I don’t have a lot of time to play game these days. I usually play games like Cities Skylines where it’s easy to pause and exit. I basically have 1-4 hours to game a week - depending on the week. But ever since coming out trans, I’ve wondered if there was a game that casually was affirming. I realize I could play an RPG where you can design your character, but most of those games have you spend 2 hours designing and then you never really look at the character again. Baldur’s Gate was a lot of fun, but it’s a little too deep to play casually on the side. I strongly prefer a non-NSFW game. I realize a lot of NSFW games exist on Steam that do explore trans concepts (I assume), but I’m looking for a more positive, gentle, affirmation.
But I don’t want to knock down too many ideas! What do you play?
Edit: I realize I made it sound like I’ve excluded all RPGs which I don’t want to be the case since - inherently - anything affirming will have some RPG element to it. I just don’t think first-person RPGs really work since I spend most of my time looking at my hands and I don’t get to see my character.
I would probably recommend mass effect. It’s an RPG in third person. I found playing an RPG character with voice acting was much more affirming, because it let me feel like I was the character much easier than games without voiced protagonists.
My own voice even within my own thoughts sounded masculine until I did voice training work. Reading my own character’s voice was enough to take me out of the experience. Also Jennifer Hale is voice goals.
I would also recommend playing games where women are the target audience. The sims is a good example of that. Core games with female protagonists are generally not great, because they assume the audience is male and are built with that attitude. They tend to put a distance between you and the character when female. When you play uncharted, you are nathan drake, but when you play tomb raider you are not lara croft.