This is presumably because of my origin in the Guild and the two main game-writing systems in the Guild, both of which assume variable gender.
Yeah -- it depends heavily on the systems and games you're used to. It's not something I've worried about much, for several reasons:
-- Final writing on my games is usually tuned to the signed-up players: the game tends not to be polished until after casting, so I know the genders.
-- I don't often re-run games.
-- When I *do* re-run them, I often do a measure of re-writing anyway (so gender-switching would be part of that process).
-- Some of my games are very intrinsically gendered. Eg, The Future of Oz and Girl Genius were two of my most successful games, both based more or less entirely on existing character lists, and I'm not willing to casually rewrite other peoples' characters like that.
I can see the value of the concept -- it's true that, in most of my from-whole-cloth games, probably 2/3+ of the characters could be gender-switched without any significant difficulties. But it isn't something I've needed to spend much time pondering, largely because I'm not especially focused on re-runnability. I think the only game I *did* really build for re-running was Panel: that one was mostly gender-neutral from the start. (But that game is small enough that I simply take the file and re-edit it for a given run.)
At some point, I might have a deeper conversation with Ken about the details of how it works in GameTeX, if for no other reason than as a useful exercise in "how *should* this work in Querki?" as anything else.
The truth is, the GameTeX model -- declaring pronouns as essentially macros over character pointers -- is very logical and consistent, and would be easy enough in Querki: the syntactic counterpart to GameTeX' (from what I remember on Saturday) "\\James Bond\Them" would be [[James Bond -> Them]], and it would probably only take a few minutes to implement a first draft. (Capitalization would actually be the only challenging problem, since Querki is usually case-insensitive.)
But I don't find it all that natural while writing: I want to be able to speak naturally while I'm blasting out text. I suspect that if I was doing it for Querki, I'd want to explore more interactive possibilities -- something like a UI that went through the sheet looking for pronouns and prompted you for who each one corresponded to. (Or possibly an IDE-like prompt, that gave you a drop-down when you typed "him".)
no subject
Yeah -- it depends heavily on the systems and games you're used to. It's not something I've worried about much, for several reasons:
-- Final writing on my games is usually tuned to the signed-up players: the game tends not to be polished until after casting, so I know the genders.
-- I don't often re-run games.
-- When I *do* re-run them, I often do a measure of re-writing anyway (so gender-switching would be part of that process).
-- Some of my games are very intrinsically gendered. Eg, The Future of Oz and Girl Genius were two of my most successful games, both based more or less entirely on existing character lists, and I'm not willing to casually rewrite other peoples' characters like that.
I can see the value of the concept -- it's true that, in most of my from-whole-cloth games, probably 2/3+ of the characters could be gender-switched without any significant difficulties. But it isn't something I've needed to spend much time pondering, largely because I'm not especially focused on re-runnability. I think the only game I *did* really build for re-running was Panel: that one was mostly gender-neutral from the start. (But that game is small enough that I simply take the file and re-edit it for a given run.)
At some point, I might have a deeper conversation with Ken about the details of how it works in GameTeX, if for no other reason than as a useful exercise in "how *should* this work in Querki?" as anything else.
The truth is, the GameTeX model -- declaring pronouns as essentially macros over character pointers -- is very logical and consistent, and would be easy enough in Querki: the syntactic counterpart to GameTeX' (from what I remember on Saturday) "\\James Bond\Them" would be [[James Bond -> Them]], and it would probably only take a few minutes to implement a first draft. (Capitalization would actually be the only challenging problem, since Querki is usually case-insensitive.)
But I don't find it all that natural while writing: I want to be able to speak naturally while I'm blasting out text. I suspect that if I was doing it for Querki, I'd want to explore more interactive possibilities -- something like a UI that went through the sheet looking for pronouns and prompted you for who each one corresponded to. (Or possibly an IDE-like prompt, that gave you a drop-down when you typed "him".)