Addressing gender option complaints in Cyberpunk 2077.

in gaming •  4 years ago 

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The second biggest complaint I've heard about Cyberpunk 2077 (at least with regards to the game being "offensive" - I'm sure there are plenty of bigger complaints about the game's quality) is that the gender options are too limited, specifically with regards to the player character's voice and pronouns.

Your character's gender (i.e. whether people in the game refer to your character as a man or a woman) is separate from their body type and from their genitalia, but NOT separate from their voice. So you can play a man with a vagina, or a woman with a dick, or a man who has a dick but otherwise has a feminine body (including breasts). But if you have a male-sounding voice then people will refer to you as male, and if you have a female-voice then people will refer to you as female. Also, there's no option to play as a non-binary person or to have people refer to you with gender-neutral pronouns.

Now, I get why some trans people would've preferred to have voice be separate from gender too. There are some trans women out there who have voices that would traditionally be considered masculine, and some trans men out there with voices that would traditionally be considered feminine, and that's perfectly valid! I completely understand why they might want representation in the game too. But at the same time, when most games only offer one axis of gender-related options, having a game that offers THREE seems like a pretty big improvement, and I can't really get upset over the fact that it doesn't offer four instead. Likewise, I can't complain about a game not having a non-binary gender option when almost NO video games offer that choice. Would I prefer that they did? Sure, but that doesn't mean I'm angry that they didn't.

I seriously don't think the game's sex and gender options were intended as any kind of statement on the validity of trans identities. I am incredibly doubtful that anyone on the design team said "you know, trans women aren't really women if they have masculine voices, let's exclude them." It really seems like the designers simply didn't think of the fact that some people would want to play females with "male-sounding" voices or vice-versa, which is totally understandable! That's not the sort of thing that's going to be obvious to most people.

Why do I even care about this? Because we should be encouraging creators to include queer characters in their works, and we can't do that if we're holding them to an impossible, excessively high, or excessively narrow standard for how those people should be portrayed. Obviously there should be some standards, like "don't reinforce stereotypes about the minorities you're portraying, especially not negative and harmful stereotypes." But complaining because the game developers simply didn't go far enough in portraying different types of queer people is going to discourage future creators from including non-cisgendered people at all. It sends a signal that no matter what they do, it won't be enough, so they may as well not try in the first place. After all, the other 99.9% of video games that don't include ANY options for characters who aren't cis male or cis female never get complaints like this.

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