Also, assuming people want to jerk off to every character is a gross overstatement. Both of these misconceptions come from a very shallow judgement of what people find appealing about gaming, fiction, porn and escapism in general.
...did you miss the part where "jerking off to every character" directly related to a personal anecdote of what specific friends have told me in the past...? Literally nowhere did I even vaguely make the beginnings of an implication that people "want to jerk off to every character". In fact, I did the
polar opposite. The only thing shallow here is your comprehension of what I wrote.
People can still be fully immersed in any kind of fiction no matter how different the main character is from the real life person experiencing it. When it comes to porn games especially, it makes perfect sense that straight men who obviously find females attractive would like to see a story about an attractive female main character having sex with other attractive female or male characters.
Two points I'd like to make here. Firstly, the second half of this paragraph has close to nothing to do with the first. I
like seeing attractive females having sex with other attractive females too; however, that isn't due to the appeal of self-insertion.
Also, immersion isn't synonymous with self-insertion; I get fully immersed in The Witcher 3 (just to use an example) in every sense of immersion I can have (except perhaps physical, I guess), because I
live into the character. I'm affected by what he has to go through, and I feel for what he feels. I emphasize with his struggles, and I do find parts of my own personality reflected in Geralt. On the flip side, I am into Ciri porn, both in contexts with and without Geralt, despite being fully aware that Geralt himself would find that revolting. It sounds contradictory, but it's not, because - unlike how you accused me earlier of having a shallow judgment - human feelings (including - and especially - empathy) and attraction are multi-layered, sometimes situational, deep, and can not be framed in these black-and-white dichotomies brought forth by such a shallow judgment.
Also, you do realize you're just telling me what I (and everybody else) already know(s), right? My whole post is just about my own opinion on it and how I feel. There is not a single sentence that implies I think any of it applies to everybody, or even the majority. I realize you're probably going to say something like "I was just discussing the topic in general", but you made some remarks in a pretty accusatory manner, but they wildly miss their mark. The entirety of my post was just me expressing my own perspective and opinion on the matter, without accusing or dictating anything anybody else does or thinks.
Self-insertion always needs to be selective anyway. If someone is, for instance, an average person in real life with an accounting job they can probably still insert themselves into the role of a successful CEO or a perverted bum even if those don't fully match their real life. For you in particular the character's gender might be a deal-breaker but you can clearly put yourself in the shoes of characters who are different than you. Other people, such as males who like playing female characters, don't find that a fictional character not having the same gender as their IRL selves to be a block at all.
This is a fair point in general. It's also why I don't identify with every single male character I have ever played as - there's always facets to any character that might be especially jarring to an individual, and break the self-insertion immersion, no doubt. Also, it is definitely possible to create a female character that I identify with more than a male character, which has been the case in a lot of non-explicit games I play. However, I think gender is a pretty big part of a person, and going into all the various ways somebody's gender affects both the way they see and interact with the world around them would take up waaay too much space, and too much time to write up, but they're more numerous than you might think.
At the end of the day, this part of your post
is valid; it's just that most of the time, especially in porn games specifically, self-insertion is dictated a lot more by your gender, 'cause you can't really completely identify with the sexual realities of being a gender that you aren't in real life, and any self-insertion you project onto that character is purely psychological. Other facets of a character (beyond their gender) can, of course, affect how much you feel you can self-insert yourself into a character as well, but
none of that makes gender irrelevant or superfluous.
