Privacy in gaming

Sunny

His mom was damn cool about the whole thing and it turned out quite well for everyone in the end, particularly as I was an additional voice poking him about homework. He got into the college he wanted and -- so on. I mean, I'm talking of course about a specific incident that went about as well as this sort of thing could ever possibly go, but this is in reality what actually happened the one time I ran into this as a game administrator. It was the only time it ever came up.

I was a TERRIBLE kid, and because I was a terrible kid, I know there isn't anything I could do as a game administrator to keep terrible kids out. It's just not possible, and beyond that, it falls into the realm of undue burden and such. It's just not reasonable.

So while I agree that there's probably things that could be done (and should be done in the cases of games that focus on themes that are popular with children) in the case of the prevention of harm to minors, I don't think it's really a privacy concern.

Legal, moral, and ethical obligations are all different sorts of obligations. It's important to be clear with ourselves on which we are discussing at any given time, since things can get muddied quickly.

DareDaemon

In general proving that someone is not a minor is so burdensome that the law does not expect you to do anything but ask politely for someone's age. If they lie, that's up to them.

IIRC some jurisdictions have rules surrounding real money gambling that are stricter than that; but I've never heard of such for porn.

Derp

Woops,.didn't refresh the page. Replied to a thing he already beat me to.

Tinuviel

@Derp Well yes, and the way to do that is to show in what ways they are vulnerable.

Derp

@Tinuviel said in Privacy in gaming:

@Derp Well yes, and the way to do that is to show in what ways they are vulnerable.

I only noticed after posting that the page didn't refresh and you already said that, lol.

Derp

@faraday said in Privacy in gaming:

Slapping an 18+ notice on the terms of service helps too.

This is literally the first thing that me and my other admin did.

Sunny

Thinking about it -- sorry, this was a REALLY long time ago -- we had a young lady who we (my co-gods and I) eventually agreed that if she wasn't actually a minor, we still didn't want her on the game because she acted so much like one, and so we banned her basically on the suspicion of being underage.

So that's the other experience I had on the subject. I also place the 18+ on the connect screen for everything but sandboxes, because it would be insane to do otherwise.

I also state in no uncertain terms that while IC public areas will be monitored, private rooms, pages, and @mails will remain private save in the case of suspected RL endangerment/law issues/I am not going blah blah to that extent right now, but it's a very very specific set of circumstances outlined that are exceptions. I also state in no uncertain terms that anyone found to be in violation of this rule will be sitebanned. Period.

I would expect to be destroyed -- and would deserve to be destroyed -- if it were discovered that I were to violate this.

I'm not quite so strict in my requirements in regards to where I play rather than staff, but it's literally only because I no longer play on games where I don't actively trust the people running them, so my boundaries are easier.

ETA: I sitebanned a coder for breaking this rule. It did not go well. We recovered. Thanks Dew, wherever you are, yes, for that gloriously colorful code.

Tinuviel

I'd definitely call into question the quality of a staffer that wanted to read all the garbage they'd be privy to if they so chose.
Going through actually posted logs is already an arduous task with much eye-rolling, why would you subject yourself to the banal shit people page about in the hopes of finding something juicy? It's like wading through a sewer trying to find gold.

Sunny

@Tinuviel

The coder was doing key word searches on the pages of people he was monitoring. He then brought evidence from this source to me as proof that people were plotting OOCly against his character. So. It's less banal and far more malicious when it does happen, I expect.

ETA: I will grant the quality though, on the grounds of stupid. OK, the premise itself I agree with.

Derp

@Sunny said in Privacy in gaming:

Thanks Dew, wherever you are, yes, for that gloriously colorful code.

Stooorytime!

Tinuviel

@Sunny It's definitely the stupid angle I was aiming for. There are so many easier ways to find out information than snooping through their mail. Just lie to people and manipulate them! It worked on me!

Sunny

@Derp said in Privacy in gaming:

@Sunny said in Privacy in gaming:

Thanks Dew, wherever you are, yes, for that gloriously colorful code.

Stooorytime!

So, BigBad was, before he was BigBad, a coder that I'd played with fairly regularly. He came on to help with Ashes in the early stages, we were pals. He did a fairly impressive job for us with code, and everything was going well. Until he began monitoring peoples' pages, then brought logs of this monitoring to me as proof that people were OOCly plotting against him. I sitebanned him. He accessed the game around the siteban and nuked a very large portion of our code before we were able to do anything about it. We were not in full open, but we were in soft RP, and while character bits had stats and such on them, the entire framework was gone.

I don't know how she managed it, but Dew built us a chargen and sheet code in what seems to me in hindsight like it was absolutely no time at all -- if it wasn't a weekend then it was a week/two at max -- using the stats that were all on everyone's charbits. Basically built us a framework for someone else's insanity that WORKED, and not only did it work, but she set it up so that I, a complete code incompetent, was able to maintain it without her.

It was -- like a rainbow vomited on kermit, then scooped it up and put it in the blender, then dumped it on our game. It was colorful but not in any particular way, but my god it was ours and it worked.

ETA: Oh oh oh and she gave us complete permission to share it as much as we wanted to, as long as I was supporting it and not her.

ETA2: The person who came along after I had spread it to several other games deserves mention. They not only cleaned up Ashes, but they went to the other games and updated that code, and then chased me back to my 'we do not test in production' room and -- yeah. They did fix Ashes' code, and the code that came from Ashes' code, and they spent many years maintaining and it was awesome. I'm not sure what they go by these days around here, but this is def recognition for them. So much appreciated.

L. B. Heuschkel

@gryphter I am new to Ares and was actually wondering about that. Asking myself why the first thought I had when I saw 'private' was, oh, so people can have sex out of sight. Says more about me than about Ares, though. I can definitely imagine uses for private scenes that are not sexual in nature, just that you don't want everyone to barge in at random.

So, no, the intended use is not the point. Staff and players alike need to respect that sometimes, people want to do something -- sexual, emotionally intense, or for that matter, just slow posing through the web interface from work -- that's not open to the public. And that's okay.

Auspice

@L-B-Heuschkel I'd say 90% of my private scenes on Ares games are 'we're gonna take at least two days to finish this 'cause RL so we may as well private it'

L. B. Heuschkel

@Auspice Makes perfect sense to me. Over on Ankh-Morpork, we're still a small playerbase and split between US and EU timezones. Some scenes happen at a glacial pace. It'd be utterly pointless to make them open because anyone wandering in, while welcome, would be standing there for up to 24 hours, waiting for somebody to get around to answering to 'hello guys'.

JinShei

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Privacy in gaming:

@Auspice Makes perfect sense to me. Over on Ankh-Morpork, we're still a small playerbase and split between US and EU timezones. Some scenes happen at a glacial pace. It'd be utterly pointless to make them open because anyone wandering in, while welcome, would be standing there for up to 24 hours, waiting for somebody to get around to answering to 'hello guys'.

We also do it to watch @L-B-Heuschkel become increasingly curious... (this is a joke, she is not that nosy, except relating to watch reports)

L. B. Heuschkel

@JinShei I am sixty-six shades of curious and I'll happily read any log, however trivial, but while I whine, I don't snoop.

faraday

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Privacy in gaming:

I can definitely imagine uses for private scenes that are not sexual in nature, just that you don't want everyone to barge in at random.

Yeah a lot of people use them for scenes that are just limited in scope - a gathering at your apartment, a private conversation in the restaurant, a meeting with your boss, a flashback scene, slow scenes like @Auspice mentioned, etc. Or for people like me who just get overwhelmed in big scenes and prefer to limit the number of players. Many of them even get shared afterward, they're just not 'open' while they're happening.

But in terms of privacy, the idea is that staff shouldn't be able to just drop in on or snoop on private scenes. Out of the box, Ares provides no method to do so for regular admins. You'd need someone with headwiz or coder powers to go digging through the database, or someone modifying the hardcode, or setting up a key logger, or something like that.

faraday

I put together a general privacy article for Ares games if anyone's interested. (Feel free to send me any comments on things I've missed, explained poorly, etc.)

In the next patch it'll be available on the games themselves in 'help privacy'.

L. B. Heuschkel

@faraday A very good one, too. Clear and easy to read. Good point there at the end, clarifying once and for all, don't assume that private is private. In the end, what you put on the net is on you, not on Ares.