This is actually quite cool. Comes very close to convincing me to pick the game up…
I’ve certainly no ideological axe to grind either way here but one of things I find really enjoyable in gaming is creating my avatar. Games without that aspect are just missing something I enjoy so I tend to avoid them. Oddly it feels much less of an omission (speaking purely for myself, of course) for single-player games.
Certainly the idea of random unique (or almost-unique) avatars is a very interesting one and I’ll be keeping an interested eye on what happens. However, my previous musings about whether to play Rust are now decided.
Take a game about griefing, torture, and murder, and then turn it into a experiment about racial identity. What the hell did they think would happen?
Might you be bringing that meaning to the party yourself? What I’ve read about the game provided no indication that it was about these things.
We had a good chuckle about this. Especially interested what happens when female characters are introduced.
Ultimately I really like this idea. I think you can still cater to the customization aspect if your game has clothing options, hairstyles ect… Not everything has to be a full on power fantasy of ideals. That’s one of the joys of rogue-likes, playing the cards your dealt.
I’m getting a 404 error for the article.
They keep screwing up the dates on the links in the BBS. Should be /03/27/etc.
That explains it. The link worked fine when I started from the Offworld portal.
A multiplayer game where you don’t get to know what your avatar’s starting attributes will be sounds like something that the good John Rawls would have loved to have been able to observe. Closest thing you can realistically get to an actual simulation of a ‘veil of ignorance’-influenced social equilibrium.
It’s too bad he missed it.
In theory, the game is neutral to those things. However, everything I’ve read indicates that it has evolved into a Lord of the Flies type of thing.
I like that they’ve randomly changed everyone’s avatar into various hues - video gamers are so famously tolerant that they’ve barely noticed 
Never played it, but I remember this article…
It was REALLY refreshing to see that people who were ready to rush to say hurtful things were in the minority.
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