In proving that identity politics have quite literally seeped into the very DNA of video games, Epic Games has taken to encouraging developers who use their popular Unreal Engine to employ “inclusive” language in their respective titles’ programming codes.
First added to the engine’s official coding standards with the April 2022 release of the tool’s 5th version and recently brought to light courtesy of its April 2024 update, this new “Inclusive Word Choice” clause sees Epic Games “encourage” (a curious word choice given that they consider the following of said standards to be “mandatory”) users “to use respectful, inclusive, and professional language” when writing or documenting a given piece of code.
“Word choice applies when you name classes, functions, data structures, types, variables, files and folders, [and] plugins,” explains Epic Games. “It applies when you write snippets of user-facing text for the UI, error messages, and notifications. It also applies when writing about code, such as in comments and changelist descriptions.”
To this end, Epic Games then provided guidance as to what words devs should and should not use in their writing.
“Do not use metaphors or similes that reinforce stereotypes – examples include contrast black and white or blacklist and whitelist,” they began. “Do not use words that refer to historical trauma or lived experience of discrimination – examples include slave, master, and nuke.”
Turning to gender-related language, Epic Games advises devs to “refer to hypothetical people as they, them, and their, even in the singular” and “anything that is not a person as it and its – for example, a module, plugin, function, client, server, or any other software or hardware component.”
Further, users are asked to “not assign a gender to anything that doesn’t have one,” nor “use collective nouns like guys that assume gender,” and also take care to “avoid colloquial phrases that contain arbitrary genders, like ‘a poor man‘s X’.”
Regarding slang, the standards call on devs to “remember that your words are being read by a global audience that may not share the same idioms and attitudes, and who might not understand the same cultural references,” and thus aim to “avoid slang and colloquialisms, even if you think they are funny or harmless,” particularly as “these may be hard to understand for people whose first language is not English, and might not translate well.”
And of course, devs are also warned to “not use profanity”.
Continuing, the standards next ask Unreal Engine users to be conscious of their use of “overloaded words”, as “many terms that we use for their technical meanings also have other meanings outside of technology.”
“Examples include abort, execute, or native,” they detail. “When you use words like these, always be precise and examine the context in which they appear.”
Finally, the Inclusive Word Choice clause closes out with a list of “some terminology” that Epic Games believes “should be replaced with better alternatives”.
Said terminology includes the terms ‘blacklist’ (alternatives listed include ‘deny list, block list, exclude list avoid list, unapproved list, forbidden list, and permission list), ‘whitelist’ (allow list, include list, trust list, safe list, prefer list, approved list, permission list), ‘master’ (primary, source, controller template, reference, main, leader, original, base) and slave (secondary, replica, agent, follower, worker, cluster node, locked, linked, and synchronized).
Ultimately, Epic Games closes out the text of this new standard by assuring the public that they are “actively working to bring our code in line with the principles laid out above.”