Are you just as outraged by D&D 3rd edition rulebooks, that does just the opposite (she will, her attributes, etc?.)

I think they're both bad solutions. I work in cryptography, and run into this problem all the time. Sometimes it's solved by giving entities identities: Alice, Bob, Charlie, Dave, Eve, Mallory, etc. This generally only works with two or three players, since assigning multiple players to one gender doesn't work well (if there are three players, then one is "the adversary", and is referred to as such, without pronoun).

After my last paper, my advisor actually started asking about gender-neutral pronouns in English. There are several solutions, including Spivak pronouns ( http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/S/Sp/Spivak_pr...), but, unfortunately, none are currently popular. All of us can help change that!

Lea

When you start writing rules, feel free to use she and her when referring to players. I promise not to take issue with your choice of pronouns (even though it would not technically a correct usage in English). You can even use it, if it makes you feel better.

One solution to this non-existent problem that I've seen used and don't care for is using he and him one sentence (or paragraph) and then when referring to the same player using she and her. That sometimes gets confusing.

They and their are plural, unless the entities competing are teams of people, it is incorrect usage and reduces clarity.

I have a problem with gender-specific rules, whether they are are he/him or she/her. It's the same problem - they're exclusive terms and gaming is an inherently inclusive pastime (in my opinion, anyhow).

While not a game designer, I am an engineer and spend a large part of my work time writing manuals, procedures for work, contracts etc. I sincerely believe that it IS possible to use the terms they/their without causing confusion. Case in point:

"On his turn, a player must perform one(and one only) of the following three actions..."

This could just as easily read:
For each turn, a player must perform...
On his/her turn, a player must perform...
On your turn, you must perform....

It just takes a little longer.

Wow! I would much prefer designers focused on the clarity of their rules, rather than the political correctness of their pronoun usage. I could not care less whether the players are referred to in the masculine or feminine. As Jorge mentioned above, the current edition of D&D rulebooks uses the feminine, and I don't care. For all I care, all future rulebooks can use the feminine pronoun, and I'll just focus on the gaming.

Blame the language. Don't blame the game designers/companies that there are no convenient pronouns in English for a person whose gender is not known.

Just to give an opposing viewpoint...

I think gender-neutral rules are confusing. It tells me more about the cultural views of the person or publishing company than it does about the game.

I have been working on a heavily-customized game during my spare time for leisure. Trying to come up with a set of understandable and concise rules is difficult -- it gives me a good deal of respect for game designers and those who write rules.

At first, I tried using plural (they/their) instead of masculine (he/his). I wanted to be gender neutral.

But it was too confusing. And - quite frankly - it sounded stupid and wrong. I know the trend is - and has been for at least ten years - to break the English language and use plural words to make sentences gender neutral. It was a lousy solution to a problem that was minor or major depending on a person's culture, worldview, and gender.

So... I am writing my rules my way. Back to he/his/him. I figured that I was doing this during MY very limited leisure time for - maybe - a dozen people on the entire planet to read so I was darn sure going to write the rules in a way that made sense to me. My leisure time? My way.

Grumble! You're right! I guess I'll settle for being cranky at the English language for now. But in future perhaps game designers/publishing companies could start looking at some of those more inconvenient pronouns as alternatives.

I just read the rules to Lunch Money and they used "she". I noticed, but didn't really care. But please, don't use "they" and "their". It's wrong and confusing. It's a plural pronoun when you really want a singular one. Using "You" is fine, but the writer will probably have to refer to other players at some point, "You choose a roll, your opponent on your right must choose one, too. He can't pick the one you did". "He/she", "his/her" is ugly.

Why don't we all agree not to care? Game writers can use Alice the Gamer in one section of the rules and Bob the Gamer in another. Or maybe they could alternate games? Or maybe we'll just focus on the good time we have with all our varied gendered friends.

Exactly. Or don't blame the language, just get over it. "His" is the catch-all pronoun, and the grammatically proper way to write it. It's not offensive or demeaning, it's not oppression, it's just the way English works. Changing that isn't going to liberate women. And not changing it isn't going to send us back to some crazy pre-suffrage dark age. Sure, there are work-arounds, but they're kludgy, and rules need to be simple.

You have to have SERIOUS insecurity issues to give a flying frig about what kind of pronoun an author is using. Anyone who throws around the term "inclusive" is, frankly, a lunatic. Sorry if it sounds harsh, but if a person is reading something and thinking "they're not including me" b/c of pronoun usage, they belong in a mental asylum, not a gaming session.

It's like when a minority objects to a phrase like "pot calling the kettle black," or an activist insists on using the word "wymyn" for the female gender to avoid having "man" in there. You instantly know the person is an idiot.

Whoa there, Andrew. That's a little harsher than we like to get around here.

In addition to being rude, that's just unfounded. Using "Inclusive" does not equate to "lunacy."

You can debate, just don't go around calling people names, or commenting on their "obvious" lack of mental health.

Take it easy.

I'm not sure why Geek gamers should worry too much about this given that over 90% of us are male. It wouldn't bother me to see 'she' used in this way in sites oriented towards a predominantly female activity.

My suggestion is that in general when using the pronoun in the abstract contributors to threads or drafters of documents who are male use 'he', and females use 'she'. The same applied to speech. Better I think than using 'he or she' over and over again.

Sorry Jesse, wasn't trying to be rude! Although my opinion of people who are obsessed with semantics is unchanged. This kind of thinking 250 years ago would have resulted in the patriots of colonial USA pestering the Crown for more polite language in their tax bills, or an insistence that Britain stop being referred to as the "Mother Country" and instead be called "Sibling Partner Nation." Real issues--taxation/representation, role of colonial legislatures relevant to Parliament, etc.--who cares? I've always viewed semantic arguments as coming from a perspective that can't grasp complicated human political and social issues and instead latches on to some easy target, something that's easy to explain and rail about and makes for nice convenient slogans to paint on protest signs. Language becomes the issue, instead of a means of discussing actual issues. You know, stuff that's like, important and not frivolous. If cigarettes are bad, you turn the public against smoking--you don't campaign to change the word because "cigarette is just too silky and easy to say and it encourages smoking, it needs to be harder to pronounce for public safety reasons." That's what the more lunatic fringe of activism engages in. This is going to sound harsh again, but if you actually notice the pronouns in something you're reading, you need to read more.

Certainly it would be weird to write a nursing manual and use all "he" or a construction worker's pension pamphlet all "she"s. Like the poster above said, sometimes it just looks more normal in those kind of circumstances. But what would you say to someone who actually NOTICED the pronouns. I'd tell the rare male nursing student, "Maybe you should be reading the text and learning about medical stuff and not obsessing about syntax and grammar. Wouldn't it be nice to be a competent nurse and not get anybody killed?"

Pronoun activists should be sent to Germany or some other country where the native language has all those confusing gender-associations for nouns. Like a table is male, a shoe is female, anyone who has taken a foreign language probably knows what I'm talking about. Imagine the horror they'd find there! Holy moly, they'd spend the next 5,000 years trying to fix the language!

It is notable to me that a woman raises an issue that is a concern to her, and a chorus of men respond with pat answers to the effect of "Why should we care about this?" Scott: insofar as she has a problem with gendered language, the problem isn't nonexistent. Saying so accomplishes nothing other than ridicule.

It's not surprising that men don't care whether language is gendered, but I disagree with uniformly trivializing something simply because it is not of personal concern to you.

With regard to comments such as:





These comments assume that language is a static entity and that grammar's job is to prescriptely apply rules of usage.

From Wikipedia [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescription_and_description]:


The descriptivist approach is aware that languages are not static entities, and that rather than conforming to an ideal form of usage, languages change according to the needs of the speakers.

I have to take issue with the assertion that just b/c somebody finds something to be a problem, it automatically becomes an issue. If somebody complains that the government isn't doing enough to prevent evil space rays from taking over the minds of the populace (and there are such people), does that mean it's worthy of discussion? No, the proper response by a rational individual is "Why should we care about this?" Not all beefs have equal merit, just because somebody is making noise about it. Pronouns and evil space rays are the same thing--nonexistent problems.

Well, judging from your three separate rants about the lunacy of "pronoun activists," it appears to me that you actually care more about this issue than does the original poster. If it's a non-existent problem, why is it making you so upset?

It's not, lunacy makes me upset. And it's not even that. It's b/c I'm sitting at a pc surfing on a Sunday morning and posting as whims take me. People talk about the weather, too, that doesn't mean they're meteorologists.

While I wonder whether the lunacy of the evil-space-ray-guy would make you as upset as the lunacy of the pronoun activist, I nonetheless have to say that this is the best, most defusing response I've ever read to an impending flame war.

Kudos.

"While I wonder whether the lunacy of the evil-space-ray-guy would make you as upset as the lunacy of the pronoun activist.."

An interesting speculation! Now you have me wondering too! It's too bad some kind of experiment isn't easily devised...

"Pronouns and evil space rays are the same thing--nonexistent problems."

The foregoing statement is incorrect. Pronouns by themselves may not be an issue, but the use of language to instill prejudice is a well-documented fact. In the case of "he," this is a pronoun which automatically produces a male image in the mind of most readers I know - half of which are female.

Just ask the left-hander here how "sinister" this is, and whether it's "right."

Now, from a game designer's perspective, I have wrestled with the gender-specific pronoun issue from the time I became aware of it. I've even made fun of the issue in the small-run game "Goth or Gauche?" The game includes androgynes, which are referred to as - well, I shouldn't type their moniker in a family-friendly forum, but combine "she/he" with "it" and you should get the joke.

When the culture of the game's subject matter dictates, I can find an excuse to side with one gender over another. In Plunder, we (my wife and I) took the easy way of "well, since most sailors were male during the golden age of piracy, we'll just the male pronoun." It works with the culture, although there were enough female pirates (dressed as men due to the times) to argue this point. Lucky for me, they're dead now.

In Horrific, Deliria, and "Goth or Gauche?" we mixed up the pronouns, sometimes alternating genders between sentences, sometimes alternating genders between paragraphs. When consistently talking about one player (or character), we kept the pronoun usage consistent. This is the best approach we've found so far when the culture of the game's subject matter doesn't play a role.

I like the usage of "you" when talking about the active player and will probably try to use it more, though what I was taught of "proper" English dictates I should use the third person, not second. Except in high-society settings, I can hardly bring myself to use "one," as in "One draws a card at the end of a turn."

"Pronouns by themselves may not be an issue, but the use of language to instill prejudice is a well-documented fact."

This is well-documented in the sense that the Flat Earth Society has tons of documentation establishing that space missions are hoaxes. It's only "well-documented" and a "fact" to those in the grip of the lunacy. I'm sure there are lots of ivory tower academics producing "research" on such nonsense, but it has little to do with common sense prevalent in the rest of the world.

I'm sure there's some way to do it...

Hmmmm. Well, I say that we all wear a turquoise ribbon on this coming Wednesday. This ribbon will mark the date as "National Equality for Pronoun Usage in Board Game Rulebooks."