Blind Luck MUD Development Diary, Entry 5: Gender in Games
In virtually all games where players are allowed to create their own character, the game will ask them to specify their character’s gender. This is expected, and most of us don’t think twice about it. We just choose “male” or “female” and off to play we go. But what if I don’t like those choices for my character? What then?
This is the fifth entry in my ongoing article series where I talk about making a text-based online fantasy role-playing game, which I try to make as accessible as possible for all players. If you want to read the whole series, I suggest you start with Entry 1.
It has recently become popular on social media to specify your “preferred pronouns” on your profile. That way, people can clearly tell “this person wants to be referred to as a she,” and then they can address them accordingly. This got me thinking that I should have support for setting your character’s preferred pronouns on Blind Luck MUD. This would mean that a player could be shown like this in the game:
Dannil the Cleric (he/him), wielding a quarterstaff.
So then I started wondering — how should the character’s preferred pronouns interact with the gender that the player specified at character creation? What if they don’t “match”? Sometimes the game will have to write things like “Dannil swings his club at the orc”. If Dannil’s gender…
