How to design gender-inclusive character customisation tools
At Devcom last month, senior narrative designer Arden Osthof gave a talk entitled "Playing with gender: A design framework for character customisation," giving tips on how game makers can improve their protagonist creation tools to be more inclusive.
Osthof previously worked at Ubisoft, with past projects including the Anno series and Tom Clancy's The Division 2, and is currently a freelance narrative designer working on Rho Labyrinths' Mars Vice and Screen Juice's Morbid Metal.
They have been researching character creators since 2017 and specifically how gender-inclusive these tools can be, and what sort of options they can offer for players to express and project themselves accurately.
After an introduction on the topic, giving pointers about gender-inclusive design, Osthof's talk centred around questions you can ask yourself while making your game to be more mindful of gender representations.
Osthof started their talk by exposing an issue regularly occurring in games or, as they call it: "The Choice."
"At the beginning of a lot of games, you might be presented with something like this: 'Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?'," they explained. "And then you get to choose one or the other. Depending on what you've chosen, you might be given an appearance. It automatically changes how NPCs talk to you or about you. And if it's a game that has some type of customisation, then maybe the customisation options might look different depending on which one you chose. Maybe if you play as a boy you have four haircuts that are kind of short-ish, and if you're a girl, then you have 12 that are long," they pointed out.
In some games, this initial decision will impact story beats and a variety of choices available to the player
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