It is the early 2000s. You are a teenage girl. You love to play shooters. Your playable character options in these games are Guy and Slightly Different Guy.
It is 2009. You’ve branched out into RPGs and online games, including World of Warcraft. Your playable character options have expanded, too: now you get Guy, Slightly Different Guy, Nerdy Guy, and Girl. Playing Guy feels right — it’s familiar, and it’s the default setting for the game, so you don’t get any weird story moments. But it also feels like a lie, because you’re not a guy.
Playing Girl feels right in a different way… and yet, it still feels like a lie. After all, “There Are No Girls on the internet.” And even if there were, people don’t play girls just because they are girls. That would be asking for trouble.
It is 2013. You watch the internet implode after Anita Sarkeesian launches a Kickstarter campaign for her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series.
You play Mass Effect for the first time. You try to make a Shepard who looks like you, but is also a guy. It feels… less wrong.
You watch the internet implode as Gamergate sweeps social media.
It is 2019. Kait Diaz in Gears of War 5 might be the first woman you’ve played in a shooter that feels like a real person. You love that she exists. You kind of want to switch back to JD Fenix.
It is 2024. You’ve been using they/them pronouns in one social group or another for about four years. One of those social groups has started playing Helldivers 2.
You fire up the game. At no point does it ask you to select a gender — we don’t have time for that sort of thing; there are bugs to be killed. Eventually, you select a “brawny” or “lean” model for your character. Each time you drop into a mission, your voice pack is randomized. Some voices sound masculine, and some sound feminine, but they’re only distinguished by a number in the settings.
Choosing to be consistently masculine is exactly as much of a choice as choosing to be consistently feminine. Choose to change nothing, and you contain multitudes.
For the first time, it doesn’t just feel less wrong. It feels right.
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