Sunday, April 17, 2016

[vzirowdx] Rust game and free software

The Rust video game, in attempting social commentary by assigning players to an unchangeable race and gender, unintentionally clearly illustrated the issue that free software has been advocating all along: users should have control over their software.

The unhappiness that some players feel is not strictly because they are unhappy with the character to which they have been assigned, but because they do not get to exercise control over it.  They are locked in.

Tangentially, although the media would like to play the story up as male gamers feeling emasculated, I have heard anecdotes of heterosexual male gamers preferring a female avatar (in games in which one can choose one's character's appearance) for rational reasons, for example, if that's the character one is going to be looking at all the time, it might as well be pleasant to look at.

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