Ah yes, when the video game allows you to use they/them pronouns, dye your hair, and equip top surgery scars but the body type options are cis woman model and cis man model, and hairstyles + clothing are gender locked, so you can't ever actually look realistically gender nonconforming
(in fairness they do also let you equip makeup on the masc body, though this is personally irrelevant.)
I just think it's very telling that an "inclusive" character creator for a game that's meant to be about hot people would explode if you tried to make a femboy or a butch lesbian
Like, I guess it's nice that I can have top surgery scars but even getting everything as close as I can, the character doesn't look like me and it doesn't look like the hypothetical Hottest™ version of me either
There's also no body hair???
Honestly I think the underlying issue here is something that keeps popping up in my orbit:
Namely, there is limited imagination on the part of cis people—particularly cishets but queer cis people can also fall victim to this—as to how a body can exist with so-called sexed or gendered components and still be worthy of discussion.
I say so-called not just bc trans and intersex people exist, but bc these components can vary even among dyadic, gender-conforming cis people. Finding a dyadic cis woman who naturally has dark hair on her upper lip, for example, is trivial (in some cultures it used to be the beauty standard, even), but in the modern West this is construed as not just unattractive but un-woman.
I was once asked by a game developer what I thought the biggest issue was with "gender-inclusive" character creators and my response was that they often aren't familiar with salient factors such as adipose distribution. That's not how fat you are, but rather how your body distributes fat once having it. "Android" distribution goes to the belly, "gynoid" to the hips. It can be altered by HRT or you can just be born with an indeterminate or "opposite" one.
This also has meaningful impact on the shape of a person's face.
But games don't know that, so their depictions of transmascs, for instance, end up being either "draw a cis woman, erase the breasts" or "draw some lines on a cis man" and while SOME transmascs do look like that, it's missing key factors that you would notice if, for instance, you made a point of drawing real trans people.
As this is doing severals, here are some factors I consider important in a truly gender inclusive character creator:
- haircuts, makeup, and clothes available for everyone without comment
- diverse face and facial feature shapes + sizes for everyone
- adipose distribution as a separate slider from body fat, AND both of these separate from bone structure
- bone structure should not have just two options. and please consider carefully, before making all the options hypersexed caricatures, whom you may be excluding
- everyone can have breasts or not (bonus points if they can have breasts that sag—a common occurrence on T)
- body hair patterns, informed by how hair grows naturally, for everyone, including patterns that are aware of breasts or top surgery scars, and including estrogen-typical body hair (bc if Aloy has taught us anything, gamers don't know what that is)
- top surgery scars referenced from real people who had surgery multiple years prior—including breast enlargement and reduction, not just total mastectomy. if the anatomy is off people Will notice
- you know that thing in some games where the female model has a featureless pelvis but the male model has a... generous Ken doll crotch? well, on a pure accuracy level, vulvas aren't flat, but also it's really awkward when the only way to not have boobs in a video game is to constantly look like I'm trying to smuggle tropical fruit through customs in my sweatpants, especially when the character's meant to be wearing, like, denim