Non-binary option for characters, please?

[KisaiTenshi]

I can already anticipate how “controversial” and “SJW” this post will be received by some as (God, when society in about 100 years from now looks back on this and how the word “SJW” is used as a slur for people who ask for more options of self expression, they’ll facepalm so hard.), but as a non-binary tax and sub-paying adult human, would there be any way you could (Square, that is) implement a gender neutral option, maybe if not on the character creation screen, then tucked away in the settings somewhere? (To avoid offending many of those who cry at the sight of *gasp* more than 2 genders!)

I look forward to the original remarks about Attack Helicopters and god knows what else being used as an argument against more options, but to the MANY gender-nonconforming players of this game (I’m sure you’ve all seen how many LGBT* FC’s there are), even just having one catch-all option outside of the gender binary would be so wonderful. I spend an ungodly amount of money on Fantasia due to being pretty fed up of being referred to as male or female constantly in basically every cutscene. (I probably shouldn’t have said that, you’re making a killing off me Square, I’ve probably funded all the expantions at this rate) What do you all think? Dangerous question to ask online, especially here, but I’ll risk it.

Gamers are sociopaths when it comes to treating people with respect, so just remember that any perceived slight at this suggestion is because they have a closed or empty mind.

While this is a nice ideal, the pragmatic limitations are on the technical side - and are probably the biggest reason your request is unlikely to see fruition. From a technical standpoint, options are anything but free. Particularly when it wasn't in the original design spec. (Perhaps in the next FF MMO?)

This is probably not too trivial to implement, it just would just make things hugely confusing for the non-English locales since English doesn't have gendered language where as French is rather heavily gendered. If we were able to create a truely "gender neutral" character at creation, ie, women characters with no chest/butt, allow facial hair options, men characters with ... you know what they're probably close to neutral enough without adding a bust and butt slider. That's still a trivial tunable, rather than creating entirely separate gender-specific gear models.

The reason people ask for such things is because they want a character that represents themselves as they are rather than playing a game with a fixed set of options. It's only been relatively recently that any MMO even allows for gay marriage, so games are just a decade behind where society finds things acceptable.

The trouble really is that NB, TG, and various other agender terms is that there is zero agreement on anything but singular "they" for language. If you don't know what someone is, you dehumanize them by calling them "it", and insult them by using any gender-determinate language, especially after they tell you what they want to be called. Voice chat adds an entire additional layer of sociopathy, and it ultimately makes any MMO far more toxic for it. If it were possible for the game to do voice analysis and then turn that into it's own character-specific speech synthesis, I think that would be removed as a toxicicity barrier.

Anyway I don't see any changes in this regard happening to FFXIV, not because of lack of interest, or developer inertia, but that there just isn't really any need for it, since the underlying motive (people identifying as agender, non-binary, transgender, etc) for it hasn't reached a similar level of acceptance in conventional media.

https://hornet.com/stories/ap-non-bi...nder-pronouns/

But now, the AP Style Guide is permitting the use of singular “they” for people of non-binary gender.

The style guide now reads:

In stories about people who identify as neither male nor female or ask not to be referred to as he/she/him/her: Use the person’s name in place of a pronoun, or otherwise reword the sentence, whenever possible. If they/them/their use is essential, explain in the text that the person prefers a gender-neutral pronoun. Be sure that the phrasing does not imply more than one person.

So the easiest way for the game to adapt, is to really just do what it's been doing all along and either referring to the WoL as WoL or the player's name, depending if it's a voiced or unvoiced scene, and use the players name instead of a pronoun even when they're being referred to in third person or not-present.

Retrofitting the existing Engish dialog is probably not that trivial, but there's probably a lot of flavor text that goes (player's pronoun) where it can be replaced with (player's name) except where someone has specific kind of 'tic that was phonetically localized. I'm not sure if there are any, but I know that some text in the game is presented different depending on your race, gender or GC.

[Sigma-Astra]

Gamers are sociopaths when it comes to treating people with respect, so just remember that any perceived slight at this suggestion is because they have a closed or empty mind.

Do you not realize that you just not only insulted a large and generalized group of individuals with little to no substantial evidence to back up your ridiculous notion and claims, but yourself as well in the same time and manner?

It's rather uncalled for....and a whole lot of other things that I can't express on the OF unfortunately.

Furthermore....because I missed this little gem...

That’s good for you. If only life was that simple for everyone we’d live in a world where we were all cut out clones of each other and despised anything out of the box.

More options > always good. How does being restrictive help anyone? It doesn’t, it only excludes.

Not sure how non-binary terms not being used inside of a video game is exactly restricting you in real life. If you lose sleep over this, I think you might need some assistance on the matter.

[KisaiTenshi]

Do you not realize...

Yet you decided to be personally offended that I posted anything and when you added nothing to the conversation for that entire page of the thread. My point, since you didn't actually read it was that this thread is troll bait, and was definitely straying off topic into the typical trolling nonsense at the time I posted, so just skip or ignore the posters that aim to derail it.

I realise people have strong opinions, but it still boggles me how spiteful some of these posts are.

Even if you disagree with the idea of it yourself, you can still respect that the other person truly thinks of themself as the gender they claim to be, and address them in the way they ask to be addressed.

I also find it very hard to believe that people would "choose" to identify in a way that opens them up to such abuse, if they didn't really believe it to be true.
...

People are spiteful about this, because they go "oh no, real life politics in my entertainment, ew, get it away", despite all story telling is political by nature. Stories tell us about people who do bad or stupid things and how they became better people by realizing the err of their ways, or they go die on that hill as the big bad. Even a story where the protagonist ends up worse off in the end, doesn't come about without the protagonist learning to be better in some way. Everyone is the hero of their own story.

Gender neutral pronouns, or handling English dialog in such a way is not really that hard, and people who believe it's hard are just grumpy that they lose a way to tease people because now it's an insult to not consider the gender of the speaker as possibly being neutral or ambiguous. Think about how masculine and feminine behaviors are called out for being frivolously not-normal when done by someone who certainly does identify as one gender, it just happens to not be the gender they present as normally.

That's the entire thing about NB. It's less about mis-gendering like it would be for trans, and more about not assuming any specific gender in stories and conversations when none is necessary. It's a relatively recent thing, and there will be pushback because people think it's silly, until they get shouted down for not taking it seriously. It's also much less excusable, because singular 'they' has always been usable and is existing in English, and doesn't make conversations awkward unless the person is present, because then you should be using their name anyway.

From a gaming perspective, the easiest way to write dialog where the protagonist can be any gender is to use the gender neutral language by default, and never use a specific pronoun except where the speaker would never could never use it because they speak in a certain formal way (eg "My Lady", "Master <family name>", "Madam", "Sir") or diminutive way (-chan and -tan suffixes with all names, including themselves.) You often see this in subtitles in foreign language media where someone refers to themself by their own name/nickname instead of "I", where they really said it with diminutive gendered language. In that language it's supposed to come off as cute, but in English it is anything but.

[JohnSpawnVFX]

Snip

>Calls the thread troll bait
>Proceeds to defend the topic and blame it on the "mean majority"

So what does defending troll bait makes you?

Oh btw, story being political doesn't have anything to do with real life politics. We don't have wars with dragons in real life, and I certainly haven't seen any of the NPCs mentioning Trump. NB doesn't exist in the universe of the game.

[Sigma-Astra]

Yet you decided to be personally offended that I posted anything and when you added nothing to the conversation for that entire page of the thread. My point, since you didn't actually read it was that this thread is troll bait, and was definitely straying off topic.

One does not have to be personally offended to call someone out for being utterly insane and ridiculous with their logic, namely you. I mean, if you want to keep insulting yourself, by all means, don't let me tell you otherwise.

You constantly act like you're this philosophical, world traveled genius on the forums, and sadly, you're not.

[Miste]

Gamers are sociopaths when it comes to treating people with respect, so just remember that any perceived slight at this suggestion is because they have a closed or empty mind.

So...you just insulted and generalized millions of people around the world, including yourself since you play games too....then claim other people are the ones with closed minds???? Really??

Insulting just the people on the forums like you usually do isn't enough for you, you have to go all out and worldwide?

No one even has to respond to anything you say really, you just discredit and defeat yourself on your own.

My point, since you didn't actually read it was that this thread is troll bait, and was definitely straying off topic into the typical trolling nonsense at the time I posted

I personally don't care where the thread was going or is going, troll bait or not, that doesn't excuse you to insult and generalize millions of people?? Hello?? Like, where has the common sense gone???

Yet you decided to be personally offended

FYI Kisai, people don't have to be "personally offended" to call out someone's ridiculous statements and bad behavior.

[Dreamsoap]

[Laughs in smug]

"Internet historians will look back upon my self righteous post on an anime game and totally agree with me."

There's a point in one's life where your degree of separation from reality makes you say stupid shit you'll regret in only 10 years.

[DamianFatale]

I can already anticipate how “controversial” and “SJW” this post will be received by some as (God, when society in about 100 years from now looks back on this and how the word “SJW” is used as a slur for people who ask for more options of self expression, they’ll facepalm so hard.), but as a non-binary tax and sub-paying adult human, would there be any way you could (Square, that is) implement a gender neutral option, maybe if not on the character creation screen, then tucked away in the settings somewhere? (To avoid offending many of those who cry at the sight of *gasp* more than 2 genders!)

I look forward to the original remarks about Attack Helicopters and god knows what else being used as an argument against more options, but to the MANY gender-nonconforming players of this game (I’m sure you’ve all seen how many LGBT* FC’s there are), even just having one catch-all option outside of the gender binary would be so wonderful. I spend an ungodly amount of money on Fantasia due to being pretty fed up of being referred to as male or female constantly in basically every cutscene. (I probably shouldn’t have said that, you’re making a killing off me Square, I’ve probably funded all the expantions at this rate) What do you all think? Dangerous question to ask online, especially here, but I’ll risk it.

Play a Lalafell. They’re the easiest gender neutral race to play as. Aside from voice, I have a hard time distinguishing male and female lalafells some of the time.

[HakaseNyan]

Madness, our old friend!

[Sigma-Astra]

Madness, our old friend!

I've come to talk with you again.