Garry writes for The Guardian: Why my videogame chooses your character’s race and gender for you
277 replies, posted
[url]http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/13/videogame-chooses-character-race-gender-rust[/url]
In the opinion section, remove if disallowed.
[QUOTE]I am the lead developer on a multiplayer survival game named Rust. Last week, we made a change to the game that upset a lot of people: we made half of our players, picked at random, play as women. We also made some of them black. The response has been extreme.
Rust is not a game about identity. The objective in Rust is to survive. This is made difficult by things such as starvation, dehydration, radiation, exposure and bear attacks. The biggest threat in the game comes from other players who are trying to survive in the same conditions. You will survive better if you’re a part of a group, but this takes a lot of mutual trust. If you kill someone you’ll be able to loot their corpse and take all their food, medicine and weapons. This makes the game very interesting socially, since players struggle with trust and slowly build up relationships with one another.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]Originally every player appeared in game as a white bald guy. We were still in the early stages of development and had other things to focus on. Recently, though, we decided to change this. We decided that we didn’t want players to pick their own appearance. We felt that player customisation had got a bit out of control in other games. And we didn’t want to spend six months making a player customisation tool – we wanted to concentrate on the game. We also wanted the appearance of the players to be consistent over time. A survivor shouldn’t be able to attack another then come back later with a different gender or race and befriend the same player. They should be recognisable consistently and long-term – so anyone likely to commit a crime would be more likely to wear a balaclava or a face mask.
So this is what we did. Gender and race are randomly selected and linked to a player’s account, permanently unchangeable.
Inevitably, there are people who like it and people who don’t. Some players have praised what we’re doing. Like us, they think that who you are in the game, your race and gender, makes no difference to the actual gameplay – and are happy to have the diversity. Others aren’t so positive. They feel that playing a gender or race that doesn’t match their own is detrimental to their enjoyment.
For race, this seems to be a regional thing. For example, most complaints about being black in the game have generally been from Russian players. With gender it seems to be more of a geography-free complaint.
Here’s one of the many messages we’ve received from disgruntled male players: “Why won’t you give the player base an option to choose their gender? I just want to play the game and have a connection to the character like most other games I play. Not have some political movement shoved down my throat because you make the connection we can’t choose our gender in reality so let’s make it like that in game too.”
Others have accused us of forcing them to accept our “feminist ideals”. Some have told us that they are quitting the game entirely. One called the move the dumbest thing we’ve ever done.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]Ultimately the decision comes down to gameplay. We don’t believe that letting you choose your race and gender would improve the game. On the other hand, randomising everyone’s gender and race meets all our requirements. We get an even spread of races and genders that make players more identifiable – while at the same time making the social aspects of the game much more interesting.[/QUOTE]
Was hoping for at least one wanking joke or something about shitting or something. You've let us down Garry.
[img]http://imgkk.com/i/m9-f.png[/img]
Maybe next time eh?
I like to be able to choose aspects of my character in video games, but there's something neat about it being randomized - as opposed to set in stone
Poor Garry tho, he's gonna have to deal with a ton of silly people:
[media]https://twitter.com/garrynewman/status/718198344070377472[/media]
I wonder how many extra sales he's going to get through people buying new copies of Rust on new accounts.
[QUOTE=sam6420;50125306]Should've made genderless/featureless characters instead. Imo once you've got loads of gear on, it doesn't really matter anyway. I don't really [i]need[/i] gender in a game.[/QUOTE]
Or just have everybody play as a skeleton.
It seems like a disingenuous excuse to say that they just didn't want to put effort into a character creator. All they had to do was put a check box for sex and a few for skin color. Done.
Its funny how I was talking with someone before about how kids today don't know how to lose/just deal with something that they can't change and this is case in point
Kids gotta learn to be told they're not in charge eventually
[editline]13th April 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=sgman91;50125384]It seems like a disingenuous excuse to say that they just didn't want to put effort into a character creator. All they had to do was put a check box for sex and a few for skin color. Done.[/QUOTE]
Which doesn't need to be done
I'd much rather get updates on anything else than the one thing I'll use once, and not give a fuck about ever again
[QUOTE=Kylel999;50125390]Its funny how I was talking with someone before about how kids today don't know how to lose/just deal with something that they can't change and this is case in point
Kids gotta learn to be told they're not in charge eventually
[/QUOTE]
This is actually so spot on, some kids nowadays are so sheltered they are almost detached from reality that not everything goes the way you want.
[QUOTE=sgman91;50125384]It seems like a disingenuous excuse to say that they just didn't want to put effort into a character creator. All they had to do was put a check box for sex and a few for skin color. Done.[/QUOTE]
I think that coding a system that sets up the race and gender and other appearance-related things based on your steamid is more complicated than making a menu that allows you to choose these things.
On the upside I bet you could sell a steam account with a white male character for some quick cash
[editline]13th April 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=TomoAlien;50125406]I think that coding a system that sets up the race and gender and other appearance-related things based on your steamid is more complicated than making a menu that allows you to choose these things.[/QUOTE]
This. I don't code but I don't think it's as easy as "just add a check box"
[QUOTE=TomoAlien;50125406]I think that coding a system that sets up the race and gender and other appearance-related things based on your steamid is more complicated than making a menu that allows you to choose these things.[/QUOTE]
not really, it just uses your steamid as a seed to generate the character
it doesn't even need to store the result because it can just re-generate it each time with the same result. this is the same way elite dangerous models the galaxy, it's not storing a trillion planets, just generating them each time a player sees them based on their coordinates and a time value to keep positions consistent
a character creator would require a gui and a way to recall the created character later which are both a bigger pain in the ass code-wise than feeding a generator a seed
I read over the conversation he had last night with two people who were saying how awful this system is for trans people and that its like just a whole privilege thing and that its super ignorant.
[quote]For race, this seems to be a regional thing. For example, most complaints about being black in the game have generally been from Russian players.
[/quote]
For some reason this had me shaking with laughter for the past 10 minutes. :v:
[QUOTE=Doctor Zedacon;50125422]I read over the conversation he had last night with two people who were saying how awful this system is for trans people and that its like just a whole privilege thing and that its super ignorant.[/QUOTE]
What's super ignorant is a group of people demanding that they want MORE priveledges than the average person
[QUOTE=TomoAlien;50125406]I think that coding a system that sets up the race and gender and other appearance-related things based on your steamid is more complicated than making a menu that allows you to choose these things.[/QUOTE]
I think both are probably comparable in complexity. The hard part is creating the randomizing system for traits. Once that's done, selecting the values for the traits just just a matter of inputting values, whether randomly generated or player selected.
[QUOTE]Which doesn't need to be done
I'd much rather get updates on anything else than the one thing I'll use once, and not give a fuck about ever again[/QUOTE]
Most things don't "need" to be done. That's not an argument for not doing something in a game that people seem to want.
My point is just that added the ability for the player to select skin color and sex would not be difficult. They purposefully made it random for some other reason. Maybe they thought it would improve the game experience, maybe they did want to put some of their politics into the game, etc. It's clear that the reason isn't that it would have been hard and taken a lot of time, which is how Garry presented it in the article.
[QUOTE=TomoAlien;50125406]I think that coding a system that sets up the race and gender and other appearance-related things based on your steamid is more complicated than making a menu that allows you to choose these things.[/QUOTE]
It's actually not
[code]
int raceGender(SteamID){
//0=WM 1 = WW 2 = BW 3 = BM
return math.randomSeed(SteamID)(0, 3);
}[/code]
This is my first and only attempt at anything related to Lua but from some cursory google searching it's that easy
Maybe Garry didn't feel like catering to a bunch of people that scream like toddlers having a tantrum when they don't follow their golden idea for his game lol
Funny. Despite it being a gameplay driven concept (which I agree with as a smart decision from that perspective), I think it's also a great way to also spite bigots.
What about all the tons of games that force you to play as a white dude, and what that dynamic is like for you if you're not also a white dude? I imagine eventually you'd become numb to it, but it's a very disillusioning thought to me.
I mean dumb as it is it's his choice. Arguing it only escalates the hilarity
tbh this feature actually makes me want to try rust, but unfortunately i'm still a cheap bastard
[QUOTE=sgman91;50125384]It seems like a disingenuous excuse to say that they just didn't want to put effort into a character creator. All they had to do was put a check box for sex and a few for skin color. Done.[/QUOTE]
I think what he was getting at was that having it randomly assigned that way better serves the emergent social gameplay elements that make Rust what it is.
Also, if you want to dive into the difficulty of the character creator, it raises a lot of questions that could lead to a lengthy development schedule; how much do they want to let people edit their character? If they half-assed it and added a gender checkbox and skin color picker then those same insatiable kids would bitch that they can't have a slider to adjust weight or height, because, "how hard can it be?" The individual pieces may be easy on paper, but getting them to work together consistently and snowballing into more complex systems is what all too often turns basic creative programming tasks into lengthy slogs. Not to mention that the character variations they have are already prone to issues, i.e. mesh normal seams/clothing clipping, issues that are, again, time consuming to fix. The more dynamic an object is/is used, the more problems it's going to pose.
Expanding further, balancing player freedom, what if certain server hosts wanted to control whether players could change appearances whenever they want, for the same emergent reasons I mentioned above? Do they maintain their character appearances across all servers, are they saved server to server with other ID specific info, do they even let server owners restrict that feature? If they do the server owners get pissed because not enough freedom to delegate their server rules, if they don't then players get pissed that server owners can have too much power.
There's always a lot more to consider besides just a bCharHasPenis check.
[QUOTE=Sharker;50125494]Guess people will just have to deal with the fact that they are racist, misogynist or what have you.[/QUOTE]
Also, pretty much this. It's [I]a game[/I]. Kinda have to get over it.
Guess people will just have to deal with the fact that they are racist, misogynist or what have you.
It does a great job to push the people we don't want in the community somewhere else. Take your drama back to Second Life.
[QUOTE=sgman91;50125444]I think both are probably comparable in complexity.[/QUOTE]
See, this is a pretty big problem when trying to put the discussion into any worthwhile direction. We've got a bunch of people with little to know actual knowledge and experience on the matter here doing guess work.
And there's not much room for this discussion to expand past that: Garry's got all the qualifications necessary to give us a more realistic and useful view of the situation, but by being directly involved in this situation, there's no way he's trustworthy. Dito will go for other people on the team. The estimations by devs from other games may not hold up either because every game's different and there's various ways to implement character generation that fulfill different standards and require different amounts of work. We don't have a big enough sample size for this particular situation to purely go by objective stats either.
So after all this, personally I think the most practical approach would be to evaluate Garry's accuracy/trustworthiness. I myself don't see much reason to doubt him, it seems to fit pretty well with the nature of many of his other decisions and I can't think of any ulterior motive. Unless he's got a track record of overestimating workload that I don't know about, I'd trust his reasoning.
The bottom line of this kind of character customization on the coding front is that it would take longer to program the buttons to select them and save that selection than it would to generate it.
But both are trivial amounts of effort and to say that they were lazy and are being disingenuous for not including a checkbox is an insult to game development. Like it would take a day or two to implement basic race or gender options.
[QUOTE=TomoAlien;50125406]I think that coding a system that sets up the race and gender and other appearance-related things based on your steamid is more complicated than making a menu that allows you to choose these things.[/QUOTE]
Nah, making a comprehensive and user friendly UI for that that doesn't allow you to recreate Oblivion would take a fair amount of time.
[QUOTE=NiandraLades;50125333]I like to be able to choose aspects of my character in video games, but there's something neat about it being randomized - as opposed to set in stone
Poor Garry tho, he's gonna have to deal with a ton of silly people:
[media]https://twitter.com/garrynewman/status/718198344070377472[/media][/QUOTE]
The reactions seem to be very mixed thus far.
[IMG]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CfejJV3WIAAJwbN.jpg:large[/IMG]
[QUOTE=Marik Bentusi;50125502]See, this is a pretty big problem when trying to put the discussion into any worthwhile direction. We've got a bunch of people with little to know actual knowledge and experience on the matter here doing guess work.
And there's not much room for this discussion to expand past that: Garry's got all the qualifications necessary to give us a more realistic and useful view of the situation, but by being directly involved in this situation, there's no way he's trustworthy. Dito will go for other people on the team. The estimations by devs from other games may not hold up either because every game's different and there's various ways to implement character generation that fulfill different standards and require different amounts of work. We don't have a big enough sample size for this particular situation to purely go by objective stats either.
So after all this, personally I think the most practical approach would be to evaluate Garry's accuracy/trustworthiness. I myself don't see much reason to doubt him, it seems to fit pretty well with the nature of many of his other decisions and I can't think of any ulterior motive. Unless he's got a track record of overestimating workload that I don't know about, I'd trust his reasoning.[/QUOTE]
There's nothing to trust or distrust. No insight from them is needed. These are things you could learn in a week's crash course with programming in Unity and realize the difference between giving the player options and auto assigning is a negligible amount of work.
Customization is totally an asset bottleneck. If the assets are made, assigning them is as simple as a few lines of code.
[QUOTE=hippowombat;50125483]I think what he was getting at was that having it randomly assigned that way better serves the emergent social gameplay elements that make Rust what it is.
Also, if you want to dive into the difficulty of the character creator, it raises a lot of questions that could lead to a lengthy development schedule; how much do they want to let people edit their character? If they half-assed it and added a gender checkbox and skin color picker then those same insatiable kids would bitch that they can't have a slider to adjust weight or height, because, "how hard can it be?" The individual pieces may be easy on paper, but getting them to work together consistently and snowballing into more complex systems is what all too often turns basic creative programming tasks into lengthy slogs. Not to mention that the character variations they have are already prone to issues, i.e. mesh normal seams/clothing clipping, issues that are, again, time consuming to fix. The more dynamic an object is/is used, the more problems it's going to pose.
Expanding further, balancing player freedom, what if certain server hosts wanted to control whether players could change appearances whenever they want, for the same emergent reasons I mentioned above? Do they maintain their character appearances across all servers, are they saved server to server with other ID specific info, do they even let server owners restrict that feature? If they do the server owners get pissed because not enough freedom to delegate their server rules, if they don't then players get pissed that server owners can have too much power.
There's always a lot more to consider besides just a bCharHasPenis check.
Also, pretty much this. It's [I]a game[/I]. Kinda have to get over it.[/QUOTE]
Let me start off by saying that I don't even own Rust. I really don't care. It just seems silly to pretend that it's some great way to make the gameplay better. Based on all the videos I've seen the randomized character traits don't add anything other than annoying some people.
The thought also just came to me that the vast majority of female characters in the game are going to have male voices coming from them. That would be super immersion breaking.
If I would have creative control over the development of the game, I would let players to build up their own character instead of forcing them down on their throat just because their steam_id isn't :0:0:001
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