Gender Changing - idea #3906

Aarbrok

Aarbrok has Roleplayed as Gender neutral since the whole genital removal, tried to be a woman, not really a man, albeit more masculine physically I dont claim anything with him and would be generally fine with "it" and not to insult anyone as I wouldnt assume it derogatory, as "it" could be used to classify any non polar representation of being.

I support this. I asked a year or so ago and was told the same things Damariel has been saying though.

Zakarel

I am all for making gender changes more accessible. I played Achaea back in '02 and had to scrap my old character because there was no way to change its pronouns. It's cool that there's an arte for that on here, but it also kind of sucks to have to pay $60 real life dollars for an in-game pronoun change. Especially if you're also spending buku bucks on real-life name changes and ID document updates. But I digress.

There's gotta be some wiz kid coders out there who can pound out some algorithms to re-conjugate sentences from "(he|she) is" to "they are"! Alternatively, there's Spivak pronouns: "Ey takes some salve from a vial and rubs it on eir legs." Or ze/hir pronouns: "Ze takes some salve from a vial and rubs it on hir legs."

Side note: As a trans person who plays IRE games, I like to think of trans gender as meaning really, really good at it. "How's your gender coming along? You're at expert now? That's cool. I trans'ed it."

Riluo

Most of my transgender clients at the hospital prefer to be called by their identified gender. The only person I have worked with that was agender/androgynous was more gender fluid and it was hard to find a way of writing my reports so I stuck with they or their name.

Jensen

@riluo I know this is off topic, but every time you mention your practice I can't help but picture you operating on patients with a scythe and a blood wisp nurse at your side.

Damariel

Zakarel said:

There's gotta be some wiz kid coders out there who can pound out some algorithms to re-conjugate sentences from "(he|she) is" to "they are"! Alternatively, there's Spivak pronouns: "Ey takes some salve from a vial and rubs it on eir legs." Or ze/hir pronouns: "Ze takes some salve from a vial and rubs it on hir legs."

With the way the game is programmed, the kind of algorithm you're talking about just isn't practical - the messages are stored all over the place, on different levels of code, and the problem is only made more complicated by the fact that such an algorithm would need to distinguish between verbs applying to the player and verbs applying to other stuff... and then there's all the verbs that don't conjugate according to the 'standard' rules, like 'go', 'be', etc. that might or might not need alteration based on the introduction of a 'they' pronoun. You're asking for a gourmet dinner, but this joint mostly does fast food.

It could be done, but regardless of how we approach the problem, it's at least a month of hard, tedious, repetitive, all-consuming work by a coder - whether it's algorithm or manual editing.

Zakarel

Ohh gotcha - I figured it was likely more complicated than my limited understanding of how coding these things works. Thanks for explaining!

What are folks' opinions of ze/hir and ey/em? Fun fact, Spivak pronouns originally gained traction on a MUD-type thing called LambdaMOO.

Areka

I think that that is becoming more complicated than it needs to be. While a neutral option would be nice, I really don't think we need to go that far, and it gets into the territory of 'but i'm a tri-gender pyrofox, these don't specifically cater to me'.

Samp

@areka Did you see ze/hir pronouns or the immense coding work as too complicated? The first was already mentioned to be the simplest scenario since it doesn't involve the latter task of the immense code work.

Also what even is your joke about tri-gender as an identity??

I also have feels about getting so far into a conversation on being trans and gender identity since @ingram already started this thread and I hoped to keep this one relevant to idea 3906 (*cough* y'all can still IDEASUPPORT 3906 *cough*) and how it relates to mechanics, and the pros and cons of altering reincarnation and reincarnation artifacts.

EDIT: Also thank you to everyone who HAS given the idea support

EDIT2: Unfortunately this topic relates to personal things for me, so I trimmed a bunch of snarky stuff off.

Areka

Tri-gender pyrofox is from an Explosm short ( and this over-sensitivity (especially when I have stated previously that I would make Areka rock 'it' in a heartbeat as my character is rather gender fluid) and demand to have everything cater is not what I think is the best investment of admin/coder time.

In regards to Spivak and w/e other terms folk want to introduce, I think that it is an unnecessary component to the game's culture/linguistics on top of the coding time investment. We have races, superior races, Kalsu and a half dozen or so in-game languages, guild titles and so on to juggle. Adding the ze/hir and ey/em is not something that really has a significant benefit to the game to balance the coding and understanding of the average lay-player.

Edit: To clarify, I was not meaning to make jabs or be overly insensitive or to really compare human sexuality and gender with the nonsense of the furryworld. My point is just that when we start introducing 23525 terms for identities, the game gets lost in 'I'm a different shade within this spectrum and I need my own word'. My apologies if I insulted any of you with my statements, such insults were not intended.

Moirean

I still don't see why it won't work. There are already mob progs for it. It wouldn't require a huge coding revamp.

Lim

While I'd love the ability to switch sex as easily as it is to reincarnate into another race and support the idea of switching, my main concern with a hard-coded third gender is that it won't be played out with maturity. To have it treated as a novelty, or at worst, as a joke, would be insulting and annoying to encounter in the game.

Eleanor

Honestly, that is my feeling on the situation, that it would be a novelty. There are already people that describe themselves as being androgynous. My character technically isn't female anymore (technically isn't anything anymore) but when you think about it, the gender that people are going to assume they are upon looking at them is the gender they appear to be when you look at them. Which is the same in real life as well, so I don't see any great need to make it somehow immediately identifiable by looking at how 'ze' swings a sword that it's not a plain old man or woman that you're looking at.

Besides, if you want to have interesting roleplay about your particular shade of gender, you're going to get a lot more of said roleplay if you do have to go "ahem sir could you stop calling me 'he'". If you're going around with sparkly pronouns, you're going to get people asking ooc what's up with your messages, and people avoiding you because wtf is going on there, and then a small fraction of people who are familiar with it who will act like nothing's up anyway, which is how it should be, in which case why would you even bother?

Edit: And also, to all the people saying "I don't think it'd be that hard", consider this: Yesterday we discovered that the elemental_infused entry/exit message had been written with 'his', not a token that takes input from the character. Consider how many lines there are in all of aetolia. Now consider how long Aetolia has been developed over, by volunteer coders of varying skill and quality. We're talking about sifting through phonebooks and phonebooks of lines to make sure that everything has a token, and then specially editing the way tokens work to affect the words around them so that different pronouns will work, and considering the laundry list of other things that need fixing an awful damn lot more urgently than 'but I don't like the two choices I've been given'... well, I think you should have to fight the Carnifex for who gets the update first.

Toz

Eleanor said:

fight the Carnifex for who gets the update first.

I don't know who'll show up for the other side, but I'll win.

Samp

Areka said:

Tri-gender pyrofox is from an Explosm short ..., and this over-sensitivity (especially when I have stated previously that I would make Areka rock 'it' in a heartbeat as my character is rather gender fluid) and demand to have everything cater is not what I think is the best investment of admin/coder time....

Thanks for taking the time to explain your intent and the context of the joke. I understand you weren't being hurtful!

I agree adding a thousand hard-coded genders isn't the most fruitful approach or pressing need, but I don't agree that by forcing players into two pronouns it fosters more roleplay. A character could identify and present any way they want with ze/hir (or an Aetolian relevant equivalent) as they currently can with he/her. I also don't agree that being in endless fights about pronouns makes for better or more interesting roleplay- why should frustrations from correcting pronouns be a staple of someone's character? That sounds tedious and counter-intuitive to a game being fun and enjoyable.

I also think people already take liberties with the gender of their characters- how many folks run are already putting heavy emphasis on their character's gender, crafting heavily gendered items (for unicorn's sake, people are flat-out identifying their clothing as "Men's trousers" or a "Woman's skirt"), and so on? Recently, I've had a few run-ins with a novice player who wears a wedding gown and veil and holds a mirror while crying about how she'll never be a bride.

I think that mechanics don't create the attitudes as many of your concerns have already manifested. Poor RP is poor RP, and a gender neutral pronoun wouldn't fix or harm that- it'd just provide another option that could be used well or poorly like everything else in the game. Some people poorly roleplay their guild, beliefs about the Gods, make extravagant histories of fake home towns, and so on; but we still encourage new and changing guilds, further understanding of Divine Orders, and discovering and discussing new lands. Why should gender be different? Non-binary genders are already established in the Aetolian universe, so why can't players participate in that?

Again, it was also already mentioned that adding a singular, gender neutral pronoun is doable and of interest to the admins. If the folks who do they work say they're open to it, why would we try and decide what's best for them especially when it's counter to the interest of some players? Yes, there are mistakes with pronouns that already exist in the game, but Aetolia will never be bug free so cherry picking certain examples is just distracting to the main conversation. Time is limited and no admin has 24/7 to manifest all of our wants for Aetolia, but improvements are not a zero sum game. Carnifex and other skill updates will roll out when they do, and there are always plenty of side projects going on too. We won't be sacrificing any important changes and updates if they decide to add gender changing to reincarnation or alternative pronouns.

Alice

+1 to our playerbase being supportive/open-minded to the point of creating this part of our world. However it doesn't sound very practical, and I think @Areka/ @Eleanor summed up the reasoning fairly well. There's also things like attack telegraphs and various other toys that would be suspect to modification to this, I think... Basically any string of code that requests/respects He & She would be needing modified :S Kind of asking for a lot for something that can be roleplayed.

Aryanne

In regards to the original topic (the idea) I don't really support it as-is. Largely, this is because I like the idea that swapping official gender shouldn't be super simple, but something a bit more meaningful (I imagine that's why the pill is more expensive than just a reincarnation*)

I'd be okay with, say, a reincarn ONLY doing statpack change, be the same price it is now, and then having the pill do both species/gender change and be the same cost it is now.

The various other pronouns, I feel, are both unnecessary bulk to coding and unnecessary for the game that really aren't a necessary addition to Aetolia's official coding**. I am especially opposed to them for the sake of anyone who isn't a native English speaker.

*If I am wrong about the cost difference, my bad. Ignore that part of the rationale, and assume I just think the gender part should be less-easy to change than statpacks because one changes the practicality of bashing/PK mechanics in various classes vs purely-RP aspects of your character
**So, if you want to use those in your RP, go for it, I say! However, make it your special-snowflake additions to your characters, not hard-coded logistics that come out of your RP. Like blindness, a missing limb, illiteracy, Telepathy, ESP, etc.

Samp

@Aryanne Can I ask why you think changing gender should require more work than changing race and statpack? If a player has the ability to take on a race they weren't born into, and to magically gain a new physique through a literal gift of the gods, then what's so far reaching about extending this to gender? If a Reincarnation ONLY did a statpack, then it would do less than it does now! :P

If you're into the pill offering a chance to change race and gender, and a reincarnation only offering a statpack change; then I can see why this all seems 'fair', but again we'd have to give up the usefulness of reincarnation and I don't know why every character should suddenly no longer be able to change their race in that interest. Reincarnation is to let players adjust their character after learning more about the game, how they want to play it, and to react to changes in the game. It's a customer service offering in a lot of ways.

I dislike the way snowflake is being used. It's demeaning as all get out! Everyone is already being a "snowflake" and this won't increase or diminish that.

Orus

Samp said:

I dislike the way snowflake is being used. It's demeaning as all get out! Everyone is already being a "snowflake" and this won't increase or diminish that.

This exactly.

Can we all agree that throwing around the word snowflake is demeaning when talking about gender?

This isn't some fandom crap about being half troll/half spartan.

Pronouns are legitimate issues that people struggle with daily.

Thanks.

Areka

Just a point re men's trousers/women's blouses - such things are not about self-identified gender and about having enough yoke/fitting to accommodate certain pieces of anatomy and I do not think need to be made more than what they are.

While this is tied to the other thread, I think that part of this needs to consider just what is being asked for - anatomy versus self-identified gender. The gender nouns with lines of code I view as being what we see IRL - someone is A or B or neither of those thus C, for the sake of simplicity, which you can then further elaborate in your description. Having all of the cis-ze-etc terms I think would inappropriate towards the medium at which the text is conveyed - through actions referring to anatomical suits.

While Aetolia is a world where technically you already know a person's name before being really introduced, there is only so much information that (I feel) should be conveyed, like in the real world. If someone asks you to address them differently, awesome, accommodate, but from a distance/in passing I certainly don't know if someone's sexuality or gender identity outside of the external shell. That is further built upon through interaction.

Alice

I think this could easily go the wrong direction if every post is considered insulting and over-complicated. Really not likely any offense was meant, and picking apart every post that vaguely touches on the tri/non/he/she gender will destroy this thread faster than 'snowflake'...

Samp

@Areka Considering how many things go in with a person's body in Aetolia as compared to RL (you know, magic, reincarnations, shapeshifting) are you sure we're so bent on such an archaic, conservative RL perspective on gender? If your characters are only recognizing binary, simplistic genders then they have been actively ignoring all the genderless, asexual, multi-gendered, eunuch, et al folks around them. Which is totally fine, but it definitely is apart of that character's history and actions. Ignoring those facets of the game isn't neutrality or avoidance, it's as active as recognizing them. The question is not about if Aetolia should integrate other genders into the canon since they already exist, it's about if players should have access to them or at least to change between binary genders during reincarnation.

Aryanne

Samp said:

again we'd have to give up the usefulness of reincarnation and I don't know why every character should suddenly no longer be able to change their race in that interest. Reincarnation is to let players adjust their character after learning more about the game, how they want to play it, and to react to changes in the game. It's a customer service offering in a lot of ways.

I agree, in general, that if you're being granted a whole new body and shape, why not change the plumbing, too?

However, throughout various re-building classes or other changes, a lot of free reincarnations are given out. These are -generally- given out with the idea of "your statpack might not really be useful anymore, so you can change it free, woo!"

So, the idea that moving species-change option from a reincarnation would be giving up the usefulness of reincarnation is inaccurate. They are -mostly- purchased (and given) in order to change statpack. To boot, many (most?) characters these days are endgamers, so they really aren't changing species at all.

My understanding is that reincarn currently changes race/statpack mostly as a hold-over from when they were one in the same.

Also - we, as a player base, really don't do a lot of rping the various species on anything other than "what we look like" and "I have a tail/cat ears, so I have more limbs to move while emoting". I think this is largely because it is so easy to change races that many characters have been three or four races throughout significant portions of their lives. Also, so many people are endgame now it is kinda a moot point.

Noobs could easily be given free reincarns AND free species/gender flips instead of just free reincarns. Alternatively, we could encourage sticking with more species-specific RP by only giving statpack changes and giving just a couple pills

The main reasons I don't want the gender-swap to be added to reincarn are
a) we already have that arti, no reason to add it to a cheaper one and kinda make everyone who bought it at the higher price annoyed now
b) the practical prevalence of giving out free-reincarnations shouldn't be fodder for a bunch of people to randomly gender-swap for free. Maybe I'm being a fuddy-duddy, but I feel like that cheapens legit transgenderism and genderfluidity as RP if everyone can so easily flop for lulz anytime their class is revamped. (having the gem that lets you do it at will is expensive enough, that I haven't noticed people doing it all the time just for occasional lulz)
c) I think the best option would really be to just move race-change over to the pill and make the reincarns strictly statpack-shifts.

Samp

To boot, many (most?) characters these days are endgamers, so they really aren't changing species at all.

Rilee is presently ranked 285th. She is the highest-ranked non-endgame character in Aetolia. The lowest rank right now is 844th. Of those currently active in experience rankings, 33% are endgame. Many, but not most! :]

The main reasons I don't want the gender-swap to be added to reincarn are
a) we already have that arti, no reason to add it to a cheaper one and kinda make everyone who bought it at the higher price annoyed now
b) the practical prevalence of giving out free-reincarnations shouldn't be fodder for a bunch of people to randomly gender-swap for free. Maybe I'm being a fuddy-duddy, but I feel like that cheapens legit transgenderism and genderfluidity as RP if everyone can so easily flop for lulz anytime their class is revamped. (having the gem that lets you do it at will is expensive enough, that I haven't noticed people doing it all the time just for occasional lulz)
c) I think the best option would really be to just move race-change over to the pill and make the reincarns strictly statpack-shifts.

a) Arti prices and powers get shifted and people get hosed all the time. For people buying lots of credits and artifacts, the 50cr hit is pretty negligible. I've bought a few reincarnations and 1 pill now and I consider myself on the low end of credit buyers. I can't answer for others, but I know this wouldn't upset me!


b) I don't think that you're being a fuddy duddy, because I do agree that if everyone started swapping genders it could be taxing and diminishing of RP. As mentioned, we don't currently put a large emphasis on race RP (though I feel like it used to be way more prevalent? I know some of us are still into it!) so I understand why changing a race has less impact than changing gender. I don't think that it should prevent us from changing our gender just because we aren't great as a player-base for interacting around race, but these are really good points.

I also don't really think being trans needs to exist in the same way as it does in RL. Like, I don't even think there's that language for it in the game. Conceptually, there may be things we in RL would call trans but are actually entirely different social constructs IC. As it stands, it isn't given tons of gravity or importance (as cited by characters already knowing heaps of non-binary gendered folks) so I don't know if it can be cheapened anymore, but I do think you're right and the flip-flop-for-lulz factor needs consideration. Hopefully, we as a player base would swat that down as it emerged with varying characters. I just saw @Moirean put some boys into their place over shouts, and there are plenty of instances where we help regulate poor RP around gender too. (I didn't think Moi's interaction with Ingram was poor RP, it was just an example of how we already work around a character's behavior and gender.)


c) How would you feel if everyone had 1 gender/race change allotted to the character for free during a reincarnation, and that any additional reincarnations were only for statpacks? In that scenario I'd be into race/gender being in a 150cr pill and statpack reincarnation as the 100cr dagger.

Mephistoles

While I've never done it, I have thought that the idea of playing, or RPing with a transgender character interesting. The stories and the emotions of transgender people are interesting, amongst other reasons, because they tend to be different from my own perspective. It might seem silly, but one of my objections to gender swapping being part of reincarnation has to do with that. If you were playing a character that was trans, I think it would diminish the RP, the conflicting and complex emotions, if someone could just simply turn to you and say 'do you still have a reincarnation left'?

I think that the way that we have of gender swapping is acceptable, though maybe it should just be 100 credits like a regular extra reincarnation. Sometimes if things are too easy they diminish our abilities to tell stories, and above all that's something that I think Aetolia, and Aetolians, do rather well and I wouldn't like to see that diminished.

Aryanne

Samp said:

c) How would you feel if everyone had 1 gender/race change allotted to the character for free during a reincarnation, and that any additional reincarnations were only for statpacks? In that scenario I'd be into race/gender being in a 150cr pill and statpack reincarnation as the 100cr dagger.

This idea I like! would totally IDEASUPPORT it!

Honestly, I think it's make a bit more sense than how things work now.

Samp

@Mephistoles The intent is nice, but I still don't know why having to get in arguments to assert a person's gender makes for interesting RP, or that if people respected someone's gender that it would diminish their RP as a trans character. I've had fun with Samp over time, but it also gets to be a hassle when after 12 years of playing IRE I still have to jump through the same boring RP of explaining why his wearing slippers and skirts isn't a big deal. In practice, this suggestion is just very dull and there are way more interesting things that can be hashed out RP-wise around gender than "No, my pronouns are she/her." "No, I am not a disgrace to the guild because of my hair." "Please unicorn off I don't have time for your boring questions." It really isn't engaging for anyone except the random newbie and a passing, idle curiosity from a non-trans player.

As someone who has that RL trans experience, the thing that makes me interesting or complex has little to do with my struggle against unicornhats who choose to ignore my right to self-determination. Aetolia is also anti-homophobic (recall Murad's actions back in the day? His refusal to drop the homophobia earned him zaps among other things) and anti-sexist as canon, so it doesn't seem cohesive for a required RP of trans characters to be dealing with people who don't respect/understand it. These things simply are, as I see it. I am 0% onboard for the expansion of gender in Aet to be an opportunity for people to explore what they think the RL lives of trans people are. It doesn't seem relevant and it defeats the point of a fantasy universe IMO.

Things we call trans in RL already exist in Aet, so I'm more excited to further that narrative rather than overwriting it.

EDIT: Ok, I've been posting too much. I'm going to sit out on this one for a minute

Areka

@Samp - it is about information at a glance that you can then develop and learn more of -through RP-. You don't know someone is a eunuch right away (unless they're actively walking around with their crotch bared) - but then they began with male anatomy to become a eunuch and still have physical markers of that birth anatomy. Self-identifying as asexual or genderless is not the same thing as being without physical anatomy, and -that- is what the he/she/men's pants/women's blouse thing is addressing - the physical anatomy. I don't know how many characters ignore those aspects of other people - often times I've found that it simply isn't the center point of interactions, and all of the other things that make a character (political views, positions held, activity in combat, accents, etc) are engaged with more and they are treated more as simply people (outside of the few who just cruise around checking out booty).

Adding it to starting reincarnations would be useful, though rather than grouping gender and race, I would probably just have three artifacts (or group them all into the 100 option) for the single-use changes.

Samp

---

Areka

A third pronoun would better to be 'it' and more broadly accommodating (especially for those uncertain cases) than getting into even more specific Spivak suggestions. I suppose in part I just don't want to have to require a HELP scroll to list all of the gender/anatomical terms and which one they go with that people have to learn on top of everything else.

However, this branches into several different conversations.

1-> artifacts that pertain to changing race, statpack and gender either individually or combining into one for the sake of convenience.

2-> Neutral anatomical terms

3-> Self-identified gender terms (which is independent of anatomical terms)
3a-> If such should be incorporated mechanically
3b-> What range should be incorporated to address the spectrum (paired with supporting at-hand information so that it is easily accessible and understood for the lay-person).

Aishia

I think I'm pretty happy with things as they are.