IVAN has a loooooot of gender issues, many of which have been addressed here, but this is still going to be a beanplatingly long post.
And I'm going to preface it by saying that I love IVAN and have a lot of fun playing it. The following criticism is intended to gather together areas of possible improvement so that it can become an even better game.
There are currently three sexes extant in IVAN: male, female, and undefined. Gender is only present in names and dialogue, rather than mechanics and code, and each character's pronouns are determined by their sex: he, she, or it. The default sex for a creature is undefined, but the default for a humanoid is male.
A fourth sex, transsexual, is defined in the code but unused, and if my reading of character::GetPersonalPronoun() etc. is correct they would also use 'she' pronouns. According to Doc/Obsolete/Main.txt it was intended to be 'something between the three'. In the nicest possible terms, that is total fucking bullshit. 'Transgender' or 'trans' is currently preferred. Neither 'transsexual', 'transgender', nor 'trans' is a sex or a gender; it is used to qualify existing genders. For example, a woman may be a trans woman, a man may be transgender , a nonbinary person may be trans. Being trans is distinct from being intersex (which describes someone's sex) or nonbinary (which describes someone's gender).
At the moment the full list of female humans and nonhumans appearing in IVAN is:
* goddesses of love and art; health and nutrition; nature; assassins and thieves; forbidden pleasures; mutations, disease, and famine; wrong knowledge and vile magic;
* the priestess of Silva;
* the enner girl; ~
* the dolphins;
* Petrus's wives; #@~
* the housewives; #@~
* the female slaves; @~
* all mistresses including Sherarax; @
* all angels including archangels; ~
* Genetrix Vesana;
* the female carnivorous mutant bunnies (though their sex is undefined);
* the female tourist. @~
Notice how many of them have an identity solely defined in-game by being someone's wife (#). There is exactly one male NPC referred to as a husband (and it's not the name displayed in-game). The only humans (@) in the list who science talk are the mistresses, and they're as effective as puppies and hunters (though that's for the best since the player can spawn unlimited friendly mistresses). Especially prominent as being unable to science talk is the priestess of Silva. Many female characters' friendly dialogue lines are at least 33% about male characters (~). Yes, I chose that percentage bound in order to write lots of ~s.
More female humans should science talk. Their roles in towns should be diversified by adding new NPCs and/or changing the gender of existing NPCs. Some of their dialogue should be replaced.
The full list of humanoids with sex specified as 'undefined' is:
* goblins
* golems
* zombies
* imps
* werewolves
* kobolds
* gibberlings
* orcs
All of them are non-human, except for zombies who may be made of human flesh. The eunuch guard is not included here (he is male), which means that a character's sex attribute does not refer to their genitalia, or at least not their gonads. Identifying almost all nonhuman humanoids that appear in game as having undefined sex muddies the interpretation of the sex attribute further. Are these species composed entirely of sexless clones? Does the player only encounter warrior individuals, who are sexless clones? Does the player character only regard humans and beings with high charisma as having sex or gender? I think the correct interpretation of IVAN's sex attribute is 'pronouns', since that is the only effect it has on gameplay.
The sex attribute should probably be renamed to pronouns. From here on I will generally talk about characters' pronouns rather than their presentation, gender, or sex (which are all different things), except when relevant.
In general the pronouns we use for sentient beings should correspond to the referent's gender (or stated pronoun choice), rather than their sex or presentation. When we use pronouns to refer to animals the choice matters much less, since it's is generally not likely to be offended. If it has an owner they may disagree.
Many of the nonhuman humanoids in IVAN (kobolds, goblins, orcs at least) use tools and have names and hierarchical societies, and are in constant contact with representatives of gendered human societies (Attnam, the dark knights, mistresses). It's not unreasonable to suppose that gender roles would arise in these cultures (the existence of a kobold patriarch and goblin king confirms it in two out of three cases) and be communicated during nonhostile interactions with humans (probably dark knights and mistresses).
Using 'it' as a pronoun to refer to another human who has not explicitly asked for that pronoun is in most cases (including all the use cases in IVAN's log text) very disrespectful, and during nonhostile interactions with intelligent nonhuman humanoids as hypothesised above, we could reasonably suppose that 'it' would not be in use for long.
The pronoun attribute of intelligent nonhuman humanoid characters should probably be set to something other than 'it'.
If gender in these cultures is similar to current Attnamese culture as it currently appears in-game then they may have a strict gender binary; if it developed independently, then like real-world human cultures they may have a variety of non-binary gender identities which may or may not use pronouns other than 'he', 'she', and 'it', for example 'they' (which would require alternative verb conjugation for much of the game text) or 'zie' (which wouldn't).
It may be a beneficial to add a fourth option 'they' or 'zie' to the pronoun attribute, or split it into 5 text attributes which do not have hardcoded values (subject, object, possessive dependent, possessive independent, reflexive). This would also accommodate nonbinary player characters.
Currently all humanoid characters share a pronoun set with all other characters made from the same character prototype. There is one humanoid prototype (tourists) which has paired male and female configurations; my understanding is that these configurations are also separate character prototypes. The implication of this is that all non-tourist/priest occupations represented in the world of IVAN are strictly gender segregated. In the crapsack theocratic/capitalist/patriarchal hellholes of Attnam and occupied Tweraif this (along with other sexist institutions like palm-leaf-waving female slaves as background decoration, and the limited dialogue options of female NPCs in town) may be thematic and unsurprising, but it is reasonable to suppose that some of the other cultures represented in the game (especially angels) could have less rigid gender roles, and even Attnam could be retconned into something less sexist.
I would suggest either making configurations with different pronoun sets or randomising spawned characters' pronouns, for some or all of the non-unique character prototypes of intelligent races.
As a sprite game with 16x16 tiles each packing so much information into a small space, I'm not sure that titillating presumed straight male players by having 'she' pronoun player characters be topless by default with 2x2 pixel breasts is a grave concern. If Tweraifian culture includes female nipples being taboo, then probably even under Decos's rule it wouldn't be difficult to obtain some garment for them. If Tweraifian culture doesn't include that taboo,
shrug.
'She' pronoun player characters (and more) would be a very good addition to the game. Presentation (so far reflected in the alternative hair sprites, which are great), gender, and sex are separate attributes which correlate strongly in Western culture, and need not necessarily correlate in IVAN.
People of any gender can have or not have beards, breasts, and long hair. Player choice of pronouns and presentation is an interesting issue. At present the player chooses nothing directly at birth; colours, stats, and training rates are randomly assigned at birth. Before I discuss gender issues at birth I'll talk about stats.
Currently it is possible to start-scum by looking at the new character's stats, comparing them to desired minimum values, and restarting the game until satisfied. Angband used to work like this, and had the same grindy optimal play at birth. Later it implemented an autoroller. The player types in minimum stat values, and the game rolls tens of thousands of characters until it hits a maximum or the requirements are satisfied. A few versions later the maintainer realised that was a
terrible mechanic and replaced it with a point-based system. You have 20 points and you spend them to increase stats. Leftover points (used to) increase your starting gold. The standard roller (one character per keypress, no highscore left behind) is still in the game for some reason. IVAN may have a penchant for needless cruelty, but it can still learn from Angband here. Manually scumming for start stats is a bad mechanic, worse when it takes 8 keypresses and a loading screen for each new character. Automating the process is not a big improvement.
The only good way to implement varying stats at birth is with a point-based system.
So, if the player can assign points to stats at birth, suddenly there is an appropriate point in the game for the player to
state their preferences about the PC's appearance (long or short hair, beard or no beard, chest shape and possible covering, hair and skin colours) and pronouns (a field to type in just like their name). Possibly also gender, and sex if that ever becomes an attribute that exists in-game. If these options did become available, some NPC dialogue (Kaethos, mistresses, housewives) would have to be altered to remove the implication that the player character is white and male.
An alternative possibly more in line with IVAN's style is to make all of these attributes independently variable at birth and randomly chosen. But following the same arguments as stat assignments, it would make more sense to let the player spend points to choose them at birth (and avoid random assignment). Another possibility is to take the Rust approach and fix the player's appearance and pronouns for all games by using eg. the computer's MAC address to seed the birth RNG.
In conclusion, wow there sure is a lot of work to be done!
TL;DR?
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Remove "TRANSGENDER" from "Sex" attribute enumeration
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Rename attribute "Sex" to "Pronouns" and change the enumeration values appropriately
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More diverse women in towns
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More human women science talking
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Women talking more often about things that aren't men
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Kobolds, Goblins, Orcs (maybe more) should not have 'it' pronouns
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Add 'they' option to Pronouns attribute, or split Pronouns into 5 text attributes
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Long hair good
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Do not make any of Pronouns, beard, long hair, chest attributes fully dependent on another; at most they may be correlated
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Make randomly spawning humanoids have randomised Pronouns, beard, hair, chest attributes
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Change some town NPCs' Pronouns attribute and/or add new NPCs who aren't men
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Let the player have any Pronouns attribute
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Spend points to increase stats at birth
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Choose skin colour, hair colour, hairstyle, beardability, chest shape, and pronouns at birth, using points if you feel cruel
Also, why are there so many rape jokes in the website's random quote box? If we want to decrease misogyny in the game, we should also try to decrease the misogyny on the website.