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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread April 11 - April 17, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Rust, a video game, has a veil of ignorance
After you've had a character for a while, gender is imposed randomly and permanently.
Interesting. I'm male, and tend to prefer playing female characters in RPGs, but am happy in those that don't allow a variation (always male or always female).
I think I'd be put out if both genders are supported but I don't get to make the choice. Feels like game designers trying (badly) to make a statement rather than trying to make the game enjoyable.
The difference between choice in the game and in real life is that I have knowledge of other things I could be doing, so I can safely opt out of the game if I don't like what's imposed on me.
It's not hard to persuade guys to play a girl character. The right argument is: Whose jiggling butt do you want to stare at for hours? X-)
While I don't play Rust, my impression is that the devs are being dicks (heh) for what looks to be ideological reasons. They say:
They are wrong, of course, what changed was that there was no choice possible and now there is a choice (which they dangle in front of you and then deny to you).
Maybe they should offer an expensive, inconvenient way of changing gender.
Ah, a new monetization technique :-)
Well, not really new. A lot of MMORGS will allow extensive plastic surgery for your character, often once for free and then for a fee.
An interesting side-note is that some (typically Asian) games have gender-locked classes. There is usually some whining about it, but not that much.
I can imagine the whining, though, if there were gender choice but your account was locked to a random class.
I think the whining would be only moderate because most people will say WTF, wonder at the stupidity of the devs, and happily go play something else X-)
Such as creating new Steam accounts and buying the game repeatedly, until you get the desired outcome?
Oh, maybe this was the strategy from the beginning.
I think you misunderstood their comment. They aren't raging proponents of "transgenderism" whatever you seem to think that means.
They were saying that women (50% of the population) were being forced to play as guys when they played Rust.
I don't think there is that implication here.
The funny thing is looking at the responsible party. Just who is responsible for releasing a game where your character could only be male and no female option was available?
Why, I think the devs are women-haters! X-)
Not to mention that even the most rabid proponents of "transgenderism" claim that it's prevalence is anywhere near 50%.
Original thread here.
The game designer explains
(Not very) sorry for the clickbait, but you'll never guess who's most likely to complain about being assigned a black avatar.
The designer says it's a survival game where it's difficult but important to form coalitions, and the assigned visual traits are a way of preventing anonymity for avatars-- you can't betray people and come back looking different. That's looks like an excuse-- avatars could just have permanent names or tattoos or somesuch.
Still, this is a really interesting experiment, and the game is apparently good enough enough that people have been playing it for years.
I have a little sneaky worm of suspicion that it might have been an excellent PR stunt.
Fairly soon I imagine you'll get games that allow you to choose the pronouns used to address your character separate from their looks and a slider or more freeform body-sculpting ability rather than just two choices.
Do you mean the pronouns used to address your character are automatically edited to be what you want?
It would be interesting if people could put up lists of the pronouns they prefer, and that would give them a tool for roughly judging how much trouble people are willing to go to to appear to be on their side.
Are there any games which encourage a you/thou distinction?
Games typically will avoid pronouns and just use the character's name. It's not hard because most of the dialogue in games is addressed to the player and is not two NPCs talking about the player.
In English the only reason to use thou would be some fake medievalism along the lines of Ye Olde Electronics Shoppe. But I wonder how things work in e.g. French where tu/vous distinction is alive and well.
Cabinet Minister: On se tutoie?
Mitterand: Si vous voulez.
Actually it's dying out in French (or possibly going back to being a singular/plural distinction rather than a familiar form), I sound gloriously stuffy because I'm not very good at the tu forms and tend to call people vous even once I've been properly introduced. My French teacher said "You will never know anyone French well enough to call them tu, so there's not much point in learning that, except for the exam". That was probably true in the 1950s.
In Greek and German it's even worse, the second person singular and plural are both familiar, for friends and family only. With strangers you have to say things like: "Would the gentleman care for a glass of beer", and sound like some sort of creepy servant.
I was thinking about chat between players.
Well, most players don't care. However in games with enough population you are likely to have role-playing guilds which will go to some trouble to role-play and yes, that involves the language used in chat (on the third tentacle there is always an OOC (out of character) chat channel where you can speak normally).
Gender-wise, everyone is assumed to be a guy -- unless (a) you explicitly declare yourself a girl; (b) you are on voice comms and your voice is clearly that of a girl; (c) you're in guild chat where people know that you're a girl.
It's hard to get players to use specific speech patterns, and harder to teach them to get it right. I've worked on a game which tried to get players to use pseudo-Elizabethan prose (in a particularly ham-handed way, granted), but in practice what happened was the people who didn't care just used natural speech, and the people that did used whatever butchered old-timey dialect they thought would be appropriate for their character. Most people didn't care.
I hope there are not, people would use the wrong cases and verb forms all the time.
No, but there's American English. I've been trying to introduce you and y'all in Cambridge, it's pretty cool.
Keep in mind that it's more complicated than just singular/plural. There are three forms: you, y'all, and all y'all.
there's also ya'all
I didn't know about all y'all. That's also pretty cool. Does "y'all" carry the implication "but not all y'all"?
Well, it's second-person so I'm not sure in which situation you would choose to use y'all to mean "you guys here but not those guys over there".
I had thought "all y'all" arose where "y'all" had come to be used universally, even when referring to a single person, so that "all y'all" became the new plural form. But that seems to be an oversimplification. See this discussion on Language Log which I think makes it clear that singular y'all is relatively rare but by no means unknown, and suggests that "all y'all" is used in different ways in different places.
The last time I queried an authoritative source on y'all (a waitress in a Waffle House in South Carolina), she was quite sure that "you" should be used for one person, "y'all" should be used for up to 5-6 people, and if you're addressing more than that, it's "all y'all".
That exists and has existed for a long time. In many games (usually MMORGs which have an incentive for you to get attached to your avatar) you can rather extensively body- and face-sculpt your character. There are still constraints imposed by your choice of race (not necessarily human) and sex. You are also limited to the general human body plan (two legs, two arms, no tentacles, etc.).
I don't know if any mainstream game (not counting sandboxes like Second Life) ever offered a fully customizable character model. There are issues here, from practical -- each player has a unique mesh and textures, and there are many players -- to social -- your game will have giant walking penises and floating vaginas.
Well, Second Life did had giant flying penises...