Survey respondents’ favorite character creation systems are listed below, ordered from most common response to least common. Respondents praised games that ask players to assign preferred pronouns to their characters rather than requiring them to make a sex or gender choice, as this allows for accurate dialogue while removing gender restrictions. Games that require you to choose from a gender binary in the character creation screen-particularly when it has limited influence on the following story-were criticized, as were games that restrict choices of clothing, hairstyles, and voices based on this choice. One of the primary issues respondents had with character creators were restrictions regarding gender, so creators that reduce these restrictions were praised highly. A lot of responses were followed by question marks to indicate uncertainty or started with phrases like ‘Weirdly’ or ‘Strangely enough.’ Interestingly, there was sometimes a sense of shame attached to the favorite character creators that respondents listed, potentially due to the games that these creators were connected to.
For this reason, respondents to the survey often favored games that were most capable of creating a character they identified with, and those games that did not have this functionality were listed as having respondents’ least favorite systems. If you have your own favorite representations that have not been featured in this series, I’d love to hear about them! Favorite Character Creation SystemsĬharacter creation systems allow players to personalize the character that they play within a game, sometimes opting to create a representation of themselves or who they would like to be. It is difficult to represent diversity in a way that works for everybody and, as such, you may disagree with the opinions of those who suggested the below games as positive examples.
For example, the Dragon Age series featured in the top five most common responses across all ten of these questions.
It is important to note that many of the same games were discussed in both the ‘favorite’ and ‘least favorite’ sections of the survey, often for the same type of representation and sometimes even by the same respondent. The survey received over 150 responses, the data from which has been used to inform a five-part series for FemHype, as well as the ongoing development of the Queerly Represent Me database. In May 2016, I conducted a survey across social media that encouraged respondents to discuss their favorite and least favorite representations of sexuality, gender, and relationships in games, as well as examples of pronoun use and character creation systems.
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