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Demo: Inclusive Language System
🕑 Added 2022-04-07 18:59:02 +0000 UTCHey everyone, I hope you've had a good start into spring wherever in the world you are! π
Today's post is a bit special because it isn't about masturbation, hentai or anything sexual for that matter. Rather, I want to share with you a technical project I've been working on.
In the past, multiple people have contacted me and asked about an option to customize the pronouns used to refer to the player in the game. Since my games are targeted towards a male audience and all of the masturbation instructions are intended to be followed with male genitalia, I had never really considered using any other pronouns than "he/him". Of course, this simplified thought of mine is far away from the reality. Over 15% of you are women and almost a fifth of the people on our Discord server use other pronouns than "he/him".
My games rely largely on high emotional involvement and engaging the player in the JOI, so being addressed with the false pronouns can decrease the enjoyment and pleasure a player receives from my content. To improve this issue, I've been working on an "Inclusive Language System", a grammar model that allows the player to change the gender they are addressed with in a text. With this system, the player can select "he/him", "she/her" and the non-binary "they/them" as pronouns. π
so how does it work?
Before I tell you, I suggest you check out the demo and really look at where the differences in the texts between the different genders are. Because it isn't quite as simple as just substituting the pronouns.
Have you looked at some of the dialogue in the demo? Okay, then here's how it works. π
Important for this solution was to not have multiple sets of text depending on the selected gender, since a decentralized approach like that isn't scalable at all. However, the solution I came up with isn't much more complicated either. There's no AI, no language models - it's basically just a fill-in-the-blanks text with the blanks being gender-dependant parts of the dialogue.
To illustrate this, I've adapted the demo's dialogue example from The Office:
This is the text in the game engine, so let's analyze what we're seeing here. Let's start by looking at the four different "p" blanks. "p1" is the subject pronoun, meaning "he", "she" and "they". The c in "p1c" indicates that the first letter of the pronoun needs to be capitalized because it's the first word of the sentence. "p2" is the possessive adjective "his", "her", "their", while "p3" substitutes the object pronouns "him", "her" and "them". Finally, "p4" represents the reflexive pronouns "himself", "herself" and "themselves".
Sadly I can't simply use the object pronouns to create the reflexive pronouns (as "p3"self) due to "they/them" gramatically being plural. This also causes complications in combination with verbs, which brings us to the "s" blanks. "s1" adds an s to the end of the verb, which is only required for "he" and "she". For "they", the blank stays empty ("They tell" but "He tells"). "s2" and "s3" are used to add "re" and "ve" to abbreviate "are" and "have" for "they/them", which are both simply "s" for the other two pronouns ("They're Tiffany" and "He's Tiffany"). "s4" is then basically the same as "s1", except it substitutes "es" and is primarily used for "do" and some plural nouns ("They don't want" but "He doesn't want").
"iv1" and "iv2" simply replace "was" and "is" with their plural forms "were" and "are" for "they/them" ("He isn't interested" but "They aren't interested").
Lastly, the "i" blanks are not really part of the grammar system but important nonetheless. They replace genderspecific nouns like "man", "mom", and "boy" and thus have to be created specifically for the text in which the Inclusive Language System is being used. For the example monologues in the demo, this includes "man / woman / someone" and "father / mother / parent".
So if we put all of that together and insert "they/them" as pronouns, we get:
"As I'm taking it down, someone catches me. They tell me to stop. It's their father's business, they're Tiffany. I don't trust them. Thirty years later, I get a postcard. They weren't interested in living by themselves anymore. They don't want to be without me."
π
At this point, I feel it's important to say that this project is in no way political. I'm aware of some of the discussions in different languages of the globe regarding inclusive language and similar topics and I'm really not interested in joining those debates.
But I know for a fact that there are people playing my games who don't use "he/him" pronouns and if I can make the games more enjoyable for them, I will try my best. π
Note that this system only effects the gender with which the player is addressed in the game but it doesn't change the instructions themselves, which - as mentioned earlier - are intended for people with a penis and balls. Of course it's possible to have alternate instructions for other people but that would come close to creating an entire extra game...
Now, after all of this text, I have bad news and good news for you. The bad news is that this project was mainly intended as proof of concept and isn't really ready to be used in a proper game yet. Because of that, I don't think it'll be used in my upcoming Home Office Game either (although I'll reconsider once the game is getting close to being finished). As experimental project and technical exercise, this was really interesting to create and I will continue working on it until it's convenient and easy to implement into a game.
And that leads me to the good news: Due to the way I've constructed it, it should be quite easy to apply the Inclusive Language System to existing games retrospectively. I won't go into detail about that but I have conducted some tests and it seems to be working as intended. So once the ILS has reached a state in which it's ready to be employed in actual games, this change can easily be applied to all of my games, not only future ones. π
Lastly, I need to relativize this entire project and everything we talked about today. I haven't looked into it a lot but I feel like third person pronouns ("he", "she" and "they") are quite rare in my games when referencing the player. They really are only used when talking about the player, which is hardly the case. Most of the time, there is a direct dialogue between the player and a character which mostly uses the first and second person pronouns "I" and "you", which are the same regardless of the addressed person's gender. This means the ILS really won't have a big impact on the games... But most of this is just speculation for now; I'll see how well it works when I actually try to use the ILS in a proper game. π€
I know this wasn't a big, fun update about a cool new game but experimenting with these smaller projects is incredibly important for me to keep innovating and improving. Even if I end up scrapping the entire Inclusive Language project, figuring how to create this grammar based fill-in-the-blanks system was very interesting and the knowledge I've gained from it will help me make better games in the future.
For now, only you amazing patrons can see innovative project but I plan to eventually release publicly my ILS and the insights I've gained, so that other creators can also easily offer customizable pronouns and make their games more fun for everyone! π€©
And I think that's a great way to wrap up today's post. After my recent teaser for the Home Office Game, I'm now preparing the other parts of the game but that's not really an interesting process to share with you. So my next post will likely be similar to this one, with me showing you an exciting technically innovative project I've been working on.
For now, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the Inclusive Language System. Do you want to see it used in a game? Is there something you'd like to be changed about it? And if you have a good suggestion for a monologue or speech to be added to the demo, please let me know~
Thank you for your tremendous loyalty and support, it means the world to me! ππ
(Please note that I'm not a native English speaker, so any faults in my language in terms of poltical correctness and inclusivity are in no way deliberate. I love all of you so much! π₯°)
