I don’t know why you think this, but I know plenty of women who play competitive Netrunner here in the UK, one of whom made a cut at a Regional event just this weekend.
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Please stop replying in bad faith about sexism. You clearly do not understand gender-based discrimination.
Happy to see staff agree on this issue. It’s a simple but very important change to me.
I suggested “they” to replace “he or she” earlier in the thread. It’s actually shorter and easier to read. While I get that you personally will not feel offended by being misgendered, some people will feel uncomfortable by being misgendered. It’s one of the reasons Magic the Gathering went with “he or she” in 1993 - because the standard of simply using “he” about players in role-playing games simply didn’t make much sense. Now, for people who do not adhere to either binary gender, using “he or she” isn’t just misgendering, it is simply not acknowledging it as a possibly option. It is forcing people into one of two boxes they do not fit in.
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Tamijo, are you talking to me? In case tell me and I’ll delete this post (if possible).
I don’t know why you think this, but I know plenty of women who play competitive
I simply counted the faces on online pictures and videos (some are even at store tournament level).
However we can get a much better indicator, at least on the online community, from the survey that is undergoing.
It is much easier to say this having grown up
male without a lifetime of board games
referring to you by the wrong pronoun already.
Partially true.
It’s 3 decades that I have to read roleplaying and board games in English and German, I feel diverse and in the early period not included as authors and editors were definitely not foreign friendly, but honestly it has never been a problem.
However, I shall investigate with my female boardmates whether this is an issue for them.
Thank you for all your answers
You clearly do not understand this problem exceed the english langage and culture. A “they” is offensive to any, or most, latin langage based feminisms, where this problem can’t be solved by a simple “they”.
Ask feminist people speaking espagnol if you know some, if you’re from the US. They will translate this either by “ellos” or “ellas” and the problems will remain exactly the same. And in fact they though a little more than 2 minutes about this subject.
“Bad faith”, pff. Open your mind. You’re the one having problems with feminine and masculines pronouns. Not a single one of the latin LGBTQ+ I know.
English has a gender-neutral pronoun that works well in “they”. If a Spanish translator didn’t know that, they might translate “they” as “ellos”. Ideally, they would translate it as whatever pronoun or pronouns best includes all people, including non-binary Spanish speakers.
Myself, I am not familiar enough with gender-neutral pronouns in French and Spanish and what pronouns are ideal to include non-binary French and Spanish speakers.
But just because “they” might not work in Spanish is not a reason not to use it in English.
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Pronouns is just less a problem here than in the anglosaxon world.
Each try to put a neutral gender in latin langage ends with people listening to you laughing at you. Solution, pick the gender you prefer at the moment you’re talking and don’t mind if people are confused.
“They” would stay her or him in french. There is no, or very rare uses of “ielles” in french, and nobody would understand your orthograph anyway because there is no neutral gender there (the use of masculine is neutral, but it’s a use, not a proper gender). I saw one people use ielle/ielles but this is very very uncommon.
Espagnol uses - : ello-a-s. French tries to, this is a more common way. So let’s say “il-s/elle-s mange-nt assi-e-s sur un/des tabouret-s”.
As you can see, this hashes sentences, and I hopefully used regular feminine and plural terms. This stay written, you can’t talk with this. If you can’t talk with it, the practice will die.
And people prefer to be looked at seriously than not be misrepresented here. Respect before image (which may be one of the very exemption to the image rule there).
This is a ridiculous statement. Pronouns are a much bigger issue in German because there is no “they”. Every nonbinary person I have met in Germany uses “he” or “she” not out of choice, but because the German language doesn’t really have any good alternatives right now.
Apart from that, I don’t see how the language issue matters at all. We’re all communicating in English, presumably the Board of NISEI will communicate in English, so what matters is the usage of the English language. Edit: To clarify what I mean with this is that we need to set up a structure that works in English and then try and see what will work in other languages, instead of the other way round. I hope this makes sense.
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Personally, speaking only for myself, I think this is the key point. The majority of Netrunner players speak English and play with English cards, so solving the pronoun issue for English is a good thing to do.
Syntax makes good points about how the same approach may not work in other languages, so this should also be considered, but the fact that it would be challenging (or even impossible) to solve this for non-English languages shouldn’t be a reason to avoid solving it for English if possible.
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This. The way I see it, the NISEI team would do well to partner up with native speakers of each language to translate them as inclusively as that language can handle. But that’s an issue of logistics, not policy, and one for way down the road. As for English, “they” is more than fine.
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Translators are one of the additional roles which have been identified as being needed on the NISEI Org Chart, so I’m sure the Board will address exactly this once they’re in place.
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@anon34370798 lack of gender neutral pronouns in other language was something of which I was unaware. Thank you for pointing that out. As others said, using ‘they’ for English will work just fine. We do, however, need to figure out the most inclusive language for all the other languages we want to use.
To that end, can you maybe tell us what Magic the Gathering uses in the languages you speak? They switched to using ‘they’ on English cards quite awhile ago, and I think perhaps did something similar for other languages MTG gets produced in.
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TL;DR: “Yep. Good direction.”
I think I fall into the ‘Ambivalent’ camp.
I don’t care that Hayley is a girl, that Quetzal is a ?? or that PoCs exist on card art.
I care that Hayley’s ability makes her strong for tournament play.
That said, I have no problem with expending effort in this direction. I mildly worry about resources being used on this that could be used elsewhere, but I don’t see that happening. Thus, I have no complaints.
Neither do I have advice, because I’ve looked into increasing diversity in spaces and have not found any real answers. My anecdotal experience has been that if you don’t focus on it, the diversity in your game equals the diversity of the spaces it is played in. And if you do focus on it, the diversity of the spaces you play your game in equals the diversity of your game, and people complain when they aren’t represented, celebrate when they are, and generally drives a bunch of communication and conversation about your game for the net benefit of Free Marketing.
The only real negative that comes along with focusing on this aspect is that you become open to criticism about ‘not enough’ inclusion. (I don’t count people complaining about too much inclusion as a real negative.) You get more benefits than that negative, barring some morality scandal.
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Sure. “Latin world have less problems on pronouns than in the anglosaxon world”.
That’s just what I’m saying dude.
Unless I’m unaware, german as langage belongs to neither but is more a cousin to anglosaxon than to latin world.
When there is no neutral pronouns and neutral gender, this makes the thing so much laughable and/or complicated that you prefer :
- a - to be understood
- b - not to be laughed at
- c - both.
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I remember seeing something about translating ‘Ruler’ into other languages, that some would translate it as ‘King’ and some as ‘Queen’, and few would use a gender-neutral term. Same would happen with ‘Nurse’, the pronouns and context would imply a female or male gender depending on translation and language. e.g., “The nurse did their job well” would translate to “The nurse did her job well” in some languages.
More than anything else, this is what convinced me that caring about pronouns is folly. Yes, we should use genderless pronouns when possible (singular ‘they’ is better than ‘he or she’), but caring about it and stating that either “this forces people to feel marginalized” or “this is just pandering to sensitive snowflakes” is not worth it. You use genderless pronouns when possible, and otherwise you just flip a coin.
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I don’t know if I agree with that. I would posit languages are mutually agreed upon cultural norms, and are constantly evolving. There’s no reason we as human beings can’t take an active hand in the evolution of our languages and guide them to something more inclusive. Lack of a gender neutral in other languages might be something worth solving.
Language is important. How we communicate with each other says a lot about who we are, the ideas we value, and the things we value in other people. Flipping a coin on gender tells me that we either don’t care about it, or that we don’t think it is important enough to see. It’s a small thing, but lots of small things add up to large things. We should change the small things that we can, when we can.
On a completely different subject:
There is apparently a way to be a little more inclusive in German, though I have heard it isn’t super elegant. As an example, the word combo “spieler/in” would roughly translate to “gamerguy/girl”. If anyone speaks German as their first language, I would be interested in if this sounds ridiculous to them?
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OK, I’ll backdash a little. I don’t want to enforce “he or she”, or “she” or “they” or whatever.
My goal there is just to make understand that on these matters what NISEI will choose is detrimental to other culture combats for diversity : it’s a matter of culture. You and I would agree that you don’t have the same current discussions whether you’re a feminist in asia, middle-east, africa, south america, north america or europe.
I just tell NISEI staff to be conscious about that.
In France, as bizarre as it seems, hate is not based on appearance (that was a 60-90’s combat), it’s based on what people thinks.
In result, most if not all appearance based “tools” coming from the US (positive discrimination, etc) are severly putting the debate on an allready won causes, making hate growing rather than progressing on accepting different cultures or peoples.
By living on the crossroad of west Europe, demonym mixing is really a non-issue for most frenches. What haters don’t like is culture mixing. Aka : they don’t like mixing ideas, and they don’t care appearances.
That’s why I said “ANR on this subject is ok-ish, on these problems I’d like to enter their minds”. Now people from the US would say “but this is politics, I don’t want that in a game”.
See ? We don’t have the same concerns.
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A lot of attention is on the future design, but I think the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Team would make a meaningful contribution to Organized Play. Feeling included and welcome starts with the play environment and gatherings like weekly meet-ups and casual events, and FFG at best offered a few guidelines in the floor rules and tournament regulations. I could see NISEI OP finding creative ways to give TOs and community organizers resources for making an inviting space and dealing with conflicts between players and staff. If a judge program ever gets off the ground, it would be great to see “being a good host” and “resolving player conflicts” as a part of what’s taught through it.
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Just wanted to add my 2 cents here.
In my view, the “he or she” does not refer to the players but to the runner or the corporation (= Valencia who is a she, etc.).
I think that the Corporation should always be referred to as a ‘‘it’’, because Corporations Are Not People. (I actually find it ridiculous when the cards, e.g., Activist Support, refer to the Corp as ‘‘he or she’’.)
As for the other side of the board, well, the pool of runners already includes Apex or Adam who, regardless of people’s opinion on gender issues or whether we care about said opinion, are clearly non-binary, so we have to find terms as neutral as possible.
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