A Software Approach to Flexibly and Concretely Gendered Characters

by Eva Schiffer

In the summer of 2012 I began working with Kathleen De Smet on a game idea that evolved into the larp Storm Cellar. Both of us felt strongly that the characters in the game should be available in male and female forms. Unfortunately, we had no tools to help us, and with an eight player game including complex, pre-written backstory the work involved in swapping character genders manually quickly becomes an untenable nightmare.

In September of 2012 I put together the first version of a computer program called Gender Swap to flexibly and concretely gender larp characters. Initially it was a command line python script. Over time it became more sophisticated and grew to include a graphical user interface (GUI). Eventually I built pre-packaged application versions of Gender Swap for MacOS and Windows.

The python code and packaged versions of Gender Swap are available for free via GitHub: https://github.com/valleyviolet/gender_swap

Why?

There are many ways to approach player character gender in larps.1 The most common ones being used in games with pre-written characters when I began work on Gender Swap were: have fixed genders for each player character or specify all materials for a player character using neutral pronouns (generally the singular they) and then tell players to treat that character as a specific gender that matches the preferences of whomever you cast them to.

The first approach of having only fixed gender characters is concrete, but not flexible. It can make casting very unpleasant, as players often have strong preferences about gender and it’s pure luck whether the concrete genders of the characters you have will match the themes and plots your players want to engage with. Fixed gender characters can also be frustrating as a player. If you have strong preferences about gender, you will often be limited in the sorts of stories, roles, and themes you are offered.

The second approach of using all neutral pronouns for gendered characters is flexible but not concrete. It can feel artificial and impersonal, as you are presented with characters who have gender, but are not discussed in the game materials as if they have gender. As a writer, it also precludes approaching a wide range of material that has different cultural connotations based on character gender.

Some writers have slightly improved on the second approach, by encouraging players to build more gendered stories and relationships after casting.2 This allows for more gendered material in the game, but puts a high creative burden on the players. Unfortunately this strategy still precludes the writer choosing which material related to gender is included in their game. It can also be less queer-friendly than I would personally prefer.3

I created Gender Swap as a tool to help writers find a middle ground between these approaches. It lets you both have concrete gendered material in your game, and be more flexible about the genders of your characters. Gender Swap lets you choose which genders are possible for which characters, including having some fixed gender characters and some flexibly gendered ones if you don’t want to go as far as making all your characters flexible in gender.4 When you’re using they pronouns for a character it can be because they have a non-binary gender identity in this run of your game, not because you have no other practical choice.

How It Works

At its heart Gender Swap is a relatively simple tool for choosing gender related text in your game materials5 using a simple markup language6. Each character with flexible gender is configured with a list of possible genders. As you write your game you use markup language to specify versions of gendered text for each of those possible genders.

There are only a few, simple patterns you need to know to use Gender Swap.

Configuring Possible Genders7

The first pattern is how to describe the possible genders for the characters in your game. This information is stored in a separate plain text configuration file. The contents of this file will look something like the following:

Dr Calvin: 01: female/male:              Female
Unit A:    02: female/male/neutral they: Male
Unit B:    03: female/male/neutral they: They

This file has one line for each character whose gender you want to be able to change, with sections on each line separated by colons (“:”). The first section is a descriptive name so you can keep track of which line is for which character (Dr Calvin, Unit A, or Unit B in the example). The second section is a two digit character number that you will use to specify this character in the markup language (01, 02, or 03 in the example). The third section is a list of the possible genders for this character, in the order you will write them in the markup (“female/male”, or “female/male/neutral they” in the example).8

The final section of a line represents the gender this character will be given when you use Gender Swap to process your materials (Female, Male, or They in the example). This final section is likely to change each time you run your game, since it reflects the genders that will be used for the characters in that run. The earlier sections of the line will not change unless you rewrite your game to allow characters to be different possible genders or to change character names.

Gendering In Game Materials

In your game materials, at any point where the text can change based on a character’s gender you use a construction like the following:

[02: she is / he is / they are]

The entire chunk of text for Gender Swap to modify is enclosed in square brackets (ie. “[ ]”). The first section is the two digit character number for the character this text depends on. In this case 02 corresponds to Unit A, so which section of text Gender Swap choses will depend on Unit A’s gender for this run. The character number is followed by a colon (“:”) and then the different text options for each of the character’s possible genders, separated by slashes (“/”).9

In this example, the entire chunk of text “[02: she is / he is / they are]” will be replaced with “she is” when the character is female, “he is” when the character is male, or “they are” when the character is gender neutral and uses they pronouns.

Gender Swap can be used in a similar manner to swap gendered relationship terms such as mother/father/parent, wife/husband/spouse, and niece/nephew/nibbling, or gendered job titles like actress/actor.

More complex examples can include multi-line sections of text or empty sections.

The field of robotics was in its infancy when you were in school[01: and you were the only woman in any of your classes / ].

In this case the final text would read “The field of robotics was in its infancy when you were in school and you were the only woman in any of your classes.” if Dr Calvin is female or “The field of robotics was in its infancy when you were in school.” if Dr Calvin is male.

Gender Swap can also optionally gender file names.10 Simply start with the character number and list the possible gendered text separated by periods (“.”).

02.Unit Alice.Unit Alvin.Unit A.rtf

This file will become “02.Unit Alice.rtf” if the character is female, “02.Unit Alvin.rtf” if the character is male, or “02.Unit A.rtf” if the character is gender neutral and uses they pronouns. If Gender Swap has been told to gender file names and sees a file that does not match the pattern it expects it will just use the original file name without modifying it.

Processing Your Marked Up Files

Once you have a configuration file specifying your characters’ genders and have written the game materials using the markup language, there are two ways to process your files using Gender Swap to set concrete genders for a run of your game. If you are comfortable downloading and running code from GitHub and want to have access to Gender Swap’s code to potentially debug your own problems, you may want to run the program from the command line. If that sounds like way too much work or you just don’t care to look at the code, you will probably want to download a pre-built and packaged application version of Gender Swap and use the graphical user interface (GUI).

Command Line Use

If you want to run Gender Swap from the command line, download the code from GitHub and make sure you have an appropriate version of Python11 installed. Then run the following command from the command line in the gender_swap/source directory, replacing <> parts with the correct file paths for your game.

python -m gender_swap swap -g <the path to the text configuration file> -i <the path to the input files to gender> -o <the path where it should put the output>

Gender Swap will place concretely gendered copies12 of your input files in the output directory you specified. If you have input files in more than one directory for Gender Swap to gender you will need to run the command multiple times, changing the input path.

The GUI

If you would rather use the GUI you can either download and run a pre-packaged Gender Swap application or start the GUI from the command line.13

In the GUI, click the “Load Gender List” button on the “Gender Definitions” tab and select your configuration file to load. Verify that the character genders you expected are loaded into the table on that tab. If not, double check that they are set correctly in the configuration file.

Open the “Files and Processing” tab and click the “Load Files” button. Select the documents you want to gender. You should be able to select multiple items by holding shift and you can continue using the “Load Files” button to add documents from different directories if you need to.

Verify that the files you want to gender are loaded in the list. Click the “Select” button and select an output directory (preferably somewhere outside the gender_swap directory structure).

Check the “also process file names to gender them” checkbox if you want to gender the file names. Finally, click the “Process” button.

Concretely gendered copies of your files should now be present in the output directory.14

Caveats

The program understands four possible “genders”: female, male, neutral they, and neutral ze. Gender Swap currently expects each of those to map to using one set of pronouns (she/her pronouns for female, he/him pronouns for male, they/them pronouns for the neutral they, and ze/zir pronouns for neutral ze). You can put whatever text you like within the markup in your game materials, but Gender Swap will issue warnings based on whether you used the pronouns it expects for the gender you specified. In the future I hope to expand Gender Swap to understand user configurable genders so it is simpler to use custom, less traditional pronoun sets.

Gender Swap can process files that are plain text (.txt) or rich text format (.rtf). I’m hoping to eventually expand to processing html, to allow writers more layout options than rich text allows.

Gender Swap doesn’t understand the details of how rich text formatting works, so you will need to be careful to use formatting either within only one section of the gendered text or across the entire expression.15 If you use formatting like [01: Susan / Scott] across the separating slash, the formatting in your concretely gendered file will behave incorrectly. Instead, bold across the whole expression ([01: Susan / Scott]) or inside each section but not across the slash ([01: Susan / Scott]).

Unfortunately, not all rich text editors are created equal. Most notably, the rich text export from Google Docs is (at the time of writing) technically correct but the resulting files are internally a hot mess that Gender Swap can’t read correctly.16 Re-saving Google Docs RTF exports using TextEdit, Word, or almost any other RTF editor will coerce them into a less awful format that Gender Swap can handle.

Conclusion

Obviously not all characters can be gender swapped meaningfully,17 but hopefully Gender Swap will give you one more tool and one more strategy for approaching gender when writing and running larps.

I’ve worked on many larps18 that use Gender Swap to gender player characters since I first created it in 2012. Having this tool made creating flexible but concretely gendered characters an interesting writing exercise rather than a logistical nightmare. Seeing what new combinations of character genders bring to these games each time I run them is fascinating and casting them is far easier than casting games with fixed gender characters.

  1. This article focuses on games with pre-written player characters who are cast to specific players each time the game is run. Generally the person running the game decides how to cast the players to characters based on player preferences, including preferences for character gender. There are obviously other strategies to making and casting player characters, like having players create them collaboratively at the beginning of each run of a game, but you don’t need Gender Swap for that! ↩

  2. I have seen game facilitators encourage players to add more strongly gendered elements to their characters both through workshops directly before the game and through collaborative online interaction significantly earlier. ↩

  3. Maury Brown discusses problems and strengths of these approaches at http://analoggamestudies.org/2015/09/the-trouble-with-gender-in-larp/. ↩

  4. I generally use Gender Swap to set genders for player characters. The program doesn’t care who you’re gendering though, so if you want to have flexibly gendered non-player characters or even flexibly gendered characters who appear only in backstory, you can. ↩

  5. Most of your flexible character gendering is likely to be on your character sheets, but if you have informational handouts or other materials that need to change based on character gender they can be written and processed in the same way. ↩

  6. A markup language is just a way of writing your text so a computer can easily tell what you want the computer to do with it. In this case, the markup language lets the computer distinguish what different text you want depending on how you’ve set a character’s gender. ↩

  7. Gender Swap’s current documentation conflates gender and pronoun usage somewhat, primarily because pronouns are the most common thing that the program swaps. Gender and pronouns can obvious be much more complex and varied than simple non-overlapping categories. In the long run I want Gender Swap to be more configurable to support writing more complexity and diversity in gender and pronouns but this article focuses primarily on what the tool does now, not on what I hope to do with it someday. ↩

  8. I find it easiest to put the possible genders in the same order for each character, so I don’t need to refer to the configuration as often while writing the markup in a game. When I started using Gender Swap I decided to always put female first on this list, because it disrupts the ordering my brain expects, and therefore encourages me to pay more attention to what I’m writing. The Gender Swap program doesn’t care what order you put the possible genders in, so you can use any order you prefer. ↩

  9. Currently there is no way to escape a forward slash inside the gendered section of the markup language, so it is the one character you can’t use there. ↩

  10. This is most useful for character sheet names since they are likely to be seen by players. ↩

  11. At the time of writing, Gender Swap works best with Python 2.7. ↩

  12. Your original input files will be left where they are and as they are. ↩

  13. You will need to have PyQt4 installed to use the GUI from the command line. You can start the GUI with the command: python -m gender_swap gui ↩

  14. If anything goes wrong, errors and warnings should be displayed in the command line interface window. In all but the most catastrophic of cases, Gender Swap should produce output files even if something goes wrong. ↩

  15. RTF files use start and end tags for text formatting (much like html) that are invisible in an RTF editor. When you bold across a slash, Gender Swap will use only text from one side of the slash when gendering the file and either the start or end tags for the bold formatting will be thrown away. I occasionally end up with many pages of a character sheet in accidental bold because I did this wrong. ↩

  16. For some reason Google Docs thinks it’s appropriate to re-issue all formatting tags for every single word in the RTF export. This interferes with Gender Swap’s ability to detect the markup language and makes the files absolutely huge compared to a well formatted RTF file. ↩

  17. There will always be games like Mad About the Boy where the material you’re approaching as a designer needs one specific gender or another. ↩

  18. Games I have used Gender Swap for include Storm Cellar, Better Living Through Robotics, Interplanetary Federation - The Cadet Years, Grandma’s Resting Place, Fire in Cambria, Peace, Land, and Bread! and Unit Test. Unit Test is available in this volume of Game Wrap or from the Gender Swap GitHub project if you would like to see an example of what a game written to use Gender Swap looks like before it is concretely gendered. ↩