I do want to say that you aren't quite grasping what playersexuality in a game space is. The characters aren't flipping or changing their sexual preference.
I ‘grasp’ it very well, cheers. To put it in the most simplistic terms, it’s making every ‘fellow adventurer’ you come across somehow sexually malleable, based on the character you happened to choose. You say these characters can have different sexual identities based on each ‘game world/playthrough’ – except that’s not how games work, or can ever work given our current tech and writerly limitations.
The backstories for these characters remain static, no matter how you choose to fantasise about every game world being different – they aren’t, as that’s impossible. Gale remains straight-coded, as does Wyll, as others have pointed out.
No matter how many Tavs you roll, your companions’ chatter around their past is the same. Playersexual then becomes this phony, brittle thing because it can’t do what you’re saying: it can’t generate entirely new personas or backgrounds for these characters based on your preferences. So straight-coded Gale, who talks about shagging goddesses and gives no indication of being into men – at any point – remains so, no matter the fantasies of the PC.
So yes, no matter how you dress it up, when looked at impartially and without emotional language, Gale is written as straight and he does indeed ‘flip’ to being the opposite, for no apparent reason, at the party scene.
I very specifically said, if that’s something people actually like – go for broke. I’m also entitled to think it’s a bit daft, and to wonder where the satisfaction is in it.
The point I’m making – and others here have mentioned the same thing – is that given the very glaring phoniness of playersexual (as a result of writing, tech and dev time constraints), how is it in any way enjoyable? Nobody who wants this gimmick has answered that in a plain way, so it’s difficult to take seriously any argument for it as anything other than gratuitous wish-fulfillment.
Gale being interested in males that take his fancy is not contradicting anything
I don’t share your confidence there at all. Are you male? Have you read anything I said about how straight men tend to react to being ‘propositioned’ by other men? It can invoke quite a reaction, let me tell you.
It doesn’t add up for me, because he never gives that impression – he just ‘flips’ because...because why? What’s the draw here for people who are into this?
All I’m going to get, I know, is emotive language as people who do want it dance around giving, no pun intended, a straight answer – but I’m afraid that’s never going to convince me, so we’ll have to just agree to disagree and move on.
I’d also like to say that this is, at its core, a RPG focused on turn-based battles – it has its work cut out for it just delivering on that promise, given the scale of the game. The dating-sim aspect will always be tacked-on and low-effort, because they’re only human and can only do so much. Personally speaking, I don’t see the appeal even outside of playersexual. By your own admission, the writing isn’t stellar – so what makes these characters so ‘sexy’ that anyone would desire them to begin with?
Even if they were all charismatic and fascinating people, they remain pixels – they remain fake. You can bring in your argument again about the ‘fantasy’ of it all, which is fine, but I merely expressed curiosity as to why people want the feature – yet all I get is cagey defensiveness.
If someone at least said, ‘Well, because of life circumstances I can’t date other humans in real life, so this provides an escapist substitute, even if it’s half-assed and not entirely convincing’ then I could buy into it. But maybe there’s some shyness there about being ‘judged’ – certainly, I don’t judge people on such matters.
Also Konmehn, I don't think people look to video games to learn social skills, in fact related to the above, they're interested in less complicated exchanges.
I never said people go to the game to learn ‘social skills’. I did state that I don’t believe ‘playersexual’ is helping the problem of people not respecting other peoples’ boundaries. I’m not saying it’s going to erode the social fabric of the human race. But I wouldn’t want my impressionable young kid to be exposed to it, let’s put it that way.
