| Tobrian |
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The language of the game changing to make female pc's feel more welcome was one thing even though the druid in our party says she cant let her daughters read the books because they teach incorrect English, the male pronoun of he is the correct generalization in literary terms.
Unfortunately, English, in contrast to German, does not have a "gender-neutral" pronoun.
I'm female, and I find the whole "your character, she" shtick irritating like hell. Found it irritating when White Wolf did it in their World of Darkness rulebooks, and I still don't like it now. It's patronizing. It's not what feminism should be about. It feels like reverse-sexism, this time against the other ca. 50% of the population. Look, just stick to one damn pronoun and be done with it. Gender equality is not a matter of semantics.
If you want to cater to female gamers, publishers, go ahead, show more female paladins and male courtesans instead of enchantresses in battle-bikinis. Oh wait, it's D&D, forget the courtesans of any gender.
And that's just the can of worms of heterosexual social identities...
P.S. I think you meant to say "make female gamers more welcome", Steven. ;-) The status of female player characters depends on the game world's societies and the game master, and at least the latter thing is beyond the control of the gaming company.
Edited to add:
Funny thing about Political Correctness...
My momma always told me if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.
"Political Correctness" enables people to talk without being rude. Otherwise, just don't say anything at all.
If you think the pronoun he is "rude", then IMO you got a serious problem. It seems your "momma" was fond of tired old clichés.
The whole "politically correct talking" idea has been nonsense from the start, because it was based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from behaviorism, named after the linguists Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941). Also known as the thesis of linguistic determinism. A hypothesis holding that the structure of a language affects the perceptions of reality of its speakers and thus influences their thought patterns and worldviews. Ergo, if you delete "naughty" words from everyone's vocabulary, people will no longer be able to think the naughty thoughts. Scrub everyone's mind clean, hey presto, everyone's polite, because of course no-one can be mean, bigoted or sadistic without having a word for it, right? Tiny problem though, the whole thing was b*%!#@#s from the start. Behaviorism and its ideological underpinnings were very popular with sociologists in the 1960s/70s, when linguists and social engineers dreamed of a bloodless revolution of behavioral modification through linguistics. Feh. Today, no serious scientist, and few social philosophers, will touch behaviorism with a long stick.
Worse, the laudable idea because political correctness was hijacked by complete nutjobs who invent new "more polite" words or changed history to herstory, despite the fact that etymologically, the origin of the word is derived from the Greek "historia" meaning "a learning or knowing by inquiry, history, record, narrative." which was adapted into Latin, Old French/Norman, and later Middle English, and has nothing to do with the Middle-English male pronoun, thank you.
As for female gamers, funny, I always thought female gamers were bothered by the actual behaviour of actual gamers, and not trivial semantics. I don't need a gaming company to add female pronouns to tell me if I am allowed to be a gamer or not (What if I want to play a male character?). There are lots of female gamers in Germany.
Christina