just accept that characters with the "wrong" sized chest would make the textures for that specific piece of clothing look shrunken or stretched, with the severity of the distortion being based on how extreme the difference between the smallest and largest options are.
I have a little game building experience and I cannot even imagine how challenging it would be to make clothing/armor that would fit infinite base models
@@Semisomnambulant The real challenge isn't so much that there's loads of different bases you need to fit things to (that's tedious work but simple), but typically that there's a small selection of bases with an insane amount of variables to account for, that EVERYTHING needs to be designed likewise to account for.
Eg, if you do something that is comparatively simple and common like a breast size slider, then every single asset made for that base now needs to have the same ability to morph. You have to pick a default state to start working from, and the further you go to either end of the scale, the more issues start cropping up.
So lets say you start with an average realistic size. If tying to give it the necessary morphs to make it fully flat, both the clothes and the body itself will be incredibly difficult to look good. You'll have unnecessary excess topology that will mess up your shading, there'll be pinch points around the centre where geometry had to be shrunk too small, and you'll suffer obvious texture distortion. and on top of that, a masculine flat chest and a feminine flat chest aren't really even the same shape.
If you want to allow the other end of the scale, then you run into issues where the poly count is visibly too low and there's not enough geometry to account for the additional folds in the clothes. Certain details will stretch or become too large, and god forbid the outfit has any solid objects like buttons, badges or equipment on it.
And you can only weight paint the model based upon the middle setting. The more complex the clothes the more this becomes a roadblock. The physics for either end of the scale will also need to be dynamically adjusted to match.
This would be why breasts especially are so often locked to "body A" or "body B" even in the more open ended character creators.
If you include changes in body thickness or proportions, then any equipment items stowed or holstered on the character will need a system to adjust their position accordingly. I've run into this myself, where I included support for fairly simple body weight and hip width etc into a model I made, only to end up having to scrap that feature anyway when I realised it conflicted with half the other things I was doing, which would have required spending time re-doing work I'd already completed, adding extra animator layers, hurting performance further, etc.
Any change in height or limb length tends to be one of the most awkward customisation options to add, since it can interfere with basically every animation or interaction the character ever does. Eg, if you have two fixed height models, making them do a handshake animation is simple. Each has their own anim clip, and that's about it. As soon as you add in variables, you now need to do the animation dynamically via inverse kinematics.
And this is stuff I'm covering is just really just basic conventional character creation stuff that we've all seen before, let alone the more ambitious super free form kind of stuff. But it all adds together into such an incredible time sink, and endless potential for bugs.
you won a subscription just for the the "the 2077th game in the cyberpunk series" joke. good stuff
To be fair that’s exactly how Tom Holland looks in real life
4:04 “the game feels like an episode of heartstopper” 💀💀💀
Woah, had this video on my "watch later" for a rainy day and I am so happy I sat down and watched it. This is so insightful and wonderful to hear being talked about. As a non-binary person I have long felt isolated from the gaming community (which I've always tried to be a part of) because I HATE HATE HATE the way that characters look. I don't want to choose between big muscle man or sexy skinny woman. I just want to look like a human being. I just want to look like me. Thank you for this video
23:50 I would like this third option on all questionnaires in the future, including government documents.
Personally speaking, I remember being individually disappointed at BG3, Cyberpunk 2077, and Dragon Age Inquisition due to the inability to actually play a character like myself.
I had to download a mod for a flat chest and curvy body for BG3, I was uncomfortable and putting myself through dysphoria with Cyberpunk's refusal to allow flat chests on feminine bodies and I played a twink male elf in Inquistion.
I think the limitations go both ways basically, not only are tall women not allowed but neither are short men. You cant have boobs on a "A" frame nor can you remove them on the "B" frame. Its so annoying.
May I have the name of the BG3 mod? Asking for myself.
I'd also like to know the mod
if it helps there's two different flat mods for Cyberpunk now: one by user PinkyDude and one by user Hyst, both on the Nexus. i'd link them but i think youtube would eat my comment
@@LazarusBell Not the OP, but I use TMTS (Transmasc Top Surgery), it's on nexus!
VERILY HAS LEGIT STOLEN CONTENT FROM ME AS A VICTIM I AM SO UPSET NO ONE IS LISTENING TO ME!!😭
I absolutely love this video !!
I have kinda given up trying to create a " myself" in many games with character creator. As a nonbinary and fat person, I simply can't have both at once. I can be fat, but usually then I need to be an older man. Or I can be gnc and have no fat on my body at all.
More and more I feel myself connecting to the "mixed blob" like characters, and in games where everyone is like that (Animal Crossing, Webfishing etc) I am more likely to make something that resembles myself. Trying to use a character creator that cant seem to fathom the possibility that a person can have a double chin and still be desirable usually simply gives me body terror blues.
i really love acnh's approach to gender and presentation! im nonbinary too (genderfluid, to be exact) and i love how changing genders does.. basically nothing to how you present. it was the first time ive experienced true gender euphoria since it allowed me to be myself
You bring up the point of "the male gaze" and the such, but even as a straight guy
I'm not satisfied BECAUSE the definition of appealing design is so slim.
"She's for you"
Yeah, I'll put her beside the last dozen+ versions of nearly the same build.
I go out into the real world and I find builds of much wider variety, all just as appealing, and yet I can't find them in gaming.
If it's all about "she's for you", and "it sells", can I get sold a wider variety please?
Of course, feel free to gender flip and even gender remove my issues.
So many of them men in a ton of games are built largely the same. What about stocky? What about short? What about so ungodly tall that cameramen have to scratch their heads to figure out how to fit them in frame?
Laios and Senshi from Dungeon Meshi have tons of fangirls!
Yet in gaming, it's "here is out narrow designs for men, and our narrow designs for women, and our even narrower designs for androgynous. Don't ask about the rest."
"It sells"
Well SELL MORE THAN JUST ONE THING!
I think Verilybitchie kind of messes up the part on the male gaze, by leaving the vast spectrum of different sexual preferences in both womens' and mens' bodies. Yes, many video games do this too, with buff wrestlers for the men and thin women with big breasts and hips, but it's really disappointing when much of a video on the limited nature of the gender binary, spends much of it's time reducing current reactions to media representation into... a limited binary. Men represent power, women represent sex. Because no one on Earth finds muscular wrestler style bodies hot on men, or skinny bodies with big boobs and hips powerful./s I know these are generally overrepresented, but Verilybitchie's wording comes off as seeming incredibly binary, while, in actuality, being incredibly vague. "Men represent power, women, sex." So does it mean some men and women, or all men and women, or most men and women? The statement; men represent power, women represent sex." is a declaration that sounds rigid and factual, but where is this information coming from. How many men or women? In my experience there is a subgenre of fetishes that often mix sex and power together in different ways, so why are they treated as mutually exclusive? How can one tell the difference between these two categories when they're sometimes mixed? A man could be sexy and powerful, as can a woman. So is this a binary of an orgy of different levels, or even two perpendicular things that go up and down independently? Nope, it's a binary, and I wonder where this idea came from, cause it sounds like a restatement of the original view of the woman who made the male gaze idea, Laura Mulvey, back in 1973. Is it supported by experimentation? Have any changes been made to it? That all media representation can be reduced down to a sex based binary of two attributes that seem utterly independent of one another. Wait, I thought human sexuality was complicated?
As a tall non-binary person I just want to be represented in video games
I feel like a good counter example to male gaze games is actually the Metroid series. Despite being an attractive woman, Samus is rarely ever presented as such in the gameplay, instead she's almost always in armor, not even showing her face. She doesn't really speak directly to the audience, in fact she doesn't really speak much at all.
And the Prime games, they put you into first person, taking any separation from you and her. Hell, whenever there's a flash of light on the screen, HER face reflects back onto YOU. The game basically screams to you that YOU ARE SAMUS.
Erasure is still sexist, making it so you just don't know the gender of the main character so the player can assume it is a male character then going "surprise, it's actually a sexy-woman" is just a different type of sexism.
@agilemind6241 I only really agree for the first game. Everyone already knows that Samus is a woman by the time the first game dropped, and they've tried to make her armor more gendered while not sexualizing it. I wouldn't really say it's sexist for her appearance to be obscured.
@@slumburger1145 You can say the same more or less for the other games aswell. The games constantly hiddes her gender behind the armor, to the point you can barely tell you are playing a woman, nothing of it is reminding you you are playing a woman, and the fact that she is heavily sexualized (or at least clearly shown to be a clearly attractive woman) when out of the suits also matters.
But if you beat the game fast enough, she appears in a bikini : (
Counterpoint: people in armor are hot. Have you seen the Warden in For Honor? /J
Thank you so much for putting this into words so eloquently. I actually wrote a paper for a queer anthropology class once about how this plays out in medical transition where nonbinary people are expected to have transition goals that exist within binary ideas of gender expression, and this reminds me of that.
another thing I wanted to mention, I use Heroforge to create character models for dungeons and dragons, and you can add extra arms and have the head of a rat and the lower half of a snake but you can’t be fat. And despite having extensive options for eye shape, angle, and even number, it’s impossible to have an epicanthic fold. There are a lot of presets and sliders for the eyes but no matter how much I mess with them, it’s impossible.
i was literally thinking about this when i started baldur's gate 3. why was every character made to be super beautiful? like there is such a lack of anyone who's even mildly fat or has a face that isn't supermodel-esque. it was such a strange experience that the character creator had so many preconceptions about bodies and faces when it was purported to be so open and free for roleplaying in other areas.
My guess is that, at least with the body, they didn't bother to model every armor and item to look good on any type of body. It's honestly lazy, but it's telling.
I was able to make a fat character who actually looked like me in Dragon's dogma. I can't remember if you can give them they/them pronouns thoo.
I'd assume it's because the lifestyle the main characters lead would require them to be somewhat fit, maybe excluding Gale but you still generally travel a lot
I had the exact same issue I couldn't be at least a little chubby with my tav
@@qisty3017 i think they're also talk about just fit plus sized people. my mum is fit but because she doesn't have a thin body and is naturally chubbier, she isn't able to play a representation of herself in a lot of the games she plays which sucks.
It is seldom i comment on youtube but your video essay really touched me. I wholeheartedly agree with many of your points and as a transgender man balacing a little bit on a line of binary i wish there are more not only better written Trans characters set in a solid worldbuilding but also less gender comforming character creators. Thank you for this video!
YES YES YES YES. so much modern representation is just putting feebly inclusive new features on top of a fundamentally unchanged gender binary. it’s such a peculiar balance and i’m so glad you talked about it
It would be unusual if every woman in the game was 6'4. Exactly one woman being 6'4 is not weird.
I also have been frustrated with character creators as a nonbinary person. Both Tiny Tina's Wonderland and Baldur's Gate 3 I was intiially like, "oh cool, I can play a trans character!" and then realized that I was still extremely limited. In BG3 I ended up playing a half-elf even when I wanted to try another option because it was the only way I could get the flat-chested body with a face that gave me the type of androgyny I wanted. I haven't seen many other people talk about it so it's great to hear you dig deeper into it.
Was in the middle of watching your "How Bisexuality Changed Gaming" video and was surprised to see a whole new video from you in my home feed.
Edit: Finished watching. Such a great double feature with the bisexual vg video.
at first when i clicked the video it was just supposed to be background noise. i just started paying full attention after the 10 first minutes, like transfixed to the screen LOL great video!!! i LOVE how you pointed out everything, including height and how characters are just supposed to be conventionally attractive despite the tool of you having to customise them. it's fake liberty!
Thank you for this video. As a gay cis man I didn’t even consider most of these thoughts. But I will say, it behooves me how men will play as female characters when I always play male. It kinda mirrors straight boys being able to play with naked male wrestlers but I can’t play with Barbies. This vid offered some thoughts on that! Being you/being FOR you. Bravo.
I think something that is interesting about the idea of sexualizing men (by drawing attention to genitalia) is that I'm not really sure you could have the same effect as sexualizing women for men. Now I could absolutely be incorrect as I've not really encountered many gay men but when it comes to women, I'm not sure I've met one that actually *Likes* male genitalia or finds it sexy. This experience could well be because I'm friends with only 2-3 straight women, the rest are all LGBT+. However, whenever I hear about attractive features of a man, it is NEVER about genitalia (outside porn) and more about chest, height etc.
I must admit hearing about the idea that you don't play as female characters like Lara Croft was insane to me, I'm not *helping* Lara, I'm playing as her, so that whole comment from the dev made absolutely no sense to me. I am conscious that my own experiences with people will likely not match the same trend as the entire population but it is just so weird to hear some of the ideas surrounding female characters in games.
Final notes: Seeing now that the new Dragon Age game was trying to educate players, it makes sense that is crashed. The way they went about it lacked any tact and was illogical for that character as well which are both recipes for disaster when you have a legion of people calling woke on anything that even *seems* DEI.
Personally, I care way more about being able to interact and have a relationship with a male character than seeing what's in their pants and I think that's the case for many. I'm a trans guy, but I think my perspective is still valid. Men are very focused on visuals and sex, while women want romance and intimacy.
Someone else brought it up in a different comment but usually when artists want to sexualize men in a masculine way, the pecs are often greatly emphasized to the point of almost seeming like breasts. I'm probably speaking for myself as a bi man but this does seem to be more appealing towards queer men than heterosexual women.
And on the total opposite end there's "femboy" character designs (usually restricted to anime-adjacent media) who are pretty much just sexualized in very similar ways to women, though the genitalia emphasis sometimes applies (I get it, at the same time I personally prefer just emphasizing the actual body type or presentation since transmasc femboys exist).
@InfinitySevens yeah I've seen that sort of thing. I'm Omnisexual myself and admittedly tend to lean more towards attraction to androgynous body types which strangely presents itself as feminine men and more masculine women so I may just be a bit odd anyway. I definitely think the body type as a whole is more important than traditionally sexual features. Though I also don't really get why people are so obsessed with nipples, I think it's silly that we have the topless double standards in the west.
Thanks for the insight though.
I'd moreso say straight women are not socialized to think about male junk in a sexual way. Since even straight porn is more focused on the female body there are not a lot of ways straight women can come across sexualized male junk.
I find a lot of us straight woman turn to gay porn if we want to see some of that and straight woman watching gay male porn is not unusual but definitely not the norm overall.
Tldr.: male junk has not been sexualized a lot in media. Straight woman have therefore not been socialized to sexualize male junk but rather secondary characteristics
completely agree! the problem is that primarily straight male developers don't know that, they just assume that everyone else feels sexual attraction the same way they do
god Fallen London was SO ahead of its time!! glad to see it get some love 🥰 it was actually my very first introduction a teenager to the very idea of non-binarism and I still remember the surprised delight I felt over it!
I also remember playing Pyre and using they/them pronouns for myself for the very first time. I had NO idea being referred to like this, even when it wasn't Me me but just an avatar, would affect me this deeply. So even these now-seeming small changes to videogames like pronouns and the ability to choose whatever hair/facial hair you want still feel pretty significant to me!! But you're so right that the issue is baked within the very DNA of videogames (and mainstream culture in general.) I can only wish amd hope things will be even better in ten years 🤞
Wanting to play Cyberpunk as a transman was awful. Like.. I don't have a deep voice and huge muscle man body.. I would like to be smol and still respected as a man thank you. I will say though, trying to have a flat chest with jiggle physics is kind of hilarious to me.
Which is why mod support should be mandatory for most triple A games.
We cant really rely on others to give us what we want, so they should enable us to modify the game into what we want, and with AI tools, you can relatively easily import your voice into the game, change the body in any way you want.
And for some games even change the animations into something more to your liking or fit to the character who's height scale has offset the animations too much.
You can do most of this in games like Cyberpunk and Skyrim especially
The uncomfortable truth is that most people like the sexy gender binary. Developers should make character creation more inclusive, but they may not be aware of the demand for options outside the binary or feel incentivised to put in the work to satisfy a small minority of gamers.
I believe the reason a lot of games don't let you customize height is due to animations. Animations are usually fairly static and if change the height of a character, animations no longer line up with the world. IE: If you make your character shorter and they reach for something on top of a box, their hand will clip through the box rather than line up with the object on top of it. For this reason, many games will have two sets of animations, one for a female (Short) character and one for a male (Tall) character... Or some of them just make both male and female the same height. The solution to this is further implementation of procedural animations (Or animations that can adapt to the world in real time). It takes more work though, and I think that's the reason many developers don't bother with it.
There's also the issue of voice acting and pronouns. Most games will have two sets of certain voice dialogs that include gendered pronouns. There's of course no reason aside from "It's more work/money" as to why they can't just include a third set of voice dialogs with they/them pronouns.