Read on Twitter
Okay so, controversy aside, Cyberpunk 2077 helped me realize I *really* like being a girl in video games. This is a self discovery thread.
When I was much younger, I played a game called Pokemon Crystal. When Professor Oak first asked me "are you a boy or a girl" I picked girl, even though I've always ID'ed as male in real life. I did not see this as a contradiction.
The very first video game I played on PC was the original Tomb Raider. My father introduced me to it. The original designer, Toby Gard, has said that players were originally supposed to be able to choose between a male or female player character, but the male option was scrapped.
This was mainly due to time and resources, but also because he noticed that male players would pick the sole female character in Virtua Fighter more often than the male options, and thought that was interesting.
He put it a bit crassly, saying that "If the player has to be staring at an arse, it might as well be a nice arse," but he failed to foresee how utterly *foundational* Tomb Raider was for me as both a gamer and a person.
It reminds me of Trinity in The Matrix. @theymerSophie has joked that it's common for folks who don't yet realize they're trans/NB to not be sure whether they want to be *with* Trinity, or BE Trinity. That was Lara Croft for me.
Of course I didn't realize any of that at the time. A commonly held adage with fiction is that people like to have an avatar that they can project themselves onto, but I'm so used to seeing myself represented that I often seek to dissociate, to experience the lives of others.
It's why I fucked so hard with The Last of Us Part II. Inhabiting Ellie and Abby, learning to see the world from their perspective and wearing their morality on my shoulders rather than force my own opinions into it was a roleplaying experience like nothing else.
Over the years, I've sought out video games the let me be a girl, even as I continued to identify as a straight cis man. A significant part of my online identity is based around largely female-centric fandoms, like the recent She-Ra reboot.
The weight of it all hit me like a goddamn truck when I watched @ThoughtSlime's video, "We Don't Talk About She-Ra."
The last third of that video is an incredibly personal exploration of gender that, I suddenly realized, *described me to a fucking tee.*
I always liked girly things growing up, and when playing pretend I didn't always want to be male. I didn't want to be straight. I didn't always want to be what I thought of as "me."
The weekend before Christmas, I participated in @theymerSophie's charity stream raising money for trans healthcare in the UK. I heard many inspiring stories about the struggle that people go through just to be who they are. And little doubts started to creep in.
For fucking YEARS, I thought I was straight because I'd always been fed a narrative that being gay or bisexual came with some level of struggle that I'd never personally experienced. Same with gender. But then I played a little game called Cloudpunk.
Your AI companion in the game, Camus, worries that he might forget that he was ever a dog as he spends so much time as a car. Then Rania drops a bomb that reshaped how I looked at myself: "Whatever you feel like, that's what you are."
Cloudpunk is a fantastic little game that made me cry so hard and so much, but pairing it with Cyberpunk 2077 helped me ask questions about identity and what it means to be "myself."
CP 2077 gives the player an unprecedented level of control over gender presentation. Other games have let me control female characters, but this one let me *be* a girl in a way I can only describe as euphoric. I loved hearing Cherami Leigh's voice coming out of my character.
I loved dressing myself and role-playing as a female avatar whose destiny I decided. It let me fucking roleplay, which is what kept me coming back to this game even after all the crashes and the bugs. It helped me figure out some things.
I think I might have just come out via Twitter. Oh well. Pronouns are in bio now.
