[2019] Damn cold shoulder man

I've seen this thought a few times, though, so I figured it was worth explaining why it works the way it does.

A major goal in UI design is to reduce noise. You don't want to repeat the same information if the player can easily deduce that information. Otherwise you're forcing the player to read words that don't carry information, which increases cognitive load for no benefit.

For example, every character in RimWorld is somewhere on the spectrum of industriousness. Some are lazy, some are typical, and some are hard-working. However, since the vast majority of characters are of average industriousness, we reduce noise by omitting this information. When the player sees nothing about industriousness, an average level in this trait is implied. Players understand this ~100% of the time.

It's the game UI version of Strunk and White's classic writing advice: "Omit needless words."

The same goes for the other traits in the game - psychopathy, move speed, natural mood, drug desire, nervousness, neuroticism, psychic sensitivity, and many more.

If we didn't apply this principle, almost every character would be listed as "non-psychopath, average-speed, typical-mood, no particular drug desire, average nervousness, average neuroticism, average psychic sensitivity..." and so on. This would be a lot of noise carrying little information. That's just plain bad UI design.

---

Note that this doesn't apply to things like gender or backstory or skills. The reason is because these characteristics don't have one much more common setting that can be assumed.

• Genders are split evenly, so the player doesn't automatically know which one was implied if the information was omitted. We need to state if every time.
• Characters have many different backstories with one backstory not dominating the others in commonality, so the backstory has to be expressed explicitly since it can't be inferred.
• Skills can be of many fine-grained levels and one level isn't much more common than all others, so we need to show all of them.

---

So sexual orientation is expressed according to the same principle of "omit needless words" as industriousness or neuroticism or any other trait. I haven't seen any indication that players are actually confused as to what 'no trait' means here, so it seems to be working as well here as for other traits, at least as a piece of UI design.

Of course you're welcome to suggest and criticize about this or any other aspect of the game. The goal is always simply to make a game that is effortless to interact with, but rich in emotion and story. I'm very happy to learn from any source I can if there's a better way to do that, and I've learned lots from the community over the years (a major reason I did early access in the first place).