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CitizenKeen posted:Maybe it's because I haven't had coffee yet, but what's wrong with "assassination"? ("They" is fine.)
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Feb 22, 2019 17:11
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I have had my coffee now and I agree with the things people are saying.
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Feb 22, 2019 17:16
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singular "they" in english predates its use as a plural
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Feb 22, 2019 18:17
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I was unaware of that. All the more reason for rpg writers being against it being dumb.
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Feb 22, 2019 18:49
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Also keep in mind that "they" wasn't originally even an English word ; it's a loan from Old Norse. Thanks, Vikings.
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Feb 22, 2019 19:22
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This might be unnecessarily pedantic, but JT's sidebar in 13 True Ways doesn't rail against singular they. He just said he'd use alternating He and She so no one would get the idea that there is more than one Occultist based on the connotations of They. He goes onto say that the Occultist could be a man, a woman, or neither. I'd chalk this section up to a linguistic failure rather than gender malpractice. YMMV
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Feb 22, 2019 19:47
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This whole discussion made me remeber how the CthuluTech guys had a whole sidebar in their 1e core rulebook that was like "We're only going to be using male pronouns in this book so deal with it, Snowflakes!!" And when I asked why they thought that was appropriate, their only excuse is they didn't think many women played tabletop RPGs at the time (early 2000s).
Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Feb 22, 2019 |
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Feb 22, 2019 20:40
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Nuns with Guns posted:This whole discussion made me remeber how the CthuluTech guys had a whole sidebar in their 1e core rulebook that was like "We're only going to be using male pronouns in this book so deal with it, Snowflakes!!" And when I asked why they thought that was appropriate, their only excuse is they didn't think many women played tabletop RPGs. That's really frustrating. My spouse recently bought a ton of old Rolemaster books (her first RPG she played as a kid) and was surprised that there was a sidebar at the beginning saying they'd only use male pronouns since that's grammatically "universal." She was pissed off.
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Feb 22, 2019 20:50
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My generic pronoun for rpg writers is "idiot." e: in a pinch, I'll accept "dummy."
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Feb 22, 2019 21:03
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slap me and kiss me posted:My generic pronoun for rpg writers is "idiot." But is that going to be exclutionary towards the morons? Ninja edit: The app put in two quotes. It is I who was the moron all along.
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Feb 22, 2019 21:08
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Octavo posted:That's really frustrating. My spouse recently bought a ton of old Rolemaster books (her first RPG she played as a kid) and was surprised that there was a sidebar at the beginning saying they'd only use male pronouns since that's grammatically "universal." She was pissed off. The Cthulhutech writers don't have that excuse. 
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Feb 22, 2019 21:11
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Raggi peacocking that he can produce "racist" content because everything is "just a matter of taste" for him and the big publishers are too Politically Correct, and Tweet disagreeing only insofar that Wizards isn't being "PC" they're just trying to protect their "brand proposition." He's not wrong, but also gently caress that. It's only a matter of taste because Raggi puts nothing of himself actually at stake when he's being "edgy." http://justonemorefix.com/2018/09/05/96-james-raggi-jonathan-tweet-interview/ Not inclined to give him much benefit of the doubt to be honest, though still way off from the scum this thread has been about recently. 100% a living argument why game design needs more voices than aging white gen x guys, certainly. Also lol that Raggi plays nothing but his own game. At least Tweet can name drop Fiasco.
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Feb 22, 2019 21:18
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dwarf74 posted:They are all RPG books written in the eighties. "Generic masculine"was still being taught in schools, and still considered grammatically correct. People were still doing studies about whether or not it was bad to use generic masculine pronouns. That's true.
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Feb 22, 2019 21:20
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I loved when WOTC changed "His or Her" out for the singular "They" on Magic cards and the grognards lost their poo poo. And they posted an article to the effect of "We're doing this because it increases the amount of space we have on cards for rules text and also makes sentences flow better..... but the fact that this increases gender inclusivity is something we wholeheartedly welcome."
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Feb 22, 2019 21:31
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Octavo posted:This might be unnecessarily pedantic, but JT's sidebar in 13 True Ways doesn't rail against singular they. He just said he'd use alternating He and She so no one would get the idea that there is more than one Occultist based on the connotations of They. He goes onto say that the Occultist could be a man, a woman, or neither. That's the thing though. If you check my posts in other threads wrt to 13th Age I like it overall. It's just that when I have a non-binary player and I hand them 13 True Ways I know to say "Yo, some of the stuff in this one is iffy". Just like when my last 5e DM pitched Curse of Strahd he opened with "Hey I know the Vistani are kind of a stereotypical mess. I'm gonna try rewriting them." A statement like "this has transphobic content" doesn't always mean it requires a Zak S. level response. Sometimes it just means you have to be aware of some stuff when you play this game.
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Feb 22, 2019 21:49
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Razorwired posted:A statement like "this has transphobic content" doesn't always mean it requires a Zak S. level response. Sometimes it just means you have to be aware of some stuff when you play this game. It is more helpful to just say what to be aware of than to say something vague like MadScientistWorking posted:There's transphobia in 13 True Ways. because in this industry that means anything from "wrong pronoun" to "led a transphobic harassment ring for a decade" and we're generally safer assuming it's worse.
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Feb 22, 2019 22:03
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Razorwired posted:That's the thing though. If you check my posts in other threads wrt to 13th Age I like it overall. It's just that when I have a non-binary player and I hand them 13 True Ways I know to say "Yo, some of the stuff in this one is iffy". Just like when my last 5e DM pitched Curse of Strahd he opened with "Hey I know the Vistani are kind of a stereotypical mess. I'm gonna try rewriting them." Yeah, more or less. It's easy to make a single stumble; I mean, back in 2013 the chance of me making a similar mistake is not unthinkable. It's not an excuse, but context is important in general. And people can make up their own minds from there. If somebody legitimately has regressive issues in their writing, in my experience it's usually not just a one-off. I mean, maybe it's my privilege, but when I review books, if there's questionable content once that's one thing to be aware of. But usually when an author has an issue you'll see it again and again, because they rarely see it as a problem for obvious reasons. It's definitely not unheard of for somebody to keep it under the radar, but usually when it's a major issue it's something like Cthulhutech where they cannot keep their bullshit in their proverbial pants for longer than a fly's fart.
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Feb 22, 2019 22:50
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Octavo posted:That's really frustrating. My spouse recently bought a ton of old Rolemaster books (her first RPG she played as a kid) and was surprised that there was a sidebar at the beginning saying they'd only use male pronouns since that's grammatically "universal." She was pissed off. My standard response to 'male is grammatically universal for a collective noun or pronoun' is to ask them if 'so, do you gently caress guys?' is universal.
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Feb 22, 2019 22:56
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Razorwired posted:That's the thing though. If you check my posts in other threads wrt to 13th Age I like it overall. It's just that when I have a non-binary player and I hand them 13 True Ways I know to say "Yo, some of the stuff in this one is iffy". Just like when my last 5e DM pitched Curse of Strahd he opened with "Hey I know the Vistani are kind of a stereotypical mess. I'm gonna try rewriting them." I definitely agree.
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Feb 22, 2019 23:01
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Mors Rattus posted:My standard response to 'male is grammatically universal for a collective noun or pronoun' is to ask them if 'so, do you gently caress guys?' is universal. I once used "So you gently caress dudes, do you?" and the dude immediately escalated to red faced screaming that he wasn't fuckin' no dudes and it was me who was fuckin' dudes. So pick your audience, I guess, because I regard that incident as a bad failure on my part.
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Feb 22, 2019 23:53
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I once used "So you gently caress dudes, do you?" and the dude immediately escalated to red faced screaming that he wasn't fuckin' no dudes and it was me who was fuckin' dudes. Ahh, the Kanji Tatsumi response.
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Feb 23, 2019 00:05
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Mors Rattus posted:My standard response to 'male is grammatically universal for a collective noun or pronoun' is to ask them if 'so, do you gently caress guys?' is universal. Yes, and?
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Feb 23, 2019 00:38
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Plutonis posted:Yes, and? If you are willing to postulate that ‘guys’ in the context of loving refers to all genders then you’ve committed to the bit and no one can do anything.
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Feb 23, 2019 01:03
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Over the 14 years I've been at my current company, I have seen our technical writing style guide move from "always use 'he' because it's the standard, and 'he or she' is too repetetive and awkward when used repeatedly" to "always use 'he or she' because it is inclusive, and the singluar 'they' is awkward and incorrect" to "re-write to avoid singular pronouns entirely" to the current "always use 'they' for singular or plural pronouns, to be inclusive, but also consider re-writing to avoid the need for a pronoun." (And as an aside, we're just experimenting with machine translation and I'm curious as to how it'll handle translating a singular 'they' into other languages.) Irrespective of the evolution of the language and the etymology of english words, what exactly is considered the "industry standard" in technical documents has been and continues to evolve, and it's forgiveable for writers to cleave to the standards they were taught in school even years after a consensus has begun to build toward a new standard. Forgivable doesn't mean you shouldn't pressure for the new standard, and it doesn't excuse people from their terrible and wrong explanations for insisting on sticking to the older way, of course. But if you pick up a game from, say, 1998, and it's using a universal "he" for the singular pronoun, it's a bit unfair to just assume without any other evidence that the game or its author intended to exclude other genders. The default assumption should be that they were just thoughtlessly doing what they were taught was correct and normal.
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Feb 23, 2019 01:15
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Leperflesh posted:But if you pick up a game from, say, 1998, and it's using a universal "he" for the singular pronoun, it's a bit unfair to just assume without any other evidence that the game or its author intended to exclude other genders. The default assumption should be that they were just thoughtlessly doing what they were taught was correct and normal. If it was so universal and normal, why did they need a sidebar explaining their editorial decision?
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Feb 23, 2019 01:23
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Mors Rattus posted:If you are willing to postulate that ‘guys’ in the context of loving refers to all genders then you’ve committed to the bit and no one can do anything. I mean you could be talking with those extreme misogynist male homosexuals who are into frotting and ancient greece cosplaying.
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Feb 23, 2019 01:25
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fosborb posted:If it was so universal and normal, why did they need a sidebar explaining their editorial decision? They didn't need to do that. And I did not say the usage of the male singular pronoun was universal among written products, I said the male pronoun was used as a universal pronoun, meaning, intended not to be gender-identifying as a general pronoun standing in for an unidentified single person.
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Feb 23, 2019 01:49
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if mark diaz truman can write a game about the cartels, you are all gonna love my game about being a member of hamas
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Feb 23, 2019 02:30
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Got in a dumb twitter fight with Holden's friends circle (dumb in that it wasn't the best fight to pick tactically, mostly), somehow ended up with him admitting he screwed up by boosting Morke's Patreon? https://twitter.com/HoldenShearer/status/1099110106392870912 Yeah, I'm surprised too. Still don't like him for a number of reasons or trust him being at the front of anti-harassment in TRPGs and believe jaymgates, but if he takes down the drat relinks to Morke it at least means people going to his feed due to his popular tweets about harassment in TRPGs aren't going to be potentially sent to a harasser's Patreon. gourdcaptain fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Feb 23, 2019 |
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Feb 23, 2019 02:42
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https://twitter.com/vl_darling/status/1099064242248900608 Hey guys, did you know that you can do lovely thing so long as you do enough good things to offset it? Also criticizing Holden is literally erasing other people's victims.
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Feb 23, 2019 02:52
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Kurieg posted:https://twitter.com/vl_darling/status/1099064242248900608 Yeah, I kinda got pissed off enough to mute the thread around that point until Twitter let machineiv's like on my post saying I did actually post about other aspects of harassment in TRPGs somehow slipped through into my notifications anyway. *shrug* Twitter is baffling.
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Feb 23, 2019 02:54
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Cat Face Joe posted:if mark diaz truman can write a game about the cartels, you are all gonna love my game about being a member of hamas Sure. And having a Welsh grandfather, I am clearly well qualified to write a game about being in the IRA and fighting the prods.
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Feb 23, 2019 03:01
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. Eh
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Feb 23, 2019 03:19
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Lord_Hambrose posted:I know that part of the resistance to Latinx is that Spanish is a long established language, and really why should people care that Americans want you to realize the thing you call yourself is wrong. Also, I understand that this is a United States-thing but some naive people do extrapolate the latinx experience in the US with Latin America in general, which is pretty loving big with its own social issues and in the process tend to mash us all together. Last time I was in the US I was talking to someone who keep saying cholo/a without realizing that's a strong slur where I come from
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Feb 23, 2019 03:59
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fosborb posted:If it was so universal and normal, why did they need a sidebar explaining their editorial decision? I'm not trying to excuse anything. I am glad we live in 2019. Back in the early to mid 90s, this stuff was in flux. There was a time where having a sidebar that said, 'actually we don't mean anything specific when we use 'he'' might have been regarded as progressive, since you're pointing out an actual incongruity. From our standpoint here in the present we can look back and see, yes, that was a mistake, and they had the answer to that problem right there and didn't use it, but even saying, 'we acknowledge the problem but we don't know what to do about it' was a relatively new phenomenon. White Wolf was the first mainstream RPG company that I'm aware of to switch between masculine and feminine pronouns and I could not tell you when they started doing that. Somebody with a better memory probably could. Up until that point the RPG industry was taking cues from technical writing, textbooks and other extremely dry sources. The universality of the male pronoun was extremely common at the time. EDIT: Actually I just read a fascinating article about the use of gendered pronouns in modern writing. https://blog.oup.com/2010/08/gender-neutral-pronoun/ Pretty interesting considering people have been trying to find a neutral pronoun for a very long time! So even if it was common in the 90s, people knew what the problem was and just... didn't fix it. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Feb 23, 2019 |
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Feb 23, 2019 04:36
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Kurieg posted:https://twitter.com/vl_darling/status/1099064242248900608 And now the discussion has gone into how this is all from SA (hi) so it's clearly the work of a hive of scum and villainy and not actual concern about this stuff or something. *sigh* I dunno. Anything for an excuse to dismiss concerns even Holden had to admit were legit, I guess. ...the amount of effort that people put into keeping tabs on this thread is astounding.
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Feb 23, 2019 04:39
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Well, if I didn't get why the Purple axed VL_Darling I do now. (I already did.)
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Feb 23, 2019 04:43
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gourdcaptain posted:And now the discussion has gone into how this is all from SA (hi) so it's clearly the work of a hive of scum and villainy and not actual concern about this stuff or something. Isn't this basically the exact same thing people used to dismiss allegations against Zak S, the whole "oh it's Something Awful so they must be trolling" song and dance? Gotta say that's not really a great well to keep on drawing from.
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Feb 23, 2019 04:50
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Kai Tave posted:Isn't this basically the exact same thing people used to dismiss allegations against Zak S, the whole "oh it's Something Awful so they must be trolling" song and dance? Gotta say that's not really a great well to keep on drawing from. Well... I mean "it's okay when we do it because we're obviously good people." is kind of their whole 'thing'.
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Feb 23, 2019 04:54
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Kai Tave posted:Isn't this basically the exact same thing people used to dismiss allegations against Zak S, the whole "oh it's Something Awful so they must be trolling" song and dance? Gotta say that's not really a great well to keep on drawing from. Exact same thing Mearls specifically used to dismiss the allegations, even. Mike Mearls posted:My impression is that SA folks are using gender and race issues to drive their personal grudges with people. It’s very damaging for making real progress on these issues. People getting in touch with me are pointing to that site to undermine the real issues we face in gaming.
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Feb 23, 2019 04:55
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