Morgan Wick: One way to avoid the gender problem is to simply ask what gender the player is at the start, and if the game calls for it, what gender they want to fall in love with. However, the former gets twisted by people who sign up for the gender they
want to be, and the latter is awfully personal for a video game, at a time when homosexuality is still largely shunned, at least in America.
Red Shoe: Ah, but is this really any better? If the game is set up so that the entire difference gender makes to the story is to flip a variable and choose one set of pronouns over the other, then the characterization can't be all that deep. It *does* make the writing a little less stilted (In
Shivers whenever someone talks about the player, they turn toward him and say "YOU", to avoid refering to the player as "him" or "her", however grating it might be in context), though. And, of course, it opens up a can of works.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos picked the player's gender through a neat trick: the game opens with the player standing outside the restrooms with an urgent need to go. Whichever he chooses is assumed to be his gender. Which is good and all, but the player's love interest is then set to be of the opposite gender, which a number of homosexual players complained about back in the day.
BT The P: In the
Star Trek Voyager FPS, they allowed the player to choose a gender, but none of the voice acting needed to be changed; pronouns are avoided, in the
Star Trek universe "sir" works for both sexes, and the character's given name is "Alex".
Red Shoe: As I recall, the pronunciation used in
Zork Grand Inquisitor was more like "Afgan-cap"
Phlip: Closer to "Aff-gn-carp"... since I tend to fail at these pseudo-English explanations: /ˈæfɡənˌkaːp/.
Just
listen, you'll figure it out. And yes, I did just break my ZGI
C Ds out for the first time in a few years, and now I'm going to have to play through the game again... Oh well, the punishment's not too bad.
gryffinp: It's said that the choice of Race in the Elder Srolls IV game is purely cosmetic, but it's actually a fairly significant choice, due to different races getting different abilities and stats. It's not huge, but it's significant
Seven Seals: I took out a few non-examples of AFGNCAAP. This is a pretty specific trope, and rare outside of adventures. You are not an AFGNCAAP if you can pick race, gender and other abilities, even if this has minimal (or actually no) influence in the game. Most RPGs just don't have this; they have extended forms of
Purely Aesthetic Gender.
removed:
- The web comic "the order of the stick" Has the mage of the group Varsuvius playing this role. You never find out until late in the comic strip. but after the halfling ranger kisses V, you later see his female looking wife. It is hard to tell though because he is in fact an elf.
because 1, it's wrong (V having a wife doesn't mean that s/he is a guy, s/he could be gay[the kids are explicitly referred to as adopted) and 2, it's not the trope, it's just an ambiguous gender.
Haven: Took out all this stuff because we now do, indeed, have the trope
Non Entity General; examples are all reproduced over there.
- Subverted in Warcraft 2, where you find out that the orc commander from the previous game, Orgrim Doomhammer, did in fact overthrow his Warchief and is now the boss of your new orc character. This was very original for the time, but unfortunately never happened later in the series. Warcraft III avoids the problem by having the player not correspond to any in-universe character.
- Note that the character you see at the end of the Orc campaign did not look at all like Orgrim Doomhammer—but presumably, we were still playing as him.
- Inverted in Fire Emblem 7, called Fire Emblem in the US for the Game Boy Advance. You did in fact have a character represented, a novice tactician who commanded the units and was actually spoken to often. However, your sprite was just a person in a robe, with nothing visible, and you never said anything. However, the character was given Gender, which minorly effects dialog with Florina and Sain during the Tutorial chapters and changes a pronoun in the end credits. However the sprite doesn't change and your character still looks Gender Neutral.
- Most games in the Command And Conquer series use this; however, in Tiberian Sun you are implied to be either Michael MacNeal or Anton Slavik, and in Red Alert 2 two female characters compete for your affections.
- Particularly bizarre is NOD mission 8 in which you have to rescue Slavik—-when selected, one of his lines is "yes, CABAL?". Yet the ending of the Firestorm expansion is a fight against CABAL (NOD's AI).
- It is also implied in the manual that the player character from the first game may in fact have been General Solomon (your boss in Tiberian Sun).
- The third game, Tiberium Wars, follows this trope to a T, while its expansion pack avoids it, as you are a Nod AI called Legion.
- Red Alert 3 ups the ante and adds a massive helping of its token silliness to boot. The entire game, you will never be referred to by any name other than "Commander". In the last Soviet mission, this is implied to be because the player's name is Commander when a soviet soldier comments that they should rename New York "Commandergrad".
- Or possibly just Lampshade Hanging
- In Star Craft the player is refered to as "Commander" (Terran campaign), "Cerebrate" (Zerg campaign) or "Executor" (Protoss campaign) and does not have a specific gender, appearance or personality.
- Blizzard later confirmed that the player was the character of Artanis (who later appeared as a hero in Star Craft Brood War) during the original Protoss campaign, though this was never mentioned in the game itself. Which brings the question as who is this new Executor the protoss (including Artanis) are talking to now, and why Artanis goes from Executor to Praetor, when he did such a good job and the Executor orders the Praetor around, at least in-game.
- The Protoss are a Proud Warrior Race, so it's entirely possible that a Praetor out on the battlefield is a higher rank than an Executor ordering troops around.
- Or alternatively that the fall of Aiur to the Zerg and the death of about 90% of the Protoss race has caused some changes to their hierarchy.
- End War apparently has you take the role of the (named) commander of whatever battalion you choose to join.
- Turn-based strategy games are often worse than real-time in this regard, because there's so many more that cover arcs of history instead of skirmish-level warfare. In a game like Civilization or Europa Universalis, not only is the player not given characteristics, but there are no possible characters who the player could be.
- However, some games avert this - for example, the Total War series generally casts the player in the role of a succession of members of a royal family.
