Rational War

Rimworld is an overhead 2D colony simulation game where you build infrastructure and control Pawns to manage their emotional and physical survival [fig 1,2]. There are many ways to play this game, but it is designed to appeal to people who a) want to plan and build for efficient living and b) people who want to think about what survival demands ¹The Sims is a 3D orthogonal family simulation where you build infrastructure and control Sims to manage their emotional and physical survival, and at least in part is defined to appeal to people who want to build for efficient living. The mechanics are in many ways similar. But The Sims isn’t about survival. The problems Sims face are minor and … Continue reading. In many ways the game is a survival trauma simulator, wherein violence and tribalism are necessary and useful, and the stating alive means deciding to hurt people.

Rimworld could be described as a war crimes simulator. You can play it without the war crimes, and sometimes you’ll survive. You can dial back the violence to more tolerable levels in the settings. But by default, the most emotionally and physically sustainable strategies often involve not just war, but structurally enforced discrimination, drug addiction, prisoner sales, false diplomacy, take prisoners or slaves, prisoner medical experimentation, and slowly socializing prisoners to join your colony and serve your will. The game doesn’t force this on you, but you’re expected to see it as a potential rational response to the situation the game presents, and there are clear benefits to doing it. There are consequences for these actions, but presented as part of a balance, not as a value judgement.

It’s useful for me to think about the different sort of life survival demands of us, because I’m often ashamed and afraid of the way I have manipulated and hurt people to get what I needed. I used to feel bad about managing Mother, even though I could see it was necessary. I felt much worse about managing the Kids, and always felt like if I was more capable in simulating a human I would have been able to avoid it. But I couldn’t, even if I had been a much better parent, because survival makes a different kind of life necessary.

So it’s useful to me to practice war crimes. To think about keeping a bunch of people alive in a place where the world and everything in it is trying to kill them, sometimes including each other. To think about excluding people who can’t be useful to me, or about privileging one over others when some must be hurt. To see how I can be the same person now that I was back then, but understand that I’m not longer dangerous like in used to be.

One of the disabilities I imagine is relieved by working from home is the one where I have to spend a lot of energy either impersonating a normal person or withdrawing from conversations to avoid people asking me questions they don’t want to know the answer to. What did you do for Christmas? I helped Shanda recover from being triggered by her family over FaceTime at like 7 AM, then we drove around dropping in unannounced at the homes of unrelated people with the intent of disrupting the households we visited, and I couldn’t eat all day because I was doing colonoscopy prep, so I finished the day with 4 liters of polyethylene glycol. Or I could say “nothing”. Or I could cook up some pleasant lie and work to sell it. If I don’t – if I just respond with a generic version of my actual life – I often see them become uncomfortable. I can tolerate their discomfort in a social sense, but it has consequences in the office, and I don’t want to be punished for it.

One of the reasons that is so stressful for me, beyond my hypersensitivity to people’s emotional reactions in general, is that I spent so much time playacting normal when I was young, and hiding life from the people adjacent to it. I had to do it all the time once I got out into the world – once Mother stated abandoning me places – so that I wouldn’t be punished for letting people see how I was inhuman. You’d think it would be easy to feed a child with no food, or to help them find a place to wait inside, but people are often very afraid and either ignore you or if they cannot, punish you. So I don’t need to see people be afraid when I answer their direct questions about my actual life in the world they currently live in. I’ve had plenty of that.

It also hurts because before when people reacted fearfully to me it was rational for them to be afraid. It was dangerous to be close to me. I was choosing to manipulate people to get what I needed. I was prepared for violence all the time. I was slowly dying and constantly under attack. I was not able to foidner people who weren’t directly impacting me. It’s hard for me to want to be connected to that person. I’m afriad if I was I would become them again. I’m afraid I still am them and that the best I can hope for is to protect people from the inevitable harm I will cause until they can leave.

School is finally canceled here, for at least 2 weeks, so now it’s just poor people who have to work, not poors and children like it has been. So no robots this week, which is sort of sad but better than a pandemic. I’m also glad they’re done threatening students with jail for not wanting to die. Of course since we feed children with school now some of them won’t eat, or won’t have safe place to be. And a bunch of them will not get enough care. Survival is tough. We should try to be a society where no one lives so close to the edge, so we don’t have to treat war crimes as rational.

I also have noticed that I like Rimworld for the music. It’s got good music, but that’s not why I like it. My early life did not allow for much recorded music, and I’ve always had a difficult relationship with it. I basically don’t use it, and I can find “background music” of many sorts not just distracting but sometimes difficult to tolerate. It can easily make me sad, which is a feeling that goes back to living on the porch and being simultaneously relieved to finally get a clock-radio and have radio, terrified that I would be discovered using it, and abandoned because I was using radio to cope with being abandoned. It wasn’t long though before I decided that it would be better to save the radio for when I really needed it, and not risk having it confiscated by using it when I didn’t “need it”.

Got a call from DerbyK, who was having a rough week. I’m sorry things feel stressful. It’s okay to be a little overwhelmed. I’m glad we got to talk, and that you got to vent. And you gave me a great idea about a thing I’ve been wanting to do. I’m excited to make it happen.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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