#05 ~ The Mirror of Fulfillment

There's little more dissapointing to me then a RPG in which you can't create your own character.

Looking at you Stone Shard ... 

As a gay guy I don't want to be shoe-horned into an overtly heterosexual character because forcing myself to seduce women as part of the story line drops me right out of the immersion. I don't want to have to endure an opening in which my wife is murdered and my child goes missing ... that's not a motivation for me, that's actually a huge relief. It's also devolution from the previous games, which is just lazy.

Contrast that to games with female-only leads ... where there simply aren't romance options. Lara Croft and Aloy aren't written for women after all. You can sense the publisher's anxiety about a female lead with size-appropriate breasts from across the world. 

The idea of making a presumably straight male role-play seducing a man isn't as palatable ...

The basics here is the ability for the player to create their own representation and make up their own minds about who they're into. 

Mass Effect does this ... ok ... just ok. 

I replay the trilogy once a year because it's amazing ... but ... in every playthrough the game assumes as a male shep, that I must want Liara. Despite being a hard no with her numerous times, somehow Mass Effect 1 still records the data points that say I liked her. 

Every time I start up Mass Effect 2 I have to meet up with Liara and she tries to kiss me. It's deeply uncomfortable to have someone that I said no to a hundred times simply ignore it because I'm a man right?  That's on top of the fact I can't actually hook up with a dude until the 3rd game in.

It's the type of bias that no-one notices unless you're outside of that paradigm. Until you test the edge-cases and embrace your outsider status.

It's something that I'm building into WROTH from day one. The first interactable object is the Mirror of Fulfillment ... the player can change everything from their skin-tone to body-hair, mix and match gender characteristics and stat-derived musculature.

My goal, the mission here, is to allow everyone to find some representation, to create a character that reflects their desired gender and sexuality.

Because it's important. For many people outside of the heteronormative mainstream, RPG's were the first place they found representation.

Behold, the Mirror of Fulfillment ... what would you do with one in real life?