I mean, by that logic, why include any diversity at all? Gay men and women are much rarer than straight men and women (or straight men and bisexual women, going by this guy's logic) so why include them? (EDIT: Though it is nice that he did include LGB characters (from the article it doesn't seem like there are transgender characters so I left out the T on purpose there), even if straight/bisexual women and bisexual men are being misrepresented, and it doesn't seem like he was trying to be intentionally hurtful or like he's homophobic(/biphobic? Is that a word?), he just doesn't know any better. It's quite the leap to go from "I feel like there are more bisexual women than bisexual men" to "I didn't include any straight women or bisexual men in my game" especially when it sounds like that wouldn't have been a difficult thing to do in terms of implementation. The guy's comment sounds somewhat nonsensical, though. So I'm inclined to say that that's one of the few things this whole dating algorithm got "right" (if the goal was to accurately portray the current dating behaviour in Western society, anyway). I don't remember the specific numbers (so the ratio this game is using may well be wrong) but I have read articles (being a gay guy, I wouldn't actually have any real-life experience of this phenomenon) detailing how men are generally much more likely to message a woman (and thus message much more women) than the other way around. I agree that a lot of the stuff mentioned is indeed bullshit (like the age limits or the whole sexual orientation stuff) but I do think that the whole "men are more likely to actively pursue a potential mate than women"-thing is accurate in our current society simply because of all the data that's been collected by dating apps. What are the possibilities that it allows? What is RimWorld setting as the boundaries of possibility? And if it is unintentional it is on us to ask what this system is trying to show. 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. Now, representation is a tricky subject, and we will probably never create a perfect model of romantic behaviour.īut the problem with this model isn’t that it’s flawed. Those are the easily-noticed, in-game consequences of a system whose base structure has literally encoded assumptions about how men and women operate. We could label that behaviour a bug, perhaps. But these negative feelings are only reflected mechanically for those being rejected, and because of the way romance initiation is handled, you end up having to cater for the sad rejected men, rather than the women who are always having to turn away these unwanted encounters. Remember how constantly being hit on and rebuffing people doesn’t lead to a mood penalty, only a reduced opinion of the person pursuing? In daily life, the feeling of having to constantly turn people down is not a nice feeling. On top of that, what RimWorld doesn’t model is as important as what it does. Contrast this to the calculation for men, where pawns 15 years older than them have absolutely no chance. 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. On the other hand, women overwhelmingly prefer partners older than them. So in this case, Boots wouldn’t find any woman over the age of 32, or any woman under age 16, attractive. There’s also a minimum age for attraction, 16 years old, and a maximum age, any pawn 15 years older than themselves. But, since the same code doesn’t check for relative age, 17-year-old Boots wouldn’t actually find a fellow 17-year-old teenager all that attractive. This explains why Rob (age 32) and Boots (age 17) keep trying to ask out Reed (age 23). If the male pawn in question is under 20, that doesn’t make a difference – because it’ll check the “lower” bound first, they’re guaranteed to find a 20-year-old attractive. In RimWorld, male pawns will always find pawns between 20 and their own age attractive.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |