How should IC discrimination be handled?
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@deadculture I'm hoping we can all agree as a board that nobody should ever, under any circumstances, be that egregiously OOCly gross again.
Like, if we can't even collectively get past that dazzlingly low a bar, it's time to take up the fiddle, 'cause Rome's a-burnin' bright.
Oh fucking well.
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@surreality Yeah, all the IC horrible aside, some of the OOC staff stuff was even creepier. I'd give better than even odds one particular person having been an RL predator.
Memories!
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@surreality said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
@deadculture I'm hoping we can all agree as a board that nobody should ever, under any circumstances, be that egregiously OOCly gross again.
Like, if we can't even collectively get past that dazzlingly low a bar, it's time to take up the fiddle, 'cause Rome's a-burnin' bright.
Honestly, Firan could turn a relatively decent person into a rabid monster within 3 to 4 months in there.
A lot of us, apparently, including former staffers, came to this realization as soon as the Firan spell was broken. It was a bad toxic environment to be in, and if you wanted to stay, you had to adapt. Of course, you adapted for the worse, not for the best.
But really, if there's a manual of how tos of proper RPing and/or being a decent MUSHing person somewhere, it has to have some Firan examples of how not to.
There were some good things, of course; they kept people on the game. But they weren't enough, and they shouldn't ever justify the level of abuse that went on there.
And while I'm actually alright with the use of offensive language in poses, etc., it should probably be conveyed in a way that won't seem like an outright attack to the person behind the screen. But that takes a level of finesse, or at least, knowing who you're playing with. So you can probably base the contents of your pose on your scene partner if they're a known quantity, and settle for something subtler if you don't know them.
But yeah... @bored's right. At least one person there might have been a predator.
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Having (briefly) played one... they treated the IC hookers like OOC hookers. There was a real, if just barely unspoken expectation of TS being on offer and the idea that if you weren't doing it you shouldn't be wasting one of the character slots. Which maybe figured into them not wanting dudes playing them.
That or heebiejeebies over accidentally text-boning a dude... though I dunno how they avoided that worry with all the commoner ladies!
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@deadculture said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
especially after the magic rape wardrobe episode
I want storytime.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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@auspice said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
@deadculture said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
especially after the magic rape wardrobe episode
I want storytime.
Some dude named Tioran had this level II character on the Bear Clan and OOCly he was quite a bit of a creeper. He'd try to force whores to TS him despite their OOC refusal, and at one point he had his character, I forget which it was, but it was a Sadin bastard, I think Andreas, hold a girl at swordpoint and abduct her, shoved her into a wardrobe, wherein he kept her inside and raped her repeatedly.
Then he got executed and castrated for it, ofc, but he had a string of problematic behavior patterns that just had staff realize they had a more overt problem on their hands and so they arranged to siteban the guy off their game.
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@deadculture I'm sure if you had a player saying OMG YOU MUST TS and you went nopenope ftb and they were haranguing you in OOC and you raised a fuss about it... in the moment, staff would side with you and perhaps even discipline the player (assuming it wasn't a staffalt).
That's not the same thing as the expectation not being there, particularly re: 'wasting' Dove slots as I mentioned.
I (blessedly) never got the long term Dove experience, but even in my short time, I had people attempt explicit sexual stuff in public rooms with almost no warning, let alone any kind of check or chance to pause or FTB out of that. That was against policy too, but I didn't get the feeling it was culturally unusual on the game.
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@deadculture said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
He'd try to force whores to TS him despite their OOC refusal, and at one point he had his character, I forget which it was, but it was a Sadin bastard, I think Andreas, hold a girl at swordpoint and abduct her, shoved her into a wardrobe, wherein he kept her inside and raped her repeatedly.
MSB free since 24/3/2018
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@kitteh said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
@deadculture I'm sure if you had a player saying OMG YOU MUST TS and you went nopenope ftb and they were haranguing you in OOC and you raised a fuss about it... in the moment, staff would side with you and perhaps even discipline the player (assuming it wasn't a staffalt).
That's not the same thing as the expectation not being there, particularly re: 'wasting' Dove slots as I mentioned.
I (blessedly) never got the long term Dove experience, but even in my short time, I had people attempt explicit sexual stuff in public rooms with almost no warning, let alone any kind of check or chance to pause or FTB out of that. That was against policy too, but I didn't get the feeling it was culturally unusual on the game.
Well, no, it wasn't. There have been instances of 'noble privilege' taken inside open, public stores, poker pavillions in Festival (this one by a staff alt), and a number of other atrocious actual noble rape stories that are way too numerous to recount here.
If there was an 'expectation' for Dove TS, it was mostly veiled from people who were not Doves, but I can see where that might have been the case.
@Faceless I wish that gif existed back then.
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@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
But by limiting the discussion to historical games, it is a lot easier to say 'Well, that's just unreasonable to even ask' when people ask why the slurs and discrimination are setting vital.
I am not saying you are trying to do that on purpose, but I am saying that in narrowing the scope back down in conjunction with your reservations about allowing players to opt out from bigotry, you are basically bolstering your point at the expense of ignoring a large part of the ongoing conversation.
Actually I never narrowed the scope. I asked a question about a historical example and you somehow took that to mean I was only concerned with historical settings. I never said that. @Arkandel even gave examples of how those exact same situations can come up in modern settings too. I also never said that slurs and discrimination were vital to historical settings. In fact I said the opposite.
So for the fourth time (as you said - thank goodness this isn't a drinking game) ... I am simply soliciting ideas for how folks (this is a general query) suggest implementing this "opt out" policy idea in actual practice.
This goes beyond something as trivial as "hey can we not use the n-word/f-word" "oh sure". I'm always in favor of folks being nice and working things out, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about situations where they can't agree because the impacts are subtle or more deeply ingrained in a character's behavior than simple word choice.
This is independent of setting. Take BSG for instance - Capricans hate Taurons. Joe's character is Caprican but he really doesn't like even fictional -isms and doesn't want to engage with that aspect of the theme. That's all well and good until...
Joe's chilling at the bar when a (different) Caprican and a Tauron get into it and flinging insults at each other, careening toward a barfight.
Joe's a doctor and there's a Tauron patient who doesn't want anything to do with being treated by a Caprican.
Joe's supervisor is a Tauron and really has it in for him because of his heritage.
How do you resolve situations like this if opt-out from discrimination is a policy?
It's not a criticism. It's a question.
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@deadculture I got festival pavilions beat!
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@kitteh said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
@deadculture I got festival pavilions beat!
Share it.
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@deadculture The uh... Gold Dragon temple place? Whatever that was called.
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@kitteh Oh god. The Inquisitors. It was the Inquisitors, wasn't it?
There's another horrible one about that: Rasmus took some woman 'for confession' downstairs and ICly raped her.
And of course there's a few other rape stories coming from Firan but did you expect otherwise?
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@faceless said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
@deadculture said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
He'd try to force whores to TS him despite their OOC refusal, and at one point he had his character, I forget which it was, but it was a Sadin bastard, I think Andreas, hold a girl at swordpoint and abduct her, shoved her into a wardrobe, wherein he kept her inside and raped her repeatedly.
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@deadculture I don't remember the details of the character trying it. Some noble. But it was right in the main, public area of the Temple. She was sitting in the pews praying, he sat next to her, and a pose or two later had a hand under her dress trying to... well, I'll leave it there, before I went scrambling.
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@faraday said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
So for the fourth time (as you said - thank goodness this isn't a drinking game) ... I am simply soliciting ideas for how folks (this is a general query) suggest implementing this "opt out" policy idea in actual practice.
This goes beyond something as trivial as "hey can we not use the n-word/f-word" "oh sure". I'm always in favor of folks being nice and working things out, but I'm not talking about that.
I may be misreading things, but I think you've got the gist of the policy. The "opt-out" is, I think, that players can opt-out of that sort of stuff by informing RP-mates that they would rather not have the slur used. I can't see any practical way to implement a pre-slur opt-out policy, as no one other than me is omniscient.
The conflict arises where there is no official "opt-out" policy, and the offender tells the offendee, "hey, buzz off, i'm just playing my character." But, in that case, my preference as staff would be to punch the offender in the mouth.
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@faraday Show me a real life BSG minority and I'll worry about the question.
I'm talking about discrimination that actually impacts real people, even through the medium of RP. Using the N word or F word hurts real people. Calling somebody a two-headed Mumblesquirt from Arcturis is only harmful to Mumblesquirt-kin.
I haven't met one yet, given that I just made it up, but this is the Internet.
There seems to be a pathological aversion to common sense standards when it comes to this stuff, for some reason. As in, 'don't worry about the made up species and races, they will be fine. Worry about the real people'.
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You're avoiding the very clear, basic question.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
