We even have a bigger issue in Italian, that is, adjectives (and other syntactic elements, but let’s focus on them for the moment) have a gender, and currently they can only be male or female.
For instance, bello = beautiful (male) - bella = beautiful (female).
Thus, should the game require to address a non-binary individual (or somebody with unknown gender), there are no choices but to default to the male adjective… or, as some do, use the *, or even the ə symbol (“schwa”). But that comes at the cost of readability, for most people at least.
spanish has the same issue as italian and french as romance languages with grammatical gender, though i hear it’s a bit more manageable for spanish than the other two (especially french where the few options for nonbinary/gender neutral language are awkward at best)
in spanish, the preferred nonbinary ending nowadays is -e, though @ and x were popular for a while. e.g., “mi amigue es muy tonte” as opposed to “mi amigo es muy tonto”.
one thing to note in spanish is that the -e ending is explicitly specifically nonbinary (different from gender neutral/ambiguous/general). you can use -e for groups or whatever to be more inclusive overall, but it’s a Statement in a way gender neutral language is not in english.
bellu seems more cogent with Italian, deriving from the Latin fourth declension, albeit it shares with the first the propension of masculine words (the fifth declension, stemming with the e, has a propension of feminine words (now intelligent people will figure why in Italian -A and -E are “feminine” and -O and -U are “masculine”…) so remain the third, which was the largest one, including -I(S) which included the largest part of the neuter words. but -I is the male plural…
Best regards from, you guess, Italy
dott. Piergiorgio. (dott. in political sciences, not letters !!)
I think the initial question of this thread has been answered, and I agree with much of what has been said! There’s one more perspective I can add on the topic of pronoun customization that I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention yet.
Games have the power to facilitate playful, productive exploration of identity. I know that roleplaying games, broadly defined, have served as an especially invaluable and impactful tool for a lot of people (myself included) to try out different pronouns and safely explore their gender through roleplay. In this aspect, character creation isn’t only giving players the opportunity to roleplay their real-life identity but to actually try out a new gender identity/pronouns. This is more typical of video games and TTRPGs, I think; but I see no reason why this kind of exploration wouldn’t take place in IF.
If that is a group of potential players that an IF author would specifically like to support (people who are questioning/exploring their gender); and if the author is creating the specific type of game where the player experiences the story more less vicariously through the PC (although not necessarily as a self-insert); then a wide range of PC pronoun options can become much more meaningful than some sort of perfunctory inclusivity. It can be a real feature!
I wrote very extensive PC pronoun customization for one of my games, The Path of Totality. This included support for custom neopronouns, but it also included rolling pronouns (he/they, she/they, she/he, and they/she/he); a feature that I haven’t encountered in any other game/IF. (The method by which I scripted this is described in my postmortem under the Technical Highlights section.) Now, I certainly do not think this is in any way a “requirement” for every game with character customization! I just wanted to make that extra effort because it was highly relevant for that particular project.
But as others have pointed out in this thread, a gender-locked, preset PC can be completely appropriate, valid, and sometimes necessary, depending on the IF. As a nonbinary person, I will never feel excluded to “have” to play as a character with a fixed gender (I actually enjoy roleplaying as characters of all genders!). But I would feel excluded by a game that features in-depth character creation with personal pronouns but doesn’t include, at minimum, they/them (and preferably custom input for neopronouns as well). All of the above is completely relative to the type of game you are making, the audience you want to serve, and your goals as an author!
I was thinking that, while it’s straightforward to write a game with a protagonist of a specific gender, and with enough games being written, a high degree of inclusivity could be achieved by a community of authors, there’s still an oversight: what about representing the person who is actively constructing their gender? How do you put that in a game, other than literally implementing that activity as part of the game? Actually it would be neat to include a gender option that enabled scene-by-scene reconfiguration or something.
For German: Yes, absolutely. The direct and indirect object can switch order and it works fine because one is marked with dative and the other with accusative. (But the order is not entirely free: if you use a pronoun, the order becomes more fixed etc.)
Thanks for clearing this up for me; I didn’t realise that it was for a specific line of games, rather than in general. I suppose the design goals of that line of games are just, somehow, hard for me to grasp. That may be just my problem, or the idiosyncrasies of my taste. You write:
I suppose it’s hard for me to get into the mindset where I feel that I could be excluded from a game because of gender or sexuality. I love to read books and play games with protagonists who are very different from me. In tabletop roleplaying games, I always very much do not play myself. (In fact I play female characters much more often than male ones, because I already get to play a man in daily life.) But of course other people can and do feel differently, and perhaps playing yourself is especially important if it’s a role that daily life tends to not allow you to play, or not without difficulty.
On any single variable, most people are close to the average, which can make it hard to comprehend the perspective of those who are outliers in that variable… and if you are an outlier, it can be easy to feel excluded by media that caters to those who are close to the average on that variable.
Of course, no one is close to average across all variables and lots of people subconsciously try to act closer to average on variables where they are outliers, wanting to fit in and the squeaky wheel getting the oil and all that rot…
And yeah, Choice of Games is clearly catering to a very specific demographic, one more traditional outlets have at best ignored/neglected and at worse are outright hostile to… and while I’m not exactly trad husband material* I get the impression CoG’s standards might be the kind of inclusive for the sake of inclusive I find off putting even if my preference wasn’t for parsers over choice. Not going to begrudge their fans their preferences anymore than I’ll begrudge a Christian for enjoying some overly preachy moral lessons masquerading as a game, but both aren’t my cup of tea.
*I’m a hetcis man to a first approximation, but I’m technically a 1 on the Kinsey scale(predominantly het, only incidentally gay) and I’m rather gender non-conformist, actively rejecting a lot of masculine qualities, preferring several feminine colors and fashions, liking a lot of media aimed at a female audience, and finding the modern standard of feminine beauty rather unattractive(Give me someone short, petite with gentle curves over the supermodel archetype any day.
It’s worth thinking about the gaming landscape in 2009 (when Choice of Games was founded)! Female PCs were relatively thin on the ground, queer romance in mainstream titles was rare, and the default gamer was assumed to be a straight dude. I can see how games where you not only could choose your gender but your sexuality were absolute catnip to the increasingly large audience of women and LGBT people who were actively playing games but not really being catered to at the time. Had I been aware of them at the time my teenage gay self would have been obsessed.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve found myself preferring defined protagonists with stories that really get into the details of the identities and cultures involved (whether or not I share them) and for that reason I don’t consider CoG my speed at the moment. But it was absolutely on the forefront of acknowledging that a diverse audience plays video games and might want to see themselves represented and that’s worth a lot.
Besides all that, once you have a house style and a player base self selected for enjoying that style of game, the thing has taken on a life of its own. Regardless of whether inclusivity was the original motivation (which it probably was), or even whether it’s making anyone feel included (although it probably does in some cases), some people just like designing and role-playing characters.
