DreamMachine wrote: ↑
January 6th, 2026, 19:01
Kalarion wrote: ↑
January 5th, 2026, 15:15I tend to agree on the whole that dev studios are primarily motivated by messaging and evangelism, but don't discount the constraints pure economics and outside, possibly hostile (even if theoretically aligned ideologically) observation places on their development work.
That it's about money constraints doesn't make any sense to me at all. What's a few lines when you are building an entire interactive fictional world from scratch? Show me a game from 10-15 years ago where they did this and I will reevaluate my position.
Furthermore, in Hogwarts Legacy they were able to put in different lines according to which House you belong to. If we follow your reasoning then this would have been too cost prohibitive and somehow they would have found another way that's more effective. You have to be of the belief that distinguishing between 2 different genders is not important to begin with to be able to think that it is not a necessary part of your game. They're not putting in body types instead of genders because of money are they?
Also, in Atomfall your player character is a MAN, there is no gender/body type selection available, and yet everyone is calling you "they".
I think you may underestimate the amount of social engineering that is going on through media. So I respectfully disagree. They're doing this primarily to be inclusive towards non-binary people, and as a consequence the whole English language is (d)evolving to become more gender neutral as well. It's happening already. Become comfortable with being called "they" everywhere you go.
The main issue is that you are conflating "they don't think distinguishing between genders is important" with "social engineering". This is understandable only if you have been living under a rock for the last thirty years or so. These people
already grew up in a milieu where everyone ALREADY CALLS EVERYONE "they". That's just normal to them, they're not even overtly thinking about it. To them, gender is cosmetic, not a character choice by the player that needs to be specifically addressed; making extra lines about the player's "important" character creation choices feels like reactivity to them, which is good, but recording lines twice to say he or she — although do keep in mind that the different lines they make for character creation choices like Hogplace house generally don't
double the number of lines outright — seems pointless to them because calling everyone "they" is 'already a universal solution everyone normally does' in their world.
I hate it, people don't talk like that where I'm from, but you're completely failing to understand that California dialect is its own thing that has existed for over a generation now. There's no need to socially engineer it; to them, it's already the default and anyone who complains must be just a Nazi being petty and pretending "everyone" doesn't already say it.
By the way, you want "a game from 10-15 years ago where they did this"? 2007's
Portal has a fixed protagonist and the only other character talks to you directly anyway, so it doesn't have third-person pronouns in the
game... but the developer commentary, I called this out in another thread a bit ago, always refers to the player as "they", and in the 2011 sequel they even specifically made a commentary 'node' (that is, a thing you interact with to read the commentary)
JUST to pat themselves on the back for this. Apparently — according to that node — some earlier game had used "he", probably in Half-Life or something (where the PC is actually male so it makes sense!) but they insist that even by that time they were already using "they" in 'normal' everyday conversation. And I believe that, based on my experience with *******.
