Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 29, 2020, 05:09:23 PM
For games, I find the best approach is, wherever possible, either to name example players and characters first ("Craig, and his character Sam"), or to write in second-person directly to the reader ("If you buy this Power, your PC can fly").  Do this often enough so that the reader isn't drowned in generic neutral "he"s and most sane readers will generally not complain.

Mostly this.
It also can be vaguely helpful for the lazy writer (and I can be) to have opposite genders interacting. "Mindfire raised his arm and hurls an flaming barrage at Emerald Hawk, but he easily dodges it." is pretty obvious but "Mindfire raised his arm and hurls an flaming barrage at Emerald Hawk, but she easily dodges it." May be slightly more obvious.
When you have longer more involved passages you are less likely to have a sentence or paragraph where it's hard for the reader to tell which of the two "he's" you are talking about in your example.

Mostly I don't care. But I think it is a little weird to not use both at some point.

Quote from: jhkim on December 30, 2020, 04:23:56 PMThis is where Sapir-Whorf issue comes in. For example, if you were Finnish and read a translation of the novel, do you think you would still feel like there was deliberate denial or misrepresentation? I wouldn't think so.

Truthfully, I'd say yes, I would; even in languages like Finnish where pronouns don't have a gender to quickly indicate the subject's sex, there is no shortage of ways to identify characters as male or female. But Leckie's protagonist, for at least the first few chapters, doesn't seem capable even of perceiving or recognizing biological sex in the characters she interacts with (she frequently guesses wrongly on the occasions the question actually comes up), and yet she's established to know of the concept.

I would have been far more interested if Leckie had invented a fictional genderless pronoun and confined her character to using that, because that would have felt genuinely alien, and I could have gotten used to a fictional pronoun much more easily than I could to a deliberately chosen "wrong" English pronoun for a source language which isn't supposed to have the concept at all. The latter simply felt too in-one's-face to me. (It's worth noting just how much of the positive press for the novel turned on this pronoun gimmick; without it, you still have what I'm sure is an entertaining and well-told space opera, but would it have won the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards? I confess to some skepticism.)

Quote from: jhkim on December 30, 2020, 04:53:55 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on December 30, 2020, 04:34:35 PM
My personal experience agrees with your supposition.  When I learn a new language, I find myself thinking new things and in different ways, enabled by the language, which supports my belief that we think at least partly in language, rather then just worldless brain-activity.  This is why I find the PC SJW language fascists so offensive.  They're trying to change my mind by coercing my language, which is a disrespectful and deceitful way to approach it.  If you want to persuade me of something, I'm generally willing to talk - maybe I'll think you have a point.  But I will not go along with being manipulated in this fashion.

But if we accept that language influences thought, then you *already* have been manipulated -- by being indoctrinated by the language you were raised with.

People have a tendency to say that whatever language they were raised with is normal and natural -- and newer ways of speaking are wrong. But language is always being manipulated and changed. The way people spoke in 1970 is different than the way people spoke in 1920, which is different from how people spoke in 1820 or speak now in 2020. Whatever language you were raised with was the result of prior manipulations.

People who insist on older language rules (like generic "he") are using exactly the same tactic -- influence minds by controlling their language. Either old language or new language can be seen as manipulative -- but whether it's deceitful or disrespectful depends on how they approach it, I would say.

There's one huge flaw in that argument--it ignores the difference in descriptive and prescriptive "standards".  Language is primarily about clarity of thought in communication.  To the extent that grammar standards reflect descriptively how the language is used in conversation, it helps with communication.  Obviously, the conversational language is looser than what the grammar describes.  There has to be some limits.  In short, English had no gender-neutral pronoun and used "he" for that purpose for the simple reason that it reflects the way people spoke most accurately.  Whereas the push for the alternatives is not arising spontaneously in the language and then being reflected but rather being prescribed systematically from those with a specific agenda that is not related to clarity of communication but indoctrination of thought.

Yes, I'm aware that some of the ones behind it are convinced that the spoken language is itself evidence of systematic bias, but you can't argue with people who beg the question, as they aren't capable of some of the fundamentals of logic and wouldn't argue in good faith if you tried.

If anything, the language used in games should more accurately reflect the conversation people use at the table.  (Not in the reference sections.  Those are technical manuals.)

If I ever publish a game, I'm going to use "it" for the gender-neutral pronoun.  People with a clue will get the joke and those without can read into it what they choose.

All of this is ignoring the actual economics of this decision.  How many times are pronouns used in an RPG book?  Assume a pronoun is one out of every 20 words (scale up or down to preference).  At 250 words per page (scale as well), that would mean about 12 pronouns per page.  In a 200 page book, that's 2400 pronouns.  Going from "he" to "she" means 2400 letters (assuming the average word has around six letters, that's 600 words or 2-and-a-half pages) wasted.  Using "s/he" doubles that waste.  And "he or she" is nine characters (including spaces) instead of two.  How much content did we not get, just because the authors are wasting space on useless elaboration of pronouns?  And I would bet that most RPG books get way fewer than 250 words per page...

My dad lives near a farmer and lets him graze his cows on his field. The farmer always refers to individual cows as 'he' even though they are all female. But I don't imagine he does that to stop women thinking of themselves as cows.

It's quite common for people to refer to their cars as 'she' or 'her' but I don't read anything into that either. It's all just part of the English language. Any attempt to change it, by edict, will ultimately fail.

Quote from: Shasarak on December 30, 2020, 05:30:10 PM

Quote from: Bren on December 30, 2020, 05:16:04 PM
* Would someone remind me, do we have a specific color we use for sarcasm?

I use black myself.

Well that avoids any confusion.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on December 30, 2020, 10:40:06 PM

Quote from: jhkim on December 30, 2020, 04:53:55 PM
But if we accept that language influences thought, then you *already* have been manipulated -- by being indoctrinated by the language you were raised with.

People have a tendency to say that whatever language they were raised with is normal and natural -- and newer ways of speaking are wrong. But language is always being manipulated and changed. The way people spoke in 1970 is different than the way people spoke in 1920, which is different from how people spoke in 1820 or speak now in 2020. Whatever language you were raised with was the result of prior manipulations.

People who insist on older language rules (like generic "he") are using exactly the same tactic -- influence minds by controlling their language. Either old language or new language can be seen as manipulative -- but whether it's deceitful or disrespectful depends on how they approach it, I would say.

There's one huge flaw in that argument--it ignores the difference in descriptive and prescriptive "standards".  Language is primarily about clarity of thought in communication.  To the extent that grammar standards reflect descriptively how the language is used in conversation, it helps with communication.  Obviously, the conversational language is looser than what the grammar describes.  There has to be some limits.  In short, English had no gender-neutral pronoun and used "he" for that purpose for the simple reason that it reflects the way people spoke most accurately.  Whereas the push for the alternatives is not arising spontaneously in the language and then being reflected but rather being prescribed systematically from those with a specific agenda that is not related to clarity of communication but indoctrination of thought.

The distinction between spoken language and written language is irrelevant. *Both* spoken language and written language change over time, as a result of people's changes.

Your premise here is that in past eras, people were all pure of heart and *only* used language for clarity of communication. It's only uniquely modern SJWs in all of history who thought to manipulate people through language. I consider that hopelessly naive.

Language is a tool, and it's never a neutral one. People throughout the ages have tried to use language to try to support and reinforce their views.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 29, 2020, 05:09:23 PM
. . . . is established as speaking a language which has no gender pronouns, and for which (for some reason) the in-universe English translation convention is to use the feminine as the default. . . . "See, this is what it feels like when the 'generic default' of a language excludes you,

Sorry, but no, that's bullshit. You're talking about a situation in which she is used as the default and there is no way to identify someone(or ones) as unambiguously male by pronoun. This is very much not the same situation at all. A proper example would have been something like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG, which uses she pronouns as the default, but still uses he/him for unambiguously male subjects.

As for myself, I hardly notice. I only notice when someone points it out to me, either directly or via a disclaimer. In the latter case, why are you justifying your pronoun usage to me in the first place? Just do it and shut up about it. I really, really don't give a fuck, and I'm certainly not going to hand out woke points. I also don't give a shit about English language conventions, as trying to hold a language in place is just . . . not how language works, so seeing them flip the script doesn't bother me in the least. As long as they don't virtue signal about it. Fuck pronoun usage disclaimers.

ETA: This does give me the slightly evil idea to find the person(or persons) who wrote the disclaimer, tell them to "here, have a cookie" and then link them to that horrid Cookie Clicker thing in the hopes that they'll lose hours, if not days, of their life to it. It's nonviolent, and it might keep them from writing something else stupid for a while.

Quote from: jhkim on December 31, 2020, 05:53:13 PM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on December 30, 2020, 10:40:06 PM

Quote from: jhkim on December 30, 2020, 04:53:55 PM
But if we accept that language influences thought, then you *already* have been manipulated -- by being indoctrinated by the language you were raised with.

People have a tendency to say that whatever language they were raised with is normal and natural -- and newer ways of speaking are wrong. But language is always being manipulated and changed. The way people spoke in 1970 is different than the way people spoke in 1920, which is different from how people spoke in 1820 or speak now in 2020. Whatever language you were raised with was the result of prior manipulations.

People who insist on older language rules (like generic "he") are using exactly the same tactic -- influence minds by controlling their language. Either old language or new language can be seen as manipulative -- but whether it's deceitful or disrespectful depends on how they approach it, I would say.

There's one huge flaw in that argument--it ignores the difference in descriptive and prescriptive "standards".  Language is primarily about clarity of thought in communication.  To the extent that grammar standards reflect descriptively how the language is used in conversation, it helps with communication.  Obviously, the conversational language is looser than what the grammar describes.  There has to be some limits.  In short, English had no gender-neutral pronoun and used "he" for that purpose for the simple reason that it reflects the way people spoke most accurately.  Whereas the push for the alternatives is not arising spontaneously in the language and then being reflected but rather being prescribed systematically from those with a specific agenda that is not related to clarity of communication but indoctrination of thought.

The distinction between spoken language and written language is irrelevant. *Both* spoken language and written language change over time, as a result of people's changes.

Your premise here is that in past eras, people were all pure of heart and *only* used language for clarity of communication. It's only uniquely modern SJWs in all of history who thought to manipulate people through language. I consider that hopelessly naive.

Language is a tool, and it's never a neutral one. People throughout the ages have tried to use language to try to support and reinforce their views.

That is not my premise, and you know it.  But I'm not going to argue about it further here, as it is borderline off-topic already.  When you are losing the argument, you try to change the subject.  I've said my rebuttal for the benefit of other readers, but I don't care to play your game at the moment.