I sus:amogus: but cannot say with 100% certainty that the Rimworld developer Tynan Sylvester is a chud.
The evidence
He worked on bioshock, bioshock was never a clear denouncement of libertarianism, it was certainly critical but that criticism always felt from the perspective of libertarians. Like how Disco Elysium was made by communists and was critical of communism. The fact that Tynan Sylvester worked on bioshock makes me sus:amogus: that he holds at least some libertarian sympathies.
Rimworld handling of gender in mechanics has always been problematic. Sexual orientation is a trait, there are three related traits. Gay, bisexual, and asexual. Mechanically these traits are net-negatives because they cause social conflicts because gay pawns hit on non-gay pawns and non-gay pawns don’t reciprocate romantic feelings and this causes negative mood debuffs and this makes having gay pawns a net-negative. Straight of course is not a trait and just the default for every pawn.
Also pawns can only be male or female, there is no non-binary option, trans pawns do not exist mechanically in-game and there is only one example of Transgenderism in Rimworld, and that is in a single pawn background written by a trans gofundme backer which Tynan has used to deflect criticism from himself for having shallow mechanics around gender in Rimworld, he literally pulled the “I have a trans friend” argument to defend why his in game social system is so shit.
In the second DLC there was the introduction of real world religions as in-game factions through a system called Ideoligions (ideology + religion). Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism were hard coded into the game. There’s burkas, Christmas trees, Buddha sculptures, turbans. These ideoligions can be male supremacist, women can be forced to wear burkas. Also there’s slavery now.
In the third DLC there was a huge focus on body modification and children were added, but there is no way to even change the gender of a pawn, no sex change operations, no way for a man to get pregnant even though you can apparently implant a kidney from anyone into anyone else. There’s now also distinct “races” of pawns and your colony can favor certain races. If you have ever heard of any d&d struggle sessions about races you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Finally there’s the community that has made it a game to commit the worse warcrime. From organ harvesting, selling crack, letting kids smoke crack, child soldiers, child slaves, killing gay pawns because they are fundamentally worse, gas chambers, what more? There’s a lot of fuck up shit the community is doing and tynan is on board with it, he is actively fostering the part of the community that wants to commit war crime. Human skin furniture. He has been constantly getting input from the community forums about has not kicked out these people from it.
Rimworld was not an inherently violent game, yeah it had combat but it was a story generator, the game can be played without committing war crimes. It’s just that the dev is really leaning in heavy with the edgy shit and kind of ruined it. If anyone is wondering what DLC one is, it was literally Star Wars, there was the empire, and the force, all it was missing was lightsabers.
If anything I wish someone would speak to tynan about how he’s starting to become more like notch, it would be a shame if he turns Rimworld into something that’s reactionary.
Someone once discovered that you could create a mermaid farm in Dwarf Fortress by embarking next to the ocean. They found some caves and built a mechanism that allowed them trap Mer-people and drain the caves. Mer-people would come into the cave, get stuck, the cave would be drained and they would then suffocate without water to breathe.
These would then be butchered for their bones, because everything in Dwarf Fortress has a value and Mermaid bones were the highest value bones in the game as a result of being extremely rare (and these can be used in ivory crafts) this allowed you to accumulate enormous wealth by farming mermaids.
Tarn did not like this so he nerfed the value of mermaid bones into the ground.
Tarn actively discourages exactly what Tynan actively encourages.
Glad to see this; was going to comment this exact story.
Fwiw, the forum thread about Mermaid 'farming' was the exact type of Gamer joy at how 'transgressive' they are that you see around the 'rimworld is warcrime simulator' Gamers. Just reveling in how 'funny' it is that the found a way to automate raising, breeding, and slaughtering of human-like pawns for virtual cash-money.
Yeah. I do think the devs deserve some responsibility for the "Dwarfy" antics though, it has always been encouraged to build elaborate over the top contraptions to achieve industrious tasks. Killing the Elves or Goblins in any way you see fit and for any purpose has always been largely encouraged and there is a very distinct industrial vs anprim thing going on when it comes to Elves getting mad at you for cutting down too many trees. The entire community hates and encourages killing them in any way you want but it's nowhere near the scale of Rimworld and the anti-Elf meme has some carryover from Bethesda that you can't really stop.
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Media influences thinking.
By that I don't mean that these people will go out and start doing those things, but that there is a certain influence towards "survival of the fittest" and "well the world is awful deal with it" types of mindsets that work against us. Additionally it attracts the people who want to play out their industrial holocaust fantasies which results in an absolutely shit community and is the reason that Rimworld's community is chuddy garbage while DF's is incredible.
Again, why are you here? You are clearly an anti-social gamer,
The weird thing is that even if you take some seriously niche precepts in ideology, the human skinning and organ harvesting thing is actually very inneficient when it comes to playing. So too actually is running a drug production colony.
Sure you can harvest organs and yes, they are valuable and yes, you get a lot of cash for drugs but the effort you put into developing and maintaining that setup diverts effort and work away from other crucial stuff like research, farming, mining etc. Basically you wind up with a very rich colony that doesn't have many pawns or much tech or defense. The threats you face are based on colony wealth.
Broadly speaking there's almost always (outside of extremes like playing on sea ice, which was never meant to be more than random world encounter tiles, more or less demanding cannibalism) a more humane way of playing that is at least as and often more effective and efficient.
That's cool! Lots of those games say "wouldn't it be crazy if the most effective resource gathering methods involved a ton of cruelty? Haha it's just efficient play lol"
I think it's cool to interact with systems in unexpected ways, but eventually it's considered regular gameplay and any passerby you don't skin and organ harvest is wasted money
Exactly, you're just playing efficiently as a monster. Every spawn of a group of people becomes no different to any herd of animals that comes passing through, something else to be farmed for resources.
The mindset it creates is awful.