How should IC discrimination be handled?

[Thenomain]

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I'm saying that anyone trying to justify their choice to engage in IC discrimination probably took lessons from the Dan Brown School of Writing. And, no, I don't mind being judgmental about it; there's good writing and there's terrible writing.

And good writing never included IC discrimination.

[surreality]

@ganymede To claim murder is unthematic on WoD games would be a huge stretch.

"Killing that guy so I don't have to deal with him again instead of letting him linger to potentially interfere with my future plans," has long been considered an acceptable reason to PK with no consent, no discussion, no staff permission, on every WoD game I am currently aware of. The closest thing to a restriction on it is FC's 'you must be this old to ride that ride' policy, so far as I know.

Does it happen often? No. That doesn't mean it is unwelcome, frowned upon, prevented, restricted, consent-based, etc.

When MSB began, which was not that long ago in the greater scheme of this hobby, the attitude described above was considered standard practice. As someone who stood very firmly and aggressively by full nonconsent-with-FtB for many years, even if your views have changed since, you really should know that, come on.

You can put people down about being 'Dan Brown crap writers' if they find the subject interesting, but that's not exactly adding value to the discussion right now, either, yeesh.

Plenty of art is not pretty, and it is not the purpose of art to be pretty or only show us what we want to see. A great deal of art is explicitly created to show the ugliness, pain, unfairness, cruelty, or despair in the world. Art has often been explicitly created to show us precisely the things we don't want to see, and don't want to have to think about or confront, and this is not simply the domain of 'modern shock crap/offensiveness by design' -- go google Goya or Picasso's Guernica or something -- and in no way does this invalidate it as art.

[rebekahse]

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I would ask the question, actually, because on many of the games I play on, murdering another PC is unthematic. Take, for example, Werewolf 2E. Written into the Oath of the Moon is a prohibition against killing other werewolves. So, if the PCs are werewolves, murdering a werewolf is verboten.

Then we have very different frames of reference, because the WoD MUSHes (and I suppose most of the games in general) I'm familiar with are ones where player characters are allowed to kill other player characters.

If this is the case, congratulations for perpetuating that horrible truism about art imitating life.

Thanks? I honestly don't understand what you mean by that.

I'm saying that anyone trying to justify their choice to engage in IC discrimination probably took lessons from the Dan Brown School of Writing.

Or possibly Tarantino, or maybe Harper Lee, or Sholem Aleichem, or Clint Eastwood, or... But your point hopefully wasn't that compelling, interesting, and even great narratives can't possibly include protagonists whose flaws include bigotry of some form or another, and was instead just expressed clumsily, because I think a lot of people have enjoyed The Hateful Eight and Fiddler On The Roof and To Kill A Mockingbird and Gran Turino.

[peasoupling]

As someone who'd probably play on a cowboys MU* to RP tragically dying of tuberculosis as much as to disarm bandits with amazing trick shots, it feels like there are two separate issues here, and there's an enormous excluded middle somewhere out there.

One issue is the setting, and how much do you remove discrimination and awfulness from the setting at large. Do you allow women to openly serve in the local cavalry soldiers fort? Will a black character be elected sheriff without anyone batting an eye?

Another thing are the PCs, how bigoted they are allowed to be, and whether you let them express that bigotry or not. Can you play a fire and brimstone preacher who refuses to marry Joe and Tex? Or characters of different races? Can the barmaid insult other people's masculinity by way of homophobia, even if you don't care that Joe and Tex are confirmed bachelors happily living together?

You can have a Lovecraftian game set in the 20s and 30s without allowing PCs with 'enormous racist' as a main personality trait. Once you've decided that (I am all for it), do you allow the white heiress who'll happily adventure alongside POC while enthusiastically believing they are a credit to their race? Do you have evil racist NPCs?

Why would I want to play a sexist/racist/etc character? I am not making a character who will be throwing slurs around. But I probably wouldn't like to play an enlightened 21st century progressive gunslinger in a 19th century that's amazingly better than our own time, either. These things aren't an on-off switch, people can be kinda racist, and kinda sexist, and kinda homophobic, etc. Most people are.

After all, I would probably like people to react to my character having fought for the Union in disguise as a man (I am very much ready for this hypothetical cowboy MU*), and not by saying, "I can't believe they still won't let women serve openly in combat roles."

[rebekahse]

@thenomain said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

And good writing never included IC discrimination.

I should have clicked onto the next page, you beat me to it and did it more elegantly.

[HorrorHound]

@Ganymede

Man, you must have hated Skullface.

[Kanye Qwest]

@the_generic_one said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

That people are having a fevered argument over whether playing a character in the proper mindset or theme of a particular game is something that translates to OOC racism is idiotic.

There are adults who play these games who are not hypersensitive Cult of The Victim worshippers. Somebody losing their cool because they got called a fag IC while playing a homosexual character, it's perhaps the most pathetic thing ever.

your posting history refers to this cult several times. I think it speaks volumes?

[Ganymede]

@thenomain said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

And good writing never included IC discrimination.

Touche. Critical fail on my expression roll.

Yes, there are plenty of great, timeless stories about discrimination. But, no, the average MU*er is not writing at that level, and likely will not.

Yes, I'm being judge-y about this.

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@surreality said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

"Killing that guy so I don't have to deal with him again instead of letting him linger to potentially interfere with my future plans," has long been considered an acceptable reason to PK with no consent, no discussion, no staff permission, on every WoD game I am currently aware of.

Right. And, in my elder years, I have come to realize that this is a puerile simplification. By that logic, life among the Invictus should be a raging bloodbath; however, it isn't because murdering your lesser without full consideration of their uses is generally frowned upon. The cost-benefit analysis in any vampire game suggests that the best course to domination is to purge everyone, and then re-populate with blood-bound childer. This doesn't really happen, and is a sphere-destroying gaming style that staff ought to curb.

I remain very firmly and aggressively (so sensual) in the position that WoD games out to be non-consent-with-FTB; however, that position doesn't mean I haven't thought long and hard about the thematic implications of adopting policies.

With that in mind, a bar against killing other PCs is far different than staff acting when players engage their PCs in IC discrimination based RL identity groups or barring it entirely. And, also, that's different than my general eye-rolling at seeing the same old unimaginative "edginess" in characters.

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@horrorhound said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Man, you must have hated Skullface.

I'd like to think you made Skullface that way for humor value or satire, rather than a genuine attempt at creating an adversarial character.

[Thenomain]

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@thenomain said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

And good writing never included IC discrimination.

Touche. Critical fail on my expression roll.

Yes, there are plenty of great, timeless stories about discrimination. But, no, the average MU*er is not writing at that level, and likely will not.

Such as the discrimination that almost every Tradition has against the Virtual Adepts and to a slightly lesser extent the Sons of Ether because they once and even recently belonged to the very enemy that they rage a constant Guerrilla War against. And these people are allies. I'd bet a dollar if someone made a compelling oWoD Mage game, you'd play it regardless of this giant bias against an entire social classification-slash-belief system.

"Enemy Mine" is timeless but the concepts are not, and removing it from the playbook just because it's discrimination is, I believe, disingenuous to the setting.

Nor should we let people allow discrimination as a reason to be a complete dick in RP, obviously, but if we already have one exemption for satire, then I'm no longer sure what kind of discrimination is okay and what kind is not.

(edit: removed quotes around one usage of the word discrimination, to make sure people don't think I'm being flippant.)

[surreality]

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

In-sphere, there are often reasons. How many games are single sphere? Not many. There's plenty of totally thematic murderfacing to be had.

With that in mind, a bar against killing other PCs is far different than staff acting when players engage their PCs in IC discrimination based RL identity groups or barring it entirely.

I still disagree with this. I don't see them as different, save for in one way:

Generally, nobody gives a damn about killing NPCs in any given plot, unless it's someone's cherished child or similar NPC. That is not going to be the case with discrimination; if a PC aims it at an NPC in front of a player sensitive to the subject, it's still going to be a problem for them.

That said, stories like the ones @faraday described a handful of posts back are incredibly compelling to me. I think they're interesting, I think they are fantastic stories, and I don't see them as lacking depth or creating real world hurt or expressing any form of player-side vileness whatsoever.

I wouldn't roleplay them with someone who wasn't equally interested in the roleplay of that story in that way, but I completely discard the notion that they are universally damaging and worthless, garbage, or are replaceable by some other 'bastardry for the sake of bastardry'. (None of those examples involved someone deliberately being a jerk, but instead focus on someone coming into inner conflict with their upbringing or environment and learning and growing from the experience.)

The number of compelling characters this would exclude is enormous and I firmly believe we would be significantly worse off for their forbidding.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@surreality said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

That said, stories like the ones @faraday described a handful of posts back are incredibly compelling to me. I think they're interesting, I think they are fantastic stories, and I don't see them as lacking depth or creating real world hurt or expressing any form of player-side vileness whatsoever.

And I don't actually think there's stories are so hugely uncommon as some of the posts in this thread seem to want to convey them as. I've played stories that were very rewarding where my character butting up against the adversity of the setting and theme was an integral part of that story. Other posters have, too. This isn't a unicorn or magical or unheard of on MUs, it's a thing that happens.

[Packrat]

Agreed there, some of of favourite Fading Suns RP for example was when I was playing a psi character with an obvious stigma and people actually responded to it negatively. Tarah on Star Crusade for example, she was an albino, she read people's minds all the time or fucked with people's emotions in council meetings to further her own agendas. Everyone was totally okay with her outside of a few instances.

Those instances where people were freaked out or nervous of her still stick in my memory years later.

[Seraphim73]

@three-eyed-crow Agreed. I think that if your (generic you) character fits perfectly into theme without a ripple... they're liable to disappear without a ripple, no matter how snowflake-y they might be. If, however, you set them up so that they either represent someone who stands out from the theme, or someone who can provide friction to those who stand out from the theme, you're liable to get a lot more good RP (provided you and those around you are willing to RP the consequences of standing out from the theme).

[surreality]

@three-eyed-crow Agreed in full. I don't think it's terribly uncommon, either.

It looks uncommon when it's being defined as 'wants to demonstrate what a jerk their character is by slinging around slurs', but that's not the sum total of this kind of interaction with these themes and I really wish people would stop characterizing it as though this is the case.

I mean, I genuinely can't really understand how you'd be able to allow most religions in the world as part of a character background at all if 'any and all discrimination is verboten', since many aspects of the dogma of many religions do either set their followers above others, demonize others, promote an imbalance among genders, demonize sexual preferences or sexuality period, etc.

Even if you only allow 'casual believers' and no zealots, these are beliefs people are legitimately raised with and even casual believers struggle with it. So do we outlaw real world religion on games, even games set in the modern real world, because they contain indoctrination into these biases to a greater or lesser extent? Because you frankly just don't have anything that even remotely resembles the real modern world on any level at that point. And wouldn't outlawing religious with some form of bias be, in itself, discriminatory on an OOC level?

What about the forms of racism practiced in some parts of the world in which nothing is ever said that is hostile or rude, but native citizens of <country> simply know they are superior to all others. They simply are; this is how things are to their way of thinking. (Many view Americans this way, for instance.) The rest of the world is inferior, and should be treated as one would treat a dim-witted child, because they are simply not as evolved and couldn't possibly understand. How would one even begin to reliably distinguish between one of these characters being genuinely kind and accepting, and being 'compassionately condescending to the lesser being' in most cases? On the surface, things may be fine and dandy and civil and almost zealously polite and there's always a plausible reason <other> didn't get that position, or didn't get invited to the dinner party for <non-others>, etc., and so on, but this is a particularly insidious and demoralizing form of discrimination with as broad-reaching effects as the much more easily identified and dismissed radical slur bomb-thrower.

What about characters that are enlightened enough now but went through periods of their life -- which may come up in play in some form or another -- in which they were not?

One of my favorite characters was a concept that I'm sure would never get approved today under such restrictions, and I'd be a monstrous asshole for even considering her. She was the daughter of a former 'fire and brimstone' scam artist televangelist with an empire of 'pray away the gay' camps and 'teen re-education facilities' outside the country and similar horrors. She didn't really believe this was a good idea, but she still had no real comprehension of what they really were or what they were like until she was sent to one for not being on board with this grand plan to convert the world. "Lucky" her, she got spared the private jet crash that killed off her folks due to... being incarcerated in such a facility outside the US, and only got let out and found out this occurred at all because she was now the one who had to sign their paychecks. Did she? No. She did everything she could to dismantle that family legacy, and to track down the people it had harmed to do everything within her power to get them real, actual help and correct what little she possibly could of the harm that had been done, because she knew. She was just as zealous about stamping this stuff out as her family had been about promoting it -- and, ultimately, guess what? She was a very vocal non-fan of most evangelical Christians, as she saw them as complicit in doing this kind of harm. As such, she was, herself, a bigot.

Yeah, it hits all the right current social justice notes -- boy howdy, does it ever, dialed up to 12 -- but it's still something that anyone being even slightly objective would reasonably have to NOPE the shit out of, and how.

[Packrat]

I feel this is a benefit of games that are not set in the real world or a close facsimile of it, it is far easier to find in character prejudice, discrimination or bigotry an interesting hook for roleplay if these things are definitely not based on something that a player might be targeted for in reality.

To use my perennial example of Fading Suns. No characters are going to be biased against for being black, or gay, or female, or Polish.

Characters might well be targeted by deep prejudice for having space magic, being a non human alien or believing in democracy as a valid form of government.

The setting does also have a serious degree of class ism, a noble might well treat a peasant like scum, but by default player characters are members of the elite on some level. I am pretty sure that most players are not going to feel personally attacked because they are accused in character of 'Republicanism', the idea of a divinely ordained order in an agrarian feudal society is just too alien even if in character you get justifications like:

Would'st thou become kings among men? Look to your breeding first! The Pancreator has wisely separated the escola seeds from the husks, the pure from the base. Look instead to your fields, to your own harvests, that you might better reap the bounty of your own souls. Nay, sully not yourselves with the ways of man and power. Such a curse is not for you, happy in your ignorance. Let the cursed bear such burdens and reap as their rewards the wealth of the world. You humble have the wealth of the Empyrean coming to you. And yet still you envy those condemned to their worldly palaces, prisons of the soul.

Nobody is going to take that as the heartfelt view of a player leaking into the in character world. I hope.

[faraday]

@packrat said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Nobody is going to take that as the heartfelt view of a player leaking into the in character world. I hope.

I've seen it happen even in fictional worlds. Especially if the IC discrimination is just an allegory for RL discrimination fo some sort, which it often is. (ETA: I mean I've seen people take it that way.)

@peasoupling said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

One issue is the setting, and how much do you remove discrimination and awfulness from the setting at large. Do you allow women to openly serve in the local cavalry soldiers fort? Will a black character be elected sheriff without anyone batting an eye?

I think this is an important point. It's one thing to say "you can't play a flaming bigot". I'm not sure this is any different from limiting any other kind of disruptive character types, so I don't see the controversy there. I mean, you probably wouldn't want someone to play a serial killer on your game either right?

It's quite another to try to rewrite the setting to pretend that pervasive, systemic -ism doesn't exist and never existed. I mean, you can try, but unless it's Star Trek utopia it's going to be hard for people to wrap their heads around. I've seen numerous cases on BSG games where people just have a hard time accepting that "no, really, sexism and homophobia and racism just really aren't a thing here." It creeps into RP in subtle ways.

@peasoupling said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

These things aren't an on-off switch, people can be kinda racist, and kinda sexist, and kinda homophobic, etc. Most people are.

Yeah. And I think it's easy to deal with the extremes. Someone who's running around hurling slurs left and right for the fun of it is clearly a detriment to the game. Someone who's dealing with these themes in a respectful way can lead to rich stories, even if those stories are not everyone's cup of tea.

But looking only at extremes can blind us to the problematic middle ground, where IC discrimination may not be raging a-holes harassing people, but can still have harmful effects on other characters. For example: somebody refusing to hire a woman in a sexist society or reporting an interracial romance to the authorities in a historical setting where such things were illegal. Yes, it's thematic. Yes, real world ugliness creeps into our games in many forms (murder, genocide, assault). But do we really need/want to go there?

[Collective]

Just out of curiosity (and yes, I know this is a question that will ruffle feathers. Bear me with a moment):

How willing are you to put a notice on, say, your log-in screen and/or very prominently in your OOC rooms/Character Generation rooms that says something like, 'By playing here, you agree to deal with as many racist, homophobic, sexist and other slurs as your fellow players feel like slinging as long as that slinging stays IC.'

Letting folks know, up front, what they can expect, rather than have it happen and then say, 'Well, that's a consequence of the theme or setting, you should have guessed'.

If you're not willing to post a notice like that, why?

If the answer is 'it might scare people off' then I would, politely and without any accusation or freighting, suggest that maybe, on some level, people might already feel like this kind of behavior is or can be problematic, rather than the non-issue that the consensus seems to be leaning towards.

[Apos]

@collective That is wildly disproportionate, you could have one dude say one problematic thing once a year and it being the rarest of unicorns ever sighted upon the MU greens, and reading a disclaimer like that people would think it happens in every scene ever.

[faraday]

@collective You seem to be selectively reading the thread if you think everyone has decided it's a non-issue.

But to answer your question, I think all games should spell out general expectations, but I don't see a need to call out IC discrimination explicitly. I am happy with what my game policy says.

Many games use a rating system and I think that should suffice when common sense is applied. If I went to a R-rated western movie, I would not be surprised by potentially-upsetting depictions of slavery. If I went to a R-rated modern war-in-the-desert movie, I would not be surprised by potentially-upsetting depictions of Islamophobia. Now if I went to a PG-rated family drama and saw people casually slinging around n-words, I'd be understandably upset.

But no, I don't see the need for a disclaimer saying essentially "People will be people, good and bad, as long as it's kept IC."

That doesn't mean I support any of these things in RL. Far from it. -isms and -obias are horrible things. But so is murder. So is war. So are many forms of injustice. I don't expect my fiction - or my games - to present a utopian view of the world.

[Collective]

@apos

So, I'm curious. What's your threshold for the amount of IC abuse that's okay and doesn't need a disclaimer? I thought we were at the point in the discussion where folks were saying that as long as everything is IC, we're all good?