Facepunch Studios has detailed a controversial change to its open-world survival game, Rust. In addition to the usual assortment of fixes, the game has added female character models and will assign players a gender based on their SteamID.
Craig Pearson, a writer on the game, detailed the change in a development blog. "We understand this is a sore subject for a lot of people," Pearson wrote. "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."
Pearson's tone struck me as flippant and dismissive. Garry Newman, a developer on Rust, came across equally as blasé in an interview to Eurogamer. "Before we added different races and genders, you played as a bald white guy—you never had a choice," he said. "So we're not taking a choice away from the player, we're just adding more variety to the player models. I don't believe that playing as a different gender/race detracts from anyone's enjoyment of the game."
I wouldn't be surprised to see the developers over at Facepunch taken to task—for their decision, for its implementation, and for their tone. Part of the fantasy inherent in RPGs, or any game that lets you create a character, is the power to become someone else. I'm a (strapping, Adonis-like) dude in real life, but I tend to play females in games. Sometimes I come up with a fun character idea that I think works best as a woman, and sometimes I just decide to switch things up a bit. Having that control taken away from me by data connected not to the game itself, but to some bit I did or didn't flip in my Steam profile, seems contrived and myopic at the very least.
It also seems blatantly lazy. Facepunch invested the time and energy to create female character models. Surely creating menus full of sliders that let players customize those and other features can't be that much harder to build. At the very least, a screen with two buttons—Male, Female—is in order.
More to the point, many players won't appreciate being assigned a gender they don't identify with. For some of these players, video games are the one facet of their lives that allows them to exercise total control over those decisions.
This update comes on the heels of another controversial decision made to Rust in 2015: to arbitrarily assign facial features and skin color to player-characters.
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