So apparently the Rust developers decided to "randomly" and permanently assign a race and sex to players of rust.

Gary Newman explains the decision here.

As you can imagine a move like this has some people pretty pissed/confused about this move. Personally, as a straight white guy, I couldn't give two hoots about what sex I happen to play and for a game that offers players heaps of choice in terms of how you can play the game, I think raging against something that has no direct impact on gameplay is kind of stupid.

All that said this Steam user seems to be experiencing some real world racism in-game.

IIRC, the race thing was from a while ago. Female player characters were recently introduced and he did the same thing.

The dev update seemed to explain precisely how this change was not making things better or worse, just changing (as the game expanded the character options which have always seemed to be added to give the game diversity not give the player customisation options for their avatar) who was living with the consequences of playing as an avatar that did not reflect their real-life gender:

We understand this is a sore subject for a lot of people. We understand that you may now be a gender that you don’t identify with in real-life. We understand this causes you distress and makes you not want to play the game anymore. Technically nothing has changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings. The only difference is that whether you feel like this is now decided by your SteamID instead of your real life gender.

Does the game still have positional voice chat? It is going to be weird with that.

I think it's pretty great that it's all 'randomly' assigned using your SteamID as a seed, even down to the size of your donger. And Garry's right, I at least take way too long fiddling around with character creators and I usually end up with a character that looks pretty much like one of the standard or premade faces anyway.

I approve of this brand of social experiment.

People are basically free to create whatever kind of fucked up society they wish in Rust. In a perfect world forcing players to be randomly assigned gender or race would have no effect as these things have no bearing on Rust's actual gameplay. This is the internet however which is a microcosm of our society so if the game decides you're going to be not white and not a man it opens you up to abuse, just because.

Naturally people are angry at the developer because they are the ones who created this arbitrary system. Frankly, they should be angry and I think that's is the desired response. What kind of dicks would go around harassing someone over something they literally had no choice in... oh wait.

Wow, that's pretty fucking cool.

It's super interesting to me how this created a dynamic where your player character is stigmatized and you're essentially doomed to play the game on a much higher difficulty, but not as an effect of choice, but rather just because others choose to be dicks to you.

That sounds like a fascinating social experiment. Maybe I'll check it out for myself.

That's definitely a bold choice. It's certainly a unique way to approach their design and I'll commend them for it.

Since I don't really care who I play as in games, I can't relate to being offended by this. I'll play as Kirby, the female Saints Row boss, Blasto, or Armor King without feeling like I'm the actual character. I suppose if you do like to inhabit a character, it's understandable that you'd be pissed. But from my perspective this is really awesome.

I understand the sentiment but it seems odd considering that although they seem empathetic to people not wanting to play a sex other than their own instead of making it so no players feel that "distress" they seem to have made it so even more people will feel that distress. Surely if they authentically cared about whether or not people were comfortable they'd make it selectable? I mean if you have a scenario where half the people feel bad why not go with the solution that makes everyone feel good instead of one where potentially everyone feels bad?

I can dig it.

@hayt: As an actual design choice based in accessibility and ease of use, this is a terrible decision that will alienate players. As a social experiment and an artistic statement, I love that a game attempted this particular design. An arbitrary race and sex assignment in a social game has the ability to demonstrate to players social dynamics that an authored character just can't, and that's something worth exploring. At the very least it's a differentiation from all of the other open-world survival games. So while I don't think this design would work for every game and I don't think it simulates an ideal situation, forcing the same unfairness on every player regardless of their actual race or gender challenges the player in very different ways than a game with a character creator. I'll never play Rust, but I love that it exists (even if I hate what the player base's reaction says about modern racism and sexism).

@thatpinguino: I agree that as a social experiment it'll be a hoot. I can't wait for clans of (probably mostly white) people with black avatars to form against the bulwark of Russian online racism. That said at least from the article that doesn't sound like the stated purpose of this change. They state in the article that it as far as game-play goes is so that your avatar has a history and recognisability to it. So long as players couldn't alter their character after the initial decision I think that'd be maintained. So yeah, I'm for it as a social experience/twist on the genre but I think the dev effectively saying it's OK that people feel bad because people felt bad before is a weak argument for them to make.

Much like MGS2, this is an example of why not listening to what people want often results in far more interesting, more evocative, more impressive works. I'm all for it. The people who are complaining either don't see why such a decision is incredibly interesting and intelligent, or don't care, and I love that they are being ignored. Down with the people who look at games as products instead of art, and thus think they get to dictate terms to the creator.

Also, that steam user is hilarious. Yes, the game is racist. It's totally not society that is racist, and you're totally not experiencing somebody else's pain for the first time in your life, in a heavily diluted form, and immediately trying to run away from it like the privileged baby that you are. lol.

I think it would make me feel lectured to. I haven't played rust... is harassment a big thing?

It seems like, more than anything, the devs want to make a statement of some kind. I could see it backfire, though. I'm not sure if white dudes roleplaying black ladies is gonna lead to more understanding and respect... it could go real bad real quick.

That said, the game isn't out yet... so while perhaps alienating some players, I think at this point it's a valid design choice. To me, it would be a different story if a change like this would come to a game that's been released for a while.

What's weird is that according to Garry's article, nobody particularly likes this move. Some groups of people hate it, some groups of people don't care, but nobody seems to feel particularly serviced by this move.

I'm glad I never got into Rust, some people who joined early access years ago are suddenly (and permanently) stuck with characters they don't want.

Such a boneheaded decision on the part of the creators.

@clush: Some of the negative reviews of Rust have called out the game for creating a "cancerous" community. Harassment is pretty much a big thing in online gaming generally, at least judging by the experiences of some of my friends.

A lot of the talk here about social experiments. That has got me thinking that maybe the developers intention is to push away the kinds of people who are likely to find this an issue. It's probably not the case at all but meh.

The kinds of people I mean are the ones who use terms like "feminist/liberal agenda", and call people "SJW" as an insult.

I'm interested in how this will turn out (don't really care about the decision itself). The general population goes against it hard enough for the dev to undo it? Dev ignoring them and possibly losing a bunch of players? Nothing really happening in the end? The Internet banding together in a new mutual understanding?

Phhhahahahaha.

Under the backdrop of male entitlement and harassment/abuse online that gaming is currently working with, I can only see this as a laudable move.

Guess what, this is "not an issue" when it's dudes and their mainly male avatars in games that don't give gender selection. That's how Rust has been so far. Every dude who has made a character has gotten a dude avatar. The rest of us have always been the ones who don't see our avatars reflecting ourselves. But there wasn't a massive outcry from the user base. Just like there isn't from most games that do this.

The dev's statement is heavily tongue in cheek about this. It drips sarcasm that the player base will suddenly find this an issue the moment it's not dudes playing dude avatars. But the reality is the issue was always there. That's the point. That's the message. If you're a dude and you expect a dude avatar in your game then maybe you shouldn't. Maybe you've been coddled for too long. Maybe you need to learn the attach to an avatar who isn't the same gender as you because that's sure what the rest of us have been doing.

So it's not about letting people choose their avatar's gender. It's about it being randomly decided and locked for the lifetime of your time with the game. That's what you've got. Enjoy. If that's an issue for you and you're not used to this being something games force upon you: congratulations dude, welcome to how the rest of us sometimes feel. Don't worry, you get used to it.

I suppose I just fundamentally disagree that the solution to the problem of people feeling unhappy with characters in video-games not matching their own experience is to make a scenario in which even more people feel mismatched. Why aim to bring everyone's experience down when you could very easily make a change that allows people of all sorts to feel like their character is what they want? I suspect you'd say, as you said in this last paragraph I've quoted, that it's so people get a taste of other people's less than ideal experience, but I question the value of that when it would be within the developer's power to make it so that undesirable scenario (having to play a man when you are a woman etc) simply doesn't occur in the first place.

From what I remember you barely even see your character so I'm kinda amused that people get up in arms about it. And honestly it doesn't even really matter because if you're playing it right you've got a bunch of armor on anyway.

@hayt: Because they didn't make it worse. They didn't bring everyone's experiences down. They didn't make any more people feel mismatched than before. That's the real venom in their statement. "Technically nothing has changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings. The only difference is that whether you feel like this is now decided by your SteamID instead of your real life gender."

They chose to not make it better. They chose to make it so that the random luck of the draw was at play. They chose to make some dudes feel uncomfortable in a game that had previous catered exclusively to them (in this respect). The dev has (as they've done in the past) decided to see what their virtual online space is like when people don't get to choose how they look to others. Kinda novel, just a bit of fun, but it also speaks to a much larger point.

What gaming really needs right now is less whiny, incensed, fragile boys and men throwing a tantrum every time anyone doesn't coddle their frail psyche and make something just for them. What gaming needs is less terrorists calling in shooter and bomb threats because someone dares to do a few basic videos about gaming and then gets invited to give some talks on campuses and at gaming events. Less doxing attacks on anyone (and their families) who dare to even support what these terrorists demand but get caught out because they were seen as the nearest publicly visible woman to the dev studio's department the terrorists think is a problem (of them not getting games made purely for them in every way).

Under that backdrop, any dev (who is economically capable of doing so) should really be thinking how they can push away these terrorists who are destroying gaming. In a very small way, that's what this change is doing. Rejecting that vocal angry mob who demand everything be made just how they want it, built under the assumption gaming is only for guys. Playing with that notion.

@shivoa: For some reason I just realized the irony of people saying "people should have thicker skin on the Internet, it's stupid that people get upset at me slinging around profanity slurs of all kind" but at the same time those people turn into whiny babies when their character is black or a woman.

I mean, it's not surprising. Those people generally turn into babies any time they're even marginally not in control of anything in their life. But I just hadn't considered the irony of it before.

Beyond all this people got equally upset when they added random penis size and some got upset because they had a small dick.

If I were at all into Rust I'd probably try for a Steam refund.

Hey, just like real life.

They should add penis pills and enlargement pumps to the game. And make them do nothing, as well.

I don't understand why people in this thread support this decision so much.

I don't play Rust at all, but if in Mass Effect for instance Shepard was automatically created for me, and I didn't get to choose his/her race or gender I think I would be upset too. Yeah, they don't affect your strength or the game play in any way, but I would immediately lose any connection to the character.

@random45: I wouldn't say it's as comparable to something like that. But first off there are plenty of games where you don't get to choose anything about your character so I'm not sure why you are bringing this up as a point. Second, you don't really ever see you character except in like the menu from what I remember. Third, it's not a game where you are really delving in and developing your character like an RPG such as Mass Effect. It would be like in Minecraft if they generated a random skin for the PC. Maybe people feel different but when I played a bit of Minecraft I changed my character skin to the KFC Colonel and never cared again what the PC looked like.

This would actually be completely hilarious.

From an entirely pragmatic standpoint, what's the likelihood this will change the perspective of anyone who actually strongly cares about the race/sex of their avatar?

Unless this is just for the lulz/social experimentation. In which case, carry on.

@liestochildren: Perhaps if more games in which you could play as male or female assigned a sex to you rather than allowing you to choose, players who do strongly care about race/sex will be forced to accept that their opinions are stupid. At which point we could once again choose our sex in games.

That's pretty fuckin rad.

What gaming really needs right now is less whiny incensed people throwing a tantrum every time anyone doesn't coddle and make something just for them.

They're pretty different cases. Character creation was a big part of Mass Effect. In Rust, as far as I recall, character creation like that was never really a feature. You never got to choose how you looked. In that regard, literally nothing's changed.

It's unfortunate that you'd have lost any connection to Shepard though, if their appearance were chosen and that feature never a part of the series (it being removed would be a different case, for sure). A big problem with the topic of representation is the weight that's placed upon superficiality. I'd hope a situation like this would underscore just how utterly fatuous judgements based on what you look like can be. Even without a crafted character (personality and such) that's pointed towards upending particular preconceptions based on particular appearaces, the developers can use multiplayer interactions--and even just the mere fact that your appearance is randomly chosen--to focus down on the base idea that your sex and skin colour just doesn't fucking matter.

In practice, it isn't changing anyone's perspective. Last time I played on one of the largest Australian servers, players had divided themselves into clans along racial lines. The 'blacks' and the 'whites' were waging turf wars, complete with nazi and black power symbolism plastered everywhere, and there were bands of white players roaming around 'lynching' any players with darker skin.

Turns out, somewhat predictably, that the players have turned the arbitrary character generation system into pretty much the worst thing imaginable.

Was this before or after the updates? It would be pretty interesting to know how many of the people involved in that whole mess were actually playing as a character that matched the colour of their skin. If the system is forcing people into a pre-determined gender or race, for example a white man being forced to play as a black woman, I actually think it would be a valuable experience for that player to see how others treat them as a result.

My utterly unsympathetic view is that if having to play as a race or gender different to your own is that much of a hurdle to enjoying a game, you'd need to re-evaluate your perspective on things.

This is why I actually think that the lack of the ability to choose is good in this situation. Imagine a white power, KKK identifying type being forced to play as a black person. I mean, they'd probably quit the game and that can only be a good thing. Right?

I actually wouldn't be opposed to playing a game where my gender and race was assigned at random. I've certainly used character creators to make protagonists outside of my gender and race, and I've never had an issue playing as characters of different race or gender in the past, so this sounds like a neat concept.

That said, to be blunt, this game developer's explanation is horseshit.

Rust was a game where, presumably, you had a very limited number of randomly generated character traits that you were assigned. The thing is, no matter who was playing the game and what their real life race or gender, they had their characters made already. Maybe they were happy with them, and maybe they weren't, but they were THEIR characters.

If you add something like this to your game after it's first released, that's fine, but you make the change going forward. You make new players randomly roll their characters with the new possibilities of race and sex, and you give existing players the option to re-roll their characters once, just as if they were a new player. What you don't do is FORCE your customers into re-rolling their existing characters because you decided you want to turn your player-base into a social experiment that they didn't sign up for.

Technically nothing has changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings. The only difference is that whether you feel like this is now decided by your SteamID instead of your real life gender.

Technically--for anyone who really cares--the entire population gets to decide EVERY TIME they buy a game if they either want to play as the protagonist, or if the the character creation features allow them to create a character they want to play as. If they don't, they can choose to not purchase the game.

Didn't want to play GTA San Andreas as a black guy? Can't stand the idea of playing as a woman in Mirrors Edge? Don't want to play the Uncharted games because the lead character is a straight white male? Well then, don't buy the game. I'll think you're silly for anything like that keeping you from any of these games, but you're the customer, and you get to decide.

Technically nothing has changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings.

Half the population isn't living with feelings of having their existing character's gender or race forcibly changed. That would just be your customers.

This. If you can't "connect" with an avatar or a character simply over gender/race then I think that might just reflect back on you as a person really.

@spaceinsomniac: You have made some good points here. The thing is this game isn't technically released, it is still in early access. So, technically it hasn't had a "first release". People should (and I believe are made to) understand that what they are buying could change dramatically at any point. At one point they scrapped all their code and started again.

People of color and women have had no choice but to play white dudes in video games for their entire lives, so holy fuck do I not give a shit if some petulant man-baby gets to feel that for once. It's an interesting experiment.

I severely doubt actual white supremacists are a significant portion of the demographic playing Rust. The only thing I've seen result from the arbitrary character creation is that the population has started role-playing in the most offensive ways they can possibly think off. To be frank, the absurdity of it makes it somewhat entertaining to observe.

Ah, well, there you go.

What developers won't do for attention.

It's a good thing then that Rust hasn't officially been released and is still in Early Access, where everyone who bought it was told it was in Early Access and that the end product might be different from what they where buying into. Where everyone who bought it knew that changes would occur throughout the development cycle of the game.

Don't pre-order video games. Don't buy EA games if you're not happy with the prospect that developers might change take it into a direction you don't like.

I've never been one to feel that "early access" means that the developers can change their game in any way they want to, and people don't have the right to be upset. If anything, I feel that early access should give developers even more incentive to share their plans for their game up front, and work towards fulfilling those promises.

Then again, I'm heavily biased when it comes to this issue. Developers changing things about a game you already purchased is one of the things that angers me most about this industry right now. Adjusting weapon or character balance in multiplayer games I can understand. Adding features I usually support. And any optional changes are pretty much always cool with me. Aside from that, I loathe the idea that the game my friend plays at my home might not be the same game they buy a week later.

Any changes forced on people who have already paid for your product have always rubbed me the wrong way. Forget topics as touchy as race or gender. If I was playing as a character I was happy with--in a game that I paid money for--and a developer so much as forced the removal of my character's mustache, I would be pissed.

That said, I'm very much looking forward to No Man's Sky, and if the developer announced tomorrow that your character's race and gender were going to be randomly assigned, it wouldn't change my interest in that game in the least.

I get it, making a functional character creator is hard work. Too hard. Why bother?

Instead, let's just randomize everyone. Then we can say its for lofty gameplay purposes. Yeah, right.

That'll be sure to rile up the obnoxiousanti-social justice crowd, which will, in turn, rile up the self-righteoussocial justice crowd.

And what better way to get free publicity for your run-of-the-mill, generic open-world multiplayer survival game?

Fucking genius. Wish I thought of it.

@spaceinsomniac: Early Access absolutely allows them to do that. That's how it's sold. Everyone buying it gets told that before they pay for the game. If a person is unsure about it or thinks "This might take a turn in a direction I don't like" then they shouldn't buy it.

I wouldn't argue otherwise, but "allows" and "allows and you shouldn't complain" are two very different things. Just because a developer can, doesn't mean they should.

I believe that any change to a game that players find objectionable, early access or not, is up for debate and criticism.

@spaceinsomniac: I think that you're ok to voice your displeasure at them for changing the game in a direction you don't like but that's about it. And if you do, it should be calm and not like an ass. But at the end of it, all the debate and criticism ultimately doesn't matter as it's the devs decision. Buying into EA doesn't give you any sort of creative voice or input into the final decisions of a game.

Yeah, I'm sure that's it. They guy who made Garry's Mod and this game (which is constantly in Steam's top 10 played over 2 years after initial release) is actually a big attention whore who wasn't getting enough.

While I agree with all of this generally, when a developer does something like forcibly changing the appearance of your player character without your consent, my rights as a consumer outweigh their rights as an artist. Perhaps not in the legal sense, but definitely in the "screw you, I'm never buying anything you touch again," sense.

They get to change their game, but they don't get to change MY character, without MY consent, without going on MY game developer shitlist.

At least, that's how I'm sure I'd feel if I'd ever played this game.

Yes, it's good to be calm and not be an ass about things when talking about subjective situations, but the "not be an ass about things" ship has already sailed once a developer forces paying customers to re-roll their existing characters, at least as far as I'm concerned.

You may feel otherwise, and that's okay too.