1. Dress-up functionality.
2. Play as girl.
3. Everything else.Why is important to play as a girl?
Because I like to play as a girl.
Lemme tell you a story.
Mount & Blade, and specifically the expanded standalone version Mount & Blade: Warband, is one of my all-time favorite games. I’ve only logged 259 hours on it on Steam, but give me a break, I have two kids and a book habit.
I’ve played as a guy in Mount & Blade … once. The save file didn’t last long. I didn’t connect to my character as well. There was something deeply rewarding about loading up this fantasy world, being a woman, and chopping the shit out of the Nords until Swadia held all the land there was that was deeply satisfying.
Here’s the thing about Mount & Blade. There was a blog post that I meant to write for a long time, and never did, about how Mount & Blade was doing feminism right. I guess this is that post, six or seven years later. I’m not going to pretend the game does it perfectly, and I’m not here to defend everything anybody can drag up about the game, I’m not going down that rabbithole. But here’s the thing: There is a difference between playing a man and playing a woman in the game, and that difference is that playing a woman is literally hardmode.
I’m not talking about stat differences, although they are there. (Something like +1 agi and -1 str for being a woman, which, no, but whatever; it barely matters even in the early game.) No, the difference is that you can do everything a man can do, just as well, but anything that involves somebody else recognizing your accomplishments is harder.
I first rode under the banner of Swadia, and early in my travels I took into my band Ymira, a runaway noblewoman. She had all the expertise in combat that one might expect of a sheltered socialite, but I gave her a sword, and we conquered. My Renown began to grow. One day she pulled me aside and said, “If you were a man, King Harlaus would have given you a castle by now.” That sounds nice, I thought. If only it worked that way. I had asked him about it once. He explained that it wouldn’t look right for him to just give a castle to a woman. There would be rumors. I later learned that that wasn’t just throwaway dialog. A male character of my renown would have been given a castle. He wouldn’t have to ask. I had what castles I could take with my own sword arm, if I asked for them, if my liege decided that I was the best of his lords to take it.
In a foreign city, I met Lady Isolla of Suno, who had been named heir by her father before Harlaus took the throne anyway. I broke ways with Harlaus and rode under her banner. I didn’t look back.
Later, in another game, I struck ties with all nations and raised my own flag. Nobody told me what to do with the castles I took; that was my decision. Eventually the other factions were forced to admit that I wasn’t just a bandit.
It’s 2011, and Mount and Blade isn’t yet an old game. Warband has only been out a year, and the next expansion, With Fire and Sword, is on the way. I am beside myself with excitement. It sounds amazing. Instead of wartorn Calradia, With Fire and Sword takes place in historical Europe. I don’t really care; I’m more interested in the system upgrades. Forgive me if I don’t remember what they were; it’s been half a decade. I couldn’t wait to play the game, but I knew that it might be a few months before we could afford it. As the release date approached I drank every detail I could find on the game. After it released I voraciously read through every review I could find that talked about how the game played.
A few weeks after release, I got an email from Steam. My wife had bought the game and gifted it to me.
That evening she joined me as I booted it up for the first time. I launched a new game, made my character, got into the game. Somehow I had missed or skipped over or accidentally clicked through a critical step in character creation. My character was a guy. I exited to main menu and started over.
No mistake this time. I couldn’t find where to play as a woman. I started looking for information online - maybe I had missed something? Big mistake.
There was no option. Because, you see, it’s based on a historical novel, and the protagonist was a guy. So your character is a guy. Not a specific guy, you can play any dude you want, but it would be unfaithful to the source material to play a woman. Anyway, the game is all about fighting for the throne of France or something, and really, do you think the French people would just let a woman be king? There’s not even a word for that! You have to understand that it was made by a small team, and it would be a lot of work to create female versions of all the armor meshes in the game. How could you ask them to do that?! It’s a passion project! Anyway that’s something that always bothered people about Mount & Blade, it’s just unrealistic to play as a woman in that game anyway. At the end of the day, who cares? Just play a dude! It’s just a game.
I was stunned. I was angry. I was crushed.
It’s six years later. A podcaster (/author/game designer) mentioned that he was playing With Fire and Sword, and someone else on the podcast brought up the issue with not being able to play women. He had no idea what they were talking about. He was playing a woman.
I went back and looked it up. You could, now. It had been patched in on June 21, 2011, less than three months after the game’s release. The same patch had a rebalance for firearms and melee weapons, the ability to crouch, a new explosion damage system, a new system for caravan trading. Somehow, against all odds, they had managed to work in female characters too.
I reinstalled the game. I loaded it up. I noodled around. I couldn’t remember what the features I had been so excited about were. I had a firearm, sure, but all I could think about was how I felt back in 2011. How I felt again, now. I couldn’t enjoy the game. It was poisoned for me. I uninstalled it.
I have 72 minutes logged on Steam.
Years later, I would come out as trans. I’ll leave any relevancy that may or may not have as an exercise to the reader.
That’s why it’s important to be able to play as a girl.
Confirmed mount and blade makes you trans.
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