Discourse: Playersexual romance options vs set sexuality
Discourse: Playersexual romance options vs set sexuality
This discourse was going around twitter today apparently and im curious takes from here.
Which is it for you?
For me i prefer playersexuality. I want to be able to romance any romance option regardless of my charachters gender. I dont want to be stuck with only Arcade Gannon if i want to do m/m
I agree that sexuality can be important to a charachter. But if you wanna do that, seems like the charachter can just not be a romance option.
That said. In RPGs devs can do what they want. You want a charachter to be monosexual and a romance option, have at it. (Unless theyre all straight, then fuck you).
I do kinda hate what The Sims did by adding monosexuality. Felt like such a virtue signal that made the game less fun. All Sims being pansexual was always more fun for me. Especially since i usually play that game as a pansexual slut. Unless i decide my player Sim is mono, but thats on the player's end.
Monosexual townies in the Sims should at least be optional (is it? Idk havent played Sims 4 since this update).
I think it's honestly better to view it through the lens of it being a game design tool moreso than a philosophical debate. If you want to emphasize player choice and freedom, playersexual. If you want to emphasize characterization and worldbuilding, set sexuality.
If you're going to incorporate dating sim components into your game, it's generally better to lean towards playersexual. Otherwise, you run into a sort of zugzwang where you can
a) lock romance options to het (e.g. Persona) and alienate queer people, even worse when you don't have a gender option which also alienates 50% of said hets, or
b) have set sexuality and allow some queer relationships with certain characters (e.g. Fire Emblem: Three Houses) but have people annoyed about the arbitrariness of it, especially when there are no characters that cannot be romanced in a heterosexual way but limited queer options.I think there's space for set sexuality, especially in linear, narrative-driven RPGs (e.g. Final Fantasy, Undertale, Zelda). Set sexuality really works when you want to emphasize relationships between characters that the protagonist/player character is not party to (e.g.
) Furthermore, set sexuality, when there is a romance mechanic, best works when you establish a boundary between player and character.Ultimately, it's a choice of what you want to grant to the player, as well as the distance between the player and the protagonist. If you want to let the player choose between characters to romance in the game, and that's an aspect that is a design component within the game, you're usually better off sticking to playersexual, unless you want to take a hyperrealistic angle to it. If you don't want to incorporate that aspect into your game, there's genuinely no need, stick to set sexuality. If you want to establish the protagonist as a character that exists outside of the player embodying them, lean towards set sexuality.
I honestly am just tired of romance being attached as a weird afterthought to certain RPGs. It's sterile when it's not handled with a modicum of care, and it definitely cements the whole unease-inducing 'escapist power fantasy' vibe you get in RPGs that take this approach alongside emphasizing openness. If you're gonna let me date, let me date. If not, why bother?
Now I feel weird because the discussions here are great, in depth, and nuanced, but the way I feel about this is kinda boring and uncomplicated? Am I missing something?
If I'm playing a customized character that I made, I prefer characters to be playersexual, allowing custom relationships to match my custom character.
If I'm playing as a written character and experiencing a set story, it is better for all characters to be written well, and have realistic sexualities, as part of the story presented.
As far as representation goes, I think both can have problems, but neither are inextricably problematic.
basically i want good queer characters whose queerness isn't ignorable and is a notable facet of their lives. i think playersexual characters are often a copout, where they write a heterosexual character and then let them date the mc, but if they're textually bi or pan or ace or something than it's fine by me. just make sure they aren't consistently het except for the mc i hate that shit
like i see people talking fire emblem. dorothea is into women! it's very simple to make the playersexual thing work, just have good writing
I like both for different reasons. If it's important to a character's design and story or if the devs want to represent a specific identity, fixed is obviously the way. If it's not, then playersexual is fine I guess. In the case of a playersexual character though, people should feel free to project their identities—after all, they're working with what is pretty much an open canvas. A character might be playersexual in the broad sense, but that doesn't mean I can't interpret them as a lesbian, for example.
I also think that if what you're aiming for is realism, NPC identities should reflect that in various ways. Getting rejected by Panam (straight) in Cyberpunk 2077 only to recover and go on to date Judy (lesbian) added a lot of depth to my Vi.
In a perfect world where more game writers weren't annoying dipshits who see writing gay or even bi characters as beneath them, romance options with defined sexualities would be no issue.
In this world I have been burned one too many times playing a game with romance options where the heterosexual romance options are with the characters who are plot relevant and have the most content and the gay and bi options are the side characters who have less content, sometimes explicitly because they're the ones who can get killed off for fun (THIS IS ABOUT YOU BIOWARE I AM SPECIFICALLY TALKING ABOUT YOU, YOU PIECE OF SHIT HACK FRAUDS FUCK YOU)
yeah no, just give me playersexual characters every time, even in ths cases where the devs make it clear they were written with straight relationships as the implied default (Stardew Valley....)
Either can be good, I did like how in DA:I you can flirt with Cassandra as a woman and she awkwardly takes you aside after a while to tell you that she is in fact straight (and crushed my heart forever
) the same with Dorian, though he's the aggressive flirt in that case.Then in Mass Effect it just doesnt really even make sense, honestly. Like you're completely different species, in some cases you cant even kiss properly for fear of allergic reactions and you're still stuck on some arbitrary gender binary romances? Live a little, goddamn.
I think this problem exists primarily in the shadow of games historically being written mostly by and for straight men. Games that break this trend, like Baldur's Gate 3, are right now remarkable for it, but once this is the norm the problems of both choices mostly disappear.
But while we are stuck in the present with everyone being bi, I wouldn't mind the characters actually saying "I am bisexual" once in a while.
Hot Take maybe; Player-sexuality as the norm is probably inevitable as more of these games tend towards adding mixed and diverse gender options. No developer wants to be the one deciding what combinations of body types, genders, pronouns, voices etc etc falls under 'available to lesbian romance option' or 'available to straight male flirting'.
That said, my preference is still set sexuality. Especially the more grounded a setting. Judy from Cyberpunk (recency bias am I right) for example likely wouldn't feel as real a character to me without the history of messy lesbian situation-ships thing she has going on.
In games where PC has a well defined personality and is distinct from the player it makes sense to have their sexuality fixed as part of the story, but in open ended RPGs that try to give the player as much choice as possible and blur the distinction between the player and the character, a set sexuality just comes across as lazy writing. I can set myself up as a fire-breathing lizard person with the highest cheekbones in history but the male characters are totally claws-off? That's dumb.
It depends on the goal of the game and the narrative it is trying to portray. It the character in the game is supposed to be a representation of the player in the game world, then it's only fair for the player to decide their own sexuality. If the character is a set character in the game with their own narrative/backstory, they should have their own sexuality and the player should not be able to change it. This requires competent writing though, which is rare in video games.
As for the NPCs which the player can romance, again that depends on how in depth and good the writing is. If the writing and lore is shallow, just let the NPCs be bisexual or pansexual and let the player romance who they want. If there is in depth narrative, good writing and worldbuilding with regards to NPCs, they should have a set sexuality that the player must respect.
I remember making a thread about this a year ago.
Honestly, even with the common pitfalls, I would still take specific sexualities over playersexual characters. Playersexual absolutely never feels authentic at all, it feels hollow and like I am just headcanoning the relationship. For me to feel like queer representation is done right, I honestly want it to reflect what actual lived experiences of queer people are, and that does include the fact that not everyone that I could be romantically attracted to will ever be able to reciprocate that feeling. It feels that much better when you actually do find someone who can. Why have I found VNs where gay people clearly outnumber the straights at least two-to-one (and where somehow homophobia still exists despite that???), that somehow still represent that experience better than the average video game? I can understand people wanting escapism and do somewhat enjoy having the extra selection from playersexual setups (I would be devastated if Halsin was strictly straight), but like, sometimes I just want an experience that is more relatable and cathartic. I'm also quite certain that most cishet game writers would probably assume playersexual is the default preference or the safer option so I feel comfortable pushing for characters having defined sexualities in hopes of getting a few games that do it well.
I haven't played a lot of really newer games so maybe things have changed, but in my experience playersexual romance options end up feeling like a straight person with a straight romance that's been genericized so any gender can be subbed in. Maybe the ideal would be having the dialogue and the way things play out depend on the player's gender? Although at that point I guess that crosses over into making all romance options explicitly bi/pan.
I personally think it's essential to have sexuality as a hard feature because it's a necessary component of writing properly developed characters.
I'm sorry but if everyone is a bisexual you are limiting yourself to the type of characters that you can write, because there are certain characters that just will not be bisexual. Or if you did make the white conservative cis male orthodox christian bisexual you are damn well going to have to write a lot of complexity into that character to square the circle. You are including many conflicting ideologies in that character and explaining them or representing the character's own torment with their conflicting sexuality vs ideology becomes a necessary part of the writing.
Features of characters force you into writing directions because a character having x but also y means either a, b or c but definitely not d. If you understand what I mean.
Your world and writing depth takes a necessary hit if you do this. What you end up with is a game that is unashamedly lgbt, I'm not complaining about that because I do love me some games that are just blatantly full of gay, but it's not all I want all the time.
On top of all the very good points everyone else made in the thread, i want to throw my additional 2 cents in:
One of the reasons that playersexuality is so common is that straight players can pick their preference and then never see any of those icky queer people in their game at all (because in most games the amount of romance-able men is usually 1 and they won't hit on you if you don't go looking for it), whereas everyone else gets to "press the gay button to enable gay content".
The idea that making everyone bi is how BG3 cracked the code is misleading, BG3 allowed you to romance a crapload of men, and a lot of them hit on you incessantly, which is what gamers (that otherwise love playersexual games) hated. That was not playersexuality being good, that was just Larian giving you choice. In most playersexual games you still get stuck with the one sad gay male option and the five lesbian options that are just repurposed straight romances. Because 1) oh, gay men, ew, and 2) wow, lesbians, awooga. So, if what you care about is gay men, then in practice either option kinda sucks, and in principle playersexuality as done by non-cowards is mostly ok, i guess, because nobody can bring themselves to write more than the one gay man.
If we’re going to be dunking on playersexual, I do think we have to come to terms with the fact that character creation in general is kind of a trade off for writing quality, and that having a more generic experience is kind of the price you pay for a truly customizable character
I’m tempted to say it’s kind of a toss up of which is better when the character is customizable. Set sexuality is probably better there when it can be done without too much effort, but playersexual just makes sense and can probably be done well. When the character is preset, of course it should be a set sexuality, because the player character itself is already set. There’s no reason not to plan for it at that point.
I don't like playersexuality, because I prefer my gay and bi characters to actually have experience with (and reference their experiences with) homophobia, which is something that every gay and bi person ive ever met has had in common. A love story between gay characters that has absolutely nothing to do with homophobia is just a straight love story with one of the characters' genders swapped
Set sexuality is my initial preference. Games that handle this topic like Skyrim and Baldur’s Gate 3 don’t really have a lot to say about specific sexualities queer experiences, because they don’t want to alienate/make the player feel left out. One of the tweets mentions dragon age which is where I felt seen and heard for the first time. Another comment mentions it but in a game with well defined characters who have queer identities I can understand and want there to be restrictions. To say otherwise would be inauthentic to the story you’re trying to tell.
Whatever we decide here you are all clearly gamers and you should be ashamed
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This is one of the few times when the gamers are right and we should just make it playersexual. I play games to do an escapism. I don't want to have every gay romance be an in-depth exploration of trauma and oppression in a hetero-dominant world. I want to go on gay adventures with my polycule of wacky characters, not be constantly reminded why my own life sucks as well.
You can remove the exploration of sexuality in their routes but then you have literally no reason for them to have set sexualities in the first place. It doesn't really come up in the story or have a reason beyond making you choose a different gender next go-around.
Of course if the game is designed to be an exploration of sexuality then that's different.
The answer is it depends on the game IMO. A game where you play a defined, scripted character like The Witcher ? I guess the criticism could make sense (even then I don't think it matters much).
A game like BG3 / most cRPGs where you create the character from scratch entirely ? anything goes IMO, it's your character, you decide its sexuality.
playersexual should be the default because the people taking the default option probably don't have anything to say about anything and the relationships are side-content to some main quest in a game that is about strategy and/or dexterity challenges. mass effect was broadly not elevated by having set orientations. New vegas was but they wrote better and had something to say about the BoS.
if you're doing something purposeful with with the relationships then you should make actual decisions about them, and can do powerful things with your narrative about whatever experiences you're depicting. I don't think anyone anywhere seriously says you shouldn't.
saint's row 4 has by far the best in-game relationships in a game that isn't a dating sim or primarily focused on those relationships.
Depends on the game. If there's only a handful of romance options playersexual design allows your character a range of options, but if there's a wide range of characters to romance having set sexualities allows them to have more detailed personalities and preferences.
I general though, I prefer neither - I don't mind the romance in most of the games I've played, but don't usually find it particularly adds anything important.It'd be fun (and angering the gamers) and realistic if there were more romance paths, dialogue options, etc. for certain characters that end up with them saying "no, not interested" - for example
Persona 3 spoiler
there's surprising amount of that kind of dialogue in the interactions the FeMC has with Junpei Iori, which he does reply by laughing off each time.
It's something I found neat - devs being brave enough to say no to the player. Though it's probably something ATLUS did unintentionally lol.
Not to sound like a broken record, but there's one character in Genshin Impact that has a fixed sexuality. I don't know if I want to spoil it. Compared to the rest of the characters, who are all "playersexual", at least as playersexual as you can get in a children's game, her fixed sexuality was a welcome change.
Open world games have now annoyed me because everything needs to be opened ended, and most of their fans get upset at “shoving politics” or whatever nonsense. I get it’s a game, but if it has a narrative and not just some Mario jumping on a goomba, then why can’t it have fixed outcomes and characters? Who gives a shit if it’s an interactive medium? Fixed stories have been around since the beginning of games and now all of a sudden it’s bad because you can’t say x or do y in a couple games.
I agree that sexuality can be important to a charachter. But if you wanna do that, seems like the charachter can just not be a romance option.
Why can’t a character be uninterested in you unless you’re a different gender? I don’t understand why we have to remove them from the dating pool just because they’ll never date you lol. How is having restricted romance options due to your gender any different than being redistricted romance/endings due to your in game choices, or being restricted items and abilities due to your class?
It’s kind of pointless to add “artificial intelligence” to your game if none of these characters have intelligence and their world revolves around you.
With that being said, I don’t mind mods that change their sexuality to whatever. It doesn’t bother me. People have been doing non-canonical sexuality shipping since forever.
Stardew Valley is one of my favorite games, but I don't like that befriending each of the romanceable characters inevitably leads to romance. At the very least, you should have some choice about if you want to smooch them before you give them so many shiny rocks and your smooch stat exceeds the smooch threshold.
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Unless the tone of the game is designed to have high heights and heart-crushing pits of despair replicating the experience of asking someone out who is not also gay does not seem like a good design goal.
Basically, unless you’re actually using it as a theme stay the fuck away from it. It actually kind of grosses me out that people want to just yeet fixed sexualities in there without thinking about the reasons WHY people have them IRL.
Like, the fuck, do you want to model straight men creeping on lesbians in your game? You better be treating that with the gravity it actually implies if you are, you’re not getting a fluffy dating side game if you do that.Edit: I don’t think this point is really relevant lmao, and is mostly inflammatory. Ignore itFrom the perspective of the player, it’s always going to feel absolutely unfair, which sure, you can go for and can be extremely good in a game where that makes sense, but it opens you up to issues like making a queer-coded character on accident and then having characters complain about them not being romanceable as a queer person.
Also, if I can play the gay card, it feels extremely uncomfortable to make characters of set sexualities in pretty much any game, because I don’t trust G*mer developers to handle it well with non-binary identities. It sure would be “fun” to be rejected by a lesbian character or a straight man because I chose the wrong character facial hair option or something, despite designing my character as a woman.
If you remove “gendered” options (like choosing from a male or female gender in character creation) from character creation, in fact, this entire concept is just silly. You would have to basically design physical attraction preferences for every romanceable character. And while “player freedom” is of course not the MOST important thing, most people don’t want to log on to a game to do a romance with the NPC they have the hots for, only to be rejected for choosing the wrong hairstyle, or being the wrong playable species. That could be fun but you’d have to basically design the game around those themes, you couldn’t just slap that on a story with romance and assume players would feel ok with it.
I would only trust a team of entirely queer people to write a game with fixed sexual identities and a proper character creation system that includes non-binary people at the same time, and even then, only if it’s being done with an actual purpose in mind and not just because they need to
maintain an extremely strict gender and sexuality binarygive what would end up being really shitty representation.Any game where players are given binary gender choices, I suppose fixed sexualities are acceptable, but FUCK that shit in any game with a proper character creation system (as in, without dumb binary gender options), specifically in the ring of romance. If a character isn’t dateable they should always have a fixed sexuality (or unmentioned I guess, but it seems like an important character trait).
Edit 2: Actually, I think having set sexualities with non-binary player characters could work if you turned it around for the non-binary characters and give the player the option to choose whether they would or would not date straight people, gay people, etc. That way they could choose themselves what experience would represent their character the most accurately. Depending on the flavor of the choice you could make it possible for the player character to make exceptions on people they’ll date because the setting could be an actual in character choice of who they’ll date, or not if the setting is just there to determine how you want other characters to be attracted to them (or not).
let people do their own thing, set sexuality is rigid definitions that do not truly define the spectrum
I think the first tweet is the kind of argument that sounds good at first but falls apart the more you think about it. Sexuality can be a big part of a character, but it isn't always. I think making such a sweeping statement is quite ignorant, actually.
If I have to choose, I've found that romances that aren't "playersexual" are generally better written. In the same vein, romances where the player character has more preset traits than the standard amorphous blob you're supposed to project yourself onto are also generally better written.
I'd rather my games don't all try to do the same thing though.
I agree that sexuality can be important to a charachter. But if you wanna do that, seems like the charachter can just not be a romance option.
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i think it gets at the deeper conflict between player gratification and considered storytelling. erotica and wish fulfillment are great, but there are other kinds of stories too.
but then again i don't really play Bioware games or dating sims in general, so it's moot to me.
Playersexual makes more sense, just make it your own headcannon that your character is gay/straight/bi/whatever. In any case it's not like there are any dialogues where the character explicitly proclaims "I AM BISEXUAL" or anything, just make the character whatever you want in your head.
It seems to me that the bottom tweet about having few options for specific sexual encounters is true and what I'd lean into. I didn't play BG3, but the plot appeared to me without an emphasis on romance. Which is to say why would you want a fleshed out discourse on sexuality from game devs and D&D writers? It seems like modding would give you more fidelity to have specific sexual intentions. I imagine the romance subplot is supposed to be cheap and hollow the same way Doom Guy's backstory is cheap and hollow.
Similarly, I have a hang up about main character syndrome and how killing humans doesn't feel good, but if I had to manage my character's mental well being and they would tap out when it became too much in a hack n slash it'd be annoying.
I have a hard time imagining good interpersonal dynamics without doing a VN or an N(ovel) or an animation. Perhaps if you had an AI 5 years in the future you could interact organically with characters who aren't a cheap caricature without sacrificing the focus of the gameplay.
I just want to be gay with Garrus and lesbian with Tali