I think everyone here is fine playing as either gender or as a robot dwarf. Having a preference doesn’t mean you’re not cool with the alternative if Option A isn’t available.
I don’t put a moment of thought into RDR2 being the story of Arthur Morgan but, when starting Red Dead Online, I made a female character to play since I could.
For certain values of “a lot”, “thought” and “care”. I don’t think many people are staring at the ceiling at night about it, but I do land a specific way if starting a game and hitting that character select that starts with Male or Female. I’d assume most people who plan to spend tens of hours, if not hundreds of hours, with a character have some opinions about how they’d like that character to be represented (given the options). Well, I guess 78% of men do since only 22% reported no preference.
I have read of people spending (literal) hours in character creation for games that allow it like Cyberpunk. They may not lay awake at night stressing about it but clearly some are happy to go to great lengths over it (which is totally fine). I’m just not sure how much my choices say about me.
That Cyberpunk then utterly fails on representing that character is a whole other discussion.
Well, sure, it’s a big world and some people spend hours on character creation and some people start with the default skin without even pressing Random. I think most people fall in the middle somewhere.
Do you start with the default look without any modifications? Hit random and go? Actually take time to decide on hair color, eyes, scars, frame build and the rest of it?
Personally, I am in the middle. I usually go through a lot of random choices and then, maybe, tweak one that I like.
I doubt I ever spend more than 10 minutes on the looks. Often less…depends on the game. In Cyberpunk I spent maybe 10 minutes before I knew it was a waste of time.
I realize this is pretty banal compared to most gaming, but I mix up my characters in Animal Crossing in terms of appearance pretty often - male, female, neuter, skin color, eye color, hair style, etc. It amuses me to do so.
Technically my characters are both male (the game makes you choose at setup) but you can make them look however you want. Also, the game gives you a helluva lot of women’s clothing, so might as well wear it occasionally.
Dragon Age: Origins is unusual in the sense that there seem to be more in-game choices for a male character. So if someone asked me what kind of character to make in DA:O, I would probably suggest a male character (as opposed to my usual answer of “doesn’t matter”).
So I’ve been thinking about this a bit because my initial reaction would have been to say I was one of those cis/het men who prefer to play female characters, but on reflection I’m not sure that’s actually true as a blanket statement. When games have defined characters, I’m not sure I do have a preference. Would I prefer if Deus Ex had a female protagonist instead of Adam Jensen? Would I prefer if the Witcher series had a female protagonist rather than Geralt? Not really. Well, scratch that, because it just occurred to me that a Witcher game where you play as a sorceress would be awesome. But in general I don’t prefer to play as Lara or Aloy vs Geralt or Adam, except insofar as I prefer one of the games as a whole over the others.
But Gorsnak, you say, you play FemShep in preference to BroShep, how do you square that with what you just said? Easy. I like Jennifer Hale’s portrayal of Shepard better than Mark Meara’s. And I was going to romance Liara anyways. I play the female survivor in The Long Dark sandbox mode for the same reason.
However, when playing games like Skyrim or Fallout or Dragon Age, I almost always choose to make a female character, and on reflection I think it’s because I prefer creating a character I find attractive to creating a character I want to be, if that makes sense. And I might flippantly describe this preferring to look at a female butt as I play (although two of those games are primarily 1st person so that’s not actually even a thing) but it’s not really about visual sex appeal.
I’m not sure that would carry over to MMO’s, as I think that interacting with other people as your character changes the dynamics compared to playing a single-player game, but of those I’ve only ever played Eve Online (my main was male) and gender there is barely even apparent. Your character is a tiny thumbnail portrait. For game purposes, you are the ship you’re piloting.
In Witcher III you play a handful of scenes as Ciri, so you get to experience the game for brief periods as a female character. (They are pretty much just action pieces though with running around and fighting, no real role-playing, just action and cut scenes.) So there is a bit of variety there.
Unfortunately she’s just another witcher with a sword. I agree that being able to play as a sorceress would be pretty cool, and dealing with the politics as part of the role-playing would be interesting. CD Projekt Red should get on that.
I used to default to female characters in single player RPGs, because if there was any queer romance option, it was almost always restricted to the female character. Now that games are offering a lot more variety in relationships, I don’t think I have a preference any more.
I kinda figure that most games that default to a gender default male, so when I choose a gender, I tend to choose female. That way it balances out.
Of course, when I was a kid I wasn’t concerned about stepping on a crack, but rather was concerned about stepping over cracks equally with my right foot and my left foot and felt physical discomfort if I didn’t maintain the balance, so I’m not exactly hyping my choices here.
Really, only 1. There was no queer romance option at all in 2, although if you’d established one with Liara in the first game, it was at least referenced.
