Thank you for taking the time and attention to try to incorporate a feature like this into your game. I've heard from a number of players that the pronoun selection in games like Long Story helped them feel welcome and immersed in the game's world. Even if the solution you find isn't perfect, I think the effort will be noticed and appreciated by your players.

One interesting case study would be the dialogue script for XCOM, and especially XCOM2. NPCs refer to the player as "The Commander", but carefully avoid using any pronouns.

How much text will you have referring to the player character in third person anyway? I imagine most of the dialogue will be the player character speaking, or another character speaking to the player character. Probably writing around the pronouns is viable, then again, having custom pronouns would be pointless in that case. I also wonder how you justify - in universe - other characters knowing the custom pronoun when referring to the player character in third person, but that is not a question for this site.

In games we frequently don't bother justifying respawning after death, or suddenly learning new skills after racking up XP fighting rats, or a hundred other implausible things that make the game feel good to play. Living in a world where folks just get your pronouns right without an explanation or argument is an attractive scenario to lots of players, just like being the hero who saves the world is an attractive scenario. There's no reason we'd have to deny our players those enjoyable experiences just to be "realistic" - the joy of gamedev is we can make a reality of our choosing.

This is a wonderful question. This might be overkill and would ethically require the consent of your voice actors, but with relatively few samples of their voices you could synthesize the speech for the custom pronouns ("deepfake" them).

@Theraot The writing in this game is very centric on characters and their development, and one pet peeve of mine is RPGs where characters are solely defined by their relationship with the player. So, characters will have dialogue talking to each other, similar to the crew in Mass Effect, and this will sometimes be about the player. As to how they know, the player character is new to town but has corresponded with some locals, who spread the word of their arrival. We can assume pronoun introductions happened then, prior to game start

How do you plan to handle custom names? In particular, how would you handle this sentence: "Hey, would you mind showing [custom name] around?"

@TheRubberDuck As in the example of my question, I'll simply omit the word when possible. Usually that means switching to a pronoun for the example you give, but that's where I ran into a block.

@DMGregory An idea that perhaps there were psychic crossed my mind. It could be plot twist. I'd be interested in playing something like that. Never mentioned "realistic". This is off-topic anyway. - Alex F, that makes sense. Seems that voice acting has value in that you could catch these conversations other characters have, on the flip side, it is a lot more work for voice acting. There are solutions for non-blocking (non-modal) dialogue text on screen that might help. I'm advocating for no voice acting because I believe games don't need it, they didn't for years. Still, great question.

So you're willing to adjust the dialog to depersonalize a name to a pronoun when the name can't be omitted. Is it acceptable to adjust the dialog to avoid pronouns in places where you can't simply omit it? It seems like a re-iteration of the same dilemma.

@TheRubberDuck It's certainly possible, but makes that element of character creation suddenly pointless. The name will only be omitted in voice, it will still appear onscreen, but when asking this question I was not sure of how to omit pronouns from voice while still keeping them visible in text. My goal is for people to play with the pronouns they choose and have them come up, rather than awkwardly skirt around the issue and make the character fully gender neutral

"but makes that element of character creation suddenly pointless" is true about names too, is it not? Like you said, you may have to adjust the dialog to avoid using a name where it can't sensibly be in text but not voice. What is the meaningful difference between doing that with names and doing that with pronouns? They're both custom and personal.

@TheRubberDuck The name still appears in text, so custom names are not pointless. The meaningful difference is that, in the phrases I posted in my question, I'm not sure what my voice actor should read out if there is a pronoun on screen.

@TheRubberDuck Names carry identity in a way that pronouns do not. Pronouns only have value and meaning in the context that they are used with us, whereas names have intrinsic value in their uniqueness.

Custom names have an established function as a unique identifier: you grant your character a unique identity in your world and, importantly, in the save file. Pronouns aren't a unique identifier and don't have this function. Their value is in being used to refer to a person. The point of asking for them would be to use them.

^

much better said

@AlexF: I didn't say that custom names were pointless - quite the opposite! I, unlike @doppelgreener, think that custom names are more than a mechanic but are a way to personalize the dialog and make it feel like it's about your character. And yet, you're willing to write the dialog such that you don't have to say those names out loud. Why not do the same with pronouns?

handling voice acting around that is another problem though :)

so we're not actually in disagreement there, i actually feel the same way, but how to manage that with regards to voice acting is something else entirely

@TheRubberDuck this might be a matter of not seeing the forest for the trees, or looking at it too academically or mathematically. "ah, yes, this is system X! this resembles system Y! we can use the same solution for system X to solve system Y. all neat and tidy." but that overlooks the unique differences between system X and system Y — they are different domains with different constraints and requirements, and the solutions do not translate because of those.

providing a solution to this problem requires exploring the constraints of this situation, and finding a way to work within those. The solution could translate with some work, but the work needs to be done, and a good solution to this would show how to make it work and show that it can work. Stopping at "just do that thing for this thing" isn't doing that work.

@TheRubberDuck Just to be clear, the custom names are only being written around in the voice acting. Say I had the phrase from my question, "Hey, this is my friend Pete!". You would still see Pete on screen in text, but you would only hear "Hey, this is my friend!" read out loud. The reason pronouns are difficult is because they appear in phrases such as "Want to help me show him around?" where simply omitting the word is ungrammatical and writing around it makes a new sentence meaning

I've also raised the example of default names being used in voice acted games: "Shepherd" being a famous example from Mass Effect. You give your character whatever custom name you want, but they have another name everyone uses consistently in voice lines. Default names are great! But there's no equivalent for pronouns.

I'm sorry if I don't seem to be picking up what you're putting down, I'm just not sure how you see pronouns being written around in dialogue without dramatically altering the sentence

The trouble with "This is my friend Pete" is that it's a nice example of an optional name. There are sentences where the name is NOT optional - what would you do then? "The prophesy has spoken. You must search for Pete."

"We must search for the chosen one" works there. ;)

But "You must search for the chosen one, then bring [them] to me" is harder, without repeating or going into awkward phrasing like "You must search for the chosen one, then bring that person to me"

@TheRubberDuck That's exactly where my trouble sits. Normally, you replace it with a pronoun and get the VA to say "him" or "her", but with custom pronouns it's not that simple. The answer to that very question you posed in your comment is the question I am asking to the stack

You are all suggesting things that require drastic changes to dialog or story implications. What if Pete is not a chosen one, or anything to that effect? You can't always replace "Pete" with a pronoun - so you must find a way to re-write your dialog for the mechanics rather than the meaning.

Personally I think the realistic answer in this case is to limit voice acting to barks and not have full voice acting of every word of dialog, but Good Subjective, Bad Subjective says answers ought to show how the solutions they're providing have worked in actual practice and, importantly, show how they can work at all.

There's prior art for using barks and grunts with partial voice acting, and there's prior art for using custom text in on-screen textual dialog.

@doppelgreener this is a relatively new problem, right? Evidence of existing answers may not exist. I get that this site may be a bad place for untested suggestions, but there may just be no answer. I hardly think "use non-words" is an answer - having voices is a significant look and feel decision and shouldn't be thrown away because pronouns are hard.

I have not advocated for "use non-words"

Do you think barks are words?

... Yes?

Voice barks necessarily involve words

I guess we mean different things by "barks". Can you give me an example?

To clarify, my understanding of barks is that for the line "Hey, this is my friend Pete, want to help me show him around?" would be voice as the bark "Hey, this is my friend!"

Basically a snippet. Let me know if that's wrong

Voice barks are small voice clips. They can be words. "What was that noise?" is a voice bark from Metal Gear Solid.

I guess Nintendo's thing of vague noises might also be a bark, but it's not the only form.

Ah, jargon I didn't know about. Bark, to me, just meant dog noises.

Ah, yeah, no, not just that

So then how does a "bark" replace a name?

New jargon ahoy!

@TheRubberDuck Games that have significant voice acting work plus custom character names usually use a stock name. I cited 'Shepherd' from mass effect above.

Kingdoms of Amalur has people call you a few different things, like The Fateless One or The Beckoned. In Skyrim you're frequently called simply 'Dragonborn' or 'Dovahkiin'.

So that solution is to ignore the custom name in voice but use it in text? Would that work for pronouns?

No

Why can you ignore someone's nominal identity and call them "Shepherd" but can't use "they"?

Because they're different domains!

I guess I'm just not going to understand what that means.

Folks can have nicknames or titles/etc. used in place of their name. But there's not such a thing as a nick-pronoun. Using a different pronoun for someone than the one they've asked you to use is just using the wrong pronoun.

Essentially because you're not ignoring their name, you're assigning them a name. The custom name is Shepard's first name, but the game mandates you play a character with the family name Shepard. Saying "they" is mandating the player uses the "they" pronoun in the same way

If I name my character Pete and not Shepherd, Shepherd is the wrong name! Unless you're re-writing your story to give a character a nickname for the sake of making voice acting easier.

I'm avoiding using default names because, much as I love Mass Effect, I didn't feel like I was playing my own character. I felt like I was playing another character which was written and I had influence over. Much different to, for example, Dragon Age

@TheRubberDuck The name is Pete Shephard

We discussed why it's significant to use someone's prononu correctly in the general chat room already a bit, starting here: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/57205090#57205090

In this example, your character is named "Pete Shepherd", so Shepherd isn't wrong, just more formal than using the first name.

Right, you've picked an example that works. But that demands that the story provides you an acceptable default name that's appropriate to use in all voice scenarios.

we discussed various scenarios in which correct pronoun usage is already very well understood in our culture, which would all still be true even a century ago

@TheRubberDuck well, that's why the stories do that, because that's how you do that thing

"to fully voice-act a game with custom names, you need a standardised name for the player character" so they give the player character a standardised name

Similarly in Far Cry 5, we call the player character "Rookie" or "Rook", referring to their position rather than their name. But that trick doesn't work for pronouns.

Also, can I just say, for a lot of people who don't get to see their pronouns represented in media, this would be an amazing thing to have regardless of the grammatical solutions to the problem. There are people who don't get to hear their pronouns used. Giving them that is a selling point.

this ... isn't weird or anything. it's just the solution for that scenario. they have that scenario so they implement that solution. that's how it works.

Making the whole question as to why someone would want to make it work when they could try to avoid it moot.

That feels like a compromise - you must WRITE AROUND a technical limitation. I'd hate to do that if there are other options - and it seems there are other options (at least for name).

correct!

Correct that there are other options?

(at least for name)

correct that it is a compromise between wanting a custom name and wanting full voice acting, and you are writing around a technical limitation by using a known solution for that problem that achieves that compromise

That's a good point - the compromise is only with voice acting AND custom names, not custom names as a whole.

right

games like FF7 and Pokemon didn't have to make this compromise because there's no voice acting, or the voice acting is limited to ambiguous noises like grunts

Zelda games let you go right ahead and name your character BUTTFART

and they just have to write $PLAYERNAME in their dialogs

I gotta say... I'm frustrated that I have such a hard time communicating. That was a simple enough answer, but this chat room is full of people answering the questions I wasn't actually asking. I don't know how to get better at directing that attention.

I am kinda frustrated that the constant solution to complex gender being to try to avoid it and not deal with it rather than to build the innovative solutions that the software community is known for.

i'd be keen on using synthesised speech, except for that i don't have any prior art to point to of it delivering voice lines effectively with the variation voice lines might need

there's lots of precedent for synthetic speech being used for singing or for simply communicating information like via a screen reader, where mispronunciation and intonations aren't super important

come to think of it, there is actually some very recent AI work on this vein

I'm hoping we're on the cusp of much better text-to-speech options, or audio modulation options, that should make many richer solutions possible in the near future.

@brug, for context, I wrote an answer that suggested that custom pronouns had the same shape as custom names. There' was no intent to avoid addressing one, but just that the answer to one can apply to the other.

I saw your answer.

@DMGregory we definitely are, it's just all pretty experimental so i'd be hesitant to raise it in the gamedev.se context

Synthesised speech is a great idea that I hadn't considered before seeing that answer. I hope to see it used successfully in other games but unfortunately that's a bit over the technical level of what I think I'm able to accomplish for this particular game

It's something my studio grappled with recently for Watch Dogs Legion - how far could we adapt a finite set of voice performances into all the variety of a whole city. There's some awesome tech in development there, but yeah, as you say, it's still a bit experimental to be a home-run solution here.

like, the AI case I know of is about one year old and was a genuine innovative creation for the purposes of a white paper

I thing one critical issue for speech-to-text in this context is that a CUSTOM name or pronoun could come with a custom pronunciation. You'd need to rely on more than just the spelling, but allow people to tweak to customize.

That should be doable though.

Are you in software? You may have an opportunity to try it out!

Please don't condescend to me.

I admitted having trouble communicating, but I can't help but think you're also interpreting me in an unfavorable way.

I'd say the interpretation was reasonable. If you didn't mean to be condescending, a quick apology can clear up any misunderstanding.

While an apology for unintended offense is reasonable, presuming good intent, while recently removed from SE CoC, is still worth bearing in mind

@TheRubberDuck "you could do this thing yourself!" is a response i've gotten sometimes in software situations (like an open source person saying "hey you could fix this yourself in the repo"), and it presumes i haven't already considered that and trivialises the issue. in this case: this is a really frickin' big technological problem that research specialists are dedicating their entire careers to figuring out.

if we are speaking to an equal, neither the presumption the other party does not know what we know, nor the trivialisation of obvious complex issues, are really necessary. and we'd have the acknowledgement we don't all have unlimited time and energy either.

but the presumption the other party doesn't know, and is receptive to the issue being trivialised, and has unlimited time and energy before them, is a bit more like how we'd speak to a child than how we'd speak to an equal.

(when i've gotten that response in the context of open source it's been when i've expressed having trouble with an open source library. "this testing library is giving me grief" "you could go in and fix it you know" sure thanks gee i never thought of that)

(one time someone even suggested that to me when i was experiencing a problem with Firefox)

(sorry, firefox, not android)

thankfully i haven't people suggest i "just go fix it" very often with my Chrome or Firefox bugs, so it's not an issue that follows me around

The question at the start of the statement came off as condescending too. Asking someone on a software technical site if they are in software sort of suggests like you aren't sure you think they belong.

"Asking someone on a software technical site": Crud, you're right. I was getting my wires crossed between this and arquade, which is more about playing games.

^

Thus, "I can't help but think you're also interpreting me in an unfavorable way." I made no assumptions about anyone's gender or what it used to be. So, in fact, an assumption was made about me to support an incorrect accusation. I'm just not what people expect, I guess? But, as I said, I'm really trying to figure out how to conform better.

The assumption isn't about you or your gender or your actions though.

If you're engaging in a pattern of behaviour that's been used to harm folks in the past, it doesn't really matter whether you're doing that out of assumptions or malice or not. The harm still gets done.

It is just a point blank statement that non-men like myself have our validity to be in these spaces questioned far more frequently, and therefore it can be upsetting for us.

So, I hope the information above helps you avoid inadvertently coming off as condescending in the future.

So you didn't think I was making an assumption based on gender - you were just warning for future situations?

I was trying to help you understand why that comment would come off as condescending, even if you didn't mean it that way.

More that it was irrelevant why you were doing it. Your assumptions or implicit biases are irrelevant. You still did the hurtful thing.

Since you'd asked for clarification, and that angle hadn't been mentioned yet.