I don't hate Body Type replacing Gender, I hate laziness

barsoap , 41 minutes ago (edited 32 minutes ago)

Games that do this aren’t being progressive or inclusive, they’re changing the color of the cup that my drink comes in and pretending it’s an entirely new beverage.

The thing is… if you use “dude” and “chick” in the body type descriptions you’re implying gender identity. There may be better options that “Type A” and “Type B” but dude and chick ain’t it because it simply means male and female.

In a very flexible system, you could use more granular options like “wide shoulders”, “wide hips”, “boobage”, etc, to freely mix+match everything. It’s also expensive to develop and even more expensive to create clothing for and a gazillion times more expensive to make really good-looking clothing for (fabric folds and flow aren’t easy). From a developer’s perspective, looking at the work involved really makes you want to say “We’ll just tell the player they’re now Geralt of Rivia and that’s it”.

I think for most games the appropriate choice would be to have an early radio button, saying “male/female/it’s complicated”, the first two options hiding every enby option including pronoun selection. That’s right-out trivial to do and just good UX. And yes the body types should be called male and female, you already selected “it’s complicated” so it’s clear that when you’re selecting a body, you’re selecting a body, not identity.

As to laziness: Eh. Noone’s going to start a research programme on how to do things in an optimal way for a re-release. Someone had a look at the code and assets and thought “hey we can support separate pronouns and bodies without doing anything more than providing an option” and that’s exactly what they did, using the extent of knowledge and consideration that was already in-house. Yep, it very well can happen that if you take your foot out of one thing, you put it right into another.

As to “primary/secondary”: One of the options has to be to the left, or on top, of the other. Ain’t no way around that. I mean you could put option B on the left of option A to cancel things out but now you’re being confusing. More importantly you can make it so that none is selected by default.

Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?

Yes and no you’re being quite personal, and I include your perspective shift into the POV of others in that, about things that will never make 100% of the people 100% happy because technical reasons. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all.

zurohki , 2 hours ago

My point is that gaming could abandon “A/B” in favor of something more like an actual spectrum of Height, Weight, and Gender Presentation instead of just awkwardly renaming the binary? I wouldn’t get so up in arms about gender replacing body type.

Okay, but an in-depth character creation system that lets you pick and adjust individual features is a lot more work than just manually creating two models and asking the player to pick one. Adding that means something else gets cut.

Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work, but devs who only offer two player models to choose from in the first place probably aren’t putting that much thought into character creation.

Eggyhead , 3 hours ago

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.

HawlSera OP , 3 hours ago

I was not aware of this slider, as I don’t really go for Souls-Like games, but it sounds like a perfect solution.

barsoap , 36 minutes ago

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.

JohnnyCanuck , 3 hours ago

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

PierreKanazawa , 3 hours ago

It's indeed low effort comparing to your proposal, but I think it's still better than the previous one.

BumpingFuglies , 4 hours ago

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.

apotheotic , 56 minutes ago

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.

brdweb , 4 hours ago

Here’s a fucking hint. YOURE NOT A WOMAN

chloyster , 4 hours ago

This is absolutely unacceptable here

julianh , 4 hours ago

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.

HawlSera OP , 4 hours ago

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.

julianh , 4 hours ago

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.

delmain , 4 hours ago

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.

HawlSera OP , 4 hours ago

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.

HatchetHaro , 40 minutes ago

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.

Now how much gear is there in Runescape?

snooggums , 5 hours ago

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.

chloyster , 5 hours ago

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

HawlSera OP , 4 hours ago

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.

chloyster , 4 hours ago (edited 4 hours ago)

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

HawlSera OP , 4 hours ago

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.”

It’s that little bit that goes a long way.

chloyster , 4 hours ago

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

HawlSera OP , 4 hours ago

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.

chloyster , 4 hours ago

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

chamomile , 4 hours ago

@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.

HawlSera OP , 4 hours ago

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.

chamomile , 2 hours ago

@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.

fushuan , 1 hour ago

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.

ShinkanTrain , 5 hours ago (edited 5 hours ago)

S L I D E R S

Fucking Saints Row 2 had this shit figured out

PS: I like when the game just shows you a bunch of presets and says “pick one”. It’s more elegant than “which of the two body types do you want”

HawlSera OP , 4 hours ago

^ 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.

derbis , 1 hour ago

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?

jmbmkn , 46 minutes ago

I get this reference