How inclusive is too inclusive?

Authoring General Design Discussions
41

In the end, it all comes down to your goals and your audience!

Speaking only for myself, as someone who uses they/them, I’m happy with IF that wants you to inhabit a specific character (I’m not expecting to choose Sherlock Holmes’s gender), I’m happy with a male/female gender select, I’m happy with a male/female/nonbinary gender select, I’m happy with an “enter your own pronouns” gender select, I’m happy with “the game never refers to the player character’s gender at all”. The only one I don’t especially like is “the player character is specifically meant to be you, the player, but the author never considered that non-male people might play IF”.

Choice of Games has a very particular style where the player character is supposed to be as customizable as possible, which is why there’s so much discussion of custom pronouns. But outside of CoG, I’m not going to be offended or anything if an author doesn’t provide that option, or doesn’t provide a nonbinary option at all. Rewriting Inform’s standard library to support singular “they” doesn’t need to be the author’s highest priority.[1]

It all comes down to the needs of the particular story, imo. It’s always nice to feel represented, but representation isn’t the only thing that matters. I won’t be taking any points off my IFComp rating if a game only provides male and female options with no they/them support.

  1. Though now there’s a solid extension for it, which is great—I spent way, way too long trying to make it work in Scroll Thief and it still had bugs in the edge cases, and that’s not even getting into entirely custom pronouns! ↩︎

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42

For present tense, I think you can key all verb agreements off of “is” (“is” = singular form, anything else = plural form), including contractions. For past tense, you can key “were” off of “are” (“are” = plural, anything else = singular), and everything else is the same for singular and plural anyway.

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43

Nope, nonbinary =/= they/them pronouns. source: am nonbinary

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44

What would you suggest instead? I feel like having a nonbinary option with they/them is better than not having one at all.

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45

Maybe not calling it “male”, “female”, “non-binary” and just “he/him”, “she/her”, “they/them”, if custom pronouns aren’t an option? Not every person who uses she/her pronouns is female, and, like Aster mentioned, not every nonbinary person uses they/them pronouns (se uses neopronouns).

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46

Thanks Aster this is why I asked.

Going toward what Hidnook suggests, I will change “Gender” to “Pronouns” and then the 3 choices (he/him, she/her, they/them). The engine is parser based so I’ll have to leave it at that for the time being - no disrespect intended to anyone.

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47

Thanks, this is my new favorite language fact!

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48

Fair question, I would suggest what Hidnook said. Thank you Hidnook. And thank you Harlock for asking and changing based on feedback.

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49

This thread was informative. I’d always planned for custom pronouns in my Javascript parser-in-development and had some support already – for instance it already had separation of gender and pronouns, with pre-defined first, plural, second, male, female, nonbinary, and nonhuman pronouns – but it still needed plenty of work under the hood to support arbitrary new pronouns. In response to this thread, I’ve firmed up the custom pronoun handling.

Here’s a sketch of a game that defines a new gender aile with a set of pronouns; and a player character and an NPC both of the new gender. This addPronouns() method is fully functional (and validates the input and offers informative error messages). I find the types of pronouns really hard to keep straight in my head, so while I was inclined to shorten the properties to subject | object | determiner etc like we’ve seen elsewhere in this thread, in the end I spelled everything out fully because I gotta assume that if it’s confusing me, it’s gonna confuse some of my users too.

MyGame.addPronouns({
  singular: true,
  gender: "aile",
  subjective_pronoun: "ai",
  objective_pronoun: "ain",
  possessive_determiner: "aire",
  possessive_pronoun: "aires",
  reflexive_pronoun: "aiself",
});

MyGame.createAsset({
  class: "NPC",
  name: "turtle",
  propername: "Roger the turtle",
  pronouns: "aile",
  gender: "aile",
});

MyGame.createAsset({
  class: "Player",
  name: "Mighty Hero",
  pronouns: "aile",
  gender: "aile",
});

And here’s some transcripty stuff…

Standing Room
Ai can go down through the hole in the ground, south, east, or west.

On the uncomfortable looking bed ai see a blanket.

Ai can see a turtle here.

> x turtle
Roger is a turtle. Roger the turtle is carrying a lettuce.

> x him
It's not clear whom ai mean by him.

(Roger’s not a him and there’s no him to be inferred.)

> x ain
Roger is a turtle. Roger the turtle is carrying a lettuce.

> x aire lettuce
Looking at the lettuce doesn't reveal anything notable.

(Two ailes are present but parser uses context to disambiguate.)

> x aire phone
Roger the turtle doesn't appear to be carrying any phone.

> x aiself
Ai's a Mighty Hero. Ai's carrying a white paper.

> x aire paper
It's a sheet of white paper.

> x aire phone
Ai doesn't appear to be carrying any phone.

 
Custom pronouns get saved to an inflections lookup. Setting the singular property also has the side effect of handling contractions and some basic verb agreements. I’m sure it’ll need further refinements as I go along but seems to be working pretty well at the moment.

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50

Since nobody can agree on names for the various inflections, I just use “they form”, “them form”, “their form”, “theirs form”, and optionally “themselves form” (if you want to treat that as an inflection too). Unambiguous and easy to remember!

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51

Is “ai” supposed to also be a second-person pronoun here? Or does your parser usually refer to the player in the third person?

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52

It’s got a fairly specifc inclusivity goal in mind: letting every reader enjoy the same story and be the same hero regardless of gender and sexuality. When you buy a CoG brand game, you always know the game isn’t going to gate out any content for you on the basis of sex.

That definitely isn’t maximally inclusive…but I’m not sure the topography of inclusivity has a single ideal maximum. For people who want to publish genderlocked IFs using ChoiceScript (to be inclusive along another dimension, or for other aesthetic reasons), there’s the Hosted Games label, which CoG partners and key CoG authors have turned to when they want to break the CoG brand rules.

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53

Gender and pronouns are distinct in the parser, but in the example there I set the player’s gender and pronouns both to aile, so yeah, that example was third person. If I set player pronouns to first or second, it does what you’d expect.

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54

Not to “correct” you or anything here, I’m not an expert either, but this is how I understand it: The reason those inflections are sometimes called different things is usually because they actually describe different grammatical cases, but the case names that English used to have have stuck even when they’re strictly speaking not correct anymore.

The forms you listed are properly called the nominative, accusative, genitive and reflexive cases. However, English doesn’t really use those cases outside of pronouns anymore; it now uses far simpler cases for almost everything except pronouns. In those cases they’re called subjective, objective and possessive (different from genitive because it doesn’t change the morphology of the word, it just tacks on an apostrophe and sometimes also an “s”). So those simpler names sometimes get used about the pronouns as well. Reflexive is basically the same I guess, but nouns don’t inflect in that case, they all just share the same pronoun (like “itself”).

Of course all of this is slightly off topic in a thread specifically about pronouns in English, but stuff like neopronouns can quickly get even trickier in other languages that have retained more grammatical cases!

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55

Well, that’s the thing—nobody can agree! Traditional English grammar books prefer “subjective”, “objective”, and “possessive” over the Latin-standard “nominative”, “accusative”, and “genitive”…except English actually has two separate possessive forms (“their” attributive and “theirs” predicative), so sometimes people in both camps will borrow the other camp’s term for the second possessive, giving subjective/objective/possessive/genitive or nominative/accusative/genitive/possessive. And then they can’t agree on which of the possessives is which!

Even within the field of linguistics, it’s a huge mess. But if I just refer to “the ‘theirs’ form”, nobody has to look up which of the two possessives I mean.

(Apart from reflexive. Thankfully there’s a broad consensus on what to call that one.)

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56

As a native speaker of English, I am going to step in here. There are many, many dialects of the English language in use across the world today. They don’t all follow the same rules. Which is to say, the rules have lost their universal applicability. You can chuck those ‘grammar books’ in the dustbin of history.

If you want to conjure up your own variant of the language, you can. If you want to invent new pronouns, you can. But can you make them stick?

The genius of nonsense verse is that entirely new words get injected into the public discourse. There are plenty of examples of words which only originate from a single line from Shakespeare. Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear were also originators to a lesser degree.

The question you have to answer is; what do these new pronouns mean?

57

That’s true, and I am aware, if only because most non-English Germanic languages (including my own native one) have attributive and predicative cases for adjectives as well as pronouns (“green” in “the green car” and “the car is green” are inflected differently, for example). I did simplify it a little, but I do think it’s interesting how English has lost most of its grammatical cases everywhere but the pronouns. And even IF systems like Inform, which is actually tailored quite a bit towards translation into other languages, and makes it fairly easy to customize pronouns (to try to go a bit back on topic), still is fairly English-centric in that cases are hard to make work for other word classes. Even for pronouns: in my language we have two different reflexive classes, for example. Anyway.

That is of course true, and as I’m not a native speaker of English, I’m not going to argue any further points here and I don’t want to derail the thread!

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58

Oh, absolutely. Trying to write an IF parser for a language like Latin, Hittite, or to a lesser extent Akkadian and Ancient Egyptian is a fun but infuriating project! In all of those languages, the structure of a sentence is basically[1] “zero or more noun phrases, followed by a verb”; those noun phrases can appear in any order, with case and sometimes prepositions marking the role of each one. So a parser has to work totally differently from English.

I unfortunately don’t know enough about non-English Germanic languages to speak to their use of case, but at minimum I’m guessing you can put accusatives and datives in either order? Which is the sort of thing I would love if Inform could handle out of the box.

  1. Eliding an enormous amount of detail here, of course. ↩︎

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59

I’m a native speaker of English and an English monoglot on to of that, and most of these 10 dollar words to describe case fly right over my head… though I’m guessing subjective is the form of a noun/pronoun that is performing the action and the objective is the form for the noun/pronoun the action is being performed on. Of all the words ending in -ive here, I think possessive is the only one I remember from my grammar classes… Granted, I think the last time I took a English class that focused on grammar might have been in the 10th grade and I graduated Highschool 20 years ago… all of my college English classes either focused on essay writing, research and citations, or literary analysis.

60

Testing this it out in Dutch with “I give them the book”, “ik geef hen het boek”, suggests to me that four of the six possible orders are fine. Note that the verb always has to come in second place.

NDA: ik geef hen het boek
NAD: ik geef het boek aan hen
AND: het boek geef ik aan hen
ADN: –
DNA: hen geef ik het boek
DAN: –

Perhaps the nominative needs to be next to the verb? Just a hypothesis!

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