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.
Just saying, there are plenty of warcrimes to be done in Dwarf Fortress. I remember one thread in particular about capturing and harvesting mermaids for their bones. But it's true that the DF devs don't get off on that stuff the same way the Rimworld devs do, which is why a patch after the thread about harvesting mermaids came out the devs nerfed the value of mermaid bones to make it not worth doing.
But I think Rimworld having an edgier community is mostly a product of when it came out. DF has been around a lot longer and as a result the community skews older and a given member is less likely to be a 4chan fascist (though they do exist, and more will probably exist now that the steam DF is out).
Yeah the community for rimworld is shit. Case in point the refugee quest. It is always better both morally and practically to accept them and treat em nice unless your people are starving with no food and about to basically become refugees themselves.
They do work around the place while they stay and that is amazingly useful even if all they do is haul stuff and clean. At least one of them usually has really high skill like research or medical so they can boost areas you really need and there's a fair chance at least some will offer to join you. There's a small chance another faction will offer a mediocre reward for killing them and a smaller chance they will turn on you. These refugees turn up mostly without armour and with crap weapons so any attempt to turn on your people is laughably easy to deal with. Additionally when they do leave, theres a reasonable chance that they do well and send you something really cool a year or so later as a thank you.
However the arseholes over on the subreddit talk about it as if it's the sensible practical decision to preemtively murder them and harvest their organs. These people are absolutely choosing to play the game like sociopathic fascists because they've mistaken being like that for having a personality I think.