Binary System
November 2, 2016 5:36 PM Subscribe
There are no straight women in RimWorld, as in, there are no women only attracted to men. Instead, every single non-gay woman in the game has some chance of being attracted to another woman. As for the men, it works a little differently. - RockPaperShotgun takes a look at the code for RimWorld and how it defines gender roles.
Tynan Sylvester, the dev, commented on the article, calling it a "hit piece".
Also, last month Breitbart interviewed Sylvester (warning: I got a Trump ad, also: it's Breitbart).
posted by ODiV at 5:46 PM on November 2, 2016 [5 favorites]
Also, last month Breitbart interviewed Sylvester (warning: I got a Trump ad, also: it's Breitbart).
posted by ODiV at 5:46 PM on November 2, 2016 [5 favorites]
Be sure to read the (lamentable) comment for the developer. It's way, way too defensive and he later apologizes for his tone. But he says
(Related: this whole "early access" / alpha thing with game sales is fucking ridiculous. Rimworld started being sold in November 2013. I get that it's taking the developer a very long time to realize his vision, and we're paying for early access, and gamers need to have some patience. OTOH you're selling a product, you have some obligation to your customers.)
posted by Nelson at 5:47 PM on November 2, 2016 [3 favorites]
You should be aware that there are some bugs in the relationship system in Alpha 15 that are already reported and fixed for Alpha 16. So you’re analyzing a broken system :/ Also, this system is just something slammed together to get the game working in a basic way. It’s just barely functional enough to fill its role. It’s never been intended as any kind of accurate or even reasonable simulation of the real thing.I like Rimworld the game. I admire Claudia Lo's analysis of the game's mechanics, and agree that the code as presented is problematic. Mostly I just fervently hope that the developer can climb down his freakout and implement a more equitable sexuality system. It's going to still be limited and simplistic but at least it can have a bit more respect for diversity built in. Partly to reflect human experience but mostly to make the game just be more fun.
(Related: this whole "early access" / alpha thing with game sales is fucking ridiculous. Rimworld started being sold in November 2013. I get that it's taking the developer a very long time to realize his vision, and we're paying for early access, and gamers need to have some patience. OTOH you're selling a product, you have some obligation to your customers.)
posted by Nelson at 5:47 PM on November 2, 2016 [3 favorites]
Also, this system is just something slammed together to get the game working in a basic way.
It's worth noting that this is disingenuous bullshit. It takes more code to make the game do what it did (still does?) with gender roles than to have equitable representation. If you're just putting something in there to get it working, there's no good reason why you'd opt for a more complex version.
posted by juv3nal at 5:57 PM on November 2, 2016 [28 favorites]
It's worth noting that this is disingenuous bullshit. It takes more code to make the game do what it did (still does?) with gender roles than to have equitable representation. If you're just putting something in there to get it working, there's no good reason why you'd opt for a more complex version.
posted by juv3nal at 5:57 PM on November 2, 2016 [28 favorites]
Yeah, that comment does him no favours whatsoever. A pity, it's an interesting subject and RPS comment threads tend to be pretty smart, so him engaging with it would been a lot more edifying than it turning into everybody sane vs GG trashfire.
posted by Artw at 6:00 PM on November 2, 2016
posted by Artw at 6:00 PM on November 2, 2016
Who else thought this was about Red Dwarf?
posted by Glinn at 6:01 PM on November 2, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Glinn at 6:01 PM on November 2, 2016 [4 favorites]
Yeah, "just slammed together" isn't a good description for a system that has that level of weird specificity modeled into it. That's an outright lie. Dude just modeled his opinion on how sexual relationships are supposed to go exactly the way he wanted to.
Actually, probably not. We're probably actually seeing what he thinks is a "sanitized", public-friendly version of his views.
posted by IAmUnaware at 6:05 PM on November 2, 2016 [11 favorites]
Actually, probably not. We're probably actually seeing what he thinks is a "sanitized", public-friendly version of his views.
posted by IAmUnaware at 6:05 PM on November 2, 2016 [11 favorites]
It'd be far simpler from a programming standpoint to write one set of rules governing attraction that covers everyone. I imagine if I had the task I'd use universal rules for attraction and give people sexual orientation on an inverse bell curve where most people are one orientation or the other and the rest are bisexual with some level of preference. It's not perfect, but is much more charitable than what is in the game.
I'm also amused by the comments complaining about RPS refusing to give up editorial control, like the only reason to protect editorial control is to spin things for your dastardly SJW agenda.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:07 PM on November 2, 2016 [5 favorites]
I'm also amused by the comments complaining about RPS refusing to give up editorial control, like the only reason to protect editorial control is to spin things for your dastardly SJW agenda.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:07 PM on November 2, 2016 [5 favorites]
It's very interesting that people call this a hit piece. It describes how the game works. Just describing how the game works is bad - we're supposed to play it without noticing, or if we notice, we're not supposed to think systematically about it.
What this suggests to me is that - quelle surprise! - dudes know they're sexist and the logic of the game is sexist. If they believed in the logic of the game, describing how it worked wouldn't be a hit piece - "that's just how the world works and/or it's what the audience wants," they'd say if they believed they were right. It's only a hit piece if you know you're being skeevy but don't want anyone to point that out because you know if someone points it out that it's harder to get away with it.
posted by Frowner at 6:09 PM on November 2, 2016 [27 favorites]
What this suggests to me is that - quelle surprise! - dudes know they're sexist and the logic of the game is sexist. If they believed in the logic of the game, describing how it worked wouldn't be a hit piece - "that's just how the world works and/or it's what the audience wants," they'd say if they believed they were right. It's only a hit piece if you know you're being skeevy but don't want anyone to point that out because you know if someone points it out that it's harder to get away with it.
posted by Frowner at 6:09 PM on November 2, 2016 [27 favorites]
Also, his claims in his incredibly defensive hit piece of a comment that it's like this because of "research" are ridiculous. Oh yeah? This is how romance works in all of the isolated space colonies in real life, so that's how it should be in the game?
posted by IAmUnaware at 6:17 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by IAmUnaware at 6:17 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
Meanwhile, the creator of Minecraft continues to... whatever.
posted by selfnoise at 6:18 PM on November 2, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by selfnoise at 6:18 PM on November 2, 2016 [5 favorites]
As an aside, how similar are men's and women's patterns of sexual orientation and attraction? This code seems like a bit of a cliché, but on the other hand, I seem to remember reading research indicating that there's at least some indicators that women are more likely to be bisexual than men are.
Ah, yes, here, for instance.
There also seems to be some indicators that (heterosexual) women in general prefer older partners while (heterosexual) men prefer younger partners.
But it's been a while since I've read anything substantial on this, so I don't know what the current state of science is.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 6:19 PM on November 2, 2016
Ah, yes, here, for instance.
There also seems to be some indicators that (heterosexual) women in general prefer older partners while (heterosexual) men prefer younger partners.
But it's been a while since I've read anything substantial on this, so I don't know what the current state of science is.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 6:19 PM on November 2, 2016
RimWorld has unexpectedly progressive aspects, too -- playing it as a lefty and feminist, I've been more struck by that than the opposite. Having said that, I think part of that is very low expectations (which, fittingly, is an in-game attitude that gives a substantial mood buff). I just don't expect sim games to do any better. I have been frustrated with the low numbers of gay characters, and with the complete absence of people with other sexualities. (I didn't recognize what was going on with women vs. men and bisexuality, since I've never had a same-sex couple in the game at all). And I'm embarrassed to say that I've never noticed that women don't take a debuff after rejecting men, or that older man/younger woman is the only type of age gap you see, or that nobody seemed to hit on the person with the shattered jaw. I thought I was more observant and critical than that, but apparently not in this case.
But, like -- the build of pawns (thin/fat/muscular/medium) is randomly generated and has no relationship to whether the character is tagged as "beautiful" or "ugly." There are canonical trans people around. Nicknames are often gender-neutral, and jobs and skills aren't tied to gender (thus, it's easy to forget people's genders but remember their traits and abilities). And I feel like most of the het relationships I've seen in the game have been age-appropriate -- I've been surprised and pleased to see, like, a 50-year-old woman and 47-year-old man together. (Turns out, though, that these are statistical outliers that I'm perceiving as more common than they are.) It surprises and disappoints me that the dude who designed these systems has also programmed in so much unexamined garbage.
posted by thesmallmachine at 6:19 PM on November 2, 2016 [14 favorites]
But, like -- the build of pawns (thin/fat/muscular/medium) is randomly generated and has no relationship to whether the character is tagged as "beautiful" or "ugly." There are canonical trans people around. Nicknames are often gender-neutral, and jobs and skills aren't tied to gender (thus, it's easy to forget people's genders but remember their traits and abilities). And I feel like most of the het relationships I've seen in the game have been age-appropriate -- I've been surprised and pleased to see, like, a 50-year-old woman and 47-year-old man together. (Turns out, though, that these are statistical outliers that I'm perceiving as more common than they are.) It surprises and disappoints me that the dude who designed these systems has also programmed in so much unexamined garbage.
posted by thesmallmachine at 6:19 PM on November 2, 2016 [14 favorites]
Well, shoot. I got the game because I'd enjoyed Prison Architect, and building space colonies seemed infinitely more preferable than prisons. I had been wondering why I seemed to get so many FF pairs and no MM's. At the very least, now that this is out there I'm sure in a week or two we'll have a mod on the workshop that will let you build your own rhinestone colonies.
posted by Lykosidae at 6:21 PM on November 2, 2016
posted by Lykosidae at 6:21 PM on November 2, 2016
Meanwhile, the creator of Minecraft continues to... whatever.
Such a shame he was actually crushed by a huge crate of money shortly after selling the game to Microsoft and nobody had to hear anything he said ever again.
posted by Artw at 6:31 PM on November 2, 2016 [24 favorites]
Such a shame he was actually crushed by a huge crate of money shortly after selling the game to Microsoft and nobody had to hear anything he said ever again.
posted by Artw at 6:31 PM on November 2, 2016 [24 favorites]
I'm still sympathetic to the "slammed together" argument. I'm a gay man who cares about representations of gender and sexuality in games. But Rimworld has literally hundreds of systems like this one, all equally barmy. I can totally believe the guy spent half a day writing some code about gender relations. And even made an effort to have some inclusiveness, not all heterosexual (like any of a number of games before). And then built in some dumb biases he has about bisexuality because he was looking for something more than the simplest possible thing. And play tested it and said "well this is better than alpha 09! Ship it!". And so he moves on to one of the other hundreds of systems he has to tinker with that week.
Yes, it's biased. Yes, his defensive comment in RPS is lamentable. No, Rimworld is not an evil oppressive game. The adult thing for Tynan to do is to just implement a better system in the next patch and move on. I'm reasonably hopeful that will happen. Maybe we'll find out in a couple of months.
posted by Nelson at 6:40 PM on November 2, 2016 [11 favorites]
Yes, it's biased. Yes, his defensive comment in RPS is lamentable. No, Rimworld is not an evil oppressive game. The adult thing for Tynan to do is to just implement a better system in the next patch and move on. I'm reasonably hopeful that will happen. Maybe we'll find out in a couple of months.
posted by Nelson at 6:40 PM on November 2, 2016 [11 favorites]
Notch is going to end up a textbook example of sudden wealth ruining a person's life. He has a ton of money for a making a game whose popularity he has never really understood. He has tried and failed to prove to himself or anyone else that his wealth is due to anything other than being in the right place at the right time.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:43 PM on November 2, 2016 [16 favorites]
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:43 PM on November 2, 2016 [16 favorites]
Partly I wondered if the "Storyteller" was a factor, what with stories tending towards cliche, and what that said about the cluches of the stories that inspired it and what other models could be possible...
But, um, clearly not.
posted by Artw at 6:44 PM on November 2, 2016
But, um, clearly not.
posted by Artw at 6:44 PM on November 2, 2016
I found the character generation to be fairly problematic, in that certain backgrounds are only available to certain genders. The "Vatgrown sex slave" background, for instance, is always female, which strikes me as unnecessary and strange. If you have a distant future post-human sci-fi world where the decadent and evil are growing sex slaves in vats, why would you imagine they are 1950s traditionalists when it comes to gender roles? (Also, wow, dark future.)
posted by surlyben at 6:51 PM on November 2, 2016 [11 favorites]
posted by surlyben at 6:51 PM on November 2, 2016 [11 favorites]
(I didn't recognize what was going on with women vs. men and bisexuality, since I've never had a same-sex couple in the game at all).
This struck me, too. It's weird that apparently non-"Gay" women are all bisexual, because I would never have known this; women in my games have never paired off spontaneously, and I don't think I've ever had one where I had two "Gay" characters of the same sex, much less where they've actually coupled up during the game. I'm not sure why he bothered even attempting to model with this kind of complexity to start with. But if you're going to go with complex models for human interactions, you'd better be able to defend those in public when people notice they exist.
posted by Sequence at 7:54 PM on November 2, 2016 [3 favorites]
This struck me, too. It's weird that apparently non-"Gay" women are all bisexual, because I would never have known this; women in my games have never paired off spontaneously, and I don't think I've ever had one where I had two "Gay" characters of the same sex, much less where they've actually coupled up during the game. I'm not sure why he bothered even attempting to model with this kind of complexity to start with. But if you're going to go with complex models for human interactions, you'd better be able to defend those in public when people notice they exist.
posted by Sequence at 7:54 PM on November 2, 2016 [3 favorites]
If you put a piece of art out into the world you should probably at least be ready for people to discuss the aspects of it that interest them. without freaking out at them.
posted by Artw at 8:35 PM on November 2, 2016 [8 favorites]
posted by Artw at 8:35 PM on November 2, 2016 [8 favorites]
women in my games have never paired off spontaneously
It's hobbled by the fact that RimWorld women only initiate hitting on others 12.5% of the time (men initiate 100% of the time) and that romantic pursuits have to build upon themselves to increase the recipient's desire to reciprocate. So the odds are very low. The relationships and particularly the gay character trait are fairly new additions to the game, though, and I was expecting some tweaks to come along in later patches based on player feedback even before this fairly focused analysis was published. Though I am saddened that some of the weirdness was apparently intentional.
posted by vegartanipla at 8:44 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]
It's hobbled by the fact that RimWorld women only initiate hitting on others 12.5% of the time (men initiate 100% of the time) and that romantic pursuits have to build upon themselves to increase the recipient's desire to reciprocate. So the odds are very low. The relationships and particularly the gay character trait are fairly new additions to the game, though, and I was expecting some tweaks to come along in later patches based on player feedback even before this fairly focused analysis was published. Though I am saddened that some of the weirdness was apparently intentional.
posted by vegartanipla at 8:44 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]
Wow, that notch tweet... I don't do the Minecraft thing, and I know he sold it a while back... But damn. That's harsh to say the least.
posted by RolandOfEld at 9:04 PM on November 2, 2016
posted by RolandOfEld at 9:04 PM on November 2, 2016
As an aside, how similar are men's and women's patterns of sexual orientation and attraction? This code seems like a bit of a cliché, but on the other hand, I seem to remember reading research indicating that there's at least some indicators that women are more likely to be bisexual than men are.
As far as self-identification goes I believe you can find studies going, um, both ways (very sorry but it was right there) on this. Obviously in this case you're asking as much about what each categories means to the participants as anything. Not sure about partner history.
posted by atoxyl at 9:58 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
As far as self-identification goes I believe you can find studies going, um, both ways (very sorry but it was right there) on this. Obviously in this case you're asking as much about what each categories means to the participants as anything. Not sure about partner history.
posted by atoxyl at 9:58 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
The rage in the comments section is astounding. The very idea of critique is anathema, I guess. I had no idea.
posted by lumensimus at 11:06 PM on November 2, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by lumensimus at 11:06 PM on November 2, 2016 [5 favorites]
Props to Artw for excessively clever thread titling.
posted by Wataki at 11:22 PM on November 2, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Wataki at 11:22 PM on November 2, 2016 [4 favorites]
I seem to remember reading research indicating that there's at least some indicators that women are more likely to be bisexual than men are
This is an interesting review.
posted by Segundus at 12:19 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
This is an interesting review.
posted by Segundus at 12:19 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
Hang on, back up a minute for me...
So "RimWorld" is not a Chuck Tingle setting based on Larry Niven's Ringworld?
How can we repair this situation as quickly as possible?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:10 AM on November 3, 2016 [18 favorites]
So "RimWorld" is not a Chuck Tingle setting based on Larry Niven's Ringworld?
How can we repair this situation as quickly as possible?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:10 AM on November 3, 2016 [18 favorites]
Also this whole situation reminds me of the infamous situation in the early-2000s Indie RPG community known as FATAL.
There was The Review and then The Rebuttal, which didn't so much rebut as engage with the review in the character of a revolting oblivious twerp:
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:32 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
There was The Review and then The Rebuttal, which didn't so much rebut as engage with the review in the character of a revolting oblivious twerp:
Be careful delving into these realms. Too much of The Truth at once can break you.So, basically, FATAL is the date rape RPG.Another faulty conclusion drawn by Darren. Where is dating included?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:32 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
As an Indie game developer with a game in early access, I am watching this whole thing unfold in a constant state of wincing. This is definitely one of my nightmares - the call-out, the developer writing an angry response that makes things worse.
I mean, I try to prevent this from happening mostly by not encoding weird sexist BS into my game.
I do wish RPS had tried harder to come to an accommodation about including a response by the developer. The standard way this thing works in my experience is that there's an interview, the interviewer edits the text for clarity and length, and then runs it past the interviewee for a thumbs-up/thumbs-down to check the interviewee doesn't feel misrepresented. Which isn't giving up editorial control. And it seems that the interaction between RPS and the dev never really spelled out how the editing was going to work.
I also think that RPS ought to be aware that even if they didn't set out to write an "anger-farming hit piece" (as the dev described it), it would pretty much function as one.
OTOH, yeah, that code is really stupid and sexist, and the dev appears to not have heard of bi erasure, and seems to think that some light reading and his own casual perceptions are good enough. Just stick to the easiest-to-program "everyone is equally attracted to everyone else" model, or make sure you do it right!
posted by Zarkonnen at 2:08 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
I mean, I try to prevent this from happening mostly by not encoding weird sexist BS into my game.
I do wish RPS had tried harder to come to an accommodation about including a response by the developer. The standard way this thing works in my experience is that there's an interview, the interviewer edits the text for clarity and length, and then runs it past the interviewee for a thumbs-up/thumbs-down to check the interviewee doesn't feel misrepresented. Which isn't giving up editorial control. And it seems that the interaction between RPS and the dev never really spelled out how the editing was going to work.
I also think that RPS ought to be aware that even if they didn't set out to write an "anger-farming hit piece" (as the dev described it), it would pretty much function as one.
OTOH, yeah, that code is really stupid and sexist, and the dev appears to not have heard of bi erasure, and seems to think that some light reading and his own casual perceptions are good enough. Just stick to the easiest-to-program "everyone is equally attracted to everyone else" model, or make sure you do it right!
posted by Zarkonnen at 2:08 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
I also think that RPS ought to be aware that even if they didn't set out to write an "anger-farming hit piece" (as the dev described it), it would pretty much function as one.
I mean, unless you're advocating never criticising anything made by indie devs or whatever, what were RPS supposed to do with this awareness other than just shrug and carry on?
And how exactly does it function like a hit piece anyway? It's a fair and reasoned critique that doesn't step beyond what it's critiquing to make broader claims about the game or its author. The only way this functions as a hit piece is the dev angrily treating it as such.
posted by Dysk at 3:41 AM on November 3, 2016 [15 favorites]
I mean, unless you're advocating never criticising anything made by indie devs or whatever, what were RPS supposed to do with this awareness other than just shrug and carry on?
And how exactly does it function like a hit piece anyway? It's a fair and reasoned critique that doesn't step beyond what it's critiquing to make broader claims about the game or its author. The only way this functions as a hit piece is the dev angrily treating it as such.
posted by Dysk at 3:41 AM on November 3, 2016 [15 favorites]
All the article does is quote code directly from the game and explain what it means. That's hardly a hit piece.
You can't call that code 'slammed together' either, it's pretty clear that he put a lot of thought into it, and he's doubling down on that in all of the comments and e-mail replies I've seen.
Sadly, this takes what was an interesting game and makes it a lot less appealing to me. I don't really need to play games that subtly reinforce dumb biases.
posted by graventy at 5:22 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
You can't call that code 'slammed together' either, it's pretty clear that he put a lot of thought into it, and he's doubling down on that in all of the comments and e-mail replies I've seen.
Sadly, this takes what was an interesting game and makes it a lot less appealing to me. I don't really need to play games that subtly reinforce dumb biases.
posted by graventy at 5:22 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
Sorry, that was a bad way of putting it. The article was obviously going to make a lot of people (rightfully) pissed off, given the subject matter.
Oh yes, and n-thing that the relationship code isn't something "slammed together". It's too complex. Simpler code would have worked perfectly well as a placeholder, and would be less likely to produce problems. (Such as the "help, I have an attractive lesbian and all the men are sad because they can't get with her" issue.)
So at best he's practicing bad software engineering, writing complex but half-assed systems where simple ones would do better, but really, yeah, he put a bunch of BS into his game and is making excuses.
posted by Zarkonnen at 5:30 AM on November 3, 2016
Oh yes, and n-thing that the relationship code isn't something "slammed together". It's too complex. Simpler code would have worked perfectly well as a placeholder, and would be less likely to produce problems. (Such as the "help, I have an attractive lesbian and all the men are sad because they can't get with her" issue.)
So at best he's practicing bad software engineering, writing complex but half-assed systems where simple ones would do better, but really, yeah, he put a bunch of BS into his game and is making excuses.
posted by Zarkonnen at 5:30 AM on November 3, 2016
His reply is pretty defensive, but it feels unproductive to drop the whole thing as garbage because the developer is, charitably, imperfectly educated about sexuality and human relationships. It could be an opportunity to suggest improvements. Just making everyone equally attracted to everyone else would be easy, but feels like bowdlerizing the very real biases and prejudices that exist.
It's obvious he feels like he's tried to be at least minimally inclusive and wants a cookie instead of a callout, but I'm at least a little sympathetic given how charged the topic is. From his point of view he thinks he's being blamed for representing what he sees as just existing.
In abstract terms of improving the actual code, I can't imagine how complex an ideal attraction system would be. I'd probably start from a position of giving each person a half dozen arbitrary variables, then giving them randomised attractions to the values of those variables, but again it feels a bit like ducking the issue.
posted by lucidium at 5:51 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
It's obvious he feels like he's tried to be at least minimally inclusive and wants a cookie instead of a callout, but I'm at least a little sympathetic given how charged the topic is. From his point of view he thinks he's being blamed for representing what he sees as just existing.
In abstract terms of improving the actual code, I can't imagine how complex an ideal attraction system would be. I'd probably start from a position of giving each person a half dozen arbitrary variables, then giving them randomised attractions to the values of those variables, but again it feels a bit like ducking the issue.
posted by lucidium at 5:51 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
You can't call that code 'slammed together' either, it's pretty clear that he put a lot of thought into it,
Well, he put a lot of effort into it...
posted by Etrigan at 6:04 AM on November 3, 2016 [5 favorites]
Well, he put a lot of effort into it...
posted by Etrigan at 6:04 AM on November 3, 2016 [5 favorites]
Just making everyone equally attracted to everyone else would be easy, but feels like bowdlerizing the very real biases and prejudices that exist.
I think this ultimately comes down to the same thing as the old fight about diversity in fantasy stories. It's a non-historical setting derived from a historical one that's perceived as being far more straight & white & cis than it actually was in reality.
So do you reproduce the biases and prejudices of the original setting in your new work? Include dragons but no female knights? Space travel but conservative western gender roles?
Do you reproduce the biases and prejudices which you only think existed because you didn't do your research? No female samurai except, oops, Onna-bugeisha actually existed. No black cowboys except, oops, a lot of cowboys were black.
I think that, yes, you can choose very carefully reproduce the actual biases and prejudices of a historical setting in your derived non-historical one, as long as you need it for the story you're telling. Otherwise? No.
posted by Zarkonnen at 6:05 AM on November 3, 2016 [10 favorites]
I think this ultimately comes down to the same thing as the old fight about diversity in fantasy stories. It's a non-historical setting derived from a historical one that's perceived as being far more straight & white & cis than it actually was in reality.
So do you reproduce the biases and prejudices of the original setting in your new work? Include dragons but no female knights? Space travel but conservative western gender roles?
Do you reproduce the biases and prejudices which you only think existed because you didn't do your research? No female samurai except, oops, Onna-bugeisha actually existed. No black cowboys except, oops, a lot of cowboys were black.
I think that, yes, you can choose very carefully reproduce the actual biases and prejudices of a historical setting in your derived non-historical one, as long as you need it for the story you're telling. Otherwise? No.
posted by Zarkonnen at 6:05 AM on November 3, 2016 [10 favorites]
His reply is pretty defensive, but it feels unproductive to drop the whole thing as garbage because the developer is, charitably, imperfectly educated about sexuality and human relationships. It could be an opportunity to suggest improvements.
That's very charitable. That said, I'm failing to see how his defensive attitude is conducive to suggesting improvements (or rather, to those suggestions being meaningfully considered). Also, suggested improvements are inherent in the critique in the original article - he sure doesn't seem to be engaging very well with them.
posted by Dysk at 6:07 AM on November 3, 2016
That's very charitable. That said, I'm failing to see how his defensive attitude is conducive to suggesting improvements (or rather, to those suggestions being meaningfully considered). Also, suggested improvements are inherent in the critique in the original article - he sure doesn't seem to be engaging very well with them.
posted by Dysk at 6:07 AM on November 3, 2016
I've always felt a bit conflicted about wanting to buy RimWorld because the dev is a gamergator, or at least a GG ally.
OTOH, purity is impossible, economic or otherwise so I'm not sure why I'm holding back (other than the banal, boring, reason that I'm broke and can't really justify spending $30 on a new game right now).
I didn't stop watching Firefly just because Adam Baldwin is a fringe right jerk IRL.
But it still feels wrong to buy the game, even before I knew about this particular bad thing.
posted by sotonohito at 6:10 AM on November 3, 2016
OTOH, purity is impossible, economic or otherwise so I'm not sure why I'm holding back (other than the banal, boring, reason that I'm broke and can't really justify spending $30 on a new game right now).
I didn't stop watching Firefly just because Adam Baldwin is a fringe right jerk IRL.
But it still feels wrong to buy the game, even before I knew about this particular bad thing.
posted by sotonohito at 6:10 AM on November 3, 2016
absent strong AI, isn't any programmed sexuality "system" going to be a horrorshow?
of course strong AI without a complete map of human cultural data would be a different kind of horrorshow, but lets leave that to cstross...
posted by ennui.bz at 6:23 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
of course strong AI without a complete map of human cultural data would be a different kind of horrorshow, but lets leave that to cstross...
posted by ennui.bz at 6:23 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
I mean, everyone, sit down and try to work out a "system" which explains all the sex you've had, or know about? OK, good. Now, do you feel a little gross inside? All of the close personal experiences you've had reduced to a set of rules... maybe, a lot gross? No, you don't feel gross? Great! Now, lets do some bug testing...
posted by ennui.bz at 6:29 AM on November 3, 2016
posted by ennui.bz at 6:29 AM on November 3, 2016
is a privilege afforded to no other authors in other art forms
Yeah, fair point.
posted by Zarkonnen at 6:44 AM on November 3, 2016
Yeah, fair point.
posted by Zarkonnen at 6:44 AM on November 3, 2016
Maybe I'm naïvé, but I don't think it's too much to ask to create a "Sex system" that isn't controversial. Do you think RPS would have written an article if Rimworld used identical rules for every pawn regardless of gender or sexual orientation? Maybe that wouldn't produce a system that perfectly emulates how people really interact, but nobody is asking for that, they're just asking for something that doesn't perperuate gross sexist bullshit.
I can understand, to an extent, wanting to incorporate "traditional gender roles" to produce your Firefly-like western space adventure, except Firefly itself had progressive gender roles like lwoman mechanic", "woman soldier", and "respected sex worker". Fantasy works too have long embraced the notion that you can be whoever you want to be regardless of gender. The whole thing springs from the thought "People shouldn't act this way so I'll program it that way" when in reality people work in every way imaginable, even the ones you can't personally imagine. Failing to take that into account makes you at least a bad programmer, and possibly a bad (or at least myopic) person.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 8:10 AM on November 3, 2016 [4 favorites]
I can understand, to an extent, wanting to incorporate "traditional gender roles" to produce your Firefly-like western space adventure, except Firefly itself had progressive gender roles like lwoman mechanic", "woman soldier", and "respected sex worker". Fantasy works too have long embraced the notion that you can be whoever you want to be regardless of gender. The whole thing springs from the thought "People shouldn't act this way so I'll program it that way" when in reality people work in every way imaginable, even the ones you can't personally imagine. Failing to take that into account makes you at least a bad programmer, and possibly a bad (or at least myopic) person.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 8:10 AM on November 3, 2016 [4 favorites]
I started reading this and, while the fact that rejection causes negative thoughts but unwanted advances don't is a little tone deaf, I was willing to cut the coder a little slack. Any attempt to model anything, let alone something as complex as human interactions in going to be imperfect and there is a finite limit to how much you can add to the game in a given amount of time.
And then, I got to the next section about how male and female sexuality are hard-coded differently and, well... I never thought I would read a code snippet that made it so clear how uncomfortable the author is with their own sexuality....
posted by 256 at 8:22 AM on November 3, 2016 [5 favorites]
And then, I got to the next section about how male and female sexuality are hard-coded differently and, well... I never thought I would read a code snippet that made it so clear how uncomfortable the author is with their own sexuality....
posted by 256 at 8:22 AM on November 3, 2016 [5 favorites]
It's dark comedy to imagine all the time this person spent thinking about "games journalism", only to react the way he did when the test came.
posted by fleacircus at 8:23 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by fleacircus at 8:23 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
The developer's second, more detailed statement on the topic.
posted by Zarkonnen at 8:38 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Zarkonnen at 8:38 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
I guess this is an example of that "white [/male] fragility syndrome" one keeps hearing about.
I haven't played Rimworld, but I have some friends who do. It sounds like a fun little game. My take on this article was that it amounted to:
Unfortunately, the dev, judging from his comment, didn't seem to read it that way at all. He seemed to interpret the article as a blistering attack on his person and character and responded by basically flipping out and accusing the author of lying, conducting a "witch hunt", and writing a "disgusting" article attacking him and his product.
Now, one guy taking something as a personal attack that doesn't seem to have been meant that way is one thing; people tend to dislike even implied criticism of themselves. But it seems to me that this kind of thing has been happening a lot lately, even with people I personally know, and even when the criticism is directed "at society," and not at them, specifically, even a little.
This trend saddens and worries me. I'm not sure how we can move things forward as a society when so many people seem to take the smallest critique of a societal trend as a personal attack.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 8:40 AM on November 3, 2016 [9 favorites]
I haven't played Rimworld, but I have some friends who do. It sounds like a fun little game. My take on this article was that it amounted to:
"Here is the code behind some of the sexual/relationship dynamics in this game. It's too bad that it reflects some real-world stereotypes/prejudices which are not entirely accurate, and are problematic in the real world. On the other hand, the game is still in development; maybe some of these formulae were just thrown in there and will improve as the game gets fleshed out."It seems to me that a reasonable person in the developer's position could have responded by saying something like "Yeah, some of this stuff has already been fixed, some of it I hadn't really thought about, and I also think that some parts do reflect actual trends in human sexuality, so they are there on purpose. Also, although I chose not to discuss this with the author when asked to do so because I didn't trust her to portray what I said accurately, I do wish we had been able to discuss it, because I think I could have cleared some of this up had we done so."
Unfortunately, the dev, judging from his comment, didn't seem to read it that way at all. He seemed to interpret the article as a blistering attack on his person and character and responded by basically flipping out and accusing the author of lying, conducting a "witch hunt", and writing a "disgusting" article attacking him and his product.
Now, one guy taking something as a personal attack that doesn't seem to have been meant that way is one thing; people tend to dislike even implied criticism of themselves. But it seems to me that this kind of thing has been happening a lot lately, even with people I personally know, and even when the criticism is directed "at society," and not at them, specifically, even a little.
This trend saddens and worries me. I'm not sure how we can move things forward as a society when so many people seem to take the smallest critique of a societal trend as a personal attack.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 8:40 AM on November 3, 2016 [9 favorites]
I guess it's Reddit, and he's got a lot of GG type hangers on, but it's kind of disenheartening the amount of reinforcement he's getting there from his mates. These people really do live in a closed bubble, it's sad.
posted by Artw at 8:53 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Artw at 8:53 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
The article was obviously going to make a lot of people (rightfully) pissed off, given the subject matter.
I'm pretty sure it's the game mechanics themselves, not the article about the game mechanics, that people are rightfully upset about.
But there are also people wrongly upset about the article itself.
posted by straight at 9:12 AM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
I'm pretty sure it's the game mechanics themselves, not the article about the game mechanics, that people are rightfully upset about.
But there are also people wrongly upset about the article itself.
posted by straight at 9:12 AM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
The developer's second, more detailed statement on the topic.
The developer actually makes a really good point that the claim "There are no straight women in the game" is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of game coding. There's no functional difference between having the game roll dice when the character is created to determine if she is straight or gay or bisexual vs. waiting to roll those same dice at the moment the game has to decide on the character's behavior.
If the dice roll(s) come up straight, then from a narrative point of view, the character is and always has been straight. That's going to be the same whether you roll the dice once at the beginning of the game or several times as the game progresses. It only makes sense to talk about whether a game character is straight or gay from that narrative point of view, because under the hood is just numbers determining the likelihood of their characteristics.
posted by straight at 9:26 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
The developer actually makes a really good point that the claim "There are no straight women in the game" is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of game coding. There's no functional difference between having the game roll dice when the character is created to determine if she is straight or gay or bisexual vs. waiting to roll those same dice at the moment the game has to decide on the character's behavior.
If the dice roll(s) come up straight, then from a narrative point of view, the character is and always has been straight. That's going to be the same whether you roll the dice once at the beginning of the game or several times as the game progresses. It only makes sense to talk about whether a game character is straight or gay from that narrative point of view, because under the hood is just numbers determining the likelihood of their characteristics.
posted by straight at 9:26 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
What I mean to say is that those numbers describe a population of potential characters and the dice roll determines which of those potential characters you get. It's a mistake to think of them as describing the inner workings of an individual.
posted by straight at 9:34 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by straight at 9:34 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
There's no functional difference between having the game roll dice when the character is created to determine if she is straight or gay or bisexual vs. waiting to roll those same dice at the moment the game has to decide on the character's behavior.
Except there is a functional difference if the character engages in more than one relationship (assuming this is possible in Rimworld. I imagine e.g. that a widow(er) doesn't withdraw from romance forever?). The current implementation will produce women who get romantically involved with a woman and a man on sequential occasions, but no men who do that.
[edited to add] ... not to mention that who a given character hits on is exposed to the player, and will reveal the same asymmetry if the player keeps tabs on it.
posted by finka at 9:42 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
Except there is a functional difference if the character engages in more than one relationship (assuming this is possible in Rimworld. I imagine e.g. that a widow(er) doesn't withdraw from romance forever?). The current implementation will produce women who get romantically involved with a woman and a man on sequential occasions, but no men who do that.
[edited to add] ... not to mention that who a given character hits on is exposed to the player, and will reveal the same asymmetry if the player keeps tabs on it.
posted by finka at 9:42 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
Mainly dude needs to chill the fuck out and come to terms with the existence of criticism.
posted by atoxyl at 9:42 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 9:42 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
The dice roll can *never* come up straight for a female character in this game, that's the point, all you can get is straight for now. Given enough time *every* female character would eventually show attraction to some other female character, the only reason this isn't much more obvious is the sexist assumption about who initiates obscures the issue in practice because female characters so seldom express attraction to *anyone*.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 9:45 AM on November 3, 2016 [10 favorites]
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 9:45 AM on November 3, 2016 [10 favorites]
First off, the women are either bi or lesbian, men are either straight or gay one of many points and not terribly emphasized in TFA, second, it is a real difference in the games coding logic, and since not every "romance attempt" results in a pairing,.
Second, this lady goes through great pain to emphasize and address the fact that the game is not finished and that it might just be whatever B.S. seemed about right late at night. There is literally no way she could have made the point "this is sexist as it stands" without pissing this guy off.
posted by Zalzidrax at 9:53 AM on November 3, 2016 [8 favorites]
Second, this lady goes through great pain to emphasize and address the fact that the game is not finished and that it might just be whatever B.S. seemed about right late at night. There is literally no way she could have made the point "this is sexist as it stands" without pissing this guy off.
posted by Zalzidrax at 9:53 AM on November 3, 2016 [8 favorites]
Ignoring the hyperbolic, problematic response by the developer, I think he really missed the boat here for some really interesting dynamics. Why just have humans?
Maybe you can play as multiple different species:
* Humans (with men and women the same to appease those "evil, thin-skinned SJWs")
* Some human-like race with a different name so that he can have his desired structure without criticism
* Aliens with one gender
* Aliens with three genders!
* Aliens with fifteen genders?! That would probably be absurd, but there's a lot of room for different relationship dynamics as well as different capabilities based on gender dynamics that don't make it feel like you're just shoving your poorly thought out biases in the game.
So many possibilities for different systems that would be hard to balance, but not hard to program. And, TBH, I don't think the motivation for Dwarf Fortress-alikes has ever been balance.
posted by No One Ever Does at 10:01 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
Maybe you can play as multiple different species:
* Humans (with men and women the same to appease those "evil, thin-skinned SJWs")
* Some human-like race with a different name so that he can have his desired structure without criticism
* Aliens with one gender
* Aliens with three genders!
* Aliens with fifteen genders?! That would probably be absurd, but there's a lot of room for different relationship dynamics as well as different capabilities based on gender dynamics that don't make it feel like you're just shoving your poorly thought out biases in the game.
So many possibilities for different systems that would be hard to balance, but not hard to program. And, TBH, I don't think the motivation for Dwarf Fortress-alikes has ever been balance.
posted by No One Ever Does at 10:01 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
I'm going to pitch a book for game designers called "Responding Gracefully."
posted by atoxyl at 10:01 AM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 10:01 AM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
'Slammed together to get the game working in a basic way' is a fairly disingenuous claim to make about a model of sexual orientation that is literally more complicated than Dwarf Fortress.
posted by Zeinab Badawi's Twenty Hotels at 10:11 AM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by Zeinab Badawi's Twenty Hotels at 10:11 AM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
I'm pretty sure it's the game mechanics themselves, not the article about the game mechanics, that people are rightfully upset about.
Yes, that's what I mean.
posted by Zarkonnen at 10:37 AM on November 3, 2016
Yes, that's what I mean.
posted by Zarkonnen at 10:37 AM on November 3, 2016
"'Slammed together to get the game working in a basic way' is a fairly disingenuous claim to make about a model of sexual orientation that is literally more complicated than Dwarf Fortress."
It *is* more complicated, and because of pointless articles such as these you may see attempts at any kind of relatable models on the downturn. It isn't disingenuous, they just introduced relationships a few alphas ago and, uh, it is an alpha. Things change and I'd put relationships up there are things that will probably be revisited.
Also this kind of BS encourages developers to hide code like this, which in this case would effect the modders who would be the only ones willing and capable of making Rimworld into the flourishing progressive utopia you all want it to be.
At some point somethings gotta give here folks, there used to actually be discussion on things like this but it's so one-sided anymore.
posted by whorl at 10:42 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
It *is* more complicated, and because of pointless articles such as these you may see attempts at any kind of relatable models on the downturn. It isn't disingenuous, they just introduced relationships a few alphas ago and, uh, it is an alpha. Things change and I'd put relationships up there are things that will probably be revisited.
Also this kind of BS encourages developers to hide code like this, which in this case would effect the modders who would be the only ones willing and capable of making Rimworld into the flourishing progressive utopia you all want it to be.
At some point somethings gotta give here folks, there used to actually be discussion on things like this but it's so one-sided anymore.
posted by whorl at 10:42 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
Compare and contrast Tynan Sylvester's doubling down and taking insult at the criticism response with the the response from the QuiVR developers to the article about being sexually assaulted in their game.
The QuiVR developers recognized that a problem existed, expressed disappointment that they hadn't anticipated it, and took steps not merely to address that specific problem, but to work out a systemic way of resolving similar problems.
Sylvester meanwhile came across like one of the guys who wrote FATAL, claiming his biases were based on research and observation. Why don't women hit on people often? Because chicks never hit on dudes, amiriteguyz?
That said, he does actually have half a point about his code not actually meaning all women in game are bisexual, to a large extent he just tossed in an extra chance of being lesbian in terms of how the code executes.
But while there's some merits to the technical side of his argument, he seems totally unwilling to admit any bias in how he laid things out when clearly there is a bias. Beginning with that 12.5% multiplier for the likelihood of a woman making romantic overtures and moving on from there.
Really, his second response (despite having some valid technical points) brings me more towards feeling that buying RimWorld would be a bad choice, though again we're into "does a bad artist mean the art is bad" territory.
posted by sotonohito at 10:42 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
The QuiVR developers recognized that a problem existed, expressed disappointment that they hadn't anticipated it, and took steps not merely to address that specific problem, but to work out a systemic way of resolving similar problems.
Sylvester meanwhile came across like one of the guys who wrote FATAL, claiming his biases were based on research and observation. Why don't women hit on people often? Because chicks never hit on dudes, amiriteguyz?
That said, he does actually have half a point about his code not actually meaning all women in game are bisexual, to a large extent he just tossed in an extra chance of being lesbian in terms of how the code executes.
But while there's some merits to the technical side of his argument, he seems totally unwilling to admit any bias in how he laid things out when clearly there is a bias. Beginning with that 12.5% multiplier for the likelihood of a woman making romantic overtures and moving on from there.
Really, his second response (despite having some valid technical points) brings me more towards feeling that buying RimWorld would be a bad choice, though again we're into "does a bad artist mean the art is bad" territory.
posted by sotonohito at 10:42 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
whorl What kind of BS are you talking about? The linked article wasn't a vicious attack, or even an attack at all. It was mild, polite, constructive, criticism.
Are you really arguing that the presence of any criticism at all means that game devs can't do things?
posted by sotonohito at 10:44 AM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
Are you really arguing that the presence of any criticism at all means that game devs can't do things?
posted by sotonohito at 10:44 AM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
At some point somethings gotta give here folks, there used to actually be discussion on things like this but it's so one-sided anymore.
I coulda sworn that the developer was allowed to speak about this... Oh, wait, there it is. In the second comment.
posted by Etrigan at 10:44 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
I coulda sworn that the developer was allowed to speak about this... Oh, wait, there it is. In the second comment.
posted by Etrigan at 10:44 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
because of pointless articles such as these
Perhaps you failed to understand the article? The point of it was rather clear.
uh, it is an alpha
Well, sort of. It's also a product that's been sold to consumers for three years.
posted by Nelson at 10:44 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
Perhaps you failed to understand the article? The point of it was rather clear.
uh, it is an alpha
Well, sort of. It's also a product that's been sold to consumers for three years.
posted by Nelson at 10:44 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
Second, this lady goes through great pain to emphasize and address the fact that the game is not finished and that it might just be whatever B.S. seemed about right late at night. There is literally no way she could have made the point "this is sexist as it stands" without pissing this guy off.
I work at an arts college, and I think we need a course on the curriculum about social media, how to protect yourself, and how not to embarrass yourself (and possibly your employer).
On the one side, people involved in game development have become the targets of an asston of harassment. On the other side, the game industry and its consumers have remarkably thin skins when it comes to criticism and bad reviews. "Sexist as it stands," describes the majority of mass media produced in our culture. If a work doesn't get criticism of its latent sexism, chances that's because it's not worth talking about at all.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:46 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
I work at an arts college, and I think we need a course on the curriculum about social media, how to protect yourself, and how not to embarrass yourself (and possibly your employer).
On the one side, people involved in game development have become the targets of an asston of harassment. On the other side, the game industry and its consumers have remarkably thin skins when it comes to criticism and bad reviews. "Sexist as it stands," describes the majority of mass media produced in our culture. If a work doesn't get criticism of its latent sexism, chances that's because it's not worth talking about at all.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:46 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
I coulda sworn that the developer was allowed to speak about this... Oh, wait, there it is. In the second comment.
No, metafilter users. Sometimes reading through comments on topics like this is like reading a single person's opinion over and over. It's pretty nuanced, but it boils down to the same thing.
Well, sort of. It's also a product that's been sold to consumers for three years.
.......and again, relationships were only just introduced recently.
What kind of BS are you talking about? The linked article wasn't a vicious attack, or even an attack at all. It was mild, polite, constructive, criticism.
Clickbait masquerading as socio-political commentary. It's all plain and clear in comment sections of things like this that it keeps people coming back to, for the most part, divisive discussions that end up turning people off to games or whatever media is clickbait worthy that day.
This article is subtle about it but it's very much there and Tynan, the developer, addresses it in his posts.
posted by whorl at 10:53 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
So...a game specifically designed so that all the straight male characters would eventually get to fuck the hottest, youngest female characters, regardless of their own age or attractiveness. Or watch the hottest, youngest bi characters get it on with each other. The older and/or ugly chicks are automatically disqualified. It's utopia! /s
Sounds like a game written by a dude who gets 100% of his relationship knowledge from porn. And a gamergater too? Shocker.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:03 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
Sounds like a game written by a dude who gets 100% of his relationship knowledge from porn. And a gamergater too? Shocker.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:03 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
whorl, I assure you that you can find comment sections out there that are super gung-ho about the hero worship of game devs and will not hesitate to defend them from the cruel, joy-destroying analyses of mean SJWs.
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:08 AM on November 3, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:08 AM on November 3, 2016 [5 favorites]
It's all plain and clear in comment sections of things like this that it keeps people coming back to, for the most part, divisive discussions that end up turning people off to games or whatever media is clickbait worthy that day.
If those "games or whatever media" are shitty, regressive MRA sims, then good. People will find less shitty, regressive MRA sims to play or watch or read or consume.
Calling out creators for this -- and note that the RPS article is a pretty gentle "calling out" -- is literally the only way things will change. If people had just stopped engaging with Rimworld and never said "Hey, this particular thing is kind of problematic," do you think the developer would have managed to figure out why they left and decided, "Hm, I guess I need to reassess my sociological assumptions"?
posted by Etrigan at 11:08 AM on November 3, 2016 [4 favorites]
If those "games or whatever media" are shitty, regressive MRA sims, then good. People will find less shitty, regressive MRA sims to play or watch or read or consume.
Calling out creators for this -- and note that the RPS article is a pretty gentle "calling out" -- is literally the only way things will change. If people had just stopped engaging with Rimworld and never said "Hey, this particular thing is kind of problematic," do you think the developer would have managed to figure out why they left and decided, "Hm, I guess I need to reassess my sociological assumptions"?
posted by Etrigan at 11:08 AM on November 3, 2016 [4 favorites]
Calling out creators for this -- and note that the RPS article is a pretty gentle "calling out" -- is literally the only way things will change. If people had just stopped engaging with Rimworld and never said "Hey, this particular thing is kind of problematic," do you think the developer would have managed to figure out why they left and decided, "Hm, I guess I need to reassess my sociological assumptions"?
There are ways to call out creators for perceived slights, and this author seems like they had a more than willing dev to communicate with but decided it wouldn't be in the best interest of their article to do so. This will realistically hardly damage his game as most folks see past or don't even bother with articles like this. There's a game that has cartoon characters that try to survive on an alien planet, and that's all it is to them.
whorl, I assure you that you can find comment sections out there that are super gung-ho about the hero worship of game devs and will not hesitate to defend them from the cruel, joy-destroying analyses of mean SJWs.
The problem is there aren't many in between forums, which enjoy having arguments from both sides. That's what metafilter used to be to me.
posted by whorl at 11:18 AM on November 3, 2016
There are ways to call out creators for perceived slights, and this author seems like they had a more than willing dev to communicate with but decided it wouldn't be in the best interest of their article to do so. This will realistically hardly damage his game as most folks see past or don't even bother with articles like this. There's a game that has cartoon characters that try to survive on an alien planet, and that's all it is to them.
whorl, I assure you that you can find comment sections out there that are super gung-ho about the hero worship of game devs and will not hesitate to defend them from the cruel, joy-destroying analyses of mean SJWs.
The problem is there aren't many in between forums, which enjoy having arguments from both sides. That's what metafilter used to be to me.
posted by whorl at 11:18 AM on November 3, 2016
If you can load a planet up with straight-identified male colonists and some of them don't start having sex with each other I'm pretty sure you've already got a hole in your simulation.
posted by atoxyl at 11:21 AM on November 3, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 11:21 AM on November 3, 2016 [7 favorites]
@cjelli
Yeah, I don't think he or I was really saying critique is unwarranted. I'd argue that is also a misreading, which is also sadly common in these discussions (see that guy who thinks Tynan gets all his relationship data from porn and GG where he explicitly states he got it from a few studies he looked up as well as his life experience).
Critique is generally a great thing, but when it comes to sexism, genderstuff, etc, it's not really been the case for the most part with games in our current culture which has some groups that get up in arms about things pretty fast. Fiction is a lie that tries to tell the truth. I'm not a fan of calling any fiction sexist, feminist, racist, communist, whatever because it is just that: a fiction. Meanwhile this is a game with very little story, tiny sprites, and tons of variables. It is just astounding so much is being read into it.
Saying things like: “It’s that it’s flawed in a way that perfectly mirrors existing sexist expectations of romance, with such specificity that it is hard to view it as unintentional” or "there might not be any specific commentary on or interpretation of gender roles behind this, malicious or otherwise” do not help critique, but spark flames these journalists know exist and are therefor contributing to. I suggested in the MFC thread that they obviously could find their way around the code, so why not change a few of these numbers and play through their "better" version of Rimworld, and write about those stories?
posted by whorl at 11:34 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I don't think he or I was really saying critique is unwarranted. I'd argue that is also a misreading, which is also sadly common in these discussions (see that guy who thinks Tynan gets all his relationship data from porn and GG where he explicitly states he got it from a few studies he looked up as well as his life experience).
Critique is generally a great thing, but when it comes to sexism, genderstuff, etc, it's not really been the case for the most part with games in our current culture which has some groups that get up in arms about things pretty fast. Fiction is a lie that tries to tell the truth. I'm not a fan of calling any fiction sexist, feminist, racist, communist, whatever because it is just that: a fiction. Meanwhile this is a game with very little story, tiny sprites, and tons of variables. It is just astounding so much is being read into it.
Saying things like: “It’s that it’s flawed in a way that perfectly mirrors existing sexist expectations of romance, with such specificity that it is hard to view it as unintentional” or "there might not be any specific commentary on or interpretation of gender roles behind this, malicious or otherwise” do not help critique, but spark flames these journalists know exist and are therefor contributing to. I suggested in the MFC thread that they obviously could find their way around the code, so why not change a few of these numbers and play through their "better" version of Rimworld, and write about those stories?
posted by whorl at 11:34 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
There are ways to call out creators for perceived slights, and this author seems like they had a more than willing dev to communicate with but decided it wouldn't be in the best interest of their article to do so. This will realistically hardly damage his game as most folks see past or don't even bother with articles like this. There's a game that has cartoon characters that try to survive on an alien planet, and that's all it is to them.
The original article is just basic media criticism and in fact goes out of its way to give him outs. If - as you say yourself - it's unlikely to damage the success of his game, why is it worth getting angry about?
It's been swept up into a bigger thing now and maybe you could criticize how quick people are to make this one dude's game a battleground but if you wanna do that then you have to admit that goes for the hair trigger of his defenders as much as anything.
posted by atoxyl at 11:35 AM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
The original article is just basic media criticism and in fact goes out of its way to give him outs. If - as you say yourself - it's unlikely to damage the success of his game, why is it worth getting angry about?
It's been swept up into a bigger thing now and maybe you could criticize how quick people are to make this one dude's game a battleground but if you wanna do that then you have to admit that goes for the hair trigger of his defenders as much as anything.
posted by atoxyl at 11:35 AM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
Can you imagine if creators of film, TV, books were this touchy about simple cultural criticism?
[somebody tells atoxyl about Twitter]
me: oh noooooo
posted by atoxyl at 11:37 AM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
[somebody tells atoxyl about Twitter]
me: oh noooooo
posted by atoxyl at 11:37 AM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
Fiction is a lie that tries to tell the truth. I'm not a fan of calling any fiction sexist, feminist, racist, communist, whatever because it is just that: a fiction.
Fiction that fails to tell the truth, as Rimworld does about sexuality, often does so in ways that reflect ideology. Being fiction doesn't exempt you from criticism on that basis.
posted by valrus at 11:42 AM on November 3, 2016 [9 favorites]
Fiction that fails to tell the truth, as Rimworld does about sexuality, often does so in ways that reflect ideology. Being fiction doesn't exempt you from criticism on that basis.
posted by valrus at 11:42 AM on November 3, 2016 [9 favorites]
There are ways to call out creators for perceived slights, and this author seems like they had a more than willing dev to communicate with but decided it wouldn't be in the best interest of their article to do so.
If by "their article" you mean "a fundamental tenet of journalism", then yes, you can spin it that way. From the article:
I suggested in the MFC thread that they obviously could find their way around the code, so why not change a few of these numbers and play through their "better" version of Rimworld, and write about those stories?
I can white out the shitty, regressive parts of any novel I want, too. That doesn't mean no one should bother calling those parts out.
posted by Etrigan at 11:43 AM on November 3, 2016 [11 favorites]
If by "their article" you mean "a fundamental tenet of journalism", then yes, you can spin it that way. From the article:
The developer was contacted for interview as part of this article, but declined to take part unless we ceded editorial control over the publishing of that interview. We do not cede editorial control to developers or interview subjects and so no interview took place.That is literally Journalism 101.
I suggested in the MFC thread that they obviously could find their way around the code, so why not change a few of these numbers and play through their "better" version of Rimworld, and write about those stories?
I can white out the shitty, regressive parts of any novel I want, too. That doesn't mean no one should bother calling those parts out.
posted by Etrigan at 11:43 AM on November 3, 2016 [11 favorites]
The original article is just basic media criticism and in fact goes out of its way to give him outs. If - as you say yourself - it's unlikely to damage the success of his game, why is it worth getting angry about?
It gives him outs while at the same time veering very close into accusatory territory. It is that last part that gives plenty of reasonable people pause. It reads like "if this isn't changed prepare for harsher articles". I'm not a fan of interferring with creative works. If it isn't buggy, is well optimized, and has good mechanics and if it does have a story, has a damned good one, is all I can really ask for as a gamer. In the Rimworld subreddit on this topic you can see the dev going into more detail in his responses, and I think he sounds like a pretty nice guy that probably would have included some of the things here anyway, but a lot of this article was just unnecessary.
posted by whorl at 11:48 AM on November 3, 2016
It gives him outs while at the same time veering very close into accusatory territory. It is that last part that gives plenty of reasonable people pause. It reads like "if this isn't changed prepare for harsher articles". I'm not a fan of interferring with creative works. If it isn't buggy, is well optimized, and has good mechanics and if it does have a story, has a damned good one, is all I can really ask for as a gamer. In the Rimworld subreddit on this topic you can see the dev going into more detail in his responses, and I think he sounds like a pretty nice guy that probably would have included some of the things here anyway, but a lot of this article was just unnecessary.
posted by whorl at 11:48 AM on November 3, 2016
Well, I'm planning to change that, but that's true now' doesn't refute the claim that 'that's true now,'
He's talking about gaydar here right? If not he's implementing that too (and has said he would previously before this article was even a thing). But to say that that one thing should rule out being able to refute the rest of the article is a bit weird.
Anyhow, he just made a proper post about this whole affair on the subreddit. Which I'm going to look through now.
Don't know how much more I'll post on this but I do appreciate that it seems none of my comments were removed, contrary to the last time I posted on a somewhat similar topic.
posted by whorl at 11:59 AM on November 3, 2016
He's talking about gaydar here right? If not he's implementing that too (and has said he would previously before this article was even a thing). But to say that that one thing should rule out being able to refute the rest of the article is a bit weird.
Anyhow, he just made a proper post about this whole affair on the subreddit. Which I'm going to look through now.
Don't know how much more I'll post on this but I do appreciate that it seems none of my comments were removed, contrary to the last time I posted on a somewhat similar topic.
posted by whorl at 11:59 AM on November 3, 2016
see that guy who thinks Tynan gets all his relationship data from porn and GG where he explicitly states he got it from a few studies he looked up as well as his life experience
He may claim that the coding in the game is based on studies, but it doesn't add up. The conclusions he draws from the studies he cites are that "a larger proportion of women who identify as straight are bi-curious or have engaged in bisexual behavior" and "the proportion of bi among women is about double the proportion of bi men." In Rimworld, there are no bisexual men and all women are either gay or bisexual. If he wanted the code to reflect the studies, he failed.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 12:02 PM on November 3, 2016 [5 favorites]
He may claim that the coding in the game is based on studies, but it doesn't add up. The conclusions he draws from the studies he cites are that "a larger proportion of women who identify as straight are bi-curious or have engaged in bisexual behavior" and "the proportion of bi among women is about double the proportion of bi men." In Rimworld, there are no bisexual men and all women are either gay or bisexual. If he wanted the code to reflect the studies, he failed.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 12:02 PM on November 3, 2016 [5 favorites]
Relationships are a game mechanic
And they are as evidenced by the sheer commenttage on this topic everywhere subjective as all hell nevermind very uncommon in games.. and further discouraged by this rare appearance being subjected to near accusations. But yes, it is a game mechanic. The problem most have an issue with is the accusatory tone that while subtle in the article itself, is rampant in some comments that the author had to know would come. You haven't said much on this though it is a, if not the, primary factor at least imo.
posted by whorl at 12:06 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
And they are as evidenced by the sheer commenttage on this topic everywhere subjective as all hell nevermind very uncommon in games.. and further discouraged by this rare appearance being subjected to near accusations. But yes, it is a game mechanic. The problem most have an issue with is the accusatory tone that while subtle in the article itself, is rampant in some comments that the author had to know would come. You haven't said much on this though it is a, if not the, primary factor at least imo.
posted by whorl at 12:06 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
accusatory tone that while subtle in the article itself
This is like a triple-axel literal tone argument. Well done.
posted by Etrigan at 12:10 PM on November 3, 2016 [9 favorites]
This is like a triple-axel literal tone argument. Well done.
posted by Etrigan at 12:10 PM on November 3, 2016 [9 favorites]
Etrigan, are you asking for something specific or just trying to look good? Because when I said subtle I was being a little bit generous.
posted by whorl at 12:12 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by whorl at 12:12 PM on November 3, 2016
So "accusatory tone" means being stating the unflattering truth while female? That's what I'm getting from this.
posted by Hildegarde at 12:14 PM on November 3, 2016 [14 favorites]
posted by Hildegarde at 12:14 PM on November 3, 2016 [14 favorites]
If it isn't buggy, is well optimized, and has good mechanics and if it does have a story, has a damned good one, is all I can really ask for as a gamer.
Good for you! I'm a queer feminist gamer. I ask that my games not be reactionary garbage that erase the existence of my many bi male friends and straight female friends.
posted by zeusianfog at 12:15 PM on November 3, 2016 [24 favorites]
Good for you! I'm a queer feminist gamer. I ask that my games not be reactionary garbage that erase the existence of my many bi male friends and straight female friends.
posted by zeusianfog at 12:15 PM on November 3, 2016 [24 favorites]
talking about other builds of the game isn't a refutation of anything in the article.
No, it isn't, and I'm not sure if that is what he was doing but I have the impression he was mentioning what is being worked on not as a refutation but in addition to his unhappiness with not being included in some capacity in an article that interprets hot topic things like this and was in some instances inaccurate.
posted by whorl at 12:18 PM on November 3, 2016
No, it isn't, and I'm not sure if that is what he was doing but I have the impression he was mentioning what is being worked on not as a refutation but in addition to his unhappiness with not being included in some capacity in an article that interprets hot topic things like this and was in some instances inaccurate.
posted by whorl at 12:18 PM on November 3, 2016
The problem most have an issue with is the accusatory tone that while subtle in the article itself, is rampant in some comments that the author had to know would come.I am just not seeing the particularly accusatory tone in the article that you mention.
The main accusation I see is the one that the game 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". This doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me especially given that, in later comments, the developer agrees that some of the mirroring of these expectations is in fact intentional, because he based them on some studies he read about human sexual expression.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 12:18 PM on November 3, 2016 [7 favorites]
Mod note: Couple comments deleted. Folks please just discuss the articles rather than getting into a meta-conversational spiral about who's filling out a bingo card or whatever. whorl, if you need to talk about moderation or about Metafilter, the contact form or Metatalk is your option, don't do it in the thread.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:25 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:25 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
The main accusation I see is the one that the game 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". This doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me especially given that, in later comments, the developer agrees that some of the mirroring of these expectations is in fact intentional, because he based them on some studies he read about human sexual expression.
It's unreasonable because it implies he is intentionally including sexism in the game despite what constitutes actual sexism being increasingly vague these days, so who knows maybe he's a sexist himself especially if he doesn't change it. Now I'm sure you won't have trouble finding folks who won't hesitate twice to think he is already, based on hearsay or a thorough misreading.
posted by whorl at 12:28 PM on November 3, 2016
It's unreasonable because it implies he is intentionally including sexism in the game despite what constitutes actual sexism being increasingly vague these days, so who knows maybe he's a sexist himself especially if he doesn't change it. Now I'm sure you won't have trouble finding folks who won't hesitate twice to think he is already, based on hearsay or a thorough misreading.
posted by whorl at 12:28 PM on November 3, 2016
despite what constitutes actual sexism being increasingly vague these days
Buh? It's sexist when men refuse to date older women but drool over 20-year-olds. It's sexist to assume that all women secretly want to fuck other women, despite their protests to the contrary. How is this vague?
posted by zeusianfog at 12:31 PM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
Buh? It's sexist when men refuse to date older women but drool over 20-year-olds. It's sexist to assume that all women secretly want to fuck other women, despite their protests to the contrary. How is this vague?
posted by zeusianfog at 12:31 PM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
despite what constitutes actual sexism being increasingly vague these days
Let me give you some vague hints:
posted by Etrigan at 12:34 PM on November 3, 2016 [14 favorites]
Let me give you some vague hints:
There are no straight women in RimWorld, as in, there are no women only attracted to men. Instead, every single non-gay woman in the game has some chance of being attracted to another woman. As for the men, it works a little differently.Sexism. Not vague.
In RimWorld, there are no bisexual men, only gay or straight men; there are no straight women, only gay or bisexual women.Sexism. Not vague.
On the other hand, women overwhelmingly prefer partners older than them. And, unlike for men, there’s no firm cutoff for pawns that are “too old”: even pawns 40 years older than the woman in question have a chance of being perceived as attractive. Contrast this to the calculation for men, where pawns 15 years older than them have absolutely no chance.Sexism. Not vague.
posted by Etrigan at 12:34 PM on November 3, 2016 [14 favorites]
what I'm seeing here is the same old tired GamerGate argument that criticizing games for how they depict sex/gender stuff is de facto illegitimate and witch hunty, which is hilarious given that the game itself is apparently about modeling social interactions
maybe devs should toughen the fuck up, stop complaining and waving the bloody shirt around, and get out of their safe reddit spaces, you know, like all of their defenders are constantly advising their critics to be doing
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:35 PM on November 3, 2016 [16 favorites]
maybe devs should toughen the fuck up, stop complaining and waving the bloody shirt around, and get out of their safe reddit spaces, you know, like all of their defenders are constantly advising their critics to be doing
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:35 PM on November 3, 2016 [16 favorites]
So reading a few studies and basing anything not found there on life experience for an independant developer is sexist. Were the studies found on sexist.com? Does he tweet a bunch of sexist things all the time?
posted by whorl at 12:37 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by whorl at 12:37 PM on November 3, 2016
Critique is generally a great thing, but when it comes to sexism, genderstuff, etc, it's not really been the case for the most part with games in our current culture which has some groups that get up in arms about things pretty fast. Fiction is a lie that tries to tell the truth. I'm not a fan of calling any fiction sexist, feminist, racist, communist, whatever because it is just that: a fiction. Meanwhile this is a game with very little story, tiny sprites, and tons of variables. It is just astounding so much is being read into it.
Rimworld is an abstract simulation. And as with any abstract simulation, the rules that are hard-coded into the simulation can be examined and critiqued. That's true whether you're talking about courtship dynamics or the possibility of spearmen defeating tanks in Civilization. If that model regarding sexual orientation is based on personal observation (mirroring a common stereotype) and a blurb about the Notre Dame study (the statistics in the Gates document are not used in the model), then that can be examined. Why not reference the large body of research pointing to the existence of straight-identified MSM/WSW who engage in recreational or situational homosexual activity at least a few times in their life?
Not that a game model needs to necessarily match real life. Omnisexual Sims and playersexual NPCs are not realistic, but they create brilliant opportunities for emergent play and narrative. Chess and Go are the most abstract of abstract sims, and have a thousand years of history as a result.
Feminist criticism considers media to be sexist (usually reflexively or unconsciously) because our culture is sexist. Calling attention to these little bits of bias isn't a personal attack on the artists. It isn't even necessarily a rejection of the game. My mockery of "Ass Effect" comes out of a passionate love of the first two games. Criticism is an examination of what the game says and does. More importantly, it's an examination of how that bias creeps into design even if that specific system undergoes a complete overhaul at some point in the future.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:40 PM on November 3, 2016 [15 favorites]
Rimworld is an abstract simulation. And as with any abstract simulation, the rules that are hard-coded into the simulation can be examined and critiqued. That's true whether you're talking about courtship dynamics or the possibility of spearmen defeating tanks in Civilization. If that model regarding sexual orientation is based on personal observation (mirroring a common stereotype) and a blurb about the Notre Dame study (the statistics in the Gates document are not used in the model), then that can be examined. Why not reference the large body of research pointing to the existence of straight-identified MSM/WSW who engage in recreational or situational homosexual activity at least a few times in their life?
Not that a game model needs to necessarily match real life. Omnisexual Sims and playersexual NPCs are not realistic, but they create brilliant opportunities for emergent play and narrative. Chess and Go are the most abstract of abstract sims, and have a thousand years of history as a result.
Feminist criticism considers media to be sexist (usually reflexively or unconsciously) because our culture is sexist. Calling attention to these little bits of bias isn't a personal attack on the artists. It isn't even necessarily a rejection of the game. My mockery of "Ass Effect" comes out of a passionate love of the first two games. Criticism is an examination of what the game says and does. More importantly, it's an examination of how that bias creeps into design even if that specific system undergoes a complete overhaul at some point in the future.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:40 PM on November 3, 2016 [15 favorites]
Just because he can cherry-pick and misread studies that reinforce his sexist/queer-antagonistic worldview doesn't mean his worldview isn't sexist or queer-antagonistic. The same for anecdata, even more so.
posted by zeusianfog at 12:41 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by zeusianfog at 12:41 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
So reading a few studies and basing anything not found there on life experience for an independant developer is sexist.
It can be, yes. Is that difficult to believe? That the vast majority of people don't wake up in the morning and say "I'm going to be sexist today" and go out and find something sexist to do? That basing an attempt at a universal sexual orientation and attraction and mating algorithm on the life experience of one single person (especially one who fits so snugly into the majority) might not be the best idea?
posted by Etrigan at 12:42 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
It can be, yes. Is that difficult to believe? That the vast majority of people don't wake up in the morning and say "I'm going to be sexist today" and go out and find something sexist to do? That basing an attempt at a universal sexual orientation and attraction and mating algorithm on the life experience of one single person (especially one who fits so snugly into the majority) might not be the best idea?
posted by Etrigan at 12:42 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
sexist/queer-antagonistic worldview doesn't mean his worldview isn't sexist or queer-antagonistic. The same for anecdata, even more so.
And you know his worldview? Does he have an autobiography out or or does data from his game define his worldview?
posted by whorl at 12:43 PM on November 3, 2016
And you know his worldview? Does he have an autobiography out or or does data from his game define his worldview?
posted by whorl at 12:43 PM on November 3, 2016
His actions and words define his worldview. If his actions and words run counter to his worldview, he's doing a pretty shitty job of bringing his worldview to life.
posted by zeusianfog at 12:44 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by zeusianfog at 12:44 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
Mod note: whorl, you've made your points in here, you disagree with folks about whether this is bad, okay. At this point, please take a step back and let the thread breathe, since it seems like this is getting to just increasingly heated reiterations of the same back-and-forth.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:48 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:48 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
I will give the dev that it's a more interesting way to be regressive than most video games. He could have done a Tomodachi Life and just not had queer people at all. He could have left relationships out of it entirely. And the idea of these stats and decision trees being representational of a set of beliefs is very interesting from a formalism lens.
It also got me to check on how same-sex attraction works in The Sims for a comparison. There, it says "every Sim is technically bisexual" because the player can direct the Sim to do whatever. The design priorities are different. The Sims is more inclined to be accommodating, in terms of allowing the player to impose whatever they want on the Sims. RimWorld is more inclined to go, "Here are the people in your crew. This is who they are. Deal with it." So the game would be more inclined to decide for itself what those people's orientations are, rather than punt the decision to accommodate what the player wants them to be.
Though, I don't buy the argument that the women are straight as long as they're only in straight relationships. Like that is literally bisexual erasure, right. But also because of that design philosophy I mentioned. It's a simulation-first design philosophy. If you're simulating a woman with some chance of being attracted to another woman, that's what you're simulating, regardless of whether she meets the right woman, right? As an analogy, you can have an item made of wood in a simulation. Wood is flammable, so you program in the ability to have the wood catch on fire. If a particular piece of wood doesn't actually catch on fire, because the right conditions never arose, that doesn't mean it wasn't flammable.
posted by RobotHero at 1:02 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
It also got me to check on how same-sex attraction works in The Sims for a comparison. There, it says "every Sim is technically bisexual" because the player can direct the Sim to do whatever. The design priorities are different. The Sims is more inclined to be accommodating, in terms of allowing the player to impose whatever they want on the Sims. RimWorld is more inclined to go, "Here are the people in your crew. This is who they are. Deal with it." So the game would be more inclined to decide for itself what those people's orientations are, rather than punt the decision to accommodate what the player wants them to be.
Though, I don't buy the argument that the women are straight as long as they're only in straight relationships. Like that is literally bisexual erasure, right. But also because of that design philosophy I mentioned. It's a simulation-first design philosophy. If you're simulating a woman with some chance of being attracted to another woman, that's what you're simulating, regardless of whether she meets the right woman, right? As an analogy, you can have an item made of wood in a simulation. Wood is flammable, so you program in the ability to have the wood catch on fire. If a particular piece of wood doesn't actually catch on fire, because the right conditions never arose, that doesn't mean it wasn't flammable.
posted by RobotHero at 1:02 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
Why is nobody complaining about the fact that he made men so stupid that they keep hitting on a Lesbian for ever? Is that because you are all sexist against men? Of course not. Why not give this guy the same benefit of the doubt you expect?
posted by Megafly at 1:05 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by Megafly at 1:05 PM on November 3, 2016
I'd be more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt if he hadn't doubled down on the whole "bisexual men don't really exist" thing. You know what else doesn't exist? Sexism against men.
posted by zeusianfog at 1:07 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by zeusianfog at 1:07 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
> Also, suggested improvements are inherent in the critique in the original article - he sure doesn't seem to be engaging very well with them.
Yeah, good point. On a positive note though, the reddit thread on his followup looks like it has a few people making thoughtful comments and explaining the issue in different ways, so maybe he will end up changing things as a result. Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but it feels better than just treating it as a lost cause (not saying you are personally, just the thread is feeling pretty despairing).
posted by lucidium at 1:08 PM on November 3, 2016
Yeah, good point. On a positive note though, the reddit thread on his followup looks like it has a few people making thoughtful comments and explaining the issue in different ways, so maybe he will end up changing things as a result. Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but it feels better than just treating it as a lost cause (not saying you are personally, just the thread is feeling pretty despairing).
posted by lucidium at 1:08 PM on November 3, 2016
At no place did he say bisexuals don't exist. In fact he said he will fix that in the next update. Did you even read his post?
posted by Megafly at 1:08 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by Megafly at 1:08 PM on November 3, 2016
There are some hard-coded limits on sexuality in The Sims (at least 2 and 3). Teens and Adults can't have a romantic relationship. Teens can't WooHoo (changed in 4) or get pregnant. And there's no sexual assault.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:09 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:09 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
He actually never says he's going to implement bisexual men. Instead, he argues that they're vanishingly rare. If he's not actually going to implement them, they don't exist for the purposes of Rimworld. This is not him earning the benefit of the doubt.
posted by zeusianfog at 1:13 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by zeusianfog at 1:13 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
The main accusation I see is the one that the game 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". This doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me especially given that, in later comments, the developer agrees that some of the mirroring of these expectations is in fact intentional, because he based them on some studies he read about human sexual expression.
It's unreasonable because it implies he is intentionally including sexism in the game despite what constitutes actual sexism being increasingly vague these days, so who knows maybe he's a sexist himself especially if he doesn't change it.I'm not sure I agree that the definition of sexism is increasingly vague these days, although I do think certain sexist-or-otherwise-unpleasant-sexual behaviors which used to be largely tolerated are becoming less so. Maybe this is the same thing that you're talking about, or maybe not; I'm not entirely sure.
But even if the definition of sexism were becoming increasingly vague, I don't think it is necessarily unreasonable to make the suggestion that someone who appears to have intentionally incorporated sexist or sexually objectionable elements into a game he designed may hold sexist or sexually objectionable views. I'm sure I hold some views on sexuality that some people would find objectionable, and if I published some creative work containing those views, I think it would pretty much be fair game to critique them and question whether I might indeed hold said views.
If someone wrote a critique saying "In Juffo-Wup's video game, sexual thing X happens. Therefore, Juffo-Wup is a no-good Xist," then, yeah, that seems like that would probably be jumping the gun a bit. But I have a hard time bridging the gap between a scenario like that and the article in question here.
Now I'm sure you won't have trouble finding folks who won't hesitate twice to think he is already, based on hearsay or a thorough misreading.For what it's worth, when I read the article, I had no knowledge of the guy whatsoever, and the only thing I knew about the game is that some of my friends play it and that it looks pretty cool.
After reading the article alone, my best guess was that this was a combination of the game still being under development with the author maybe not having put a whole lot of thought into what (if anything) he wanted to portray with that part of the game. After reading the developer's (initial) angry response, my estimation of his reasonableness dropped quite a lot, but even that didn't make me conclude that he is personally "a sexist".
Overall, while I could easily understand a person thinking that the developer is not sexist or not identifying/agreeing with the concerns expressed in the article, I just can't extend that understanding to thinking that the article is "unreasonable", "BS", or that its having been written was a bad thing.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 1:19 PM on November 3, 2016 [5 favorites]
One vote for the the "that article was a hit-piece" column.
It very nicely laid out that the author was naive, sexist, or careless.
You could make an article on how the game hews to closely to the current expression of gender and sexuality in our culture, and how that is a very bad thing, but that is not this.
It also seems likely that the author of the article was angling for this sort of reaction from both the developer, the gamers-gaters, and - as you can see - us.
Ugly all around.
posted by pan at 1:21 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
It very nicely laid out that the author was naive, sexist, or careless.
You could make an article on how the game hews to closely to the current expression of gender and sexuality in our culture, and how that is a very bad thing, but that is not this.
It also seems likely that the author of the article was angling for this sort of reaction from both the developer, the gamers-gaters, and - as you can see - us.
Ugly all around.
posted by pan at 1:21 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
Men that keep hitting on a lesbian forever is the kind of thing I actually would easily excuse with "slapped together code, will fix later." Because dumb men that won't learn are easier to program than men that are smart enough to realize this isn't going to work.
posted by RobotHero at 1:23 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by RobotHero at 1:23 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
It's also not like previous RPS covergae doesn't exist, generally positive in tone.
posted by Artw at 1:24 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Artw at 1:24 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
It very nicely laid out that the author was naive, sexist, or careless.
It very nicely laid out that the author had done a thing that was naive, sexist, or careless. And had a whole paragraph of disclaimers right there in the text (it's the one starting with "Now, RimWorld is not finished.").
A pretty big clue about whether a person is naive, sexist, or careless -- or any of a lot of other bad things -- is how they respond to someone saying "Hey, you've done a thing that is n/s/c." Sylvester did not cover himself in glory in that regard.
posted by Etrigan at 1:28 PM on November 3, 2016 [15 favorites]
It very nicely laid out that the author had done a thing that was naive, sexist, or careless. And had a whole paragraph of disclaimers right there in the text (it's the one starting with "Now, RimWorld is not finished.").
A pretty big clue about whether a person is naive, sexist, or careless -- or any of a lot of other bad things -- is how they respond to someone saying "Hey, you've done a thing that is n/s/c." Sylvester did not cover himself in glory in that regard.
posted by Etrigan at 1:28 PM on November 3, 2016 [15 favorites]
It very nicely laid out that the author had done a thing that was naive, sexist, or careless. And had a whole paragraph of disclaimers right there in the text (it's the one starting with "Now, RimWorld is not finished.").
... and after that paragraph:
But we are not analyzing RimWorld on the basis of what it might be in the future. The question we’re asking is, “what are the stories that RimWorld is already telling?” Yes, making a game is a lot of work, and maybe these numbers were just thrown in without too much thought as to how they’d influence the game. But what kind of system is being designed, that in order to ‘just make it work’, you wind up with a system where there will never be bisexual men? Or where all women, across the board, are eight times less likely to initiate romance?
... we have a paragraph explaining what the game might become doesn't matter.
It's that nice polite sort of high-school bullying. Just right to trigger this sort of response.
posted by pan at 1:38 PM on November 3, 2016
... and after that paragraph:
But we are not analyzing RimWorld on the basis of what it might be in the future. The question we’re asking is, “what are the stories that RimWorld is already telling?” Yes, making a game is a lot of work, and maybe these numbers were just thrown in without too much thought as to how they’d influence the game. But what kind of system is being designed, that in order to ‘just make it work’, you wind up with a system where there will never be bisexual men? Or where all women, across the board, are eight times less likely to initiate romance?
... we have a paragraph explaining what the game might become doesn't matter.
It's that nice polite sort of high-school bullying. Just right to trigger this sort of response.
posted by pan at 1:38 PM on November 3, 2016
It's not "high school bullying" to do critical reporting on a video game that currently exists for public purchase, even if that game isn't complete and might theoretically address your criticisms at some unspecified future date. It's just journalism. I really fail to understand the persecution complex gamers and game developers develop around these issues.
posted by zeusianfog at 1:41 PM on November 3, 2016 [17 favorites]
posted by zeusianfog at 1:41 PM on November 3, 2016 [17 favorites]
The dice roll can *never* come up straight for a female character in this game, that's the point, all you can get is straight for now.
This is simply false, because the characters don't have infinite lifespans. I'm not going to do the math, but you can take the percentage chances and multiply by the number of possible relationships a character could have and figure the chance of a female character being straight. It's not zero. And in practice, there are plenty of female characters who only ever have relationships with men.
To say they could have been bisexual if they'd lived longer is indistinguishable from saying they could have been bisexual if the dice had rolled bisexual when the character was created. From the player's point of view, there's no possible way to distinguish between those two differently-coded ways of determining a character's sexuality.
posted by straight at 1:42 PM on November 3, 2016
This is simply false, because the characters don't have infinite lifespans. I'm not going to do the math, but you can take the percentage chances and multiply by the number of possible relationships a character could have and figure the chance of a female character being straight. It's not zero. And in practice, there are plenty of female characters who only ever have relationships with men.
To say they could have been bisexual if they'd lived longer is indistinguishable from saying they could have been bisexual if the dice had rolled bisexual when the character was created. From the player's point of view, there's no possible way to distinguish between those two differently-coded ways of determining a character's sexuality.
posted by straight at 1:42 PM on November 3, 2016
(None of this is intended as a defense of the developer's bad ideas about sexuality or the particular numbers he coded into the game. If he had better ideas and chose more realistic numbers, the way the thing is coded would not be an issue.)
posted by straight at 1:46 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by straight at 1:46 PM on November 3, 2016
It's that nice polite sort of high-school bullying. Just right to trigger this sort of response.
oh god, the thoughtful but occasionally uncharitable essays critiquing my heteronormative narrative choices that I was subjected to in my freshman year still give me night terrors
I really fail to understand the persecution complex gamers and game developers develop around these issues.
game devs are delicate flowers, apparently
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:51 PM on November 3, 2016 [13 favorites]
oh god, the thoughtful but occasionally uncharitable essays critiquing my heteronormative narrative choices that I was subjected to in my freshman year still give me night terrors
I really fail to understand the persecution complex gamers and game developers develop around these issues.
game devs are delicate flowers, apparently
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:51 PM on November 3, 2016 [13 favorites]
It's not "high school bullying" to do critical reporting on a video game that currently exists for public purchase, even if that game isn't complete and might theoretically address your criticisms at some unspecified future date. It's just journalism. I really fail to understand the persecution complex gamers and game developers develop around these issues.
What you're ignoring here is the dialogue between the author of the article and the developer of the game. That is what makes this into a bullying issue. It's designed to produce outrage here and to stir up the hornet's nest that is the gamers-gate crazies.
It's very high level trolling.
posted by pan at 1:52 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
What you're ignoring here is the dialogue between the author of the article and the developer of the game. That is what makes this into a bullying issue. It's designed to produce outrage here and to stir up the hornet's nest that is the gamers-gate crazies.
It's very high level trolling.
posted by pan at 1:52 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
But as with my earlier analogy, straight, you're arguing that wood that never got caught on fire is indistinguishable from wood that isn't flammable.
And there is a statistical difference. If we are to define a woman as straight until in a non-straight relationship, then the odds of her being straight are now dependent upon how many potential women partners she meets.
posted by RobotHero at 1:53 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
And there is a statistical difference. If we are to define a woman as straight until in a non-straight relationship, then the odds of her being straight are now dependent upon how many potential women partners she meets.
posted by RobotHero at 1:53 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
"But it's fiction," is one of those areas where the distinction between game and narrative gets muddled. Almost all fiction focuses on the specific out of the general. Even the fictional "everyman" really isn't every man, he couldn't be. The Chuck Tingle game project can do whatever it wants with sexuality because it's an interactive adventure fiction (and surrealism is apparently the point.)
Simulation is the opposite of fiction. It's a generality. It's the sort of thing you use when hand-coding every single AI agent within the system becomes unwieldy. If this was an academic simulation of human population dynamics, we would absolutely be examining the assumptions that went into it.
If you're managing civilizations, cities, colonies, etc., it's a game mechanic. Apparently, one of the problems with gender as a game mechanic in Rimworld is that it's just not fun for some of the people who play it.
pan: ... we have a paragraph explaining what the game might become doesn't matter.
Developers can't have it both ways here. They can't use an early-access model in order to get in-development feedback from people, and say that what's already in the game is off-limits for criticism because of what might be changed in the next version.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:54 PM on November 3, 2016 [7 favorites]
Simulation is the opposite of fiction. It's a generality. It's the sort of thing you use when hand-coding every single AI agent within the system becomes unwieldy. If this was an academic simulation of human population dynamics, we would absolutely be examining the assumptions that went into it.
If you're managing civilizations, cities, colonies, etc., it's a game mechanic. Apparently, one of the problems with gender as a game mechanic in Rimworld is that it's just not fun for some of the people who play it.
pan: ... we have a paragraph explaining what the game might become doesn't matter.
Developers can't have it both ways here. They can't use an early-access model in order to get in-development feedback from people, and say that what's already in the game is off-limits for criticism because of what might be changed in the next version.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:54 PM on November 3, 2016 [7 favorites]
Oh, yes, let's talk about that dialogue, where he was offered an interview to say his piece and he demanded complete editorial control of the article, which no journalist worth her salt would ever agree to. He then proceeds to throw a public tantrum about how unfair and mean she is for not letting him hijack the story. He proceeds to call the article "disgusting" and a "malicious" "witch hunt." Yeah, she's the real bully here.
posted by zeusianfog at 1:55 PM on November 3, 2016 [14 favorites]
posted by zeusianfog at 1:55 PM on November 3, 2016 [14 favorites]
His compete failure to do himself any favors simply isn't her problem, or ours.
posted by Artw at 2:07 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Artw at 2:07 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.-- Robyn Ochs
Attempts to define bisexuality in terms of relationship history or behavior are highly problematic for multiple reasons.
pan: What you're ignoring here is the dialogue between the author of the article and the developer of the game. That is what makes this into a bullying issue. It's designed to produce outrage here and to stir up the hornet's nest that is the gamers-gate crazies.
First, the reporter and the editor always have editorial control. That's the nature of the business. You can go on the record, you can go "no comment," or you can submit your own piece (which would still be subjected to editorial standards.)
Second, parts of gg have taken the position that any discussion of games beyond just the facts including gender and sexuality is some sort of hostile takeover of gamer culture. There's really no way one could examine the differences in source code between male and female pawns without getting a gg response.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:08 PM on November 3, 2016 [8 favorites]
@zeus, he only asked that his words not be edited, right? That isn't complete editorial control. In his response to the author he said they could have done something else if they wouldn't accept that but they chose to just keep him out entirely.
posted by whorl at 2:13 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by whorl at 2:13 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
So, if the relationship dynamics are wrong: are they also wrong in say, The Sims? How about some of the critics here lay down what the correct numbers should be if they are to be a correct representation of real world dynamics?
posted by The Seeds of Autumn at 2:13 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by The Seeds of Autumn at 2:13 PM on November 3, 2016
Attempts to define bisexuality in terms of relationship history or behavior are highly problematic for multiple reasons.
Really one of his errors here is that he attempted to define behavior in terms of (reported) "bisexuality."
posted by atoxyl at 2:24 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
Really one of his errors here is that he attempted to define behavior in terms of (reported) "bisexuality."
posted by atoxyl at 2:24 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
But as with my earlier analogy, straight, you're arguing that wood that never got caught on fire is indistinguishable from wood that isn't flammable.
You're confusing "wood" in the narrative which has such properties and the hacks under the hood that produce that narrative. It doesn't matter if the code creates inflammable wood by re-using the same code used for flammable wood that never catches fire.
And there is a statistical difference. If we are to define a woman as straight until in a non-straight relationship, then the odds of her being straight are now dependent upon how many potential women partners she meets.
Yes, but you can include those odds when you figure the overall percentage chance of a character being bisexual. That total percentage chance is still indistinguishable from rolling the dice once with the same odds when the character is created.
posted by straight at 2:27 PM on November 3, 2016
You're confusing "wood" in the narrative which has such properties and the hacks under the hood that produce that narrative. It doesn't matter if the code creates inflammable wood by re-using the same code used for flammable wood that never catches fire.
And there is a statistical difference. If we are to define a woman as straight until in a non-straight relationship, then the odds of her being straight are now dependent upon how many potential women partners she meets.
Yes, but you can include those odds when you figure the overall percentage chance of a character being bisexual. That total percentage chance is still indistinguishable from rolling the dice once with the same odds when the character is created.
posted by straight at 2:27 PM on November 3, 2016
whorl: If you go on the record, you will be edited. That's a standing practice of how interviews work for a number of reasons, including liability, style, cleaning up verbal tics, and correcting obvious mistakes. If you're not comfortable with being interviewed, you don't sit for the interview.
The indie game industry either needs to hire or punt to people with PR experience. An alternative to doing the interview is putting together a carefully prepared statement.
The Seeds of Autumn: Yes, the Sims are wrong. It doesn't matter much because those dynamics turned out to be extremely fun to play for a lot of people. Men who persistently hit on uninterested women seems to be anti-fun for some people.
A problem with modeling real world dynamics in this area is that there's very little research consensus as to what the basic definitions are or what they should be. As much as I think the Kinsey scale is flawed, creating a somewhat bimodal range with a majority of pawns for both genders at Kinsey 0 seems more realistic than what was actually coded. Adjusting the frequency at which women initiate romantic relationships to be more even would be good, as would adjusting the age-of-attractiveness curves.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:34 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
The indie game industry either needs to hire or punt to people with PR experience. An alternative to doing the interview is putting together a carefully prepared statement.
The Seeds of Autumn: Yes, the Sims are wrong. It doesn't matter much because those dynamics turned out to be extremely fun to play for a lot of people. Men who persistently hit on uninterested women seems to be anti-fun for some people.
A problem with modeling real world dynamics in this area is that there's very little research consensus as to what the basic definitions are or what they should be. As much as I think the Kinsey scale is flawed, creating a somewhat bimodal range with a majority of pawns for both genders at Kinsey 0 seems more realistic than what was actually coded. Adjusting the frequency at which women initiate romantic relationships to be more even would be good, as would adjusting the age-of-attractiveness curves.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:34 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
From the player's point of view, there's no possible way to distinguish between those two differently-coded ways of determining a character's sexuality.
Err, no it's definitely possible. Think about coins: suppose you have two types of trick coins, one which is heads on both sides (100% probability of heads), and another type which is merely heavily weighted towards heads (88% probability of heads). Now suppose somebody hands you an infinite box of coins, and says you can flip any single coin only n times (let's say 4)-- can you determine whether the box contains some fraction of two-headed coins? Yes, because if there are two headed coins, the sequence [H,H,H,H] will come up at a higher frequency than would be expected.
If you don't know the weighted probability (88%), then you can experimentally determine that too by looking at proportions of all-head sequences after various numbers of flips. Intuitively, if there are double-headed coins, then for longer-flip sequences the all-heads outcome happens more and more frequently relative to a population of only heavily-weighted coins.
In short, no, these are not indistinguishable scenarios.
posted by Pyry at 2:34 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
Err, no it's definitely possible. Think about coins: suppose you have two types of trick coins, one which is heads on both sides (100% probability of heads), and another type which is merely heavily weighted towards heads (88% probability of heads). Now suppose somebody hands you an infinite box of coins, and says you can flip any single coin only n times (let's say 4)-- can you determine whether the box contains some fraction of two-headed coins? Yes, because if there are two headed coins, the sequence [H,H,H,H] will come up at a higher frequency than would be expected.
If you don't know the weighted probability (88%), then you can experimentally determine that too by looking at proportions of all-head sequences after various numbers of flips. Intuitively, if there are double-headed coins, then for longer-flip sequences the all-heads outcome happens more and more frequently relative to a population of only heavily-weighted coins.
In short, no, these are not indistinguishable scenarios.
posted by Pyry at 2:34 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
I think you're forgetting that, in the narrative, a character only reveals their sexuality when they choose to have a relationship with someone. A character determined at the beginning of the game to be bisexual who meets more women would have a greater chance of meeting a woman she wants to have a relationship with. A bisexual character who meets fewer women would have a greater chance of never meeting someone she wants to have a relationship with and therefore never revealing her bisexuality. Without looking under the hood, you could never tell the difference between that way of coding sexuality and the way this game does it.
posted by straight at 2:39 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by straight at 2:39 PM on November 3, 2016
there is literally nothing women can say about sexism in games that won't get called "bullying," unless it's "there's no sexism in games."
it's the kid on the playground who tells the teacher you're a meanie because you told him it hurts your feelings when he calls you names. it's a clumsy ploy to co-opt the sympathy that we extend to victims of bullying, and it's not terribly convincing when it's obvious no bullying has taken place.
i really get a kick out of how the care the author takes to extend the benefit of a doubt about the developer's intentions is taken as evidence she's playing some kind of super subtle troll-baiting game.
like, there is really no way to win, so the only thing left to do is laugh.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 2:41 PM on November 3, 2016 [25 favorites]
it's the kid on the playground who tells the teacher you're a meanie because you told him it hurts your feelings when he calls you names. it's a clumsy ploy to co-opt the sympathy that we extend to victims of bullying, and it's not terribly convincing when it's obvious no bullying has taken place.
i really get a kick out of how the care the author takes to extend the benefit of a doubt about the developer's intentions is taken as evidence she's playing some kind of super subtle troll-baiting game.
like, there is really no way to win, so the only thing left to do is laugh.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 2:41 PM on November 3, 2016 [25 favorites]
You don't have to respond to a negative review, and unless you are offering a refund or a bug fix, you probably shouldn't.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:42 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:42 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
Whorl: If you're not comfortable with how the interview will appear, don't sit for it. Really important people with much more at stake understand this. And given the utter lack of grace in his response, he shouldn't have gone on the record.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:59 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:59 PM on November 3, 2016
straight: "I think you're forgetting that, in the narrative, a character only reveals their sexuality when they choose to have a relationship with someone."
No, I think you're forgetting to consider the experience of playing a game while it's still unfolding vs. looking at what happened after the fact.
Going with the coin analogy, if you've flipped a coin four times and it came up heads every time, and you're trying to predict what would happen if you flip it again, then it does matter to you if some of the coins are heads on both sides. If there's no such thing, then you know for a fact that the next time is still 50/50 odds. If there are some coins that are double-headed, then you start suspecting you might have one of those coins. You won't know for sure, it could be a coincidence, but the odds are no longer exactly 50/50.
posted by RobotHero at 3:27 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
No, I think you're forgetting to consider the experience of playing a game while it's still unfolding vs. looking at what happened after the fact.
Going with the coin analogy, if you've flipped a coin four times and it came up heads every time, and you're trying to predict what would happen if you flip it again, then it does matter to you if some of the coins are heads on both sides. If there's no such thing, then you know for a fact that the next time is still 50/50 odds. If there are some coins that are double-headed, then you start suspecting you might have one of those coins. You won't know for sure, it could be a coincidence, but the odds are no longer exactly 50/50.
posted by RobotHero at 3:27 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
The Kotaku piece touches on the "does the interior make a difference" question some of us have been talking about.
posted by ODiV at 3:29 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by ODiV at 3:29 PM on November 3, 2016
Oh, one more bit on The Sims 2. Same-sex relationships were implemented as a mistake that proved insanely popular.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 3:31 PM on November 3, 2016 [8 favorites]
In early 1999, before E.A. had a chance to kill the design, Barrett was asked to create a demo of the game to be shown at E3. The demo would consist of three scenes from the game. These were to be so-called on-rails scenes—not a true, live simulation but one that was preplanned, and which would shake out the same way each time it was played, in order to show the game in its best light. One of the scenes was a wedding between two Sims characters. “I had run out of time before E3, and there were so many Sims attending the wedding that I didn’t have time to put them all on rails,” Barrett said.Which is a good thing, because the OTP of the Sims franchise is pretty clearly Pascal/Nervous.
On the first day of the show, the game’s producers, Kana Ryan and Chris Trottier, watched in disbelief as two of the female Sims attending the virtual wedding leaned in and began to passionately kiss. They had, during the live simulation, fallen in love. Moreover, they had chosen this moment to express their affection, in front of a live audience of assorted press. Following the kiss, talk of The Sims dominated E3. “You might say that they stole the show,” Barrett said. “I guess straight guys that make sports games loved the idea of controlling two lesbians.”
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 3:31 PM on November 3, 2016 [8 favorites]
The implementation aspect is interesting. To make a completely reduced example, say you had two different systems:
a) Characters are assigned a preference on creation, only advances from that preference are accepted, and characters only marry once.
b) Characters have no assigned preference, advances are accepted randomly, and characters only marry once.
That's an enormous difference in the beliefs represented, but the behaviour in game would be exactly the same. In this particular case, the implementation obviously is reflecting beliefs pretty directly, but I can see how there could easily be a large divorce between what the implementation describes and what result is actually being aimed for.
posted by lucidium at 3:50 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
a) Characters are assigned a preference on creation, only advances from that preference are accepted, and characters only marry once.
b) Characters have no assigned preference, advances are accepted randomly, and characters only marry once.
That's an enormous difference in the beliefs represented, but the behaviour in game would be exactly the same. In this particular case, the implementation obviously is reflecting beliefs pretty directly, but I can see how there could easily be a large divorce between what the implementation describes and what result is actually being aimed for.
posted by lucidium at 3:50 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
I think it is interesting too, and my gut says that it would be facing way less scrutiny, and be easier to talk about in the abstract, if it were the same system for both men and women.
posted by ODiV at 3:59 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by ODiV at 3:59 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
I agree. People seem to be getting bogged down in when and how sexual orientation is determined while the real crux of the matter is that it's determined differently for men and women.
I honestly wouldn't care as much if everyone were 100% straight all the time. That would be short-sighted and exclusionary, but it wouldn't be actively offensive and sexist like the current system.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:34 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
I honestly wouldn't care as much if everyone were 100% straight all the time. That would be short-sighted and exclusionary, but it wouldn't be actively offensive and sexist like the current system.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:34 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
I agree. People seem to be getting bogged down in when and how sexual orientation is determined
I think it's important to note that the messy way something is coded =/= the narrative meaning and result of the coded behavior, and it would be a mistake to make a regular practice of trying to determine a developer's intent by looking at the code rather than the actual narrative experience produced by the code. In this case there does seem to be a relationship between the developer's bad ideas about sexuality and the some of the underlying code, but that might not always be the case.
posted by straight at 4:46 PM on November 3, 2016
I think it's important to note that the messy way something is coded =/= the narrative meaning and result of the coded behavior, and it would be a mistake to make a regular practice of trying to determine a developer's intent by looking at the code rather than the actual narrative experience produced by the code. In this case there does seem to be a relationship between the developer's bad ideas about sexuality and the some of the underlying code, but that might not always be the case.
posted by straight at 4:46 PM on November 3, 2016
Going with the coin analogy, if you've flipped a coin four times and it came up heads every time, and you're trying to predict what would happen if you flip it again, then it does matter to you if some of the coins are heads on both sides. If there's no such thing, then you know for a fact that the next time is still 50/50 odds. If there are some coins that are double-headed, then you start suspecting you might have one of those coins. You won't know for sure, it could be a coincidence, but the odds are no longer exactly 50/50.
Using coins is misleading because one of the things you don't know is the percentage chance of a given result. Think of two groups of n-sided dice. In one group, some of the dice don't have the number "1" on them, in the other group, all dice have the number "1." ("1" in this case represents bisexuality, so a die without a "1" would be "straight," with no chance of ever rolling a "1").
I'm going to pick a group and roll a random die from that group a random number of times and then tell you whether or not I rolled a "1". No matter how many times I do that with dice from my chosen group, you will not have enough information to determine which of the two groups of dice I'm rolling. You can't tell whether my group has any "straight" dice or not.
posted by straight at 4:59 PM on November 3, 2016
Using coins is misleading because one of the things you don't know is the percentage chance of a given result. Think of two groups of n-sided dice. In one group, some of the dice don't have the number "1" on them, in the other group, all dice have the number "1." ("1" in this case represents bisexuality, so a die without a "1" would be "straight," with no chance of ever rolling a "1").
I'm going to pick a group and roll a random die from that group a random number of times and then tell you whether or not I rolled a "1". No matter how many times I do that with dice from my chosen group, you will not have enough information to determine which of the two groups of dice I'm rolling. You can't tell whether my group has any "straight" dice or not.
posted by straight at 4:59 PM on November 3, 2016
so the argument i'm hearing here is the sexist mistake isn't real because the other sexist mistake cancelled it out
okay then
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 5:05 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
okay then
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 5:05 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
I don't buy that resulting in game behavior is more important than what the code is intended to do. Let's say I'm coding a similar game and include in the code a variable that makes black people twice as likely to commit violent crimes. As it turns out, though, committing violent crimes doesn't end up being a major aspect of the game compared to non-criminal forms of violence. Since the initial racist code isn't perceptible in the resulting game, does that mean I never had any racist intent?
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:06 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:06 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
If I was digging through a beloved RPG and discovered every shopkeeper was assigned "Jewish" as their religion and "Evil" as their alignment that'd be fucked up even if it was invisible while playing the game.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:12 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:12 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
Mr.Encyclopedia, I'm not talking about the developer's intent. If, in your example, when playing the game black people don't end up committing crimes more often than white people, it would be false for a reviewer to say that they are twice as likely to commit violent crimes because there's a variable in the code that would work that way if it were expressed in the game, but isn't.
posted by straight at 5:16 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by straight at 5:16 PM on November 3, 2016
plus i mean, the reason they were looking at a disassembly in the first place was to figure out why the relationship code was producing such sexist outcomes, so...
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 5:19 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 5:19 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
There's other sexist stuff in the game, but the pull-quote in the FPP claiming that there are no straight women in RimWorld is false.
posted by straight at 5:23 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by straight at 5:23 PM on November 3, 2016
There's other sexist stuff in the game, but the pull-quote in the FPP claiming that there are no straight women in RimWorld is false.
No, it's true. You could keep reloading the same savegame and eventually every woman would enter into a same-sex relationship.
posted by Pyry at 5:28 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
No, it's true. You could keep reloading the same savegame and eventually every woman would enter into a same-sex relationship.
posted by Pyry at 5:28 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
There's other sexist stuff in the game
I guess I wouldn't be surprised? But I (presuming you were responding to me) was talking about the relationship code, which isn't other sexist stuff, it's the same sexist stuff.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 5:44 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
I guess I wouldn't be surprised? But I (presuming you were responding to me) was talking about the relationship code, which isn't other sexist stuff, it's the same sexist stuff.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 5:44 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
This is such a textbook case of the way in which sexism is perpetuated. It is hard to believe that some people are unwilling to consider that what Sylvester did was problematic. Not evil, not something "only a terrible person would do", but something that ended up being offensive to a great many people. Not intentionally offensive, but offensive nonetheless.
The thing is, fiction isn't neutral - the stories we tell (or the game tells*) CREATE the world, in very small but important ways. And when the stories being told have as their underpinnings systems which dictate that "women are equally attracted to men from 0 to +40 years older" and "men are never bisexual" (and also "women always have a chance of being bisexual") -- well, that is going to create stories which disproportionately favour those outcomes. And people will experience these stories, and on some level learn "that's just how the world is".
And that is exactly what is happening when Sylvester says (in the kataku interview) "My goal is to non-judgmentally simulate."** He is using his own experience and some research(?) to create a system which contains stories depicting "how the world is". The thing that makes me angry is the idea that people are making such a big deal out of nothing. Some people may say "the system in rimworld basically is how the real world works" or "its just a game/is just a joke/isn't meant to be a big deal." But to a lot of other people, the (real) world the game is helping to bring into being is a continuation of the same world which has been so painful, damaging, violent, demeaning, disenfranchising. And it isn't a small deal. That is a really big deal.
* This is what the game community seems to consider is happening - and I think this is incorrect. You don't get off with creating systems with offensive output and then claim "its the systems responsibility". YOUR responsibility as a creator is for the output of what you create. And it isn't up to the player, either -- the control of the system creator dwarfs the control of the player.
** Or, put another way he is saying he is attempting to create an objective simulation, without biases. If this seems like a good idea, or even possible, well I'll just say you are going against the tide.
posted by ianhattwick at 5:50 PM on November 3, 2016 [10 favorites]
The thing is, fiction isn't neutral - the stories we tell (or the game tells*) CREATE the world, in very small but important ways. And when the stories being told have as their underpinnings systems which dictate that "women are equally attracted to men from 0 to +40 years older" and "men are never bisexual" (and also "women always have a chance of being bisexual") -- well, that is going to create stories which disproportionately favour those outcomes. And people will experience these stories, and on some level learn "that's just how the world is".
And that is exactly what is happening when Sylvester says (in the kataku interview) "My goal is to non-judgmentally simulate."** He is using his own experience and some research(?) to create a system which contains stories depicting "how the world is". The thing that makes me angry is the idea that people are making such a big deal out of nothing. Some people may say "the system in rimworld basically is how the real world works" or "its just a game/is just a joke/isn't meant to be a big deal." But to a lot of other people, the (real) world the game is helping to bring into being is a continuation of the same world which has been so painful, damaging, violent, demeaning, disenfranchising. And it isn't a small deal. That is a really big deal.
* This is what the game community seems to consider is happening - and I think this is incorrect. You don't get off with creating systems with offensive output and then claim "its the systems responsibility". YOUR responsibility as a creator is for the output of what you create. And it isn't up to the player, either -- the control of the system creator dwarfs the control of the player.
** Or, put another way he is saying he is attempting to create an objective simulation, without biases. If this seems like a good idea, or even possible, well I'll just say you are going against the tide.
posted by ianhattwick at 5:50 PM on November 3, 2016 [10 favorites]
You could keep reloading the same savegame and eventually every woman would enter into a same-sex relationship.
Someone get me Andie MacDowell's agent. I just had a great idea for a Groundhog Day sequel.
This is what the game community seems to consider is happening - and I think this is incorrect.
The game community is also who is calling this out too, right?
posted by ODiV at 6:50 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
Someone get me Andie MacDowell's agent. I just had a great idea for a Groundhog Day sequel.
This is what the game community seems to consider is happening - and I think this is incorrect.
The game community is also who is calling this out too, right?
posted by ODiV at 6:50 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
That sounds a bit accusatory, which I didn't intend; I was using that sentence as a jumping off point. It just feels like some people are trying to create a narrative where this criticism is coming from outsiders who don't belong, blah blah blah, when its gamers who are making these observations, writing these pieces, having these criticisms.
posted by ODiV at 6:58 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by ODiV at 6:58 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
And in practice, there are plenty of female characters who only ever have relationships with men.
And in practice, many actual, real, honest-to-god bisexual women will only ever have relationships with men. That doesn't make them not bi.
posted by Dysk at 7:21 PM on November 3, 2016 [5 favorites]
And in practice, many actual, real, honest-to-god bisexual women will only ever have relationships with men. That doesn't make them not bi.
posted by Dysk at 7:21 PM on November 3, 2016 [5 favorites]
No, it's true. You could keep reloading the same savegame and eventually every woman would enter into a same-sex relationship.
Once you start doing that, it's not clear that those women are actually the same character. If you read a rough draft of a novel in which a character was straight but in the finished book the character was gay, would you say the character wasn't "really" gay?
posted by straight at 7:59 PM on November 3, 2016
Once you start doing that, it's not clear that those women are actually the same character. If you read a rough draft of a novel in which a character was straight but in the finished book the character was gay, would you say the character wasn't "really" gay?
posted by straight at 7:59 PM on November 3, 2016
The reason they were looking at a disassembly in the first place was to figure out why the relationship code was producing such sexist outcomes
But I (presuming you were responding to me) was talking about the relationship code, which isn't other sexist stuff, it's the same sexist stuff.
But "There are no straight women in RimWorld, as in, there are no women only attracted to men," is not a sexist outcome it is possible to observe in the game.
posted by straight at 8:02 PM on November 3, 2016
But I (presuming you were responding to me) was talking about the relationship code, which isn't other sexist stuff, it's the same sexist stuff.
But "There are no straight women in RimWorld, as in, there are no women only attracted to men," is not a sexist outcome it is possible to observe in the game.
posted by straight at 8:02 PM on November 3, 2016
But the game is simulating a world in which there are no straight women. Whether a same-sex relationship comes up for every woman in any particular run-through of the game, it is always a possibility according to the mechanics of the simulation. Every possible combination of cards are a possibility during a game of poker, as a consequence of the rules of the game, even if you're never going to observe every single one come up during one game.
I mean, you would never be able to observe that the men aren't bisexual. Just because they were in relationships with one gender, doesn't preclude that it would be possible for them to be attracted to another gender. But according to the algorithms of the game, they were not simulated as bisexual men. Similarly, none of the women are simulated as straight.
posted by RobotHero at 8:17 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
I mean, you would never be able to observe that the men aren't bisexual. Just because they were in relationships with one gender, doesn't preclude that it would be possible for them to be attracted to another gender. But according to the algorithms of the game, they were not simulated as bisexual men. Similarly, none of the women are simulated as straight.
posted by RobotHero at 8:17 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
The Dwarf Fortress version seems pretty good. Everyone has X% chance of preferring the same gender, Y% the opposite gender, Z% either gender, and Q% neither gender.
That seems like the most straightforward way of designing video game romance. You can also add things like "people prefer people within N years of their age" or even the "at least half+7" cliche with a max. I don't even mind the random attractiveness trait.
Choosing to make things different for different sexes just feels weird. I mean, why do we have to try to "accurately" represent real life? It's a video game!
I say developers should just invent new genders. How about we have flargs, blargs, and xargs. Offspring require or more parents, and conception and gestation occur in earthenware vessels.
posted by that girl at 8:20 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
That seems like the most straightforward way of designing video game romance. You can also add things like "people prefer people within N years of their age" or even the "at least half+7" cliche with a max. I don't even mind the random attractiveness trait.
Choosing to make things different for different sexes just feels weird. I mean, why do we have to try to "accurately" represent real life? It's a video game!
I say developers should just invent new genders. How about we have flargs, blargs, and xargs. Offspring require or more parents, and conception and gestation occur in earthenware vessels.
posted by that girl at 8:20 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
straight: "Once you start doing that, it's not clear that those women are actually the same character. If you read a rough draft of a novel in which a character was straight but in the finished book the character was gay, would you say the character wasn't "really" gay?"
I think that's more like parallel universes. It's the same character, but with different occurrences leading them down different paths in life. Again, because I`m thinking about it as a simulation.
posted by RobotHero at 8:21 PM on November 3, 2016
I think that's more like parallel universes. It's the same character, but with different occurrences leading them down different paths in life. Again, because I`m thinking about it as a simulation.
posted by RobotHero at 8:21 PM on November 3, 2016
But "There are no straight women in RimWorld, as in, there are no women only attracted to men," is not a sexist outcome it is possible to observe in the game.
okay i guess i have two responses to this
one, you've been trying to prove that point for a while now, and, uh, your arguments haven't come across as "increasingly convincing" so much as "increasingly desperate" so like, taking it as a given in other arguments isn't really going to work that well, is it?
two, being as the romance simulation code is sexist in its results, all of the sexist assumptions in the logic are relevant, even if some of them seem to cancel each other out
two and a half, seriously, you are not doing your argument any favors by defending the sexist no-straight-women thing by saying the sexist women-hardly-ever-initiate thing makes it okay
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 8:30 PM on November 3, 2016 [4 favorites]
okay i guess i have two responses to this
one, you've been trying to prove that point for a while now, and, uh, your arguments haven't come across as "increasingly convincing" so much as "increasingly desperate" so like, taking it as a given in other arguments isn't really going to work that well, is it?
two, being as the romance simulation code is sexist in its results, all of the sexist assumptions in the logic are relevant, even if some of them seem to cancel each other out
two and a half, seriously, you are not doing your argument any favors by defending the sexist no-straight-women thing by saying the sexist women-hardly-ever-initiate thing makes it okay
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 8:30 PM on November 3, 2016 [4 favorites]
But the game is simulating a world in which there are no straight women. Whether a same-sex relationship comes up for every woman in any particular run-through of the game, it is always a possibility according to the mechanics of the simulation.
But the game isn't actually simulating those things. The game is telling stories about characters. "Jane had a relationship with Ron. They broke up. Then Jane got married to Lisa. Lisa died. Jane died. The end." "Mary had a relationship with Dave. They broke up. Then Mary got married to John. Then Mary died. The end."
The player is looking at those stories and saying things like, "Jane was bisexual," or "Mary was straight," or "Maybe Mary was bisexual too, we'll never know."
Whether the game rolled the dice at the beginning of the story or several times while the story was being told doesn't change the story, and I think it's a misguided way of critiquing the stories the game tells.
posted by straight at 8:35 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
But the game isn't actually simulating those things. The game is telling stories about characters. "Jane had a relationship with Ron. They broke up. Then Jane got married to Lisa. Lisa died. Jane died. The end." "Mary had a relationship with Dave. They broke up. Then Mary got married to John. Then Mary died. The end."
The player is looking at those stories and saying things like, "Jane was bisexual," or "Mary was straight," or "Maybe Mary was bisexual too, we'll never know."
Whether the game rolled the dice at the beginning of the story or several times while the story was being told doesn't change the story, and I think it's a misguided way of critiquing the stories the game tells.
posted by straight at 8:35 PM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]
But it changes the odds of certain stories being told, and it changes the extent to which past behaviour is a predictor for future behaviour.
posted by RobotHero at 8:40 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by RobotHero at 8:40 PM on November 3, 2016
two and a half, seriously, you are not doing your argument any favors by defending the sexist no-straight-women thing by saying the sexist women-hardly-ever-initiate thing makes it okay
I did not say that. I never said anything about the game is "okay."
posted by straight at 8:41 PM on November 3, 2016
I did not say that. I never said anything about the game is "okay."
posted by straight at 8:41 PM on November 3, 2016
But it changes the odds of certain stories being told, and it changes the extend to which past behaviour is a predictor for future behaviour.
The mechanics of when the dice are rolled is not what determines the odds of a particular story being told. The weights the developer puts on the dice are what determines those odds.
posted by straight at 8:43 PM on November 3, 2016
The mechanics of when the dice are rolled is not what determines the odds of a particular story being told. The weights the developer puts on the dice are what determines those odds.
posted by straight at 8:43 PM on November 3, 2016
But the number of times you roll the dice changes the odds. If you're essentially rolling a new die every time your character meets a new person, there's no way to make that statistically equivalent to rolling once at the start. You could make it equivalent to meeting seven people, for example, but then what if she meets eight people, or six?
posted by RobotHero at 8:57 PM on November 3, 2016
posted by RobotHero at 8:57 PM on November 3, 2016
Once you start doing that, it's not clear that those women are actually the same character.
This is the point where the horse you are beating died.
posted by fleacircus at 9:26 PM on November 3, 2016 [4 favorites]
This is the point where the horse you are beating died.
posted by fleacircus at 9:26 PM on November 3, 2016 [4 favorites]
As somebody who has played a ton of RimWorld and really enjoy it, I was pretty disappointed to read Sylvester's comment on RPS (which I also read frequently and tend to enjoy). It was quite defensive, and he really didn't do himself any favors by calling the RPS article "anger farming" and the like, when in fact it was quite neutral in tone.
He did do a better job of articulating his position in the Reddit comment. Here's his description of how the romance system as it currently stands came to be:
posted by whir at 9:53 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
He did do a better job of articulating his position in the Reddit comment. Here's his description of how the romance system as it currently stands came to be:
Rather, I did the same thing I do when setting weights for weapons or nutrition values for food or nearly any other such balancing task: I did some quick research to get some ballpark numbers, simplified them to be implementable and easy to read, and put them in the game. Example sources would be:To me this seems like a reasonable explanation of how he wound up with the system as it is. I'm honestly not really sure why he felt the need to model ballpark approximations of "first three google hits I found about sexual orientation distributions" in his far-future Sci-Fi/Western sim that contains alien robots and psychic drones and whatnot, but I don't read it as coming from wanting to intentionally encode a bunch of assumptions about sexuality in his game in order to reflect his views on that subject.
OKCupid statistics blog: https://blog.okcupid.com/
This site: http://www.advocate.com/bisexuality/2015/08/26/study-women-are-more-likely-be-bisexual-men
This site: http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Gates-How-Many-People-LGBT-Apr-2011.pdf
So I made an honest attempt to understand the reality, and applied that to the game as I learned it. And, I'm updating it as I learn more. What else can anyone do?
Of course, I could've spent more time trying to get everything even more perfect, doing more research, and so on. But my general philosophy is to make it work well enough and move on. There's tons of stuff to work on in this game and I'm always balancing between many different tasks. Often I'll come back to a system many times over the years to touch it up (as I'm coming back to this one). All this is a good process that works well.
I also could have taken the easy way out and just modeled everyone identically. But that really struck me as bland and a bit lazy. I wanted to at least attempt to make a good-faith effort to model these things in a bit richer way.
posted by whir at 9:53 PM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]
straight: It doesn't make a great deal of sense to talk about game mechanics entirely in terms of observed outcome of this or that game. For example, the mechanics of Poker are such that any hand could be a royal flush. If you go for a week without seeing a royal flush, you could tell a story that "lady luck cursed my cards to prevent a royal flush." But that would just be a fantasy as long as you were playing with a standard French 52-card deck. Checkmate is a fundamental mechanic of chess, even if in grandmaster play you almost never see the checkmate in action, and rarely the threatened checkmate.
But the game isn't actually simulating those things. The game is telling stories about characters.
Actually, many games do simulate, and mechanics are not stories. If I move the stick to the right, the orientation of my "character" rotates clockwise in a 3D coordinate grid and the view updates accordingly. The "story" there is little more than set-dressing that says I'm a spaceship in one game, a cyborg in another, and an apocalypse survivor in another.
Many games don't have a story to tell. Many do. But confusing the mechanics with the story usually muddles both. Mechanics like health/mana as a limited resource are often shit from a storytelling perspective. I love turn-based strategy but turning that system of mechanics into narrative would be painful. Using the toilet in The Sims is an mechanic for relieving bladder that takes an absurd length of time. On the one hand, it puts bladder on par with fun and hunger in terms of time budgeting. On the other hand, this has predictable and somewhat sadistic effects on parties with large numbers of people.
On the mechanics level, Sylvester is creating an abstract sim game. In his own words: "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." He goes on: "People tend to think of game characters as people, but they’re not. They don’t have internal experiences. They only have outward behaviors, and they are totally defined by those behaviors, because that’s all the player can see, and the player’s POV is the only one that matters."
Which is glossing over the fact that AI agents in a game have mechanics implemented as code, and that code modifies the outward behavior in ways that players notice. A large part of beating a game involves figuring out those hidden mechanics behind the AI. In the case of Rimworld, with multiple pawns in play, a mechanic where women disproportionately pair off into same-sex relationships, while most men hit on them anyway, affects happiness as a mechanic. Is this a reasonable complication? That would need to be playtested.
Now if we're going to talk about story, the assumption that a person is "straight" if they are only seen having heterosexual relationships is a BIG FUCKING PROBLEM for many BPQ people. And it's not something that can be fully addressed without going down a rabbit hole of theory about interpretive frameworks for queerness in history and narrative. The view that a game character is, in terms of mechanics, bisexual is reasonable, even if an individual player may chose to only play one way.
And to be the broken record, criticism is "hey, let's take a closer look at this," not necessarily, "this is bad, and you're a bad person for making this."
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:25 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
But the game isn't actually simulating those things. The game is telling stories about characters.
Actually, many games do simulate, and mechanics are not stories. If I move the stick to the right, the orientation of my "character" rotates clockwise in a 3D coordinate grid and the view updates accordingly. The "story" there is little more than set-dressing that says I'm a spaceship in one game, a cyborg in another, and an apocalypse survivor in another.
Many games don't have a story to tell. Many do. But confusing the mechanics with the story usually muddles both. Mechanics like health/mana as a limited resource are often shit from a storytelling perspective. I love turn-based strategy but turning that system of mechanics into narrative would be painful. Using the toilet in The Sims is an mechanic for relieving bladder that takes an absurd length of time. On the one hand, it puts bladder on par with fun and hunger in terms of time budgeting. On the other hand, this has predictable and somewhat sadistic effects on parties with large numbers of people.
On the mechanics level, Sylvester is creating an abstract sim game. In his own words: "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." He goes on: "People tend to think of game characters as people, but they’re not. They don’t have internal experiences. They only have outward behaviors, and they are totally defined by those behaviors, because that’s all the player can see, and the player’s POV is the only one that matters."
Which is glossing over the fact that AI agents in a game have mechanics implemented as code, and that code modifies the outward behavior in ways that players notice. A large part of beating a game involves figuring out those hidden mechanics behind the AI. In the case of Rimworld, with multiple pawns in play, a mechanic where women disproportionately pair off into same-sex relationships, while most men hit on them anyway, affects happiness as a mechanic. Is this a reasonable complication? That would need to be playtested.
Now if we're going to talk about story, the assumption that a person is "straight" if they are only seen having heterosexual relationships is a BIG FUCKING PROBLEM for many BPQ people. And it's not something that can be fully addressed without going down a rabbit hole of theory about interpretive frameworks for queerness in history and narrative. The view that a game character is, in terms of mechanics, bisexual is reasonable, even if an individual player may chose to only play one way.
And to be the broken record, criticism is "hey, let's take a closer look at this," not necessarily, "this is bad, and you're a bad person for making this."
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:25 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
I'm surprised nobody has brought up the violation of DRY principles In having two separate code paths for genders. Write it once and then fuck around with weighting, if you must.
posted by Artw at 10:31 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Artw at 10:31 PM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]
The somethingawful games thread on Rimworld has been renamed: 'Rimworld: No Man's Bi'
okay that's me out namaste
posted by Sebmojo at 11:40 PM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
okay that's me out namaste
posted by Sebmojo at 11:40 PM on November 3, 2016 [6 favorites]
Bisexuality is not relationship or attraction outcomes - it is relationship and attraction possibilities. I.e. I am bi because I can fall in love with people of any (either, in rimworld's binary universe) gender, regardless of whether or not I actually end up in relationships with both men and women. So I don't care about whether or not any given woman in rimworld ends up in a relationship with another woman or not - the fact that it's checking for it each time you meet a new woman (as well as having all the stuff relating to attraction to men) is bisexuality, regardless of how the roll actually goes.
posted by Dysk at 1:37 AM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 1:37 AM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]
This discussion about whether there are any straight women or not is quite interesting and in certain ways philosophical. I can see straight's perspective that we shouldn't be looking into the underlying implementation of the game to judge it, from the point of view of modularity and interfaces; you only consider what is exposed publicly, and ignore the underlying implementation.
In this case the only things that are exposed are external events; so we can only reason and judge what we observe. As such, the statement "there are no straight women in Rimworld" is not so much wrong as it is unknowable; we can only know how the women in the game behave but not their "true" nature, which is hidden. So it doesn't mean that a woman who only has relationships with men is thus straight; we just don't have evidence that she might not be. And as a piece of narrative fiction, it is up to the reader to decide how they wish to fill in the blanks. Not too different from reading a book where the sexual orientation of a character is never discussed.
However, that doesn't mean we can't discuss authorial intent, which is what analysing the code gives you. And this is where all the problems arise, like if we find that some author consistently writes gruesome rape scenes. So in this case we find that the author has basically consistently generated stories that when taken together reflect sexist attitudes.
PS: I've never actually played the game so for all I know it might actually explicitly state the pawns' orientation in some interface. Which would be a whole different matter.
posted by destrius at 2:24 AM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
In this case the only things that are exposed are external events; so we can only reason and judge what we observe. As such, the statement "there are no straight women in Rimworld" is not so much wrong as it is unknowable; we can only know how the women in the game behave but not their "true" nature, which is hidden. So it doesn't mean that a woman who only has relationships with men is thus straight; we just don't have evidence that she might not be. And as a piece of narrative fiction, it is up to the reader to decide how they wish to fill in the blanks. Not too different from reading a book where the sexual orientation of a character is never discussed.
However, that doesn't mean we can't discuss authorial intent, which is what analysing the code gives you. And this is where all the problems arise, like if we find that some author consistently writes gruesome rape scenes. So in this case we find that the author has basically consistently generated stories that when taken together reflect sexist attitudes.
PS: I've never actually played the game so for all I know it might actually explicitly state the pawns' orientation in some interface. Which would be a whole different matter.
posted by destrius at 2:24 AM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
This discussion about whether there are any straight women or not is quite interesting and in certain ways philosophical.
Until you remember that the stuff being philosophised on are real issues that have affected and continue to affect the quality of life of real people in the real world as well. Bi people in real life are profoundly hurt -- whether they move primarily in straight or gay communities -- by precisely the logic of bi erasure that straight is engaging in here.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:46 AM on November 4, 2016 [3 favorites]
Until you remember that the stuff being philosophised on are real issues that have affected and continue to affect the quality of life of real people in the real world as well. Bi people in real life are profoundly hurt -- whether they move primarily in straight or gay communities -- by precisely the logic of bi erasure that straight is engaging in here.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:46 AM on November 4, 2016 [3 favorites]
I don't know that comparing gameplay to modular programming actually helps here. Ideally in modular programming you write the documentation for the interface, you write the test cases for the interface, and then you write the interface. And even there, bug hunters should be probing the internals of the interface by exploring additional test cases and looking for undocumented behavior.
Most currently published electronic games involve a process of inquiry via iterative hypothesis testing. There's a figure in the distance. What is it wearing? How does it move? How will it react if it sees me? What are the combat behaviors? We may not know the exact algorithms underlying those behaviors, but we do make approximate hypotheses early in the game, and test those hypotheses against characters of the same type later in the game.
In Rimworld, analysis of this mechanic started from a set of observations about the dynamics:
1. Female pawns have a higher probability of same-sex relationships.
2. Male pawns have a higher probability of bachelorhood.
3. Single male pawns make passes at same-sex partnered females.
4. This reduces happiness.
As the article found, those dynamics are the result of a mechanic in which all women are open to same-sex relationships but men are not. Since that's been exposed by examination of the game code, there's no reason not to talk about it.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 5:48 AM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]
Most currently published electronic games involve a process of inquiry via iterative hypothesis testing. There's a figure in the distance. What is it wearing? How does it move? How will it react if it sees me? What are the combat behaviors? We may not know the exact algorithms underlying those behaviors, but we do make approximate hypotheses early in the game, and test those hypotheses against characters of the same type later in the game.
In Rimworld, analysis of this mechanic started from a set of observations about the dynamics:
1. Female pawns have a higher probability of same-sex relationships.
2. Male pawns have a higher probability of bachelorhood.
3. Single male pawns make passes at same-sex partnered females.
4. This reduces happiness.
As the article found, those dynamics are the result of a mechanic in which all women are open to same-sex relationships but men are not. Since that's been exposed by examination of the game code, there's no reason not to talk about it.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 5:48 AM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]
tobascodagama: Yes you're right, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it isn't at the same time a real and emotional issue. All important are.
CBrachyrhynchos: What I mean is that there are two different kinds of analyses we can perform; one is on the story, and one is on the story generator. So for each story that is generated, it could be that a character is straight, bi, gay, queer, trans; in some cases the behaviour observed would reveal the underlying "truth", in others we would never know. The "truth" is not what lies in the underlying code, because the code is not meant to be read as part of the story. In a way the truth is up to the player to imagine and construct given the behaviours that they can see. It's like if you read a book and you feel strongly that the protagonist is a closeted gay character based on all sorts of subtle cues. Does it matter to your understanding and appreciation of the story if the author comes out and says that hey no, he's straight?
But if we're critiquing the story generator, i.e. the mechanics of the simulation, then that's a different matter and the underlying code is very relevant to the discussion. So it might be that straight is confounding the two.
posted by destrius at 6:36 AM on November 4, 2016
CBrachyrhynchos: What I mean is that there are two different kinds of analyses we can perform; one is on the story, and one is on the story generator. So for each story that is generated, it could be that a character is straight, bi, gay, queer, trans; in some cases the behaviour observed would reveal the underlying "truth", in others we would never know. The "truth" is not what lies in the underlying code, because the code is not meant to be read as part of the story. In a way the truth is up to the player to imagine and construct given the behaviours that they can see. It's like if you read a book and you feel strongly that the protagonist is a closeted gay character based on all sorts of subtle cues. Does it matter to your understanding and appreciation of the story if the author comes out and says that hey no, he's straight?
But if we're critiquing the story generator, i.e. the mechanics of the simulation, then that's a different matter and the underlying code is very relevant to the discussion. So it might be that straight is confounding the two.
posted by destrius at 6:36 AM on November 4, 2016
Does it matter to your understanding and appreciation of the story if the author comes out and says that hey no, he's straight?
Yes. Just like leaving things hinted at with subtle clues and refusing to elaborate or confirm matters. We have had several threads recently that dealt quite thoroughly with why this kind of erasure is a problem.
posted by Dysk at 7:09 AM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]
Yes. Just like leaving things hinted at with subtle clues and refusing to elaborate or confirm matters. We have had several threads recently that dealt quite thoroughly with why this kind of erasure is a problem.
posted by Dysk at 7:09 AM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]
Until you remember that the stuff being philosophised on are real issues that have affected and continue to affect the quality of life of real people in the real world as well. Bi people in real life are profoundly hurt -- whether they move primarily in straight or gay communities -- by precisely the logic of bi erasure that straight is engaging in here.
If you re-read my comments more carefully, you will find that I am consistently objecting to people making pronouncements about whether a character is straight or bisexual based only on code governing the behavior of characters.
But the game actually flags characters as 'gay' or not at character creation. That means that out of all of Rimworlds stories, there are zero stories in which anyone finds out that someone is gay; it's a visible character trait.
So the sensible critique of the game would be, "Rimworld contains no straight women because the interface fails to explicitly label characters as 'straight' or 'bisexual,'" rather than trying to talk about whether straight characters "exist" based on parsing code for character behavior.
But my broader point is that I think it's a category error to talk about whether narrative categories exist based on analysis of the code. There is code for the game; it's a mistake to talk about characters having code as if it were the same sort of thing as human beings having character traits. A human being has a sexual orientation as well as behavior. A computer game has code that creates events in the game. The players create narrative meaning from those events.
For instance, you might have a game where character behavior is an emergent property of objects in the game. Sexual behavior could be coded as a property of beds. Whether that behavior adds up to a good or a bad depiction of human sexuality should be based on what players experience in the game rather than an attempt to divine the developer's intentions from analysis of the code.
posted by straight at 7:40 AM on November 4, 2016
If you re-read my comments more carefully, you will find that I am consistently objecting to people making pronouncements about whether a character is straight or bisexual based only on code governing the behavior of characters.
But the game actually flags characters as 'gay' or not at character creation. That means that out of all of Rimworlds stories, there are zero stories in which anyone finds out that someone is gay; it's a visible character trait.
So the sensible critique of the game would be, "Rimworld contains no straight women because the interface fails to explicitly label characters as 'straight' or 'bisexual,'" rather than trying to talk about whether straight characters "exist" based on parsing code for character behavior.
But my broader point is that I think it's a category error to talk about whether narrative categories exist based on analysis of the code. There is code for the game; it's a mistake to talk about characters having code as if it were the same sort of thing as human beings having character traits. A human being has a sexual orientation as well as behavior. A computer game has code that creates events in the game. The players create narrative meaning from those events.
For instance, you might have a game where character behavior is an emergent property of objects in the game. Sexual behavior could be coded as a property of beds. Whether that behavior adds up to a good or a bad depiction of human sexuality should be based on what players experience in the game rather than an attempt to divine the developer's intentions from analysis of the code.
posted by straight at 7:40 AM on November 4, 2016
Actually, let me correct that. I'm not objecting to attempts at divining the developer's intentions so much as I am saying it's misleading to reify bits of code as if you could draw a line around a bit of code, label it "the character," and then try to talk about the code as if it were a fictional person the way you can talk about a character in a book as a fictional person.
posted by straight at 7:47 AM on November 4, 2016
posted by straight at 7:47 AM on November 4, 2016
Whether that behavior adds up to a good or a bad depiction of human sexuality should be based on what players experience in the game rather than an attempt to divine the developer's intentions from analysis of the code.
...and Rimworld's model produces results that are bad enough that people went hunting through the code to try and figure out why it was so badly skewed. The model is not a good one. A world in which any female character could partner up with any other gemakker character - not will, not does, but could - where the same is not the case for men, that is a problematic model, a problematic simulation producing a problematic emergent reality (again, that being what caused people to go poking in the code to begin with). If sexuality were a property of beds and produced the same results, it would be an equally bad and problematic model.
Much like flammability of wood is a property of all wood, whether it actually catches fire or not, "has an X percent chance of being interested in a given woman and a y percent chance of being interested in a given man" is a property of all women in Rimworld, and is not of a characteristic of men in the game. Whether it happens or not, those percentages, those possibilities exist.
posted by Dysk at 7:50 AM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
...and Rimworld's model produces results that are bad enough that people went hunting through the code to try and figure out why it was so badly skewed. The model is not a good one. A world in which any female character could partner up with any other gemakker character - not will, not does, but could - where the same is not the case for men, that is a problematic model, a problematic simulation producing a problematic emergent reality (again, that being what caused people to go poking in the code to begin with). If sexuality were a property of beds and produced the same results, it would be an equally bad and problematic model.
Much like flammability of wood is a property of all wood, whether it actually catches fire or not, "has an X percent chance of being interested in a given woman and a y percent chance of being interested in a given man" is a property of all women in Rimworld, and is not of a characteristic of men in the game. Whether it happens or not, those percentages, those possibilities exist.
posted by Dysk at 7:50 AM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
I am saying it's misleading to reify bits of code as if you could draw a line around a bit of code, label it "the character," and then try to talk about the code as if it were a fictional person the way you can talk about a character in a book as a fictional person.
Okay, but if you look at the gestalt of the code rather than any specific thing, all women in Rimworld still possess the "can fall in love with either gender" characteristic in a way that is simply not true of Rimworld's men.
posted by Dysk at 7:52 AM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]
Okay, but if you look at the gestalt of the code rather than any specific thing, all women in Rimworld still possess the "can fall in love with either gender" characteristic in a way that is simply not true of Rimworld's men.
posted by Dysk at 7:52 AM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]
destrius: The narrativist approach to game criticism is extremely limited and depends to a great deal on a very limited definition of game, or art for that matter. What is the "story" of Beethoven's 7th, Central Park, or Jackson Pollock No. 31? A good cinema critic isn't just going to look at the story, they are going to also be looking at formalisms such as the use of montage, the blocking and framing of scenes, and visual and audio rhythm. A music critic isn't going to be limited to just opera and narrative ballads, they're going to look also at compositional contrasts, unity, and development. In game design, one approach to this is mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. (PDF). A game isn't necessarily a "story generator," and I'm not convinced that's an accurate description of a management simulator.
Looking at mechanics is what allows for people who study games to talk about Chess or Settlers of Catan as beautiful games. We can talk about how Mario Kart is a beautiful game because negative feedback mechanics allow for a skilled player to pull off amazing upsets from a losing position. In contrast, we can talk about how Monopoly is an ugly game due to the lack of meaningful endgame play. Bioware games have become ugly to me lately because the narrative aesthetics of having characters debate social justice metaphors directly conflicts with the primary dynamics of mass homicide.
straight: Why do I think you wouldn't be beating a dead horse if the code in question simulated a tractor-trailer truck, a rifle, or a liquid-fuel rocket? The bits of code in question are simulating people, with gender, sexual orientation, and relationship status as variables (along with profession, age, basic needs, personality, and mental health.) We can use the word "bisexual" to also talk about fictional and simulated sexual orientation/identity. Singing out sexual orientation out of a dozen different variables and mechanics for a deep dive into deconstructionist "what does it really mean" bullshit is starting to look like the usual homophobic/biphobic pushback we get when we talk about LGBTQ representation in both fiction and games.
And very few people have talked about authorial intent at all. For the most part, I've been sticking to talking about mechanics and dynamics.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:18 AM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
Looking at mechanics is what allows for people who study games to talk about Chess or Settlers of Catan as beautiful games. We can talk about how Mario Kart is a beautiful game because negative feedback mechanics allow for a skilled player to pull off amazing upsets from a losing position. In contrast, we can talk about how Monopoly is an ugly game due to the lack of meaningful endgame play. Bioware games have become ugly to me lately because the narrative aesthetics of having characters debate social justice metaphors directly conflicts with the primary dynamics of mass homicide.
straight: Why do I think you wouldn't be beating a dead horse if the code in question simulated a tractor-trailer truck, a rifle, or a liquid-fuel rocket? The bits of code in question are simulating people, with gender, sexual orientation, and relationship status as variables (along with profession, age, basic needs, personality, and mental health.) We can use the word "bisexual" to also talk about fictional and simulated sexual orientation/identity. Singing out sexual orientation out of a dozen different variables and mechanics for a deep dive into deconstructionist "what does it really mean" bullshit is starting to look like the usual homophobic/biphobic pushback we get when we talk about LGBTQ representation in both fiction and games.
And very few people have talked about authorial intent at all. For the most part, I've been sticking to talking about mechanics and dynamics.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:18 AM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
Dysk: "Okay, but if you look at the gestalt of the code rather than any specific thing, all women in Rimworld still possess the "can fall in love with either gender" characteristic in a way that is simply not true of Rimworld's men."
Pedantic correction, there are lesbians, who are simulated as monosexual. In this respect, the gay men and women are treated more as equivalent than the non-gay men and women.
posted by RobotHero at 9:51 AM on November 4, 2016
Pedantic correction, there are lesbians, who are simulated as monosexual. In this respect, the gay men and women are treated more as equivalent than the non-gay men and women.
posted by RobotHero at 9:51 AM on November 4, 2016
I should have specified that I meant in Rimworld's straight men and women, yes. Though the differing percentages for determining male and female homosexuality still need a hell of a lot of justifying.
posted by Dysk at 10:00 AM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Dysk at 10:00 AM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
Dysk: Yes. Just like leaving things hinted at with subtle clues and refusing to elaborate or confirm matters. We have had several threads recently that dealt quite thoroughly with why this kind of erasure is a problem.
Alright, I didn't really think through my comment. How about a slightly different scenario; what if the author comes out and says "well, when I was writing the story, the character was straight in my mind. But now that I've read it again, picking up on the cues you mention, I can see your point. Perhaps my subconscious knew he was gay even though I didn't. I've now decided that the character is gay as you believe." That the author didn't set out to write a gay character is disappointing, definitely, but I think that shouldn't affect your feelings towards the story too much?
straight: I'm not objecting to attempts at divining the developer's intentions so much as I am saying it's misleading to reify bits of code as if you could draw a line around a bit of code, label it "the character," and then try to talk about the code as if it were a fictional person the way you can talk about a character in a book as a fictional person.
Yes, this is what I mean. Let me try a stab at another example.
Suppose for some reason that the developer is constrained to store the sexual orientation of the characters in a single bit. So, in order to allow for bi characters, they have to do what Rimworld does; they do an additional probability test during each interaction, with the numbers carefully adjusted so the result is that you the effect of a certain percentage of straight, gay, bi and queer characters. Or what if they don't have a place to store sexual orientation at all, so a magic function is used for each interaction to produce the desired overall effect.
Would you then say that sexual orientation does not exist in the game at all? Perhaps, but isn't that a bit like saying that characters are not really alive because we model their health with hitpoints? Another example would be if the code was written lazily and that sexual orientation was only decided during the first interaction. We shouldn't conflate the code performing a conditional operation with the character making a decision; they are two separate things. (I feel like we're starting to venture into Searle's Chinese Room territory)
The reason why this feels like an important distinction to make is that I can imagine situations where there might be a really problematic mechanic, but it isn't exhibited in the code; that shouldn't be an excuse for the developer.
CBrachyrhynchos: Looking at mechanics is what allows for people who study games to talk about Chess or Settlers of Catan as beautiful games.
Yes, but the low level code implementation of the mechanic can be separate from the design of the mechanic; we should be critiquing the result of the code, in terms of its effect on the game, rather than how it does so internally (unless of course you're critiquing the code, which is a separate thing).
In any case, there are lots of really problematic mechanics mentioned in the article that are inexcuseable, like how females are less likely to initiate, the way attractiveness works, etc. I pretty much agree with the entire article. In fact I agreed that there were no straight women in the game as well, till straight's comments made me think a bit deeper about how that might not make sense.
Anyway I have a feeling this is all a huge derail that is getting a bit too academic and nitpicky, so I will leave things as that.
Ironically, I work in infosec, and a large amount of my time is spent reverse engineering code to figure out what the programmer is trying to do.
posted by destrius at 10:05 AM on November 4, 2016
Alright, I didn't really think through my comment. How about a slightly different scenario; what if the author comes out and says "well, when I was writing the story, the character was straight in my mind. But now that I've read it again, picking up on the cues you mention, I can see your point. Perhaps my subconscious knew he was gay even though I didn't. I've now decided that the character is gay as you believe." That the author didn't set out to write a gay character is disappointing, definitely, but I think that shouldn't affect your feelings towards the story too much?
straight: I'm not objecting to attempts at divining the developer's intentions so much as I am saying it's misleading to reify bits of code as if you could draw a line around a bit of code, label it "the character," and then try to talk about the code as if it were a fictional person the way you can talk about a character in a book as a fictional person.
Yes, this is what I mean. Let me try a stab at another example.
Suppose for some reason that the developer is constrained to store the sexual orientation of the characters in a single bit. So, in order to allow for bi characters, they have to do what Rimworld does; they do an additional probability test during each interaction, with the numbers carefully adjusted so the result is that you the effect of a certain percentage of straight, gay, bi and queer characters. Or what if they don't have a place to store sexual orientation at all, so a magic function is used for each interaction to produce the desired overall effect.
Would you then say that sexual orientation does not exist in the game at all? Perhaps, but isn't that a bit like saying that characters are not really alive because we model their health with hitpoints? Another example would be if the code was written lazily and that sexual orientation was only decided during the first interaction. We shouldn't conflate the code performing a conditional operation with the character making a decision; they are two separate things. (I feel like we're starting to venture into Searle's Chinese Room territory)
The reason why this feels like an important distinction to make is that I can imagine situations where there might be a really problematic mechanic, but it isn't exhibited in the code; that shouldn't be an excuse for the developer.
CBrachyrhynchos: Looking at mechanics is what allows for people who study games to talk about Chess or Settlers of Catan as beautiful games.
Yes, but the low level code implementation of the mechanic can be separate from the design of the mechanic; we should be critiquing the result of the code, in terms of its effect on the game, rather than how it does so internally (unless of course you're critiquing the code, which is a separate thing).
In any case, there are lots of really problematic mechanics mentioned in the article that are inexcuseable, like how females are less likely to initiate, the way attractiveness works, etc. I pretty much agree with the entire article. In fact I agreed that there were no straight women in the game as well, till straight's comments made me think a bit deeper about how that might not make sense.
Anyway I have a feeling this is all a huge derail that is getting a bit too academic and nitpicky, so I will leave things as that.
Ironically, I work in infosec, and a large amount of my time is spent reverse engineering code to figure out what the programmer is trying to do.
posted by destrius at 10:05 AM on November 4, 2016
Or what if they don't have a place to store sexual orientation at all, so a magic function is used for each interaction to produce the desired overall effect.
Would you then say that sexual orientation does not exist in the game at all?
No, I'd say that everyone in the game is bi, and accept that add an abstract simplification for the sake of simplicity, simulation complexity, underlying code reasons, whatever. It's like... an undetailed model isn't necessarily bad for lacking detail. A very detailed model that conspicuously omits certain details, or introduces complexity in order to create unequal outcomes, is a different matter.
posted by Dysk at 10:21 AM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]
Would you then say that sexual orientation does not exist in the game at all?
No, I'd say that everyone in the game is bi, and accept that add an abstract simplification for the sake of simplicity, simulation complexity, underlying code reasons, whatever. It's like... an undetailed model isn't necessarily bad for lacking detail. A very detailed model that conspicuously omits certain details, or introduces complexity in order to create unequal outcomes, is a different matter.
posted by Dysk at 10:21 AM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]
How does a knight move, in chess? If I ask you that, you know what I mean. Because we do draw a line around certain rules of chess and treat them as properties of the pieces.
En passant is a property of a pawn. And if you play a game of chess where neither player actually has opportunity to use this property, it doesn't retroactively mean that it wasn't a property of the pawn for that game.
posted by RobotHero at 10:25 AM on November 4, 2016 [3 favorites]
En passant is a property of a pawn. And if you play a game of chess where neither player actually has opportunity to use this property, it doesn't retroactively mean that it wasn't a property of the pawn for that game.
posted by RobotHero at 10:25 AM on November 4, 2016 [3 favorites]
Generally when we talk about LGBTQ (and straight, rather than assuming that everyone is straight) characters in art or mass media, it's taken for granted that "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." The representation isn't a person, it's an artistic depiction of complex persons, real or imaginary. That the representation is done via algorithms and bytes rather than paint strokes on a canvas or silver molecules in a gelatin print doesn't really change the principle that it represents people. Or see Scott McCloud's chapter on semiotics in Understanding Comics for a broader explanation for how it works. Much of this reductionism strikes me as along the lines of a literal-minded alien that can't understand portraiture because it's flat.
I'm skeptical of this because characters do a lot of things across different media, but it always seems to be in the area of sexuality that "thou shalt no label" comes to the fore. We rarely say that Raider Scum isn't really violent because it's all just numerical functions, or that shopkeepers are not really engaged in an economic exchange. If it looks like a duck and acts like a duck, we might as well call it a duck. And if bits of code represented as human form relationships with other bits of code, get jealous, and possibly have children, we might as well call it sexuality. With the full no shit sherlock caveat that Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
For a variety of reasons, I don't think those systems need to be realistic. They do need to be fun (unless "fun" isn't the point of the game.) A character can be a yellow pawn in a train car.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:27 AM on November 4, 2016 [3 favorites]
I'm skeptical of this because characters do a lot of things across different media, but it always seems to be in the area of sexuality that "thou shalt no label" comes to the fore. We rarely say that Raider Scum isn't really violent because it's all just numerical functions, or that shopkeepers are not really engaged in an economic exchange. If it looks like a duck and acts like a duck, we might as well call it a duck. And if bits of code represented as human form relationships with other bits of code, get jealous, and possibly have children, we might as well call it sexuality. With the full no shit sherlock caveat that Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
For a variety of reasons, I don't think those systems need to be realistic. They do need to be fun (unless "fun" isn't the point of the game.) A character can be a yellow pawn in a train car.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:27 AM on November 4, 2016 [3 favorites]
straight: Why do I think you wouldn't be beating a dead horse if the code in question simulated a tractor-trailer truck, a rifle, or a liquid-fuel rocket?
That's a helpful question because I think it would be equally misguided for someone who doesn't like the vehicle handling in a truck simulator to go into the code and claim that the problem was that this particular bit of code doesn't model tire physics accurately. Physics and movement code in games is a bunch of ugly hacks, and it's a big mistake to assume the way to get it to feel "right" is by taking an individual bit like the tires and trying to model tire physics more accurately.
Unless we develop genuine AI, sexuality and other aspects of game characters will always be insultingly, de-humanizingly mechanical under the hood. Some people would argue that this is a fatal flaw of video games, that it's actually harmful for us to be interacting with these mechanical parodies of people as if they were people. But if it is acceptable (and maybe it only is in some cases but not others), it is because players agree to fill in the gaps, to use narrative to humanize the characters produced by these simulations. That's not to say that the simulations and the narratives they suggest can't be criticized. They can and should be. But it's entirely possible that in some cases better narratives can be suggested by code that, under the hood, looks more insultingly mechanical. I think it's a mistake to criticize games because the code isn't working at a low level the way real humans work. It never will. We should be judging whether the code produces game characters that feel right when we play the game.
posted by straight at 12:38 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
That's a helpful question because I think it would be equally misguided for someone who doesn't like the vehicle handling in a truck simulator to go into the code and claim that the problem was that this particular bit of code doesn't model tire physics accurately. Physics and movement code in games is a bunch of ugly hacks, and it's a big mistake to assume the way to get it to feel "right" is by taking an individual bit like the tires and trying to model tire physics more accurately.
Unless we develop genuine AI, sexuality and other aspects of game characters will always be insultingly, de-humanizingly mechanical under the hood. Some people would argue that this is a fatal flaw of video games, that it's actually harmful for us to be interacting with these mechanical parodies of people as if they were people. But if it is acceptable (and maybe it only is in some cases but not others), it is because players agree to fill in the gaps, to use narrative to humanize the characters produced by these simulations. That's not to say that the simulations and the narratives they suggest can't be criticized. They can and should be. But it's entirely possible that in some cases better narratives can be suggested by code that, under the hood, looks more insultingly mechanical. I think it's a mistake to criticize games because the code isn't working at a low level the way real humans work. It never will. We should be judging whether the code produces game characters that feel right when we play the game.
posted by straight at 12:38 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
That's a helpful question because I think it would be equally misguided for someone who doesn't like the vehicle handling in a truck simulator to go into the code and claim that the problem was that this particular bit of code doesn't model tire physics accurately. Physics and movement code in games is a bunch of ugly hacks, and it's a big mistake to assume the way to get it to feel "right" is by taking an individual bit like the tires and trying to model tire physics more accurately.
This doesn't make a bit of sense. The source code for the game is where mechanics are implemented. There are few ways to improve mechanics without changing the underlying code. In many cases, unwanted behavior is introduced or eliminated by tweaking a handful of algorithm constants. And in contrast, you can't raise very many criticisms of game mechanics that don't require changes to the code (or rules if you're talking analog games).
So yes, if the truck slides across the road like its on ice skates in the middle of summer, it's probably a problem with the relationships among velocity, tires, and road surface. More importantly, we can't really talk about those mechanics at all unless we admit that the mechanics are an object-oriented model with an approximate model of physical objects. From there, it's a small step to recognize that social and psychological mechanics in games are also an object-oriented model.
That's not to say that the simulations and the narratives they suggest can't be criticized. They can and should be.
Now you're dragging the goalposts around. And repeating what the people you've been concern-trolling with sophomoric deconstructionism have been discussing from the start. But at least you're finally on board (sort of) with the fact that we are talking about an abstract simulation game and not a visual novel.
But by all means, we can critique the resulting dynamics in terms of the mechanics as implemented in code because those mechanics don't live in texture maps or in audio files. If that code says that ducks breathe fire and spit acid, well, we can talk about how feeding the ducks has become a ridiculous losing condition. Similarly, if the code sets up an imbalance in relationships between men and women, we can talk about that introduces a weird problems managing happiness in the game.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:21 PM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]
This doesn't make a bit of sense. The source code for the game is where mechanics are implemented. There are few ways to improve mechanics without changing the underlying code. In many cases, unwanted behavior is introduced or eliminated by tweaking a handful of algorithm constants. And in contrast, you can't raise very many criticisms of game mechanics that don't require changes to the code (or rules if you're talking analog games).
So yes, if the truck slides across the road like its on ice skates in the middle of summer, it's probably a problem with the relationships among velocity, tires, and road surface. More importantly, we can't really talk about those mechanics at all unless we admit that the mechanics are an object-oriented model with an approximate model of physical objects. From there, it's a small step to recognize that social and psychological mechanics in games are also an object-oriented model.
That's not to say that the simulations and the narratives they suggest can't be criticized. They can and should be.
Now you're dragging the goalposts around. And repeating what the people you've been concern-trolling with sophomoric deconstructionism have been discussing from the start. But at least you're finally on board (sort of) with the fact that we are talking about an abstract simulation game and not a visual novel.
But by all means, we can critique the resulting dynamics in terms of the mechanics as implemented in code because those mechanics don't live in texture maps or in audio files. If that code says that ducks breathe fire and spit acid, well, we can talk about how feeding the ducks has become a ridiculous losing condition. Similarly, if the code sets up an imbalance in relationships between men and women, we can talk about that introduces a weird problems managing happiness in the game.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:21 PM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]
I think it's a mistake to criticize games because the code isn't working at a low level the way real humans work.
But we aren't talking about a code choice that is unobservable in gameplay, but one that has observable mechanical effects, both on a population level (it produces a different statistical distribution of relationships) and on an individual pawn level (reloading a save will demonstrate that all female pawns are functionally bisexual, whereas no male pawns are).
posted by Pyry at 1:27 PM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
But we aren't talking about a code choice that is unobservable in gameplay, but one that has observable mechanical effects, both on a population level (it produces a different statistical distribution of relationships) and on an individual pawn level (reloading a save will demonstrate that all female pawns are functionally bisexual, whereas no male pawns are).
posted by Pyry at 1:27 PM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
I think it's a mistake to criticize games because the code isn't working at a low level the way real humans work.
The game author said he did it that way on purpose, because he thinks that is the way humans work.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 2:27 PM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]
The game author said he did it that way on purpose, because he thinks that is the way humans work.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 2:27 PM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]
In SimCity they simulate little people commuting to work and back home. Except, they don't bother making the individual people remember what job they have. Each time a workplace starts a shift, it sends out a signal for workers, and the closest available workers receive the signal and go work there. So in a sense, everyone in your city is a temp-worker.
But the design of SimCity is not very interested in the life of any individual person, they're trying to get broad trends like the resulting traffic patterns. So simulating individual people going on job-searches and being interviewed and hired, etc. is a level of detail they didn't want to bother with. So there, I'd see the argument that they're not really simulating temp-workers. It's just beyond the level of detail of the simulation to make further distinction. Like how, if your graphics are made of pixels, it doesn't necessarily mean the game's about people made of squares.
But in RimWorld, this clearly is the level of detail we're supposed to be considering, otherwise why would we even know who has shacked up with whom? And we have other character-assigned properties, like how good are they at particular jobs, like hunting or cooking. (They also get better with practice, but I could understand not applying that logic to sexual attraction.) If every character had equal likelihood for success at hunting, it would be perfectly valid and true for me to say, "Every character is equally good at hunting." If one of them has a lucky streak, that has no correlation with his future performance. Similarly, it doesn't make sense to say a character is straight based solely on her past relationships rather than what potential relationships you could predict as possible.
And to show there are real, observable differences here: if you sent all your men on suicide missions, resulting in an all-women crew, you would have some small chance of them all pairing up. If you did the opposite and got an all-men crew, you're going to have a hard cap based on how many gay men you've got.
This seems like a good time to link Legomancer's SimCity comment. Tangentially relevant, because it's about determining the personality of simulated people according to their behaviour.
posted by RobotHero at 4:34 PM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]
But the design of SimCity is not very interested in the life of any individual person, they're trying to get broad trends like the resulting traffic patterns. So simulating individual people going on job-searches and being interviewed and hired, etc. is a level of detail they didn't want to bother with. So there, I'd see the argument that they're not really simulating temp-workers. It's just beyond the level of detail of the simulation to make further distinction. Like how, if your graphics are made of pixels, it doesn't necessarily mean the game's about people made of squares.
But in RimWorld, this clearly is the level of detail we're supposed to be considering, otherwise why would we even know who has shacked up with whom? And we have other character-assigned properties, like how good are they at particular jobs, like hunting or cooking. (They also get better with practice, but I could understand not applying that logic to sexual attraction.) If every character had equal likelihood for success at hunting, it would be perfectly valid and true for me to say, "Every character is equally good at hunting." If one of them has a lucky streak, that has no correlation with his future performance. Similarly, it doesn't make sense to say a character is straight based solely on her past relationships rather than what potential relationships you could predict as possible.
And to show there are real, observable differences here: if you sent all your men on suicide missions, resulting in an all-women crew, you would have some small chance of them all pairing up. If you did the opposite and got an all-men crew, you're going to have a hard cap based on how many gay men you've got.
This seems like a good time to link Legomancer's SimCity comment. Tangentially relevant, because it's about determining the personality of simulated people according to their behaviour.
posted by RobotHero at 4:34 PM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]
reprise the theme song and roll the credits: The game author said he did it that way on purpose, because he thinks that is the way humans work.
For what it's worth, he does say in his reddit comment that the fact that male pawns can't have relationships with other male pawns in the same way that female pawns can is a bug that he'd like to fix:
The game does expose orientation to the user in the specific way that a pawn (either male or female) can have the trait "Gay", which appears at the time of creation and is visible in the game if the user pulls up the details of a specific pawn. As detailed in the RPS article, pawns with this trait will only ever attempt to initiate relationships with members of their same gender. (When you start the game you can choose between 1-5 pawns as your starting colonists, rerolling them if you don't like them; subsequent pawns join your colony during the game and are randomly generated. I'm not sure what the percentage chance is of any given pawn having the "Gay" trait, but it must be in the code somewhere.)
Also: Suppose for some reason that the developer is constrained to store the sexual orientation of the characters in a single bit. So, in order to allow for bi characters, they have to do what Rimworld does; they do an additional probability test during each interaction, with the numbers carefully adjusted so the result is that you the effect of a certain percentage of straight, gay, bi and queer characters. Or what if they don't have a place to store sexual orientation at all, so a magic function is used for each interaction to produce the desired overall effect.
I think this is a fascinating thought experiment; in effect the character's orientation would not be determined when they were created, but could only be determined post facto by whether they had had relationships with the same gender, the opposite gender, or both. To the naive player who did not decompile the code, I don't think the experience of any single game would be detectably different, although if the percentages were as skewed as they currently are towards only female pawns engaging in same-sex relationships, one might notice a trend over multiple games.
More broadly, I wonder what alternative systems people would advocate for determining the orientation of the pawns in Rimworld. If we take as given that the current system is problematic, how could it be amended to not be problematic?
posted by whir at 4:59 PM on November 4, 2016
For what it's worth, he does say in his reddit comment that the fact that male pawns can't have relationships with other male pawns in the same way that female pawns can is a bug that he'd like to fix:
It's true there's an issue in the game where this behavior won't appear. It'll be fixed in the next release.destrius: PS: I've never actually played the game so for all I know it might actually explicitly state the pawns' orientation in some interface. Which would be a whole different matter.
The game does expose orientation to the user in the specific way that a pawn (either male or female) can have the trait "Gay", which appears at the time of creation and is visible in the game if the user pulls up the details of a specific pawn. As detailed in the RPS article, pawns with this trait will only ever attempt to initiate relationships with members of their same gender. (When you start the game you can choose between 1-5 pawns as your starting colonists, rerolling them if you don't like them; subsequent pawns join your colony during the game and are randomly generated. I'm not sure what the percentage chance is of any given pawn having the "Gay" trait, but it must be in the code somewhere.)
Also: Suppose for some reason that the developer is constrained to store the sexual orientation of the characters in a single bit. So, in order to allow for bi characters, they have to do what Rimworld does; they do an additional probability test during each interaction, with the numbers carefully adjusted so the result is that you the effect of a certain percentage of straight, gay, bi and queer characters. Or what if they don't have a place to store sexual orientation at all, so a magic function is used for each interaction to produce the desired overall effect.
I think this is a fascinating thought experiment; in effect the character's orientation would not be determined when they were created, but could only be determined post facto by whether they had had relationships with the same gender, the opposite gender, or both. To the naive player who did not decompile the code, I don't think the experience of any single game would be detectably different, although if the percentages were as skewed as they currently are towards only female pawns engaging in same-sex relationships, one might notice a trend over multiple games.
More broadly, I wonder what alternative systems people would advocate for determining the orientation of the pawns in Rimworld. If we take as given that the current system is problematic, how could it be amended to not be problematic?
posted by whir at 4:59 PM on November 4, 2016
Now that I think about it, a skyrim mod that mapped dragon mechanics onto chickens would be pretty hilarious for at least 20 minutes.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:41 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:41 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
To be pedantic I'd categorize that more as a feature request than a bug fix.
posted by Artw at 7:20 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Artw at 7:20 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
OK, so how about this even more contrived thought experiment: suppose for each world, the game stores and unchangeable random seed that is used for all probability calculations, like how it's done in Civ. As such, all sequence of events are deterministic, and you can take a character and calculate her responses to every interaction she will ever go through. Does that still make all characters in the game bisexual?
Or let's say there's a huge table in the game that is referenced each time a character has an interaction; there no longer is any concept of orientation besides a list of outcomes for each character.
[Edit: hit send accidentally]
Like whir, I'm finding this thought experiment quite fascinating, and hope nobody minds us continuing to discuss it; I do think that regardless of what we're talking about here, the mechanics of Rimworld are deeply problematic, and I'm not suggesting this isn't the case. Just indulging in some geekery... If you feel offended by this discussion let me know and I'll stop, apologies in advance!
posted by destrius at 10:33 PM on November 4, 2016
Or let's say there's a huge table in the game that is referenced each time a character has an interaction; there no longer is any concept of orientation besides a list of outcomes for each character.
[Edit: hit send accidentally]
Like whir, I'm finding this thought experiment quite fascinating, and hope nobody minds us continuing to discuss it; I do think that regardless of what we're talking about here, the mechanics of Rimworld are deeply problematic, and I'm not suggesting this isn't the case. Just indulging in some geekery... If you feel offended by this discussion let me know and I'll stop, apologies in advance!
posted by destrius at 10:33 PM on November 4, 2016
suppose for each world, the game stores and unchangeable random seed that is used for all probability calculations, like how it's done in Civ. As such, all sequence of events are deterministic, and you can take a character and calculate her responses to every interaction she will ever go through. Does that still make all characters in the game bisexual?
No.
Or let's say there's a huge table in the game that is referenced each time a character has an interaction; there no longer is any concept of orientation besides a list of outcomes for each character.
Er sorry, no. However you implement it, characters exhibiting relationship behaviour have a sexuality. Whether that concept is handled as such in your code, characters have a sexuality if they're pairing off. That's pretty much what a sexuality is.
posted by Dysk at 11:05 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
No.
Or let's say there's a huge table in the game that is referenced each time a character has an interaction; there no longer is any concept of orientation besides a list of outcomes for each character.
Er sorry, no. However you implement it, characters exhibiting relationship behaviour have a sexuality. Whether that concept is handled as such in your code, characters have a sexuality if they're pairing off. That's pretty much what a sexuality is.
posted by Dysk at 11:05 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]
I mean, you might as well argue that none of the characters in, say, Fallout (or virtually any narrative game) don't have memory if you don't implement a variable or array to 'be' a given character's memory. If a character turns up late in the game making reference to something that happened earlier, that character is not memory-less just because you aren't storing what they've seen anywhere and that line of dialogue is determined purely by the plot and is actually triggered by your actions or whatever.
posted by Dysk at 11:08 PM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 11:08 PM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]
Like whir, I'm finding this thought experiment quite fascinating, and hope nobody minds us continuing to discuss it;
And I don't know if anyone minds as such, or what that would mean.exactly, but "whee, thought experiment!" on issues like LGBT representation is never going to be a good look.
posted by Dysk at 11:24 PM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
And I don't know if anyone minds as such, or what that would mean.exactly, but "whee, thought experiment!" on issues like LGBT representation is never going to be a good look.
posted by Dysk at 11:24 PM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]
Well I kickstarted that Chuck Tingle thing so thanks guys.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 6:26 AM on November 5, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 6:26 AM on November 5, 2016 [2 favorites]
I think it's reasonable to apply the word "bisexual" to a system of algorithms in which a character can have a romantic/sexual relationship with other characters. We can also use the word bisexual to talk about historic persons before the emergence of a bisexual (sub)cultural identity in the 1970s, and about characters in fiction where those relationships are hinted but not explicitly described. Similarly, we can talk about characters having race, class, profession, and sexuality even if those characters are little more than splashes of paint on a canvas.
A big chunk of why I'm pushing back on this so hard is that using the word "bisexual" as an interpretive adjective is increasingly challenged right now. It's one thing to note that compulsory heterosexuality makes such interpretations tentative and ambiguous. But this is an objection that routinely is made regarding bisexual and not other ways of interpreting character sexuality.
Note that there's been no debate about the existence of exclusively gay/lesbian characters in the game, even though a gay/lesbian character may never have a relationship.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:51 AM on November 5, 2016 [4 favorites]
A big chunk of why I'm pushing back on this so hard is that using the word "bisexual" as an interpretive adjective is increasingly challenged right now. It's one thing to note that compulsory heterosexuality makes such interpretations tentative and ambiguous. But this is an objection that routinely is made regarding bisexual and not other ways of interpreting character sexuality.
Note that there's been no debate about the existence of exclusively gay/lesbian characters in the game, even though a gay/lesbian character may never have a relationship.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:51 AM on November 5, 2016 [4 favorites]
"whee, thought experiment!" on issues like LGBT representation is never going to be a good look.
Uh, I mean, pardon me for being interested in the ongoing discussion I guess? I take your point about bi erasure, but we're talking about game systems that generate simulations of people, are thought experiments off the table?
posted by whir at 10:58 PM on November 5, 2016
Uh, I mean, pardon me for being interested in the ongoing discussion I guess? I take your point about bi erasure, but we're talking about game systems that generate simulations of people, are thought experiments off the table?
posted by whir at 10:58 PM on November 5, 2016
Dysk: Er sorry, no. However you implement it, characters exhibiting relationship behaviour have a sexuality. Whether that concept is handled as such in your code, characters have a sexuality if they're pairing off. That's pretty much what a sexuality is.
What I meant was, there is no longer any concept of orientation and sexuality in the code in the form of a variable assigned to a character. The list of partners of a character does not equate to their sexuality; like you mentioned mentioned upthread, that a bi person only has parters of a certain sex doesn't mean they aren't bi. And I'm also saying that the list of partners is isomorphic to the random check per encounter.
Dysk: I mean, you might as well argue that none of the characters in, say, Fallout (or virtually any narrative game) don't have memory if you don't implement a variable or array to 'be' a given character's memory. If a character turns up late in the game making reference to something that happened earlier, that character is not memory-less just because you aren't storing what they've seen anywhere and that line of dialogue is determined purely by the plot and is actually triggered by your actions or whatever.
Yeah, and that's my point! Whether or not a character is X or has Y is something that we should be determining at the narrative level, not at the level of code. We shouldn't establish a direct correspondence between things in the code and facts in the story. That we do a random check before each interaction in the code does not mean the character is making a decision before each interaction, unless that is what the story says.
whir: The game does expose orientation to the user in the specific way that a pawn (either male or female) can have the trait "Gay", which appears at the time of creation and is visible in the game if the user pulls up the details of a specific pawn.
Okay, then this changes everything and it means Rimworld is even more screwed up.
Dysk: And I don't know if anyone minds as such, or what that would mean.exactly, but "whee, thought experiment!" on issues like LGBT representation is never going to be a good look.
Yeah, which is why I was kind of hesitant to join in this thread to begin with; I can see that while I'm just having an abstract discussion here, these things that many people have to live through daily. I've decided its probably in bad taste to continue anymore, so I'll bow out after this comment. If you don't mind though, I have figured out one last scenario which will hopefully explain better why I think conflating code with narrative is dangerous:
Suppose we have an RPG with a trans character. When you talk to her, she tells you that she is trans. But if you go and dig through the code representing the character, her gender is marked as "female" (since from the perspective of the game engine, the fact she is trans does not make anything different). Should people then go and declare that she is actually not trans after all, but a cis woman? And that she's lying in the dialogue? No, because the code is not part of the narrative. What happens under the hood shouldn't be taken as evidence of anything story-related.
Okay, that's all from me. Thanks for reading!
posted by destrius at 11:49 PM on November 5, 2016
What I meant was, there is no longer any concept of orientation and sexuality in the code in the form of a variable assigned to a character. The list of partners of a character does not equate to their sexuality; like you mentioned mentioned upthread, that a bi person only has parters of a certain sex doesn't mean they aren't bi. And I'm also saying that the list of partners is isomorphic to the random check per encounter.
Dysk: I mean, you might as well argue that none of the characters in, say, Fallout (or virtually any narrative game) don't have memory if you don't implement a variable or array to 'be' a given character's memory. If a character turns up late in the game making reference to something that happened earlier, that character is not memory-less just because you aren't storing what they've seen anywhere and that line of dialogue is determined purely by the plot and is actually triggered by your actions or whatever.
Yeah, and that's my point! Whether or not a character is X or has Y is something that we should be determining at the narrative level, not at the level of code. We shouldn't establish a direct correspondence between things in the code and facts in the story. That we do a random check before each interaction in the code does not mean the character is making a decision before each interaction, unless that is what the story says.
whir: The game does expose orientation to the user in the specific way that a pawn (either male or female) can have the trait "Gay", which appears at the time of creation and is visible in the game if the user pulls up the details of a specific pawn.
Okay, then this changes everything and it means Rimworld is even more screwed up.
Dysk: And I don't know if anyone minds as such, or what that would mean.exactly, but "whee, thought experiment!" on issues like LGBT representation is never going to be a good look.
Yeah, which is why I was kind of hesitant to join in this thread to begin with; I can see that while I'm just having an abstract discussion here, these things that many people have to live through daily. I've decided its probably in bad taste to continue anymore, so I'll bow out after this comment. If you don't mind though, I have figured out one last scenario which will hopefully explain better why I think conflating code with narrative is dangerous:
Suppose we have an RPG with a trans character. When you talk to her, she tells you that she is trans. But if you go and dig through the code representing the character, her gender is marked as "female" (since from the perspective of the game engine, the fact she is trans does not make anything different). Should people then go and declare that she is actually not trans after all, but a cis woman? And that she's lying in the dialogue? No, because the code is not part of the narrative. What happens under the hood shouldn't be taken as evidence of anything story-related.
Okay, that's all from me. Thanks for reading!
posted by destrius at 11:49 PM on November 5, 2016
Whether or not a character is X or has Y is something that we should be determining at the narrative level, not at the level of code.
This is not a narrative game. This is a simulation of a world. We should be looking at it at that level. The functional level, not the narrative one. You can impose any narrative you like on the characters.
Suppose we have an RPG with a trans character. When you talk to her, she tells you that she is trans. But if you go and dig through the code representing the character, her gender is marked as "female" (since from the perspective of the game engine, the fact she is trans does not make anything different)
I don't know where to even start. This is so odious I'm shocked you even considered posting it on MeFi. Trans women are fucking women. Of course a trans woman is marked as female. That is what she is. Jesus fucking Christ.
And if she were male in the code would that make her not a trans woman in the narrative? No, but it would make her character problematic, and the coder a transphobic asshole baking his shitty prejudices into the game. Like Sylvester with his heteronormative sexism.
posted by Dysk at 2:47 AM on November 6, 2016 [3 favorites]
This is not a narrative game. This is a simulation of a world. We should be looking at it at that level. The functional level, not the narrative one. You can impose any narrative you like on the characters.
Suppose we have an RPG with a trans character. When you talk to her, she tells you that she is trans. But if you go and dig through the code representing the character, her gender is marked as "female" (since from the perspective of the game engine, the fact she is trans does not make anything different)
I don't know where to even start. This is so odious I'm shocked you even considered posting it on MeFi. Trans women are fucking women. Of course a trans woman is marked as female. That is what she is. Jesus fucking Christ.
And if she were male in the code would that make her not a trans woman in the narrative? No, but it would make her character problematic, and the coder a transphobic asshole baking his shitty prejudices into the game. Like Sylvester with his heteronormative sexism.
posted by Dysk at 2:47 AM on November 6, 2016 [3 favorites]
we're talking about game systems that generate simulations of people, are thought experiments off the table?
That's not all we're talking about, and failing to recognise that playing hypothetical "what if..." games with something as fraught and personal as LGBT identities is a bad fucking idea regardless. Just look at how this thread has gone if you want to know why.
posted by Dysk at 2:49 AM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
That's not all we're talking about, and failing to recognise that playing hypothetical "what if..." games with something as fraught and personal as LGBT identities is a bad fucking idea regardless. Just look at how this thread has gone if you want to know why.
posted by Dysk at 2:49 AM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
No, because the code is not part of the narrative. What happens under the hood shouldn't be taken as evidence of anything story-related.
Characters don't just exist in the narrative (which again, the game in question lacks!). An RPG with a character who is a powerful magic user but doesn't explicitly talk about it, if I play through the game never giving her anything other than a dagger, that doesn't make her not a mage (it just makes me bad at the game). Games aren't books or films. They have more than just narrative, they also have gameplay mechanics. And characters very much exist and have characteristics relative to that as well as any narrative (which again, this game doesn't have, it asks you to impose or overlay one). The character that definitely has memory despite not having a variable to store it also has it even if they didn't remember anything on a given play through.
posted by Dysk at 3:09 AM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Characters don't just exist in the narrative (which again, the game in question lacks!). An RPG with a character who is a powerful magic user but doesn't explicitly talk about it, if I play through the game never giving her anything other than a dagger, that doesn't make her not a mage (it just makes me bad at the game). Games aren't books or films. They have more than just narrative, they also have gameplay mechanics. And characters very much exist and have characteristics relative to that as well as any narrative (which again, this game doesn't have, it asks you to impose or overlay one). The character that definitely has memory despite not having a variable to store it also has it even if they didn't remember anything on a given play through.
posted by Dysk at 3:09 AM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
I don't know where to even start. This is so odious I'm shocked you even considered posting it on MeFi. Trans women are fucking women. Of course a trans woman is marked as female. That is what she is. Jesus fucking Christ.
Okay I have to clarify on this point... yes I know that trans women are female, and I'm not suggesting that its wrong to mark her gender as female. And yes if her gender was marked as male this would be even worse. What I meant is that there is no indication from the code that she is trans, yet that doesn't mean her character is thus a cis woman. If anything it means that whether characters are cis or trans are unknowable from the code. Originally I wrote it as that she had no "isTrans" property set on the object, but I rewrote it to sound technical. I obviously phrased this atrociously, I'm really sorry and apologise. :(
Anyway I think we are actually in agreement... just that I'm drawing a line between gameplay mechanics and algorithms, versus the underlying to-be-compiled-to-machine-code implementation. It is probably a very pedantic distinction, but its the kind of thing I deal with all the time so that's why I talked about it.
Okay I've done enough damage... sorry everybody. I'm out.
posted by destrius at 4:49 AM on November 6, 2016
Okay I have to clarify on this point... yes I know that trans women are female, and I'm not suggesting that its wrong to mark her gender as female. And yes if her gender was marked as male this would be even worse. What I meant is that there is no indication from the code that she is trans, yet that doesn't mean her character is thus a cis woman. If anything it means that whether characters are cis or trans are unknowable from the code. Originally I wrote it as that she had no "isTrans" property set on the object, but I rewrote it to sound technical. I obviously phrased this atrociously, I'm really sorry and apologise. :(
Anyway I think we are actually in agreement... just that I'm drawing a line between gameplay mechanics and algorithms, versus the underlying to-be-compiled-to-machine-code implementation. It is probably a very pedantic distinction, but its the kind of thing I deal with all the time so that's why I talked about it.
Okay I've done enough damage... sorry everybody. I'm out.
posted by destrius at 4:49 AM on November 6, 2016
Things exist in function as well as narrative. That's gameplay mechanics. We can, to an extent, interrogate gameplay mechanics by looking at the underlying code. If you've made sexuality a gameplay mechanic (as rimworld has) then you can absolutely say things about it based on how that mechanic is implemented (which is, after all, what governs how it manifests to the player) in a way that you're right we couldn't do in all sorts of other hypotheticals. We aren't dealing with them, though. We're dealing with rimworld, about which we can absolutely make statements about view sexuality operates in its game worlds based on the code.
posted by Dysk at 5:27 AM on November 6, 2016
posted by Dysk at 5:27 AM on November 6, 2016
In RimWorld there are trans characters but as far as I know it only ever appears in their backstory. Which I think would fit destrius' thought experiment to a T.
But I think that's the opposite situation from what we get regarding bi men and straight women. We would expect there to be a difference in behaviour between a straight person and a bi person in terms of who they're likely to be attracted to.
posted by RobotHero at 8:26 AM on November 6, 2016
But I think that's the opposite situation from what we get regarding bi men and straight women. We would expect there to be a difference in behaviour between a straight person and a bi person in terms of who they're likely to be attracted to.
posted by RobotHero at 8:26 AM on November 6, 2016
Oh wow, there is an entire essay to be written about what is wrong with that text.
posted by Dysk at 8:35 AM on November 6, 2016
posted by Dysk at 8:35 AM on November 6, 2016
If I understand this correctly, and the Mercenary reward tier on the Kickstarter it's very likely that backstory was written by a Kickstarter backer.
posted by RobotHero at 8:55 AM on November 6, 2016
posted by RobotHero at 8:55 AM on November 6, 2016
Jesus, that Steam thread. Even the few people trying not to be assholes are failing utterly, talking about "the transgenders" in a deeply dehumanising way.
posted by Dysk at 8:58 AM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Dysk at 8:58 AM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Okay, the TADR* on the Steam thread is someone refers to spending $$ to get transgender characters, but so far it seems to only be trans women, no trans men. And so there's speculation that only trans women are submitting characters. And then a bunch of people act like a collection of assholes. But the relevant information is I think the trans backstories are crowd-sourced.
*Too Aggravating, Didn't Read
posted by RobotHero at 9:18 AM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
*Too Aggravating, Didn't Read
posted by RobotHero at 9:18 AM on November 6, 2016 [1 favorite]
Rimworld already lets you graft bionic arms onto your characters, I don't think mechanics for gender related surgery are too much to ask
posted by LogicalDash at 6:47 AM on November 8, 2016
posted by LogicalDash at 6:47 AM on November 8, 2016
How gender is coded under the hood often has a wide variety of consequences, from the relatively cosmetic (in terms of gameplay) issues of pronouns, skins, character models, and voice sets, to mechanics such as different stats resulting in different gameplay experiences. There's a fairly old history of discussion about how this is done in different systems ranging from the binary gender of classic CRPGs to the plural gender of LambdaMOO. Cosmetic gendering of characters can create various degrees of dysphoria.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:55 AM on November 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:55 AM on November 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
CBrachyrhynchos: "Cosmetic gendering of characters can create various degrees of dysphoria."
How do you mean?
Do you mean identifying with a particular character? In Rimworld's case, you manage a group of people rather than play as a particular individual so there's less of a sense that this character is me than in some games, I think.
posted by RobotHero at 7:11 AM on November 8, 2016
How do you mean?
Do you mean identifying with a particular character? In Rimworld's case, you manage a group of people rather than play as a particular individual so there's less of a sense that this character is me than in some games, I think.
posted by RobotHero at 7:11 AM on November 8, 2016
Rimworld already lets you graft bionic arms onto your characters, I don't think mechanics for gender related surgery are too much to ask
That would be one hell of a can of worms to open. I cannot think of a way to implement that in a game like Rimworld - which takes a fairly shallow and simplistic view and model of people, being a simulation rather than a narrative RPG for example - without problematic implications. It's a problem if it changes the character skin from the "male" model to the "female" one. It's a problem if it has a functional effect in terms of the character's gender on nearly any level. Either has horrible implications about trans people who don't have surgery or the in terms of locating gender legitimacy or validity in surgery. Having it do neither makes the feature pointless and feel like odious tokenism.
I don't really think this kind of game is a good platform for explorations of the idea of gender-related surgery.
posted by Dysk at 7:16 AM on November 8, 2016
That would be one hell of a can of worms to open. I cannot think of a way to implement that in a game like Rimworld - which takes a fairly shallow and simplistic view and model of people, being a simulation rather than a narrative RPG for example - without problematic implications. It's a problem if it changes the character skin from the "male" model to the "female" one. It's a problem if it has a functional effect in terms of the character's gender on nearly any level. Either has horrible implications about trans people who don't have surgery or the in terms of locating gender legitimacy or validity in surgery. Having it do neither makes the feature pointless and feel like odious tokenism.
I don't really think this kind of game is a good platform for explorations of the idea of gender-related surgery.
posted by Dysk at 7:16 AM on November 8, 2016
Primarily, I'm referring to why we have conversations about gender as a system of code at all, not just in RimWorld. But yes, even from a 3rd person, god's eye perspective seeing a fantasy world where everyone is strongly binary coded can create some dissonance, especially if the art design tends to take that to extremes (such as the notorious "chainmail bikini" designs.)
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:23 AM on November 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:23 AM on November 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'm not sure I'm interpreting "cosmetic gendering" the way you mean? Calling something "cosmetic" I often hear used to say it has a visual change but no impact on the game mechanics. And what brought RimWorld to our attention was its clumsy attempts to make gender change the character's behaviour, rather than leave it purely cosmetic.
posted by RobotHero at 8:07 AM on November 8, 2016
posted by RobotHero at 8:07 AM on November 8, 2016
RobotHero: I'm not certain what you're asking that wasn't explicitly addressed in previous posts.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:10 AM on November 8, 2016
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:10 AM on November 8, 2016
Okay, on double checking, you did explicitly say "cosmetic (in terms of gameplay)" so I guess I did get that right. I was confused because the connection of this to the "chainmail bikini" is not obvious to me? Like, if the chainmail bikini had a mechanical difference then it would be better?
posted by RobotHero at 9:46 AM on November 8, 2016
posted by RobotHero at 9:46 AM on November 8, 2016
My point is that even the cosmetic effects of binary gender coding can create dissonance and dysphoria. The decision to model gender as a boolean, an enum, or an integer scale is likely to have consequences for someone. This essay discusses difficulties relating to masculine bodies from a trans perspective. I wrote a bit about gravitating to greater abstraction as a response primarily focused on RPGs.
But even god's-eye games can be weirdly gender coded. And sometimes that bugs me.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:25 AM on November 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
But even god's-eye games can be weirdly gender coded. And sometimes that bugs me.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:25 AM on November 8, 2016 [1 favorite]
« Older Paid £80 million a second. Never even done a... | Where the Heck is Matt? 2016 Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:42 PM on November 2, 2016 [14 favorites]