Change in-game pronouns from his to his/her or their or use the player's gender

[EmilyMoby]

I searched but didn't find another thread on this topic (but these are common words so it's possible there's something out there that I couldn't get from searching).

I just played a move in In the Year of the Dragon and noticed it says "his craftsmen," which sounds weird to me, since I'm a she. I don't know if it would be an easy fix or anything, but I'd like to suggest a change to use either his/her or their (or alternatively, if possible, to have each player just answer what his/her preferred pronoun is and have that be plugged into the game).

[Shaq Jenkins]

I agree. Not everyone identifies as a man, and I really dislike seeing male pronouns on here because the assumption is that only men are members of this site. I'm also a woman and there's a significant amount of women who play here. The language they use should either be gender neutral (they) or based on the player's gender preference.

[Liallan]

There isn't any assumption that only men play on the site. I kind of think they know better.

There was a time when no one cared about this kind of thing. (In fact, it doesn't bother me in the least, and I'm female.) Since it used to just be "how it was done," it's certainly not because anyone assumes everyone is male. It's just a left-over from when no one cared. And a lot of Euro rules are still full of his's and him's. It's going to depend on who developed the game of course.

The easier thing is using they and their. I don't know what work that would take to change that in all the games, especially if it's left to a few people if the developer is not around to do it. (They can certainly request all new games be done that way.) Having people specify what pronoun they want used would probably be difficult since that would have to be site-wide throughout all games and taken from a central database.

[Een]

There isn't any assumption that only men play on the site. I kind of think they know better.

No assumptions indeed, I can even give you some statistics. 43% of players have set a gender on their account; 77% have selected "male", 23% "female".
Of course, this is the internet and you don't need to be what you say you are (or the opposite), but it gives an idea: the gender ratio on BGA seems to be around 3/4 men, 1/4 women.

There was a time when no one cared about this kind of thing. (In fact, it doesn't bother me in the least, and I'm female.) Since it used to just be "how it was done," it's certainly not because anyone assumes everyone is male. It's just a left-over from when no one cared. And a lot of Euro rules are still full of his's and him's. It's going to depend on who developed the game of course.

Yes. Some rules skirt the problem by naming the players by first names and not using pronouns. I have seen one rule where the writer makes excuses in advance for using masculine pronouns in the rules That seems a headache for everyone.

This is also a language specific problem. In French, the gender of the possessive pronouns depends on the object, not the owner, so the problem is just not there.

Internationalization is hard, and this specific problem is a pretty much unsolved one. Thing is, it's a context that occurs rarely. Most translation is done either in a context where gender is absent or doesn't vary. I was one day at a software convention, a guy from wikipedia asked how to do exactly that (saving me the trouble), and the speaker on internationalization didn't even seem aware of the problem... I suspect he just never ran into it.

Summing up the current situation:

• we have no "correct" solution for this (i.e. generic, no side effects, working well for English and for other languages);
• we use his/her on the main site;
• we recommend using gender neutral sentences as much as possible in games.

We also have been contemplating a "not correct" solution that would add a layer to parse strings to replace "his" by "her" if the player has selected a female gender (obviously, it would also replace legitimate "his" by "her" and that player would now think she plays only with women even if their nickname is BeardedMike and PrinceCharming). Don't know when we'll try this, there is a lot of stuff we'd like to do on the translation system that has been waiting for a long time already, but anyway you should know that it will always be glitchy. Just think of some sentence such as "Anna moves her tower and Mike loses his knight". You understand that Anna is a woman and Mike a man and you can use the proper possessive form. The computer doesn't.

This subject has been discussed in other threads (mainly here for English and here for German), but often only by men or "undeclared" players, which sort of seemed to invalidate the importance of the subject to women. We also got one or two heated emails about this, but that's not much over 6 years, and their excessive virulence pleaded against them. I think it's good that a forum thread has been created by women to discuss this (actually not the first, but that other time no other women weighed in) and it would be interesting if more women tell us if this is important to them or not (currently I count 4 to 1 overall but that's a rather small sampling). We don't have any way to know if you don't tell us, as you can guess from the gender of our accounts

[Liallan]

Of course, this is the internet and you don't need to be what you say you are (or the opposite), but it gives an idea: the gender ratio on BGA seems to be around 3/4 men, 1/4 women.
I'm honestly surprised women are that high, especially when a higher percentage of those not wishing to divulge their gender may be women, especially given it's the internet. (I could be full of it on that one.)

This is also a language specific problem. In French, the gender of the possessive pronouns depends on the object, not the owner, so the problem is just not there.

Ha, yes, I took French. Not that I really remember much. But just realizing that all languages handle things differently, it's just not a surprise to me that some might never think of this at all.

I know at Yucata in some cases, words used are based on the gender, like in the ranks. A male is a priest and female is a priestess. But being a rank, that was probably not difficult to do. Our old framework doesn't have any kind of game log so there's no verbage at all. (There's a play-back feature similar to here that just shows the moves.) Our new framework shows the player's name and then just says what they did without referring to them, i.e. like "played such and such card", or "meeple placed", or "such and such scored," so there's no "he placed his meeple here." There's no "the player" used, so nothing like "the player score the player's meeple on the blah blah," which is rather awkward. So that works pretty well.

I figured it would be difficult to find a good solution. You're right that a computer doesn't really understand these things. As a native English speaker, I think the best solution you could have that would probably be easiest is just using "their/theirs." That's actually what rolls off our tongue the most easily when we don't know. That at least solves the possessive. (I think that may even be grammatically correct since it's referring to someone that's part of a group [of players].) The he/she is a bit more difficult, but "the player" probably works for that. I'm sure there's a lot more possessives being used.

So now you do know the opinion of just a small amount of women. I actually care so little that when I'm writing up rule outlines and such, I just use he, him and his, and don't worry about it. I'm older - it might be my age.

[Shaq Jenkins]

There isn't any assumption that only men play on the site. I kind of think they know better.

No assumptions indeed, I can even give you some statistics. 43% of players have set a gender on their account; 77% have selected "male", 23% "female".
Of course, this is the internet and you don't need to be what you say you are (or the opposite), but it gives an idea: the gender ratio on BGA seems to be around 3/4 men, 1/4 women.

There was a time when no one cared about this kind of thing. (In fact, it doesn't bother me in the least, and I'm female.) Since it used to just be "how it was done," it's certainly not because anyone assumes everyone is male. It's just a left-over from when no one cared. And a lot of Euro rules are still full of his's and him's. It's going to depend on who developed the game of course.

Yes. Some rules skirt the problem by naming the players by first names and not using pronouns. I have seen one rule where the writer makes excuses in advance for using masculine pronouns in the rules That seems a headache for everyone.

This is also a language specific problem. In French, the gender of the possessive pronouns depends on the object, not the owner, so the problem is just not there.

Internationalization is hard, and this specific problem is a pretty much unsolved one. Thing is, it's a context that occurs rarely. Most translation is done either in a context where gender is absent or doesn't vary. I was one day at a software convention, a guy from wikipedia asked how to do exactly that (saving me the trouble), and the speaker on internationalization didn't even seem aware of the problem... I suspect he just never ran into it.

Summing up the current situation:

• we have no "correct" solution for this (i.e. generic, no side effects, working well for English and for other languages);
• we use his/her on the main site;
• we recommend using gender neutral sentences as much as possible in games.

We also have been contemplating a "not correct" solution that would add a layer to parse strings to replace "his" by "her" if the player has selected a female gender (obviously, it would also replace legitimate "his" by "her" and that player would now think she plays only with women even if their nickname is BeardedMike and PrinceCharming). Don't know when we'll try this, there is a lot of stuff we'd like to do on the translation system that has been waiting for a long time already, but anyway you should know that it will always be glitchy. Just think of some sentence such as "Anna moves her tower and Mike loses his knight". You understand that Anna is a woman and Mike a man and you can use the proper possessive form. The computer doesn't.

This subject has been discussed in other threads (mainly here for English and here for German), but often only by men or "undeclared" players, which sort of seemed to invalidate the importance of the subject to women. We also got one or two heated emails about this, but that's not much over 6 years, and their excessive virulence pleaded against them. I think it's good that a forum thread has been created by women to discuss this (actually not the first, but that other time no other women weighed in) and it would be interesting if more women tell us if this is important to them or not (currently I count 4 to 1 overall but that's a rather small sampling). We don't have any way to know if you don't tell us, as you can guess from the gender of our accounts

I appreciate your concerns and suggestions for how to rectify this.

I think you need to ask more female players on BGA about this issue. Not everyone uses the forums (I didn't start participating in the forums until two years after I joined). I've chatted with women here who have the same concerns as the OP and me. I have a few female gamer friends who were turned off of this site because of the gender pronouns, as they felt it wasn't welcoming of female players. That's not good for your site, as you should want as many people as possible to play here.

Gaming culture, at least here in the United States, has a serious problem with sexism and discrimination against women. Google "Gamergate" and read the disgusting comments directed towards female gamers. While I understand that there's language differences (I took 5 years of French and can read it fairly well) and something like pronoun usage may seem trivial, it does speak to the larger erasure and marginalization of women. Using male pronouns as a default is extremely troubling, and although you and Liallan may not agree, it does assume that everyone in that group is a man, which is not true (as your stats show, women do play here).

I could continue to discuss gender equality and the larger societal problem with default male pronouns, but perhaps that's a conversation that's too deep for BGA. I have experienced sexism on here, but not as much as I have on other sites. I was playing Tash Kalar with a male player, and he remarked that he was surprised I was so good at Tash Kalar because he didn't think women played abstract games. What a ridiculous, idiotic comment.

[chrisa]

I'm also female, and I am somewhat divided over this issue.
I understand the point of those who think that male pronouns contribute to hide the fact that many players are women. On the other hand, I think it will be difficult to find a reasonable solution for all languages. It might be easier and lighter in English, using they/their, than in other languages (in French, more and more documents are feminized and this makes texts so laborious... I don't like it at all). It would be fine if gender-neutral formulations were used whenever possible in new games, but I am not sure that fixing all the games that are already online is worth so much effort.
Actually, I personnally do not care much about the use of male pronouns (and I would certainly not leave this site for that reason!)
I have never felt discriminated as a female on BGA. I rather often feel ignored as a human being by players who do not bother answering my "hello/good luck!/have fun/gg"...

I was playing Tash Kalar with a male player, and he remarked that he was surprised I was so good at Tash Kalar because he didn't think women played abstract games. What a ridiculous, idiotic comment.

Yes, some men are still surprised to learn that women can play abstract games, repair their computer or replace a flat tyre (To be fair, some women also think that men cannot take correctly care of laundry or children, while my personal experience is that they can do that perfectly )
That's life! In my opinion, the best way to change their mind is not to argue, but to show them that we can.

[Liallan]

I have a few female gamer friends who were turned off of this site because of the gender pronouns, as they felt it wasn't welcoming of female players.

There are plenty of translated game rules out there that use male pronouns. Many of them. Do these female friends refuse to play all games that do this in the rules? They're missing a lot of good games.

Gaming culture, at least here in the United States, has a serious problem with sexism and discrimination against women. Google "Gamergate" and read the disgusting comments directed towards female gamers.

And I can find you plenty of sites where you won't find this. Just because there's some jerks out there does NOT mean that the gaming culture in the States has a serious problem with sexism. I have been playing computer games for many years, and have hung around that type of gaming group online for over 15 years (the board games came later), which are predominantly male. I never once felt there was any sexism in these groups (groups, plural) or any type of discrimination. I've never been the object of disgusting comments. If anything, some guys were pleasantly surprised to find a female playing these games. (Granted, that means it was unexpected, but only because that hadn't been their experience, and if something is male dominated, of course that's going to be their experience!)

Sorry if you've been the brunt of this type of behavior, but please don't make generalizations about gaming culture in the U.S. and assume that your experience is just the way things are. Most people are just fine with female gamers and don't think a thing about it. So trying to create that type of stereotype, especially if it's towards males gamers, is doing to them exactly what you believe they are doing to you. I'm sure my male friend gamers would not appreciate that stereotype. Furthermore, I happen to enjoy the groups with mostly males.

And in all those years, I only ever ran across ONE female who thought there were any sexism problems, and ALL of the other women on that group backed up the men.

Using male pronouns as a default is extremely troubling, and although you and Liallan may not agree, it does assume that everyone in that group is a man, which is not true (as your stats show, women do play here).

And all those game rules using male pronouns are assuming only males are going to play the game? Seriously? That's what you and your female friends think? They don't assume any such thing. I did not for one second when I first came here think there were nothing but males here. Not only did that never enter my mind, I assumed there were females here.

I was playing Tash Kalar with a male player, and he remarked that he was surprised I was so good at Tash Kalar because he didn't think women played abstract games. What a ridiculous, idiotic comment.

It is a ridiculous, idiotic comment, but that one guy is not representative of every male in the world, and I can only repeat that I know some men who would not appreciate creating stereotypes out of this. OF COURSE there's going to be those kind of people out there. You are aware that you can't stop all of that type of behavior that's in the world, right?

Chrisa is right. In all fairness, women make dumb assumptions about men as well. Not only do they make dumb assumptions and stereotype men, they also decide that men are wrong about everything. She may also be right that it's better to just show what you can do.

I really don't care if they leave everything the way it is, or if they make the pronouns gender neutral - either is fine by me, so don't take me wrong that I'm against that or anything. I just don't like the stereotyping and assumptions.

[Shaq Jenkins]

I have a few female gamer friends who were turned off of this site because of the gender pronouns, as they felt it wasn't welcoming of female players.

There are plenty of translated game rules out there that use male pronouns. Many of them. Do these female friends refuse to play all games that do this in the rules? They're missing a lot of good games.

Gaming culture, at least here in the United States, has a serious problem with sexism and discrimination against women. Google "Gamergate" and read the disgusting comments directed towards female gamers.

And I can find you plenty of sites where you won't find this. Just because there's some jerks out there does NOT mean that the gaming culture in the States has a serious problem with sexism. I have been playing computer games for many years, and have hung around that type of gaming group online for over 15 years (the board games came later), which are predominantly male. I never once felt there was any sexism in these groups (groups, plural) or any type of discrimination. I've never been the object of disgusting comments. If anything, some guys were pleasantly surprised to find a female playing these games. (Granted, that means it was unexpected, but only because that hadn't been their experience, and if something is male dominated, of course that's going to be their experience!)

Sorry if you've been the brunt of this type of behavior, but please don't make generalizations about gaming culture in the U.S. and assume that your experience is just the way things are. Most people are just fine with female gamers and don't think a thing about it. So trying to create that type of stereotype, especially if it's towards males gamers, is doing to them exactly what you believe they are doing to you. I'm sure my male friend gamers would not appreciate that stereotype. Furthermore, I happen to enjoy the groups with mostly males.

And in all those years, I only ever ran across ONE female who thought there were any sexism problems, and ALL of the other women on that group backed up the men.

Using male pronouns as a default is extremely troubling, and although you and Liallan may not agree, it does assume that everyone in that group is a man, which is not true (as your stats show, women do play here).

And all those game rules using male pronouns are assuming only males are going to play the game? Seriously? That's what you and your female friends think? They don't assume any such thing. I did not for one second when I first came here think there were nothing but males here. Not only did that never enter my mind, I assumed there were females here.

I was playing Tash Kalar with a male player, and he remarked that he was surprised I was so good at Tash Kalar because he didn't think women played abstract games. What a ridiculous, idiotic comment.

It is a ridiculous, idiotic comment, but that one guy is not representative of every male in the world, and I can only repeat that I know some men who would not appreciate creating stereotypes out of this. OF COURSE there's going to be those kind of people out there. You are aware that you can't stop all of that type of behavior that's in the world, right?

Chrisa is right. In all fairness, women make dumb assumptions about men as well. Not only do they make dumb assumptions and stereotype men, they also decide that men are wrong about everything. She may also be right that it's better to just show what you can do.

I really don't care if they leave everything the way it is, or if they make the pronouns gender neutral - either is fine by me, so don't take me wrong that I'm against that or anything. I just don't like the stereotyping and assumptions.

This is the last time I'm going to reply to you because, like I said in a comment on a different thread, you like to argue for argument's sake, and I really think you have a problem with reading comprehension.

You are being extremely obtuse if you don't believe sexism happens in American gaming culture. There are TONS of articles out there about it. I could send you hundreds, even thousands, of links to them, but that would be a huge waste of my time since you insist on being flippant. It's more common than you think - just because you haven't experienced it doesn't mean it's not out there, so please stop trivializing some women's experiences.

You keep insisting that I'm generalizing all men - please point to the specific comment where I said all men were sexist. In the Tash Kalar example, I did not say this man represented every single man in the world (I'm confused as to how you came to that conclusion - again, please work on your reading comprehension). Stop putting words into my mouth and read what I actually wrote.

Like I said, this conversation about gender discrimination is too deep for BGA, and I knew there'd be some people who would act oblivious and dismissive. This is exactly why I was hesitant to bring it up in the first place. I'm not wasting any more of my time arguing with you when it's clear that you're not even attempting to understand my perspective.

[Liallan]

Gaming culture, at least here in the United States, has a serious problem with sexism and discrimination against women. Google "Gamergate" and read the disgusting comments directed towards female gamers..

OK, I'll just stick to this one thing. You've made a generalization, instead of stating this as your personal opinion and/or your personal experience. I'm sorry, but this most definitely IS a generalization and I read what you said just fine. I never said you had not experienced any problems, nor did I say no problems existed at all. I simply disagree that it's the "serious problem" you claim it to be.

I don't like or agree with your generalization that there's a "serious problem" in the U.S. gaming community with sexism, or you stating it as though there is no refuting it. Perhaps I would like it pointed out that "serious problem" is your personal opinion and not a fact, and that others do actually have a different point of view on the matter that is valid, because you don't get to have the sole opinion. You are the one who threw out the generalization, not me. So I presented things that speak for a different point of view. That you would think this makes me obtuse merely points towards not believing there could possibly be other valid points of view.

And by the way, I'm simply not afraid to argue IF I have something say, but that is not the same as arguing just for the sake of doing it. I don't come to the forums so I can hunt down something to argue with. I post plenty of other things, or perhaps you just don't notice those. Yup, I do argue with you quite a bit. Instead of claiming to be posting your last comment, you could have just not posted at all. So I don't see where you have room to talk, since you quite obviously had something else you felt the need to say.

Well, so did I.