For the MC, I mean. Many (most?) games allow the player to select the MC’s gender, and selecting a gender would then set a number of variables to be compatible with that, including forms of address and pronouns. The forms of address and family relationships can come in handy, depending on what’s actually going on in the game.
How often, though, do you find yourself actually using those personal pronouns? I was scanning my WIP and I realized that it actually took forever before I used the pronouns for the MC, and that a few of the instances I used seemed… pretty contrived. For a new WIP, I’m on the verge of deciding not to set pronouns or gender at all until I reach a point where I need to use them. It’s an experiment. I’m curious to see how far I’ll get.
I know that there are a few games that don’t address the MC’s gender at all, and then there are others where gender-related worldbuilding is a major part of the game. I think my stories probably fall somewhere in the middle.
Voltaic actually has very few references to the player’s gender since the perspective is always theirs and they spend a lot of time talking to people directly. In fact, the only instance so far where their pronouns get referenced heavily is one scene near the end of Chapter 2 where two characters are talking about them.
I think they’re nice to have regardless of usage. I always keep the standard three (he, him, his and the counterparts) and a plural variable, and that usually lets me write grammatically-coherent sentences.
Yep the MC gender is less often used in my writing than I imagined. So at the moment I am thinking about putting this and other questions ingame at all. I want to include being genderfluid in the game, but I fest the daily question, how do you feel today might get tiresome. So I might include this as a Switch in the Stat Screen. I am thinking about adding the RO question there too, since there just is No right time to ask the question ingame. I’ll See of anyone is okay with that.
I wouldn’t say that I use the MC’s pronouns very often, but they do come up. Sometimes the other characters talk to each other about the MC without switching away from the MC’s perspective, and sometimes I switch away from the MC’s perspective which necessitates their pronouns (most writers don’t do this though, and it would be pretty easy to eliminate if I was going for no pronouns). I could probably rewrite the rest of it it to eliminate the use of pronouns pretty easily too.
