Do you know what ‘playersexual’ means? It refers to romanceable video game characters whose sexual orientations are, rather than being canonically gay or straight, whatever they need to be in order for the player to romance them as whichever gender they choose. It sounds like it means that all romanceable characters would be bisexual or pansexual, but in practice it means that they’re straight when you’re straight, and they’re gay when you’re gay. What’s the difference? Well, if you’re playing as a gay man, the playersexual male character you’re courting is unlikely to reference having come out or how his parents feel about his sexuality or when he first realized he was gay, and he’s definitely not going to talk about having had relationships with women in the past.

This approach has its proponents, and I admit it’s better than not having queer characters or relationships present at all, but I tend to prefer it when characters have canon, well thought out sexual orientations as part of the larger package of who they are, even if it sometimes means I can’t date the hot straight guy. It makes characters and worlds feel more real, and it doesn’t give homophobic straight players a way to pretend gay people don’t exist. (This YouTube essay goes into some of the problems of playersexuality specifically from a bisexual point of view, and I highly recommend giving it a watch.)

But what does all that matter to Desert of Ash? I’m making a gay game for gays! Well, I actually think gay adult games kind of have their own version of playersexuality that crops up from time to time. While not nearly as problematic as playersexuality in games for broader audiences, I think it still places limits on characterization.

For some players of gay adult games, there is one key preference that they have going into a game: do they top, or do they bottom? For some folks, if they’re a bottom in real life, they want to play as a bottom in their games too, with no exceptions. Some developers accommodate this by making a game only for tops or only for bottoms, aiming for one specific slice of the audience and understanding that they’re losing another. Others don’t want to compromise, and aim to please everyone by making all potential partners versatile.

This is what I mean when I say that gay adult games have their own version of playersexuality. These games flatten the range of positional preferences you will run into in real life to universal versatility, reducing the diversity of their casts and eschewing opportunities to create depth by building these preferences into who characters are.

This is not to say that tops should ‘act like tops’ and bottoms should ‘act like bottoms’. Both in and outside of the gay community, stereotypes exist around who bottoms and who tops, with associations being made between preferences and femininity/masculinity or body type. These stereotypes are false: there are big, beefy, submissive bottoms, hyper-feminine power tops, and everything in between. However, top/bottom preferences do exist and are informed by not just biological but also social and psychological aspects of people’s lives.

I’ve touched on this before in a previous devlog, but in Desert of Ash, the player character is versatile and open to the preferences of his many potential partners. This gives me the opportunity to work those preferences into who each man is, giving them another layer of characterization. Is this a core, vital part of who each guy is? Not really, but it assists in one’s understanding of him, just like knowing his favourite sandwich would.

I want to represent a broad spectrum of queer male sexuality, and I want each person you meet on your journey to feel real. Deciding on characters’ sexual preferences is just one tool I’ve used to meet those goals, and one I’m happy not to have left out of my toolbox.