When you're playing an abstract computer game against one or more computerized opponents (chess, say, or checkers, or Dicewar--any game where the opponent doesn't have an avatar or other representation per se), do you think of the opponent as gendered?<\/p>\n
And whether you do or not, do you refer<\/em> to the opponent as gendered? As in, for example, \"If I go here, then he'll go there, so I'd better not do that.\"<\/p>\n If you think of or refer to the opponent as gendered, is it always the same gender? Does it vary by game, by opponent behavior, by your mood, by anything else?<\/p>\n For me, the unmarked state for a computer player is always male-pronouned. I don't think I think of computer players as gendered per se, but I always refer to them using male pronouns. If I were watching someone play chess against a computer player and the human said \"I've got him on the run now,\" I wouldn't think it at all remarkable, but if the human said \"I've got her on the run now,\" it would take me a moment to figure out who \"her\" was.<\/p>\n I'm sure I use \"it\" in some contexts, when I'm thinking of the opponent as the computer itself rather than as some kind of a persona. But I think most of the time I use \"he.\"<\/p>\n (Again, I'm not talking about games in which there's a gendered avatar of your opponent. Obviously in first-person shooters where your avatar is fighting a humanoid opponent, most of the time that opponent will be gendered.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When you’re playing an abstract computer game against one or more computerized opponents (chess, say, or checkers, or Dicewar–any game…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,47,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-gender","category-language"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}