If he'd written a book and added a bisexual man in the sequel, the same thing wouldn't have been true. Even if Sylvester adds them later, no-one's going to forget he made that assertion. There will never be bisexual men in (unmodded, unpatched) RimWorld. Representation is (rightly) a hot topic, in film and books as in games, but not every cast of characters in every work can satisfy every expectation about diversity.īut when you write code, you make a categorical assertion, whether you want to or not. If Sylvester had written a book that featured no bisexual men, it probably wouldn't have caused a fuss. This isn't unique, but it's still unusual, and it got me thinking about the extra difficulties of cultural commentary and criticism when it comes to game mechanics - and especially to simulations. What caught my attention is that Lo demonstrated the point with an analysis of the game's source code. This isn't a piece about Sylvester, and I don't want to get bogged down in that, but I know if I don't express an opinion it'll sound like I'm taking a side anyway, so here goes: I think Lo's piece was interesting I think it was a mistake to exclude bi men from RimWorld, and I've got lost in the detail of the rest I think that Sylvester has the right to make whatever kind of game he chooses, and to make his own mistakes I imagine he's had a bad week. (Interlude! There are a lot of claims and counterclaims about other aspects of the code, and about Sylvester's motives and politics. When Claudia Lo wrote on this last week, the current culture war in gaming immediately polarised opinions: Sylvester was a bigot, Sylvester was a scapegoat, Lo had done good investigative journalism, RPS had run a hit piece. The guy doesn't want to put water management in his game, so RimWorld has no water management.īut more controversially, RimWorld also has no bisexual men - although it does have gay men and women, and bi women.
It's caused some opinions in the RimWorld community, but the game is made by one person pursuing a personal vision, and that one person - Tynan Sylvester - has pointed out that with limited dev time, any feature comes at the cost of any other feature. You can die of heatstroke, but not thirst.Īnd that's fine. You won't find latrine trenches in RimWorld. But toilets, and indeed water management generally, aren't a thing. Food rots, at a speed affected by temperature floors become dirty colonist injuries are modelled down to the level of ear and finger location. It's a slightly odd omission in a game with a lot of realistic features. Meanwhile, RimWorld, a sim game where you build and manage a colony on an alien world, has wildlife but no toilets. So Prison Architect has toilets, but no wildlife. The world is a lot more complicated than anything we can fit in software, especially on an indie budget. In fact, every simulation has to leave most things out. Of course every simulation has to leave something out. The world is a lot more complicated than anything we can fit in software, especially on an indie budget" "Of course every simulation has to leave something out. Toilets are important in prisons, so in Prison Architect you have to plan plumbing, put a toilet in every cell, watch for prisoners Shawshanking their way out. Even more so in something like Prison Architect, a sim game where you're building and managing a prison. If there wasn't a toilet in a Sims house, you'd notice, so toilets there are, and Sims have needs. There are exceptions - like human-scale 24/7 simulations where you watch little digital people do their thing throughout the day. They don't usually happen in games, either, unless a henchman is conveniently distracted so you can assassinate him.
This is one of the natural elisions of drama, like the way that toilet breaks don't happen in films. To all intents and purposes, there is nothing under his pants. The Hulk is a mainstream comic-book character, so you are never going to see under his pants. So how come his pants stay on?Īng Lee, the story goes, spent some time thinking about the question, and then he looked the questioner in the eye and then offered this explanation: "Because if his pants came off, you'd see his cock." One questioner asked this: when the Hulk hulks out, his body expands and all his clothes are torn to rags. A friend of mine tells a story about Ang Lee at a Q&A session after the release of Lee's Hulk.