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 don’t understand this bullshit, if developers/publishers drop their games, just stop investing time into their games or buying from them. How could you force private companies to invest into something which gives zero return?
Why is that ridiculous? Seems like a totally fine solution to me. Probably not possible in most cases due to licencing issues, but if not this is the best thing a developer could do. And making games and/or their servers open source isn’t even the only option. In most cases it will suffice to just provide server binaries and patch the game to make it work with self-hosted servers, or just patch it to make it playable offline. It’s that simple. Developing games with that in mind from the beginning makes this even easier.
never build in forced server components to begin with
patch out the need for the server as part of the last update before support ends
give buyers access to run their own servers with an officially-provided executable and set the client to connect to that executable
open source the whole thing
And maybe others. It’s about making sure that a product you have paid for actually works as it was sold to you. It’s honestly a really basic consumer protection concept. You sell me a television and it stops working within a reasonable lifetime due to your own failure, and you’re obligated to repair or replace it. The same should be true of software.
A couple titles that deserve mention and I don’t see in any other lists:
Children of Mora - Narrative driven action RPG with some light Roguelite-ish elements. Amazing world building and story telling, good character choice/building and gameplay.
Cassette Beasts - Pokemon, if it were good. Much more mature story, tons of quality of life systems that makes building things fun, a weakness system that matters a lot more than “number big” and the entire game is double battles. I’ve played the game start-to-finish in couch co-op and it was incredible. They’ve recently added online multiplayer, but I cannot say with 100% certainty that the online allows you to engage with the story together. Couch co-op has one player play as the companion character in an otherwise unchanged experience whereas online has one player character hop into another player characters world.
Weird enough, the Monster Hunter franchise - I’m not sure how this isn’t anywhere else in this thread. Use large weapon to hunt large monster. Build bigger weapon to hunt bigger monster. World and Rise are both on sale on Steam right now. World is dumb to move through the story together though, despite the fact that most fans who aren’t me are likely to call it the better game.
Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis is one of the best tactical rpgs I’ve ever played. I was shocked how short it was when I finished only to find I had been playing for over 40 hours.
Single-handedly? Nah. It pulled a lot of existing ideas together though, and it’s certainly responsible for the popularity. Another Minecraft influence is early-access.
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