Sorry if this has been addressed elsewhere, but everything I’ve found is a bit too broad for what I’m trying to do.
I have an NPC who is not man/woman, and they are not an “it”. Is there a default way to assign them “they/them” pronouns? I tried this old extension by Ron Newcomb, but the extension won’t compile for me. Looks like user rainmaize was working on an extension, but it’s unclear if it was completed.
Any suggestions?
Check Gender Options by Nathanael Nerode.
(Optionally along with Gender Speedup, which name I adore.)
So, perhaps this is a clash of extensions, or I’m not understanding the extension notes properly, but I’m still having problems giving the NPC that ambiguously plural pronoun.
Include Conversation Suggestions by Eric Eve.
Include Gender Speedup by Nathanael Nerode.
The Library is a room.
Books are a familiar thing.
Kevin is an ambiguously plural person in the library.
The ask-suggestions are { library, Books, kevin }.
Instead of asking Kevin about "library":
say "'It has books.'".
Instead of asking Kevin about "books":
say "'Too many to read.'".
Instead of asking Kevin about "himself/kevin":
say "'Slow day.'".
Test me with "talk to Kevin / topics".
I’ve only played with it a little, but it had seemed to me like the extension does a better job at allowing the player to use pronouns on the command-line than it does with output (it’s doing pretty heroic work, but it’s fighting uphill against some assumptions baked deeply into Inform.)
If you say Kevin is a neuter plural-named person, you’ll get “You can ask them about themselves.” (though you probably want “themself” there). But then it would also be the case that if you have a person variable called interloper and its current value is Kevin, then "[interloper] [talk]" would be “Kevin talk” and not “Kevin talks”.
I think I see a way a better third-person neutral they could be hacked into it without, I think, doing great violence – I’ll try to get back to it later.
Cool, yeah, that’s mostly “good enough” for what I’m trying to do. Just wanted the output to respect pronouns. Thank you!