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).
let people do their own thing, set sexuality is rigid definitions that do not truly define the spectrum
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.
Yeah lets make video games sterile, loveless, and sexless thats the solution.
Cant let artists try to explore a part of life because some but not all of the attempts at it so far have been clumsy, hacky, or undercooked.
Sorry im just tired of getting this answer. Its not the question i asked. And this answer just feels anti-art.
Are you trolling lol? Its a medium of artistic expression. How is Disco Elysium not art?
The first one the answer is that, well first of all thats reductive as hell but more importantly romanceable NPCs are not real people. You cant manipulate them.
The second is just a reason you pulled out of your ass to decide that something you dont like is a moral bad, like all anti-art freaks do. Fuck off to twitter with that mindset. Theres nothing inherently unacceptable about that. You just said some words.
How the fuck do you expect a game like The Sims to work under you rules? And hell, if youre right, which youre not, why is it acceptable in porn anyway? Wouldnt it still be (what you consider) harmful there too?
Whatever we decide here you are all clearly gamers and you should be ashamed
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.
I feel like this is true in non interactive fiction, the problem I see is that it ends up being in Vidya games that someone always ends up with 1 or zero option, cough cough bg2. Like I agree largely with what you ate saying I just think that there are constraints on video game development under capitalism that makes the least worst solution to be everyone is basically pansexual.
