More Stories About Gender and Text

[rthorm@cornellbox.com]

I'd like to thank everyone for keeping this civil.  There's always a fear of
things going nuclear when you find a whole lot of messages on a topic where
there have been some strong opinions voiced.  By and large, the DQ groups have
done extremely well at respecting other people's opinions and keeping the
discussion from getting acrimonious.  And once again we've seen the same thing
happening here.  

You guys are great -- I love you man!  (Or should that be "you people are
great," instead...? ;-)

Quoting David Chappell <kaith_athanes@yahoo.com>:

> 
> Copy-editing... That brings up a good point. Once the rules are 
> compiled, they can always be copy-edited to fit whatever editorial 
> standard is chosen to avoid gender bias.
> 
> -David

This is certainly true, and the only reason I brought up the topic in the first
place is that I wanted to set a standard (if we chose to adopt a standard) so
that that step of copy-editing could be minimized.

Same with the indexing question.  If we can do more of the work as we go along
with the writing of the text, it will be easier to complete the whole project
later on.

I also brought up this subject with the 20'x20' Room blog folks (a really
interesting  blog for intelligent gaming and game design with a good group of
core contributors; take a look if you're interested:
http://www.20by20room.com/2004/05/grammar_and_sty.html) and got a range of
opinions from them.  

One suggestion I really like in some respects was, "take a page from the
Heroquest rpg. Robin Laws and Greg Stafford chose a fixed set of players and
characters for all the examples, and used the appropriate pronouns to refer to
each player and character throughout."  

We could stick with the use of he/him/his in cases of indefinite pronouns, but
have a set of example player/characters and GM who are all female, so all
examples would naturally use she/her/hers.  I'm not sure if I like this better
than the alternating scheme I suggested earlier. 

I'm sorry I opened up this whole can of worms in one respect, but I think it's
been a good discussion so far, and I've found the comments useful in helping me
sort out what position I want to take on the whole matter.

I'll get back to rewriting rules soon! 

  --Rodger

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