The makers of online game Rust have gone a step beyond adding female characters to the game. Fifty percent of players will now be playing as a woman (or man!) whether they like it or not.

Until last week, all the character models were male. Now the game is randomly assigning a male or female model to each player. The model is tied to the player’s Steam account, making it inconvenient at best to make any changes. One player has already developed a workaround patch, but this only affects what the player sees on their own screen and not how their character appears to others.

It’s the latest step in a series of randomized attributes in the game: players already lack control over the race of their player model or (in the previously ubiquitous males) it’s penis size.

The game’s design team are making no apologies for the move. Writing in a development blog, Craig Pearson said:

We understand that you may now be a gender that you don’t identify with in real-life. We understand this causes you distress and makes you not want to play the game anymore. Technically nothing has changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings.

(Fair as that point may be, the last sentence does assume half the people playing the game were female, which may well not be the case.)

Rust’s designer Garry Newman, when previously speaking about plans to bring in female characters to the game, said he was intrigued to see whether the characters would be treated differently by other players, for example if they’d be more or less vulnerable to attack.

Online response has been mixed. While there’s some support for the political and cultural motives behind the move, some players have criticized it, arguing that a lack of control over a character undermines the RPG element of the game.