

There have been days where getting out of bed was a herculean task, made possible only by throwing back whatever combination of over-the-counter painkillers I had in stock. Partially because I thought my colony was over, but mainly because I saw a bit of myself in her. I was stunned when Sweetpea was first incapacitated from her pain. Optimizing for a better colony means creating a better life for everyone in it-even Sweetpea. It’s here where Rimworld stands out, including parameters for human happiness and empathy in its black box. But the worlds in which we play are based on others’ interpretations of reality, whatever they may be. There’s an assumption that comes with playing simulation games that the player is dictating the events that unfold that they’re booting up the game for a few hours of playing god. But there is an extreme amount of air pollution, high unemployment, and a totalitarian police state available to all citizens. There’s no fire stations, hospitals, or readily available leisure. But a look under the hood shows a city that would be hellish to live in. Magnasanti is a perfect city according to the game, with six million residents jammed into it.
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SimCity 3000 player Vince Ocasla took four years to figure out how to build the ideal city for this black box, and created an absolutely monstrous city dubbed Magnasanti. Baker wrote, “an ‘unreachable black box’ which could ‘seduce’ players into accepting its assumptions, like the fact that low taxes promoted growth in this virtual world.” When these ideas were integrated into SimCity, they created, as Kevin T. Urban Dynamics encouraged city planners to forgo social programs in favor of incentivizing businesses, saying that such programs were actually detrimental to cities.
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The book sought to explain the rise and fall of cities via a series of mathematical equations, a number of which Wright implemented into his game.īut in doing so, Wright also implemented Forrestor’s assumptions about what an ideal city looks and operates like. When developer Will Wright got serious about turning his map editor into the first SimCity, he turned to a book by Jay Forrestor called Urban Dynamics. This sort of devaluing is most apparent in the SimCity games. Very few strategy and simulation games ask the player to consider the ramifications of their actions. It may seem like the general valuing of human life would be an obvious motif to bake into a game attempting to simulate society, but it could have been easily overlooked.

Unlike other games, however, Rimworld forces the player to ask themselves if they’d be happy doing either of those things, and provides real consequences. You can harvest a prisoner’s organs for later transplanting or even sell them into slavery. Like a proper simulation game, Rimworld allows the player to exert a questionable level of control over characters. If an innocent prisoner dies, every character’s mood will be negatively affected-even more so than if one of their fellow colonists dies. If your characters don’t get enough time to relax, they’re liable to break down and go rogue.īut the colonists aren’t just concerned about their own needs they care about the wellbeing of people in general. One of the first structures the game’s tutorial has you build is a horseshoe pit to give your colonists a place to hangout after work. The basic needs like food and sleep are there, but so is the rest of the hierarchy. Every colonist has a set of needs that must be met on a daily basis. There are a number of systems in the game that promote this playstyle. That’s when I realized that, in a genre that prioritizes ruthless efficiency above all else, Rimworld stands out in letting players strive for their own ideal version of what a society should be and value.

My colony didn’t enter a decline, but rather a period of adjustment that everyone made it out of. But to my surprise, the daily lives of all my colonists went on with minimal changes. The colony was set to slowly wither away, just as the last eight had. Now she could hardly get out of bed and was stuck in the ramshackle hospital she had finished just days before.Įverything I knew about base building games was telling me it was time for a restart.

Sweetpea was the backbone of my colony, throwing up entire buildings in a matter of minutes and harvesting crops as if winter was perpetually right around the corner. The little nanobots had taken hold of her muscular system, giving her superhuman strength at the cost of being in constant pain. I was certain that my ninth and longest-lived Rimworld colony was doomed when Sweetpea fell ill with mechanites and collapsed in a corn field.
