As a cis male, fwiw, I personally wouldn’t even think about it if the male body was option B or 2 or whatever, but what do you think about a feminine to masculine slider? I think Elden ring did that and it seems pretty clever. After that I think there were other sliders for options such as weight or fitness or whatever.
So max femme makes you look overly and cartoonishly feminine? I’m sorry I’m not understanding the problem. I’d imagine any slider pushed to one extreme end would give you an extreme result.
That’s morph targets and you just increased the budget for the character model and every single set of clothing and armour by a whole magnitude. Might even influence animations, though I guess with Elden Ring being the game that it is those are the same for everyone.
As a woman, I look at “Body Type A or Body Type B” and think “Well, I’m a woman, not a Body Type B, and isn’t it kinda misogynistic that the secondary option is the female one? Like A+ for Men, B- for Women?”
This really pissed me off, I have to say. Why are you calling the “secondary” option “the female one”? To me that seems a bit presumptuous.
If I have body type B with he/him pronouns, are you saying something about my body? Is it too “feminine” for you?
Honestly, you seem to be looking for something to complain about. The developers have taken an extra step to try to be accommodating and inclusive and your complaining about the order the choices are listed in… Smh
yikes, OP wasn’t calling this secondary any more than Simone de Beauvoir was when she published The Second Sex… it’s an actual problem that deserves recognition, and shitting on someone for recognizing it? you’re the one reinforcing the problem now!!
OP was merely gesturing at another instance of patriarchal culture treating the feminine as secondary by putting it second. not a controversial revelation tbh quite trite really
I’m not saying that women are inferior or that anyone with tits is a woman… I’m saying that by labeling the feminine option as the “B-Grade” option instead of just the “Feminine” option there is an uncomfortably misogynistic implication that needs addressing.
As you can see from OP’s response to you, my primary issue is that OP is still calling the option the “female” or “feminine” one. The developers specifically removed those labels to be inclusive and OP is adding them back. The complaint about the order was the secondary issue.
Oh come on, now you’re just feigning ignorance. The body types correspond to both modes of human sexual dimorphic presentations. Just because you take away the names doesn’t mean the dimorphic traits are absent. It IS a sexually dimorphic character creation system. So within that, let’s look at who gets to be the default and who gets to be the “second sex” (highly recommend reading de Beauvoir, again). OP is taking issue with not just the veiled binary but also the hierarchy within it.
Let me put it this way. Imagine if the body types were no longer sexually dimorphic but had varied skin tones. And despite the fact that we know skin tones present in a variety of ways, they only offered light peach skin tones and dark skin tones. And they made the secondary one the darker skin tone. Maybe you or I would have a problem with it, maybe we wouldn’t. But could you understand why someone might take issue with that? It’s a fair objection to make, whether we can conceive of a solution or not.
And hey I think OP’s solution would apply pretty well here: let us create characters with a variety of presentations! Or maybe just take away the “light” and “dark” options? A lot of people in this thread responded with great rationale from game dev standpoints, and that stuff is valid. I can see why devs do things the way they do. But I can also see why OP doesn’t like it.
I remember when Mega Man X DIVE ended, and then turned around and released an Offline version with all the non-PVP content and none of the microtransactions. That was beautiful. Wish I could play a version of Marvel Heroes that was like that.
To me, the obvious answer is to do away with the concept of “gender” altogether. It’s a societal construct that doesn’t really need to exist in video game character creation, anyway.
Everybody is born one of two biological sexes: male or female. There. Those are your choices. Call it “apparent sex” and include a pronoun option to allow for players who want to roleplay gender nonconforming characters.
But like, not everybody is born one of two biological sexes, so if we’re doing away with societal constructs we may as well get rid of this nebulous concept of a rigid biological sex binary.
Technically there is an extremely small amount of people born as both sexes (intersex), but they tend to have appearances that favor one sex over the other, so from a game development perspective, they’re covered by having two sex options.
I think you’ll find a good many intersex folk would have something to say about being “covered” by being entirely excluded by your arbitrary choice of categorisation.
You said in your comment “they tend to have appearances” which in itsself alludes to the true fact that there’s some who won’t be “covered”. I was more upset by your dismissal of their experiences than I was by your game design suggestion.
How so? Biological sex is a quantifiable fact. Every sexually reproducing species on the planet has two sexes, easily identified by gamete size - males have small gametes and females have large gametes.
I don’t wanna start a flame war, but the science on this is sound. Sure, in science, nothing is absolute, but there’s never been any evidence of more than two sexes.
Man, I thought I’d found my people in this community, but my perfectly civil comment discussing scientific definitions of ‘sex’ was removed. That shows that this is likely just another echo chamber that can’t abide civil conversation around scientific facts when said facts make people feel icky.
The worst part is I’m on your side. I’m all in on inclusivity and representation. I’m trans. I’m bisexual. I’m just open-minded, seemingly unlike whichever mod removed my comment.
You, apotheotic, seem civil enough. I was looking forward to discussing biological sex with you, maybe expanding my understanding in the process, but it’s not worth trying to have a conversation if I have to worry about my responses being unceremoniously removed. For what it’s worth, your reply has inspired me to do some more reading on the subject.
Reddit mod practices seem to have bled into every corner of Lemmy. Community: blocked. Good riddance.
I play a lot of couch coop with my kid but adults would enjoy all these too. Most can be found under $20 on Steam and a lot are fairly lightweight games but have good coop mechanics and can be a lot of fun to sit down for an hour or two with.
Overcooked 1 + 2 (but 2 really is better) you will love or hate it depending on your personalities, nothing in between. We loved it
Ship of Fools
Enter the Gungeon
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime
Moving Out
On Switch
Cadence of Hyrule
Don’t starve together (only split screen on console not PC… Wtf)
I agree with what others said that more customization is generally good, but not all games really need that level of customization. For something like animal crossing, I think the body type thing is fine, since the designs are more neutral unlike what you’re describing. I think what could help is a third option that’s a more neutral body type. Or maybe if it’s not relevant, just don’t have a body type option.
I also don’t know much about runescape, but I assume this was an update that just changed the names from genders to body types, so adding other options might have increased the scope of the update. I think at least uncoupling that from gender is at least an improvement over before. Plus, I kinda disagree that people would only pick the corresponding pronouns. Plenty of people have a gender expression that doesn’t necessarily match their gender identity.
Oh definitely, heck, in Animal Crossing they might as well just ask for your pronouns and nothing else… In fact doesn’t New Horizons basically do that? But I’m referring more to the more common scenario of “Beefy Guy” and “Curvy Cutie”, which we see in World of Warcraft, you can pick whatever pronouns you want but it’s going to go on either on testosterone fueled bearded Dwarf you’ve ever seen or the hourglass with pointy ears we call a Night Elf…
When you only get two body type options and neither have any level of androgyny, what does pretending they aren’t gendered when they clearly are accomplish? That’s the part I have an issue with, it’s dishonesty being masqueraded as progress. Either have androgynous character options or don’t pretend “Body Type A/B” is a solution to a problem.
I feel The Sims 4 gets this right by letting you pick between male, female, or a custom gender (where you can decide if the sims pees standing up or sitting down, whatever pronouns you want them to have, whether the sim gets others pregnant, becomes pregnant, both, or neither), and ALL THREE of them have a healthy amount of customization options to go for whatever look you want.
Yeah I agree with you there. If you’re gonna just give two or three body type options and no other customization, there should be an androgenous option or at least they should all be generally androgenous. I think the issue with runescape probably stems from how the game was before.
I agree that your setup would be perfect, but the reality of the situation is that it depends on the engine and how much time the programmers/artists/whatever have.
Like if the engine doesn’t support dynamically resizing equipment, then you have to make every single piece of equipment over again for every body shape. That is a potentially massive amount of work, even if there is tooling that will automate most of it and only require retouching. There’s only so much time in the day, and every hour that people are working on this is an hour that they aren’t working on building more levels or adding more systems, etc.
Is it better to have “Body Shape A/B” or “Male Body / Female Body”? Because those are the options that are the same amount of work.
It would be better to have a ton of body options. It would be even better to have sliders and have everything adjust itself to fit whatever shape you make. But both of those options take time to work on, and time is money.
I don’t think it’s fair to call (for a specific choice) BG3’s developers lazy because they only have 2 (or 4 for some races) body sizes. They are just optimizing their time investment.
Yeah, but In Baldur’s Gate 3 I can make a feminine looking character with tits and a big throbbing horse dick, a masculine character with a vagina, or an adrogynous character with whatever the hell I want… So having the pronouns separate from the build actually makes sense. The concept of binary gender identity is subverted enough for pronoun selection to serve a practical purpose.
In something like Old School Runescape or the Demon’s Souls remaster? Not so much.
If I’m ONLY going to have two body type choices, Buff Dude or Curvy Chick, why this unnatural “Body Type A/Body Type B” language instead of saying “Masculine/Feminine” ? It just makes me feel like I’m in some Orwellian New Speak environment that just simply doesn’t exist in day to day life. And again, Non-Binary individuals aren’t getting any favors here because they’re STILL forced into a dichotomy of Masculine or Feminine, it’s just now that “Those buzzword unfriendly M and F-Words” aren’t present. The best a non-binary individual can really get in that situation is do a heads/tails coin toss and pick They/Them pronouns.
No one’s needs are really being met here, we’re just forcing awkward corporate jargon to pretend the game is more inclusive than it really is.
Fun fact, BG3 only has a max of 4 body types per race, and the lower genitalia each have their own models to fit each body type, and that’s just for the “normal” sized races. The short races also have their body types, and so does the Dragonborn. Each armour and clothing piece has to have one unique model and rig to fit each of those body types; that’s a lot of modeling and rigging work.
Not to mention the massive difference in age between BG3 and OSRS/RS3. RuneScape’s running on an engine that was never built with more than 2 body types in mind. Changing that is probably a much more monumental task than OP realizes, the armor models being just one (big) roadblock.
I’m no Jagex defender but I feel like the fact that they added even this small change to a 23 year old game’s character creator shouldn’t be labeled lazy. All that will do is discourage developers from trying.
Be a vampire lord with a keep, thralls, blood banks, cast magic, wild shape to a wolf, decorate a castle, posess a horse, make your Castlevania/vampire fantasy come true!
Yep that’s perfect. They get to be the “farm hand” and get their own little cottge and everything! You can buy more cottages at the carpenter if you are more than two people.
Honestly only having two body types is the lazy part, no matter what the two types are. The best solution would be a variety of heights, weights, shoulder, waist, and hip sliders with boobs and butts and whatever else as add ons to the body shape. That should cover everyone as long as there is plenty of range on each option.
Unless everyone is in armor, in which case two or three gender neuteal body types are fine because boobs and butts won’t be noticeable through armor anyway. Height is pretty much all that is different if everyone in the armor is in decent shape and the armor is made to fit a range of people.
While I agree having more options is always a better thing, I really can’t see body type A and B with pronouns choosing anything other than more inclusive, a good thing, and not something that deserves getting up in arms about.
I don’t really see how it could be seen as not more inclusive. Sure it’s not more inclusive than having full blown sliders that let you change every bit of a character’s body, but it’s adding more pronouns and not forcing those pronouns on a certain body type. If we look at number of options, it is more than the previous “male and female” options. Thus including a broader set of people
My issue is how half-assed the measure is. What’s the point of letting me pick between “He/Him” and “She/Her”, if it’s going on a character that looks like a stereotypical brodude or a model in a fashion magazine? Is it really doing anyone any favors?
Would anyone in good faith, with only two options “Stereotypical Brodude or Fashion Magazine Cover Girl”, is going to play the former with she/her or the latter with he/him? If there was more variety or perhaps something like Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur’s Gate 3 where you can have a masculine build with feminine features or vice versa, I could see the point… but for most games that are only going to give you the most common denominator as your only two options?
It just feels like throwing a coat of paint to make it look like the studio cares about making their product more accessible, when really it’s just trying to check a box to appease HR.
It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s so small that it’s insulting to everyone involved.
Would anyone in good faith, with only two options “Stereotypical Brodude or Fashion Magazine Cover Girl”, is going to play the former with she/her or the latter with he/him?
I think so. Why not? There are as many valid genders and identities as there are people in the world. Who am I to judge what people want to be referred as? Also even if there wasn’t people like that, I can almost guarantee there are people who would want to put a “they/them” to those body types, which seems to be the main point of this body type trend.
I don’t see it as a bad faith thing to be like “hey, we should include the ability for NB people to have their preferred pronouns”
Again, I agree that having more options would be better, but why does perfect have to be the enemy of good?
Edit: I also want to say that NB does not equal androgenous. Sure many NB people may desire or have an androgenous look. But I also know people who like to look and be feminine but are still NB, and the other way around
The reason why perfect is an enemy of good in this particular circumstance because the message it gives off now is “We care about buzzwords”, with just a little more effort, it could be “We care about inclusion.”
As it stands now, I’m just left rolling my eyes because game studios see me as not a woman, but as “Body Type B”, but if we had some more androgynous options alongside itl, it’d come across more… “Oh I CAN have a feminine build if I WANT to.”
I guess I just really don’t see it that way. Man and woman and “she/her” and “he/him” are so much more than the way a body looks. Like someone could be the most traditionally culturally masculine looking person and go by she/her. That’s valid, that’s fine.
I don’t see it as the studio not seeing you as a woman. I am somewhat confused by that statement. Like you get the ability to choose she /her with a couple body options. The she / her is the woman here no? They recognize it as a thing. You can look however. I mean fuck I certainly don’t have a body type B, but I’m still a woman
Thing is I definitely don’t look like the “Type B”, but my other option is “Type A”, which is something so blatantly masculine in every way that it would be insulting for me to represented as such, and I guarantee any other trans woman would feel that same in that scenario.
As another trans woman, I just have to say you do not speak for all trans women. I have met sooooo many trans women whose idea of transness are much different to my own. It’s so broad and expansive there are no absolutes here
@HawlSera@chloyster I mean, I absolutely know people who use she/her but present very masc, and vise-versa. They may be relatively uncommon, but so are trans people in general and we're still worth representing. Not to mention non-binary people who have relatively binary gender presentation. Your experience is absolutely not universal.
I am a tomboy, I present very masc, and it does annoy me when as a consequence people mistake me for a guy despite the fact that I obviously have breasts… But that is what it is…
But what I’m getting at is most Body Type A options don’t allow me to play a masc-presenting woman, but a masc-presenting man as in “Someone who looks like Leonidas on Steroids”. If Body Type A regularly allowed you to play as a masc-presenting woman I’d see your point.
The option to play someone like Zarya rarely if ever exists, whereas the option to play as someone who looks like Kratos is overwhelmingly what Body A refers to.
@HawlSera I do recognize that tomboys, buff women, etc are worth representing, (and we should push for their inclusion) but that's not what I'm talking about - I mean people who look like "men" but use pronouns other than he/him.
In agile development. You do a little, release. Otherwise it is too big and may never be done. The fact they committed resources to improve this is a positive. The hope is they build on it and add more options.
However, if they get trashed for trying, they and many other companies may not try. Why spend money to get a bad reputation when the spending nothing creates less I’ll will to the company. That is ultimately the decision Product Owners and Designers will weigh up.
I think for progress, the best approach is maybe “positive first step but more options are needed for non-bonary for this to really make players feel comfortable”.
From a technical perspective, separating pronoun hard coding from the models gives more scope to give more options in the future, however, as someone mentioned, there is a lot of art work needed on assets and animations so the new shapes function the same in all cases.
To be clear, your stance is it’s such a small step in the right direction, you’d prefer no step at all? Keep it cis-only or invest time/money in extra character models?
I’m not saying keep it cis-only, I apologize if that’s implied, pronoun selection is fine and I don’t have a problem with that. My issue is if we’re not going to offer more options than simply two body types, both based on super idealized and gender stereotyped versions of the male and female form… Can we have a less awkward thing to call it than “Body Type A/Body Type B”?
Would anyone in good faith, with only two options “Stereotypical Brodude or Fashion Magazine Cover Girl”, is going to play the former with she/her or the latter with he/him?
Not sure what you mean by “good faith” here, but I can assure you there are some he/him dudebros that play female characters bc if you’re gonna be staring at someone in 3rd person the entire game it might as well be someone attractive to you.
Also it’s perhaps a minority of gamers, but people with fewer identity issues don’t need to see themselves as a self insert for their character, so why not play someone totally different from you?
I basically mean, who intentionally picks an overly masculine character unambigiously male character with female pronouns? Because that’s really only a thing in transphobic far right political cartoons.
I could see people picking the “female” character with he/him pronouns if they wanted to play a femboy and there wasn’t really an option to make the male character look “pretty”, but the “male” character with she/her, I dunno about that one chief.
WhatbI don’t get is why they are using body type A/1 and B/2. One is clearly feminine and the other masculine, regardless of the gender of the character, why not use those words? They are describing the physical form of the body, it says nothing about gender.
Unless you’ve installed some very particular mods, the body types in most video games do not contain genitals, and therefore are not definitively male nor female.
I have boobs and a butt. My body looks like “Body B” from these games. It is not a female body. It does not have a vagina. I have a surgery planned, and that surgery will not result in a vagina. What I’m hearing right now is that you think my body is female. And that makes me feel uncomfortable because I do not want a female body. A feminine body, I am happy with, but not female. I choose “Body B” in these games because it looks like my body, which I am happy with. I do not choose it because it’s “female”. I feel a little bit of pain every time I have to click on female.
…they literally said “feminine” and “masculine”, not “male” or “female”. Specifically using language you say you’re okay with, but still prompting this response. What exactly is your problem with what they said?
No, but we still see models that largely either have bulges or camel toes.
Seeing a buff, hairy, bulge-having individual labeled “she/her” is typically only done in transphobic alt-right political cartoons and it feels a little tone deaf that game companies actually expect transpeople to unironically go with that…
What I’m hearing right now is that you think my preference to have a character that looks like me in video games isn’t worth pursuing because of camel toes, and because a troll might conceivably use the same features that help me, to make a character you don’t like. I already told you the nonbinary perspective on this issue. I’d just like to take a moment before I offer counterarguments to ask… what on earth is your intention with offering these arguments?
Now, as to camel toes: I cannot remember ever seeing a visible camel toe on a character in a video game. Maybe this is just because I don’t make a habit of staring at the crotches of women and femmes in games. But if I did notice a camel toe in a video game that was not about sex, my first thought would be “what the fuck game developers” and I would immediately be on the look out for misogyny in other aspects of the game. Maybe I’m completely off base here and I’ve actually been playing characters with camel toes this entire time and not realised it because I’m not a creep. But in that case, revealing this information to me would increase the gender dysphoria I feel in these games. Why do you want to do that?
And as for trolls? I saw someone in this thread respond to you say they like bearded ladies. You might have read that as a joke, but it wasn’t. Popular streamer JoCat is also a fan of bearded ladies, and I know this because he was cancelled by a bunch of TERFs for playing one in Baldur’s Gate while singing a controversial song. He decided to quit making his YouTube videos because of the harassment. JoCat is not a transphobe. He’s used his platform to raise money for LGBTQ charities in the past, and he was previously embedded quite firmly in the queer D&D youtubers community, friends with a lot of queer people who had nothing but positive things to say about him. I think that you’re confusing your trauma around transphobic representations with other genuine queer people who just wanna live as themselves, and you’re circling back around to transphobia as a result.
While I don’t personally agree with OP, I still believe that they are discussing in good faith. I see nothing here that says they think NB people are “alt right trolls”. Our rule here is to be(e) nice. Please don’t resort to unfounded personal attacks
Actually if you read what I said, I’d say part of my problem is that having two character models one that is “Unambiguously Male” and one that is “Unambiguously Female” while claiming “Oh you can just choose your pronouns, and we didn’t actually say Male or Female! So it’s fine” is a lazy solution that does more to annoy than to assist.
And that if they were actually serious about being more respectful to the wider gender spectrum that exists in real life, they’d have more than just those two options. But the concern dev studios have is not in helping gender non-conforming individuals be more immersed in games, it’s to say “I’m with the current trendy thing, upvotes to the left.”
We need to be critical of what’s called “Rainbow Capitalism/Pink Capitalism” or we’ll be stuck without any real meaningful change.
^ This, I much prefer this… I mean something about “Body Type A/Body Type B” just feels too “corpo” for my tastes… but Saints Row sliders not so much.
Heck Pokemon even figured this out by just showing you pictures of characters and saying “Hey, which one of these do you wanna play as”, didn’t even have to use words.
What if you found a portal to a parallel universe? What if you could slide into a thousand different worlds? Where it’s the same year, and you’re the same person… but everything else is different? And what if you can’t find your way home?
bin.pol.social
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