how would you feel a about a genderless race

[Iscah]

genderless is a very subjective term, as gender itself is a product of the mind, so for argument sake ill assume you meant sex. and while sex matters to alot of people, in terms of identification sex is meaningless in a videogame. most female characters are played by men, theres a very well known quote on the matter. "there are no women on the internet."

"A well-known quote" that is usually tongue-in-cheek or sarcastic - or otherwise just plain wrong. There are plenty of women on the Internet, and playing characters of both genders. (And yes, genders - when you're not trying to differentiate between mental gender and physical sex, then it is perfectly fine to use "gender" in a physical sense as well.)


You're correct in that you can't connect "character's gender" to "player's gender" (which may or may not correspond to "player's physical sex"), and certainly can't draw any universal meaning out of it - did they pick their character because they identify with them? Are attracted to them? Just thought it was a cool character design?

But that doesn't make "[male/female] meaningless in a videogame". The characters are still male or female, plus gender identity, within the "real world" of the story. It's a part of who they are and how they act.

Yes, at a technical level they're all genderless clusters of polygons being instructed to move around a virtual space.... but that's not what most people are talking about here.

The question here is about making an actual character or race within the story that is genderless, or sexless if you want to be technical - something that physically can't be identified as one or the other.



In another story, it's entirely possible. Here, it would raise too many programming issues - script pronouns as I mentioned earlier, and costumes as other people have raised since. Right now there's essentially a switch in the programming that determines a character to be male or female, and that controls what gear they equip, or what form some gear pieces take. It's like a light switch - it can't be left in the middle, it has to be on one setting or the other.