A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like

[Arkandel]

@HelloProject It's all different, but that doesn't mean it's better. It definitely doesn't mean there's no racism, in fact just the opposite; in Europe racism is a powerful, ascending force that's threatening to take over governments.

For example there are apartment rental ads on newspapers openly stating "no Albanians"; hardcore stuff like that aren't hidden well beneath the surface. Or someone's economic status could be assumed from their ethnic group; in countries flooded with refugees seeing a brown skinned person might be instantly associated with someone who's broke, looking for work or panhandling.

Politics are also closely associated with reality - there's very little buffer between what you see on TV and what impacts your life. The USSR falls apart? There are suddenly Russians everywhere trying to make a living. War breaks out in the middle east? Thousands of refugees are showing up in boats (or drowning in your seas) within a few short weeks. It's all ... direct, in your face. It's not necessarily happening to you but it sure does affect you right away, something North American folks might not be used to.

[SparklesTheClown]

@Arkandel I get you, I at least understand this in ways that aren't anywhere near as extreme (Like people who hear of and talk about gentrification on TV and the internet vs. me literally experiencing it right now).

I mean, I know Europe isn't perfect, mostly because my best friend is European and I know a lot of people in different countries. And I also don't necessarily lump all of Europe together. Some countries are better than others about certain things, same with Asian countries, from what I read and what people tell me. My friend who lives in Sweden right now paints it as some sort of racial dystopia where people think American alt-right culture is cool and hip >_>.

[Tinuviel]

@Cupcake Can confirm.

[Cobalt]

I know the conversation has moved on but as a gamerunner, I'm not really down with the idea of setting up a db for problem players. There are people that I know I would know find welcome on my game. Some of them know who they are, and some of them should fucking know. But if they manage to play on the game without me being aware it's them, and without them causing problems-- then whatever.

If they cause problems then I'll ask them to leave.

Keeping a db of people's stuff from /other games/... gives me the willies.

[Thenomain]

@Cobaltasaurus

Almost every game I've staffed on (not DarkMetal, obviously) has asked if there's a way to keep a private database of issues and people. While "staffnote" was not originally used for this purpose, it quickly became that way.

I'm of mixed feelings on this. I see the purpose of being able to see a longer pattern of behavior, but not sure if I like giving tools like this to staff I don't trust to be responsible with it.

[Cobalt]

@Thenomain My main issue with it is when it tracks cross games. Like, I don't like that very much. I can't really articulate it very well, but it hits my buttons wrong. Like-- I'm ok with the idea of keeping records of what someone is doing on /your game/ to be a jerk to other players. But I don't think anyone has the right to take those records to another game.

[Meg]

I would agree. Also, those standing accused couldn't defend themselves like they can here, if they choose to.

But. Think of the queries you can run on such a DB! Select * from t_jerks Where Offense like '%dickpic%'.

[Thenomain]

@Cobaltasaurus said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

I don't think anyone has the right to take those records to another game.

The rumormill grape vine isn't a hugely better solution, and does roughly the same thing. The advantage of the rumormill is that there is enough uncertainty that it doesn't become a tool for, as @ghost would say, the witch hunt. Mind you, I believe that the kind of people who would abuse the tool for that level already abuse rumors.

The point here being that sometimes there are problems that span games. It is rare enough that I would absolutely not use a global database ... though I kind of would like one of Jill sightings with IP addresses so that we can hunt that Sasquatch. Not to harm, but because it's a mystery, and who doesn't like solving that kind of bizarre mystery?

[Auspice]

@HelloProject said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

I've heard interesting stories of African-Americans going to foreign countries and suddenly experiencing being seen as an American before being seen as a black person. It sounds like an absolutely fucking mindblowing experience, which is a part of why I want to travel soon.

I remember seeing a tweet once from a black guy in Britain. It went 'I am sick of being called African American. I'm British. #FML.'

It's a joke I've always been able to well appreciate.

[Paris]

@Arkandel It was really crazy. We've still got crazy in the hobby, but the general reaction to it is, "That's screwed up!"

This was in the early to mid 90s, and folks were still getting used to the idea of the internet. Most people in America were on AoL; the rest were often paying by the hour on inix/linux based internet services, and monochrome monitors were still a thing.

People LIVED online at a time where that was an incredible, heady experience, and just being internet- and especially telnet-savvy was a badge of pride and pretty unusual. A lot of nerds (and I consider myself one) had never really held social power before. Most of us were college-age with a few in their early 30s. No forum RP, no MMOs, livejournal wasn't a thing. Facebook wasn't a thing.

People were still sometimes resisting graphical browsers, and many computers could not run the web and telnet at the same time unless it was a linux machine running x-windows, which made you switch desktops. Ordinary people didn't do that.

There was no real decades-long everyman internet culture. There was no everyday standard of 'that's fucked up'. People had their little fiefs and got away with so much shit; it also encouraged, when web boards became a thing, places like soapbox's predecessors, where that excess was normal to a lot of people.

That intensity was a rush to so many people.

It's no surprise to me that as a lot of us oldbies have matured, a lot of the forum arglebargle has started to drain out. You've got some resultant 'but what if this goes bad, everything goes bad' kneejerking still (more lately I noticed but stuff goes in cycles), but nowadays every other game is not run by an Elsa or a Spider and their mush-wide posses.

IE it was the wild west back then. I am kind of surprised we made it to where games like SYE are considered toxic. These were the popular folks back then.

Sorry if this comes off as patronising, anyway.

[Paris]

@Thenomain said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

I'm of mixed feelings on this. I see the purpose of being able to see a longer pattern of behavior, but not sure if I like giving tools like this to staff I don't trust to be responsible with it.

We already see it. If folks are allowing certain players to play on their games, it's out of willful ignorance. There have been fewer and fewer folks like that popping up in the hobby (as attitudes about acceptable behavior change as the playerbase has matured , imo).

[Ghost]

@Thenomain said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

The advantage of the rumormill is that there is enough uncertainty that it doesn't become a tool for, as @ghost would say, the witch hunt. Mind you, I believe that the kind of people who would abuse the tool for that level already abuse rumors.

Agreed.

The people who abuse rumor mills and exaggerate subjective complaints to their advantage aren't going to stop doing it anyway. People have doing this as long as MUs have been open.

[Thenomain]

@Ghost said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

@Thenomain said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

The advantage of the rumormill is that there is enough uncertainty that it doesn't become a tool for, as @ghost would say, the witch hunt. Mind you, I believe that the kind of people who would abuse the tool for that level already abuse rumors.

Agreed.

The people who abuse rumor mills and exaggerate subjective complaints to their advantage aren't going to stop doing it anyway. People have doing this as long as MUs have been open.

BUT, as I said about something else, I wouldn't want to give people the tools to make abusing knowledge about people easy. We seem do be doing okay—better, certainly—as a community about getting the word out and letting people note on their own.

--

edit:

WORA had a wiki. The WoraWiki. It was, I admit, hilarious. It was damaging, and full of rumors, and as far as I can tell had no lies in it that anyone came forward about (and when they did we deleted the lies, but not the rumors, I realize the irony and that was the point). It was also about the only place people could go to say, "Hey, I remember that game!" or, "What was that game with that thing? Oh, that thing was mentioned here. Huh!"

People knew it for what it was. It was about as an official representation of the community as I am. And it still had some pretty awesome side-effects. Replicating those side-effects as a stand-alone wiki would be great; that the wiki was tied to Wora accounts was even better. Almost no anonymity.

[Tinuviel]

I think it's important that a game keeps internal records of troublesome players, especially games with a high staff employment rate (be it through simple turn-over or expansion). Naturally those records should be as confidential as we can make them.

That said, it's also important for other people to know what the heck is going on in our little community, so this place serves as that tool rather better than a cold an implacable database, as others have mentioned.

The ability for a community to establish elementary rules of conduct for its members, no matter what sub-groups they belong to, is important; as is the obvious and overt punishment of rule-breakers. For our own sakes, and for the sakes of whoever is unlucky enough to find themselves newly amongst our august number.

[surreality]

@Tinuviel said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

I think it's important that a game keeps internal records of troublesome players, especially games with a high staff employment rate (be it through simple turn-over or expansion). Naturally those records should be as confidential as we can make them.

I think this is actually pretty important regardless of the staff turnover rate. I have a pretty good memory, but I know I have misremembered things, or initially thought someone I was warned about was actually someone else (especially if a number of people were brought up in the conversation, and there's not really any conflict on a game that only involves one person, since it takes at least two for there to be friction of some kind). Confusion like this happens pretty easily, and it's usually an innocent mistake. It's why records help: they avoid memory glitches, help to avoid misattributions if they're made in the moment and can be reviewed for a quick 'ok, so this is what happened' (as in, if there's a mistaken attribution, it can be spotted before it becomes ingrained, repeated, etc.).

It helps keep new staff updated if they weren't around when Incidents 1-3 occurred, but making a record in the moment of the issue helps keep everybody on a more accurate track for a bunch of reasons.

[SparklesTheClown]

@Auspice said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

I remember seeing a tweet once from a black guy in Britain. It went 'I am sick of being called African American. I'm British. #FML.'

Belatedly, I think it's dumb as shit when people try to be so overly PC that they call British people and Jamaicans and shit, "African-American". I use African-American when I don't want there to be any mistake about which culture of black people I mean, I use black when being so specific isn't as important. But that's just my particular way that I use the words.

[Auspice]

@HelloProject said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

@Auspice said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

I remember seeing a tweet once from a black guy in Britain. It went 'I am sick of being called African American. I'm British. #FML.'

Belatedly, I think it's dumb as shit when people try to be so overly PC that they call British people and Jamaicans and shit, "African-American". I use African-American when I don't want there to be any mistake about which culture of black people I mean, I use black when being so specific isn't as important. But that's just my particular way that I use the words.

I just recall a period of time when 'black' was offensive. It didn't last long, but there was a stretch where it was, so people were sort of floundering for ways to identify those who were... and 'African American' was all they could generally land on.

It's sort of nuts at times, I guess. I mean there are def. offensive terms, no one's gonna disagree. But 'people of color' is hella broad. African American sorta cuts out, well, a massive chunk of the world, yo. So yeah, black works? But that tweet has always sort of made me laugh and it's an example of humor that identifies race without being racist.

[SparklesTheClown]

@Auspice I like African-American for specifically referring to my own culture separately from other black cultures. But I like black as a casual term. So I think there's a place for both. I don't really necessarily lump myself in with British black people, or Jamaicans, or Nigerians. We're all distinctly different cultures who have our own shit going on.

But yeah, there are black people who will 100% take offense if you don't use African-American. I mean, I somewhat understand? But eh, it's whatever to me.

[Auspice]

@HelloProject said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

@Auspice I like African-American for specifically referring to my own culture separately from other black cultures. But I like black as a casual term. So I think there's a place for both. I don't really necessarily lump myself in with British black people, or Jamaicans, or Nigerians. We're all distinctly different cultures who have our own shit going on.

But yeah, there are black people who will 100% take offense if you don't use African-American. I mean, I somewhat understand? But eh, it's whatever to me.

Culturally, for sure. And I think we need a place for both? Because yeah, I can't go to England and refer to someone as African American because... they... aren't American. Hell they might not be British. They might be visiting from Africa or Jamaica or even elsewhere (Canada!).

It's sort of landmine-y, but I appreciate people like you who are willing to discuss it because I want to be able to find terms that are acceptable. Because as a writer, esp. one who writes articles from time to time, it's important to know these things.

[Paris]

Having a broad pool of friends helps, you can ask about the local nomenclature culture.