Rimworld’s system for sexuality is both a work in progress, and fair game for discussion

A Rock, Paper, Shotgun story about NPC sexuality in an early-access Steam game called Rimworld caused a bit of controversy this week. Writer Claudia Lo dug into the code of the game and published a report report detailing the ways in which the game mirrors situations that are more uncomfortable and real than developer Tynan Sylvester may have intended.

Rimworld is a survival game that includes a mood debuff when the NPCs, usually referred to as pawns, attempt to initiate romance with other pawns and are rejected. So why is this a problem?

Well, according to posts on Steam forums and on Reddit, the gays. The gays are the problem. A minority of attractive gay pawns can wreak holy havoc by rejecting advances from straight pawns and make everybody super sad.

In her piece, Lo uses the example of a lesbian pawn to demonstrate why exactly this can make players uncomfortable: it mirrors a situation that women of any sexuality have probably experienced in real life. Rejecting a person’s romantic advance makes them sad. It could make them angry. In a few cases, it gets women killed — and for some gay pawns in Rimworld, that is indeed the reality.

Sylvester has referred to the 1,800 word examination of Rimworld’s code, complete with graphs and pseudocode, as “anger-farming, combined with a moralistic witch hunt.” If the piece were malicious, or intended as a hit piece to be skimmed, I doubt it would be as long as it is, or as detailed. Nor do I think Rimworld is a juicy target if you’re looking to maximize traffic. If the only goal were to get people riled up for traffic, this was the path of most resistance.

“Code is never neutral,” Lo writes in her piece. I’m inclined to agree — no art is neutral, whether it’s a game, a book or a film.

In the Reddit thread about this article, Tynan Sylvester said he drew data from OKCupid, The Williams Institute, and Advocate.com, in what he said was “an honest attempt to understand the reality.” For what it’s worth, I agree that he did make a good-faith effort to try. Seeking out articles and statistics like this is exactly what I would do if I were trying to learn something. You don’t research something you don’t care about, and it’s very easy to introduce unconscious bias into your work.

It’s hard to condense complex societal influences into code, and your strategies and opinions on doing so are shaped by your lived experiences. When I read this Advocate piece that he drew from, for example, I don’t draw the conclusion that men are by default less likely to be bisexual. There’s more at play here than the numbers; men don’t have as many opportunities in our culture to explore their sexuality.

The broad assumption is often that women go through phases of experimentation (and are often fetishized for doing so, but that’s another conversation); but if a man is interested in other men, he’s probably just gay or in denial.

That assumption sucks, and it’s not helped by low representation of bisexual men in media. How we are shown the world influences the art we make, as does our own sexuality and lived experiences. You can’t sit down to create an entire system of sexuality for your game without saying something about how you view sex and gender.

The code changes character and player behavior

But the issue here isn’t how well or how poorly the romances in Rimworld reflect the real world. The game doesn’t take place in our world. The cultural context and attitudes toward sexuality could be completely different than our own. But the developer chose to use statistics about the present-day U.S. to provide data points for his fictional setting. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach.

There is something wrong with the end result: a situation in which players, desperate to keep their majority-straight colonists happy, resort to killing off or imprisoning pawns who continuously reject romantic advances from pawns that they’re not attracted to because of gender. The code influenced player behavior, and incentivized violence towards people with certain sexuality. When you base your systems on reality, sometimes you end up with the ugly parts of reality as well.

"You're analyzing a broken system,” Sylvester wrote in the RPS comments. “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."

Based on Sylvester’s research and the conclusions he drew, it’s clear that some work actually was put into this system. It probably would have been easier to implement every pawn only being attracted to the opposite gender. Or even pawns being attracted to any gender.

The system could have been simple, but it is not. It is based on certain ideas and assumptions about existing, human sexuality. It may be a broken system, I think everyone agrees with that assessment. But it’s also a system inside a game that is being sold to players. Discussing the system as it exists isn’t just fair game; it’s also a helpful way to get feedback from people with experiences different from the developer’s. It’s how we can pinpoint where things went wrong.

This process doesn’t imply anger towards the developer nor is it an example of an attack against their goals. It’s a look at the work they created and put into the world.

And that work can have consequences, and the consequence in this case is a community that casually discusses how to deal with the lesbian problem in their colonies. That’s uncomfortable. It’s terrible, really. And those conversations are happening because of a system that was never supposed to be a big deal, never supposed to be a headline. It’s a system that, according to the developer, was both created without thought and also heavily researched. It was never meant to be a major point of discussion.

But it is now. And someone has to deal with it.