So why were Reed’s fellow survivors constantly hitting on her? The answer lies, partially, in how romance attempts are calculated differently for male and female “pawns”, the game’s term for all the colonists you control. Additionally, an earlier decompilation of the game, summarizing how RimWorld models romantic behaviour, was a pretty good indicator that the answer to Reed’s dilemma lay somewhere in the game’s source code. The current top-rated post of all time on the RimWorld subreddit is a user asking for "strategies to deal with attractive lesbians". To be clear, the anecdote I've described above is not a unique scenario in RimWorld. For the sake of non-coders among us, longer sections are presented in pseudocode that tells you what it does, without requiring you to be fluent in C#. Setting aside the truth of those stories, and how demeaning they are to men and women both, why is this the story that RimWorld tells about relationships? In order to get to the heart of the situation, I unpacked the latest publicly-available build of RimWorld to see how romantic interactions are determined. It is not at all uncommon to hear stories, in media and in real life, of how men ‘just can’t help themselves’ around beautiful women, and to hear how devastating it is for men to be rejected by the women to whom they are attracted. The eerie thing is, remove the bit about the crashed spaceship and this scenario mirrors a common narrative about romance, sexuality, and relationships between men and women. More precisely, that’s how they’ve been programmed. But it’s not really their fault - Rob and Boots can’t stop hitting on her because they’re men, and because she’s just so gosh-darned pretty.
They have a near-permanent mood and relationship penalty for Reed, because they keep asking her out, and keep getting rebuffed. But the two men, Rob and Boots, feel differently. She receives no penalty to her mood for being barraged by come-ons. Returning to Reed, we can see that the pick-up lines don't get her down.
#RIMWORLD IDEOLOGY BROKEN CODE#
We dug into the code to find out why that is. RimWorld is a scifi colony management sim that seems to effortlessly weave dynamic stories around the player's attempts to survive on an often harsh alien world, but when it comes to sexuality, romance and gender, it tells variations on this one story far too often. Her life is a constant hellish stream of corny pick-up lines and work for the colony. Unfortunately for her, she’s beautiful, which means that they’re immediately enamoured with her unfortunately for them, she’s gay, which means the feeling is definitely not mutual.
Reed’s having a bad day: her spaceship crashed, she’s one of three survivors, and the other two won’t stop hitting on her.
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