Following suggestions from the other poll, I've created this one. I'm curious to see the statistics myself



Please be honest when voting



Some clarifications:

1) transex/transgender could also be an alien race (like Planet Stronghold).

2) asexual means both a purely platonic romance, or also romance with beings that can't have sex (ie. robots or "entities")



I think this is the ultimate romance poll because should cover all the possibilities!

Quick question, is there a limit on poll choices you can add? Since some players are non-binary gendered and can't answer the poll.



Tweetblocked Ae (who identifies as non-binary) has added:

So F/F, M/M, T/T, F/T, M/T, can be purely romantic or not, any perspective.



Two people expressed interest in playing as a trans character. (Post-operation characters, too)



I'll do my best to keep track of answers that can't be covered in the poll. You can contact me via PM or Twitter if you want an answer included. (@kittykatstargal)

The problem/limit of phpbb is that if I change the poll, all results are reset

So I try to do the less possible. Is true that the normal F/F, M/M etc can be romantic - however the asexual one for sure, while the other could be not. I didn't want to put yet-more-choices

No prob, totally understandable. I'll do my best to keep track of any options that can't be covered in the poll.

So, after some heavy thinking, it seemed a bit pointless to just choose everything...although that would've kind of been according to my philosophy to do that...... so decided to choose everything except yuri available to a player of my gender ..

Why not yuri? Because it'll most likely be offered here anyway.

Why everything else? As stated by a couple of others in the thread that gave birth to this poll, I, too, am interested in the character interactions in VNs/RPG/fiction in general, and if those are well written, gender will be secondary.



So here's a slogan for Sprites:

Gender is nothing.

Love is everything.

Obey your Love.

An user on twitter commented:

"I think you'd want to fix transgender/transex to "genderqueer" - most trans people are male- or female-identified so having them as a separate "third gender" invalidates their stated gender identities".

So well think like that - I don't want to change the term because would reset all the votes count (is really a crazy limitation of phpBB polls but already happened in the past).

Well, yes, most transgender people identify as male or female, so technically they would be included in the male and female categories. I guess the intent was to see how players would take to transgender romance interests?



Romancing aliens is completely different from romancing a transgender character, though. I don't think I've ever seen a transgender or genderqueer romance option in a game, but romancing aliens isn't even a big deal nowadays. You do it all the time in Mass Effect. I think you should just edit out that clarification. It's messing up your data. Plus, lumping genderqueer people together with aliens is unfortunate.



Personally, I'd love to see a genderqueer or transgender character, whether they're romanceable or not. There are a lot of possibilities of messing up and unintentionally misrepresenting or hurting players, though, so if you choose to include that type of NPC maybe you could show it to a few people who are knowledgeable on the subject and get some feedback. Just to make sure there aren't problematic aspects of the portrayal that you didn't see yourself. If you have just one character in the game who belongs to a certain monority, everything about that character becomes a big deal. (Bioware learned this when people pointed out that they reproduced stereotypes by havig their only trans character be a sex worker, which wouldn't be as much of a problem if it wasn't the only trans character. They'd never thought about that, but promised they'd shape up in DA3.)



I'd also be thrilled to see an asexual character in a game, mostly because I'm thrilled by diversity in general. While I'm not really interested in playing platonic romances, I'd give it a go if it was well-written and I liked the character enough. Same with romancing characters/entities that can't have sex. Also, I wouldn't mind if a romance option wanted to wait until marriage. (I guess that's pretty much how all romances work in most games, though - wait until you love each other and have the sex scene as the romance end game. It'd be nice to see some variety in how the romances are paced. Like, maybe one romance has the sex scene early on and the cute, tender scene at the end.)

Hi,



this is interesting. I erroneously tried to read some things into the poll until I realised that these numbers are tricky to interpret without knowing how many male/female players voted in total. Players can vote for multiple options, and the number of votes per gender isn't listed above. For the benefit of readers who made the same mistake, here's a quick explanation: right now there is a total of 172 votes from male players (they've cast fewer votes, so let's give them a little space here). The most highly voted male player option is female + female (at 3, so barring double votes you have at least 38 players who voted -- and at most 172. That's a huge range.



Let's consider female + male (now at 19). If 100% of male players voted for female + female (meaning that exactly 38 male players voted), then 50% of your male players are interested in playing female + male, so there's a substantial difference in how many are interested in that option. If all male players only voted for a single option (meaning that 172 male players voted), then only 11% of your male players are willing to play female + male, as opposed to 22% in female + female.



Even more fun with statistics: if you sum up all male votes, you get 38% of the total vote. However, we again don't see a number that shows how many players (total or for each of the listed genders) voted, so those 38% doesn't tell us much about the voter population. Depending on how peple used the multi-vote ability, you might have anywhere between 12% (38 males, females never multi-vote) and 69% (172 males, 78 females) male players...



(Yes, I'm great fun at parties, too...)



You may have access to those gender-segregated vote counts and are probably considering this, but we casual visitors will be left out a little. So I'll be curious to hear about any conclusions from this data.



- peregrin

The problem is that is impossible to have "reliable" stats - for example I thought about making this two separate polls, one for male players and another for female players. But then, who would check if males voted also for females, and vice-versa? impossible to know

However, assuming AT LEAST people voted for what they really wanted (it would be weird if they didn't!!), I can know for example how much interest there is in yuri (GxG), yaoi (BxB) and so on. So I think at least for that should be useful

This is really interesting. I thought for sure that there would be more female player: male + male since in the past there were some many female shounen-ai and yaoi fans. But the poll has just started so I'll have to check back later. I like that there is a nice variety of players out there and that they are voting.

Of course will leave it running for months before drawing conclusions, for example now the male player: playing as male + female got a huge jump respect to only 1-2 days ago

Very interesting poll! Thanks for putting it up.



I personally chose the het, yuri and asex options (Female player).

Looking at the results of this poll so far--- Does it strike interesting to anyone else in addition to moi, that the heterosexual romance playing as the opposite gender is the least favourite for both female and male players?



EDIT: Typing this as a player who plays all the above options as long and the story/characters are intriguing enough.

So interesting! I just voted and it's pretty cool how popular romances with transgender (or genderqueer) and asexual characters are. :3 It's second place in the female pole, and a very close third on the male pole.

Jack - can you draw any conclusions with more than 1000 votes cast?



I'm hoping that having 1/4 of the total votes being cast for yuri makes those routes/games more likely.

Well the conclusion I can draw is that I should make games with all romances

Of course while that won't be always possible, I'll try to.



About yuri, if you consider the games released in the last 2-3 years we have:

Planet Stronghold

Spirited Heart Girl's Love

Loren+expansion

Heileen 3

Roommates



in practice the only games without yuri were Bionic Heart 2 (but that game has few romance in general) and Nicole (but as you know the yuri version was planned from the start, is only late but will come).

And in the upcoming games, beside SOTW, Nicole yuri and the still unnamed yuri-exclusive dating sim, there are yuri romances in all games (Roger Steel, Spirited Heart 2, Amber's Magic Shop).



So I think you can stay safe regarding yuri!

Not to mention Planet Stronghold 2 will have yuri romances, and I can guarantee PSCD. I really hope we get a chance to show you some of the small peeks of the romance CGs (on all of them).

I voted for female x female, the male x asexual, and male x transgender, but honestly I didn't want to vote for the male x transgender and male x asexual, I wanted to vote for female x trans and female x asexual since I prefer playing as a girl, but there was no option for male players, so is this really the "ultimate" romance poll?

I definitely think we need romancible robots though

So interesting! I just voted and it's pretty cool how popular romances with transgender (or genderqueer) and asexual characters are. :3 It's second place in the female pole, and a very close third on the male pole.

well honestly ? I'm not really sure that what you think about transgender and asexual isn't what most people who voted think especially because of this

Some clarifications:

1) transex/transgender could also be an alien race (like Planet Stronghold).

2) asexual means both a purely platonic romance, or also romance with beings that can't have sex (ie. robots or "entities")

I got the the feeling that a lot who voted tought more about alien and robot than actuel transgender and aseuxal people.

And jack contrary to what most people think "no sex = asexual" is wrong.



for the result of the poll I'm surprise(in a very good way) and glad that there are so many lesbian and bi women.



i'm dissapoint but not surprise for the result for the BxB options, I mean when I first see the poll I tought,

"Right now the game with BxB option are planet stonghold which only has one small option.

Roommates too which make it look like the option is there only for the sake of it , not really good in a dating sim if you only want the BxB and it will not help to promote the game to the BxB fans,

and loren who has 3 BxB option but it's called loren the amazon princess and when you look on the internet the first thing you see is a image of loren with little clothes which probably make a probably does not make a good first impression and probably make idea of a BxB options look like a joke.



so yeah I don't think WW has a big BxB fanbase for the moment."

So interesting! I just voted and it's pretty cool how popular romances with transgender (or genderqueer) and asexual characters are. :3 It's second place in the female pole, and a very close third on the male pole.

well honestly ? I'm not really sure that what you think about transgender and asexual isn't what most people who voted think especially because of this

Some clarifications:

1) transex/transgender could also be an alien race (like Planet Stronghold).

2) asexual means both a purely platonic romance, or also romance with beings that can't have sex (ie. robots or "entities")

I got the the feeling that a lot who voted tought more about alien and robot than actuel transgender and aseuxal people.

And jack contrary to what most people think "no sex = asexual" is wrong.



for the result of the poll I'm surprise(in a very good way) and glad that there are so many lesbian and bi women.



i'm dissapoint but not surprise for the result for the BxB options, I mean when I first see the poll I tought,

"Right now the game with BxB option are planet stonghold which only has one small option.

Roommates too which make it look like the option is there only for the sake of it , not really good in a dating sim if you only want the BxB and it will not help to promote the game to the BxB fans,

and loren who has 3 BxB option but it's called loren the amazon princess and when you look on the internet the first thing you see is a image of loren with little clothes which probably make a probably does not make a good first impression and probably make idea of a BxB options look like a joke.



so yeah I don't think WW has a big BxB fanbase for the moment."

So I take it you aren't aware of the pure BxB game in development that comes up in pretty much every page of the forum?

And maybe the transsexual and asexual should have been separated into people and alternatives (like robots and aliens), but there is defiantly a decent number of people in the WW community that like BxB.

I would instead argue that robots have bodies, and thus depending on their programming could have sex lives . A full AI that fell in love with someone may make adjustments to itself so it can share that with the squish fleshbag that is the object of its affections.