I don't at all object to including the standard, binary pronouns. But we are at a social stage where we don't reliably know what all the gender forms are going to be called .
So if we don't to just use a generic gender-neutral, we're always going to be leaving someone out ... unless we ask the programmers to let people enter their own pronoun which is certainly a solution that some people use .
And I agree that using "he-she-they" is better than what we have now. But it's still more complicated programming than a simple search and replace from he to they. If there are three choices the board has to be programmed to figure out what is the right one in every case and every Game interaction
But it's a reasonable argument to not ask the board programmers to complicate the entire board , when there is a simpler solution .
As a side note to the grammar... Enthusiasts... Who want to abhor this solution & cry "but no! 'THEY' is a plural! it's an Abomination to use it as a singular non-specific-gender pronoun!"
Well, to that I have two very pertinent replies .
The most important one is
1) That English is a living language, & has always been especially good at adaptation to evolving needs. This is the usage that is currently evolving and is becoming so widely accepted that it is now being used in official documentation & legal language .
But if it makes you feel better, there's also a grammatical logic to this.
2) This is not the first time that "English" has adapted a plural pronoun to a common use.
Not everyone realizes it, but the words "thou" & "ye" are not actually just a fancy form of "you ," invoked these days when someone wants to sound especially religious or old-timey.
These words were originally the singular forms of "you ." The word YOU was plural, a "you" inclusive of more than one person...or formal, Such as when one addressed God, or a particularly powerful person like a queen. Hence the "royal we."
(The German language has a construction similar to this, in the word "Sie").
But people ended up using "You" so commonly that the words "thou" and "ye" simply fell out of common use, and became uniformly replaced by the word "you ," as we use it today .
In fact, this evolved to the point where people had to reinvent a NEW word that meant "YOU, including more than one" ...and that's why the word "y'all" was invented!
But you can also see the history of the word YOU in the fact that the pronoun takes the verb forms that a plural would, even when you're addressing a single person.
So really, there's absolutely no reason why "society," (which is really just a frustrated lot of individual people coming to the same practical conclusion), can't just decide that "they" can mean a singular person , whose gender we do not yet know.
It's simple, it's logical , it's easy. We already know how to conjugate it . And it is inclusive of every single gender that the human race may yet discover.
(I think basically everyone just got tired of saying 'he or she,' when being inclusive. HE-OR-SHE Just naturally evolved to THEY and that's how we use it now.)
And best of all , to make this positive, inclusive change to the board , the ONLY programming that would be required, is to do a simple "search and replace" of the male pronouns to the gender non-specific, "they" pronouns.
One and done.
And if you find yourself resistant of this solution, because you say "but I don't WANT to be referred to by the pronoun 'THEY,' I want it to stay HE..."
Then try to be self-aware enough to realize that you don't like it for the same reason that the rest of us don't like it the way it is NOW. It's not pleasant to be misgendered...is it?
If we use "they ," then everyone will be on a level playing field, (literally), at last...
