why? because they have strings like:
char* HE="He\0\0She\0"
char* HIS="His\0Hers\0";
char* HIM="Him\0Her\0";

so they can do like:

printf("Follow %s to %s lair, and capture %s alive!", badguy->name, HIS+badguy->gender, HIM+badguy->gender);

I like how the game only asks your name, not your gender.
Player's don't have genders. Only thieves have genders.

It's a prequel to Disco Elysium, and your gender is set to COP

why does ghidra's "search by instruction pattern" default to BINARY?
what kind of a freak remembers the machine code for INT 21 on x86 in BINARY?
it's CD21h, not 1100110100100001!

what are you, some kind of nerd?

I love reversing a string and it's:

void printString(char* str, int length);

and I go look what calls it, reverse that function, and it's:

void printStringSimple(char *str){
printString(str, strlen(str));
}

it's like "aww, did someone have second thoughts about making PRINT always take a length, and got tired of having to manually calculate lengths so you just wrapped it?

and your compiler didn't inline SHIT?

oh those poor people of Bamako! Someone stole their.

okay so when you start a game (well, technically when you restart), the game rolls 3 dice:
0-31: where the shit was stolen from
0-2: which item it is from that location
0-8: whodunnit

like if you roll 0 on the first, you get Athens.
For the second one, it's:
0: mask of Priam
1: Achilles's heel
2: sibyl's secret.

The last die is used as a lookup table into the dossier's list.
It's got 1 added to it so you won't get Carmen Sandiego, as a rookie at least.

so the game uses a pattern like this:
char * RANKS="Rookie\0Sleuth\0Private Eye\0Investigator\0Ace Detective\0"

and then latter they do:

char* your_rank = select_string(RANKS, player->rank);

and select_string is a confusing function to reverse engineer, but knowing the name I gave it gives it away: it advances through the list until it's on the nth string and returns it

there is no check for going past the end.

so probably it uses the same trick for pronouns. The string I'm seeing is probably like: "He\0Him\0She\0Her\0"

Ghidra is officially sexist. It'll automatically detect the word "Female" and mark it as a string, but not the word "Male"!

Why? SEXISM!

or the fact the default minimum length for strings is 5 characters, so "female" is long enough but "male" isn't.

correction: there IS a check for going over the end, it's just not used in every place select_string is called. so it's sometimes-safe

they have invented a Pronoun Markup Language.
It's \x80 for He/She
It's \x81 for he/she
It's \x82 for his/her

so a string will be "\x80 mentioned \x81 liked seafood and offered me a ride in \x82 motorcycle"
and it'll fill it out based on the pronouns of the suspect

BOOOOOOOOOOOOO

in trying to hack myself into the game, it glitched and said I had "Hobby: Male"

no... I haven't done that in ages!

I'm in the game now

I modified the game's NUM_GENDERS and found where it stores the database of criminals, so now you can find me if you search SEX=NB.