Reflecting the imaginaries and priorities of the people that write and play them, roleplaying games do not have the greatest track record with gender. At time of writing I am finishing up an archaeological play of Burning Wheel, which genders players as ‘he’ throughout. While is stops short of listing gender as a gate in character creation, lifepath names like ‘City Wife’ and ‘Prince of Blood’ (with no distaff counterparts) make the intended gender discourse evident.1
Now, Burning Wheel Gold (the edition I played) was published in 2011–the last eleven years have seen a massive shift in representations and visibility of non-cisgender identities, but it’s important to remember how recently some linguistic conventions have been adopted! In the heyday of 2012 ‘nonbinary’ had not get coalesced into a free-floating gender descriptor2 and the widespread use of the gender-neutral ‘they’ had yet to claw its way into the Chicago Manual of Style.
This brings us to Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World (1st edition, 2010), which I recently re-read in preparation for another archaeological play.
It’s a fun read! AW’s rules are a fun read and I got through them over the course of a morning. I find the idiosyncratic writing style dodges “internet edgelord” and lands squarely in “your rowdy buddy,” here to pitch you on why and how you’re going to have a great time. The conversational tone makes you feel like the author on the other side of the page is here to help, rather than enforce:
“Remember how to make NPCs human? Give them straight-forward, understandable self-interests. Choose a body part – their stomach, their gut, their dick or clit, their nose, their time-ticking womb, their fearful cowardly heart (or their generous caring heart, or their bold big heart) – and have them just follow it around wherever it goes.”
As the the phrase “dick or clit” suggests, AW makes an effort to be inclusive in it’s writing (note the gender-unknown ‘their’ is also used in this passage). AW switches between he & she throughout the text when discussing players and characters–recall that “they” had yet to reach its current status as the go-to gender neutral pronoun.
Apocalypse World also has sex moves, drawing inspiration from the Sex & Sorcery (2003) supplement to Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer. For those unfamiliar: each playbook in AW has a specific move (under the heading [Playbook] Special) with the fictional trigger of “If you and another character have sex…”3 This explicitly puts sex within the space of anticipated play (provided consent at table) and ties back into AW’s focus on the visceral, which is woven into the game’s systems. The basic persuasion move is ‘seduce or manipulate’, rules describe bodies as weak and vulnerable, the GM is told to “Look [at NPC’s] through crosshairs”, the Brainer (psychic) can cause physical harm on both successes and failures.
“‘Man, woman, ambiguous, or transgressing’–the four genders!”
This focus on the body brings us to the “Look” section of the playbooks, a “pick from this list of options” approach to describing characters’ appearances. For example:
Notice how the options are separated into unnamed categories by line-break. What caught my curiosity was the first group–“Man, woman, ambiguous, or transgressing”–the four genders! Joking aside, <this was meant to map to gender presentation4 (as the category “look” would suggest), an intent I consider to be clearly communicated. A useful shorthand to give players in describing their characters, though in modern vernacular I’d probably opt for ‘masculine/feminine’ over ‘man/woman’ so all the choices are adjectives and gently nudge the reader towards some Gender Fuckery.
Interestingly, across the stock playbooks AW features two additional gender presentations: “concealed” and “androgyne”. Both play with the part social roles play in gender. “Concealed” is only available to select characters: The Angel, Brainer, Gunlugger, and Hocus. Baker has said this was intended to reflect how our role in society impacts what’s permissible and possible in our gender presentation. While I think the option is interesting, I find some of the distinctions a little odd. Why can the Gunlugger conceal their identity, but the Driver cannot (behind some tinted windows, perhaps)? Does the mysticism of the Hocus allow them to lead their followers without being gendered in a manner required of the gang-steering Chopper and settlement-administrating Hardholder?
In contrast to my ambivalence towards “concealed”, the artistic Skinner’s access to “androgyne” is everything I want from curated options: it evokes a particular aestheticized gender performance that fits the playbook like a glove. ‘Androgyne’ does more work than ‘man’, ‘woman’, or (in a hypothetical design) ‘nonbinary’ in the same manner that labels like “stone butch” and “high femme” give much more specificity than “lesbian”. It’s more descriptive and suggests far more about how others see the character than “do they think this character’s a boy or a girl”. Unfortunately it’s a single option in a single playbook where most of the other option do lead back to the question of “Man or Woman?”
“Like the cockroach, gender norms have survived the apocalypse.“
This where I find myself running into the limits of Apocalypse World’s implied setting and gender norms: “man” and “woman” grate against ‘ambiguous’ and ‘transgressing’, the latter two defined in relation to the former. Man and woman are presented as two poles, with the other options being defined in relation to this bimodal set of norms. In fact, the choice to include ‘transgressing’ implies a degree of rigidity to these norms!
As written, Apocalypse World is a game set 50 years after the apocalypse, during which culture is suggested to have undergone vast shift and losses. This is a game where the Driver can take such names as Grand Cherokee, Suv, and Beemer, where people “have cultural references without the cultural referents” and yet, somehow, hegemonic gender norms of Man and Woman persist. Like the cockroach, gender norms have survived the apocalypse. Perhaps we can blame their persistence on the Quarantine, a limited (i.e. non-core) playbook for an emerging vault-dweller tragically burdened with the restriction of choosing their Look between Man or Woman, a design choice playfully evocative by 2010 standards but that erases the presence of queer people in our present pre-/mid-apocalyptic times, suggesting gender deviance is ‘wild’ or precipitated by the dissolution of society.
In 2021, the Meguey & Vincent Baker released Burned Over, of which they say: “In many ways, if we were to create Apocalypse World today, Burned Over is the game we’d create.”. In contrast to base Apocalypse World using “Looks” to handle character appearance, the playbooks of Burned Over feature the heading “1st Impression” which prompts players to “Choose 1 or more, and add your own,” and provides less physical and more social descriptions: aggressive, cryptic, forgiving, lively, nitpicky, raving, etc. The playbooks also prompt players to enter their pronouns into a blank box (no “he” or “she” provided!). Something is lost in not prompting the player to consider how their character presents gender (I consider pronouns to be an intermittent part of this, given their tendency to be assumed/ignored/unimportant to many social interactions) but this is perhaps deliberate given Burned Over’s shift in tone from 1st edition5. Burned Over, while aiming to produce the same genre and play as original flavour Apocalypse World, steers itself along a safer path.
Scraping away the framework of binary sex from this 2010’s TTRPG I find myself left with these non-binary gender “looks” as a useful but situational tool. Providing players with a list of options (along with the option to create their own) sets tone and theme while giving players inspiration or quick answers. While these lists can be simple laundry lists of apparel they can also position themselves in relation to social norms without prescribing those norms. Thirsty Sword Lesbians “Aesthetic” section provides options like “clothes to play a role” (The Trickster), “transgressive clothes” (The Infamous), and “holy vestments” (The Chosen). This approach gives players more room to define their setting’s own norms than “Man, woman, ambiguous, transgressing”.
For its time I don’t think Apocalypse World’s handling of gender (presentation) is bad or offensive, but it is certainly bears evidence of being released in 2010. Providing players with a fixed set of gender options (in identity or presentation) is not something I would recommend as standard practice, but putting character choices in relation with social norms (e.g. “transgressing”) can serve as an excellent onboarding aid for games where the players aren’t already experts on the game setting. And finally, always consider giving players the option to create their own options: what you imagine as the scope of desirable options may not match your players’.
[1] The 2019 Revision of Burning Wheel Gold replaces the universal ‘Man’ with ‘Human’ but deploys ‘him or her’ or just ‘her’ with startling infrequency.
[2] I am here not speaking of nonbinary gender identities generally, but the formation of the specific nonbinary/NB/enby identity that allowed for the elision of the word “gender” from the label.
[3] As an aside: I think anytime you write a PbtA move, the choice of phrasing between ‘if’ and ‘when’ can help set expectations for how that move will come up. The choice of ‘if’ here makes it clear this isn’t something that must happen in the course of play.
[4] I use “presentation” throughout this post, but “performance” could be used near-interchangeably. In either case, presentation/performance should be understood to include not only deliberate expressions but also aspects of appearance and behaviour that may be more difficult to change: voice, body shape, etc.
[5] Burned Over also elects not to include sex moves.