Bay 12 Games Forum

Ever played an RTS where you had to move dung around?

Does Black & White count?

There is no two-second clip they can play to get parent's dander up, merely text.  It would be news that wouldn't sell.

Some news sells that way, others doesn't. Some of the weirder game-changing arguments were derived from things that were total lies, and so certainly couldn';t have video clips. Jack Thompson in particular didn't play the games he talked about, let alone provide evidence to his claims. Given, he didn't do as much damage as, say, the Hot Coffee mod, which could provide clips. I'm not convinced the news wouldn't sell, and I'm certainly not convinced a video clip couldn't be come up with. Even isometric art gets kind of weird if you see a line of dwarves forming to a cute little dwarven child for the purposes of rape, or whatever (that scenario is rather unlikely to pull off, depending on how it's implemented-- it'd be easier, perhaps, to show rape and subsequent beating death or something). It's a scary image, and isometric rendering would make it much easier to visualize.

In contrast, Mass Effect requires at least 8 hours of game play devoted to merely hanging out with the girl to get a 15 second clip of barely R-rated side-boobage.  In game terms, that is an eternity.

What? As far as I recall it just meant visiting the character in-between missions and choosing the right conversation options. I did it entirely by accident.

There is no good way to pull it off, really, because people will always think you did it tastelessly no matter how hard you try to do it tastefully. People think that the start of Saving Private Ryan is too long. People complain about the "No Russian" mission in Modern Warefare 2. I thought those scenes were powerful and epic. Nyeh to the lot of them. And people say that ME's romance subplots were intricate and realistic and difficult, not just a shoddy way to see some porn, and while I agree it's not the latter, I don't think it's the former either. They don't seem particularly deep to me.

Dwarves? Drunk? That'd take, what, five times their weight in whiskey?

You can add the feature, but it'll never happen. Dwarves are stout fellows.

But even then, let's say Fox claims Dwarf Fortress allows you to simulate rape in an intense level of details and that hundreds of pedophiles play it. Well, people who know what Dwarf Fortress is laugh. Pedophiles check it out, find out it was a lie, and don't come again. A number of people wanting to see what it is about just stay because the game is awesome. A handful of guillible people are deeply offended and no one cares.

Sure. That's an intense enough of a lie to get backlash. I wonder if they didn't lie? "DF, a strategy game produced by a man who goes by the name of 'Toady', allows you to brutally rape and murder children and animals, before carving their bones into ornaments and decorating your room."
It sure *sounds* bad, and worse, it'd be true! We'd be reduced to the defense of "That's taking it out of context", which is a lot weaker sounding than "You, sir, are a liar."
And there's stuff in-between, with more or less fabrication. Well orchestrated, it's possible a fair amount of repulsion could be produced towards DF, even if it wasn't strong enough to produce actual protests. So DF would get this aura of nastiness ("oh, it's that game that lets you do *anything*, blegh") and because of this (a lot?) fewer people try it out. And this is sad.

plus nothing would be illegal about it.

Oh pshaw. In civilized countries, yes, but I live in Canada. Our child porn laws are so overbroad that it is ridiculously close to being illegal-- one could construe the sentence, "DF is cool, I wish you could do every one of those things in real life" as child pornography if rape of a minor was possible in DF, though you would surely get laughed out of court. But, it's dangerously close. Given the Canadian disregard for the exact letter of the law, it could be prosecuted, too.

I mean, a kid can read books or watch movies, no one gets charged when this happens.

The difference is that these are video games. Surely video games shouldn't touch adult concepts? They're for kids! Ha ha ha-- except that's seriously how it works. :/

Has something like this happened already, with so unknown an indie game, or so harmless a simulation ? (both on the ground for a few frames)

Nothing has actually done this before to my knowledge. Pretty much every game with rape as a gameplay element has done it for the purposes of creating pornographic video games. If you want some small, unknown title that got a ton of backlash for including rape, I guess Rapelay is as close as you can get. Wasn't even released in the US, but that didn't stop Americans from protesting and demanding the halting of distribution. For what its worth, it worked-- the developers removed all references to the game and ceased distribution, though it lives on in the internet.
On the other hand, you have, say, Mass Effect, which had a sort of implied sex scene and was called a "rape simulator" and so on. And then right in between you have the Hot Coffee minigame in GTA:SA, which of course didn't hurt GTA's sales in general in the long term, but at the time it caused quite a bit of damage. It was rerated AO, they had to recall or rerate existing copies, deal with a class action lawsuit, create a new disc, republish, and all this with politicians raising threats about further control of the gaming industry, further litigation, and an overall suppression of artistic freedom in the industry (if, at least, you want to also be able to sell at all).

To balance it out, ME and GTA:SA were AAA games with a large fanbase, DF is not. And Rapelay was extremely unknown, but brutal and graphic in its depiction not only of sex, but of rape. I obviously can't predict exactly what will happen if DF got this, so I am rightfully shamed for making predictions. I wouldn't like to see it go deep in the bad end, though.

tl;dr
Imagine fortress mode where no dwarf goes berserk, or suicidally-depressed /insane because it would be "too controversial" to have the mentally unstable kill themselves or others.
Yawn.

I don't remember anybody advocating removing any content that anybody dislikes, but regardless, I agree.

Scaring off new players isn't really an argument, since the forums are full of enthusiastic descriptions of new ways to kill peaceful traders and kittens anyway. Any attention is good attention, GTA for example certainly isn't worse off for all the fuzz.

re: GTA, see above. It could have been better off, certainly. Rockstar deeply regrets adding the sex minigame to their codebase. Actually, just in general see above, I don't want to be redundant, and I'm sorry I replied to that other dude first, despite you beating him to the punch.

re: profit: oh yay politics.

Now, if you aren't a "special" fellow, it only takes a few days to get used to most of DF's main features. Don't dumb down the game for the sake of newbies, give them a tutorial instead.

Sure, the learning curve is short, it's also quite steep. Now, before I get started, let's take it in context. I was responding to somebody that was justifying adding some silly feature that a few people might use but will probably clutter up gameplay slightly, making DF harder to handle. So when I say that a DF barren of complex features would be newbie-friendly, the point I am making is not that I want it to be barren of features, but that this new feature doesn't really help, while others (in fact, you just suggested one-- a tutorial) could-- I'm reminding you that DF is not very newbie friendly, and that's precisely because of this mind-shattering array of features. (A huge set of features is not an altogether positive thing, as this shows, so I wouldn't use it as justification, ever). In particular, I wished to imply that this relatively minor concern was in fact more significant to me than all the benefits that feature brought.

DF is actually kind of shallow in certain areas-- the newbie-stage is pretty much empty of content, and in terms of area of play there's tons that could be added with more significance, like is being done now. On a per-hour work level, I have no idea how it measures up, and I don't think I can, but I suspect it doesn't measure up there either.

sproingie, you really need to hang out on #python more.

That is the single most important reason why the game shouldn't include controvercial elements: Because they go against the wishes of some of the community itself.

Now don't go too far with my statement, of course the game cannot be everything to everyone and some things need to be included or excluded even if it would cause the community to lose members.

The two sentiments are pretty incompatible.

How much of an improvement are we seeing with the people who would prefer rape to the people who would dislike it? Then how important to the game is the inclusion of Rape?

Hah, that's a serious question?

Adding rape to DF would be absolutely out of the question, right now. Nobody misses it as a feature, so it's not like people are going to abandon DF as players if it doesn't get added. If it does get added, on the other hand, DF becomes an instant pariah among video games, alienating most of its userbase for the sake of a few. Probably many will soldier on, but the ability of DF to attract new players is compromised. Maybe DF wouldn't die, but it would be set back. Rape is a stupid feature, AFAICT nobody honestly suggested it, and that's not what this thread is really about anyway.

I think any human being must know at some level the reality that men (and people in general) are supposed to protect and serve women (and other individuals in general), not abuse them for their own desires. Any saying to the contrary is simply justification for selfishness.

I think you meant to say that people are supposed to protect people. Attaching genders and then afterward dismissing any possible accusations of sexism with "and people in general" and so on is a cheap trick, and doesn't make your post less offensive. Neither does your simple dismissive attitude towards selfishness, and in particular your dismissal of any opposition ("you're with us or against us", right?)-- a large number of people think that selfishness is in some way good-- it is the foundation of capitalism, the mechanism of evolution, and so on. The trick is that sometimes you can help yourself by helping others.

Most of these options seem like viable plot elements, if the goal is to create an immersive world for the player. I would really hope that no programming goes in to support the player committing sexual crimes, but a world completely lacking them will likely seem a little odd as DF becomes more complete.

For that kind of thing, honestly I think maybe you'd rather play Second Life. DF doesn't have an explicit goal of being a simulator of everything, and from what I can tell Toady has a few times rejected this as a primary goal. Not all simulations need be all-encompassing., nor can they be-- the more DF simulates, the slower it gets, until it's simulating individual particles and quantum effects, and you have 1 frame per 5300 years. If you want an immersive and complete world where any action is possible, Second Life and clones can do that, I think. It doesn't feeel like DF to me, it just feels like fluff. Given how long DF has been in development, it's ridiculous to prioritize something like simulating sex or rape over, say, allowing me to lay siege on goblin forts. You already agree with this, but you insist on discussing further. What more do you need? Obviously rape shouldn't be added to DF anytime soon, if ever, because there are so many more valuable things that allow so much more to be added to the tapestry of the world history.

I mean, sure, if Toady simulated every possible thing that could enhance the gameplay more than rape, maybe that would be an option. But that's enough stuff that I think we can just plain ignore it. For now, suggestions like that are mind-numbingly pointless.

Aside from such features slowing DF down further, increasing the complexity of the source code, increasing the complexity of the UI, increasing the steepness of the learning curve, and taking time away from other features that may be less controversial and do less of these things, there's not much I can think of, no-- some or all of these seem to tend to be present in controversial ideas. As a game design principle, adding anything anybody wants is bad.

On the other hand you're being awfully vague despite appearing to have some particular feature in mind. I can't argue the specific case for reasons that I guess should be obvious, but in general, controversial ideas are controversial for a reason, and adding them only because some people like them is silly.

I don't see why you bring up C/C++. The language MIGHT have something to do with multi-threading IF you had the source code, and for a functional and interpreted language it MAY be possible without it.

Because this is the Dwarf Fortress suggestions board, and Dwarf Fortress is written in C++. Given, that's not the only applicable language, as the statement was broader, but I figured I'd get the important bit out of the way first. DF isn't going to get rewritten in Haskell. :p

But for something compiled, the language does not matter, its all just binary/machine language in the end. If someone did find a way to make pure machine code multi-threaded without much effort, then they would win a medal or something.

Well, no. Compilation is the process of translation, that's pretty much it. Compilation can be multi-step-- for example, you might compile an unthreaded non-multi-process single-core ExampleLang file into a multicore C file and then to a multicore native program. Compiled languages can in fact get this magical multi-core thing, the main requirement is just that data dependencies be limited, as with functional languages. For example, GHC, a Haskell compiler (to native code), has an alpha implementation of this implicit parallel execution via DPH. There are also paradigms other than functional that can do this-- in particular, logical programming can, but I don't know if anybody's trying. Haskell gets a lot of attention.

I'm not sure why you brought C into this, we don't have the source, so it isn't C for us.

I brought in C++, and we won't get to implement anything. Is this thread going to become a lamentation about multicore programming in general? I honestly only said it because I assumed we were still talking about the difficulties involved in improving DF to be multicore. C++ is relevant in that context.