Sexual themes in roleplay
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We, the talking heads of wora, can try to make things better, yes. Call me cynical though, I don't have any faith in it ever coming to light for even a minority, must less a majority.
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I plan on pages in a MU* wiki that lay out behavior expectations, and what is supported and what is not.. I have my own stuff for that, and would include several things from various threads here.
Demonstrate. Model the behavior for others. Accept that no one is a paragon.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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I am considering walking away. It's always that quibble though about all that you've constructed and having to kick your sandcastle in based on external factors that are beyond your control, but for the walking away.
We are very much in the same 'Yes And' RP as improv. And I do think the consent as OOC issue parts of rape RP are where the works on the very good method get gummed up. If players are consenting, then 'yes and' is infinite in its outcomes. But often, the radius of consent gets murky. It's not just the victim but the immediate people around the victim that often get left out of the chain and are often left holding the bag.
Most of my experiences have been WoD games, namely TR and HM. Beyond that? A sandbox game based on the Dresden Files and Serenity Mush. So all roughly in the last 3-5 years, in terms of what springs immediately to mind but I'm sure I could come up with more if had to chart back all the games I've played over the last decade plus.
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I'm actually interested in counts, and not in a snarky fashion. At least not completely snarky. I remember one rape that went public on TR, and two more that were "unexpected", but OOC consented, that stayed quiet.
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@Misadventure said:
I plan on pages in a MU* wiki that lay out behavior expectations,
This is called code of conduct or ethical guidelines. Every game has them. That even staff ignores them is the problem. A rule that's never enforced is not a rule.
I do believe that players should be afforded rights of agency, not over their character but about their experience. Therefore, I think what @Ganymede and @Arkandel are related in a general sense, even if not a specific sense.
Every player on every game has the right to:
- Role-play freely within theme and setting
- Be judged equally among their peers (including staff) when that role-play exceeds the bounds of theme, setting, or into the OOC/RL
- Have a reasonable expectation of privacy
- Be reasonably defended against external emotional abuse
I don't know what "reasonable" means in every case, but I know what it means to me. For me, privacy is "near-complete". For me, external emotional abuse is pretty flaky but I have @Coin kicking me in the shins when I exceed it.
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Yup. I still think stating a bill of rights helps armor some players. What you want doesn't change the world, but knowing others think something should be guarded against, eg pressure to RP a scene you don't want to play through, can help a few.
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I know I've used this example before, but the one time I've seen an aspect of rape RP truly "forced" on others was on Akashat. The victim in an publicly announced plot made her dramatic entrance and collapse in the main public room of the city grid. Everyone (including me) posed rushing over. She then as part of her next pose described both the external and internal mutilation of her character's genitalia as a result of the rape. I couldn't do anything for a few seconds; then, all I could manage was to say, "ooc I'm sorry, I have to leave" and exit the room.
@Misadventure, if you want examples of "what not to fucking do" for your behavior expectations, I'll offer that.
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@HelloRaptor said:
The list of terrible things that have happened to people is long and incredibly vile, but WoD has never made any bones about the fact that it does (sorry Sunny) cover all manner of vile story elements, up to, including, and surpassing rape. Do we really need to go over depicted uses of mental domination powers, physical abuse, torture, kidnapping and sexual sadism that have appeared in WoD books over the years? Because we've had this conversation before, and the list is incredibly long and detailed.
As I said, someone who's had those bad things happen to them can certainly speak up. Personally, child abuse is something I would put on the same level of rape. Please just don't, for the health and comfort of your fellow players.
Yes, it should be treated differently. If I'm playing a game with 'violence' as a theme, that does not imply rape or childhood sexual abuse. It does, however, imply people getting shot and/or stabbed with swords and/or any number of other things. It's on the tin. If I'm allergic to eggs and something is made out of eggs, it's generally going to say so on the package. Putting 'violence' on the tin, okay, maybe I should go play Harry Potter instead of The Greatest Generation if I'm dealing heavily with war related PTSD. I don't get to do that about rape! Usually, nobody writes 'oh btw rape happens here' on the tin. Instead, it's just like SURPRISE RAPE! Oh great, fuck you for making me twitch.
I have a secondary issue that similarly will mentally fuck me up. Deadly or nearly deadly car accidents. It is a stronger trigger for me than pretty much anything ever. RP, TV, Movies, books, whatever. I'll put it down or turn it off. When it comes into RP, it's easy to extract myself or not get into the situation in the first place, without fading to black, without violating my character, without having to deal with IC CONSEQUENCES for avoiding and/or ignoring this. Not so, with rape. Fuck, if I say 'I don't want to deal with childhood sexual abuse as a plot' people are like 'oh okay no big deal', but if I recoil from rape RP 'but it's the world of DARKNESS'.
I do not give a shit if people do it in private, or in a small circle of people, or whatever. I don't want to see it / hear about it. I don't want to see Suzie Snowflake using it to get the PC she wants to hook up with to hook up with her. It hurts. Yes, I can (and would) fade to black. Too late, though. Already twitching.
I pretty much address this with the same basic two questions/the test I try to apply to pretty much all policy sorts of decisions:
What harm does it do?
What good does it do?I can see a lot of harm, and the list of good is.... Well. I can't think of any, but I'm sure somebody else could.
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@BetterJudgment
Your chat is blocked. If you wanna share, feel free.I have a waggish sense of humor.
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@Misadventure Oh, sorry, I meant "I'll offer that story as an example." It's only one I have. (Well, I once saw @walls of Brooke getting kidnapped and I assume assaulted on SerenityMU*, but I figured that just meant it was Tuesday.)
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Just to add a little more, obviously this topic has me a little riled up -- I am a survivor of a ridiculous number of things. If my life were a Lifetime movie nobody would ever, ever believe it. How am I still alive? I dunno.
Of all of the various bits of trauma I have had to deal with, rape is the only topic I would ever say 'please just don't ever go there'. The blast radius is huge. Not really the case with many other things.
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@BetterJudgment said:
@Misadventure Oh, sorry, I meant "I'll offer that story as an example." It's only one I have. (Well, I once saw @walls of Brooke getting kidnapped and I assume assaulted on SerenityMU*, but I figured that just meant it was Tuesday.)
I have heard more horror stories about weird-ass sex stuff bleeding over into RP and overwhelming everything else going on than I have on any other game (that didn't just bill itself as a sex game). I guess this is to be expected when the game is used as a very strange tool by the headwizes for whatever issue is going on in their marriage at present.
I guess if I have any contribution to what RP of sexual themes should look like, it's, 'The polar opposite of the shit Mal and Inara do on Serenity.'
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If being entertained by rape is bad, I have to wonder why it's used as a plot device in Hentai so frequently.
I mean, tentacle rape, you guys. Nowadays, though, it's mostly Orc rape or dickgirl rape, Tentacle rape is kinda passé in 2015.
Watch "Kuroinu" to see what I mean.
@Admiral mentioned posing TENTACLES EVERYWHERE; if I allow my female (or male
) character to be raped by said tentacles, does this make me a Bad Person? Should I avoid doing this?Is it Wrongfun
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Honestly, call me Prudey McPruderson No Sexhaving but I'm pretty okay with a ban on rape RP on games since the drama bombs are awful. Yes, I've been caught in a couple and even left HM over it.
Otherwise, I guess have at. People can and do break theme for sexytimes, but if there's no reasonable way to deal with it IC, I just quietly pretend not to notice.
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@Sunny said:
@Cirno said:
Is it Wrongfun
?Not until you shove it into my face.
That...sigh. DON'T SAY IT.
The only thing I was going to say was that I usually keep my consensual Japanese-style rape RP in a private room.
I'm trying to avoid contributing to Rape Culture.
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@Arkandel (for sure this time)
Playing such obsessions out appeals to me, as I've no interest at all in healthy IC relationships. Those can't go anywhere because what's left for the PCs to do after they've hooked up and everything is working out just great for them?
That doesn't really seem to follow. I mean, if an IC relationship is the primary focus of your storytelling interest, that would be true but a relationship is only one part of your life. Other shit can still go terribly wrong, even when you're in a healthy relationship, can't it?
But people who seek rape RP from unknowing or unwilling participants need to cut that shit out.
Truth.
Not so, with rape. Fuck, if I say 'I don't want to deal with childhood sexual abuse as a plot' people are like 'oh okay no big deal', but if I recoil from rape RP 'but it's the world of DARKNESS'.
You need to stop associating with such shitty people, then. Anybody who gives you shit for not wanting to participate due to OOC/RL discomfort is a shitty person, regardless of the subject matter.
Putting 'violence' on the tin, okay, maybe I should go play Harry Potter instead of The Greatest Generation if I'm dealing heavily with war related PTSD. I don't get to do that about rape!
You sort of focused on the violence angle, but that's really not at all what WoD has presented pretty much from day one. Hell, the flagship game going all the way back was Vampire, a game about predators who use physical and mental domination to take control away from their victims by taking what they want from their bodies while forcing them to experience sexual ecstasy. And that's just the starting line for presentations and implications of sexual violation in the game lines. It is absolutely on the tin, inasmuch as anything is on the tin. The WoD has always described itself as very much like the real world, except with all the terrible things that happen in the real world being cranked up to eleven both in frequency and in horror. How is that not putting it on the tin?
Too late, though. Already twitching.
That's unfortunate, but also not compelling. Do you watch the news/read blogs covering events/etc? Because there's some truly awful things happening out there in the world on the rape front, from college campus creeps to rape camps in other countries. When that shit comes up do you refuse to watch that news channel ever again? If that's too far from entertainment, how about television shows? Most of them don't advertise 'SOMEONE MAY GET RAPED ON THIS SHOW AT SOME POINT', but it's happened on many of them at one time or another. Sure, you have a reasonable expectation that it's not going to happen while you're watching children's television, or an evening sitcom with a laugh track, but if WoD were a television show it's one where something rape-y would pretty inevitably happen. Which... it actually did if I'm remembering my Kindred: The Embraced right.
I can see a lot of harm, and the list of good is.... Well. I can't think of any, but I'm sure somebody else could.
The one person I know RL with combat related PTSD finds the portrayal of combat veterans and their reactions to/portrayal of their personal trauma to range between offensive and triggering, and has ranted at length about Nerve and so many others because of how common the character trope is. These people don't know what it's like, they don't really understand what people really go through or have to deal with when they come back, they're just using an easy to identify trauma for an attention grab and bring it up whenever that attention wanders away from them. So on and so forth.
What good does it do to allow people to play those characters? Hell, what good does letting people play any particular concept or through any particular roleplay actually do, that's true for one type but not another? 'What good does it do?' seems like a false question asked to frame the followup as more important. What good does it do to roleplay sex between characters? What good does it do to sit in bars and chat? What good does any of it do, and how do you even answer that for other people, when the value of any of it will vary wildly between persons?
What harm does people portraying victims of terrible trauma do? Are you injured by someone portraying a combat veteran? I'm not. Animal abuse? Do you shut off your computer and walk away if there's a zoo massacre? There are absolutely people who find even the suggestion of animal cruelty so disgusting that they've exited stage right when it's come up in RP, and even refused to RP with those they felt responsible. There was a rant on the Dunlin channel back when I first started playing Xenos about how terrible it was that they weren't warned ahead of time that it would come up in the PRP. Clearly they felt there was some kind of harm involved, and a cursory glance at the internet suggests they aren't alone. Is your trauma greater than whatever's setting them off? Maybe. There's no way to know without questioning the very thing they don't want to be confronted with.
What harm a subject of roleplay does is entirely dependent on individuals and their particular traumas and issues, just like why someone roleplays a given thing will vary pretty wildly, no matter how much people want to paint with the brush that everyone doing X is just an attention whore/monster.
Again: Rape isn't special. Its victims don't have a monopoly on trauma, or on feeling sick and disgusted at it being used, nor on being offended when it's handled in a shitty fashion by people whose closest experience with it is network television or other truly shitty fictional portrayals.
Personally, child abuse is something I would put on the same level of rape. Please just don't, for the health and comfort of your fellow players.
Should we just have a game-wide vote every six months to get a majority opinion on what can and can't be a subject of role play? How many people have to be 'harmed' by a particular subject for it to be against the rules to engage in it? How will we judge relative levels of trauma to properly weigh the ratio necessary? Is it enough if just one person speaks up? It would be at pretty much any game table, after all.
Honestly, call me Prudey McPruderson No Sexhaving but I'm pretty okay with a ban on rape RP on games since the drama bombs are awful.
Please don't use this example. Whatever one's opinions on the subject being used in roleplay, it's got nothing to do with Prudey McPrudeperson, or how one feels about Sexhaving. Not that I believe you think it does, but phrasing. >_>
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@7Wonders said:
I am considering walking away. It's always that quibble though about all that you've constructed and having to kick your sandcastle in based on external factors that are beyond your control, but for the walking away.
You don't have to get rid of your character. Just distance yourself from the person who's making you uncomfortable (maybe even explain why to them it is over a page) and the related RP.
@HelloRaptor said:
@Arkandel (for sure this time)
Playing such obsessions out appeals to me, as I've no interest at all in healthy IC relationships. Those can't go anywhere because what's left for the PCs to do after they've hooked up and everything is working out just great for them?
That doesn't really seem to follow. I mean, if an IC relationship is the primary focus of your storytelling interest, that would be true but a relationship is only one part of your life. Other shit can still go terribly wrong, even when you're in a healthy relationship, can't it?
Yes. The thing though is, MU* gameplay tends to occupy time in a biased fashion; the shit that goes wrong usually happen over PrPs or the background, so they occupy a relatively small part of your actual play time, but usually a PC dating/TSing yours is on a lot more. It's harder for me (YMMV) to maintain the premise of a conflicted, down on his lack character when the majority of the time I'm actually posing it's in a happy, committed, stable situation.
As for the rest of the "some bad things are different than others"... I don't like the idea of quantifying trauma or picking which is 'worse', since all of it is terrible past a certain point, and it all leaves scars behind. The person who was the victim of random non-sexual violence and flinches at sudden motions around them, the guy who lost a loved one to gun violence and abhors firearms, they're all traumatized people. That crap shouldn't happen to anyone, ever.
So how do we really say "okay, <X> is banned on this adult game" with a straight face? I am not a therapist and I honestly don't know how to go about this other than by trying to not be an douche when I play.
What I do know is that stories anchored in relatable pain can be made more powerful for it. For instance on SHH my entire first act of a PrP series was centered around extensive animal abuse where I was specifically pulling on players' heartstrings about it to get an emotional response. And they gave it, they were really angry at the villain - which is great if you want to create a long-term nemesis rather than just a generic enemy to throw dice against. I don't get off in any way from mistreated animals (all my dogs are rescues and my spouse works for Animal Control and tells me infuriating real stories of being being complete assholes regularly), and I would have totally understood if someone had gone 'sorry, I can't do this', but I wouldn't hesitate to use it to tell a more interesting story.
Anyway, I dunno. It just seems to me that saying "oh, no, rape is bad so we're banning it" but being okay with people getting shot in the face is a bit hypocritical.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel said:
It's harder for me (YMMV) to maintain the premise of a conflicted, down on his lack character when the majority of the time I'm actually posing it's in a happy, committed, stable situation.
I don't understand this at all. You're suggesting that a conflicted, down-on-his-luck character cannot have a happy, committed relationship, which is false. At the same time, you're suggesting that your character must have a happy, committed relationship, which is also false.
There's nothing stopping you from having a dysfunctional relationship with your dysfunctional character. The other player may not like it, but that's kind of how dysfunctional relationships work: one person is generally fucked up and ruins the relationship.
I mean, Clarice (my PC on The Reach) seems to have a healthy relationship. She sure does love her partner. The problem is that her partner is flighty, un-committed, and very, very, very, very different. That doesn't mean that Clarice can't imagine that everything's fine (which she does), that nothing will go wrong (which will happen at some point), and that, if her partner leaves town, she will happily go with her (which will likely not happen). Their laughing, fun picnics are merely a cover for the inexorable truth that they ain't gonna make it.
But, what do you expect from a Winter Courtier? A HAPPY relationship?
I think you should explore your relationships a little more, bub.
“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.
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@Ganymede said:
@Arkandel said:
It's harder for me (YMMV) to maintain the premise of a conflicted, down on his lack character when the majority of the time I'm actually posing it's in a happy, committed, stable situation.
I don't understand this at all. You're suggesting that a conflicted, down-on-his-luck character cannot have a happy, committed relationship, which is false. At the same time, you're suggesting that your character must have a happy, committed relationship, which is also false.
I said no such thing. I said it is harder for me to maintain the premise of such a character when the majority of my time is spent roleplaying happy fun times but the themes I intend to explore are darker ones.
That's my preference (your-mileage-may-vary and all); I said nothing about it being impossible. If it works for other people then more power to them.
