The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc

Coin

@DareDaemon None of that makes it any less fucking creepy, man. Like I said, I can accept some sort of uninformed consent, but if you're willing to spy, your explicit word, on people, at least inform them of the very real possibility so they can decide whether they want to play there. Don't take it as a granted just because you can do something it's implicitly obvious you will when most people's general expectations differ.

It's super creepy, man.

Ghost

As I understand it, the reason people don't like staff monitoring/logging is because of risk of unethical use on staff's part, and in most cases headstaff aren't exactly removable; they can actually ban you for calling them out on shady things. There are a lot of known cases of staff perv-monitoring TS or monitoring pages of people they don't like to fish for ban-bait.

On the other side of the coin, it seems reasonable to me that people might not also lile stafd monitoring because not every accusation is ground in fact. There are shit stirrers. Nobody wants to have their TS read because some crazy made a baseless accusation.

Yet, having said this, I think it's a smart policy for staff to reserve the right to "monitor" based on accusations regardless, so long as it is done transparently with staff and with respect to the person being monitored. Keeping this in play gives staff a useful tool to protect their players from bad behavior.

Pandora

Well, when I say spy, I mean 'watch what you're doing without being in the same grid space as you', not 'watch you without your knowledge'. I think in this day and age, it's not a huge leap to say that the owners of online spaces where people interact are taking on much more liability. Spying (with everyone's knowledge and consent) just seems to make good sense, cutting down on settling the entire burden of proof on victims' heads, or stopping cyberbullying in its tracks. If you want to rage against the machine (staff) do it on Discord. Or yenno, MSB. Not the server someone is gracious enough to allow you to log into for free.

Tinuviel

@Coin said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

We play in a hobby where people routinely choose not to read news files

Most folks don't read legislation either. It's still there and available to be read, it's the not-reader's fault if they break a rule that's written down. Fuck 'em.

Arkandel

Frankly this tangent is pretty theoretical. I believe in privacy is a right in MU* (and everywhere online) while others don't, and that's fine.

Even so I doubt staff in any game have ever felt entitled to do so because there's a clause buried in a help file or wiki page somewhere.

Tinuviel

@Arkandel said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

Even so I doubt staff in any game have ever felt entitled to do so because there's a clause buried in a help file or wiki page somewhere.

True. They feel entitled whenever they feel they need or want to.

Pandora

Firan staff spied on people IC/OOC and used/abused the info they gleaned on their characters, as well as sharing 'funny' snippets of IC/OOC conversations with others. That's gross imo, crossing the line from watching-to-make-things-better to watching-to-make-things-worse.

L. B. Heuschkel

@Pandora said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

Firan staff spied on people IC/OOC and used/abused the info they gleaned on their characters, as well as sharing 'funny' snippets of IC/OOC conversations with others. That's gross imo, crossing the line from watching-to-make-things-better to watching-to-make-things-worse.

That's... not acceptable. I've staffed on various online games, and that's never been acceptable anywhere I've been. It may have happened but I certainly didn't hear about it -- but of course I'm also the kind of person who believe that rules exist for a reason, not to be discarded if I feel like it.

Players have the right to privacy in actions and conversations as long as they are not using that privacy to harass or disrupt a third party. Admins shouldn't be monitoring or reading logs unless there has been a formal complaint and investigation is ongoing.

That said, I've heard this complaint often, and always, the solution offered is the same. If you can't trust your game's admins, take private stuff to Skype, Discord, wherever. Away from the game. Let the admins worry why, in a few years, player activity starts to doze off because people don't feel SAFE in the game.

Tinuviel

@L-B-Heuschkel said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

If you can't trust your game's admins, ~~take private stuff to Skype, Discord, wherever. Away from the game~~ LEAVE THE GAME.

FTFY

L. B. Heuschkel

@Tinuviel They will. And they should. Games with untrustworthy admins end up dead in my experience. Which is as it should be.

Tinuviel

@L-B-Heuschkel All games end up dead. Firan, the poster child for fucked up Admin-ness, lasted a good long while. People are going to play if they like 70-80% of the things there. The head admin could be a murderous, incestuous drunk and people would still play there if they like much of the rest of the game.

That said, I think the "expectation of privacy" (it's not a right, it has never been a right, and never will be a right) is a naive expectation to have in the era where every other week some big business is being breached and it makes the news, and every other day another big business is being breached but we don't hear about it.

Don't expect any communication on a game to be secret or private. If the person on the other end of your page conversation isn't telling all and sundry, then a staffer could be reading it. We might find such things "unacceptable" but that word is virtually meaningless when we don't get a say in what is and isn't acceptable to every single person that runs or visits a game.

L. B. Heuschkel

@Tinuviel Ethically, I disagree with you. Privacy SHOULD be a right.

Realistically, however, you're absolutely correct -- on big business and social media, and on supposedly private channels in-game.

Tinuviel

@L-B-Heuschkel said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

Ethically, I disagree with you. Privacy SHOULD be a right.

That's not how that works. I certainly think that using such tools without notification, authorisation, or other such -ation as seems valid should be unethical but rights do not cover ethics or morality.

L. B. Heuschkel

@Tinuviel That is indeed why I concede that realistically, you are 100% correct. Regardless of what ethics think.

Tinuviel

@L-B-Heuschkel Unfortunately for any MUer to have anything approaching a "right" there must be an overarching authority-type structure that one can appeal to when those rights are violated. Some folks think MSB is it (or should be it) but we're just a bunch of grumpy adults grumpily adulting about grumpy stuff adutily.

The only thing we can really do is appeal to the "authority" that is the wider community and, through social pressure, enforce the privileges we want.

ETA: This wasn't an argument of your point, just a general statement to clarify my view.

L. B. Heuschkel

@Tinuviel I can grumpy adult with the best of them, I'm a 48 year old disabled person who's stuck at a computer most of the day.

There's never any court to take appeals to online. Sure, there may be one on paper, but as anyone who's ever argued with Facebook, Blizzard, or any other private company with public access will know, that's just not how it works.

I will always advocate for human decency and mutual respect, and as part of that, the right to have a private conversation. I will also always tell people that there is no such right on the internet -- at least no such right that will not be routinely violated and cannot be enforced. It's not fair, but it's how it is.

silverfox

It always surprises me that there is an expectation of privacy from staff. My first game never had it, and I just always assumed dive and Chey could read and see absolutely anything they wanted to.

I feel like I am consenting to give away my rp privacy when I rp online in any format. This runs true also for my pages, mails, channel chat, ooc. It is there game, and I am a guest.

Is that morally or ethically right? I don't know.

JinShei

I tend to assume that staff CAN, and hope they WON'T. If the rule says no TS, well, then I won't. I tend to dislike it, partially because I am really bad at it, and partially because I cringe.

One place I played (as did @L-B-Heuschkel ) a staffer was caught watching people TS by standing in the room invisible, outed by his speaking sword. He got fired but as the admi there puts it "this is a benevolent dictatorship".

L. B. Heuschkel

@JinShei On the first place I played, back in the late 90s, a fellow admin used a command (aptly named 'force') to force a female character to emote how she performed oral sex on him. The player was too indimidated to report it -- we only found out because use of the Force command was logged, and the game's main admins occasionally glanced at the log to see if anything weird was going down. He too was fired, obviously, but it does go to show that yes, even admins will get up to absolutely horrific behaviour, and players won't always feel safe enough to tell you.

Tinuviel

@L-B-Heuschkel There was a game I worked on during... the early 2000s, I want to say, that had a room in the 'admin section' - because this was the time when everyone needed an 'office' when they're staff. The game had hooked code onto the pose, @emit, say, etc commands to transmit RP'd things to that room. The intent was to better enable realistic reactions from NPC stellar powers and such (it was a Star Trek game), but naturally it was used to watch TS without players realising.