Saints Row 2 is essentially the stereotypical video game. By that, I mean that when I talk to non-gamers about video games, they all imagine every video game is essentially one long romp of extreme violence and explicit sex with no discernible plot or mitigating feature. Saints Row 2 is that video game and more.
Anna Anthropy also argues that the game makes some interesting choices in how it handles the gender of the main character the user plays:
There are tons of gendered accessories for the player’s character – she’s surrounded by urban gang culture, or some facsimile thereof – but the game gives the player the choice of how to use those accessories (or not) to present her gender. Play as a burly man in a dress and heels, a woman with a beard, someone totally androgynous – I played through the game as a fat woman, and I can’t remember the last time a game, mainstream or otherwise, gave me that choice. You can present as a wide variety of genders because, for all the game’s scripted scenes and recorded dialogue, no one ever gives you a gender.
All of the dialogue has been written to explicitly avoid giving the protagonist a gender, in fact. Your gang minions address you as “Boss,” and refer to you in third person either as “the Boss” or “the leader of the Saints.” No one ever gives you a pronoun. There’s a scene early in the game where one of the Saints’ lieutenants is planning a raid on a casino by moving bobble heads of the gang members through a scale model of the place: the player’s character is represented by a featureless, genderless chess pawn. The player is given the room to internalize her character how she pleases. At the start of Saint’s Row 2, a fellow Saint who knows the protagonist from the first Saint’s Row says, “You look different. You do something with your hair?” That’s the game’s tacit acceptance of however you’ve decided to present your character. And who’s going to question it? Who would fuck with the boss of the Saints?
I couldn’t agree more, and I wish more games would give you this range of choices.
For the life of me, for example, I cannot understand why Madden NFL will not allow me to create a female character for its Superstar mode. The common argument I have seen online is that this wouldn’t be “realistic.” Really? Well, it is not very realistic when I run for 1,000 yards in a game on the Rookie setting, either.
After all, this is what games do best–allow players to make all sorts of different choices in simulated worlds and see what happens. A video game where gang leaders and starting linebackers can only be one gender is beyond dull.