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Character Gender

Will we have options beyond the male/female binary in character creation?

I notice Decheerans are a "unisex" race, for example. Will there be nonbinary options no matter the racial choice?
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  • As long as you can only play as a female or a male HUMAN. The other races can have as many non-binary genders as the devs are willing to put in but there are only two genders for the human species.
  • I may sound as untolerant but in the nature there is a binary option of gender as long as you are well developed specimen. So if you want to be trans-gender, none-gender or gender-fluid keep it as part of your character psychology. Nature dictates that there are two genders. Even plants have gender
  • Regardless of your personal stance on it as an IRL hot-button issue, it's not exactly nature we're talking about, now is it? Nor any kind of nature simulator.

    There's many people who draw comfort from being able to naturally express themselves however they wish, most notably in a role-playing environment! It is also not without precedent in IRE, gender-fluidity is even a draw for some people buying certain artifacts (especially in Lusternia's earlier days).

    I am not looking for, or remotely interested in, any kind of discussion about how "natural" you think it is. Nor should we debate the flawed analogies of plants (which are, by and large, hermaphrodites).

    I asked a simple question for the devs, and am just looking for a simple answer.
  • I believe the issue might come down to code. Messages for things like quests, attacks and such in third person will have to have coded alternatives. "The space monkey grins at <name>, holding <his/her/its> stolen bunny slipper in its lifted hand."

    It might be difficult to match up all pronouns, so in this case I'd think one would have to pick one set of anatomical parts and then RP out gender identity. 

    My thoughts. 
  • Cen said:
    I believe the issue might come down to code. Messages for things like quests, attacks and such in third person will have to have coded alternatives. "The space monkey grins at <name>, holding <his/her/its> stolen bunny slipper in its lifted hand."

    It might be difficult to match up all pronouns, so in this case I'd think one would have to pick one set of anatomical parts and then RP out gender identity. 

    My thoughts. 
    Thank you. The only thing I'd amend is that "their/they" is usually preferable to "it".
  • Sorry! Meant no offense with the example. It was the language teacher in me popping up (third person singular)!
  • edited January 2018
    You're choosing your sex, not your gender, to be accurate. There are too many genders for us to include them all, and how many depends on what culture you're part of.

    On the other hand, sex is a biological reality, and isn't subject to cultural norms (barring intersex people, of course, who are real fully-developed people) so that's what is assigned to your character. Gender, however, is completely up to you. 

    RP whatever gender you wish. Feel free to invent new genders for yourself if you want! Sounds like interesting RP to me.

    As far as pronouns go, the game will report them based on your sex or lack thereof in the case of Decheerans and possibly a couple other NPC races, as the alternative is going to be too annoying to read. Decheerans will stick out as an oddity, but were we to have a large selection of gender-based pronouns available, the text would start reading very oddly to most people. 


  • I just assumed the character sex (what NPCs refer to you with/how you look in your desc/third person interactions) is whatever other people can easily identify you as. Not to sound intolerant or something, but I'm sure I'm not the only one that's seen a person who identifies as a guy or a girl and assumed otherwise based off physical attributes + personal preferences/biases (until corrected, of course).

    Will make for fun RP, though.
  • I have to say that it surprises me that there won't be a singular they/them/theirs option given that Decheerans have their own code and that this has been requested in other IRE games but that would have irequired a code rewrite. (But Starmourn was coded from scratch, essentially.) 
    Vote for Starmourn! Don't hurt Poffy.
  • Syaja said:
    I have to say that it surprises me that there won't be a singular they/them/theirs option given that Decheerans have their own code and that this has been requested in other IRE games but that would have irequired a code rewrite. (But Starmourn was coded from scratch, essentially.) 
    We want this to be a feature of races like Decheerans.
  • Laxnarl said:
    As long as you can only play as a female or a male HUMAN. The other races can have as many non-binary genders as the devs are willing to put in but there are only two genders for the human species.
    This is inaccurate, a simple google with provide articles to show why.

    Aurelius said:
    You're choosing your sex, not your gender, to be accurate. There are too many genders for us to include them all, and how many depends on what culture you're part of.

    On the other hand, sex is a biological reality, and isn't subject to cultural norms (barring intersex people, of course, who are real fully-developed people) so that's what is assigned to your character. Gender, however, is completely up to you. 

    RP whatever gender you wish. Feel free to invent new genders for yourself if you want! Sounds like interesting RP to me.

    As far as pronouns go, the game will report them based on your sex or lack thereof in the case of Decheerans and possibly a couple other NPC races, as the alternative is going to be too annoying to read. Decheerans will stick out as an oddity, but were we to have a large selection of gender-based pronouns available, the text would start reading very oddly to most people. 


    I feel like a really difficult aspect of just RPing it is that, unless written around, the choice of sex will be constantly fed back through lines. Like emotes where pronouns are scattered around for example (This is based on experience trying to rp a gender neutral character)

    Maybe a middle road could be to just make it an easily changeable config option? People that are one or the other will just set it and forget it, but others could flip it to have days where they look more masculine and others where they’re more femme?
    Avatar by berserkerelf!
  • @Sairys : The beauty of RP is that you are in charge of how your character acts at every given moment. With Admin providing an alternative gender-neutral race, all you need to do is to look at that for examples if you have been struggling with how to portray something like that. 

    You choose which pronouns suit your character inside your own emotes. Then it is up to the people you interact with how they will respond. Maybe they pick up on your signals and start using them too. Maybe they don't. Maybe their characters are ignorant of such things, or intolerant.

    The point is, you play your character with complete freedom through custom emotes. If you prefer this kind of angle, which is an interesting one, you just stay away from the pre-defined ones. Mechanics are a different matter, as Admin clearly want the Decheerans to stand out in that way.
  • edited January 2018
    @Cen And the moment that you use an ability, a predefined emote, interact with something that has a room emote, etc your character is misgendered.
    Gendering is everywhere, even in custom emotes. cause when someone targets you, the tags that make the various POVs work would use the system gender.

    Apparently no matter how you describe or play them everyone takes a look in your pants to make sure what pronouns to assume for your character?
    Avatar by berserkerelf!
  • edited January 2018
    As a side note, hope to have options outside the binary has come up previously in Lusternia a couple of times now and get bumped back because of the amount of work it would take to convert everything over at this stage. (apparently, the "gender" flag is just like... are you female? no okay you're male)

    Which likely creates the feeling that if we don't have it from the beginning the game just won't have it.
    Avatar by berserkerelf!
  • Flags tend to have a true/false nature. It is kind of difficult to mimic the diversity that exists in human society with those. I'm no expert, but isn't most code binary? 
    01110111 01110010 01101111 01101110 01100111 00100000? 

    In Aetolia I believe they have consumable artifacts for people to switch gender whenever they feel like it. Maybe that is an option?

    The thing with emotes is that you cannot control how others write their custom ones when interacting with your character. You don't use target flags in your own emote about your character, just for others, and this is by choice. Sure, if someone chooses to use your signals of a different gender against what mechanics provide, it will mess up your side of the log, but isn't that alright?

    Emote looks at $Bob, taking her hand after being introduced. 

    Others see: Cen looks at Bob, taking her hand after being introduced.

    Target sees: Cen looks at you, taking her hand after being introduced. 

    I'd say it shows an effort to get involved in your RP, but maybe that's just me.

    You can only control your own portrayal of your character through your own emotes. Interpretation of this will always be up to the observer. If they want to use target tags, they will and mechanics will go by sex. If they want to pick up on your signals, they will. If they want to ignore them, they will.

    If I come into a room and see a person, I will go by what I see with my eyes first, until otherwise is made clear through interactions. Use your writing,  imagination, mad skills, to portray your character through the description and perhaps poses (I hope this will be a thing) and emotes. Then trust that people will take mechanics for what it is, much like real people will have to understand that looks and what's on paper might not always match the insides. Interaction is key to understanding someone, after all.

    Anyway. My thoughts. Dropping this now as Admin have explained that they want one race specifically to stand out as gender-neutral, and RP exists as an option.
  • Cen said:
    Flags tend to have a true/false nature. It is kind of difficult to mimic the diversity that exists in human society with those. I'm no expert, but isn't most code binary? 
    01110111 01110010 01101111 01101110 01100111 00100000? 

    In Aetolia I believe they have consumable artifacts for people to switch gender whenever they feel like it. Maybe that is an option?

    Gender could, in theory, also be an identifier (like 0, 1, 2, etc) which looks up a table that's like.

    0 | he | him | his | he is | he's
    1 | she | her | hers | she is | she's
    2 | they | them | their | they are | they're
    3 | groot | groot | groot | groot | groot



    And the ability to switch elsewhere is why I suggested just making that a config option as an alternative. The issue with doing that in lusternia is that one of the races has different stats between the sexes.

    Cen said:
    The thing with emotes is that you cannot control how others write their custom ones when interacting with your character. You don't use target flags in your own emote about your character, just for others, and this is by choice. Sure, if someone chooses to use your signals of a different gender against what mechanics provide, it will mess up your side of the log, but isn't that alright?

    Yes, that's the issue. The easiest and typical way that people will interact with you or around you will be with those emotes. You'll see first-person stuff, but everyone around you will only see that in your emotes and if someone else is logging it then that will show up there.

    Cen said:
    If I come into a room and see a person, I will go by what I see with my eyes first, until otherwise is made clear through interactions. Use your writing,  imagination, mad skills, to portray your character through the description and perhaps poses (I hope this will be a thing) and emotes. Then trust that people will take mechanics for what it is, much like real people will have to understand that looks and what's on paper might not always match the insides. Interaction is key to understanding someone, after all.
    By your logic here, gender should not be specified until each player has looked at another player and assigned an assumed gender to them.

    I've had non-binary friends talk about how they get yelled at for trying to use one changing room, use the other, and then get yelled at when they come back out because on the same day in the same clothes two people assumed different genders for them.

    As for trusting people... you're hoping people will pay attention to something that the game is consistently telling them is wrong, you're asking them to remember something they don't need to think about for likely the majority of other characters. And that's before you consider the bullying potential of intentional misgendering.
    Avatar by berserkerelf!
  • Short of making everyone able to just swap genders whenever they decide to identify one way or the other, I think the best option most people will find (based off of what's consistent with most IRE games) is to just pick the Sex that their character identifies with as their gender.

    Maybe there will be a 'they' option, as a third choice, to provide neutral as a pick. Dunno, just depends on how developed the code is in that area and whether they can inject such a thing in there with nothing breaking.

    We have to keep in mind that any change they make to already existing software can, and likely will, break something. That is pretty much a given in anything IT related, and that only pushes the release further back. Worst case (short of it just being scrapped) is that it'd have to be pushed back, and provided as a free-change sort of thing at some point.
  • From the Lusternia discussions, an issue is that it doesn’t just affect players cause denizens are also handled the same way. So as more and more denizens get added it’s more stuff to change to a new method later on, adding to the whole “massive change if done later” thing
    Avatar by berserkerelf!
  • edited January 2018
    Depends on if they have gender as a function, or an actual part of the response. If it is a function, that's just one change. Otherwise? God help them.

    Variables are 50/50.
  • True.
    Now I'm imagining trying to add in another race with unique pronouns in the second version.
    Avatar by berserkerelf!
  • Instead of pick gender or sex we should pick pronouns, especially considering you write your own description (or should).
  • edited February 2018
    They/Their is not grammatically correct for singular pronouns, so I'd have to disagree with that out of principles.

    A better solution (linguistically) is to remove pronouns, but that would likely lead to name spam.

    A lot of the other suggestions seem like they'd just be used for silly memes or stupid stuff. Gendering other people?!

    While I don't believe that we should base the system on it, it should be something that's available to the few that will actually use it.

    One more note, Gender is a social construct and not a physical thing like Sex is, so articles that definitively 'prove' there are multiple genders tells me that these are probably fairly ignorant researchers with some sort of agenda, since the hypothesis literally cannot be correct. 
    FoofFoof
  • CenCen
    edited February 2018
    Affurit said:
    They/Their is not grammatically correct for singular pronouns, so I'd have to disagree with that out of principles.

    I am afraid this is not entirely true. It is becoming increasingly more accepted to use third person plural as a neutral singular alternative. Not a new concept, but it has not been in wide-spread use since the 16th century. I looked it up, as I am a non-native English teacher and wanted to make sure I do the correct thing. (Backing this up with references: Merriam Webster, Collins cobuild, Oxford dictionary)
  • Along the same lines, we've used singular they/their/them for ages for an unknown. "Maybe whoever left their book behind will come back and get it. It'll be at the front desk waiting for them."
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  • Yeah, studies have pretty conclusively shown that in regular speech, the singular "they" is used by the majority of people. Like even people that will argue against its use will often immediately use it the moment they stop thinking about it. As in @Syaja's example.

    The generic he being "correct" only really goes back to the mid 18th century.
    Avatar by berserkerelf!
  • Khargal said:
    I may sound as untolerant but in the nature there is a binary option of gender as long as you are well developed specimen. So if you want to be trans-gender, none-gender or gender-fluid keep it as part of your character psychology. Nature dictates that there are two genders. Even plants have gender
    This is actually not true to a 100%. There are species of animals that have both genders which is actually a third gender called Hermaphrodite (the common earth worm for example and plants can also have this quality) and there are fish that can swap between female and male at will. There is also a fourth state called asexual reproduction which takes a variety of forms but removes the need for any sort of gender. 
  • edited February 2018
    You don't even need to go outside of humans to see that "biological sex" isn't really black and white.

    Like... that goes to a whole discussion about sex-wise what is a male and a female? And what about the many people that don't fall directly into the boxes you try to define for them?

    It's also an area which can really easily become transphobic. The main reason I've seen anyone even bring up "biological sex" is when they're attacking trans folk and attempting to invalidate them.
    Not saying this has necessarily happened yet in this thread, just personal experience.
    Avatar by berserkerelf!
  • Personally, as a person who has failed spectacularly at this whole life thing (life as in sex, gender, and identification(?)) and finds it really difficult to grasp the whole concept (I really try, but the whole thing is a little too abstract for me and past experiences have not at all been pleasant simply because I can't seem to understand all of this), I think it'd be a good idea to add some sort of 'Other' option at character creation for those who want. 

    Why? Well, having three options (Male, Female, or Other) gives people greater freedom to roleplay however they want, whether that be changing something on a day-to-day basis or like... Other. And it's a happy medium between ignoring those that don't follow old cultural norms and trying to please every single user. It's kind of like, "I respect you being somethingsomething, and while I can't add your specific lifething because it wouldn't be at all good code-wise, I can make it a little easier for you."

    And then it'll also be easier for people like me to be more considerate. I don't like the idea of me running into someone who has masculine pronouns but isn't masculine at that time(?) or something because then I'm certainly going to never try interacting with them again so that I can just wholly avoid insulting someone because again, it's all just difficult for me despite years of trying to. 

    Again, I'm sorry if anything in this post insults you in any way, reader. It is not at all my intention and if I said something that is really bad, feel free to PM here or on Discord (Star Gazer #0636) calling me out on it. Every little bit helps me understand a little more.
  • I'll do my best to be respectful of everyone's unique designations but any time spent on developing an advanced gender identification system would be better spent on...literally anything else.
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