Video Game Characters who Confound Professor Oak: The Enbies of Gaming
- Clara Mount
- 19 hours ago
- 4 min read
Written in collaboration with Austin Vetor, @vetorphotography on Instagram.
As we here at Goblins are celebrating International Nonbinary People’s Day, we want to highlight video game characters who challenge the gender binary by their very existence. This roundup features monsters, humans, robots, and other entities who use “they/them” pronouns and/or identify as nonbinary.
We hope you think of these characters the next time you boot up a Pokemon game and Professor Oak asks, “Are you a boy or a girl?”
Single-Player
Turing
Although you can’t play as them, this adorable blue-and-silver robot is the real star in this point-and-click cyberpunk adventure set in Neo-San Francisco. The story centers around Turing’s quest to find out what happened to their creator, Hayden. As you help them unfold this mystery, Turing must also wrestle with the fact that they’re the only sentient AI in existence. You get to see Turing learn and grow emotionally as they encounter social conflict, discrimination, and ethical dilemmas caused by technological advancements. In one particularly sweet moment late in the game, Turing opens up to you about their gender, confessing that they don’t know if gender applies to them since they’re AI, but they would prefer to be known as nonbinary.
In an interview with Gamasutra, creator Matt Conn said he wanted to represent a future where queer folks experience less discrimination and exist on equal footing with straight people. As a result, the world of 2064 is populated by numerous queer-identifying characters whose identity is not “the point” of their inclusion in the story – they’re just people. One of my personal favorites (besides Turing, of course) is the badass genderfluid hacker, TOMCAT.
Mangle
In this point-and-click survival horror game where you are working at a pizza place as an overnight security agent, Mangle is a disfigured, pieced-together animatronic and a major antagonist. Their horrifying appearance is the result of too many toddlers trying to take them apart repeatedly until management decided they would be a “take apart and put together attraction” (mostly to save on maintenance costs).
While the fandom is still debating Mangle’s gender identity, there’s a strong argument that Mangle is either nonbinary or genderfluid. The game refers to Mangle using both “he” and “she” pronouns at different points, and the creator posted in a comment on Steam in 2015 that Mangle’s gender is “yes” – which did absolutely nothing to clear up the controversy and may well have been his attempt to troll the community.
Shamura
In this roguelike game created by Massive Monster and published by Devolver Digital, you play as a lamb whose life was saved by a deity known only as “The One Who Waits.” Your sole responsibility now is to build a cult in this deity’s name, and in doing so you must combat The Four Bishops of the Old Faith. Shamura is one of these Bishops – the Deity of Knowledge and War – and the reason that all the lambs are dead. They are also the only Bishop to use gender-neutral pronouns.
Bonus points: This game offers a local co-op mode for two players!
Sabine, Bliss, and Peake
Citizen Sleeper is a quiet, dice-based RPG with a unique system of using “clocks” that tick up as time progresses or as the player succeeds in the relevant dice challenges. The visuals are stunning as the game is set on a ruined space station called Erlin’s Eye, against a backdrop of deep space, where you are working to both escape your previous corporate overlords and navigate your gradually deteriorating body. Along the way you meet three notable enbies: Sabine, the ex-corpo slum doctor who provides the Stabilizer you need to prolong your life; Bliss, a highly skilled but troubled mechanic and engineer; and Peake, a refugee who helps other refugees safely cross the security cordon on the Eye.
Multiplayer
Bloodhound
Bloodhound is the original Recon Legend of Apex Legends. As a child, Bloodhound lost their engineer parents to a flash freeze that buried their home (‘cause they gotta be traumatized). They were then raised by their uncle, who belonged to a community that fully rejected technology. This great game hunter is a follower of the Old Ways, a belief system that values the glory of nature.
After their boyfriend Boone was killed in the Apex Games, Bloodhound chose to compete to earn the glory needed to rejoin their lover in Valhalla.
Oz + Seven More! (So Far)
I don’t know who else needs a multiplayer competitive dating sim in their life, but I certainly did! From the very first installment, this series makes a strong effort to represent multiple gender identities among the (datable and non-datable) cast.
At the start of the game, the player gets to choose between a feminine, masculine, or somewhere-in-between physical appearance for themselves, and then independently choose whatever pronouns make you feel most at home. Not only does the game give you this delightful choice of how to present your gender identity, the lore also explicitly states that the gender-neutral character option is, in fact, nonbinary. Their name is Oz.
Besides Oz, there are five other nonbinary PCs that you can play as in the DLC for Monster Camp and Monster Roadtrip. And the cherry on top is that you can also pursue two highly datable enby monsters: Milo, the death reaper/online influencer, and Nico, the cosplaying mimic.
Testament
Look, Guilty Gear takes like five hours just to explain the basics, but Testament was born in Switzerland during the Crusades (no, not that crusade). After being orphaned (again, ‘cause gotta be traumatized in a fighting game), Testament was raised by the commander of the Sacred Order of Holy Knights, eventually joined the Order against his wishes, and ultimately got captured by a foreign government to be part of some weird science experiments. Their story only gets weirder from there.
Officially, the developer has stated that Testament is agender, an identity that falls under the nonbinary umbrella. According to Arc System Works marketing rep Riku Ozawa: “Agender is the best word. Neither male nor female. Testament is Testament.”
Did we leave something out? Let us know what we missed!