Privacy in gaming

Pandora

Realistically? They're gonna do this one way or another. I can't police what someone wants to do in their private Discord sandbox. All I can do is make sure that when on the game itself, they adhere to the policies.

Actually, they're not. Not unless you've decided to let them. I've never seen any sort of egregious thematic breach on a game where staff is openly watching. This can likely be attributed to any number of factors, but one of them is certainly the idea that people care more about your theme, your rules, your expectations, and impressing you when they know you're watching and actually care about the story they are telling.

I know plenty of people love the idea of sandboxing in their little corner of a game, but a lot more like the idea of being seen and mattering, which is why people swarm staff characters and metaplot hooks, etc. Imagine if, to make people feel included and as if they matter, rather than having to hump staff's leg for a pat on the head, staff could just see their thematic conversation with a newbie in that bar that one time, and appreciate them for it.

Derp

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:

Actually, they're not. Not unless you've decided to let them.

I'm sorry, what now? How am I going to 'not let them' fire up their own little Discord sandbox and go at it? My powers to police other people's actions are limited by code and various laws of nature and the United States.

L. B. Heuschkel

@Derp I read that as 'let them' as in, acknowledge what happened in their Discord sandbox as actually game canon.

Pandora

@Derp I don't know where that came from so I didn't respond to it. I'd said 'making up theme on Discord and applying it to their characters, teaching it to newbies, who then make it part of their backstory because they don't know any better, and these misinformed newbies are now in-game spouting the nonsense they learned in your blind spot'.

Derp

This seems like a discussion that could be spun off into another thing, rather than cluttering up here. @Arkandel! Do your thing and thready-splitty por favor!

Pandora

@Derp said in Privacy in gaming:

This seems like a discussion that could be spun off into another thing, rather than cluttering up here. @Arkandel! Do your thing and thready-splitty por favor!

To be fair, it's not actually a thread of conversation I'd like to continue outside of the aspect of whether or not privacy in terms of staff being able to see/monitor RP is a 'right' worth more than the benefits of such visibility.

Derp

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:

To be fair, it's not actually a thread of conversation I'd like to continue outside of the aspect of whether or not privacy in terms of staff being able to see/monitor RP is a 'right' worth more than the benefits of such visibility.

You and I are not the only ones engaged in this conversation, however, and I think it deserves a different thread.

Sunny

@Derp

I mean if you're interested in the conversation go make a thread; I don't think it's been enough of a derail that we need to be asking to have posts moved? Especially as it all relates to this topic.

Derp

Ok, fair. Just seems that we're moving away from 'privacy in gaming' and more into 'how can staff enforce the game theme'.

In terms of controlling what people do in their private spaces, there is blessedly little that I can do for that in an age where everyone can have a private space that only they control. Nor do I want to continually play whack-a-mole with people hell bent on doing so. Again, I am limited in my abilities, and that actually makes my life easier in a lot of ways, so I'm not disputing that too much.

The only thing I can control is what the game considers official. If people are spreading misinformation to newbies, I can try and stop that. I can correct it when I see it. I can make robust theme files. But at the end of the day, we all know that everyone's gonna have their own headcanon anyway. The limits of my power are, ultimately, to try and correct misinformation and if necessary move egregious offenders off of the public game space, and back into their own little private areas where they can live out their fantasy of alternate timelines or whatever on their own.

But I can't stop them from thinking that. I can't change their mind if they disagree with the Official Staff Interpretation (TM) of what the theme files are. I can control a limited set of actions and try to counter theme-drift by providing accurate information, but I don't have any illusions of control over that, nor should any other staffer. People are gonna people. All you can do is try to herd the cats, and remove the bad apples.

L. B. Heuschkel

@Derp There will always be a segment of players who just don't think the restrictions of the theme applies to them. Cue catgirls in Victorian settings -- or just plain indifferent to the theme because they're there to find TS partners.

What you can control is indeed, as you say, what the game recognises as canon. What the helpfiles say. What gets added to the game wiki, and so on.

I am always inclined to be lax on players, and I am likely far more friendly than I should be -- which is ironic, given that I have on occasion been terribly frustrated with games that didn't bother to address strong theme deviations.

Pandora

@L-B-Heuschkel Where's the complication in not approving catgirl apps in a Victorian setting? Like, if there are no hybrids in your setting, why approve one?

In terms of privacy, if you mean people RPing being a catgirl in private RP, that seems to be more of an argument for staff oversight than against it.

Derp

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:

@L-B-Heuschkel Where's the complication in not approving catgirl apps in a Victorian setting? Like, if there are no hybrids in your setting, why approve one?

I think that both LB and I are talking more in terms of 'character wants to pretend they are some kind of catgirl after approval' and not 'approved as catgirl'. What staff approves and what players play are wildly different things, in many circumstances.

In terms of privacy, if you mean people RPing being a catgirl in private RP, that seems to be more of an argument for staff oversight than against it.

You keep saying this, and I don't think that you're getting what we're putting down, so let me just ask you -- how? How does staff police this? What tools would they use in order to do this? How do you see this functioning?

Pandora

@Derp Someone claims to be a catgirl in an emote, staff notices in the scroll-by of emotes, drops her an @mail that there's no catgirls so please cease & desist. Simple. I'm not proposing something far-fetched, plenty of games have staff watching the IC RP without any issues.

faraday

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:

If it's not too much trouble, can someone give me an example from either the second or third category (or both if something comes to mind) of something you imagine that you or another hypothetical player would feel violated about if you found out staff had read it?

As others have pointed out, who feels 'violated' by what is an intensely personal thing, rooted in moral and philosophical beliefs as much as anything.

Whether you buy into that or not, it's pretty easy to speculate instances where such behavior could be problematic, just on a practical level.

One can imagine an admin gaining an unfair advantage for their own PC through OOC knowledge snooped from a private log.

Or becoming privvy to personal OOC details that were not meant to be shared beyond the person they were told to (off-game contact info, family drama, illness, work situations, anxieties, love life, etc.). Even worse if the snooping admin then shares that info with others. The fact is that this info has been abused by nefarious admins in the past, so it's not just a hypothetical concern.

Pandora

@faraday Sure, I don't have any problem with what anyone feels; I wish people were more cognizant of their feelings & that people were more ready to accept that people(not me of course) have them and are entitled to them. This isn't an exercise in trying to convince anyone that they need to embrace the joy that is an omnipresent staff, I'm just wondering if there is any angle I personally am not looking at, in terms of privacy, that should make me less open to the idea of staff seeing everything. Thus far, that's a no. But it's always interesting to see other people's points of view, so long as they have some measure of reason to them other than 'just 'cause'.

Derp

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:

@Derp Someone claims to be a catgirl in an emote, staff notices in the scroll-by of emotes, drops her an @mail that there's no catgirls so please cease & desist. Simple. I'm not proposing something far-fetched, plenty of games have staff watching the IC RP without any issues.

Yes, and nobody is suggesting that it can't happen if they bring it onto public spaces on the grid.

What we're saying is that we have no control over private spaces. Spaces where staff cannot see things, either scenes set to private or RP that happens in a Discord sandbox. Staff cannot see everything, even if they can see every bit of code that comes onto a server (which would be a nightmare to wade through anyway), because not everything even happens on the game itself.

Pandora

@Derp Cool. What was being discussed before this tangent was the merits of the ability for staff to see all roleplay/PMs/@mail on their server, not RP that happens literally on Discord.

When I mentioned Discord, I was talking about the annoying tendency people have to have OOC conversations about everything IC, getting things incredibly wrong without staff oversight, and then taking it on-grid.

What I did not mention was staff needing to have the ability to police what happens on Discord, but rather the ability to see everything that happens on-grid and nip the stray theme in the bud.

I sincerely hope that clears my end of things up, I intensely dislike the feeling of being chased through a thread with arguments that I didn't make.

faraday

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:

This isn't an exercise in trying to convince anyone that they need to embrace the joy that is an omnipresent staff, I'm just wondering if there is any angle I personally am not looking at, in terms of privacy, that should make me less open to the idea of staff seeing everything. Thus far, that's a no.

I'm similarly not trying to convince you that having an omnipresent staff makes the game evil, as long as players know what they're getting into. Certainly on most MUs players don't go into it thinking that staff is going to be monitoring literally everything as a matter of course. I think that's why there was such a big disconnect between you and @Derp, because Derp's talking about "private spaces" on a game (a fairly common concept in MUs) and you're talking about a game where that's a concept that doesn't exist.

But I don't think you can get away from the fact that actual harm has come from staff snooping on things that were meant to be private. From extreme examples of doxxing, stalking and spamming to the more everyday cases of drama, hurt feelings, and in-game cheating. These things have happened with reasonable frequency. That's why so many folks are touchy about it, even beyond the philosophical "privacy is a right" arguments.

L. B. Heuschkel

@faraday said in Privacy in gaming:

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:
From extreme examples of doxxing, stalking and spamming to the more everyday cases of drama, hurt feelings, and in-game cheating. These things have happened with reasonable frequency. That's why so many folks are touchy about it, even beyond the philosophical "privacy is a right" arguments.

One of the things that made me give up on World of Warcraft a few years back was the profound attitude among regular players that EVERY roleplayer must be there only for virtual porn. And that it is totally all right to follow them around, screenshot everything they do, and use any means available to sneak into their guilds, chats, and conversations, to prove that they are perverts who should be banned from the game. It got very, very tedious.

Pandora

@L-B-Heuschkel Surely that has nothing to do with privacy from on-high, and everything to do with players that had no power over you other than to make your roleplay experience tedious - same as any other player on any other game?