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Rimworld

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20 hours ago, Twig said:

dorftress has gay relationships but it's much rarer than hetero

 

It also has the same behaviour for both genders.

 

Not really insightful but another forum named their Rimworld thread "No Man's Bi".

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22 hours ago, cavilatrest said:

If anyone's interested, the dev's posted some additional points on the Rimworld subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/5ax9a9/some_notes_on_recent_controversies/

 

This is well worth reading. Looks like he's calmed down a bit and taken a step back (by god, he was furious on RPS), says the "no bi men" thing is a bug that he will fix, etc.

 

One quote stood out for me:

Quote

And just some final notes on it all: RimWorld's depiction of humanity is not meant to represent an ideal society, or characters who should act as role models. It's not a Star Trek utopia. It's a depiction of a messy group of humans (not idealized heroes) in a broken, backward society, in desperate circumstances.

 

Sometimes I feel like criticism of "problematic" elements of media is carried out from an aspirational view of how the world should be, rather than allowing media to uncritcally depict society's ugly side. Not everything has to be a progressive commentary on society. The RPS piece itself says  "it’s flawed in a way that perfectly mirrors existing sexist expectations of romance" - so what? Players feel that there's no escape from sexism to be had here? I don't think that's such a bad thing - it's not right to pretend sexism doesn't exist.

 

I also don't think it's wrong to model relationships based on the social dynamics of the modern world. It'd be interesting to see a comparison between the hard-coded assumptions written into RimWorld's code vs actual sociological data. The best I have access to is OKTrends which isn't exactly going to pass peer review.

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As Dinos said, I also think the reporting was... less than stellar. And, I think there were some people jumping on otherwise innocuous things, trying to interpret intention from things that were obviously just ways of making the code less cumbersome. For example, the "no straight women" is kind of actually just "all women have a chance of being attracted to another woman", because he doesn't track the state of individual people in the game. A technical choice, rather than a design choice, in my opinion, and a technical choice I'd almost certainly make myself if I didn't want to have to store every single pawns' personality traits to the minutest detail. I think it's easy to see numbers as cold representations of worldview, but that's not always the case. Especially when programming simulations!

 

The saddest part to me is it really does seem like the guy was trying to do his due diligence. He just fell short at properly thinking about WHY the data he was looking at might be skewed, or why his anecdotal experiences might not be representative of the whole. Or, hell, why the data he has would almost certainly not be representative of a future society where gay rights and how society thinks about homosexuality have probably evolved far beyond what they are now... Better to err on the side of utopia than dystopia unless you're actually trying to say something - which he's obviously not. Claiming that he's attempting to represent a broken society is all well and good, but there's nothing about the game that suggests that beyond the desperate survival aspects.

 

In other words, as far as I can tell, the problem with his implementation doesn't seem to be malice, but rather ignorance. The problem with his reaction is, well, self-explanatory. If he had just been less DEFENSIVE I don't think this would even be a big deal. "Oh, you're right, I suppose I didn't think about WHY the data I looked at is the way it is! I'll take some time to rework this to be more balanced later on." Guy makes mistake, guy learns. And yet... C'est la vie.

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37 minutes ago, Beasteh said:

I also don't think it's wrong to model relationships based on the social dynamics of the modern world. It'd be interesting to see a comparison between the hard-coded assumptions written into RimWorld's code vs actual sociological data. The best I have access to is OKTrends which isn't exactly going to pass peer review.

 

This is my opinion, but I think that there's a spectacular failure of imagination in building the fiction of a post-collapse society in the year 5500 and basing the particulars of that fiction on your own personal experiences and some blogs that you read. Like... Sylvester knows that the sexual and romantic dynamics at work in Western society right now have only been in place for a few hundred years at most, right? In the seventeenth century, the vast majority of Puritan communities in North America were forced to legislate that a man had to fulfill his conjugal duties at least once a year, else most husbands, unburdened with the fullness of Eve's curse, would go without and leave their wives to suffer. Even further back, in ancient Greece during the fourth century BC, one of the justifications for homosexual relationships between men was that women simply enjoyed intercourse too much (remember, Tiresias told Zeus and Hera that women enjoy sex ten times as much as men, speaking from his experience as both sexes) and that made it really gross and distracting to have sex with them (NSFW case in point, erotic scenes on drinking cups that have men telling women to hold still and be quiet). Those are just two examples out of literal dozens that I have on offer, as someone with a very surface understanding of the issue, and I'm sure I could find even more examples if I cracked open a scholarly book or article on the topic, instead of making the system and then tracking down small-scale sociological studies and OKCupid analytics to justify the mechanics of that system.

 

Unless you assume that 2016 is the end of history—which, granted, it's easy to do right now—there's no reason not to make your system of social interaction and attraction as utopian (or dystopian) as possible. Really, the only boring choice is to try to make it as much like your (white, male, middle-class, straight) experience of 2016, fail because of your innate biases, and then get defensive about it... which is what Sylvester did.

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Hrm. I don't like the code that was presented in the original article now, I think it should have been more clearly labelled/explained.

 

That said it's disappointing that even though the dev has calmed down, he's only making small concessions. He's still insisting that he did research as if that means there weren't any assumptions involved. In part it's a bad side effect of the way on the internet that arguments usually involve trying to defend against a list of points. But ultimately doesn't seem like he's actually taking the criticism on board (aside from fixing the removal of bisexual men).

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Ultimately this all seems to confirm Rimworld's world-view, of nihilistic survivalism. If that requires despotic tyranny, cannibalism, sexism, so be it. That's the poetic license he is entitled to as auteur. I'm not really into that part of the fiction so I stopped playing the game. But I do respect the game's ability to model the fragile bubble of survival.

 

Sylvester defends the game by saying he is making it empirical, and stats based, rational. Inevitably it becomes subjective as he is compelled to make arbitrary decisions about ineffable qualities such as sexuality. He takes short cuts that reflect his personal world-view, and projects that onto the player, assuming they will agree that he made an objective decision. The real players have different world-views and respond with their reactions. 

 

 

He is actively making an outrageous piece of media, to simulate a portrait of humanity struggling to survive. He should be pleased when people are so outraged by his assertions. His game serves a function, to show how ugly despotic tyranny really is. The problem becomes partisan, should I regret that I have funded a celebration of this world-view? Is any simulation a celebration? 

 

As comparison I offer that I see the Dwarf Fortress world-view as a very pious one. The creator has professed his admiration of monks, and describes his male pattern baldness as a tonsure. Failure in Dwarf Fortress is not even about losing the game of survival, it is a noble sacrifice to Armok the Blood God. Also do dwarfs still reproduce via "spores?"

 

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12 minutes ago, SuperBiasedMan said:

That said it's disappointing that even though the dev has calmed down, he's only making small concessions. He's still insisting that he did research as if that means there weren't any assumptions involved. In part it's a bad side effect of the way on the internet that arguments usually involve trying to defend against a list of points. But ultimately doesn't seem like he's actually taking the criticism on board (aside from fixing the removal of bisexual men).

 

I think it's a phenomenon that you see among people, usually smart and college-educated, who are used to winning an argument by being the most informed person involved in the argument. When you get to situations like this one, where more information isn't necessarily more informative and there's the possibility of doing bad research, it's hard for them not to double down and reduce the argument to the provable facts. Also, in general, Sylvester doesn't seem like a person who's used to be wrong.

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2 minutes ago, plasticflesh said:

As comparison I offer that I see the Dwarf Fortress world-view as a very pious one. The creator has professed his admiration of monks, and describes his male pattern baldness as a tonsure. Failure in Dwarf Fortress is not even about losing the game of survival, it is a noble sacrifice to Armok the Blood God. Also do dwarfs still reproduce via "spores?"

 

I don't know, does the piety of Tarn Adams deny the existence or agency of certain identities?

 

The despicable acts that are possible in Rimworld are just that, possible. You can play an entire game, at any difficulty, and never resort to cannibalism or organ-harvesting. It's difficult, but you can capture (human) enemies, disarm them, and release them. The game provides you with the tools to act out your vision of post-collapse interstellar society... except in the case of social interaction, where every man in your settlement will harass a beautiful twenty-something lesbian until they die or find another partner. There's a deep difference in design between providing the player with the tools with which to enact their own descent into despotic tyranny and mandating that despotic tyranny with the fundamental code of your system.

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1 hour ago, Gormongous said:

There's a deep difference in design between providing the player with the tools with which to enact their own descent into despotic tyranny and mandating that despotic tyranny with the fundamental code of your system.

 

I agree this is an important distinction!

 

My comparison to Dwarf Fortress's piety was a odd one. If anything it reflects DF's willful ignorance of horrible realities; and replacing them with cozey fantasy horrors. And contrasts with Rimworld's recognition, or perhaps celebration, of horrible realities. (edit- perceived realities)

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He's taken the easy option of depicting today's assumptions about relationships - perhaps making his own assumption that the (mostly white, straight, middle class, male) audience of 2016 would find it relatable. He could have picked another model, although there would need to be some faith that the audience would suspend disbelief (or that they would be aware that you're depicting the mores of something like Ancient Greece). The alternative of giving choice to players would be more complicated to implement, and might detract from the premise that Rimworld's universe is a broken one.

 

Anyway, isn't there something incredibly dystopian about the story of a lesbian being flirted with by a straight guy until one or other of them dies? There's a story to tell there...

 

 

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27 minutes ago, Beasteh said:

He's taken the easy option of depicting today's assumptions about relationships - perhaps making his own assumption that the (mostly white, straight, middle class, male) audience of 2016 would find it relatable. He could have picked another model, although there would need to be some faith that the audience would suspend disbelief (or that they would be aware that you're depicting the mores of something like Ancient Greece). The alternative of giving choice to players would be more complicated to implement, and might detract from the premise that Rimworld's universe is a broken one.

 

Anyway, isn't there something incredibly dystopian about the story of a lesbian being flirted with by a straight guy until one or other of them dies? There's a story to tell there...

 

 

 

Apparently, it's a story that everyone's seen multiple times, judging from the huge Reddit thread asking for advice on how to deal with it.

 

Anyway, my argument is not that Sylvester should have modeled a different society's system of sexual and romantic dynamics. It's that Sylvester is hiding behind FACTS and DATA and RESEARCH to justify an inaccurate and offensive system when a cursory knowledge of the history of social interaction and attraction shows that he only ever made the effort to confirm his own biases. If he were intentionally trying to model how a fedora-wearing MRA thinks that love and lust work, that'd be fine if a bit uncomfortable, but he's said (multiple times) that his system models real life according to empirical research. That's not true and it's a pernicious argument to make as the designer of a video game.

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1 hour ago, Gormongous said:

 

Like... Sylvester knows that the sexual and romantic dynamics at work in Western society right now have only been in place for a few hundred years at most, right?

I would venture a guess that this may be something that Sylvester doesn't know. I'm fairly certain the "research" he did on this topic consisted of looking for stuff that confirmed his preexisting biases and stopping once he'd found it - all unconsciously, because he doesn't thnk of them as preexisting biases, he just thinks of them as correct apprehensions of the pure objective reality that others fail to see at their peril because they're blinded by leftist ideology and they can't face up to the bare facts about life that he, Sylvester, can face up to. As you point out in another post, it's a trap "smart" people fall into fairly easily, because stuff like privilege and other sorts of biases cloak themselves in ways that make them more or less impossible to discover if your mode of inquiry is "read science, assimilate science, learn knowledge." It takes a real fundamental shift in the way one thinks about the world to realize that figuring stuff out isn't always as easy as just Googling for some academic papers.

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The real issue is that his response wasn't "Oh I see what you're getting at with this article and I think it makes some valid points that I will take/have taken into consideration!" and was instead "Excuse me but I am a very smart man and you simply don't understand all the things I am doing as an artist and also for the fans who are all important why have you bothered them with this?".

 

But this is hardly anything new for this guy. And whatever I hope he works it out and he starts taking criticism better and ditches the gamer gate crap. In till then I'm not buying anything by him and that's fine.

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11 hours ago, lunch said:

 

As someone who hasn't played RimWorld (and in light of the developer's response, might not), how did the game handle mental health in a way you found poor?

 

I found the two systems that govern it deeply unsatisfying. The first is the trait system. Every character starts out with a handful of traits. These remain fixed for the entire game regardless of what they experience over the course of months and years in your colony, and their impact is always the same. For example, a character with depression always suffers from a static negative modifier to their mood score and a character with the "slothful" trait always works more slowly than your other colonists. In contrast to Crusader Kings II, in which characters gain and lose traits in response to life experiences, Rimworld's traits are immutable. That's always struck me as weird, because life experiences do impact a colonist's statistics. For example, when a character experiences the death of a loved one their mood score suffers a negative impact that slowly diminishes over time and if a character is stoned they work more slowly until they sober up. But if a character is industrious, lazy, or depressed, they will forever be thus.

 

The second is the mood system. It works on a scale from 0-100. If a character's mood falls below certain thresholds, they're at risk of a mental breakdown. These breakdowns manifest as:

  • Hiding in their room
  • Binging on food
  • Binging on drugs
  • Wandering in a daze while stripping off their clothes
  • Melee attacking any people or animals they see until subdued or killed

Additionally, characters with the pyromaniac trait will experience mental breaks regardless of mood and start setting fire to everything around them. Mainly, I take issue with the violent episodes. It's really weird that this game doesn't model self-harm (with the exception of the very recently-added drug binges) or suicide, but models folks in mental distress harming those around them and treats it as a frequent occurance.

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Another weirdness there. As far as I can tell you can't calm down someone from a break, or help them in any way besides waiting it out.

 

The only way I've ever had someone stop a break early was if they were physically incapacitated enough that they'd be bedridden. You would think that a woman on a mental break because her son died could be talked down by her husband. In general the social mechanics of the game are pretty bare, but given that this is a bit of a focus in the game I'd expect more.

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Right, okay, but these are all cases where the system is too simple to capture subtleties we might expect or would like to see. What makes the original example so striking is that this is a way in which the system is unexpectedly complex, but in a way that only serves to reify regressive biases.

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3 hours ago, Problem Machine said:

Right, okay, but these are all cases where the system is too simple to capture subtleties we might expect or would like to see. What makes the original example so striking is that this is a way in which the system is unexpectedly complex, but in a way that only serves to reify regressive biases.

 

That's a good point. For Sylvester, the minimum complexity of the system involves substantial age-, gender-, and orientation-based asymmetry. It was important for him to include those features where other ones, especially reflecting the potential for social boundaries and comfort, were not so important. It's an interesting insight into what the designer of Rimworld sees as the essential dimensions of human interaction.

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It's also an interesting insight into what a Gamergater sees as the essential dimensions of human interaction. It's no accident that the ideologies shake out this way. Funny how a concern for ethics in games journalism just happens to match up with an under-informed, ostensibly scientific, misogynistic heterosexist habitual acceptance of a perceived status quo that is taken to be eternal, objective, and unchanging. It's almost like he's in the habit of assuming that reality objectively conforms to all his preconceived biases and that if (just pulling an example at random out of a hat) a game review disagrees with him, it must be because the reviewer has some sort of vile SJW agenda. Especially if the reviewer is, say, a woman.

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