I Love Sunless Skies’s Gender Defying Character Creator
I’m a woman who plays games, which I know isn’t remarkable — we make up 52% of gamers. However, I am also a gender non-conforming lesbian, because I enjoy whittling myself down into increasingly unrelatable niches. I even use the word “butch” as a noun sometimes: My name is Ruth, and I’m a butch.
Whenever I am given the choice to play a female player character, I take it. I’ve enjoyed many games with male protagonists, but I feel like I control them, not that I play as them. I can’t relate to their stories. It feels more true to play as a female protagonist, but it raises a dilemma for me: In a game, designers need to define boundaries around what makes this avatar recognisably a woman, and not a man, or a sword, or any other asset in their game world.
Within these boundaries, women have certain hairstyles, wear certain clothes, and are usually heterosexual, even when romance options or a fixed love interest do not feature in the game.
I don’t fit within these boundaries. I have a men’s haircut, I prefer men’s clothes, and I have a long-term girlfriend. I can break these expectations in real life more easily than I can go against game design, but I still face resistance. Every time I’m made uncomfortable by the programmed limits of how “woman” works in a game world, I’m reminded of the discomfort I experience when a new hairdresser tries to “fix” my hairstyle into an adorable pixie, or I go shopping in public and find myself surrounded by clothes I could never wear, or someone asks what my boyfriend does (she’s an accountant, thanks for asking!)
Sunless Skies is a gothic horror RPG about exploring the skies in an alternate history where Queen Victoria breached the heavens, filled with explorers, devils, bees, and hours of surreal storytelling.
When you create a captain, you create a visual cameo of them, with options for hair, hat, brow, nose, chin, and outfit. None of these features are organised in a way to separate and define “masculine” or “feminine” features and accessories, but simply presented as they are without comment. You’re given a randomised cameo to start with so I had to go out of my way to try and match the sliders. I was delighted to find I was correct in assuming that this also would not produce something organised: matching all of the third options, for example, gave me an individual with a strong brow and delicate nose, full beard and moustache, and a bun tucked under a feathered cap.
Sunless Skies has no interest in telling me, or even asking me, what my gender is. In fact, its character creator explicitly says otherwise underneath the options for the term of address:
“This will determine what people call your captain, but your captain’s gender is up to you.”
You choose a term of address, and a name. There are gendered address options such as “My lord” and “My lady”, but options that are much more narratively evocative are “Specialist”, “Reverend” and “Comrade”.
I have played many captains, as is the way in Sunless Skies: death is frequent and you pass on your legacy to the next captain to come after you. I have had a “My lady” captain, a Lady Madigan, ex Queen’s guard with a stern brow and long hair stuffed under a sailor’s hat. A Comrade O’Connor, whose entire lower face is obscured by a large scarf, a violent revolutionary back in London. Captain Whitlock, who frowns over the glasses she wore when writing subversive pamphlets against the establishment.
Role-playing games are at their best when you can feel immersed in the stories they are telling, no matter how fantastical. None of the captains I’ve made have been me — they’re far too quick to cannibalise their own crews — but there’s a truth and relatability in playing as them that wouldn’t be there if I were controlling a male avatar, or trying to avoid the more discomfiting gender signifiers of a female one.
Sunless Skies is a game that cares about telling stories, about people and their temptations and curiosities, and at no point does it need to define the player’s gender to do so. Players can engage with that aspect of their own captains as much or as little as they like, without bumping into gender boundaries imposed by game design or social pressure. I hope that more games take this direction in the future, soaring the wide open skies of truly flexible gender representation.
