Can This Game Evolve Beyond White Supremacy?

Spoonwood · 2020-09-28 22:05:50

Summary: The game, at present, is compatible with white supremacist beliefs. It should not be promoting white supremacy. It should evolve beyond that phase into something better.

For anyone new to the forums, there exist four different races of characters in the game. Ginger, Brown/Dark, Black/Darkest, and Pale/White.

One user on Steam describes them as follows:

"Black families' specialty is the desert and its resources. Brown families are the jungle and its resources. Ginger families are the arctic and its resources. And white families? They have no specialty in that regard except that they're the only family that can understand all the other families and bring them together.

You... uh... you see where the problem is, right? It's bad."

https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/765 … ed/595690/

Also, they get described here:

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8377

Contrary to what Mr. Rohrer writes, those specialties did not make for specialty on the basis of family, since there have existed times where multiple families exist on bigserver2 since then, and they do not get assigned to players based on their familial history or their family tree. They get assigned on the basis of the character model that the player has.

They have gotten described as "race restrictions" before. That term arises, because before they got introduced one's characters race had no effect on what one could do in game. I did not buy a game where such restrictions existed.

Which race has superior ability in terms of what they can physically do may not be entirely certain or able to get settled. Some differerent races may get thought of, I suppose, as physically superior to another in some ways and not in others.

However, one thing does seem certain. The "whites" or "pales" can understand all languages of other races. Their ability in that regard is unique, when a server has at least 15 players on it. Thus, that whites have superior intellectual ability to the other races holds true when imaging this game as a game about hypothetical people in some future.

Simply put, this is not a good state of affairs. That white people in the real world have superior intellectual ability is something that white supremacists believe. White supremacists, almost certainly, do watch professional sports, including some professional sports where non-whites *tend* to be at the top, such as the 100 meter dash. Thus, many of them may also believe that non-whites have physical superiority to whites also.

It's somewhat interesting that Mr. Rohrer writes: "Some people are going to be mad about this update for political reasons". Well, the inversion of that also may also hold true. Some people might like that update for political reasons. Perhaps, Mr. Rohrer likes those restrictions, not only for the objectives that he states, but also for political reasons. OHOL is a social game. Thus perhaps, Mr. Rohrer was trying to promote white supremacist beliefs with that change.

I, for one, sure as hell didn't purchase this game to promote white supremacism or white supremacist beliefs in real people. Nor did I expect the game to promote any form of white supremacism at any point in time, and I don't think that I could have known that such would be coming.

This state of affairs just isn't right. Things may not change in this regard, but they should.

Addendum: Also, I find it rather strange to have gingers as the snow people, so to speak. People with red hair are most common in The British Isles. Evolution suggests that people with red hair thus do best in that area. Humanity did not evolve such that red haired people would do better in arctic climates than others. People in more arctic climates look different than gingers, usually. And really, almost surely, any character type could have gotten classified for any biome or any ability. So, one really has to wonder why each race got picked the way it did.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-09-28 22:17:12)

sigmen4020 · 2020-09-28 22:44:04

What am I even reading...

fug · 2020-09-28 23:02:04

Drugs are bad kids.

Spoonwood · 2020-09-28 23:17:24

I don't do any drugs.

Caprys · 2020-09-29 00:16:20

No problem, we can fix that. We'll just give the specialisations of the blacks to the whites and the language understanding to the blacks. Then they can be the useless fam that has nothing to offer, but in your eyes they'll be superior. Problem solved.

Spoonwood · 2020-09-29 01:10:52

Caprys wrote:

No problem, we can fix that. We'll just give the specialisations of the blacks to the whites and the language understanding to the blacks. Then they can be the useless fam that has nothing to offer, but in your eyes they'll be superior. Problem solved.

That would promote viewing black people as intellectually superior though. I don't like black supremacy either, and it is bad too.

Gogo · 2020-09-29 02:10:46

Yeah, switch black and white specializations, so blacks can hoard stuff from others.

DiscardedSlinky · 2020-09-29 02:32:07

I liked when skin color didn't matter. You could have a brown kid a ginger kid a black kid it didn't matter they were your kids.

karltown_veteran · 2020-09-29 04:21:00

Yeah race restrictions are stupid. It’s not political. It’s not white supremacy. Last time I checked ginger people are considered Caucasian.

mrbah · 2020-09-29 06:54:17

karltown_veteran wrote:

Yeah race restrictions are stupid. It’s not political. It’s not white supremacy. Last time I checked ginger people are considered Caucasian.

wait until an american decides to lecture you about the irish.

Eve Troll · 2020-09-29 07:57:32

If you actually pay attention biome restrictions send a dark message. As much as this game plays off gingers as being a race, they're not. Its a recessive gene among whites. Ive avoided bringing this up, to avoid what will likely happen but here goes.

In terms of pure tech progression:

Blacks make sulfur and horses.

Browns make latex and palm kernels.

Whites can speak good?

Ginger can make oil. Once they do they can make more oil, and more oil and more..

What does oil make? Water and iron. What does that make? Food and everything else. Past the first oil pump gingers never need any of the other races besides for tires and belts for engines. Once they have enough engines and trucks they dont need the other races. Rubber is basically useless. Ive avoided bringing this up for obvious reasons. Jason will likely nerf engines, oil, iron, trucks, etc. Instead of removing a stupid system he seems to think is great for the game.

Its time to wake up. Biome restrictions are broken and add nothing to the game beyond making families reliant on each other. Reduces the risk of having one fam be dominant while others struggle. Which is a community problem, not a mechanical problem. You should be asking yourself why are people gravitating to *this* fam in comparison to the others instead of asking how to force people to gravitate to these fams instead of this one.

Being a race used to be a feature, not some type of racist mechanic that is completely unbalanced.

But yea back to the dark message. Blacks and browns are to be used by whites until they reach a certain tech tier then they are completely expendable. Huh.. very woke jason. Im sure this is some progressive statement about history and abuse towards minorities. If not.......

Last edited by Eve Troll (2020-09-29 08:20:50)

Rookwood · 2020-09-29 12:48:05

You're all reading too much into it and putting your personal biases onto the mechanic. Biome restrictions is intended to provide geographical advantages in a game that is procedurally generated. In doing so it encourages trade and family interaction. The interactions can be positive or negative, but that's just human nature.

If every family could get all the resources it needed, there would be 0 reason for interaction. The power gamers would just spawn into the town and run up the tech tree and no one would ever go find the other families except to grief or war. Right now, you have the option in any life to go help another fam out by getting them your resources. If you want to encourage xenophobia, that is exactly what eliminating biome restrictions would do, because there would be no reason for a foreign family player to be in your homeland except to grief. People would kill on sight or at least be very suspicious and hostile.

There is a good argument to be made that whites are fairly useless. They are replaced by low tech pen and paper, but arguing that this balance issue is equivalent to white supremacy is just ludicrous, and it undermines a serious issue that exists.

Blacks and browns are to be used by whites until they reach a certain tech tier then they are completely expendable.

Also this is untrue. Rubber and glass are always in demand. Not as critical to the late game as oil, sure, but nonetheless valuable.

"Used by whites" is also an interesting way to put it considering it's the blacks and browns who have more content due to their biomes. The game makes whites dependent on these families which is completely different than what you are insinuating, slavery or exploitation. The whites have no power over these families, rather they are at their mercy, again definitely a balance issue. Perhaps it shows us something about the ludicrous nature of our real world history with labor relationships, eh?

No player is forced to help another in this game and therefore slavery does not exist except when people try to roleplay it with babies they trap in fences, which is another issue entirely.

Last edited by Rookwood (2020-09-29 12:50:03)

Spoonwood · 2020-09-29 13:42:55

Eve Troll wrote:

What does oil make? Water and iron. What does that make? Food and everything else. Past the first oil pump gingers never need any of the other races besides for tires and belts for engines. Once they have enough engines and trucks they dont need the other races. Rubber is basically useless.

I agree that they don't need any of the other races. But, if a ginger is going to make ice cream (requires sugar) to satisfy a craving, they'll want a brown. Also, the feast table requires a bottle, wine needs glass, I think some milk cravings can only get satisified by using glass. Pickles make for a better example, since they require both sugar and peppercorn. I may have missed something, but I'm not finding something similar for blacks, if the resources already exist. Still a rather dark message.

Spoonwood · 2020-09-29 14:04:58

Rookwood wrote:

Biome restrictions is intended to provide geographical advantages in a game that is procedurally generated.

Whatever you want to call them, Jason knew that white characters would have NO geographical advantages when he made that system. So, no, the system was NOT just about geographical advantages in game.

Rookwood wrote:

The interactions can be positive or negative, but that's just human nature.

It's not human nature that black people can't work an oil rig. It's not human nature to drop a basket or food, because you step into an area. It's not human nature that white people can't slash a rubber tree. It's not human nature that black people can't pick a banana off of a banana tree. It's not human nature that gingers can't pick a cactus fruit off of a cactus. It's not human nature that brown people can't interact with a sulfur pit. And so on.

Rookwood wrote:

If you want to encourage xenophobia, that is exactly what eliminating biome restrictions would do, because there would be no reason for a foreign family player to be in your homeland except to grief.

I played on bs2 before race restrictions. I went to other towns occasionally, and I know Tarr and Pein did also. At least at some points in time, how things worked weren't like how you expect they would work with outsiders.

And they are not "biome restrictions". Biomes are NOT limited by those changes. Player characters got limited by them on the basis of their race and the number of people on the server.

Rookwood wrote:

They are replaced by low tech pen and paper, but arguing that this balance issue is equivalent to white supremacy is just ludicrous, and it undermines a serious issue that exists.

Whites have the language learning feature. Thus, they have superior understanding of speech. They somehow have more intellectual capability than everyone else. That they are intellectually superior is thus clear. Intellectual superiority of white people is a white supremacist belief.

DestinyCall · 2020-09-29 15:14:17

Spoonwood, you hurt your own arguments when you take them too far. It undermines the validity of your position and calls into question your base assumptions when you make inflammatory claims for their shock value.

Jason is not a white supremacist. Jason is not a rapist. Jason does not hate players. Jason does not want his game to fail. The list goes on ....

You have some good suggestions, Spoonwood But they get lost in all the noise and hyperbole. The so-called family specialization is a poorly designed mechanic that should be removed for game-play reasons and yes, it is inherently racist, but calling Jason out for "white supremacy" is not going to get anyone to take you seriously. It just makes you sound disconnected from reality.

Rookwood · 2020-09-29 15:16:10

It's not human nature *snip*

Right, but you're being incredibly literal. It is true that certain civilizations and cultures did not have access to certain resources until globalization and unfortunately, imperialism happened. That is what biome restrictions try to add to the game. The fact that resources were localized to certain civilizations and this gave them advantages and lead humans to seek trade.

Whites have the language learning feature. Thus, they have superior understanding of speech. They somehow have more intellectual capability than everyone else.

That is one way to look at it but it seems to me an intentionally inflammatory way to view it. What you are essentially arguing is that all whites are savants because the ability to just understand any language is beyond any realistic capability. It's Star Trek level technology.

It's meant to be more of a metaphor for whites as the most gregarious race, going out to interact with other cultures, much like Europe did in the age of exploration. Of course, that lead to many atrocities that happened in real life, but in this game, the dynamics of power that allowed Europeans to terrorize and exploit the world does not exist. Therefore your white supremacy does not exist in this game.

Again, you've forced me to defend the mechanic with your absolutely ridiculous arguments. I do not think whites having speech as their special ability is good for balance reasons. But I don't think it is white supremacy either and I think you are acting in bad faith to argue as such.

Last edited by Rookwood (2020-09-29 15:23:44)

JonySky · 2020-09-29 15:57:42

The breed limitations in OHOL are poorly implemented and smack of racism (although I am convinced it was never Jason's intention)

But races must have different tech trees without using artificial and racist limitations.

Forbidding the collection of resources from an area is like a dirty plaster on top of a wound (a sloppy solution)

An example: Age of empires ... each race has different characteristics, but all can collect resources in any area of the map and all can create different military and commercial units

It surprises me that in the 21st century we continue to coexist with racism, xenophobia or sexism

I hope that someday these forced and meaningless mechanics are improved and new mechanics can be implemented without offending anyone

Spoonwood · 2020-09-29 16:54:15

Rookwood wrote:

It is true that certain civilizations and cultures did not have access to certain resources until globalization and unfortunately, imperialism happened. That is what biome restrictions try to add to the game.

Again, Jason knew that white characters would have the language learning feature when he put them into the game. So, no, they were NOT about modeling such. And no, they were NOT an attempt to model how things happened historically, as this game is NOT a historical simulation. It takes place in a hypothetical future, and Jason has made this clear before:

jasonrohrer wrote:

The game takes place in the realm of thought experiments.
It is "in the future," because the thought experiment is about the future.

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … 896#p81896

A future where people get separated by their races in terms of their abilities, and segregated by their races also, at least when bs2 has only 4 families on it.

Again, they are NOT biome restrictions. They restrict what *players* can do with respect to objects in biomes. They do NOT restrict biomes.

Given that we assumed the default as no understanding between families, and no one having any access to specialty biomes, they could also get viewed as racial abilities in that whites have the ability of universal understanding all other groups of people. And the other groups of characters having certain abilities with respect to accessing objects in biomes, based on their type; ginger, brown, or black.

Rookwood wrote:

That is one way to look at it but it seems to me an intentionally inflammatory way to view it. What you are essentially arguing is that all whites are savants because the ability to just understand any language is beyond any realistic capability. It's Star Trek level technology.

The game promotes that point of view. What I've said would be inflammatory if I had distorted things out of proportion with respect to what the game promotes. I don't see where I have engaged in such a distortion.

Rookwood wrote:

It's meant to be more of a metaphor for whites as the most gregarious race, going out to interact with other cultures, much like Europe did in the age of exploration. Of course, that lead to many atrocities that happened in real life, but in this game, the dynamics of power that allowed Europeans to terrorize and exploit the world does not exist. Therefore your white supremacy does not exist in this game.

White supremacy isn't just the white supremacy of colonialism. Neo-nazis, for example, are white supremacists, and they aren't engage in such colonialism. Also, America, or at least certain parts of America, has had white supremacism which wasn't because Americans descended from English people. It wasn't like the British Empire was causing the racial slavery of the American South.

Rookwood wrote:

Again, you've forced me to defend the mechanic with your absolutely ridiculous arguments. I do not think whites having speech as their special ability is good for balance reasons. But I don't think it is white supremacy either and I think you are acting in bad faith to argue as such.

I don't think you've had a counterargument that the game promotes the view that whites or pales have intellectual superiority, because they have superior understanding of other families of people. Eve Troll also has a good point about gingers in the real world being a recessive gene of white. You talk about rubber and glass as always in demand. But, rubber tires theoretically aren't needed late game with oil pumps and trucks, and protection of those I suppose. Only so many glass bottles are needed, if protected, of course. After all, only so many players can be on a server.

Thus, at least in principle, gingers could be entirely self-sufficient in the end, and the only deficiency that they have is that they might not satisfy some of their cravings. But, those are necessary anyways.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-09-29 17:01:00)

Spoonwood · 2020-09-29 16:55:41

JonySky wrote:

I hope that someday these forced and meaningless mechanics are improved and new mechanics can be implemented without offending anyone

I do too.

Eve Troll · 2020-09-29 19:24:41

Get your head out of your ass rookwood.

My statement was about the impression the balancing gives. An impression that's not hard to pick up on if you have more than two brain cells.

It also sounds like you seem to like race restrictions..

My point was that gingers don't *need* the other races past a certain tech tier while all of the others are completely reliant on gingers for water. A town doesn't always need glass or rubber... they don't need stuff for cravings to survive either. All a family needs to survive is water. If one race has absolute control over the water and iron supply is that not unbalanced?

Race restrictions were supposed to encourage(force) interactions between families. So what's the difference in having them or not if one family can pretty much live in isolation sitting at high tech while the others can't get past newcommen?

Families interacted a lot beyond griefing. Families also had an identity that wasn't purely skin deep. Sometimes families would even live in the same village. Not because they had to, but because they wanted to.

It also gave the opportunities to have incredibly varied lives. You could spawn in a small village one life, an opulent one the next, and a mobile village building a large road after that. Race restrictions, homeland, and even springs limit the variability of towns and experiences. The less random you make things the more predictable and boring they become.

Last edited by Eve Troll (2020-09-29 19:37:26)

Rookwood · 2020-09-29 20:26:57

I like the trade that results from biome restrictions.

I also feel like you guys don't even play the game. No one is racist in game in the ways you are suggesting. Gingers don't dominate everyone because they have oil. Whites don't walk around bossing people around because they can speak to anyone. It's all in your heads. And I'm the one with my head up my ass?

Rookwood · 2020-09-29 20:45:44

I don't think you've had a counterargument that the game promotes the view that whites or pales have intellectual superiority,

Because that's a stupid assertion. Everyone else who plays this game will tell you whites are the worst race. Being multilingual has less to do with raw intelligence and more to do with early education and integration with other cultures.

Do you think white supremacists want to learn other languages? White supremacists in America would never learn Spanish. In real life, white supremacy is isolationist and xenophobic. In this game, whites have the exact opposite ability... They are the most able to integrate with other families. That's the opposite of xenophobia and white supremacy.

You are completely insane to argue that it is white supremacy.

JonySky · 2020-09-29 20:52:21

Rookwood wrote:

I like the trade that results from biome restrictions.
I also feel like you guys don't even play the game. No one is racist in game in the ways you are suggesting. Gingers don't dominate everyone because they have oil. Whites don't walk around bossing people around because they can speak to anyone. It's all in your heads. And I'm the one with my head up my ass?

sorry, but... did you say trade?
what trade do you mean ???

Eve Troll · 2020-09-29 21:42:57

Yea no one trades. Everyone is just forced to share to even get anything done.

Ever had one of those lives you just wana do something fun in town but have to travel almost your entire life collecting resources from other fams just to do it?

And by the time you have collected it, after a frustrating experience of chasing people around with a piece of paper, you're too old to even do what you wanted to do.

Thats trade for you. Its boring, monotonous, and really just a wall to slow players down. The interactions we get from it are artificial.

You question if we play the game but i question if you played the game prior to the addition of race restrictions.

Last edited by Eve Troll (2020-09-29 22:38:42)

Spoonwood · 2020-09-29 21:53:15

Eve Troll wrote:

It also gave the opportunities to have incredibly varied lives. You could spawn in a small village one life, an opulent one the next, and a mobile village building a large road after that. Race restrictions, homeland, and even springs limit the variability of towns and experiences. The less random you make things the more predictable and boring they become.

Also, the change in the biome spawning pattern to the current topographical ring system, which I'm sure you recall, happened during The Rift, lead to things as more predictable. The temperature overhaul lead to fewer town types, since everyone lives in the cold these days, instead of in the deserts with snakes, in the jungles with mosquitoes seeing noobs burn (since they didn't know to run to the cold), or roughing it in the grasslands and swamps.

But hey, one would have to have played in those days to understand such a claim. As anyone who looks can tell, Rookwood registered on the forums this July. So, given that as indication of when he first played, he'd have to listen to people to understand those days.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-09-29 21:55:34)

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2020-09-28 22:05:50

Can This Game Evolve Beyond White Supremacy?

#2 2020-09-28 22:44:04

Re: Can This Game Evolve Beyond White Supremacy?

#3 2020-09-28 23:02:04

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#11 2020-09-29 07:57:32

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#12 2020-09-29 12:48:05

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#13 2020-09-29 13:42:55

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#21 2020-09-29 20:26:57

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