Customizable pronouns

[Cled-cat]

I said people view it as a mental illness because that's been my exposure to it so different walks of life, most people ive seen talk about rarely is it positive. And I understand what they are asking for, but Japan is the most "non inclusive" place ever as far as social change. They do what they want, and that's that. The odds of it happening are so slim it just isn't a good idea to bring up the topic on an online forum.

Well, a few decades ago (and even today in some countries), being gay is seen/classed as a mental illness, but that’s a pretty ridiculous thing to assume in most developed societies nowadays. Sexuality and identity are different yeah, but if you can’t convince someone that being gay or bi or whatever isn’t a choice/illness then yeah we got no chance at all of convincing those same people of different identities. You may think it’s not a good idea to bring it up, but it’s always worth talking about something that’s not understood much, how else will it ever be more understood if it’s not an idea that’s applied to most mediums of conversation you know? They have gay marriage in this game, so that kind of contradicts your message about Japan’s noninclusivity. If we set them up for failure before they even try to adopt change, then yeah, there really is no point.

[NealSnow]

It is recognized as a mental illness (Specifically a developmental disorder treated with therapy and psychotropics) by every single psychiatric organization in the world.

As is gender dysphoria, as an aside.

Thank you my potatoe shaped friend lol. I have aultism myself and I myself deal with the issue's. I'm not normal, I have a illness. I just don't care! If people accept me fine, if not idc. I'm not gonna demand SE let me make my wol autistic as a result. Be happy with who you are, but don't expect the entire world to conform to your needs I say.

[Siete]

All this forced "inclusion" is getting way too strong in videogames, lately all games have a highly forced "inclusive" character which the biggest aspect of characterization and lore surrounding it is the "inclusive" part.
And no, it's not because they're "badly done", it's simply because the specification forced in means so little that the only way for it to be seen is making it be constantly in the spotlight.
Final Fantasy XIV has it's own world, with it's own inhabitants and in it's lore and foundations. There are no such things as "nonbinary", they're just what they are and we shouldn't transgress the rules of OUR world into THEIR world, period.

[Ardox]

Hi there!

So I'm nonbinary and it's been a real treat seeing gender neutral pronouns being used for the pixies in Il Mheg and for our adorable branch. For the WoL, though, there's always only he/him or she/her. I was wondering if it might be possible to set different pronouns for written dialogue and system messages, either through the character creation process or something in the options menu? It would be a nice little bit of inclusion to have in the game.

Obviously, voiced lines that use pronouns don't necessarily need to change in the process.

I glanced over, thought to stay silent...

Then i realize I'd be really peeved if wedding would have been made gender restricted.

You go trailblazer, don't let the naysayer discourage you

[Gwenorai]

But the question is, how is OP putting forward a solution for this to be done? Seeing as all of the local language teams will need to edit every single piece of code that has a 'yes/no' flag regarding gender. This needs to be considered. Or how would this even work in different languages where they don't tend to use certain pronouns? I'm seeing a want, but I'm not seeing a lot of acknowledgement to the basic logic which is the code itself. And more of a 'my inclusion' social movement type of thing going.

Like, I can't take anyone seriously until they acknowledge the major issue is the code itself. And what they're asking for is hours upon hours of work for something they're just going to see. Remember that even if this was added, people are more than likely not going to call you by your pronoun. So, wouldn't that just completely nullify it? So all this would do is give a very small amount of players acknowledgement of their different pronouns, in the text which will soon be shattered because someone in your party or around you will call you 'he/she' anyway because your avatar has no in-between.

[cinnamonoreo]

I need a citation for them programming in gender as a binary flag in this game because honestly, that's a ridiculous and resource-intensive way to go about it vs just defining a variable and calling that.

[Gwenorai]

I need a citation for them programming in gender as a binary flag in this game because honestly, that's a ridiculous and resource-intensive way to go about it vs just defining a variable and calling that.

Google 'what's a hrothgar', check the first result which should be on reddit. You will see a huge thread that shows the code. Where male and female flags exist throughout the entire code for dialogue.

https://i.redd.it/xre7d6dnl7g21.jpg Here is an example of it. As you can see, the code does a check regarding your gender, such as 'le' and 'la'.
Here is another example; https://i.imgur.com/4JgffXR.png
Basically, all of this would need to be rewritten to include this, and there's a lot of it throughout this game.

[cinnamonoreo]

Google 'what's a hrothgar', check the first result which should be on reddit. You will see a huge thread that shows the code. Where male and female flags exist throughout the entire code for dialogue.

https://i.redd.it/xre7d6dnl7g21.jpg Here is an example of it. As you can see, the code does a check regarding your gender, such as 'le' and 'la'.
Here is another example; https://i.imgur.com/4JgffXR.png
Basically, all of this would need to be rewritten to include this, and there's a lot of it throughout this game.

Ah, French localization. They gender everything. Indeed, it would be a localization challenge and for that, they could keep the same overly complicated gender deal going. Given that it's in French, I'm not going to take that as definitive evidence they program it this way globally. If they do, lol.

Still doesn't change my suggestion. Even some French people are nonbinary. They might appreciate having some agency other than modifying character appearance in terms of pronouns.

Why would a boolean be resource intensive compared to anything else as an option?

I have no idea what the variable type is, I had just thought it was just an integer but then reading other posts figured.. not really necessary at the time of creating the game to be an integer because why for? So it probably is a boolean now that I think about it more lol.

Obviously at this point it being an integer could help with the request (gender = 5) but then we'd still have structure problems in the sentences and likely different problems in different languages (like some words need more than just the pronoun changed to sound right, for example they in English sometimes sounds a lot better with tweaks to the rest of the sentence and cannot just be plopped in simply).

One call to a database vs having the game individually test each case every time.

[Shougun]

One call to a database vs having the game individually test each case every time.

Could just be one call to check if you're male or female too though (1=yes, 0=no; 1=male, 0=female). A variable of a space of two would certainly be simpler and less resource intensive than a variable larger than a space of two.

Edit: oh I see what you meant, I was already thinking you'd have to test cases no matter what so "how would having anything larger than 2 be possibly better?" (in terms of efficiency) lol. But you were thinking more like if the system didn't work as it did, I think Harmonea did a good job explaining how it probably isn't that way (because of so many ways each language can and does say things).

Also actually how they coded it if Harmonea's example is real like (structure wise) then the amount of work to add more genders is so much more than I had thought which was already quite a bit (because the structure doesn't really promote for an easy change). If I paid more attention to those French leaks that'd help here hahah, but I didn't because I was like "I can't read french anyways, important detail is Hrothgar - yeet!" lol.

[Ayuhra]

Here's my totally controversial stance:

Sure, why not.

The biggest hurdle is recorded dialogue. Custom pronouns would not appear there. Already recorded dialogue for old content would not reflect they/them.

But gender neutral pronouns as an option for more current content? Sure.

Localization teams might have it rough, though, since some languages are gendered (see for example: All romance languages)