Sensitivity in gaming

[faraday]

@derp said in Sensitivity in gaming:

This thread comes from a place of like -- gushing empathy

I have tons of empathy. But I also believe in personal responsibility. That's why I argue for a middle of the road approach.

There are certain topics where I think there's widespread acceptance that it's a sensitive subject you should warn people about - e.g., suicide and sexual assault. That's just common courtesy.

But for the rest, it's largely dependent on context. When I'm watching Chicago PD for instance, I don't expect to be warned about the inevitable murders. For Gray's Anatomy, I don't expect them to warn me if a child is going to be hurt or die. For Battlestar, I don't need warnings about general post-apocalyptic misery or war violence. There is a certain base level of expectations that comes along with the theme and the overall content rating (TV-14 vs. TV-MA).

I think games can operate in a similar way - establish base expectations, and then communicate like reasonable people if there's a special situation beyond that.

[Roz]

@lordbelh said in Sensitivity in gaming:

I think there are some valid arguments made in the video. There is a point where being sensitive tips over into the death of creativity, and the end result is that the only thing you're either allowed to or feel comfortable writing about is your own little bubble.

Honestly, this kind of sounds like the comedians who whine about "political correctness run amok" and not being able to make shitty jokes anymore.

[Derp]

@saosmash said in Sensitivity in gaming:

What exactly requires "gushing empathy" here?

It was hyperbole. But a lot of this reads as though there is a considerable amount of hand-wringing going on about making sure that everyone is perfectly accommodated.

And that person is not me.

I have flat-out told people that entire game lines are not for them because they complain about the content that is very clearly portrayed in said game line, and I always have disclaimers in multiple places. The effort that I will put into ensuring everyone is cozy above and beyond that is absolutely minimal, and I'm not gonna get all tangled up in knots and fidgety about whether I've given people sufficient warning about whatever.

Opting out is always an option. I leave you an escape hatch and post the expectations in the handbook. Past that, you're responsible for you, and I don't care if people think that's not enough.

[insomniac7809]

So, yeah, there is a conversation to be had here about how to handle this sort of thing in games, above and beyond how bad the video that sparked it was. (Which was, I want to be clear here: bad. Not gonna go back and read whatever I said in the wee hours last night, so gonna put that out. Bad arguments in bad faith to make a bad video.)

But beyond talking about how bad the bad video is, there is some meat to get into here. Especially in how it relates to MU*s.

In-person games have a lot of ways to handle content; I've got some fondness for "lines and veils" and "the X-card." "Lines and veils" gives people the chance to set up "lines," which are things they don't want to deal with at all in game (say, "no spiders" or "no sexual violence") and "veils" which are things that can happen in the fiction but they don't want to be 'on-screen' (so, for instance, someone could put "torture" behind a veil, and while there could be torture happening in the plot it wouldn't be a scene focus or get any graphic description. (The scorecard @Carma has there looks to be based on the same lines.) The X-card is something anyone can play to veto an element that was just brought up, we retcon it and move on. ("'From the pit, you see the leg of an enormous spider start to-' 'X-card.' '-an enormous snake start to emerge!'" "'I start to cut off the rude shopkeep's-' 'X-card, no you don't.'")

The thing is, these are a lot more workable in smaller sit-down games with friends. With MUs, where it is a good bit more ad-hoc and with a broader group (and, yeah, where you frankly can't have the same assumptions of good faith that you have in a smaller in-person game), it does get to be a thornier issue. Twice as much so when it comes to any game with horror elements, where violating social norms is kind of key to the whole experience. Anything trying to appeal to as wide of an audience as a given MU* can't really work with the same degree of "everyone gets veto power" as a smaller game with friends.

Setting a "rating" for the game is a good first step, although it does come with the issue that ratings are kinda bullshit. (Fun fact: Taxi Driver was given an NC-17 over the climactic violence scene, so Scorsese kept sending "recut" versions of the film to try to get it down to an R. Thing was, he didn't cut a goddamn thing, he just desensitized the NCAA by showing them the same ultraviolence over and over until they decided it was an R rating.)

Putting out some hard rules across the games is generally a good idea, I think. As well as respecting players who ask that topics or details be "veiled," more or less as outlined above; even if it's a bit much to ask that "violence against children" not be a thing in any aspect of the setting, it's perfectly reasonable for a player to ask that it not be given detailed description or focus. It doesn't need to just be "players," either; I know one of the GMs on a L&L game has said they won't have a scene where a horse explicitly dies. You can't have a world where the cavalry charge is the height of military technology but no horses are ever killed by violence, but it's perfectly acceptable to say that they don't want to GM a scene like that or give/be subjected to descriptions of it.

Give players a chance to bow out for content just the same as we have to accept that sometimes real life obligations take precedence over being available for pretendy funtime events that our characters should be present for. Be willing to gloss over detail rather than lurid prose about things that make people upset.

You can't reasonably have a game of a hundred, or even like twenty, people where everyone gets complete veto power over anything else that happens in-game (and while content in one TT group is basically only the business of that group, characters in a MU* interact outside the scope of a given PRP).

As far as people using bad faith to try to escape consequences to their character... I feel like the only thing to do here is work out with the player/s involved what the consequences are, at least in broad strokes, and move on. Maybe do one or more abstracted rolls to determine outcome without getting into detail. Real people and their feelings are more important than make-believe consistency, but a MU* is by definition something that has to have a certain degree of fictional 'reality' holding together, or everyone's play experience suffers.

Much more than a TT group, a MU* has to have some points where the fictional reality of the setting takes precedence over personal comfort, and the answer has to be "take it or leave it."

[saosmash]

@derp I have no idea where the hand-wringing you are perceiving is occurring. You appear to be reacting hyperbolically to demands that don't - as far as I can tell from my read of this thread - exist.

I don't think anyone has an expectation that GMs will accommodate everyone - or indeed, anyone. What I have seen is a general expectation that players will have an escape route or the option to leave (or FTB) if something is too much for them, and that GMs will be prepared to warn for reasonably common triggers in their content.

I imagine that the points of reasonable disagreement are probably within the details of this spectrum.

[Arkandel]

@insomniac7809 said in Sensitivity in gaming:

The thing is, these are a lot more workable in smaller sit-down games with friends.

I think that's been why I've viewed table-top games much differently than I have MU*, since almost the sum of my physical games have either been with friends I already knew pretty well outside of gaming, and on a couple of occasions with coworkers.

I am not going to push the envelope with coworkers in any regard. There won't be kids dying or graphic depictions of people's guts hanging out! As for people I know well there's both more knowledge of what (if anything) creeps them out but also more trust; my spouse has a phobia of underwater terrors and I'm not sleeping on the couch just to get to spring that giant mutant piranha on the party.

Online the expectations can be tempered but the line does blur. Yes, a World of Darkness universe can and should be 'dark'. On the other hand if every scene seems to somehow incorporate women enthralled to vampires perhaps there's something more to it than generic dark themes, right?

[lordbelh]

@roz said in Sensitivity in gaming:

@lordbelh said in Sensitivity in gaming:

I think there are some valid arguments made in the video. There is a point where being sensitive tips over into the death of creativity, and the end result is that the only thing you're either allowed to or feel comfortable writing about is your own little bubble.

Honestly, this kind of sounds like the comedians who whine about "political correctness run amok" and not being able to make shitty jokes anymore.

Sure. It is the same fundamental logic and argument, at different points in its trajectory. I don't think sensitivity in gaming is wrong, or political correctness is some kind of evil. I think it ties into respect, and showing your fellow players a level of courtesy and respect is always good.

But I do think that at some point it becomes increasingly counter productive, going from helpful to dogmatic. Where that line is, I don't know exactly. If you disagree that there is a line, that's fine, I'm not going to call you names over it. I think its still an interesting conversation to have, because I don't have many answers. Got me thinking, though, which is what I took from the original video, even if I didn't feel the video was entirely honest or right about everything.

Say you put your fantasy setting in a arab inspired setting. How much research is expected? And how much from the game maker, and how much from the players? Who gets to decide what is appropriate, or too cliche, or downright offensive? Would you put a setting there at all, rather than a generic western culture approximation?

I think that's the sort of convo @Arkandel was looking for? Or I might be wrong about that, too. I'm not known for my high batting average.

[insomniac7809]

@arkandel Yeah. Even with a TT game, playing with friends, playing with coworkers, and playing at a convention are all going to be really different sorts of experiences and expectations.

But all of them allow for a good bit more in-person communication and specificity than a MU* can. Not that a MU* doesn't need to take player comfort or consideration seriously, just that it can't have the same degree of "everyone gets to make these decisions" that a TT game does. It has to be a certain degree of "this is what we're doing, feel free to hop on."

Not that this is entirely absent in TT. "I don't want to play in a game where secondary school aged teenagers are sexualized, hurt, or killed" is a perfectly reasonable line to have, but someone who does that and tries to play Monsterhearts really only has themselves to blame.

[mietze]

When I write stories (single author, just me) I understand that any risks I take or mistakes in representation are my responsibility. Maybe I'll choose to channel my inner edgelord, which I do sometimes, maybe I won't, but that's a decision I get to make. If I then put that up for public consumption, then I'm also signing on to criticism.

If I as a middle-aged biracial-but-white-passing-for-the-most-part lady decide that I'm going to write a story centered around a black family who grabs their bootstraps to come up in society and finds shelter with a kind MAGA family who helps them to see that really if they would stop seeing color they'd finally find success and wealth, and then I decide to publish it and then cry loudly about how the black cultural community center won't let me hold a reading there and nobody seems interested in my tale of how they can improve themselves--I mean maybe I should have expected that, a little. My creativity wasn't impinged at all--I already wrote what I wanted to. It's just that not everyone liked it. I'm sure there'd be plenty of other people who would be happy to give me a platform to whine about reverse racism, even. Well, maybe I'd have a better shot if I was hot or something.

You don't get to make people like your content. You don't even get to accept that they have to accept it. (just like some people reject any notion of "sensitivity".)

If you want to create Realistic Historical Mush and want to include rape/human trafficking/slavery/racism/genocide, I mean no one is going to stop you, you might find less of an audience than you want (or you don't like the audience that shows up for it because they think it's lame they don't get to do those things elsewhere--even if it wasn't a focus for your vision, many people will steer clear and other people will come FOR the fact that you proclaim that 'historical accuracy without modern sensibilities' is a point of pride).

If you decide to create a character on a mush that doesn't allow people to create prostitute/pimp characters or any reference to that sort of thing, and that's made very clear, it's not stifling your creativity to not allow you to be the only exception or to find a workaround. If anything, if you really have trouble stepping out of your pimp/prostitute rut, maybe it will inspire more creativity as you need to think outside of your usual box. And if you can't or don't want to, that's okay! Nothing wrong with wanting to play a pimp/prostitute, IMO. You just need to find a place where it's supported.

I find a lot of people I have personally seen on mushes in particular who balk at "stifling my creativity" are more wanting to not have to abide by the rules laid out by the mush. Or in the case of writing in general they don't like hearing about other people's anger/discomfort/hurt at how they might have chosen to wrote something. But that is kind of a risk one takes when one takes their private writings for their own edification/enjoyment and sends them forth for other people to consume.

Social tastes change. I can see it even in my own tastes in music/humor/ect. Julie Brown's Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun and several of her other songs are nostalgic and super funny to me, but understandably probably pretty not so funny to people younger than me or who grew up in different circumstances especially in the era of school mass shootings, and victims being harassed for being deep state false flag actors. It wasn't until I started watching films from the 80s that I loved as a kid with my own now late teens/young adult kids that I realized how rapey many of them were (or even stuff from the 60s and 70s). What was considered fine in the 90s is different than today, when it comes to cultural content in roleplaying games largely written for and by white people. I assume that things will be even more different when my youngest kid (now 6) is in his 20s.

[insomniac7809]

@lordbelh said in Sensitivity in gaming:

Say you put your fantasy setting in a arab inspired setting. How much research is expected? And how much from the game maker, and how much from the players? Who gets to decide what is appropriate, or too cliche, or downright offensive? Would you put a setting there at all, rather than a generic western culture approximation?
I think that's the sort of convo @Arkandel was looking for? Or I might be wrong about that, too. I'm not known for my high batting average.

So, okay, looking at a question like this...

The question of "who gets to decide" is a thorny one, I'll grant that. Not everyone is going to come to the same answer, obviously.

A first step kind of has to be "someone Arabic," which is why the people being mocked in the bad video are talking about sensitivity readers. Not that every Arab is going to have the same answer. But, I mean, it's 2020; you can probably find someone on the internet who's actually a part of the culture you're depicting to tell you if you're doing a fucky.

Barring that... I mean, "how much research" is kind of a tricky subject, but I feel like "fucking, y'know, some" is still a step beyond what a lot of people do. No one's expecting a dissertation, any more than western fantasy settings actually resemble historical Europe, but like, for an Arabian-inspired setting, just figuring out that "Persian" and "Arab" aren't the same thing and a harem isn't what you think it is would be a step beyond. Read up a bit on the history--not like getting a graduate degree, but at least a bit. Maybe even read some histories or just fiction actually by members of the culture you're taking inspiration from, instead of just white men writing up their orientalist fantasies with one hand.

@mietze Yeah, and kind of riffing on that... for all the talk about oversensitivity, I mean, it's weird how often the people who are being silenced get to complain about it on late night talk shows or national news, y'know?

People keep asking, like, "how can I know nobody will be offended" and yeah, that's not a thing. Look around the internet for discussion on any media property, you're sure to find a few truly baffling takes. But that doesn't mean there's no legitimate criticism to be had, or that people shouldn't try to be thoughtful and responsible with their work, y'know?

[mietze]

I'm not sure one can point to many points in history where there were not bad consequences for writers who wrote against the prevailing norms or offended the powers that be. Sure in some cases things changed over time but rarely to save the writer. I'm not going to say that death, torture, mutilation, or imprisonment is always worse than online harassment or people calling you names and not wanting to associate with you--im sure for some people the pain of being told that another person thinks they're wrong or racist or whatever is acutely painful, and if hundreds plus people are doing it at the same time along with threats that it can be harrowing and very intense pain. Especially when often innocent people in your life are roped in (though that too is "historically accurate").

But I do have to shake my head at the notion that creativity is more stifled today than in the past. With the increase of diversity and also more ways for people to get unedited or reviewed stuff out there for consumption it seems like there's more avenues for you to get your thoughts and ideas and writing projected out than ever before.

Maybe not by the places you most crave or tp tbe accolades you wish, and not quite as much to tbe detriment of ideas/people you don't like, but.

[Sunny]

I feel like there's a lot of confusion around the differences between "being censored" and "not being owed an audience". People refusing to pay money for a product because the themes are racist isn't stifling anyone, and them TALKING about the themes being racist (and thus, why they aren't paying money for it) isn't censoring and/or shutting anyone up.

eta: if you care about people not saying your shit is racist, then put the work in to make it not be racist. if you can't write your genre without being a racist jerk, then pick another genre.

[Ganymede]

@insomniac7809 said in Sensitivity in gaming:

People keep asking, like, "how can I know nobody will be offended" and yeah, that's not a thing.

Right. And that's not really the point of being sensitive. If anything, that can and should be what a comedian is aiming for.

From Karith Foster:

"The real problem, however, isn't the wasted energy of the political correctness patrollers or the hurt careers of comics. The danger of this outrage phenomenon is that, in the process of policing every sensitive subject, we lose comedy itself — one of the only tools we have to grapple with our testiest issues. Humor is an entryway unlike any other for talking out things we're too afraid, too uncomfortable or too pained to broach head on. If we can't joke about issues such as ethnicity, sexuality, class, politics, pain and death, we may never get through them or find ways to heal."

(Here's a set of hers.)

Being sensitive, to me, is appreciating both intent and context. Being sensitive is being able to detect the racism and condescension in seemingly-ordinary language. Being sensitive is also being able to find the criticism in a seemingly-tasteless joke. Jokes can be insightful and racist/sexist/transphobic and it is important, I think, to see that.

A good joke is going to offend someone. Michele Wolf has taken flack for this, but I think her shit is golden. Ronny Chieng's insight on the Chinese experience is blatantly racist and even mirrors anti-Semitism, but his shit is on point.

But I would hasten to point out that being a GM or a player on MUSH is not the same as being a comedian. It is very, very, very different. And chances are the people who are trying to use offensive tropes "to make a point" aren't smart enough to deliver it.

[Seraphim73]

Within the first 23 seconds of that video, I know just what it's going to be: cishet white male privilege on full whinging display (I say this as a cishet white man).

On a more useful note, @Carma, I love that worksheet for TT gaming. I don't know how practical it would be for MU* gaming, because then plot-runners have to check the responses for every one of the players signed up for their event, plus any that join at the last moment, and edit on the fly to avoid anything Red for players who joined at the last minute. That being said, I absolutely think that events in particular should include trigger warnings. Not because some people might be offended, but because some people might be harmed, as several other posters have mentioned. It might still work, it could just lead to a bunch of extra work for plot-runners (that being said, extra work is a pretty low cost to avoid harming those you are having fun with).

I think that pre-warnings are great because they allow players to either avoid topics that can be harmful to them, or to connect with plot-runners to see if a particular trigger is integral to the plot or if it might be removed. Sometimes things come up due to actions that PCs take, however, and the plot-runner might not be able to warn their players ahead of time. In this situation, I think it's important to do some check-ins with the players and, yes, roll events back if they're likely to be harmful to some of the players.

I understand what @Derp is saying about bad actors using this to manipulate events, and honestly I don't have a problem with a plot-runner saying, "If the current trajectory of the scene is going to be harmful to you as a player, I'm happy to help you extricate your character from the situation." Especially if it doesn't provide the character with a benefit or a detriment (as @mietze mentioned).

To @Arkandel's point about history, I think it's contingent upon the game-runners to acknowledge that they aren't experts on situations and to adapt to best fit their vision of the game. For instance, on TSS I freely admitted to not being an expert on Hirohito's involvement with war crimes, but when provided with evidence and examples, we altered the game's rules to treat the hardline elements of the Imperial Japanese government and the Emperor the same way we treated the Nazis and Hitler. Game runners can't be expected to know everything, but they can be expected to be open to education.

[Arkandel]

@insomniac7809 said in Sensitivity in gaming:

Say you put your fantasy setting in a arab inspired setting. How much research is expected? And how much from the game maker, and how much from the players? Who gets to decide what is appropriate, or too cliche, or downright offensive?

And here's a different way to do it - which harbors as many if not actually more pitfalls.

Let's say you don't want to do a ton of research or you actually want to avoid triggering people, so you run a faux-Arab setting instead and make it 'inspired by' 1000 Nights or the Second Crusade or... something. I think there's just as much potential for things to go terribly wrong with that because of this change in narratives since you, or even just a minority of your players, may treat the now-fictional nationalities as a carte blanch to write some pretty racist tales instead - and how dare you be offended because the ArabsSarcenarians are depicted as scum of the earth in the plots?

On the other hand I can see a gamerunner who makes that 1000 Nights MUSH with the very best intentions getting blasted because they didn't read multiple sources and dissertations to properly depict the staggeringly complex politics, racial tensions and socio-economic issues of the time so that the wrong people are depicted as villainous. Hell, if someone perceives it that way and suddenly the gamerunner is being portrayed as wildly racist on MSB.

So let me make a vast exaggeration (but hopefully less offensive than my poorly selected video in the original post) just to offer it as a debate point: At some point you might as well run a WoD game set in Maine just to be safe. No?

[insomniac7809]

@mietze Yeah, taking the scope a good bit beyond RPGs, but...

So I feel like there's a lot of cultural cachet with people who are willing to push boundaries, speak truth to power, defy censorship. And that's not a bad thing! We've got plenty of art that speaks in marginalized voices that the world would, I'd argue, be better off without,

(And yeah, a lot of prurient edgy stuff that I like, regardless of artistic quality or message.)

And yeah, @Ganymede is quite right that good comedy is almost always going to be offensive to someone.

But I see a difference between making cutting observations about your society and lived experience versus trying to claim the label of "brave" by saying *-ist stuff that some people think you shouldn't say. Satire requires clarity of intent and all that, and doing stuff like, IDK, early-2000s Comedy Central or Adult Swim where the joke was just racist jokes with the extra layer of "oh but you're not supposed to say that!"

Hell, talking about comedians, Jerry Seinfeld had two gay joke routines that kind of come to mind. There was a whole episode where people started thinking Jerry and George were in a relationship, and the main thrust of the joke was "we have to prove that we're not gay! Not that there's anything wrong with that!"--that is, the joke is that they're properly tolerant but obviously it's a bad thing if people think they're gay, which is a legit cultural commentary and observation to make. Then recently (well, "recently" in that it was five years ago, fucking time progressing where does it get off) he went on Seth Meyers to complain about political correctness because a bit of his bombed where he compared scrolling on your phone to looking like "a gay French king." The whole thrust of his, well, whingefest was that it was the PC attitudes that kept college students from appreciating his brilliance, not because the joke was kind of shitty and a bunch of college kids in '15 honestly didn't see anything funny about scrolling on your phone or being gay. (No matter what a big deal he was in the 90s, not only aren't people owed an audience, they definitely aren't owed a laugh.)

Also compare the shows of Dave Chappelle and Carlos Mencia. Chappelle actually walked away at the height of his career because he thought his observations about race were being taken as just racist jokes, or giving white kids license to tell racist jokes. Mencia was more than happy to just be the guy who tells jokes where the punchline is racism but it's okay because he's Hispanic.

[Derp]

@insomniac7809 said in Sensitivity in gaming:

A first step kind of has to be "someone Arabic," which is why the people being mocked in the bad video are talking about sensitivity readers. Not that every Arab is going to have the same answer. But, I mean, it's 2020; you can probably find someone on the internet who's actually a part of the culture you're depicting to tell you if you're doing a fucky.

Eh.

I mean, I get that in a sort-of general principle way? But like -- I'm not sure that that's a great idea either. That would be like saying 'an American' gets to decide whether Squidbillies is a fantasy comedy based on specific tropes/stereotypes or a horrible slander against Appalachian persons.

Which American? Which culture? Which age range? Which geographical locale?

What sort of education? What are their political leanings?

Ultimately, the people who get to decide what is 'too much' are the consumers of the media, based on their own tastes and preferences as social mores change. People can certainly be advocates for change, but I'm not sure that anyone gets to be "the arbiter of how much is too much" when it comes to things built on, ultimately, stereotypes, whether accurate or not.

Accuracy certainly isn't the point most of the time, and the offensive nature of something is so subjective as to be almost a not-helpful metric.

It's something that gets thrown around a lot: Who decides. But I just have never once in the entire history of reading those conversations found them to amount to anything useful outside of a chance to air any grievances and let the wider audience decide for themselves.

[mietze]

@arkandel why would WoD be "safe", what with its themes of rape, mind control, domestic abuse, human trafficking, incest, potential pedophilia at worse and certainly statutory rape in many of its lines?

If someone wants to do history they can do what most WoD game runners do to one extent or the other: be clear about what is/isn't permitted or supported and enforce it (or not.)

I think the problem is that people are often too uncomfortable to describe and hold their line, and instead rely on people to read their minds OR just never make them enforce it and they just don't have to "see" any drift. The problem is that people are not mindreaders and bad people can often use that to their advantage and even if you are just a lowly prp runner there probably will come a time when you must defend and uphold the boundaries you've set. Neither is fun. Which is why I think lip service is common, avoidance tends to be the rule. Its just not easy to take that on when you're already doing a lot as a runner, but imo its often something you must. Even if that's just giving a complainer the boot.

[Ganymede]

@insomniac7809

As an amateur humorist, I appreciate your take on this.

As a recent event, SNL got flack for this joke by Michael Che. (Ignore the fact that the video is backwards.) On the one hand, this is blatantly transphobic; I will not deny this. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has never been particularly sensitive about these sorts of issues, despite their rhetoric, and Biden was around when Clinton signed the "don't ask don't tell" policy that later had to be repealed during Obama's tenure. (It barred openly LGBTQ people from serving in the military.)

So, was Che trying to punch down or punch up?

It kind of depends on how you feel about some of his other comedy. On the one hand, there's this joke where he dead-names Caitlyn Jenner. On the other hand, there's this joke about Black Lives Matter. As for SNL, it can be a mixed grab bag: I liked Pete Davidson's bit here and here.

How you feel about it is how you feel about it.

I mean, I agree with Che when it comes to Louis C.K.; let the man try and perform. And he did, and it was terrible. And as for Che? He's just not good at being a Weekend Update. He may have chemistry with the white-than-wonder-bread Colin Jost (so that's why Scarlett Johansson married him), but he's not a good performer.

Anyhow, yeah. Sensitivity is important. Satire and social criticism is good if you're clearly punching up and not spiking down on the oppressed at the same time.

[Kanye Qwest]

Yeah honestly the "this hamstrings creativity" arguments are laughable, to me. There's an 85% chance this applies to any person who reads this sentence: the creative significance of whatever thing you have set up is basically nil. It's probably not even that good a story. There's nothing sacrosanct about your 'vision'. Don't look for excuses to be a jerk.

Or look harder!