I appreciate the current title in a macabre sort of way. Especially given some recent news in part of California. I can't read the full article, but I still find it funny that the intended...
I appreciate the current title in a macabre sort of way. Especially given some recent news in part of California. I can't read the full article, but I still find it funny that the intended behavior in-game is
rather than finding new housing or moving out of the city.
It may be a bug, but I think it's more immersive to leave it in. Or expand on it; have your utopic town and anyone priced out forms a slum or Shantytown.
Also, let's face it: I've been in those circles. Without going to the comments for such mod communities I know exactly how this discourse turns out among gamers. There's a grain of truth in the title even if it is sensationalized.
This feels a little like the author is trying to stretch bug reports to fit their prior narrative regarding the heartless nature of gamers, when even then they were trying to stretch the narrative...
This feels a little like the author is trying to stretch bug reports to fit their prior narrative regarding the heartless nature of gamers, when even then they were trying to stretch the narrative of heartless gamers to cover the heartlessness of people with regards to homeless people.
While I agree that we need to treat the unhoused with dignity and respect, this article is very thin.
As someone who has been playing since launch, yeah that's about right. The thing is, the game is approximating real world systems, but doing so in an odd, and a lot of the time, unrealistic way....
As someone who has been playing since launch, yeah that's about right.
The thing is, the game is approximating real world systems, but doing so in an odd, and a lot of the time, unrealistic way. Things like them removing the "landlord system" to fix high rent issues, but its not really the same thing as a real landlord in the real world, although its somewhat similar. Or the bug they fixed recently where offices would keep shrinking their employee count over time (I think due to not actually selling the things they make, so their stockpile grows and grows and they let go of employees because they're producing too much, but also their stockpile provides them with a high net worth), which also contributed to high homeless counts. One of the big signs that they (the devs) make weird decision choices is that the main revenue in the game from your city is taxation graduated by education level, as in, you can tax highly educated people more than less educated people, and that's your main source of revenue, a scheme that as far as I'm aware is not used in any city in the world.
Makes for fun headlines though, but again, take the sentiment with a grain of salt, most players are just doing whatever they can to work around issues in the game to stop their city from collapsing.
Video game news outlets can't help but insert their activism into articles about games that never tried to make a political point in the first place. It's honestly exhausting. Removing homeless...
Video game news outlets can't help but insert their activism into articles about games that never tried to make a political point in the first place.
It's honestly exhausting.
Removing homeless people from a game is just that, removing homeless people from a game. Outside of an insane person and/or rare outlier, I can guarantee this is mainly downloaded for no reason other than "the game now plays better" and not for any nefarious reasons implied by the author.
This is the other way around; 404 Media isn't a game news outlet, they're a regular news outlet. Most of their stuff has historically been pretty good, but this is a very weak take from someone...
This is the other way around; 404 Media isn't a game news outlet, they're a regular news outlet. Most of their stuff has historically been pretty good, but this is a very weak take from someone whose byline isn't gaming or game media.
EDIT: I will say that "editing/modding game to remove X" is often a huge red flag, but mostly because of the thing or topic being removed. Mods removing trans people, or minorities, or other marginalized groups are concerning signs, because it says something about someone that they will go out of their way to go to the effort of removing those people from the world they're (temporarily) inhabiting. But I don't agree with stretching that conceptual framework to cover this bugfix.
I think the difference between the article and what you're mentioning isn't that one fixes a bug, it's that trans people, minorities, and marginalized groups in games generally don't alter...
I think the difference between the article and what you're mentioning isn't that one fixes a bug, it's that trans people, minorities, and marginalized groups in games generally don't alter gameplay.
If there was a subsystem in cities skylines that required you to build LGBT shelters or deal with racial segregation in some way, I wouldn't fault anyone with removing those systems from the game, because there's nothing wrong with people playing a game the way they want to play it. Having a problem with any of those groups just being represented in the game is indictive of a personal issue though.
I'd also just add that "huge red flag" feels a little overstated. Just about every game that CAN have mods has dumb/offensive/hateful mods. If you're going to get worked up over the fact that 30...
I'd also just add that "huge red flag" feels a little overstated. Just about every game that CAN have mods has dumb/offensive/hateful mods.
If you're going to get worked up over the fact that 30 people who played X game downloaded or made some mod out of the literal thousands that can have 100's of thousands of downloads, you're probably not spending your time efficiently.
Now obviously if the hate mods have the highest amount of downloads or represent a huge portion of the community, that is 100% an issue. As always it's a matter of scale.
Oh yeah, I didn't mean a red flag for the game. Anyone can make a mod for any game; it's nothing on the game or its developers. It's only a red flag regarding that person, and only really for...
Oh yeah, I didn't mean a red flag for the game. Anyone can make a mod for any game; it's nothing on the game or its developers. It's only a red flag regarding that person, and only really for people who disagree with that sort of cultural cleansing.
My reading is that the writer had a point they wanted to make about people modding games to "fix" female designs and representation but they missed the boat on when it was breaking news. Now they...
My reading is that the writer had a point they wanted to make about people modding games to "fix" female designs and representation but they missed the boat on when it was breaking news. Now they tried to shoe horn a characterization into a more current event. Like they copy-pasted the details of the bug, the negative impact it had and how the mod works, but then just farmed out of context lines from dozens of posts about the issue. I can't make the connection.
If you want to bring attention to homeless issues, at any point there's probably several cities rejecting shelter proposals or enforcing unreasonable laws to persecute them. But deleting bugged entities in a game does not equate to poverty erasure.
Oh, that may make it worse. Talk about a topic you know next to nothing about and insert opposing viewpoints where there were none to begin with. We have a saying here: cobbler, stick to your last.
Oh, that may make it worse. Talk about a topic you know next to nothing about and insert opposing viewpoints where there were none to begin with.
We have a saying here: cobbler, stick to your last.
Even if this was actually what was happening on face value; gamers removing homeless people simply because they don't like them in the game, it still wouldn't be a political culture war story like...
Even if this was actually what was happening on face value; gamers removing homeless people simply because they don't like them in the game, it still wouldn't be a political culture war story like the author of this article so badly wants it to be.
I play a game called factorio, a game about crash landing on an alien world, subjugating the native fauna and murdering them by the tens of thousands to exploit all of the natural resources on the planet in the most exponential way possible while giving zero care to the enormous amount of modeled pollution this causes.
I usually disable those native fauna in the game because I don't find the "fight alien" aspect fun, and it's a game I paid money for, so I will play it in the most fun way for me possible.
If removing homeless people makes the game more fun for some people, more power to them. That doesn't mean they don't respect real life homeless people, or aren't sensitive to their plight. It means they're playing the game they want to play. Just like how when I played SimCity 2000 as a kid, the most fun thing for me was to make gigantic natural disasters that wiped out half the city and recovering from it.
Does that mean I enjoy when tsunamis kill thousands of people? No, that's obviously absurd. I also don't like murdering people or visiting prostitutes, but I did those things a lot when I played Grand Theft Auto also.
I always thought we put this tired, played out argument to bed when Hillary Clinton and Joe Leiberman made it in the early 2000s, but I guess it still rears it's baffling head now and again.
Also worth mentioning that the homeless people in the game aren't a good representation of real homeless issues. Like, in the real world, there's a whole aspect of lack of mental health resources...
Also worth mentioning that the homeless people in the game aren't a good representation of real homeless issues. Like, in the real world, there's a whole aspect of lack of mental health resources and rampant drug use, and things like not enough homeless shelters, and existing shelters being underfunded and sometimes dangerous, and a loop of losing your job, maybe not making rent, potentially running in to the law (especially now that sleeping outside can be criminalized), now you may not be able to get another job due to a criminal record, etc.
Well the game doesn't have any of that, homeless people in this game are just people who lost their job and can't afford rent, and one of the main ways to deal with it in the game was just build a bus connection to outside the city and they'd all just leave to greener pastures. There's no sense of mental health in the game, there's no drug use (although there is policing), there's no homeless shelters, there's a thin representation of welfare (you can place welfare offices, but honestly I don't really know what they do), there's very little politics (or at least, little idea of politics influencing and causing some of these issues) in the game.
In the game, homeless people are just people who lost their job and can't afford rent, and they can exit the city and stop being your problem. They're not really analogous to real life homeless/houseless issues, and I don't think there's much to learn from the game's representation of it. It's interesting that they included a real world issue in the game, especially a negative one (clarification: it's negative that homeless/houseless people exist and we haven't been able to provide better lives for them, not that I'm demonizing houseless people), but they also didn't model it in a very realistic way, or at least in-depth way -- same as a lot of things in the game.
Doesn't the population of homeless also start taking over parks and sport areas? I don't play the game, but I remember seeing a video where the creator spent hours making a city look pretty and...
Doesn't the population of homeless also start taking over parks and sport areas? I don't play the game, but I remember seeing a video where the creator spent hours making a city look pretty and nice and then the tennis courts were filling up with tents and the like
Visually you start seeing tents pop up in recreation areas (parks, basketball courts, etc.). I have no idea if that has an impact on the parks themselves, if it lowers happiness or stops people...
Visually you start seeing tents pop up in recreation areas (parks, basketball courts, etc.).
I have no idea if that has an impact on the parks themselves, if it lowers happiness or stops people from using the parks, etc.. Parks themselves may be buggy, I don't know if they've fixed this yet, but there's a bug where people will only ever go to one park in your city, no matter how many you build, they'll all be empty (but provide happiness to those living around it), and no one will go to them, regardless of homeless people.
It occurs to me that Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic (the city builder I've been playing recently instead of City Skylines 2) doesn't even have homeless people. If you don't have enough...
It occurs to me that Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic (the city builder I've been playing recently instead of City Skylines 2) doesn't even have homeless people. If you don't have enough housing for young adults they leave your republic altogether. But I suppose that makes more sense since the housing is all public and afaik rent-free in that game.
Alternative headline: Players appreciate it when a bug is fixed, even if it's a mod creator that uses a brute force method to do so.
I appreciate the current title in a macabre sort of way. Especially given some recent news in part of California. I can't read the full article, but I still find it funny that the intended behavior in-game is
It may be a bug, but I think it's more immersive to leave it in. Or expand on it; have your utopic town and anyone priced out forms a slum or Shantytown.
Also, let's face it: I've been in those circles. Without going to the comments for such mod communities I know exactly how this discourse turns out among gamers. There's a grain of truth in the title even if it is sensationalized.
This feels a little like the author is trying to stretch bug reports to fit their prior narrative regarding the heartless nature of gamers, when even then they were trying to stretch the narrative of heartless gamers to cover the heartlessness of people with regards to homeless people.
While I agree that we need to treat the unhoused with dignity and respect, this article is very thin.
As someone who has been playing since launch, yeah that's about right.
The thing is, the game is approximating real world systems, but doing so in an odd, and a lot of the time, unrealistic way. Things like them removing the "landlord system" to fix high rent issues, but its not really the same thing as a real landlord in the real world, although its somewhat similar. Or the bug they fixed recently where offices would keep shrinking their employee count over time (I think due to not actually selling the things they make, so their stockpile grows and grows and they let go of employees because they're producing too much, but also their stockpile provides them with a high net worth), which also contributed to high homeless counts. One of the big signs that they (the devs) make weird decision choices is that the main revenue in the game from your city is taxation graduated by education level, as in, you can tax highly educated people more than less educated people, and that's your main source of revenue, a scheme that as far as I'm aware is not used in any city in the world.
Makes for fun headlines though, but again, take the sentiment with a grain of salt, most players are just doing whatever they can to work around issues in the game to stop their city from collapsing.
Video game news outlets can't help but insert their activism into articles about games that never tried to make a political point in the first place.
It's honestly exhausting.
Removing homeless people from a game is just that, removing homeless people from a game. Outside of an insane person and/or rare outlier, I can guarantee this is mainly downloaded for no reason other than "the game now plays better" and not for any nefarious reasons implied by the author.
This is the other way around; 404 Media isn't a game news outlet, they're a regular news outlet. Most of their stuff has historically been pretty good, but this is a very weak take from someone whose byline isn't gaming or game media.
EDIT: I will say that "editing/modding game to remove X" is often a huge red flag, but mostly because of the thing or topic being removed. Mods removing trans people, or minorities, or other marginalized groups are concerning signs, because it says something about someone that they will go out of their way to go to the effort of removing those people from the world they're (temporarily) inhabiting. But I don't agree with stretching that conceptual framework to cover this bugfix.
I think the difference between the article and what you're mentioning isn't that one fixes a bug, it's that trans people, minorities, and marginalized groups in games generally don't alter gameplay.
If there was a subsystem in cities skylines that required you to build LGBT shelters or deal with racial segregation in some way, I wouldn't fault anyone with removing those systems from the game, because there's nothing wrong with people playing a game the way they want to play it. Having a problem with any of those groups just being represented in the game is indictive of a personal issue though.
I'd also just add that "huge red flag" feels a little overstated. Just about every game that CAN have mods has dumb/offensive/hateful mods.
If you're going to get worked up over the fact that 30 people who played X game downloaded or made some mod out of the literal thousands that can have 100's of thousands of downloads, you're probably not spending your time efficiently.
Now obviously if the hate mods have the highest amount of downloads or represent a huge portion of the community, that is 100% an issue. As always it's a matter of scale.
Oh yeah, I didn't mean a red flag for the game. Anyone can make a mod for any game; it's nothing on the game or its developers. It's only a red flag regarding that person, and only really for people who disagree with that sort of cultural cleansing.
My reading is that the writer had a point they wanted to make about people modding games to "fix" female designs and representation but they missed the boat on when it was breaking news. Now they tried to shoe horn a characterization into a more current event. Like they copy-pasted the details of the bug, the negative impact it had and how the mod works, but then just farmed out of context lines from dozens of posts about the issue. I can't make the connection.
If you want to bring attention to homeless issues, at any point there's probably several cities rejecting shelter proposals or enforcing unreasonable laws to persecute them. But deleting bugged entities in a game does not equate to poverty erasure.
Oh, that may make it worse. Talk about a topic you know next to nothing about and insert opposing viewpoints where there were none to begin with.
We have a saying here: cobbler, stick to your last.
Even if this was actually what was happening on face value; gamers removing homeless people simply because they don't like them in the game, it still wouldn't be a political culture war story like the author of this article so badly wants it to be.
I play a game called factorio, a game about crash landing on an alien world, subjugating the native fauna and murdering them by the tens of thousands to exploit all of the natural resources on the planet in the most exponential way possible while giving zero care to the enormous amount of modeled pollution this causes.
I usually disable those native fauna in the game because I don't find the "fight alien" aspect fun, and it's a game I paid money for, so I will play it in the most fun way for me possible.
If removing homeless people makes the game more fun for some people, more power to them. That doesn't mean they don't respect real life homeless people, or aren't sensitive to their plight. It means they're playing the game they want to play. Just like how when I played SimCity 2000 as a kid, the most fun thing for me was to make gigantic natural disasters that wiped out half the city and recovering from it.
Does that mean I enjoy when tsunamis kill thousands of people? No, that's obviously absurd. I also don't like murdering people or visiting prostitutes, but I did those things a lot when I played Grand Theft Auto also.
I always thought we put this tired, played out argument to bed when Hillary Clinton and Joe Leiberman made it in the early 2000s, but I guess it still rears it's baffling head now and again.
Also worth mentioning that the homeless people in the game aren't a good representation of real homeless issues. Like, in the real world, there's a whole aspect of lack of mental health resources and rampant drug use, and things like not enough homeless shelters, and existing shelters being underfunded and sometimes dangerous, and a loop of losing your job, maybe not making rent, potentially running in to the law (especially now that sleeping outside can be criminalized), now you may not be able to get another job due to a criminal record, etc.
Well the game doesn't have any of that, homeless people in this game are just people who lost their job and can't afford rent, and one of the main ways to deal with it in the game was just build a bus connection to outside the city and they'd all just leave to greener pastures. There's no sense of mental health in the game, there's no drug use (although there is policing), there's no homeless shelters, there's a thin representation of welfare (you can place welfare offices, but honestly I don't really know what they do), there's very little politics (or at least, little idea of politics influencing and causing some of these issues) in the game.
In the game, homeless people are just people who lost their job and can't afford rent, and they can exit the city and stop being your problem. They're not really analogous to real life homeless/houseless issues, and I don't think there's much to learn from the game's representation of it. It's interesting that they included a real world issue in the game, especially a negative one (clarification: it's negative that homeless/houseless people exist and we haven't been able to provide better lives for them, not that I'm demonizing houseless people), but they also didn't model it in a very realistic way, or at least in-depth way -- same as a lot of things in the game.
Doesn't the population of homeless also start taking over parks and sport areas? I don't play the game, but I remember seeing a video where the creator spent hours making a city look pretty and nice and then the tennis courts were filling up with tents and the like
Visually you start seeing tents pop up in recreation areas (parks, basketball courts, etc.).
I have no idea if that has an impact on the parks themselves, if it lowers happiness or stops people from using the parks, etc.. Parks themselves may be buggy, I don't know if they've fixed this yet, but there's a bug where people will only ever go to one park in your city, no matter how many you build, they'll all be empty (but provide happiness to those living around it), and no one will go to them, regardless of homeless people.
It occurs to me that Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic (the city builder I've been playing recently instead of City Skylines 2) doesn't even have homeless people. If you don't have enough housing for young adults they leave your republic altogether. But I suppose that makes more sense since the housing is all public and afaik rent-free in that game.