Rimworld has some pretty...interesting sexuality mechanics (RPS)
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UncleSporky
Member
No it doesn't. No more so than the Sims normalizes the idea that babies materialize and mature swiftly and painlessly, and therefore women should breed often and with confidence. No more so than Dwarf Fortress, the game that inspired Rimworld, normalizes all of its own goofy concepts and orientation percentages.
If you're a PC gamer, it should be on your radar (RPS article notwithstanding).
The game is amazeballs.
the normal developer response to mainstream press coverage and inquiries is not immediate defensiveness and accusations of bias, even if one feels unfairly targeted. and as i said, the piece itself does not mention him by name at all or even say that this was done by one guy. at no point is tynan sylvester himself attacked by RPS.
this is the closest thing in the piece to an accusation:
but really nothing in there is controversial or libelous. at no point does RPS say that the developer is sexist or that they made a sexist game, just that the end result of their deliberately coded relationship system mirrors sexist attitudes in the real world. this is a totally fair and true statement. if sylvester hadn't immediately jumped to his shitty conclusions i would have assumed that this was all the result of the sorts of unconscious biases that are the background radiation of our culture and not the fault of any one person in particular.
cubicle47b
Member
I've spent a lot of time working on code that I still considered 'quickly thrown together'. It was often complex code even though it was only a placeholder. I don't doubt that part of his comment.
whalleywhat
Member
lol, what happens to this industry when it stops catering to sad, rejected men.
I don't find that realistic at all. There are some extraordinarily attractive disabled individuals. It's not realistic at all. It shows a dusturbung bias in the developer that is reflected pretty much in everything he's saying.
chaobreaker
Member
lol he's a gamergater what did you expect? He already felt attacked the moment the corrupt game journalist was him questions. Always gotta stay on guard.
Camp Freddie
Member
I was willing to assume that the dev was putting in some alpha code to see if he could make the game reflect real life differences between the sexes, and that he wanted to improve it - but his gamergate comments make me suspect he isn't really interested in self-examination.
So avoiding the sexual politics for a moment, I think it's really interesting as a tale of game development and how the simple decision to add make men more likely to initiate relationships has the (presumably) unintended consequence of turning all single men into depressed arseholes who need to be mollycoddled.
Since only the rejectee gets a negative modifier, men get it 8 times as often as women.
And being rejected doesn't seem to put colonists off of making another attempt.
Then you have the attractiveness modifiers. I think most devs would start with a simple ugly/beautiful modifier, since it a lot easier than a complex system with charismatic/funny/dull/obnoxious modifiers that all overlap and do the same thing. I don't think it shows any particular wish for the developer to ignore non-physical factors. ANd given the game has a vast array of personality traits, it seems obvious that relevant ones will be added eventually.
Modifying attractiveness for disabilities is also fine, especially since i think 'disabilities' in the game are essentially status conditions.
The lesson and punchline to this tale of unintended consequences is the fact that attractive lesbians bring doom to any colony, as all the straight-male colonists fall into a death-spiral of rejection, depression and suicide.
A less amusing consequence is that gay men will be the saddest creatures of all. They don't adjust their 'pass chance' for the sexuality of the target, so they'll spend their lives pursuing and getting rejected by straight men, which are presumably much more common than attractive lesbians.
The age thing is also interesting. The dev is clearly trying to model the real-world where men tend to try and date younger women and vica versa. However, the algorithm doesn't combine well with the "anti-paedophillia" cutoffs, so you get young men who fancy 20 year olds more than their own age-group, but have no affection for 21 year olds.
I think the people asking "why are there all these unnecessary modifiers" do not understand the type of game that Rimworld is. The game is basically about characters with all sorts of random relationship modifiers and the janky emergent gameplay that results from it.
Having said that, no straight women and no bisexual men? It sounds like the dev got most of his sex-ed from playground conversations and porn (or 4chan).
Still, he's a young guy developing a game mostly by himself, so I'm not surprised that the sexual relationship algorithms are based on less than ideal gender theories.
Hopefully it's not too late to avoid him going full Notch.
So avoiding the sexual politics for a moment, I think it's really interesting as a tale of game development and how the simple decision to add make men more likely to initiate relationships has the (presumably) unintended consequence of turning all single men into depressed arseholes who need to be mollycoddled.
Since only the rejectee gets a negative modifier, men get it 8 times as often as women.
And being rejected doesn't seem to put colonists off of making another attempt.
Then you have the attractiveness modifiers. I think most devs would start with a simple ugly/beautiful modifier, since it a lot easier than a complex system with charismatic/funny/dull/obnoxious modifiers that all overlap and do the same thing. I don't think it shows any particular wish for the developer to ignore non-physical factors. ANd given the game has a vast array of personality traits, it seems obvious that relevant ones will be added eventually.
Modifying attractiveness for disabilities is also fine, especially since i think 'disabilities' in the game are essentially status conditions.
The lesson and punchline to this tale of unintended consequences is the fact that attractive lesbians bring doom to any colony, as all the straight-male colonists fall into a death-spiral of rejection, depression and suicide.
A less amusing consequence is that gay men will be the saddest creatures of all. They don't adjust their 'pass chance' for the sexuality of the target, so they'll spend their lives pursuing and getting rejected by straight men, which are presumably much more common than attractive lesbians.
The age thing is also interesting. The dev is clearly trying to model the real-world where men tend to try and date younger women and vica versa. However, the algorithm doesn't combine well with the "anti-paedophillia" cutoffs, so you get young men who fancy 20 year olds more than their own age-group, but have no affection for 21 year olds.
I think the people asking "why are there all these unnecessary modifiers" do not understand the type of game that Rimworld is. The game is basically about characters with all sorts of random relationship modifiers and the janky emergent gameplay that results from it.
Having said that, no straight women and no bisexual men? It sounds like the dev got most of his sex-ed from playground conversations and porn (or 4chan).
Still, he's a young guy developing a game mostly by himself, so I'm not surprised that the sexual relationship algorithms are based on less than ideal gender theories.
Hopefully it's not too late to avoid him going full Notch.
Not to mention fetishes. So yeah...
whalleywhat
Member
When asked why women were almost always the sexual aggressors in his films, Alfred Hitchcock replied, "Have you ever seen a man try to pick up a woman? It's awful."
We can do better than this.
Esp. in light of the dev's long-form citations in this thread.
UncleSporky
Member
A lot of those people are probably disabled because they were grievously injured by jagged steel when their escape pod hit the surface of the planet, and they were left face down, bleeding out with exclamation points coming out of their head.
And later healed with herbs and makeshift scraps.
LurkerPrime
Member
It's also worth noting that in Rimworld, every pawn in the colony is trapped on the planet with no method of escape (it's the victory condition, I think), having either crash-landed there or migrated from a native-born tribe. And of those crashed, they can be from tribalistic societies, medieval-esque kingdoms, or futuristic glimmerworlds (think Coruscant). And further, the whole concept of beauty would be radically altered when every pawn is spending 18 hours a day doing hard labour to keep the colony running, and is periodically attacked/wounded by raider groups. NinjaEdit: The above post is also a good point. Medicine and medical treatment in general is scarce, while accidents and animal attacks are common.
The current system for attraction/appeal/etc is far too rooted in modern standards.
Scientist Supreme!
Banned
Better than what?
He supports a hate group and therefore deserves no respect or benefit of the doubt.
BrutishMrFish
Member
That doesn't help his case, given that he clearly ignored a lot of what he found in favor of his own personal anecdotes.
For example:
The dev said:
He ignored the obvious - that there are bisexual men at all. He's clearly picking and choosing to take things out of research that already conform to his views, and only those things. If he were interested in learning, he wouldn't have done that, and also he wouldn't have cried "this writing is disgusting" to the RPS article that corrected him.
After a certain point, a person's actions can show that they don't need the benefit of the doubt.
I don't support hate groups either in any form or fashion.
But if you've been following the conversation this situation is far more nuanced than that...And therefore worthy of good-faith analysis and at least a shred of sympathy.
When you view everything through black & white lenses, you lose a lot of perspective.
UncleSporky
Member
Actually, that code is interesting. Considering that bisexual isn't treated as an orientation, there is only straight or gay, and based on that there is a percentage chance for "making a pass" at someone in spite of their otherwise set-in-stone binary state.
It's also obviously been copy-pasted:
I totally believe it was thrown together quickly without too much thought.
But what a difference that little "attractiveness = attractiveness * 15%" makes. If it returned 0, there would be no bisexuals in the game and it would probably be assumed by everyone to be an oversight in an alpha game, or even something that didn't necessarily need to be modeled.
It's also obviously been copy-pasted:
I totally believe it was thrown together quickly without too much thought.
But what a difference that little "attractiveness = attractiveness * 15%" makes. If it returned 0, there would be no bisexuals in the game and it would probably be assumed by everyone to be an oversight in an alpha game, or even something that didn't necessarily need to be modeled.
But he didn't say this though.
Subway Diet
Member
Clicked on this thread expecting something funny.
Ended up having Rimworld ruined by association.
Funny indeed.
Ended up having Rimworld ruined by association.
Funny indeed.
Messofanego
Banned
Where is the nuance and perspective lost in believing and codifying that bisexual men don't exist?
He didn't need to say it directly when it's obviously implied by how he coded the system. His system doesn't have any bisexual men in it and his justification for that was to point to research that says there are more bisexual women than bisexual men.
It's in realizing that the dev at least tried to insert diverse gender identity into the game in spite of falling short of standard progressive understandings on the subject.
If he were a "letter of the law" GG'er, diversity wouldn't even be on the table. He could have simply made relationships strict '1 man + 1 woman' affairs, but he instead steered into a more diverse exploration of these digital relationship possibilities.
Doesn't mean he nailed it. But he deserves credit for at least trying.
This is why shutting down conversation with variants of, "LOL, he's a Gamer Gater." can be so problematic. It's akin to calling someone a racist in that it shuts down any reasonable dialog. "He's a GG'er. Therefore he's bad. End of story. We're done talking here."
It's a limiting communication style that keeps everybody stuck in their camps, leaving zero room for understanding and growth.
Exceptions prove the rule.
when the developer is the one who responds to reasonable criticism with vitriol and personal attacks i don't think people posting in a forum thread he'll never read are the ones shutting down the conversation and inhibiting personal growth
I'm not actually surprised (but I am disappointed) by what Tynan said. The last time I checked, the official forums for the game are full of right-wing ultra-conservatives (IIRC, when gay characters were added there was a long thread full of people bitching about "SJWs" and saying they'd kill any gay colonists; the only user who was banned was a gay man talking about how ridiculously bigoted the other users were).
Honestly, one has little to do with the other. (And his follow-up posts in the RPS Comments section kind of refute your assertion anyway.)
We're all responsible for the contributions we make in every individual thread, whether it's referencing outside sources or not.
That puts the responsibility on our shoulders to respond with open-minded reason or close-minded emotion, in a conversational sense at least.
As much as I think people should separate art from the creator, this shit is awful...
Wow
You're on the precipice of realization right now
Read Stuart Hall's Encoding/Decoding if you're interested in how media producers encode their ideology based on various contexts that result in dominant frames of interpretation.
SomedayTheFire
Member
UncleSporky
Member
Yes I'm sure paranoia about how the cultural illuminati controls the minds and hearts of the common folk is a healthy worldview.
I'm not sure if the tin foil protects against the signals or amplifies them!
Wait what
UncleSporky
Member
Rimworld isn't part of any grand conspiracy to encode demeaning/degrading messages into games to form a dominant negative interpretation of women or LGBT people. In fact, it goes much further than most games to be accommodating! It ought to be celebrated in comparison to most everything else on offer. A lot of games, you can't even choose to play as a woman, much less an LGBT character.
If it deserves criticism for "confining the player to perform heterosexual actions" then so does nearly every other game (and a large percentage of books, movies, etc.). Which makes the criticism on this scale largely meaningless. One game doesn't deserve to be targeted specifically if the same criticism needs to be leveled at all of them, especially when the game already treats the subject far better than the others. That's honestly its own discussion to be had elsewhere.
When I first started reading through it I was thinking the same thing. It would have been doubly funny if all men were straight and all women were bi, so you could end up with some hilarious 'all the women are with other women' thing and have fun with that.
Reading through it all though, that's a really screwed up way to view the world.
Instead of behaving like this, you can read about Hall's concepts here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoding/decoding_model_of_communication
or the actual article in itself: https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/SH-Encoding-Decoding.pdf
What? No one is asking for anyone to be fired, relax.
Getting offended about everything has sadly become a distinctive trait of this forum
Are you offended that people are offended?
People in this thread have had some pretty legitimate complaints but sure, whatever. Do you have any actual thoughts on the matter or what?Getting offended about everything has sadly become a distinctive trait of this forum
SomedayTheFire
Member
Jesus christ.Getting offended about everything has sadly become a distinctive trait of this forum
I don't know if it's possible to program romance logic without offending somebody.
Unless it's just "lol everyone is nonbinary pansexuals", but that in no way represents reality.
I think the main issue is maybe that this was created with a single view of sexuality. There should have been more consultation. Like, at least ask a woman or two for feedback.
Unless it's just "lol everyone is nonbinary pansexuals", but that in no way represents reality.
I think the main issue is maybe that this was created with a single view of sexuality. There should have been more consultation. Like, at least ask a woman or two for feedback.
And the creator jumped into the comments with this gem:
Ugh.
This is upsetting.
Well the inclusion of gay/bi people is bound to offend someone, and not including them is bound to do the same.
I think having straight/bi/gay women and straight/bi/gay men is the best you can do in terms of romance mechanics.
This game sounded like it was going for a really good way of doing it, gameplay wise, but the creators extremely misguided and baffling views affecting it has ruined it somewhat
Sure, but then he specifically didn't include straight women and bi men based on his own views, and then rather than saying "I was wrong, I'll change it" threw a fit and made up a bunch of excuses
Well you could argue that since RimWorld is daring to explore diverse relationship identities & roles then it has the added burden of representing them throughout and authentically. To be entirely inclusive to all.
I'd imagine other games get a free pass as it's not a stated goal to represent diversity in any manner, as they're linear experiences with dialed-in characters/roles.
Here's the thing though. It's not about winning individual battles, but rather winning the war.
I see RimWorld as a hopeful sign of social progress. The mere fact that it features some variant, any variant, of LGBT pawns is something that would have been completely unheard of a decade ago.
The game may have not crossed the finish line in regards to full representation, but damned if it didn't step off of the starting line and make some progress toward getting there.
That's why getting caught up in the minutia is a problem. The game or the dev's comments are not above criticism. But let's not get lost in the weeds here.
I see this as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. Maybe someone else will look at RimWorld and be inspired to create a game with an even more diverse cast. Focus on the possibilities rather than demonizing the dev because he didn't get it 100% right the first time. He broke barriers either way, regardless of how you want to grade the final result.
UncleSporky
Member
I think one of his main problems is the fact that the characters are intended to be human. Similar games like Dwarf Fortress get away with weird/unrealistic relationships because the characters are clearly dwarves living in a warped fantasy reality. They might as well be Smurfs. The players talk about them as such: oh those goofy dwarves, and their obsession with socks, wandering around without a care in the world while every part of their body is on fire.
You can't talk about "those goofy humans." We know how humans are supposed to act.