I worked on a video game in the late 2000s, and one of the bits of code I did was the code for filling the seats in the stadium with people. One of the artists cobbled together like 5 low poly man models and 5 low poly woman models, and you could just about tell the difference, and I put some code in there to ensure the genders were evenly distributed. (The 2 genders, I mean. Man, and woman.)
Looking back, I don't even know why I made it an enum, rather than a 1-bit bitfield called is_woman - but in the end I was glad I didn't, because the art director moaned a bit about the clothing colour distribution, and somebody asked if we could have some mascots, and there were some complaints about the unreasonable number of interesting hats. And, so, long story short, by the time we were done, we had 18 genders based on clothing colour and type of hat, 2 genders for mascot (naturally: tall, and squat), and a table to control the relative distributions.
Once we got to 5 genders I tried to change the enum name to Type - but we had this data-driven reflection system that integrated with various parts of the art pipeline, and once your enum had a name, that was pretty much that. You were stuck with it.
Is that a metaphor for our times too? I don't know. My own view is that sometimes stuff just happens, and you can't read too much into it.
I would love to think msft blocks gender because your code somehow made it into the training data and somebody was confused seeing “squat” as a gender.
Looking back, I don't even know why I made it an enum, rather than a 1-bit bitfield called is_woman - but in the end I was glad I didn't, because the art director moaned a bit about the clothing colour distribution, and somebody asked if we could have some mascots, and there were some complaints about the unreasonable number of interesting hats. And, so, long story short, by the time we were done, we had 18 genders based on clothing colour and type of hat, 2 genders for mascot (naturally: tall, and squat), and a table to control the relative distributions.
Once we got to 5 genders I tried to change the enum name to Type - but we had this data-driven reflection system that integrated with various parts of the art pipeline, and once your enum had a name, that was pretty much that. You were stuck with it.
Is that a metaphor for our times too? I don't know. My own view is that sometimes stuff just happens, and you can't read too much into it.