Like most other games he plays
Oh no, look out, look out – a popular video game is making it so that players can’t choose the sex of their characters. You know what that means – sometimes a man gets stuck with a female character! Ewwwwww.
Rust is a popular first-person survival video game where you start out completely naked, left to a barren environment to build yourself tools, weapons, and a home as other players try to do the same — and potentially try to kill you and steal your stuff. It’s a tense game, one in which your friends can suddenly turn against you and basically ruin everything you worked for just for their own personal gain.
But it’s not the betrayal and tension that has gamers upset with Rust. Instead, it’s a new feature recently added to the game, which has 500,000 players each week, by developer Garry Newman: Your character’s gender and race are now randomized. So even if you’re a white man in real life, you now may be forced to play a black woman.
Some men aren’t happy. Well of course they’re not! Women are weak and stupid.
Men, particularly white men, are not happy. Newman explained the situation in the Guardian, characterizing the reaction to the change as “extreme”:
For race, this seems to be a regional thing. For example, most complaints about being black in the game have generally been from Russian players. With gender it seems to be more of a geography-free complaint.
Here’s one of the many messages we’ve received from disgruntled male players: “Why won’t you give the player base an option to choose their gender? I just want to play the game and have a connection to the character like most other games I play. Not have some political movement shoved down my throat because you make the connection we can’t choose our gender in reality so let’s make it like that in game too.”
Oh, honey. That’s so touching. Try being a woman sometime, just for a few hours. Check out all the tv shows and movies that have no characters a woman can “have a connection” with. I’m told the same thing applies to most games. Pause for a moment and remember that not all human beings are men. Take your time, we can wait.
[T]hese same complaints from male, white gamers would very likely fall on deaf ears if they were made by another group — by, say, a black, Hispanic, or female gamer. After all, originally, everyone on Rust was forced to play a bald white man — and there was no similar uproar.
Because default male. We get tired of having to create an uproar about every damn thing, so we don’t. So default male goes on default maleing.
I wonder how many of these gamers would be as upset to have play a character of a different species?
Does the gender of the character affect its stats or just how it appears on the screen?
Your Name’s not Bruce? – Do you mean fantasy species or realistic non-human animals? Or perhaps anthropomorphic animals?
Stats are unchanged… There was indeed similar outrage over having to play as black people.
Again with the “shoved down our throat” bit. Why is the patriarchy always so homoerotic?
Waiting for Dawkins or someone to give these guys a “Dear Muslima” type serve.
I wonder how long I’ll be waiting.
*crickets*
Rust is really fun and I love the concept but I hate what people do with it! That was the first time ever in a game I’ve had someone insult me for my gender and it pissed me off for weeks. It was before the update that randomly assigned sexes and I got a lot of guys who would react to my voice by going “Whoa, is that a girl???” and a few guys yelling slurs at me when I asked them why they killed me when I didn’t even have anything to steal. That, and chat was full of racial slurs when skin color was random and then when random sexes happened they turned into sexist slurs. It’s better on smaller servers but it’s still pretty bad.
It just seems like such a waste of potential to me that people drag racism and sexism into it and that everyone just kills each other on sight instead of cooperating and forming alliances.
BKiSA, I’ve sometimes wondered if it is homoeroticism or if it is horror at the thought they are being placed in a powerless position like, say, a person being Forced to fellate another. I’m not even sure if the origin of the phrase is sexual or not, and if it’s not whether modern users of the phrase realise that…
Emily, I trust you’re not holding your breath while waiting.
beckyescalator, the kill on sight thing has put me off playing frankly. It says something deeply nasty about the mentality and urges of a substantial number of humans. Makes me look around carefully at my fellows and ponder what will go down in the zombie apocalypse.
beckeyescalator, long ago I came to the conclusion that the internet was a wondrous thing because it allowed unprecedented communication, but was also a horrible thing because it allowed unprecedented communication.
I was taken aback by the information that “most complaints about being black in the game have generally been from Russian players”. It’s really curious, as their black minority is very small (check “Afro-Russians” in Wikipedia).* Here is one possible explanation: racism in Russia is directed mainly against the people from the south (the Chechen, the Tajik, the Armenians, etc). As it happens, it is exactly those people who are called “чёрные” (“blacks”) in Russian derogatory slang. Maybe this is the association that explains it? I’m not completely sure.
*The same in my country. When I was a kid, my first and immediate thought after seeing a black person was “a foreigner”. Usually the second thought was “rich”, because – obviously! – all foreigners are rich, aren’t they? (Yes, I’m sure you’ll agree.) It still seems to me that moving from such experiences to racist attitudes is quite a task. In this, I’m probably naive: evidently, we are very talented people and we can perform such a move quicker than it takes to utter the words “long live the European Union”.
Racism in largely homogeneous countries tends to be very weird (see Japan for great instances of that), so who knows?
Oh NO!
BALD?
I honestly think the phrase originally derived from force-feeding. However, the homoerotic connotation is so obvious in this era that it’s remarkably difficult to believe it’s not used deliberately, to suggest the speaker is being orally raped.
Which, in turn, is a lovely way of using analogy to diminish the horror of actual rape. (See also: Godwin’s Law and corollaries thereof.)
Yes, the expression came from forced feeding. It’s amazing to me that even has to be explained. Almost as if as soon as anything to do with sex organs is used in any context whatsoever, the sex meaning takes over the whole thing. It’s as if everything is regressing to junior high. (I’m not blaming you! It’s just the attitude that’s in the air and we all catch it.)
Anyway, what I really climbed into comments for was about the Russian racism. I grew up in a Russian family and visited there when it was still the Soviet Union. No, the racism does not come from other ethnicities to the south. They’re racist about them too, but there’s a specific variety for them. The anti-black racism is broad and deep in Russia. It’s pervasiveness is on the order of, say, sexism in the media: so complete that there’s a genuine lack of understanding it even exists. It’s taken for granted, normal, there’s no other attitude conceivable.
A sort of funny-ewww story about that. When the first African travelled to Russia, some three hundred years ago, he was such a curiosity that he met the Tsar. I don’t remember which one. He was so amazed by this new form of human that he wanted a member of his court to marry a black, to see what would happen, if I remember right. (Yeah. I know.) Well, there were zero volunteers and everybody was horrified, but Tsars had absolute power so whatcha gonna do? Some woman from the lesser nobility got drafted and that was that. Six generations later, that family produced Pushkin, arguably the greatest poet in any language, not just Russian. If you check out his picture on Wikipedia, it’s pretty easy to see the faint echoes of black African features.
This article is a perfect example of why, if you want to be a man who is at least reasonably friendly to feminism, it takes… Oh so much self control. Every single line of that article drips with the assertion that it is “men” in some collective, class like, whole sense, who are complaining. Not some people who are men, not some percentage of male players, no, it’s “men” doing this. And they collectively must be taken to task for their collective moral failings.
If feminism hasn’t taught you that it’s unpleasant she people do this sort of thing to you, it’s maybe not such a great idea to be casting aspersions on other people’s sense of empathy.
And on cue, the canned response to anyone who points that out is, “But this is what we deal with EVERY DAY! See?! See?! How do you like it? Take it! Take it!” Which is fine up until the point where it’s transparently obvious that the speaker is reveling in being cruel to someone in a specific way that their entire political self identity is supposed to be about opposing.
I can almost excuse the article because it’s just click bait. I don’t expect anything of it. But come on. The inability to create your own character is a known feature of Rust. How many players are actually upset by this? More than zero, I’m sure, but come on.
What does it mean that no one seems to even care?
Quixote, thanks. During my visits to Russia I noticed the prejudice against the southern nations (it was sort of hard not to notice). As for anti-black racism, perhaps I’ve just never participated in the proper sort of conversations, but you may be quite right about this.
I know the story of Pushkin’s ancestor from old Russian movies (oh my, I watched too many of them!). Speaking of racism and old movies, here is “a sort of funny-ewww” scenario which I give to you in return for your interesting comment. Unfortunately, I do not remember the title, but the movie was quite old, for sure from the Stalinist period.
Here is the plot: a troupe of American artists – dancers, singers and whatever you want – goes on tour in communist Russia. (Strange idea for the very start, but just wait.) The American heroine falls in love with a Russian guy and all is sweet and nice until the problem arises. The leader of the troupe, a classical American imperialist bully, wants the heroine for himself and he resorts to blackmail. See, the heroine’s horrible secret is that she used to have a black lover. Obviously, this is an utter disgrace to the Americans and the leader takes it for granted that such a revelation will ruin her reputation forever. In the final scene the secret is revealed. The Russians look in amazement at the sobbing heroine, then at the leader, then at the heroine again … at last one of them asks, with an unforgettable melodious accent of a true Stalinist worker: “ну и что?” (“so what?”) Music, tears of joy, and they lived happily ever after – or at least till the next great purge.
I remember a lot of this crap also from my youth. Everything so false, so distorted and ridiculous, but still … Ah, when you catch yourself thinking of the old totalitarian propaganda with sentiment, it probably means that the time has come to die.
“when you catch yourself thinking of the old totalitarian propaganda with sentiment, it probably means that the time has come to die.”
Dear god. So true!