Making a Line For What Content Not to Include

Thrive’s goal is not having realistic graphics, it’s being realistic, it doesnt need realistic graphics for it.

Should be noted that a lot of people actually want to exclude obscenity because it makes them uncomfortable to look at. I’m fine with it personally but I understand why others would not be, so it’s still important to discuss the rating even with YouTubers aside.

YouTubers can always just blur whatever themselves. And what exactly makes people uncomfortable?

I’m pretty sure that if the game allows turning off the censorship with an option, then any ratings board will review the game as if that option is always turned off, which would result in a higher age rating.

I’m pretty sure that people wouldn’t want to put in the effort to blur a significant fraction of a 30 minute video, if they can instead play a game that’s suitable for Youtube as is. Though, I guess there are some “shock value” Youtubers who do content that needs to be heavily blurred, but I think only having those people play Thrive would seriously limit how many views Thrive gets.

Why would so much of the game be taken up by unacceptable content?

This whole censoring discussion is centered on the presumed fact (/ future idea) that the player and auto-evo would create unacceptable looking creatures or that we’d add a type of genitalia in the game that has to be censored.

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The presence of obscene structures is going to be a rare edge case. Even looking at reality there are only about 4 clades with phallic structures as far as I know

And there’s also the question of if they’d actually need censoring: Looking at youtube now, there are already plenty of videos with uncensored animals, including quite a few nature livestreams. And thrive, based on what I’ve heard about the design, would pretty much look like that but with about a 1% chance that any of the animals actually have any phallic organs

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You don’t need to tell me that. Tell that to the people above who re-ignited this whole censoring certain parts of the game discussion.

This is already pretty much my opinion, we should aim to look like a nature documentary.

We will not be implementing visible genitals to the game. The only reproductive customization the player might partake in is defining method of reproduction, and potentially sexual dimorphorism in the case of appearances.


We will not include any form of visual intercourse in the game, honestly just animating walking is gonna be hard enough already without limbs clipping through each other, so we wont be bumping up the age rating for no clear purpose.


We will not be implementing any method of censoring parts or features in the game, as there will be no obscene features that would need censoring. If some feature just so happens to appear “obscene” that is merely happenstance and based entirely on the imagination of the user. Besides, how would you design things while they are censored? Don’t actually answer that question I do not care to hear it.


And that there is the line we have drawn.
If some players might truly desire to design genitals on their creature or something akin to that, then I would like to encourage them to use their imagination to decide on how it works. Else if they are truly motivated they could make a mod for it, I won’t judge.

Whatever the case, we will not be including these features in any official capacity.

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How will you even omit such features? Any alternative short of having new creatures magically materialise in the nest will simply reduce to designing genitals but with less realistic mechanics

And why does this suddenly become false when the organ in question has a duct for haploid germ-line cells?

Again, the only thing we really need to worry about are the evolutionary methods of reproduction, not necessarily the act or mechanism of reproduction itself. We just have to ensure that a player has a choice on whether they want live birth, birth via eggs, heavy investment in parental care, r vs k strategy, etc. And all that can be implemented via sliders in the behavior tab or through presenting a very ambiguous and abstract organ part, which might be analogous to genitals but have very little purpose or visual quality other than the most basic level of detail. We really aren’t obliged to put in genitals or demonstrate how they mechanically work, and I don’t see the issue the majority of this discussion has been attempting to answer.

I really don’t feel like the merit of our simulation comes down to whether or not we want to add unnecessary details that would just make things more contrived, unsettling, and difficult.

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think pretty long and hard about arguing with the devs about their own game

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Those are the same thing. There’s no difference between saying ‘mammals mate by direct contact and give live birth’ and ‘male mammals have penes to inject sperm, and female mammals have an internal chamber from which the embryo can absorb nutrients’ other than the complexity of your wording

And without tracking the mechanisms behind reproduction you’ll have absolutely no way to track what sort of reproductive adaptations an animal should or shouldn’t have, which isn’t exactly conducive to having a good simulation

And what you aren’t getting is that we can track those mechanisms behind reproduction with explicitly demonstrating the structures said mechanisms of reproduction. Are you seriously arguing that we can’t represent mammalian reproduction without representing penetration? Do you seriously think we can’t just allow the player to signify they want their organism to reproduce via live birth without having to go through all the details? Because to me it seems that’s ultimately what you are arguing. I think you are way too caught up in the details and not seeing the main point.

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Assuming you don’t want the player to switch over to broadcast spawning in the next generation, then yes, you do need to go through all of the details

@BurgeonBlas 3 developers have given definite answers, and you are still trying to argue in a very non-constructive way. This isn’t even the first time you’ve done this kind of posting to really annoy and get on multiple people’s nerves. I’ll give you one more timed suspension right now. If you even after that keep doing this kind of thing over and over again, you won’t be welcome back.

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Just gonna throw in my two cents before this goes quiet;

Things don’t need to be graphically portrayed to still keep the feel of it realistic. Thrive is an evolution simulator, and while yes, a large portion of evolution is reproduction, as others have said this could simply be a ‘do you want live birth, eggs, etc’.

While this might lower the amount of possibilities one could come up with for reproductive methods, it also makes this more younger age friendly, which means it could potentially be used as a tool that could potentially be used for education.

Is losing the ability to design more complexly unfortunate? Yes, and I understand some people would want that. But imo the negatives that could come with using a feature that is limiting to the age group for the entire community outweigh the positives for the portion of the community who would enjoy the game either way but would prefer the ability to design this particular field of evolution.

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Flowers are genitalia.

And plants? Or the different mechanisms of insemination like broadcast spawning or direct insemination?

I asked this before, but what’s really the point of censoring? It’s not like auto-evo would necessarily make organisms with mammalian genitalia or that perform the same humping action many vertebrae do, and even if it does, that does automatically make the game Mature.

We can be technical with the exact definition of what “genitalia” is, but you and I both know what exactly is considered to be obscene. We see angiosperm genitalia all the time.