Disagree. Don’t get me wrong, it’s the easiest/most conventional way to do things - but you can absolutely have romance stories without an established protagonist gender.
(This should not be taken as a statement on the recommended course of the community collaboration, where I have no pertinent opinions. It’s just a game design observation.)
Right. Take Jigsaw. 
Not conventional romance, but then again, rather more interesting than anything conventional.
But you have to be pretty damn good to pull that one off.
And I am certainly not at Graham Nelson’s level.
Yeah, anything is possible with fiction, but like Peter said, you have to be pretty good to make that work. Establishing gender wouldn’t be a restriction, at all – authors can do whatever they want with that, or not use it. I just don’t want to have NPCs acknowledge the player without knowing whether the player is a he or she. This kind of direct communication would work in a Myst game, where you have one NPC at a time looking directly at you, and speaking directly to you. If you have multiple NPCs, to make dialogue fluid, you have to have gender references to the player. Not everyone will acknowledge you directly in a conversation between multiple NPCs, especially if the person in question doesn’t respect you, or is speaking to another NPC about you.
And, if the story revolves around gender, like the link from the previous collaboration, where the gender was established as a woman (a pregnant woman), then I want to have a branch with a male gender, if that’s my character’s gender. I want the character to be my own, and even if author’s put my character through the mill in a story, and he / she comes out scarred, torn, and bleeding, I want it to be the same character I started with.
I think this is what attracts me to this project the most – the idea that I will have a completely different character in the end than everyone else, that there will be literally no way that two people could have the same characters, the same abilities, or the same disposition, by the end of the game, if there is one.
One final aside – neutral can be a gender. A story could also have an option to establish if the character is transgender – but again, this should be a choice by the player to establish if this is true, or not. I wouldn’t want that characterization forced on me. Choice should be king, because there’s could be thousands of branches in this.
I dunno; it seems to me that the tricky bit of writing Jigsaw’s romance was that the romantic interest was also ungendered. Just keeping the PC ungendered is much less of a feat.
In real life, people acknowledge people all the time without knowing their gender. 
To be clear, I understand what you’re saying – I just want to clarify that we’re talking genre conventions here, not “how do we most accurately simulate reality.”
I know what you mean – and I don’t want to put any restrictions on authors with how to handle gender or gender issues. If an NPC is talking down to me to another character, he could refer to me as “that one”, or “that dog”, or whatever. But this won’t work in every situation, and I don’t want to stumble in dialogue, or not know whether to have a male or female love interest. I mean, your character could swing either way, that’s not the point, but that should be established somewhere. And, established by the player.
Anyway, Masema, what do you think? Should we establish gender and give the player control over some customization options at the beginning? Or should the character be a blank slate that builds as it goes?
Also, are we going to have a ‘Quantum Leap’ type system, where characters can radically shift for each story, or should we keep continuity in place and use branching choices in each story to define the character as we go, so that each character’s evolution and journey is in the hands of each player to decide? I would suggest this – but this becomes another rule, namely, that any alterations to the player character have to be done by the player’s actions, and radical shifts to the player couldn’t be done in each story without good reason, without returning the character to a relatively similar state once the story is done. I would say this is important, so that a story that comes along six months down the road doesn’t railroad the entire narrative into a vastly different direction.
What this means is that, if we have 50 stories, and I’m building the character I want, and making lots of choices, that I don’t jump into a story that disables UNDO or saving, and then forces a permanent change to my character that I don’t like.
I would prefer to keep continuity in place between stories. It emphasizes the connections between them, rather than being more like an anthology of sorts.
AFAIK, as general rule… the saves will be incompatible.
That’s no good… does anyone know of a workaround for this?
Me too. I want this to feel like a personal journey, through a vast array of stories and settings. I want each player to feel that, at the end of the road, that they’ve affected the overall universe that every story is a part of, and the character is completely their own, that every choice they’ve made, good and bad, has led them to an end point that makes sense.
That’s why I made the Mass Effect joke, earlier. I never fully played through that series, since the first game barely works on my computer, but I know the ME3 controversy, and how people felt when the reached the end of it. Everyone’s ‘Shepard’ was their own through 99% of the game, but the ending was railroaded and tacked on.
I do not believe so. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the Z-machine save format up to the interpreter?
What about different release versions of games, though? Does this mean that if I d/l the latest Kerkerkruip, that saves from the original release won’t work? I’m playing the most current version, but I also have the original comp release. I suppose I could test this, but I’ll throw the question out there, first.
So it’s easier to make both the NPC and the PC ungendered than to make the PC gendered and the NPC a fixed gender? I have to disagree, because it’s different whether or not the NPC has male/female characteristics, regardless of sexual orientation.
Also, the really tricky bit of writing the romance was often not writing it but letting it emerge.
Exactly. It’s going to be difficult to keep a player defined character coherent across multiple stories. This is a slight limitation to setting up a story with a well defined player character, since that character is going to be fluid.
Yeap. That’s why I’m sticking with horror. 
craftian: save files only work with exactly the same game file, but you can load Glulx data files between different versions and even completely different games. You can save and restore data to those data files, but you’ll need to write your own code to do so. It’s more useful for statistics and settings than storing the exact properties of every object, but theoretically you could do that too.
Thank you! Glulx is probably better, anyway, for a project that might get pretty massive. I really want to see people take their characters through an evolving world, and never have to start over, or feel they’ve wasted their time by losing things they’ve gained. The first version might have 2 stories, the end result might have 200, but it would be incredible if that continuity could be achieved.
If you’re wanting to preserve a character, then I’d recommend using a datafile as a key/value data store. Essentially you have a Table with two columns and a lot of rows. Keep a healthy buffer of unused rows so that there is space to grow, and with future release you can always expand the table. Each sub story would then have to check for each setting, and it would have to have support in case the data isn’t there.
You can see my implementation of this for Kerkerkruip at github.com/i7/kerkerkruip/blob/ … 20Data.i7x
That would be good, but I’d hate to have to write that save code. You can’t put objects into a file (as they’re just pointers internally), so we’d need to have some sort of lookup for all the objects in play to be able to store locations and relations…ugh.
I said I could fake one. Tables and external files, you know?