This is a bit of a rant, but please try to stick with me through the whole thing
So recently OSRS (Old School Runescape) has joined a list of games that have replaced “Male or Female” with “Body Type A or Body Type B” with you selecting your pronouns secondary.
And it made me furious, but I had to sit down and ask why such a small meaningless thing that I only see during the character creator pisses me off. After all, isn’t this giving a seat at the table for Gender Non-Conforming/Non-Binary individuals?
So I tried thinking about this issue from the perspective of a Non-Binary individual. See I myself am female (Transgender MTF for what it’s worth), so the only thing I’m ever going to pick is the female option unless I’m doing a challenge run where I try to roleplay Guybrush Threepywood (Mighty Pirate!) while playing Fallout 3…
That’s when I realized why I absolutely hate Body Type A/Body Type B
This is not a solution to a problem, this is highlighting the issue.
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?”
As someone is very much not cisgender, I look at it and go “Well, isn’t every FTM going to pick Body Type A with male pronouns while MTFs like myself go with Body Type B with female pronouns? Who outside of a Far Right Troll trying and failing to be funny is gonna pick the buff bearded dude and select the she/her pronouns?”
It was only when I went “Let’s pretend I don’t exist in a male/female binary and see how I feel about it.” that I realized why I absolutely DESPISE Body Type A/Body Type B
Because when I look at it from that angle, I realize that if I am a non-binary individual, my options are to look like an overly buff dude but occasionally NPCs will refer to me as a They/Them, or like an overly curvy chick who again sometimes gets called They/Them…
That’s when I realized why Body Type A/Body Type B doesn’t do it for me.
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.
I realized that if the choices in Body Type were something like
A - Buff Dude
B - Slim Dude
C - Fat Dude
D - Skinny Androgynous Individual who doesn’t need a bra/binder
E - Fat Androgynous Individual who doesn’t need a bra/binder
F - Skinny Androgynous Individual who requires bra/binder
G - Fat Androgynous Individual who requires bra/binder
I - Curvy Chick
J - Buff Chick
K - Fat Chick
L - Slim Chick
Maybe have also an option for a big buff masculine dude who has big tits, because that’s just how he rolls, I dunno just thinking aloud here…
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.
I don’t know what more I have to say on this. I guess it’s just a revelation I had about something in gaming that bothers me…
So, wider gaming community. What do you think? Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?
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.
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.
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?
Not to mention the massive difference in age between BG3 and OSRS/RS3. RuneScape’s running on an engine that was never built with more than 2 body types in mind. Changing that is probably a much more monumental task than OP realizes, the armor models being just one (big) roadblock.
I’m no Jagex defender but I feel like the fact that they added even this small change to a 23 year old game’s character creator shouldn’t be labeled lazy. All that will do is discourage developers from trying.