A lot of role-playing games (RPGs), new and old, let you pick the sex of your character (male or female) before you start. Which is awesome. I’ve played Mass Effect with both Maleshep and Femshep characters.
The Table of Contents
Gender Choice in RPGs: From Binary to Beyond
You get two games’ worth of quality voice acting for the price of one. (We could have a similar discussion about the choice of race or species in RPGs, but that’s an article for another day.)
Modern Gender Options in Gaming
Modern RPGs, however, often go far beyond the simple male/female choice. Older conversations about character creation focused on “male or female” as the default. Today’s games frequently offer much more. Players can select pronouns, choose non-binary or custom gender identities, and independently customize body type and gender identity.
Some titles, like Cyberpunk 2077, even let you change these options mid-game. Games like Baldur's Gate 3offer extensive character creation, including diverse gender identities, body types, and romance options open to any character.
Starfield and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey or Valhalla let you choose pronouns or select between protagonists such as Kassandra/Alexios or Eivor (male/female). Even Elden Ring includes subtle dialogue changes based on gender choice. These options reflect a growing trend toward player agency and gender inclusivity in game design.
Allowing both male and female protagonists, plus more gender options, gives you more choices for character creation. But how does this affect the story, gameplay, and overall meaning? You might be surprised at how far and how subtly the effects go beyond simply the choice of romantic partners.
Classic RPGs: Resident Evil and Fallout
Choosing the sex of your character goes back at least to 1996’s Resident Evil. The game gave you the choice not to create a character from scratch, but to play as either Chris (male) or Jill (female). Chris is stronger, faster, and has better aim, but can’t carry as much gear and has to find keys to get around.
Jill’s disadvantages in strength, speed, and accuracy are offset by greater carrying capacity, useful lockpicking abilities, and (in my opinion), better advanced firepower. She gets a grenade launcher that can
also shoot flame rounds, while Chris gets a flamethrower. Jill also has a better support character (Barry vs. Rebecca). Both characters are fun to play.
A year later, in the original Fallout (1997), your character’s sex has fewer effects on gameplay and story. Male characters have an extra weakness in combat: if hit in the groin, they’re easier to crit hit or knock down. Which, you know, is fair enough. Some NPCs treat men and women differently, with a few being actively misogynistic toward female player characters. So interestingly, men have a physical disadvantage in the game. Women have a social disadvantage based on NPC prejudices.
In both these classic 90s games, gender subtly affects the game experience but leaves the story largely untouched. There are some minor Chris/Jill variations, but the overall plot is identical. The point here is both that gasp boys and girls can do a lot of the same things and that they might have slight variations on their strengths and weaknesses.
It’s not necessarily worth making every game about, but it’s perfect as a side message of lots of games that are about other things entirely. And it’s nice that female players can play as female characters more often!
The Evolution from Binary to Customizable
The shift from the gameplay-focused gender selection in Resident Evil (1996) to the customizable character creation in Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023) shows how much game representation of gender and identity has changed. Early games typically offered a binary choice that might affect stats or minor story details. Modern RPGs, by contrast, empower players to define pronouns, gender identity, body type, and romantic possibilities.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
This progression reflects a broader shift in the industry from simple, binary selections to rich, player-driven storytelling where everyone can find a character that resonates with their own sense of self.
I remember when I played a game like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, it followed in the footsteps of those older games. Much like Fallout, in Skyrim, your character’s gender was only mildly relevant. Occasionally, NPCs treated men and women differently.
There were also skill perks that gave you slight bonuses to bartering with or damaging NPCs of the opposite sex. Here, too, was a world where gender affected skills and social situations only slightly. Unlike in most RPGs, it didn’t affect romance at all, since any player character could marry NPCs of either gender.
BioWare's Worlds Without Sexism
BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect do something different. The worlds of these games are conceived of as places where sexism does not exist. Because they’re created in our real world, where it does exist, they don’t always succeed at avoiding gender stereotypes and the like. Those issues have been well covered in the links above.
As they stress, these issues don’t simply make Mass Effect a “sexist” series. It’s a series with interesting and often successful feminist ambitions, alongside unfortunate sexist blunders. My interest here is in the implications of creating a game world where the societies presented are intended to be free of sexism. On the one hand, you lose out on the opportunity to explore sexism and how it works. Games that do this are valuable, and there should be more of them. But there should also be more games like Dragon Age that allow us to imagine worlds without sexism (while still addressing issues that relate to sexism).
What would it be like if there weren’t misogynists around, bluntly or subtly treating women as less competent and less valuable than men? It’s kind of nice. Games, books, and movies can encourage us to strive
to create a better world than the one we live in.
Addressing real-world problems is part of that encouragement, but so is imagining worlds in which those dysfunctions are absent. In these worlds, women’s armor looks like, say, armor, instead of metal lingerie, because it’s meant not to arouse men but to protect them from stabbing while they go about their own business of stabbing.
The (intended) hidden message of a BioWare game’s choice of player-character sex is that a world where your sex doesn’t make it easier or harder for you to take care of business is a pretty cool place to be. It’s nice to have a break from that real-world problem sometimes. We don’t want to ignore them or pretend they’re not there. But it’s good to occasionally step back and imagine how much better a place the world would be if we can make progress on problems like sexism.
My Take on Gender Choice
I don't have a strong preference for which gender I play. I pick based on gameplay differences or which story sounds more interesting. Sometimes I research what's different between characters before choosing. When Resident Evil first came out, it wasn't about making a statement. It was about which experience I wanted.
