Pronouns???

I know you meant well, OP, but with the amount of trolls on this fourm there's gonna be a lot of transphobes out. As for why, pretty much the others here said why. That's why I'm for genderlocks to be removed on things, so at least people can express themselves the way they want to in that way.

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Originally Posted by Artemiz

Well this thread is sure to end in a reasonable and rational discussion where everyone ends up sitting around a campfire singing kumbaya while agreeing to a common consensus.

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The reason I hesitated in bringing it up [sad sigh]

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Originally Posted by HollyJollyPaca

No I assumed your intelligence and in this case, I'm assuming your guardian is typing for you at this point.

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Yes my guardian did, I was getting a sponge bath at the time. I didn't bite mommy's hand this time, I'm such a good boy.

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Originally Posted by Keramory

Please no.

Edit- To be a little less rude about it, please know that it would NOT be an easy thing to implement. The dev team would then have to go through 10+ years of dialogue in this game and either tie it to w.e pronoun you made on your character. And that would be after theres a clear consensus of how many genders there are and how to refer to them in every instance of that dialogue. Then of course there's those who are fluid or changing, so you'd have to have an option to change that pronoun and the game reflect that every switch. The easier answer would be just to make every instance of dialogue completely gender neutral... but then you'd still have to through 10+ years of dialogue to get that done.

I hope your friend understands that the dev team is already drowning with being overworked as it is. While it might be nice, such a system would be unreasonable to ask for at the moment.

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Thanks for clearing up your original answer!! I understand now it's not so easy to program that hmmm. With the gender fluid deal, that's just something I think people would have to just deal with or make alts for cause that'd be asking a lot. Same with multiple genders.

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Originally Posted by HollyJollyPaca

...it seems like it'd be an easy thing to implement...

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A noble thought, and it seems like it would be easy, but likely it's not as the game is a decade of spaghetti code and all those limits.

The biggest issue will be language and not just the difference between Japanese and English regionalisation - but over the entire game including the database - where it's encoded likely as a binary. And when we are talking of this, please don't forget that all that data you carry gets transmitted to everyone. We are removing belts in 6.0 to give a few more rings, that's how tight it is.

And, in terms of language, how would you deal with わたし vs おれ if you only think in terms of English's He/She/Them and don't take into account the absolute jigsaw of Japanese pronouns that account for age, context, gender, social standing...?

Then bring French and to a lesser extent German into the picture, which are both gendered languages, and the grammar can become a dog's breakfast. You end up needing to say "Hi, my name is XXX, my pronouns are X/Y/Z, and they should follow the grammatical rules for masculine/feminine".

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Originally Posted by Shibi

A noble thought, and it seems like it would be easy, but likely it's not as the game is a decade of spaghetti code and all those limits.

The biggest issue will be language and not just the difference between Japanese and English regionalisation - but over the entire game including the database - where it's encoded likely as a binary. And when we are talking of this, please don't forget that all that data you carry gets transmitted to everyone. We are removing belts in 6.0 to give a few more rings, that's how tight it is.

And, in terms of language, how would you deal with わたし vs おれ if you only think in terms of English's He/She/Them and don't take into account the absolute jigsaw of Japanese pronouns that account for age, context, gender, social standing...?

Then bring French and to a lesser extent German into the picture, which are both gendered languages, and the grammar can become a dog's breakfast. You end up needing to say "Hi, my name is XXX, my pronouns are X/Y/Z, and they should follow the grammatical rules for masculine/feminine".

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This is a really good point. Both coding wise and language wise seems to be an obstacle sadly. :C

Is it truly necessary?

I'll be honest, I truly don't understand what's the trend with pronouns in the past years, we all lived perfectly fine without it for centuries.
You want me to call you "she" rather than "he" or "he" rather than "she"? Why not, I don't care, nobody cares, just don't make a fuss if I make a mistake by force of habit.

And it's the same with the game. You're free to select your character gender... Genital, rather?
Is it that big of a deal to play a man that isn't called "she" or opposite?

Point remains the same, I don't think it would be difficult but would it be worth the trouble? Just to satisfy a handful of players, that letters display exactly what they want their character to identify as?
It's not quality of life, I don't see the point. Surely you wouldn't stop playing the game because of that reason, neither would you engage in a game because of that same reason?

EDIT: Actually just saw that great answer above about language barrier, meaning it would be actually difficult and only meant to please a very small percentage of the community.

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Originally Posted by HollyJollyPaca

Thanks for clearing up your original answer!! I understand now it's not so easy to program that hmmm. With the gender fluid deal, that's just something I think people would have to just deal with or make alts for cause that'd be asking a lot. Same with multiple genders.

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When it comes to suggestions for features, it helps to map out what it would take to add said feature. I'm not a programmer either but an example of the process:

Problem: We need to add pronouns because game dialogue is misgendering players.

So how do we get that done? Potential solution you had: Option in character selection, adding pronoun. I'm assuming you suggested this because you know on some level the character's sex is tied to the dialogue. Add the pronoun, tie it to the dia, then the game will call you the right thing.

- So we add an extra "line" under your custom options to insert a pronoun. 2 options there off the top of my head. Add a "type your own" or a drop down. We can remove "type your own" as an option because we need a way of course to tie this pronoun to the dialogue. So we need the drop down. So we have to then grab however many genders there are and add them to the drop down. That'll be a bit of research.

- We then need to go in and tie every gender option to their corresponding pronoun when referenced in dialogue.

- We then need to check to make sure every instance of every option makes sense in every conversation in the game.

- We then need to repeat this for every language. Assuming of course every language can support something like this in dialogue to where it makes sense.

This isn't even the programming part. Where then someone needs to figure out if implementing this is even possible and if it wont interfere with everything else thats remotely tied to both the character creator and dialogue.

Then there's the moral issue that you kind of brought up in that reply. If we're doing this in the name of inclusion, why are we stopping it at just enough to satisfy your friend? What about those who are fluid, why is it fair that they have to make alts while your friend got what they wanted? If we're going to do this, we should do it all the way. Which then adds in the issues I brought up in the first page. So now we have to rework everything. And thats assuming there isn't another issue I didn't think of, in which we have to go back again to do it right.

THEN there's the issue of considering every culture and region we supply this game to. Not everyone's down with the ideology of what your friend believes. What kind of backlash will this take? Is it worth it for that alone? Things to consider.

I know this is a fantasy world and all, but sometimes you have to establish rules in said fantasy worlds. World builders go to great lengths to set the rules for magic use, religions, etc. It's not beyond the reach of world building that gender is also established. Until the rules change, we need to be willing to accept that there are two genders in this fantasy world. It's fine and all if they want to change things down the road, but it would take a lot of work. Sometimes words like they/them don't work well with dialog either, so it's a little more extensive than simply changing variables.

For instance, what would you replace "lass" with in your example? How would you address the culture of NPCs in game having to use such language? It's the same kind of adjustment you'd have in the real world at any rate. If the devs missed something in the dialog somewhere, would your friend feel misgendered? It would take time to address every little problem like that.

I think it's easier to accept that it's a role playing game where only two genders exist. You're not playing as yourself. You're playing the role of another character. It doesn't have to 100% represent you in real life. They're not calling your friend "lass," but rather your friend's character "lass." I mean, your friend picked a Lalafell. Are they that small? I know I'm not over six feet tall with rabbit ears. Do they have this issue with other games where they can't pick a gender at all?

As a more realist side note: This is a non-issue for a large amount of people. People that really would like to have more playable content, rather than have the devs take time away from that to make sure a few people are called "champ" instead of "lass." They still haven't gotten hats done for Viera or Hrothgar after two years. I'd hate to see how much of a delay this would cause.

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Originally Posted by SannaR

I might be a clueless cis female, but isn't part of being transgendered is to be seen as the gender they transitioned to? At least that's what a lot of stories of transgendered people say. That they want to be seen as passing as much as possible of the gender they identify with. So, I'm a little confused. Also the majority of the time the WoL is either addressed by their first or last name. If not their race. It's very rare for them to use him/her unless the npc speaking isn't one to call you Warrior of Light/Darkness while also not being close enough to use part of the character's name.

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Don't worry you're good!! But presentation is a big part of being transgender/gender fluid. So in my friend's case, they're trans BUT they're still quite fem in terms of physical appearance. So they wanted to have that in their character. But they couldn't get exactly what they looked for unless they had a lady Lala's face. They got the presentation they wanted from the female physical model but it didn't satisfy them gender wise. Another example could be somebody wanting to play an Au Ra and wanting to play as a girl but...well, we know how the sexual dimorphism is there haha!