♫Penguin Cap by HydroM♫
So, I want to talk about rust.
If you haven't seen it before, it's sort of a
Minecraft meets DayZ, multiplayer survival game.
But I'm not really here to talk about any of that. I want to talk about one particular design decision
they made in the earliest moments of the game:
Character Creation
It's something that has absolutely no in-game mechanical effect
and yet has had a profound effect on the way players play.
I want to talk about the fact that you get no input whatsoever in how your character looks.
Yep, the game randomly rolls
What your character looks like and that roll is tied to your Steam ID
so you can't just reroll or try again
You are who you are and you're stuck with that, and that happens to include your race
And I'm not talking fantasy races here like Nord or Khajit. I just mean the color of your skin
What race you are in this multiplayer game isn't a matter of choice
It's what you're born with...
This is forcing a lot of people to face a lot of things and it's making a lot of players pretty uncomfortable
And that's a brave design choice
This wasn't a fiscal decision. In fact, this choice has almost certainly lost the company money
But they made it because they felt like it was the right choice
They made it because they felt like without taking anything away from the game,
they could use design to give us another opportunity
to better understand who we are - and if this game makes you uncomfortable,
That's okay. Sometimes, art is supposed to make us uncomfortable.
It's the discomfort that comes from getting out of our normal boundaries that helps push the limits of who we are.
Personally, I found this fascinating as a sociological experiment.
I've seen on message boards, players talk about the fact
that playing this game was the first time they suffered racial discrimination.
That, they had never had racial slurs used against them before;
That, they were white males who had never felt what it was like
To have terms of racial hate levelled at them. I even saw a discussion about what it feels like to
play a minority from somebody who
self-avowed, was the type of person who threw around the n-word in multiplayer games.
And the Rust creators have talked about the fact that they've chosen not to
automatically filter racial slurs because they feel that part of the strength of games
is that they give us the opportunity to safely experience
a part of life we might otherwise never get to. And through doing so,
come to a greater sense of empathy
As the lead designer said, when a friend of mine was interviewing him,
"I would love nothing more than if playing a black guy in a game, made a white guy
appreciate what it was like to be a persecuted minority.
There's still work to be done
so consider this just the boilerplate of an idea for now
but it's quite pleasing to see different races working together in-game
and it makes you realize how arbitrary race is.
That is a powerful statement.
A perspective on race only games
can bring. It shows how we can use this medium to advance the dialogue,
even if it's in painful, sometimes uncomfortable ways.
And, it goes beyond just the bounds of the game itself.
If you read many of the steam reviews you'll see complaints from
people, saying that they just can't get immersed in the game because
they don't have a character that looks like them.
That's the best argument for more diversity in games that I've ever heard. Time and again,
I've seen people say that they don't feel like games need to be more diverse
that they hate how diversity is being pushed into the
games industry. But if you can't get immersed in a character that
doesn't look like you in a first-person game,
Okay, but just imagine what that means for all the players who are minorities.
Who are drastically underrepresented in games,
who almost never get to play a character that looks like them.
Think about how many people lose out on the immersion that
many of us take for granted, just because we share a skin color with
Link or Mario or Marcus Fenix.
We should be able to give that to everyone. My only complaint with the diversity in Rust
is that right now, they've only got one character model, and it's male,
but as it's a survival game, where you start out completely naked,
I, unfortunately, understand the choice.
It's pretty depressing that not giving players a naked female character model
because of what it would do to your game, makes sense
but there it is.
I hope they can find the solution
but despite that, I think there's a lot to learn from Rust because Rust
shows us just how much
impact a game can have on our
understanding of society and each other without hitting us over the head with the message,
without even impacting play.
A game doesn't have to be about race to teach us about race
or to get us to better understand ourselves, and to better understand one another.
Instead, it only has to just give us the tiniest taste
of what it can be like to be somebody else.
See you next week.
♫"What We Left Behind" by Aviators♫