Some months ago, I read this post at Terranova which made me think a lot.
Suppose a disgruntled programmer were to run some code that flipped the sex of every player character in EverQuest. Further suppose that this programmer did such a thorough job that it would take a week before all the characters could be flipped back.
The players would complain, obviously, but would they actually play for that week? Would they learn anything from the experience?
It is incredible how easy is to “play with reality” and test any hypothesis when you can change at will these virtual worlds (but in which real humans “lives”, and some for many hours every day…)
Now from a post of Zephoria at Misbehaving, I come to know that Ping created a service that swaps the gendered pronoun information on every web page (“he” becomes “she” and viceversa, but there are a lot more swappings). Check it at Regender.com. I tried it on my blog and I kind of realized that I don’t often use 3rd person pronouns. But you can try, for example, on regender the Book of Genesis from the Bible for a different take on who created what.
In the beginning Goddess created the heaven and the earth….
Besides jokes, I think it can be an interesting mental exercise for realizing how society imposes on us some ways of thinking, and how they could be different if just … Well, call it “one day of regendered navigation”, if you like.