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Just walk on by man. It don't apply to you? grand! you don't have to use it. Can still play the space game, more choice in games is not less choice for you. You still have all the choices you had before, plus another.
They have to get that esg score up or black rock will say they are mean.
After you click confirm you can choose whatever gender pronoun you want so don’t worry if it defaults to him or her etc.
In the real world, I'm forced to use these confusing pronouns under threat of potentially losing my job if I don't.
Therefore: its inclusion in the game does, in fact, affect me.
AH whhhhhaaaaat? you mean you have to RESPECT your co-workers in the WORKPLACE? WHAAAAAT? Never! how dare they make you... ya know... call people by the name or pronoun they ask you to...
Seriously. Its NOT that hard. All you have to do is have a basic ammount of respect for you fellow human.
Here's a fun exercise for you. Imagine what it's like to walk a mile in my shoes. Harassed in the street. Followed home by strangers. Threatened with beatings.
Or hell, lets not even think about that extreem stuff. How about being told "Use your REAL name on your CV next time you apply for a job". Could you imagine if a non-trans person had that said to them, after they had a legal name change?
I have been degraded, humiliated, hunted, assulted. Had my healthcare taken away. Had my right to vote curtailed, been fired from jobs and not hired at others, simply because I am visibly trans.
But sure. You having to remember to use the correct pronouns, is difficult.
Get some perspective man. The world is not out to get you. Just.... Respect your co-workers, jeeze
The char creation portions are a joke.
If you would like to pick a real pronoun, by all means. I'm not going to use your special confusing ones just because you want me to.
I mostly try and stay out of this kind of thing, as I don't have much deep investment in it. I can however see all sides of the issue.
I will say, the biggest issue I have with the idea of pronoun options in these kinds of games is that I find the whole thing immersion breaking beyond most things. It's a case where they are putting the political expression of a small group of people, beyond common sense or building any sense of reality. Despite how this sounds, take a time to really think about it. Can you spot the obvious problem? It's not one with identity issues, fairness, or anything about the validity of certain identities, I'll leave you to think about this one for a second before you scroll down. People who defend this fail to see a glaringly obvious problem to creating a realistic fare more often than they think of it themselves.
... the problem is simply, how does anyone know what your preferred pronoun is? For that matter how do you know someone else's pronoun. In the real world the answer is you simply do not, which is part of why it's so stupid, and why so many people in certain places have taken to wearing name tags with their preferred pronoun, but let's be honest, that is pretty dumb to begin with, and it's not something your seeing done in these environments.
I meet some NPC for the first time, how do they know my character prefers they/them? Well in a video game it's because of a character generation toggle. What's more in the same games, I have my character use the appropriate pronoun with people who would have no sign of preferring anything other than the obvious. It's an issue I sort of had with Temtem which was a decent game, and well intentioned, but a bit silly.
One of the issues with this both in games, and the real world, is that unless someone says something, you have no way of telling. Some argue it "should be obvious" but those people are typically very naive and have no real societal experience or perspective, typically being ivory tower types who have little experience offline, and in many cases no real knowledge of the world even a few years before they were born. One thing the rise of social media did was erase generational awareness. As Generation X I for example know quite a bit about what the world and culture of my parents and grandparents was right, yet for Gen Z, and many Millennials, they literally have no idea what the world was like prior to Tiktok and make wildly inaccurate assessments about everything before platforms like that existed, and oftentimes assume they invented anything that seems cool or to have value that they are introduced to from a previous generation. If you were to describe some things from the 1990s for example they would not believe you.
To give you an example, during the 80s and 1990s there was this whole "glam" movement that was a sort of sub set of punk and overlapped with parts of it, as did Emo and Goth. It could be massively incestuous as well. Glam typically involved guys using things like powder and feminine makeup, along with wild, typically long and spiked, feminine hair styles or wigs. They were hardly gay, and a lot of girls liked guys who could pull that off, and most of them would kick your butt utterly if you used anything but a perfectly heterosexual pronoun. Also despite some attempted retroactive projection let's just say "Boy George" from "Culture Club" was hardly gay despite people making him an icon, it was an attention getting gimmick combining aspects of punk and glam, and it worked. Look him up sometimes and notice how he appeared in public and who was on his arms when he appeared and you'll possibly "get it". Likewise Annie Lennox nowadays gets labeled as an "out and proud lesbian" and turned into a sort of gay rights hero for how she looked in the "Sweet Dreams" video and some stuff around that time. Guess what though.... totally straight, and she was also married a few times... to guys. It was a reverse boy george. This is one of the reasons why people who are older tell you this pronoun stuff is utterly stupid. If you operated under the assumptions people think you should now, you would get your ass curb stomped back then, a lot of my friends would have done it. Tell some glam-goth guys they are women or "they/thems" in some of the rougher clubs, you'd wind up in the hospital, just saying. A lot of the punks doing looks like that would bodily throw you into a mosh pit, or worse yet a slash pit, and you might wind up a statistic. I'm sure all those Billy Idol imitators would have loved to hear what you think of their gender identity.
As such, I am a believer that since fashions change and recur, it's typically best to simply address people by their actual, physical, gender, if it can be determined, and leave it for them to correct you if they think it's that important, and in the real world, unless your going to be part of their recurring peer group or deal with them a lot, it's probably not. That is the polite, informed, and practical, thing to do, and it is how I think video games should work. Unless they are somehow going to be aware of what's actually in your pants or could have gained this knowledge, then it should be he/she according to body type.
I also won't go into science but let's just say that beyond anything on any side of that debate, many human languages like Spanish or French using a gender designator for many or even most words and concepts. Ideas like this not existing in any real way are extremely recent, most humans disagree with this, and have throughout most of history right down to the formation of languages that we use now. This is by the way exactly why most people it is used to refer to hate the term "Latinx" as "X" is being used to remove the gender specification, and that is not accurate to Spanish which is a big part of the cultures being referred to, and let's say they mostly disagree with American activists on this issue. The French have similar issues with things like the use of "Le" and "La" and so on where gender specification is needed to use the language properly, and let's just say they can be particularly anal about this too as a source of cultural pride. If you want to release your game into any language except english and not piss people off, it's probably a good idea to keep American activist politics out of the basic dialogue to ease translation regardless of your actual position on the issues themselves. Consider this a practical concern that just happens to reinforce the general realism and trying to justify how people in your game somehow have "identity radar" and know that average looking guy wants to be called "they/them". If you insist on that, then please, at least make sure everyone is at least wearing a nametag.... oh sure, I'm positive a lot of people will laugh at that being stuck on the outside of all the space suits and armored combat outfits, but it will explain itself. "Yes, before we can go into heavy combat make sure your wearing a properly visible pronoun designator so the enemy won't be more offensive than intended before they set out to insult and murder you". Just imagine a Warhammer 40k battle where the Tyranids leave in shame after getting a pronoun lecture from a Sister Of Battle who identifies as a dude or something "OMG eat my planet, but don't assume my gender by this armor and the name of our organization! I keep telling them to call us the persons of battle. You might be a biological murder plague, but that's no excuse to be bigoted as you devour and assimilate everything".
Yes I'm trying to be funny, but honestly, I am trying to make a point. Sure you can say "it's just a video game" as people always do dismissively, but when your trying to create a realistic sense of the world and get people to suspend disbelief things like this help. Believe it or not, psychically knowing everyone's preferred pronoun actually does break immersion more than a world where there are dragons or you can throw fireballs or whatever because the latter things are typically explained within the world and lore to the point where they can be consistently be portrayed as real. Something like precognitive sexual identity detection raises all kinds of other questions and to really function has to exist outside of being explained within the reality being built. See they typically do explain how people being able to throw fireballs has effected the evolution of that world and society. If they are giving everyone a gender identity hive mind, they need to explain how and why this exists, the limits, parameters, and other assorted things. Among other things can people now sense each other as you automatically know where all other people are by being able to sense their identities around you? "I Darth Apocalyptus know there is an ambush ahead as I sense great gayness behind that door, be ready as I'm sure they are aware of our approaching heterosexuality". I'm sure it would be a ball to write that dialogue for an entire world and try and take it entirely seriously as it was being done. Also if this exist realize, most social issues people love to whine and grandstand about logically shouldn't exist. :)
I remember in the BG3 forums, people would get ganged up on for asking for a sexuality option in character creation, so that they wouldn't get hit on by people they weren't interested in. A common argument was "Well how would the companions know your sexuality?". Apparently them psychically knowing that your obviously physically female character is actually a man isn't immersion breaking at all.