In response to the recent discourse surrounding the board game’s decision to give special attention to its character’s respective pronouns, the Czech division of tabletop publisher Asmodee has assured players that when Mass Effect – Priority Hagalaz releases within the Central European country, it will do so with a lack of pronoun-highlighting.
Described by its English-language publisher Modiphius Entertainment as a “cooperative, story-driven game for 1-4 players” with “branching narrative and multiple outcomes ensure unique experiences with every playthrough,” Priority Hagalaz‘s gameplay sees players working together to investigate the wreckage of a crashed research station, the contents of which threaten to endanger not just its incapacitated crew, but the universe at large.
In service of this mission, players must choose one of several noted Mass Effect squadmates, including Commander Shepard (male or female), Garrus, Tali, Wrex, and Liara, to serve as their in-game avatar.
Rather than asking players to spend a meticulous amount of time compiling their own stats, Priority Hagalaz instead provides completed character sheets for each character out-of-the-box, the contents of which provide a number of details regarding their respective hero’s play mechanics.
These include their combat stats, special attack skills, and as specifically noted underneath each character’s name, their respective pronouns: ‘He/Him’ for Garrus, ‘She/Her’ for Tali, ‘He/Him’ for Wrex, and – despite the fact that the Asari species has just one, explicitly feminine gender and that, as recapped in the first Mass Effect game, the concepts of “male and female have no real meaning” for them – ‘She/They’ for Liara.
As previously reported, this decision by game designers Eric Lang and Calvin Wong Tze Loon to highlight the pronouns of Shepard’s squadmates was met with widespread criticism from tabletop players, many of whom considered the entire affair to be nothing more than hollow virtue signaling.
And thanks to the sheer volume of the criticism being leveled towards the game – as well as a number of angry social media posts on the subject from Lang himself – the discourse surrounding Priority Hagalaz would quickly reach the wider internet stage, whereupon it would proceed to gain particular attention from players in the aforementioned Czech Republic.
To this end, on October 28th, an article concerning Lang’s responses to his critics from Czech news outlet iDNES.cz was shared to the Priority Hagalaz discussion page on the Zatrolené Hry (Eng. Crazy Games) video game forum.
And it was in the resulting conversation that Michal Ekrt, the Board Games Brand Manager for the aforementioned Asmodee’s Czech Republic branch, would reveal his team’s thoughts on (and proposed solution to) the Mass Effect game’s pronoun discourse.
“Well, we think it’s absolutely unnecessary to mention it, so there won’t be any pronouns on the Czech version of the character cards (or we won’t put them there and we’ll argue with the publisher that we don’t want them there),” wrote Ekrt on November 1st, as machine translated by DeepL. “They don’t make any sense at all.”
Asked by another user if he could “please elaborate more on what is behind this decision?”, the Asmodee manager explained, “Just as thousands of records released worldwide over the past X [amount of] years have gone without pronouns, so will Mass Effect.”
“Those pronouns have absolutely zero meaning there,” he continued. “Liara is a female looking character, why would there be anything written under her? Feel free to play the game with a feeling, because it identifies itself as a tram.”
Responding to speculation from another user that the Czech team’s decision to drop the game’s pronoun highlights was “due to the translation, which could be based on the PC version, and there Liara (just like the other Asari women) is a woman,” Ekrt further noted, “the PC game translator does the translation. He pointed out the pronouns long before the internet shitstorm and we agreed right away not to use them. So if someone is dealing with some political decisions here, this was a purely practical decision quite a long time ago.”
“And it turns out to be correct,” he added, next proceeding to joke, “Watch out for (justifiable by lore) calling Liara a woman, it could burst someone’s blood vessel.”
Following a few more days of heated public discussion on the topic (which notably included ever-more frustrated responses from Ekrt), on November 3rd, an admin for Zatrolené Hry eventually closed the relevant thread wholesale.
However, after doing so, they would return to the topic one more time to share a statement sent to the forum by Asmodee Czech Republic Country Manager Martin Polák apologizing for Ekrt’s comments.
“As Country Manager of Asmodee Czech Republic, I would like to apologize to all affected people and communities on behalf of our employee Michal,” wrote Polák “At Asmodee, we respect diversity and support equality and inclusion, and we will do everything we can to ensure that all our employees uphold these values and principles in their day-to-day communications within the company, with clients, customers and other business partners. Recent comments from a member of our team are completely at odds with these values.”
“While we do not comment publicly on individual matters, we are committed to ensuring that every team member understands the importance of respectful and inclusive behavior in accordance with our Code of Conduct,” he concluded. “We remain open to feedback as we continue to strive to improve all of our communications.”