December 2012. That's the last time I listened to a Lostprophets song. It was never my favorite band, but a few tracks were in my regular rotation until that month, when The Guardian broke news that the band's frontman, Ian Watkins, had been charged with child sex offenses. As the terrible nature of his crimes slowly unraveled, I came to associate every drum, every chord, every lyric, with the horrors I had read about.
The question -- Can you detangle creativity from its creator? -- is an old one. It's often argued that we should judge a work on its own; that to tie it into an author's views or politics is wrong. But I've always struggled to separate the two. Recently, that struggle was brought into sharp focus. Since July, I've put 71 hours into the sci-fi colony simulation game RimWorld. It is far from perfect, and aspects have frustrated me, but as a whole I deeply enjoyed it. Until, that is, an article, a response and a few tweets made me stop playing.
It started when Rock, Paper, Shotgun published an article by Claudia Lo, an academic and journalist, titled "How RimWorld's Code Defines Strict Gender Roles." In it, she pulls apart the game's underlying code to reveal issues with how its relationships function. Lo claims that, rather than being realistic or neutral, the game is imbued with the beliefs of its developer, Tynan Sylvester. Bisexual men don't exist in RimWorld, and all women are either bisexual or gay, she said. There are also issues with how women and men react to romantic advances, and how colonists perceive disabilities. Sylvester has disputed almost all of the claims, both publicly via a Reddit post and through an interview with Engadget.
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