Grammatical gender has little to do with human gender. Here, we’re talking about the concept of assigning a gender to every noun and concept, including inanimate ones. Grammatical gender is often linked to another concept, noun classes. Some use them as synonyms but the commonly accepted definition is that noun classes are a broader family that includes other distinctions between nouns, such as animate vs inanimate (Basque) or strong vs weak (Old English). Shona, spoken in parts of Zimbabwe, has over twenty noun classes!
It’s always easier in English
Let’s be real: even outside of the Commonwealth, video games are mostly developed in English to reach the broadest possible target audience, and sometimes to be able to hire internationally. To a native English speaker, the very notion of grammatical gender makes little sense for nouns. Calling a lad “he” and a lass “she”? Fine. But nouns? Things are what they are, and there is no need to make objects and concepts masculine or feminine. A table is a table, a car is a car, a butter is a butter, and-
Wait. What was that?
”A butter”? No chance. A knob of butter, a stick of butter, a tablespoon of butter perhaps. And there you have it: countable vs. uncountable! English has noun classes too! And just like English speakers make this distinction without thinking twice, it’s natural to speakers of many languages to attribute a gender to every noun.
“Alright, who started it?”
The origins of grammatical gender are still nebulous, especially considering civilizations grew and matured independently for millennia before the world became interconnected, meaning many unrelated languages could have reached similar structures for vastly different reasons. Proto-Indo-European, for example, is theorized to have switched from animate/inanimate to masculine/feminine/neuter at some point in its existence, but that does not explain why the modern languages that stem from it have such a variety of approaches to grammatical gender. What we do know is that some languages still spoken today have been gendering their nouns for millennia, such as Greek, Hebrew or Sanskrit. If we focus on FIGS, the most prevalent in game localization at the moment, Latin (which was gendered) is a clear influence on their respective systems. Either way, philology still has a long way to go before untangling these knots.
All it takes is one guy
Grammatical gender comes in multiple forms, as it mixes different criteria, such as having a neuter gender vs. only masculine and feminine, being arbitrarily assigned to nouns vs. only relating to human gender, and other quirks, like which gender to use as default in unclear or indeterminate situations. For instance, while English conveniently defaults to “they” or “it”, French is built to always lean towards masculine when possible: if an adjective describes a group of 1001 people, one man and one thousand women, that adjective is going to be masculine ; and when you look at your watch and realize it’s getting late, surprise surprise, that “it” is now a “he” (il est tard)!
The guessing game
The notion of which concept gets which gender is generally chaotic, and trying to assign masculine or feminine energy to ideas and objects based on human gender roles won’t help. Of course, some are common sense and can be guessed, mostly animate concepts like the word “dog” in Spanish (male dog is perro, masculine, and female dog is perra, feminine). Sometimes, suffixes can be a hint, but that notion is only useful if you remember the exceptions for each rule. Languages live and evolve! So if you see a German word that ends in -or and think to yourself “surely that’s masculine”, make sure it’s not Tor (gate/goal, neuter) or Labor (laboratory, neuter)…
Oh, and since we were talking about butter earlier, do you know what grammatical gender and the T-Rex from Jurassic Park have in common? You’re only safe if you stay absolutely still. If you gender butter as feminine in Saxony, congratulations, you are correct! Move to Swabia and you are now a complete fool, since the word “Butter”, the very same German word, is CLEARLY masculine.
Good luck with that
If you came to this post hoping for a eureka moment that would help you decide if your bed is a he, a she or something else, sorry, it depends on who you ask. Italian? Letto, masculine. Russian? кровать, feminine. Romanian? Pat, neuter.
So yes, it’s still a confusing mess. But you may find solace in the notion that it is a mess all around the world and in varied ways. You’re not alone.