Are you a boy or a girl? Many games open with this question. Your choice might dictate your appearance, how NPCs talk to you, story choices or more. But what if you want to be a guy with long hair? Or wear a skirt and a beard? Or play as neither a boy nor a girl? In this workshop we’ll be analyzing games that offer more gender expansive options and what makes them work. I’ll be leading you through a series of design questions to create a unique example together.
Designing inclusive gender choices is not a scary task – it’s one of the most creative and rewarding design challenges of the moment.
Recording
Workshop Leader: Arden Osthof
Arden Osthof is a non-binary narrative and game designer. They have worked on well-established franchises at Ubisoft Reflections and Ubisoft Mainz; shipping Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 and helping the Anno strategy series break into the international market through their multi-lingual expertise. A storyteller at heart, they believe narrative is an interdisciplinary effort to create context for what the player does, why they do it, and why they should care about it.
