All is not well in RimWorld, the popular space colonist simulator released in July. Yesterday, a Rock, Paper, Shotgun writer opened up RimWorld’s code and published some surprising revelations about how sexuality factors into its gameplay. RimWorld’s developer, in response, has gone on a tear, denying that the game mirrors the “sexist expectations of romance” described in the recent article.
RimWorld
RimWorld is only in Early Access, but it’s already a hit on Steam. In the space sim, players construct and manage a space colony. The goal is to develop the colony, which entails, well, romance between the colonists, called “pawns”. Pawns all have distinct personality traits, like an aptitude for botany, being a night-owl, masochism or homosexuality. RimWorld’s presentation of queerness is what’s on the stand.
In an article headlined “How RimWorld’s Code Defines Strict Gender Roles” writer and academic Claudia Lo dug into RimWorld’s code and found that “there are no bisexual men, only gay or straight men; there are no straight women, only gay or bisexual women.” Women are also eight times less likely to hit on men. A few other items, like how men are less attracted to older women (but not the reverse), and how physical beauty is the only measure of attractiveness, stood out to Lo. These things are real-life issues that can negatively impact real-life people. To Lo, it was strange for a sci-fi game developer to intentionally insert them into his game.
She wrote that RimWorld’s model for sexuality is “flawed in a way that perfectly mirrors existing sexist expectations of romance, with such specificity that it is hard to view it as unintentional”.
RimWorld
RimWorld’s developer didn’t take Lo’s article very well. In a comment below the piece, developer Tynan Sylvester described Lo’s article as an “anger-farming hit piece” and said that some of the things she cited about the game’s code aren’t true to how things actually play out in the game. Ever since, in Rock, Paper, Shotgun‘s comments and on various RimWorld forums and social media, Sylvester has been defending RimWorld’s code and what it means for pawns’ expressions of sexuality – and, in the process, his belief system.
Citing research he’d done for RimWorld, as well as his personal observations, Sylvester said that bi-curiosity is “quite asymmetrical between sexes”. Bisexual men are uncommon in his experience and, from what he’s seen, end up only dating other men. According to research he cited in his comment, many women who identify as straight are often actually bisexual, and, according to anecdotal evidence, many men who identify as bisexual are often actually gay.
“The game simply attempts a very rough approximation of some patterns from real life,” Sylvester explained. (Of course, plenty of people may dispute his understanding of real life or the cited research.) He added that, in any case, men and women in RimWorld are equal in many other categories: Cooking, fighting, emotional aptitudes and so on.
He implied that the exclusion of bisexual men from the game is a bug and, over email, told me it is being fixed. Sylvester also recently added “gaydar”, in his words, to prevent straight male colonists from hitting on lesbian women.
RimWorld
Sylvester claims that RimWorld was never intended to simulate real life. It’s a science-fiction game. “My goal is to non-judgmentally simulate, in a simplified way, a flawed group of people in a brutal, backwards environment, tuned for maximum drama. In no way are the characters in RimWorld meant as role models to follow, or as a vision of an ideal society,” Sylvester told me over email. Earlier this year, a controversy ensued in RimWorld’s forum over whether “gay” should be a pawn trait at all.
Lo did not respond to Kotaku‘s request for comment.
RimWorld’s code does not seem to allow for the existence of straight women who only find men attractive. Nevertheless, Sylvester says the women in the game tend to mostly wind up with men. That’s due to the code making it more likely for men in the game to approach the people to whom they are attracted. The men court women and wind up with them. So, in RimWorld, it appears that most women are straight, despite how Sylvester coded the game and what Lo says in her piece.
Sylvester seems focused on how the characters express themselves, not about what the code suggests about who they might be. That idea of an internal life isn’t relevant to a video game character, he said: “People tend to think of game characters as people, but they’re not. They don’t have internal experiences. They only have outward behaviours, and they are totally defined by those behaviours, because that’s all the player can see, and the player’s POV is the only one that matters.”
RimWorld
In real-life, internal experience does matter. It’s the truth of who we are. A woman attracted to other women may not engage romantically with them for a variety of reasons, including fear of social repercussions. Perhaps a bisexual woman only dates men. Observers may draw one conclusion about her, but that won’t necessarily be true to who she is.
Sylvester’s distinction between a pawn’s code and her outward behaviour raises the question of why he programmed female colonists in this way to begin with – a question that, over email, Sylvester dodged. Does it matter that he coded RimWorld’s characters to reflect, in Lo’s words, “sexist expectations of romance” if those characters, a lot of the time, behave differently?
“Everything was fine,” Sylvester wrote on Reddit, “up until this author decided to decompile my code and then start interpreting emotional impulses from data. The way the game plays is what matters. Not the calculations behind the scenes.”
Comments
53 responses to “RimWorld’s Queer Women Controversy, Explained”
– Dev uses dubious statistics to provide relationship framework
– Journalist publishes code, makes mild commentary
– Dev simultaneously flips lid and backpedals
– Gamergate signal is lit
– Cue neckbeard rage, RPS gets plenty of clicks from the Reddit flood
– Kotaku adds progressive spin to get IM OFFENDED BY OFFENSE CULTURE clicks from their own neckbeard audience
– In other words, a typical day on the internet
Next Thursday President Trump will be having people who get upset about this stuff dragged onto the street and beaten.
I’m only half joking; and only half horrified at the idea.
He’s 100% right, it is
I’ve been playing this game for a while now and the stories are the ones you interpret for yourself. It seems like what we’ve got is an author who’s pulling apart a machine that works remarkably well (although still needs fine tuning) and is looking for something to complain about. “There are no straight women in this game. Wah wah wah”. While this may be true, just as the author said, unless you look into the code, you’ll never notice this because most of the pairings are male-female. Is this a problem then? I mean, if the end product is one that works and shows what the game is intending to show, why does it matter how it gets there? It’s not a real person, it’s a program. It doesn’t have feelings and emotions. It’s nothing more than a bunch of robots executing code.
If anything, I think that this shows how successful the game is that Claudia is upset to find out that it’s just lines of code running these characters and that they’re not real, tiny people.
Out of all the things I’ve read about this drama, I think you’ve explained jt the best.
What you are ACTUALLY saying is ‘this game mirrors my preconceptions of the world (and what the world should be like in the far future) and I’m outraged that other people don’t have the same preconceptions.’
Wah Wah Wah.
No, what the duck is saying is that if you enjoy the food at a restaurant, does it matter if the food is cooked on a hot plate vs a gas stove vs a hot rock vs a bonfire?
Too many people these days like to nitpick and read too much into things for the sole purpose of starting a fight so that they can get their 15 mins of fame.
Thank you, you’ve explained my point exactly.
For some reason my commenting profile has been changed to “moderator approval required” when it was previously fine for my posts to be published without moderation (most likely because I’m not immediately jumping on the cis-white-male hate bandwagon) and so my posts here have taken over 2 hours to appear.
EDIT: I take it back.. this comment didn’t require moderation at all… Curiouser and curiouser….
If there were some actions to suppress people who “didn’t immediately jump on the cis-white-male hate bandwagon” wouldn’t they just, you know, not approve your posts in the first place?
Exactly what I thought was happening as my posts weren’t approved for over 2 hours (I’ve had many posts not approved which were much tamer than anything I’ve written in this thread).
Don’t put words into my mouth. I never said that at all. What I said was that if the outcome of how the sprites behave onscreen is as intended, why does it matter why those behaviours occur? What you’re doing is the same as being upset that, when you opened a camera up there wasn’t a tiny person inside painting the pictures, so now you think the photos are worthless. What you should be focusing on is the pictures and whether or not they are to your standards.
Have you ever played Rimworld? If so, how long have you played it?
I’ve played over 135 hours and the fact that there are technically no straight women in the game was a complete surprise to me. All my couples have been male-female (including couples where the female has proposed marriage multiple times). At no point does any part of the game say “Hey! This girl is attracted to men 98% of the time and women 2% of the time!”. That’s never seen. All you get is what you see from the way they interact with people. The characters don’t have tiny inner monologues where they’ve got doubts and fears where they’re unable to truly embrace their sexuality and come out of the closet to other characters. That’s a human construct. These are little robots. They look like they’ve got lives and wants and fears, but they don’t. What they have is percentages and dice rolls. As such, when you’re actually playing the game, the characters are whatever you read into them. Do you want all your characters to be bisexual but they only happen to date characters of the other gender? That’s fine. Do you want your female characters to be completely straight unless they act otherwise? That’s fine as well. The game is about you watching the interactions of these robots and reading your own interpretation and story into it. The same way you can watch an anthill and give the ants names and make up little stories for them.
I’m not outraged that other people don’t have the same preconceptions as me. I’m outraged that, in a game where you make up most of the story by yourself, people are throwing a wobbly because they don’t like the way calculations that they’ve never seen and never would have impacted their enjoyment are not designed in the way that they want (regardless of the fact that these complainers have likely had zero programming experience at all).
The RPS article is an excellent analysis of how the traditional male perspective of relationships has made its way into the game, not through the vagaries of procedural generation, but both consciously and unconsciously in the actual code itself. It’s not just about “Queer Women” (in fact, that’s only a small proportion of the article), but about the game’s implicit assumptions about gender roles and preferences.
As another example of how the game’s code is reflective primarily of the male experience, there is a mood penalty associated with one’s sexual advances being constantly rejected (and men are significantly more likely to ask other people out than women), but there is no mood penalty whatsoever associated with constantly being asked out despite having said no numerous times already.
This in turn leads to further offensive outcomes, such as players being forced to corrall physically attractive females away from the males in order to prevent the males(!) from getting depressed.
The RPS article is a high quality article, couched in more caveats than any reasonable person should have to include. It is completely fair for journalists to tease these issues out, and the hyper-over reaction from both the dev and numerous conservative comment warriors (including hundreds of offensive posts that have been deleted by RPS) is more evidence again of the need for articles such as this one.
As an ex-journalist, it made me cringe to see all the caveats and kid-gloving.
The irony of the modern world is that conservatives have made ‘offense culture’ Public Enemy Number One in their delusions, yet they are the most quickly and easily offended human beings ever to have been spawned on this planet.
Just include the word ‘gender’ in your article and wait for the Reddit neckbeard flood to ensue.
This has been listed as a bug by the creator and will be fixed in an upcoming patch.
I’m sorry, but have you actually played the game? This sounds like the worst way to manage a colony. If my best plant grower is a beautiful gay woman and my second best is a male that’s attracted to her, there’s no way I’m going to be trying to set up different fields for them to sow, then set up restricted areas so they don’t interact, then set up different schedules for them (so they avoid socialising or working together) and possibly different eating areas and the list goes on… That’s ludicrous. Especially for something as small as a -10 mood modifier. If being rejected is the worst thing that happens to him that week, that’s a great week for him. If having to reject a guy who doesn’t get the hint is the worst thing that happens to her that week, she’s in heaven (assuming she gets the debuff when the bug is fixed).
But you know what? Let’s say that that’s what you do. Let’s say that you are so emotionally attached to these characters that you firmly believe that these are actual little people living in your computer. So what? Isn’t it their behaviour that you’re watching? Unless you open the source code, you’re just watching them live out their lives. You have as much actual insight to their decision making process as you do with 99.99999% of the people you meet in the real world. Which is none. As Stephen Covey said; “We just ourselves by our intention and others by their behaviour”. So all you can judge these little people by is their behaviour.
That’s not clear to me. He mentions that there are some “bugs” in the code with the gender system on RPS, then goes on to start quoting dubious statistics and studies to back up the way the code is currently written, which suggests to me that he is pretty happy with the current arrangements.
The code is not a place holder either. As the RPS article points out, a place holder would have involved cutting and pasting the same systems for both male and females. Instead, he’s tweaked these systems and inserted a whole bunch of assumptions instead.
I have played the game, however I don’t need a lecture from you about why so and so strategy is a bad idea. I just have to point out that I can only judge people by their behaviour and, as an example, Reddit has a 266 comment thread dedicated to discussing the problem.
From the reddit thread found here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/5ax9a9/some_notes_on_recent_controversies/
Also, you mention that the thread has 266 comments discussing the problem. Have you read the comments? The vast majority are jokes, not discussion of the game and the issue. Not only that, but the problem is that they want to stop the male from hitting on the female. There’s no discussion of all the other issues brought up here, just that they’re looking to stop a single mood debuff. Solutions range from killing her, killing him, eating them and harvesting their organs. The discussion is about game mechanics, not societal behavioural norms.
Yes, he’s mentioned that he’d like to include bisexual men (even though he goes on to argue that all the bisexual men he’s ever met ended up gay, and ergo, that they don’t actually exist). But regardless, that’s not the “bug” we were discussing here, is it.
And despite the humorous spin, many strategies involve dealing with the woman, not the men. After all, from the perspective of optimising the game there is one problem (an attractive lesbian) and two men. It’s obviously more efficient to kill off one survivor instead of two.
Sorry, but what bug are we discussing, then?
And you’re 100% correct, that in this scenario it’s more efficient to remove one colonist than two. But this isn’t an issue about women’s rights. See, the thing is that it’s not about an actual woman. It’s about a pawn with code written for it. That pawn is only female because it’s got a marker saying “female”. Killing it off is no different than killing a Sim who you’re bored of. It’s not a sexist act, it’s purely about trimming the fat.
And yet that’s how the article is packaged and sold. The author and editor made a conscious decision to project that onto the article. You can look down on someone who gets hung up on that aspect after reading the entire article but you can’t really blame them when that’s the objective.
I’m not trying to derail the conversation or anything, it’s an important conversation to have and the developers reaction is the story, but I think it’s also important to recognise that Cecilia D’Anastasio/Kotaku intentionally made this about Queer Women. They pushed that button and they were well aware of what that means to the conversation.
Spoilered for length.
I mean if we’re talking about harmful representation of the female/LGBT population in video games I think we’d be wrong to ignore the way this sort of button pushing represents those groups. The idea of the SJW is a bit of bullshit but a lot of social issues right now are being represented by aggressive, warrior types.This game has little to no influence, it’s pushing a perspective that’s almost dead and buried. It’s on par with DoA in that even the people who like it don’t think that’s how actual women work. The developers perspective is more or less ignored. On the other hand this article, or more specifically this headline, represents the female/LGBT population terribly. This sort of overly aggressive ‘here’s a headline that will make people angry while dragging in baggage from a thousand other issues’ writing has poisoned the ability to have a conversation here.
Feminism has been haunted by this stuff forever. It was always been seen as a nothing but a bunch of angry, man hating lesbians going out of their way to find fault with anything that wasn’t actively promoting their idea of an empowered woman and it caused a rather simple issue, treating women like people, to get stuck behind what was more or less a flame war. Women’s rights were set back quite a lot by both men and women stubbornly refusing to agree with an extremely hostile representation.
Again, not trying to derail the conversation. I just find the actual story begins and ends with the fact this guys views are dated, while the response to it is part of a much deeper and harder conversation.
That’s an awful lot of ‘I’m not bagging feminism BUT’.
Neither this, nor the original article are anywhere near ‘hostile’. In fact, the amount of bending over backwards so as not to offend the sensibilities of manbabies is painful to see.
Yet here we are, manbabies everywhere.
I do like how your point of view is ‘the biggest issue about the representation of female/LGBT people in media isn’t about how they are represented, but how people have the gall to mention it.’
No son, the issue is that this conversation is even being had in 2016.
There’s a reason why there are ‘aggressive, warrior types.’ and that’s because the world is full of people like you who aren’t especially malicious per se, but happily provide normalisation support for the really toxic scumbags.
Don’t do that.
The issue here is that a game lauded for its interpersonal simulation has been found to use outmoded notions that align with conservative viewpoints about women/LGBT people, and this has been pointed out to the OUTRAGE of Men’s Rights Activists and other assorted fedoras.
It’s got nothing to do with your diatribe about ‘SJWs are the real threat to equality’.
Have you played the game? When you play the game, it isn’t represented as “every woman is X% bi”, the maths more comes out to “X% of women display bi tendencies”. As I said in a previous post, I’ve played over 135 hours. I’ve never had a female-female relationship occur. As far as I’m aware, all my non-gay females are straight. They’ve only had relationships with men. If one of them displays behaviour otherwise, I’ll then know that that’s what their preferences are. I concede that bi men should be represented, but that’s an easy modifier to add in which he’s stated he’ll do in a future update)
Why is it so difficult for you to separate the mechanics of the game with the result of those mechanics?
Of course I have played the game. And I had a female/female relationship in the first game, so clearly my personal anecdote trumps your personal anecdote.
What you are missing in your burbling is that NO ONE AT ALL is saying ‘this ruins my game’.
The point that has sailed so clearly over your head is that people are still coding dubious notions of gender and gender relations into games in 2016 and it’s time we actually talked about it.
The only people actually whining here are conservatives like yourself with the ‘WELL IMA WHITE MALE SO I DONT SEE A PROBLEM HERE SO IM GONNA WHINGE ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO DO’.
Thanks for that. And with 135 hours played, your fanboy pants are showing. And get some sunlight.
But it’s the current year!
The thing you’re not seeing is that a lot of this stuff does actually reflect real life. Most females are straight but show some bisexual tendencies. Most males are straight but can fall into all 3 sexualities represented in the game. Art imitates life.
Cool, what about the “male characters suffer negative mood for being rejected but female characters don’t suffer anything for being constantly hit on”?
The game and article (the original RPS one) discuss more than just “straight vs bi vs gay”.
The problem is that the actual issue – if you could read – is that the author is complaining about the mechanics used to dictate the behavior of the colonists. Not the actual outcomes and the behaviors themselves. My argument is that, if the mechanics deliver the outcomes intended, then it doesn’t matter how the mechanics do that.
You, on the other hand, are just itching to be offended by something. You obviously need to be triggered and so are looking for a righteous fight, even when one isn’t necessary.
You should also know that the game is three years old. Are you telling me you haven’t played any game that’s three years old for more than 135 hours? That’s less than an hour a week. Not sure that that’s “fanboy” levels, but even if it was it would still be a matter of someone with more experience with the product than you have giving you their opinion based on experience. But you’re more than happy to dismiss that because it doesn’t fit your “100% more educated than everyone else” narrative you’re so busy jerking yourself off to.
Finally, are you actually telling me to “get some sunlight”? On a gaming blog? You’re seriously using the “OMG you’re a nerd!” argument? Grow up, kid. You’ve got a lot of development ahead of you once you pass puberty and I have no doubt that one day you’ll back on this and think “Man, what an insufferable asshole I was”. But I have no doubt that if you respond to this it’ll be to tell me how you’re actually a 50 year old, ex-navy seal that graduated in the top of his class, etc etc etc…
If you’ve read that as ‘I’m not bagging feminism but…’ then maybe I’ve misspoke or you’ve read into something that’s not there but it’s certainly not my intent to undermine feminism. I haven’t defended the developer or the people who are upset either. I get why you might think it’s some dodgy ploy to get an anti-feminism foothold in. I’ve heard all the anti-feminist crap a million times too so I know that happens. I’m normally right there explaining why their warped idea of feminism is wrong or that a feminist wanting to be treated as a woman is not a hypocrite.
However, feminism is a movement pushed forward by millions of people acting almost totally independently. As such it’s not free of mistakes, extremists or other flaws. I understand it’s frustrating to have feminism challenged because it’s so often challenged for the wrong reasons but I sincerely believe that challenging the movement when it makes a mistake can be vital to achieving it’s goals.
In this case I think it made a big mistake by allowing itself to be represented in a way that at various stages alienated a huge portion of the female population and attacked almost the entire male population. This sort of stuff requires more than a polite conversation but I think frustration played too big a part in defining the movement in the public mind and that hurt it. If you disagree with that fine, I’m open to the idea that I could be wrong, but I do believe it was a mistake and I would like to see the LGBT rights movement avoid similar mistakes.
As for the hostility I was talking about, I didn’t mean in the article I meant in the response it generates by promoting itself to this audience with ‘Queer Women Controversy’ when that’s not what the article is actually about. Admittedly in this case it’s a pretty tame one as far as misleading titles go but as you can see by the comments it was enough to rope in a few people looking to fight. If framing an article that way is unavoidable so be it, but more often than not I feel like there’s a less aggressive way to write a headline/article or script a video.
From our perspective it feels strong, confrontational and unavoidable which is good but for a lot of people it just makes the content inaccessible. They see ‘social issues’ in the headline and run off because they know there are only two sides and they’re probably going to get yelled at by both of them.
I mean you’re standing here berating me and a few others for not being far enough away from the MRA/right-wing side. Can’t you see how that perpetuates the myth that all people who support things like feminism or LGBT rights are close minded, angry, hostile SJWs? You’re almost certainly a reasonable, level headed person who is just frustrated by comments that miss the point., but in these scattered paragraphs you’re coming out guns blazing. Throwing around insults like neckbeard and manbabies. You’re accusing everyone of being MRA scum.
You’re on the right side but you’re representing it in a way that makes your point of view completely inaccessible to anyone who isn’t already throwing bricks.
Actually, it isn’t how the article is packaged and sold. The article is titled “How RimWorld’s Code Defines Strict Gender Roles”. No icky queer rights click bait there.
In fact, nowhere in the article is the term “queer” used at all.
There is an initial example involving a lesbian that is clearly used because it crosses the boundaries of a couple of game systems and makes a nice case study into the game’s overall gender model.
The only reason that I can think of that queer rights is even coming up in some of the comments and commentary is that some people are so sensitive to the bare mention of gays and lesbians that the thought acquires an overwhelming importance in their minds far beyond the words actually written in the article itself.
Have you read the title of this article?
Obviously. Not sure where that came from, since it completely misrepresents the article that it is purporting to discuss.
All my comments are based on the original RPS article, not Kokatu’s half-arsed pseudo-summary, which I agree does tend towards cheap click bait.
I meant the Kotaku article we’re commenting on not the RPS article. I should have said ‘how the article is packaged and sold here’.
Fair enough.
So if you didn’t SEE the Holocaust, it’s not a problem then?
Gotcha.
Wooohoo there’s Godwins!
Yeah, burnside has zero actual coherent arguments that aren’t complete SJW tripe and so has to result to name-calling and comparisons to Hitler.
The brief quotes someone pulled form the article on Facebook made me go “hah, silly dev!”. Didn’t bother reading further until now.
I’d say the dev is completely fine in defining the roles as he did. Without data mining you’d only see the outwards behavior and as stated that tends to most women ending up with men, regardless of the all women bi or gay rules.
What’s under the hood of a game’s code doesn’t matter, just the result of that code.
Dear I’M NOT AN MRA BUTs,
If you actually read the article, you’d see the issue isn’t just about the horrid girls.
It’s actually more about the fact the author actively erased bisexual men, and then backpedalled when called on it. HERES SOME STATISTICS NO WAIT ITS A BUG LOL
So it IS a Men’s Rights issue, get out there and start defending the rights of bisexual MEN!
*tumbleweed*
Do you just believe people that don’t identify as feminists are MRA’s? You’re using “MRA” in such a derogatory manner so I take it that you’re trying to insult people. That’s a pretty immature thing to do and shows that you’re just trying to shut down the argument. The truth is though, it’s a bug and the devs are fixing it. I assume that it will still follow the research that’s been cited though. Perhaps making bisexual men to be in man-man relationships more often than man-woman ones.
If it’s a bug, then why is the developer simultaneously citing research that tries to argue the current coding is accurate?
Shhhhh!
I call people who are summoned to any article mentioning gender to whinge that their conservative views are being ‘shut down’ MRAs.
Hot tip – people who are in the spectrum between ‘feminists’ and ‘MRAs’ don’t feel the need to leap in every time.
Oh the fucking irony from the person who comes in screaming “It’s MRAS and gamergate dribble dribble dribble”.
Never commenting on anything else.
It’s not irony, you halfwit. I’m a feminist, that’s why I post here.
You’re a Men’s Rights Activist, that’s why you post here.
I was talking about other people who don’t.
Do you need a diagram?
Still waiting on evidence that I’m an MRA other than the fact that anyone who doesn’t agree with the bollocks you spew out that looks cut and paste from the depths of “retard weekly” and thinks you are a whiny pathetic cuck of a human being is an MRA by your reckoning.
PS: Jump on your other account “Hotcakes” to give yourself another upvote.
*Denies being an MRA*
*Then uses the term cuck as an insult*
*Wonders why no one is buying his smokescreen of denial about his fedora wearing home-life*
Don’t stress man, burnside’s an idiot.
This is not new, Tomodachi Life for example as a piece of software can’t help the way it was coded, by actual people. But the people supporting/publishing the software at retail (the company that ‘makes’ what we call the final game) are the ones that perhaps get treated harshly by ‘anger-farming hit-pieces’.
Now, I’m itching to play my copy of Rimworld, and I only got it six weeks ago. This whole issue seems very interesting, and I can’t wait to play the game, but also can’t wait to read what people are saying about it, like the RPS article.
The goes back to my gripes earlier in the week re: Steam and screenshots on the game page apparently needing to be up-to-date at every waking moment.
The game is in early access? I didn’t even know that. However because the dev is putting it up for sale and therefore evaluation, he damn well expect it.
The chef can’t cook if the food critic, and even the customers themselves are in the kitchen nit-picking every damn thing before the chef finishes cooking.
That said, there are definitely places for such criticisms, (the recent documentaries on exactly how our food gets to our plates, you can pick any) but they can’t exist if the establishment constantly puts a contract hit out on them like people are probably going to want to happen to a female writer writing about video games.
Remember Sim-Copter?
Man, I LOVED SimCopter! I played the demo to death.
I tried it again not long ago and… it hasn’t aged very well.
Social issues aside, Rimworld’s a bloody amazing game and I highly recommend trying it if you aren’t particularly bothered by the social framework it uses. That damn game kept me up into the early hours of the morning on school nights, more than once.
(My first three runs, any sexuality/relationship drama never had any opportunity to manifest in the first place, given that everyone was either starving/freezing to death or murdered by wildlife and bandits, long before anyone got comfortable enough to hit on anyone else.)
Try starting in a jungle biome on a mountain. Immediately build a temporary wooden shelter with beds and a stove. Pick a nice area and start digging in to the mountain and set your base up in there. Put fields and solar panels out the front and map out the rest so you’re efficiently using space.
You should get a nice, decent size base going that’s not too hard to defend against pirates and raiders before a volcanic winter causes your survivors to slowly starve to death, having to resort to eating their pets while the rest of your colony dies from malaria and the plague.
I had a colony with about 20 colonists in it and I couldn’t tell you if anyone was in a straight or gay relationship because the men and women are just 2 circles stuck together with no features.
I guess that’s a good thing because it stops me accidentally assuming someones gender.
Also you can counter relationship failure mood penalties by building them a nice chair to sit in while they work, just like in real life.
I hate everything about this.
There is actually some good points either way, but as usual there is more stupid than anything else.
When it comes down to it, who cares? How does this really effect anyone’s life gay bisexual or straight?
The very first time I played Rimworld, I started a colony with 1 dude and 2 girls, and the girls hooked up and rejected the guy repeatedly. Subsequent colonies I’ve had have pretty much always had at least 1 lesbian couple. Maybe I just “got lucky”, but to me it reinforces the dev’s “it’s the behaviour that matters” argument and I totally agree. I’m as anti-gamergate as any educated human being, but goddamn I hate click-bait farming “journalists”.