Pronouns?

[reiichi]

Cutscene right before you confront Vauthry, Exarch talks about his friend. About things he would like to do with he/she. Admittedly I only readily have this by hand because I just got done with that particular part of the story, but trust me on this when I say there are far more examples than just this.

Yeah, in the handful of situations where a voice line DOES actually refer to the player character's gender, we do have an issue there. But there's only a handful of them, and I think this is something that could be handle by letting the player have a fallback to one of the currently implemented choices (male or female pronouns). It's the sort of choice that SE could improve upon going forwards by either avoiding gendered phrases for the player (ex, "a person of your stature" instead of "a woman of your stature" or "a man of your stature"). And that saves them a line of recording.

There isn't really a perfect way to handle the already-recorded things because like plenty of other features that were tacked onto FFXIV, it wasn't a design decision from the start and there's going to be technical bloat. But I don't think that means it cannot be improved for new content.

[SturmChurro]

I stand corrected, although I will point out, that that's a scene where the gender neutral pronoun "they" would fit quite nicely. For the next MMO, perhaps.

Just off the top of my head from last night. One example.

https://youtu.be/xHdQgaBKIKg?t=1114

Yeah, in the handful of situations where a voice line DOES actually refer to the player character's gender, we do have an issue there. But there's only a handful of them, and I think this is something that could be handle by letting the player have a fallback to one of the currently implemented choices (male or female pronouns). It's the sort of choice that SE could improve upon going forwards by either avoiding gendered phrases for the player (ex, "a person of your stature" instead of "a woman of your stature" or "a man of your stature"). And that saves them a line of recording.

There isn't really a perfect way to handle the already-recorded things because like plenty of other features that were tacked onto FFXIV, it wasn't a design decision from the start and there's going to be technical bloat. But I don't think that means it cannot be improved for new content.

No, I actually like my character being referred to as their proper gender, and would rather not have voice lines diluted for this purpose. It's not a "design choice" at all either to refer to someone as their sex.

[reiichi]

Just off the top of my head from last night. One example.

https://youtu.be/xHdQgaBKIKg?t=1114


No, I actually like my character being referred to as their proper gender, and would rather not have voice lines diluted for this purpose. It's not a "design choice" at all either to refer to someone as their sex.

I'm not sure how people's desire for MORE options means it's going to be taken away from you? Quite literally every line of dialog in the game, including those that have the character's pronouns, are a design choice. FFXIV could have gone the way of older games that only referred to the player character as "you" and never addressed their gender (because sex is biology and I'm pretty sure we're not trying to call people things based off unrendered sexy bits). Does it mean some scenes would have had a different impact? Maybe. But we're not rendering every single line that refers to the player character already because that also just doesn't happen in speech.

Gonna be real with you chief, I'd rather you kept the "she" there. It added a lot more emotional punch to his speech than if he'd just said "they" which, by the way, a lot of people still go "isn't that plural?" when they hear or read it. A lot of people are more used to directed he/she's and would think the dialogue is weird if everything was aimed in third person.

I could see the argument for recording more voice lines for different options, but cutting back on them seems like the opposite of a good idea.

Like I said to the other person, some of these scenes could be affected by making things more ambiguous, but I'm also certain they ALL could have been written in such a way to avoid the player character's gender if that's what the scriptwriters felt like doing. By the way though, third-person pronouns are "he, his, she, hers, they, them, etc." So the proposed change going forwards that I had demonstrated was actually getting away from third-person pronouns.

--

Ultimately, I, as a cisgendered person, already have the game catering to my preference choices. while I don't expect SE to go back and "fix" things to be more inclusive, this isn't a technical limitation of the game so much as a choice by the people writing the game's dialog and the people who voice the lines. I think SE could make things more inclusive for the players who do want to have those choices in future games (or ideally, future content in this game), but I don't really have a horse in this race myself.

[Ammokkx]

so aside from me fucking up what "third person means" (I admit that's on me, but you get what I was trying to say regardless) there's one choice quote I want to pick out since I'm getting tired of this thread

Ultimately, I, as a cisgendered person, already have the game catering to my preference choices.

So. Like. What's you being cisgendered got to do with... anything, really? I'm cisgendered too, but I'm also not Khenda. I'm a 21 y/o white male. I certainly don't have cat ears, pink-turned-white hair and am, last time I checked, not a woman. I'm playing a character, not me. I'm not Khenda, Khenda isn't me. I recognise that there are people who would like to be their characters, but the game doesn't cater to you because you are cis. You superimpose being cis onto the game, in the same way people pushing for more forms of self-identification are pushing their identity onto the game.

You don't have to be you in-game. I'd like the identity of the character I've *created* to be respected, though.

[Ammokkx]

Yeah, in the handful of situations where a voice line DOES actually refer to the player character's gender, we do have an issue there. But there's only a handful of them, and I think this is something that could be handle by letting the player have a fallback to one of the currently implemented choices (male or female pronouns). It's the sort of choice that SE could improve upon going forwards by either avoiding gendered phrases for the player (ex, "a person of your stature" instead of "a woman of your stature" or "a man of your stature"). And that saves them a line of recording.

There isn't really a perfect way to handle the already-recorded things because like plenty of other features that were tacked onto FFXIV, it wasn't a design decision from the start and there's going to be technical bloat. But I don't think that means it cannot be improved for new content.

Gonna be real with you chief, I'd rather you kept the "she" there. It added a lot more emotional punch to his speech than if he'd just said "they" which, by the way, a lot of people still go "isn't that plural?" when they hear or read it. A lot of people are more used to directed he/she's and would think the dialogue is weird if everything was aimed in third person.

I could see the argument for recording more voice lines for different options, but cutting back on them seems like the opposite of a good idea.

[Mavrias]

Gonna be real with you chief, I'd rather you kept the "she" there. It added a lot more emotional punch to his speech than if he'd just said "they" which, by the way, a lot of people still go "isn't that plural?" when they hear or read it. A lot of people are more used to directed he/she's and would think the dialogue is weird if everything was aimed in third person.

I could see the argument for recording more voice lines for different options, but cutting back on them seems like the opposite of a good idea.

Why would the addition of the choice "they" to the traditional choices of ""she/he" dilute that in any way? You could still pick "she" if thats what you wanted.

Additionally "they/them" has been used as a singular pronoun for literal centuries. So those people would still be incorrect. That's a very tired excuse that never made sense.

Yeah we're talking about going forward.

[Ammokkx]

Why would the addition of the choice "they" to the traditional choices of ""she/he" dilute that in any way? You could still pick "she" if thats what you wanted.

Additionally "they/them" has been used as a singular pronoun for literal centuries. So those people would still be incorrect. That's a very tired excuse that never made sense.

Yeah we're talking about going forward.

The man was talking about cutting back voice options in favor of having everything third person.

I explicitely said I could see the argument for adding more options, but not for removing them.

Granted I still think it's not worth the additional effort, but I'm not going to deny that you lot have a point. Everything weighed on a scale I still think SE's current direction is the correct path to follow that makes the most sense, but you're not going to catch me saying that adding more options is a strictly negative thing.

As long as Khenda's being referred to as a woman throughout the game I really couldn't care less.

[SturmChurro]

Why would the addition of the choice "they" to the traditional choices of ""she/he" dilute that in any way? You could still pick "she" if thats what you wanted.

Additionally "they/them" has been used as a singular pronoun for literal centuries. So those people would still be incorrect. That's a very tired excuse that never made sense.

Yeah we're talking about going forward.

That reply is referring to removing gendered language as supposed "progress". Even the OP here didn't go that far, they were only asking for the option of a neutral pronoun.

[Iscah]

Using your first linked quest as an example,

Ahhh! I'm sorry, <If(PlayerParameter(4))>m-m-madam<Else/>s-s-sir</If>! No need to get angry, now! I-I have a problem, all right!? I was working it out with my mummy, and─uh, er, ah...

It's quite literally a template and placeholder system that generates the correct line based off your character's information. Just like any other templating system out there, you can have conditionals and branching which allows for a more "dynamic" text block display, which is what the game already does. Making an adjustment to check for some other character variable would be simple and like all other question dialog, handled completely client-side because the server doesn't care about pronouns. Naturally, the character's gender would still matter for things like equipping gear, but those checks do have to be validated by the server. There's no in-game dialog that checks the gender of your party members to my knowledge.

The plugin itself basically just overrides those local to the client variables and the text payload continues as normal. It'd be a lot more involved to inject something like "they/them" since that's not swapping a conditional if/else, but the general work needed to make these adjustments could be largely automated by the developers, I'd imagine as their scripting system likely allows them to already make those changes without having to hand-touch each one. (Just like how all the quests that mention race magically adjusted to Hrothgar and Viera).

The original script as you quoted it isn't a placeholder - at least not in the way I would understand the term, although I have no experience in programming to know how the terms are normally used. But I would think of a placeholder as needing to fetch something from another external list to insert into the script, which clearly isn't the case - all of the variables are there in the text, unique to that line, and it only needs to check the character parameter to assemble the right version of the script.

We got an unintentional glance at the coding for a race-variable line a while back when the French version stuffed up their code while inserting references for Hrothgar - which was how the name of the race got leaked in the first place. You can see from the screenshot that the French version also has to code their gendered lead-in words into the individual races.

There's no in-game dialog that checks the gender of your party members to my knowledge.

Not dialogue, but lots of emotes have gendered language, and you also have system messages like when someone "casts his/her lot" for loot. If pronoun preferences need to be stored separately to the character's physical sex, they absolutely do need to be transmitted to the server and to everyone else you may interact with.

Making an adjustment to check for some other character variable would be simple

At a simple level of "can you make the dialogue change based on a hypothetical pronoun-gender parameter and not the physical sex parameter", yes. They could do that if the parameter existed.

What they couldn't do is simply find-and-replace every instance where the game currently references sex and change it to gender. We've already covered examples of situations where that couldn't work and the result wouldn't make sense.

So that means at minimum a writer would need to go through every single gendered reference in the entire game and evaluate which is the appropriate parameter to reference. They would have to add new situational lines for a neutral-gendered character in places. And where it is deemed necessary to reference physical sex rather than gender, they would have to ask the question of how someone might react if those two aspects do not match.

(Additionally, because there are so many possible forms that a gendered reference might take, that might actually amount to going through the entire script manually to search out those references in the first place.)

Yeah, in the handful of situations where a voice line DOES actually refer to the player character's gender, we do have an issue there. But there's only a handful of them, and I think this is something that could be handle by letting the player have a fallback to one of the currently implemented choices (male or female pronouns). It's the sort of choice that SE could improve upon going forwards by either avoiding gendered phrases for the player (ex, "a person of your stature" instead of "a woman of your stature" or "a man of your stature"). And that saves them a line of recording.

There isn't really a perfect way to handle the already-recorded things because like plenty of other features that were tacked onto FFXIV, it wasn't a design decision from the start and there's going to be technical bloat. But I don't think that means it cannot be improved for new content.

As others have already touched on, I don't feel like stripping out all possible references to gender is the right way to go about things. Sometimes scripts just need to refer to someone with a pronoun, or it becomes stilted and awkward as you try to dodge it.

Already I'm sure they avoid it whenever they can, to avoid having to double-record lines, but it's still necessary in places.

Big hypothetical if they could add the option to use "they" as your preferred pronoun, you would add a third recording to those situations, not avoid them or only write a single ungendered version.

Would it really be considered removal had they never included it from the beginning? Legit question. If all the voiced cutscenes had only used first/second person pronouns for the player character because they'd been written that way, would you feel as strongly?

I would observe that they are deliberately avoiding pronouns in cutscenes - just like they are already, inescapably, avoiding using your character's name and instead using generics like "my friend" or "the Warrior of Light". I'd chalk the lack of pronouns up to the same necessity of voice recordings, and I'm sure there would be lines that would come off awkwardly because of that approach.

I'm not sure how a script requiring third person pronouns is deemed more respectful to the character than a script that was more neutral, offered neutral options, or avoided the issue altogether. In any case, it's not like I expect SE to bend to my standards or make any changes. I simply proposed a few ways this thread could have been avoided.

Adding a third variable of "they" and removing the need for variables by avoiding all uses of "he/she/they" are two very different approaches but I think you are either conflating them or coming off as proposing one when you actually mean the other.

I'm also not sure how "a script requiring third person pronouns" differs from "a script that offers neutral options" but you seem to be contrasting those things.

A script that continues to use personal pronouns (whatever they are) is going to sound more natural and more personal than one that avoids them for the sake of neutrality. And so long as the only options to pick for your character in FFXIV are "cis male" and "cis female" then they should be addressed by those pronouns.

I can see there's a counter-argument that some people might want to be deliberately ignoring those inevitable gender-references and pretending their character is the other gender, so each mention is jarring, but... it's tricky. And I think it's a loss if we have to minimise gender references because of that scenario.

There's also - correct me if I'm wrong, but to my knowledge, while "they" is an equal substitute to "he/she", we lack the same vocabulary when you get to more varied gender-based wording. When someone politely addresses you as sir/madam, or the old man calls you lad/lass... where does that go if you're trying to avoid gendered terms? They add personality to a character's speech and tells you a bit about them.

In the end, unfortunately, I doubt the likely technical effort involved in retrofitting this notoriously spaghetti-code engine to redo the dialogue system—much less go back and change prior dialogue—is feasible, at least not if we want the dev team to still produce other content. (MOAR CONTENT PLZ)

But I can 100% understand why there are people who would want that done.

That's my impression too. I'm fine with the idea of the option being added, but it just seems to be several levels of complicated and it's unlikely (or maybe impossible from a technical angle, at least within their budget) that they are going to add it. It's something you'd want to build in from the start and consider in the programming and scriptwriting - both the words and the events.

So I don't mind people asking for it, but I do mind them saying "it'd be simple to add".

[Shibi]

A well thought out post Iscah, kudos.