Quote:
Originally Posted by Sveid Heidenstam  If, say, furniture or poseballs which detected the av mesh to determine what animation was to be played became popular, that could be the source of no end of frustration for a large number of people. |
A better approach might be for a person to select options to flag the avatar. The options would be male, female, genderless, random.
1. The flags would not be fixed. You can change it anytime. A resident would choose the settings based on how they want the avatar treated at any particular time.
2. The flag set can be an additional avatar element (like the skin, shape, etc) that defaults to the gender of the avatar.
3. Different aspects get separate flags
4. Random is detected not as random but male/female since it's a client-side switching that is transmitted back to the server for broadcast. Optionally there can be further settings to select what "random" will detect as.
What this means is that you can have a male avatar that can have a male default walk, but sit like a female, and have a gender-neutral set of default sounds.
More humorously the default walk can be switchable automatically by your client if you select the "random" setting.
Here we have a possible solution to gender determination without most the risk of discrimination ... all the settings are mutable anytime.
The discrimination that cannot be eliminated by this approach involves history. If for example someone decides to ban anyone who has ever been detected by the sim a male avatar with a female default walk regardless of current settings, then that's that. That discrimination however cannot stop this visitor from having an alt with the correct settings from returning.