I don't hate Body Type replacing Gender, I hate laziness
I don't hate Body Type replacing Gender, I hate laziness
This is a bit of a rant, but please try to stick with me through the whole thing
So recently OSRS (Old School Runescape) has joined a list of games that have replaced "Male or Female" with "Body Type A or Body Type B" with you selecting your pronouns secondary.
And it made me furious, but I had to sit down and ask why such a small meaningless thing that I only see during the character creator pisses me off. After all, isn't this giving a seat at the table for Gender Non-Conforming/Non-Binary individuals?
So I tried thinking about this issue from the perspective of a Non-Binary individual. See I myself am female (Transgender MTF for what it's worth), so the only thing I'm ever going to pick is the female option unless I'm doing a challenge run where I try to roleplay Guybrush Threepywood (Mighty Pirate!) while playing Fallout 3...
That's when I realized why I absolutely hate Body Type A/Body Type B
This is not a solution to a problem, this is highlighting the issue.
As a woman, I look at "Body Type A or Body Type B" and think "Well, I'm a woman, not a Body Type B, and isn't it kinda misogynistic that the secondary option is the female one? Like A+ for Men, B- for Women?"
As someone is very much not cisgender, I look at it and go "Well, isn't every FTM going to pick Body Type A with male pronouns while MTFs like myself go with Body Type B with female pronouns? Who outside of a Far Right Troll trying and failing to be funny is gonna pick the buff bearded dude and select the she/her pronouns?"
It was only when I went "Let's pretend I don't exist in a male/female binary and see how I feel about it." that I realized why I absolutely DESPISE Body Type A/Body Type B
Because when I look at it from that angle, I realize that if I am a non-binary individual, my options are to look like an overly buff dude but occasionally NPCs will refer to me as a They/Them, or like an overly curvy chick who again sometimes gets called They/Them....
That's when I realized why Body Type A/Body Type B doesn't do it for me.
Games that do this aren't being progressive or inclusive, they're changing the color of the cup that my drink comes in and pretending it's an entirely new beverage.
I realized that if the choices in Body Type were something like
A - Buff Dude
B - Slim Dude
C - Fat Dude
D - Skinny Androgynous Individual who doesn't need a bra/binder
E - Fat Androgynous Individual who doesn't need a bra/binder
F - Skinny Androgynous Individual who requires bra/binder
G - Fat Androgynous Individual who requires bra/binder
I - Curvy Chick
J - Buff Chick
K - Fat Chick
L - Slim Chick
Maybe have also an option for a big buff masculine dude who has big tits, because that's just how he rolls, I dunno just thinking aloud here....
My point is that gaming could abandon "A/B" in favor of something more like an actual spectrum of Height, Weight, and Gender Presentation instead of just awkwardly renaming the binary? I wouldn't get so up in arms about gender replacing body type.
I don't know what more I have to say on this. I guess it's just a revelation I had about something in gaming that bothers me..
So, wider gaming community. What do you think? Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?
S L I D E R S
Fucking Saints Row 2 had this shit figured out
PS: I like when the game just shows you a bunch of presets and says "pick one". It's more elegant than "which of the two body types do you want"
^ This, I much prefer this... I mean something about "Body Type A/Body Type B" just feels too "corpo" for my tastes... but Saints Row sliders not so much.
Heck Pokemon even figured this out by just showing you pictures of characters and saying "Hey, which one of these do you wanna play as", didn't even have to use words.
What if you found a portal to a parallel universe? What if you could slide into a thousand different worlds? Where it’s the same year, and you’re the same person... but everything else is different? And what if you can’t find your way home?
I get this reference
While I agree having more options is always a better thing, I really can't see body type A and B with pronouns choosing anything other than more inclusive, a good thing, and not something that deserves getting up in arms about.
I don't really see how it could be seen as not more inclusive. Sure it's not more inclusive than having full blown sliders that let you change every bit of a character's body, but it's adding more pronouns and not forcing those pronouns on a certain body type. If we look at number of options, it is more than the previous "male and female" options. Thus including a broader set of people
My issue is how half-assed the measure is. What's the point of letting me pick between "He/Him" and "She/Her", if it's going on a character that looks like a stereotypical brodude or a model in a fashion magazine? Is it really doing anyone any favors?
Would anyone in good faith, with only two options "Stereotypical Brodude or Fashion Magazine Cover Girl", is going to play the former with she/her or the latter with he/him? If there was more variety or perhaps something like Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur's Gate 3 where you can have a masculine build with feminine features or vice versa, I could see the point.. but for most games that are only going to give you the most common denominator as your only two options?
It just feels like throwing a coat of paint to make it look like the studio cares about making their product more accessible, when really it's just trying to check a box to appease HR.
It's a step in the right direction, but it's so small that it's insulting to everyone involved.
Would anyone in good faith, with only two options "Stereotypical Brodude or Fashion Magazine Cover Girl", is going to play the former with she/her or the latter with he/him?
I think so. Why not? There are as many valid genders and identities as there are people in the world. Who am I to judge what people want to be referred as? Also even if there wasn't people like that, I can almost guarantee there are people who would want to put a "they/them" to those body types, which seems to be the main point of this body type trend.
I don't see it as a bad faith thing to be like "hey, we should include the ability for NB people to have their preferred pronouns"
Again, I agree that having more options would be better, but why does perfect have to be the enemy of good?
Edit: I also want to say that NB does not equal androgenous. Sure many NB people may desire or have an androgenous look. But I also know people who like to look and be feminine but are still NB, and the other way around
Would anyone in good faith, with only two options "Stereotypical Brodude or Fashion Magazine Cover Girl", is going to play the former with she/her or the latter with he/him?
Not sure what you mean by "good faith" here, but I can assure you there are some he/him dudebros that play female characters bc if you're gonna be staring at someone in 3rd person the entire game it might as well be someone attractive to you.
Also it's perhaps a minority of gamers, but people with fewer identity issues don't need to see themselves as a self insert for their character, so why not play someone totally different from you?
WhatbI don't get is why they are using body type A/1 and B/2. One is clearly feminine and the other masculine, regardless of the gender of the character, why not use those words? They are describing the physical form of the body, it says nothing about gender.
My point is that gaming could abandon “A/B” in favor of something more like an actual spectrum of Height, Weight, and Gender Presentation instead of just awkwardly renaming the binary? I wouldn’t get so up in arms about gender replacing body type.
Okay, but an in-depth character creation system that lets you pick and adjust individual features is a lot more work than just manually creating two models and asking the player to pick one. Adding that means something else gets cut.
Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn't be a ton of work, but devs who only offer two player models to choose from in the first place probably aren't putting that much thought into character creation.
Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work
Body types no but you also need armour and clothing for everything. You quickly get a combinatorial explosion which you can then reign in with shape keys ("sliders") which make all assets harder to develop.
In the context of Runescape this is just a hellish mess, because its ultimately a codebase from the late 90s with graphics created everywhere from the early 00s to the mid 20s. Oh and as an MMORPG anyone who was a player but stops playing is a lost sale so no pressure at all
As a woman, I look at "Body Type A or Body Type B" and think "Well, I'm a woman, not a Body Type B, and isn't it kinda misogynistic that the secondary option is the female one? Like A+ for Men, B- for Women?"
This really pissed me off, I have to say. Why are you calling the "secondary" option "the female one"? To me that seems a bit presumptuous.
If I have body type B with he/him pronouns, are you saying something about my body? Is it too "feminine" for you?
Honestly, you seem to be looking for something to complain about. The developers have taken an extra step to try to be accommodating and inclusive and your complaining about the order the choices are listed in... Smh
Its runescape, the difference between the body types is like 2 polygons
Games should just get rid of character creators. Just play the damn game with whoever the main character is and learn to empathise with someone other than yourself.
Then we'd be going back to having the vast majority of games having a cis male protagonist. No thanks. I don't mind playing as them from time to time, but I want a choice, especially if the main character is one of those blank slate types.
Games could have multiple protagonists with different bodies, genders, personalities, etc... something like Overwatch did have that, you could even play as a hamster or a robot!
keep the character creators, but only let the player use a randomizer button and a silliness slider.
I don't know whether we would have ever gotten the absolute brilliance that is Turg if proper customization weren't available.
sea of thieves style
This reminds me of that "vessel creator" troll from Deltarune
See, I don't really care that the player is referred to as "They/Them" in Deltarune, because it's established that you are playing as Kris and those are their pronouns.
(and in Undertale, the monsters simply had no idea what Frisk's gender was due to an unfamiliarity with humans so it's kept intentionally vague.. with they/them simply being the most gender neutral thing to call them and the fanbase having their own headcanons on what Frisk actually is. Personally my head canon is Frisk is male and Chara is female, which seemed to be the most common interpretation in the fanbase back then... my headcanon for Kris is that they're intersex with they/them pronouns as I see them as being representative of both Frisk and Chara, but however you see the situation is just as valid unless the creator comes out and says "No it's this specific way, everything else is wrong!" and to my knowledge Toby Fox has not done that)
Sidenote: First non-binary person I ever met used ey/eir pronouns, this was so long ago that ey called eirself "Genderless" instead of Non-Binary as the latter wasn't a word. Ey was femme presenting, but very much not female. Sadly we've drifted apart and wherever ey is I wish eir well.
I always wished ey/eir had caught on instead of "singular they", because personally I thought "ey" sounded cooler and was more straightforward than "singular they". But hey I'm not non-binary myself so it's not really any of my business.
On a similar note, I used to see shi/hir pronouns more often than I do now as well, though that was more for intersex individuals than non-binary. I still see some usage of shi/hir, though the people I see with those pronouns tend to self-identify as "hermaphrodite", a phrase that is considered highly insulting by most. I guess what I'm saying here is that there are all kinds and it's probably best not to make assumptions or assume gender to be a one-size fits all phenomenon.
But what about games that require you to distinguish yourself from other real-life players as in all massively multiplayer games?
I'm actually all for this as well, unless the game is some open-ended roleplaying experience just give me a character to play as and design the game around who this person is (I think the original Dead Rising did a good job of this with Frank West, the remake.. well unless previews are from an earlier build than what we're getting in September not so much)
And I mean a REAL open-ended roleplaying experience, not something like Fallout 4 that was blatantly designed for me to play as Nate, a lawful good heterosexual cisgender male military vet with predefined goals.... with gay romance options and the ability to play as his wife Nora existing solely to give the illusion of choice... An Illusion I still appreciate because when I play I always wind up being Nora with Curie as my wifey.
(I feel like FO4 would be far less divisive if it was a spinoff about Nate's journey rather than a sequel to a series that is known for player agency, and even then the Brotherhood of Steel suddenly being a bunch of Nazis is still stupid as hell)
I think that trying to please everyone is generally a bad idea, especially when it comes to niche social justice issues and identity, because everyone thinks their personal rules are universal these days.
With that said, body type over gender is step in the right direction.
I won't stop until we allow slutty costumes for all body types.
Again, I feel like it would be if this wasn't just "Gender Binary with feel-good buzzwords to fake inclusivity where little is present"
I just believe that you need more than "If we just don't say the M-Word/F-Word then we've solved transphobia forever" for this to be a proper step in the right direction, as it stands it just feels like "Don't say Latina/Latino! Say Latinx!" all over again, and we now how well THAT went.
You simply need more than a couple of rainbow pins on your jacket to make meaningful change.
Honestly only having two body types is the lazy part, no matter what the two types are. The best solution would be a variety of heights, weights, shoulder, waist, and hip sliders with boobs and butts and whatever else as add ons to the body shape. That should cover everyone as long as there is plenty of range on each option.
Unless everyone is in armor, in which case two or three gender neuteal body types are fine because boobs and butts won't be noticeable through armor anyway. Height is pretty much all that is different if everyone in the armor is in decent shape and the armor is made to fit a range of people.
Starfield did this the right way, just as you are suggesting. it's the only game I've seen so far that does it, but your character body exists on a wheel of buff, slender, thicker, etc. you can adjust every little part of this to get a truly unique character. i believe there were also at least 4 voice options. the rest of the game was meh, but maybe other games will start doing it that way. i think inclusion is still a very new concept in gaming, everyone is trying new things, and i appreciate the effort. it'll get there.
The Sims 4 actually added a similar approach to character creation about 2 years ago, but very different kind of game with a very different market
Off the top of my head it has options for male presenting body type, female presenting body type, sliders for fat and muscle (and you can generally reshape most of the body) and the available clothing and hairstyles got sorted into masculine and feminine with I believe more traditionally gender neutral stuff getting placed into both, then for biological purposes there's "can pee standing up/cannot pee standing up" and "can impregnate/can be impregnated" It defaults to Male/Female defaults but makes it easy to customize, and a good mix of default townies (NPCs) are all over the spectrum.
They also recently added more complex relationship and romance preferences, so sims can be sexually bi but romantically straight for example, but also expanded to allow various levels of openness to relationships as well as poly relationships
I definitely have to say, Body Type A/Body Type B definitely feels like a groan-worthy growing pain that will be ironed out sooner or later. It's just disappointing that we have to resort to such awkward terms that mislead players about how much variety across the gender spectrum is actually being offered. It almost feels like a vegan menu that still heavily uses animal byprdouct.
This almost makes me want to buy Starfield to support a proper way to revamp gender selection, but it's going to need the same amount of work that FO76 getting it from how it was at launch to the awesome experience it is now for me to dip my toes in that....
shattered space might be a perfect time to try it. that dlc is just 1 planet so it'll most likely be made how previous bethesda games were
As a cis male, fwiw, I personally wouldn’t even think about it if the male body was option B or 2 or whatever, but what do you think about a feminine to masculine slider? I think Elden ring did that and it seems pretty clever. After that I think there were other sliders for options such as weight or fitness or whatever.
That's morph targets and you just increased the budget for the character model and every single set of clothing and armour by a whole magnitude. Might even influence animations, though I guess with Elden Ring being the game that it is those are the same for everyone.
I was not aware of this slider, as I don't really go for Souls-Like games, but it sounds like a perfect solution.
It's indeed low effort comparing to your proposal, but I think it's still better than the previous one.
I agree that your setup would be perfect, but the reality of the situation is that it depends on the engine and how much time the programmers/artists/whatever have.
Like if the engine doesn't support dynamically resizing equipment, then you have to make every single piece of equipment over again for every body shape. That is a potentially massive amount of work, even if there is tooling that will automate most of it and only require retouching. There's only so much time in the day, and every hour that people are working on this is an hour that they aren't working on building more levels or adding more systems, etc.
Is it better to have "Body Shape A/B" or "Male Body / Female Body"? Because those are the options that are the same amount of work.
It would be better to have a ton of body options. It would be even better to have sliders and have everything adjust itself to fit whatever shape you make. But both of those options take time to work on, and time is money.
I don't think it's fair to call (for a specific choice) BG3's developers lazy because they only have 2 (or 4 for some races) body sizes. They are just optimizing their time investment.
Yeah, but In Baldur's Gate 3 I can make a feminine looking character with tits and a big throbbing horse dick, a masculine character with a vagina, or an adrogynous character with whatever the hell I want.. So having the pronouns separate from the build actually makes sense. The concept of binary gender identity is subverted enough for pronoun selection to serve a practical purpose.
In something like Old School Runescape or the Demon's Souls remaster? Not so much.
If I'm ONLY going to have two body type choices, Buff Dude or Curvy Chick, why this unnatural "Body Type A/Body Type B" language instead of saying "Masculine/Feminine" ? It just makes me feel like I'm in some Orwellian New Speak environment that just simply doesn't exist in day to day life. And again, Non-Binary individuals aren't getting any favors here because they're STILL forced into a dichotomy of Masculine or Feminine, it's just now that "Those buzzword unfriendly M and F-Words" aren't present. The best a non-binary individual can really get in that situation is do a heads/tails coin toss and pick They/Them pronouns.
No one's needs are really being met here, we're just forcing awkward corporate jargon to pretend the game is more inclusive than it really is.
Fun fact, BG3 only has a max of 4 body types per race, and the lower genitalia each have their own models to fit each body type, and that's just for the "normal" sized races. The short races also have their body types, and so does the Dragonborn. Each armour and clothing piece has to have one unique model and rig to fit each of those body types; that's a lot of modeling and rigging work.
Now how much gear is there in Runescape?
As someone is very much not cisgender, I look at it and go "Well, isn't every FTM going to pick Body Type A with male pronouns while MTFs like myself go with Body Type B with female pronouns? Who outside of a Far Right Troll trying and failing to be funny is gonna pick the buff bearded dude and select the she/her pronouns?"
Me! What do you have against bearded, manly ladies? They're awesome!
It is kinda lazy to have "full masculine" and "full feminine" as your only choices while pretending they aren't just "male" or "female", but at the same time, I think it's a step in the right direction. Today the options might be "not-man" and "not-woman", but the future might have "not-man", "not-woman", "man-woman" and "woman-man"!
One thing that always irks me with character customization is how often games have more customization options for girl characters. I have always assumed that developers only allocate so much time and resources to character creators and call it a day.
Not always true; I was quite disappointed with the lack of labia options in Cyberpunk 2077.
Hah that's true. I thought it was odd that they mentioned how you could customize genitalia and then they had 2 options for penis's and only one vagina option. It definitely seemed like an advertising strategy more than anything
I agree with what others said that more customization is generally good, but not all games really need that level of customization. For something like animal crossing, I think the body type thing is fine, since the designs are more neutral unlike what you're describing. I think what could help is a third option that's a more neutral body type. Or maybe if it's not relevant, just don't have a body type option.
I also don't know much about runescape, but I assume this was an update that just changed the names from genders to body types, so adding other options might have increased the scope of the update. I think at least uncoupling that from gender is at least an improvement over before. Plus, I kinda disagree that people would only pick the corresponding pronouns. Plenty of people have a gender expression that doesn't necessarily match their gender identity.
Oh definitely, heck, in Animal Crossing they might as well just ask for your pronouns and nothing else... In fact doesn't New Horizons basically do that? But I'm referring more to the more common scenario of "Beefy Guy" and "Curvy Cutie", which we see in World of Warcraft, you can pick whatever pronouns you want but it's going to go on either on testosterone fueled bearded Dwarf you've ever seen or the hourglass with pointy ears we call a Night Elf...
When you only get two body type options and neither have any level of androgyny, what does pretending they aren't gendered when they clearly are accomplish? That's the part I have an issue with, it's dishonesty being masqueraded as progress. Either have androgynous character options or don't pretend "Body Type A/B" is a solution to a problem.
I feel The Sims 4 gets this right by letting you pick between male, female, or a custom gender (where you can decide if the sims pees standing up or sitting down, whatever pronouns you want them to have, whether the sim gets others pregnant, becomes pregnant, both, or neither), and ALL THREE of them have a healthy amount of customization options to go for whatever look you want.
Yeah I agree with you there. If you're gonna just give two or three body type options and no other customization, there should be an androgenous option or at least they should all be generally androgenous. I think the issue with runescape probably stems from how the game was before.
Crazy talk, and you're onto something... that's been solved already.
First part: you hate that a 10+ years old game is only getting cosmetic changes instead of a rehaul of the whole character model. That's crazy, nobody's going to do that, not the ones expecting a profit, and not the modding community doing it for free. If you feel it's a silly change, you're right, but realize that it's the only change they could do.
You're onto something: body feature sliders. Male, female, giraffe, and turtle bodies, have some structural differences, that however mostly match to the same bones having different shapes. The solution is a body shape slider, or 50. It's something that existed, in some games, since at least the 2000s. Others were lazy and didn't do it.
For reference of how far this could go, the following all have the same bones, only change in shape, size, and muscle placemen:
I really appreciate your points and this comparison, but the pictures are giving me Attack on Titan vibes lol
Hold up...
Runescape has a mod scene?
Well, there is an OpenSource client, and private servers with custom rules. That makes every modification possible.
I've had this exact thought in my head the past few days, including the idea that having 3 or 4 different types would actually fulfill the goal of avoiding "Male/Female" choices - something that only Saint's Row has done, AFAIK.
The issue is that they only changed the label and Body Type A and B are still clearly Male and Female, but for some reason people praise it as not being gender locked because...?
Its even more ridiculous in games like Monster Hunter Rise for example, where you get the Type A and Type B body options...and then you still get gendered outfits where one is fully covered and the other is baring their midriff and wearing dresses! Wow, I wonder which is supposed to be which!? /sarcasm
I've heard that for Monster Hunter Rise "Type A/Type B" was decided upon by the localization and that in Japan (the country of origin for MHR) they just use Male/Female. Meaning it's not the dev being lazy, it's localization earning themselves a "You Tried" ribbon.
At least, that's what I've heard.
Games that do this aren’t being progressive or inclusive, they’re changing the color of the cup that my drink comes in and pretending it’s an entirely new beverage.
The thing is... if you use "dude" and "chick" in the body type descriptions you're implying gender identity. There may be better options that "Type A" and "Type B" but dude and chick ain't it because it simply means male and female.
In a very flexible system, you could use more granular options like "wide shoulders", "wide hips", "boobage", etc, to freely mix+match everything. It's also expensive to develop and even more expensive to create clothing for and a gazillion times more expensive to make really good-looking clothing for (fabric folds and flow aren't easy). From a developer's perspective, looking at the work involved really makes you want to say "We'll just tell the player they're now Geralt of Rivia and that's it".
I think for most games the appropriate choice would be to have an early radio button, saying "male/female/it's complicated", the first two options hiding every enby option including pronoun selection. That's right-out trivial to do and just good UX. And yes the body types should be called male and female, you already selected "it's complicated" so it's clear that when you're selecting a body, you're selecting a body, not identity.
As to laziness: Eh. Noone's going to start a research programme on how to do things in an optimal way for a re-release. Someone had a look at the code and assets and thought "hey we can support separate pronouns and bodies without doing anything more than providing an option" and that's exactly what they did, using the extent of knowledge and consideration that was already in-house. Yep, it very well can happen that if you take your foot out of one thing, you put it right into another.
As to "primary/secondary": One of the options has to be to the left, or on top, of the other. Ain't no way around that. I mean you could put option B on the left of option A to cancel things out but now you're being confusing. More importantly you can make it so that none is selected by default.
Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?
Yes and no you're being quite personal, and I include your perspective shift into the POV of others in that, about things that will never make 100% of the people 100% happy because technical reasons. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all.
"Dude and Chick" aren't terms I'm saying they should use instead, I'm saying Body Type A and B come across as disingenuous and better terminology could be used. "Masculine" and "Feminine" would work, as you can be masculine without being male. I'm a short-haired tomboy who strongly prefers she/her pronouns, I'd be considered "Masculine, but not male" even if I was cis!
Heck I myself am in a relationship with a cisgender male who presents feminine with many of his behaviors, but that doesn't make him less of a man aynmore than being masculine makes me less of a woman. We're all adults here we know that pink can be for boys and blue can be for girls, this isn't kindgergarten in the 80's anymore.
In fact let's take a look at how Old School Runescape handles it. This image is.. not great..
Why is the term "Body Type A" and "Body Type B" present at all when there are clear pictures of the two options that speak for themselves? It feels like just going out of the way to include "the corporate approved buzzwords intended for maximum synergy with the brand!"
That's not the only problem with the UI as we're still seeing rigid reinforcement of the gender binary.
The example picture of the more masculine build has a beard and the example picture of the more feminine build has a skirt, as if to reinforce gendered stereotypes while trying to avoid using the word gender, which is a mixed message at best.. And to really draw the point, she/her is located just under the feminine option, and he/him is under the masculine option as if to imply these are the "correct" options.
The message this gives off is "Look, we call these A and B, but you and I know what's really going on here eh fellow cisheteronormative? Gotta check off that box for corporate"
When the message they should be giving off is "He, she, they... whatever, it's all good. All we have is that you have fun playing our game and try not to let anyone else tell you who you're supposed to be!"
I agree we should be more inclusive, but we should do so in a way that feels less insulting and backhanded.
Why is the term “Body Type A” and “Body Type B” present at all when there are clear pictures of the two options that speak for themselves? It feels like just going out of the way to include “the corporate approved buzzwords intended for maximum synergy with the brand!”
"Type A" and "Type B", I assure you, are not things corporate or marketing came up with. This is programmer speak for "I don't want to name it but can't call it
fooandbareither because normies will be seeing it".As said: This is a re-release. The game and its assets was originally never designed to support anything but a strict binary, but the pronoun vs. body type thing was trivial to do, so they did it. And then for some reason avoided "male" and "female" because face it that sounds like a good idea especially if you're not overthinking it and the labels were left in because probably also easier to do. Or just didn't consider the alternative.
That is: You're assuming intent when there's simply economy of action. You might call it laziness, but then the people who did that release had 10000 other things to do besides that.
Oh wow, I could never put to words why I didn't like the body type system either, but you nailed it. Yeah, I also wish that games could just give you sliders and/or more presets or something to have actual variety. If a game will only support curvy girls and buff dudes, but won't also let people make, for instance, cute androgynous cat boys, or anything else a person might fancy, then what's the point of it?
A good option that I think could work could be "fat distribution", instead of body type.
Selecting chest, abdomen and/or legs would be great for binary and non-binary people depending or their presentation.
God I'd love to redistribute the fat from my belly to my hips and tits
Right? Both traditional genders have a characteristic fat distribution, allowing to customize them independently (sliders!) would be a win-win for binary and non-binary people.
