Suicide

[Thirite]

"Well just because you're not offended doesn't disprove SOMEONE might be"
What an unsurprising and predictable response. I suppose we should censor everything possible that might have the tiniest chance of upsetting someone. You know what upsets me? The fact that self-appointed censors like you think people with depression are fragile little eggs that need to be shielded from depictions of their condition.

[Tynan]

Hey, I appreciate the discussion, but let's remember to focus on the topic of the thread, and not go into discussing the the people in the thread.

Small minds discuss people.
Average minds discuss events.
Great minds discuss ideas.

[Thirite]

Right, sorry. I get carried away easily.

On topic, I think it's entirely a worthwhile addition because RimWorld is firstly a story generator, not just a videogame. Another mental break is simply another possible story. There's already drug-binging, wife-beating (I witnessed on my first playthrough no less) and all other sorts of dark subject matter. If RimWorld got an ERSB rating it might manage to dodge an AO rating due to its graphics alone. With this context I think it's quite silly to say, "Now THAT crosses the line."

[O Negative]

My stance (from 8 months ago...?) still stands.

From Page 1

Or, a mental break where a colonist tries to leave the colony entirely.

I agree with this one. It has the same gameplay effect as a suicide while avoiding the sensitive issues surrounding it. Not to mention there's a precedent for people marching off to their deaths in desperate situations. Letting colonists injure/kill themselves would require mechanic changes, and open the door to some scenarios with... rather disturbing implications. ("I got this hideously ugly colonist who wasn't good at anything, so I forced him to sleep outside and eat slop until he snapped and killed himself. My other colonists got a mood buff from his suicide because they disliked him.")

I think the only interesting gameplay element suicide offers is: A mental break that leads to the loss of a colonist.

I don't buy the argument of: We can do some messed up things, why not this messed up thing, too?
Why? Because, as messed up as some of RimWorld's mechanics are, I personally believe a line should be drawn somewhere. A lot of us just disagree on where (if anywhere) that is...
That said, I'm not entirely close-minded towards the idea. I'd like to see it as a mod before implemented in the core game, though.

[Sola]

My stance (from 8 months ago...?) still stands.

From Page 1

Or, a mental break where a colonist tries to leave the colony entirely.

I agree with this one. It has the same gameplay effect as a suicide while avoiding the sensitive issues surrounding it. Not to mention there's a precedent for people marching off to their deaths in desperate situations. Letting colonists injure/kill themselves would require mechanic changes, and open the door to some scenarios with... rather disturbing implications. ("I got this hideously ugly colonist who wasn't good at anything, so I forced him to sleep outside and eat slop until he snapped and killed himself. My other colonists got a mood buff from his suicide because they disliked him.")

I think the only interesting gameplay element suicide offers is: A mental break that leads to the loss of a colonist.

I don't buy the argument of: We can do some messed up things, why not this messed up thing, too?
Why? Because, as messed up as some of RimWorld's mechanics are, I personally believe a line should be drawn somewhere. A lot of us just disagree on where (if anywhere) that is...
That said, I'm not entirely close-minded towards the idea. I'd like to see it as a mod before implemented in the core game, though.

A mod already exists for this, if I'm not mistaken.

I'm 100% on board with not "including one messed-up thing because another messed-up thing exists in the game!", too.

The problem with topics like this one are that we've got SJWs crawling out of the woodwork, and entitled gamers demanding more realism in their megaspider-den killbox with triangle shaped stick figures simulator.  It's difficult for anyone to have a strictly objective opinion on a subject when you have to wade through a topic where 80% of the posts are ad hominem.

That said, O Negative's got the right idea.  Between leaving and suicide, the end result is the same, and doesn't carry the ramifications of using "the bad word".  Similar examples exist in "hide in room" or "sad wander" replacing "depressed stupor" and "psychotic wander" replacing "self injurious behavior" (dropping clothes outside during bad weather may not be the same as smashing your head into a wall, but the point is there).

But do we even need to waste man hours coding something into a game that already has a spectacularly steep learning curve and known bugs to fix doing something whose only purpose is to make it harder?

[Thirite]

The only place I'd honestly draw the line for something would be rape or similar sexual fetishism- and not necessarily because it's dark subject matter but because RimWorld isn't supposed to be a hentai-game. It would attract the wrong kind of people to it.

That said, imho suicide is not really dark in the same way. It's sad, but it's not vulgar. It's the end result of untreated depression. Like asphyxiation is the end result of untreated asthma. Like death is the result of untreated cancer. Having a "Depressive" trait yet dancing around what actually happens to those that go untreated is quite frankly somewhat silly and from a certain view even irresponsible. It reminds me of the whole absurd "fan death" myth in Korea, where they are so adamant to never admit that suicide happens they cover it up, pretending it was the fault of a fan magically cooking them in their sleep. I'm not by any means saying it's Tynan's intention, but that's how it could come across. Bad things happen. And by pretending they don't for the sake of "not upsetting people" you're not doing anyone a favour. The way to prevent real world suicide is by bringing it to light. By stopping it from being that "taboo subject" people aren't allowed to talk about. Imagine if someone with cancer refused to seek treatment because they worried it was a "taboo".

That's my 2 cents.

[OFWG]

... waste man hours coding something into a game that already has a spectacularly steep learning curve and known bugs to fix doing something whose only purpose is to make it harder?

I call that Dwarf Fortressing.

But seriously, an event that punishes the player with the loss of a pawn without any way to save the pawn is just anti-fun. The current game already has that in the "Just gave up" break and it's disabled by default for a reason...

Although it's handy to use (from the dev menu) on any Pyromaniacs that show up.

[Draconicrose]

I wouldn't like suicide in the game. I deal with people close to me who are suicidal or often get suicidal, and it's a painful thing. Everything else that happens in Rimworld is so comically detached from the real world that there's no problem but suicide isn't. There's also people who might play the game to distract themselves from their own suicidal thoughts and it can't be good to see it depicted as an 'inevitable consequence' in the game.

I also agree with people who say this adds nothing to gameplay. It'd be just as unfun as mental break spirals. If people really want this in their games, I think there are mods for it. This is definitely a case where it should STAY in mods.

[Thirite]

Alright, I'm going to try to cover a few things here as clearly as I can.

Firstly, the argument of "Well this horrible thing is already in the game and no one cares, so why not this?" is imho a perfectly valid argument, because what it's doing is pointing out hypocrisy. If you believe that suicide is "too dark" and "over the line" when spousal abuse, drug overdose (resulting in death), cancer, and similar other "dark" things are in the game that naturally upset many people in reality, you are by omission saying "Oh but those don't really matter." If you are playing the card that "This will upset someone and make their life worse." then you need to justify why the existing horrible things don't. Drawing an imaginary line at one topic but not another is entirely arbitrary and hypocritical. Either you care about people being hypothetically offended or you don't.

Adults do not need protection from "scary ideas". Not only are you patronizingly presuming that someone might be upset from the content of a videogame, you're presuming to know you know what's best for them. As I said in my previous post, the topic of suicide should be pushed more into the light, not out of it. Depression is a condition much like any other severe health condition, with a particularly high rate of mortality. By saying, "This should be censored because it's bad and will upset people." you are simply keeping the topic a taboo. How do you know you're not harming rather than helping?

"It's just a videogame." is a much stronger point than you realize. From what I said in my first paragraph, let me give an explanation why no one cares about all the completely horrible things that can happen in the game already: it's just a game. Videogames do not affect people anywhere near what you presume they do when you say "That will upset people!" Then why hasn't a man beating his wife to death in a drunken rage in RimWorld caused endless hordes of people to cry about how terrible and evil of a game this is? Shouldn't there be thousands of people complaining about how offended this game made them? Well, no. Because it's just a videogame. Only SJWs like the morons at Rock Paper Shotgun pretend to care about the allegedly offensive mechanics of a videogame, and in reality even they don't. They just needed something to be offended at, otherwise their clicks and meaning of existence goes down the drain.

[Harold3456]

The problem with topics like this one are that we've got SJWs crawling out of the woodwork, and entitled gamers demanding more realism in their megaspider-den killbox with triangle shaped stick figures simulator.  It's difficult for anyone to have a strictly objective opinion on a subject when you have to wade through a topic where 80% of the posts are ad hominem.

To give credit to this game's audience (at least, the ones I see on the forum), people don't actually seem to get offended by many things with this game. In fact, I see more people complaining about people getting offended by things than I do actual offended people.

The only things I've regularly seen people cautious about are rape scenarios and suicide, but to their credit these people usually provide arguments against implementation of these things that are better than merely "because they offend me". Whatever a person's personal opinions are on the matter, one can certainly see how the issues may be contentious.

[Harold3456]

Firstly, the argument of "Well this horrible thing is already in the game and no one cares, so why not this?" is imho a perfectly valid argument, because what it's doing is pointing out hypocrisy. If you believe that suicide is "too dark" and "over the line" when spousal abuse, drug overdose (resulting in death), cancer, and similar other "dark" things are in the game that naturally upset many people in reality, you are by omission saying "Oh but those don't really matter."

While I can see one's inclination to view things this way - "X is in and it's bad so all bad things must equally be in" - most of the game's content doesn't simply operate on a binary "good/bad" basis. Not all things are created equal in this regard. There are many factors that go into stuff like this, things like: how prevalent the issue is in real life, how many people are affected, the nature in which they're affected, etc. etc. The phrase "X is in, therefore everything should be in" really closes the door on rational discussion. Not to mention, given the obvious differences in resistance levels to these ideas on this very forum, the statement is objectively untrue.

PS: When you talk about the SJW's at Rock Paper Shotgun like they're some sort of epidemic, are you still referring to that one (singular) article written over a year ago about homosexuality and gender roles that basically everyone disagreed with? Because that seems to garner a lot more attention than it's actually worth. Or have a bunch more cropped up and garnered a bunch of support without me noticing?

[Limdood]

thirite, you can stop presuming we're talking FOR someone.  -I- would be upset if this made it in game.  I've a few too many friends who took their own lives to want to see it in a game i play for fun.  I'm not presuming some theoretical "someone" would be upset, i'm stating fact that I would be.  The people saying "no one cares about all the completely horrible things that can happen in the game" seem, by far, to be more presumptuous; thinking they know everyone's reaction is a certain way.  To the "i don't know of anyone who's killed themselves over a game" crowd, that's because if it happens, ITS TOO LATE, it never should have gone that far.  By that reasoning, you could leave your door unlocked with a sign that says "unarmed people and valuables inside."  You won't be murdered in your sleep.  After all, it hasn't happened to you before.

Anyways...

To your other points: Spousal abuse is a symptom of an indiscriminate social, and social fighting system.  it is the negative side of the balance of the social system.  Drug overdose is the negative balance of adding drugs as both a mood treatment and economic cash flow.  Cancer was likewise added when the existing penalties of drugs weren't enough (addiction was so easy to avoid and so easy to deal with).  Notice all YOUR examples, and EVERY OTHER dark thing in the game was added as a common-sense balance to another system or feature.  Cannibalism is a staple of the genre and the often recurring "last step" in survival/food situations.  Murder is the natural result of being able to do combat and have friendly fire. 

The current penalties/drawbacks of the mood system ALREADY exist, from removing the pawn from activity for a time, to consuming theoretically scarce resources, to endangering oneself, and finally to attempting to harm anything near oneself.  It doesn't NEED suicide added in.  It ADDS nothing to the game and as has been said and ignored several times already in this thread, "dropping dead from low mood" detracts from gameplay and fun.  That EXACT feature has been removed TWICE from the game already (the mental break that caused a pawn to wander off the map and leave the colony forever, and the one where they permanently became a hostile member of another faction).  Even a gradual suicide or one that the player has to act to prevent is still just the "wander off the map forever" event all over again, which was already removed.

[Thirite]

@Harold3456
When I say SJWs like the idiots at RPS, I only use them as an example because people here are aware of them. Hit pieces for "problematic content" that don't fit the regressive left's narrative are hardly rare.

[Harold3456]

@Harold3456
When I say SJWs like the idiots at RPS, I only use them as an example because people here are aware of them. Hit pieces for "problematic content" that don't fit the regressive left's narrative are hardly rare.

I don't see Rimworld mentioned in that article. Someone somewhere gets offended at video games in general, therefore there's endemic SJW-ness infecting Rimworld?

That EXACT feature has been removed TWICE from the game already (the mental break that caused a pawn to wander off the map and leave the colony forever, and the one where they permanently became a hostile member of another faction).  Even a gradual suicide or one that the player has to act to prevent is still just the "wander off the map forever" event all over again, which was already removed.

To move away from the inane, repetitive argument, "wander off the map" was already in this game and taken out? It seems to me like it'd be a pretty good addition (only for the extremest of extreme mental breaks, eg where you've been at 0 for a whole season straight). Was the frustration factor of just up and losing a pawn like that simply too great?

[Thirite]

There's certainly no epidemic of SJWs attacking RimWorld thank god.  If that implication was made somewhere it was unintended. Videogames in general? Absolutely.