He, She OR It?

Authoring Inform 7
1

Hi folks,

Just curiosity at this stage, but I’m contemplating creating some games with different viewpoints. I’ve got the male / female pronouns firing fine, but I can’t seem to get a pronoun output for ‘it’… ? The below outputs to ‘he’ as does ‘animal’ as does just saying the player is neuter… am I missing something?

There is a room called Start. R2 is a neuter person in Start.

When play begins:
	now the story viewpoint is third person singular;
	now the player is R2.
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The code that prints pronouns for the player is a bit different from the code that prints pronouns for any other object in the world. It only ever uses “he” and “she”, not “it” for neuter or “they” for plural-named objects.

You can find this code in the extension English Language by Graham Nelson:

Section 2 - Saying pronouns (for interactive fiction language element only)

To say we:
	now the prior named object is the player;
	if the story viewpoint is first person singular:
		say "I";
	if the story viewpoint is second person singular:
		say "you";
	if the story viewpoint is third person singular:
		if the player is male:
			say "he";
		otherwise:
			say "she";
	if the story viewpoint is first person plural:
		say "we";
	if the story viewpoint is second person plural:
		say "you";
	if the story viewpoint is third person plural:
		say "they".

…followed by similar definitions for “We”, “us”, “Us”, and so on. This code is also invoked when you print [them] or a similar substitution referring to the player.

This isn’t too hard to change: just copy out that section and use section replacement to replace that code with yours. It’s just a bit tedious.

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3

This is one of several peculiarities of the Standard Kits that I found while working on my general replacement of Inform’s pronoun handling.

If you’re using Inform7’s v10 and up, try using “Non-binary Pronouns by Sadie de Might”.

I’m still slowly providing updates, first to finish documenting what it does, and then next to make sure it works with v9 and Z-machine (which it doesn’t yet).

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