At the beginning of The Scroll Thief, the game asks the player to choose their character’s name and gender. This is then used later in the story. At present that section looks something like this.
The second question accepts a number of inputs: “m”, “man”, “male”, “masculine”, “boy”, etc. cause the player character to be referred to with the honorific “Mr.” and the pronouns he/him/his/his; “f”, “w”, “woman”, “female”, “feminine”, “girl”, etc. give “Ms.” and she/her/her/hers; “o”, “x”, “other”, “neither”, etc. give “Mx.” and they/them/their/theirs. But the phrasing of the question doesn’t indicate at all that this third option exists, unless the player types an invalid command (in which case it says “[Try man, woman, or other.]”).
Is there a better way to phrase this question to indicate that a third option is available? I considered asking specifically what pronouns they used, since that’s the main use for this information in the story, but I couldn’t come up with a good way to ask that without interrupting the flow of the text even more.
I like that suggestion, Carolyn. And I was able to get it to fit into the text much more fluently; it ties in more with the player’s thoughts than the previous version did. Thanks!