Interesting experiment by the developers of Rust.
When the game was first opened up, all players were given the same default avatar: a bald white man. With the most recent update, Rust’s lead developer, Garry Newman, introduced different avatars of different racial origins into the mix. However, they did so with a twist – unlike typical massively multiplayer online role-playing games, Rust does not allow players to choose the race of their avatar. Instead, they are assigned one at random.
Interestingly enough, the inability to choose skin colour only became a problem after a black skin colour was added to the game. I love experiments like this.
I think I can understand both (or more) sides of this kind of thing.
When there is no choice at all — say the game only has a black avatar — I do wonder how it would turn out.
I don’t think people in general like being denied the choice, but some how I expect people would be more annoyed that they were used in an experiment about it.
I’d be interested to see that as well.
When there is an obvious place to allow choice but I’m denied the choice, I get annoyed (for example: Apple devices not allowing default apps except their own in house apps annoys me to no end).
When I play games with avatars, I very often try to make the character look a lot like my real-world self in order to get into the game more, and I know some other people prefer to do the opposite.
THIS! One reason why some of us play video games is to ESCAPE the politics and BS of every day life, and for these SJW devs to use games like this as their political soap box is EXTREMELY tacky. They’re like the Left’s version of a fundie who just will NOT shut up about their religion. It’s like I can’t even take a shit anymore without somebody turning it into a political issue.
Also, what exactly were they trying to prove? That there’s an anti-black bias in society? I could’ve told them that and saved them some time. There is and will ALWAYS be an anti-black bias, until/unless we’re allowed to have some real, two-way dialog about racism. Right now, the only conversation we’re allowed to have is how evil and racist white people are, which accomplishes nothing except to breed animosity and turn a bunch of racists into a bunch of closet racists.
And if this comment gets modded down, it’ll just prove my point
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKGZnB41_e4
One instance, two different departments, two different police officers. That makes it very hard to use this as evidence of anything systematic. The only valid conclusion here is: “different people react differently in a different environment.” Stuff like this is simply good outrage material for clickbaiting. That does not mean that there isn’t a larger problem, but your response makes no point at all.
As for the topic: personally I find this an interesting idea for a one time experiment, especially in a survival game like Rust. Although I hope not every game will start doing this, I like picking a character that somehow represents my style and looks the most fun to play with. Race or gender does not matter to me at all, but properties like behaviour, background story, and even superficial stuff like tattoos and piercings do (I personally dislike them). It wouldn’t ruin my experience, but I’d still like to have a choice and increase the immersion, it’s a game after all. So I can understand the people who complain about this, especially when wasn’t mentioned before.
Edited 2015-05-26 14:26 UTC
cfgr,
You are right that one video doesn’t mean there is a problem, but when you see more and more videos it becomes clearer that there may be. Amateur video footage captures a lot of events that society at large was very abstracted from in the past.
Racism is very real in the US, especially depending on where you are.
Edited 2015-05-26 15:45 UTC
I don’t deny that, I just don’t understand why he posted that particular link here as if it would contribute to something.
Racism is very real in pretty much all of the world. That said, I think pointing at perceived racism everywhere regardless of the intention and context really hurts the anti-racism fight as it (1) blames the wrong people and (2) just gives further ammo to the actual bigots.
Very simple anecdote: one of my girlfriend’s brothers is brown while the other is very white (Indonesian-Dutch parents). During a party someone asked her who her brothers were, my girlfriend answered something like “the white one is X, the brown one is Y.” That person was offended by her answer about her own brothers. “Discrimination is evil!!” No, it’s not, sometimes it’s just telling people apart without any intentions or motivations. Evil is treating them differently (whether positively or negatively) by their skin colour, rather than their personal accomplishments.
When you run into those kind of situations often enough, it becomes a bit difficult to take those people seriously. I’d rather see proper statistics (without lies and without omissions), but I don’t care enough to look it up myself, it’s not my country nor my area of interest and the racial problems in the USA appear to be of a quite different nature than those over here.
Edited 2015-05-26 16:23 UTC
cfgr,
I’ve seen racial discrimination over here, with some people it’s quite an overt trait with no ambiguity about it. I’m not really sure what you mean by it being of a different nature elsewhere?
I meant the underlying issues. In Belgium, immigration is a relatively new thing (the last 50 years or so) and I think racism is more caused by xenophobia. In the USA black people have been living there for so long and can’t be considered immigrants or strangers with a culture that conflicts with the nation’s culture. Furthermore, the language is the same.
One variant is not better or worse than the other, but I think the underlying causes are different. This is of course written from a European/Belgian perspective. I don’t live there so Americans may see the situation differently, hence why I said that it appears to be of a different nature
Edited 2015-05-26 20:32 UTC
This kind of euphemism is even absurder in Africa, where you can clearly say “he is that white guy” or “he’s the chinese guy” but then you keep finding other words to avoid saying “he is that black/negro guy”. So you say “african”, “local”, nation-specific term such as Kenyan or Angolan, this despite that there are a lot of white guys that are “local citizens”.
I seriously wish everyone could just go back to treating skin colour as that, skin colour… no judgement, it’s just much easier to tell two people apart or describe someone if you can just say out loud, ” the tall black/white/chinese guy”. and no judgement…
Edited 2015-05-26 20:33 UTC
Don’t we call them African Americans these days?
I agree though, I wish people would stop assuming any intention or motive behind everything, especially on other people’s behalf. It would make conversations simpler and also let us focus on real issues.
I actually think that people who go look for a racist motive behind every message are closet racists themselves, projecting their own obsession about race on others.
Edited 2015-05-26 20:41 UTC
You mean like this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgZWK_OnX8c
I can trade posting videos with you all day long. And the thing is, I can’t criticize this behavior without being called a racist. Why? Why are these people beyond reproach? If you are not white and want to post videos of whites acting like idiots, I will join you in the ridicule. In fact, I’ll post one right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmzpcTm0yLc
Edited 2015-05-26 17:16 UTC
It is interesting that Garry has decided to do this since I had made a very similar choice in a Roleplaying Lua script I’m currently working on (for use within Garry’s Mod). After death, players are assigned another character – which may be male, female, of any race of player model that the random number generator selects and with a random age. If the players of the game don’t like that, they are free to write their own character selector. (It will be under a similar license to MIT). Part of this was about me not having to write a character selector and partly about the fact that it is not known whether we had the choice to become any specific race / gender in reality, so it makes the game slightly more realistic.
Edited 2015-05-25 23:05 UTC
I’m skeptical that this is evidence of racism—though it could be. If everyone has the same avatar, no one cares. If avatars in various skin colors are added, many people will naturally want one that reflects what they look like. I don’t think there’s anything racist at all about this. Is saying, “I’m not black and don’t want an avatar that presents me as such” actually racist? I don’t think so.
Racism is the idea that the character of a person is determined by the color of her skin. It is not the denial of the existence of different skin colors. It isn’t racist to want a white avatar if one is white or a black avatar if one is black, and so on.
Phuqker,
It’s not clear if this was actually a deliberate social experiment or just conclusions drawn after the fact, but I agree the “experiment” is flawed for this reason.
Consider a BBQ joint serving just ribs for a while, and then expanding it’s menu to include pork chops, but not giving customers a choice about which one they get. It’s completely irrelevant that they never had a choice before because they were implicitly getting the entry they would have chosen anyways.
In the game, I suspect the annoyance has more to do with this lack of choice than anything racist. While racism could be a problem, this experiment fails to capture it IMHO.
A more clever and devious experiment would have been to randomly change the race that others observed online without the players themselves knowing it to see how it affected social interactions.
If I worked for EA or another soulless game company, I’d be running to apply for a software patent.
other_players.select(80%).display_color = user.skin_color
I find people’s reactions to this “experiment” more interesting than the experiment itself. Racism is very real, and we should all fight against it. But there are many who see racism where it does not exist. Rather than helping, this kind of politically correct overreaction impedes the fight against racism, because it causes resentment in people who do not appreciate being called racist when that is not their intent. It also prevents many kinds of dialog from occurring that would be very constructive.
The story’s dated 24 May. My first reaction–based entirely on the word “experiment”–is that the uproar is based on a lack of disclosure and people were caught off-guard.
So I go check out the official Rust website.
There’s nothing about it in the “About Rust” section or the FAQ. Twitter updates going back a month don’t mention anything about skin color. The most recent Devblog entry from 21 May–the one to go with the most recent update–doesn’t mention it, either.
No wonder people are annoyed.
I check the official message board for complaints, and find many, about game-breaking bugs and how the new ladder is going to ruin the game for anyone except raiders. If this is such a big de.al, why isn’t anyone talking about it?
I go back to the article. The screenshots are from March. The article may be talking about a recent update, but not the newest one.
My personal conclusions are as follows:
1. Al-Jazeera is as competent at covering videogame news as any US news organization. Which is to say, not at all.
2. Gamers love to complain, and will do so at every opportunity.
3. Said complaints only become racist when race is involved, and even then only for some or in certain eyes (see also, the decrying of comic book fans reacting to Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch when they’ve been complaining about casting choices since at least when Michael Keaton was first announced as Batman).
Some of the original complaints were by people who do Machinima or do Streams and Lets Play type videos.
Not being able to choose your skin color in the game can be an issue if you are trying to follow a particular narrative and can also hinder RP as you don’t have control of character creation.
I play Rust and could care less, my character is black and it really hasn’t made a difference, I get killed on sight the rest as anybody else. But it does have one advantage in game and it’s gonna seem racist but its actually very handy, I’m nearly invisible at night to enemies which can prove very handy.
It does make people laugh though when they see a black character in game come up and sound like your typical Canadian white male.
And if people prefer female avatars, that make them sexist?
Yes, there may be the case that a lot of people are racist, but there are also other possible explanations, this experiment doesn’t rule them out.
I have a feeling experimenting with avatars is going to be an even more intense experience with Virtual Reality soon like in this example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLqVxC6JWIM
With VR it has pretty much to be the avatar *I* feel like playing.
Otherwise it should be deeply linked to the story. And don’t expect a racist to want to play a story centered around a black person.
“And don’t expect a racist to want to play a story centered around a black person.”
Did you just say:
racists are always white or at least not black ?
That’s what the original story said, not me. I’m just following it. If you ask me, racists are always white just as sexist are always men… meaning not always by any means. It just happens the white racists are more often in a position of power.
Care to describe this ‘position of power’? With a few exceptions I’d say typically racists are middle to lower class people who hold exactly zero power and blame another group of people for that. And every so many years you get a populist political party that tries to harvest their votes and fortunately mostly ends up in the opposition.
The corrupt few who are in the ruling class screw everyone else over equally.
White racists, compared with non-white racists, are more often in a position of power simply because white people are more often in a position of power.
As for middle to lower class people, they are the majority of the population and therefore the majority of the voters.
You still haven’t described what a ‘position of power’ means. “They’re in power because they’re in a position of power.” Very useful. I’m white but I have no power to force you or any one else in this world to do anything. Am I in a ‘position of power’? The president of the United States is black, is he not in a ‘position of power’? I can assure you that almost the entire population has as much power as I do, that is: none at all.
I didn’t say most middle to lower class people are racists, I said most racists are middle to lower class people. Don’t commit a logical fallacy by turning that upside down. I also don’t get your point.
Edited 2015-05-28 13:27 UTC
Position of power: business owners, managers, politicians.
the headline is true, the article is bullshit. is it really that hard to demonstrate that racist shitbags don’t magically become unicorns on the web?
> Rust is making gamers question their racialized assumptions about the people they are interacting with online.
Why are people obsessed with race? It’s such an insignificant issue. White guilt?
Only if you’re in the majority race of a geographical area.
But in the article’s context, it’s pretty irrelevant. People have the right to make their own choices. And it’s no one else’s business. It is mindboggling how we have to heavily dramatise everything in sight.
Back in my day, when we had to rely on pencils and s*** and doing math in our heads, randomly generating characters was the ONLY option. You rolled the dice and took your chances, and if you didn’t like what ya got, TOUGH! Sometimes your character even died in the process. Kids don’t know how good they have it now.
Seriously though, it’s interesting to see which choices users notice are missing. All games limit choice, but I don’t see many complain about the linear storytelling in JRPGs, or the randomness of selections in CCG packs. So it’s interesting to see such a reaction when it comes to skin color. Personally I find this kind of randomness to be part of the fun, or at the very least a source of inspiration when I’m strapped for ideas.