@rebekahse said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
As someone who sticks around these games for the day-to-day narrative/social RP aspects rather than the endless cycle of PRPs, I get frustrated when a game's setting goes out of its way to remove every negative societal trait that I would potentially have to deal with. Maybe sometimes I want to play Joan Holloway or Betty Draper, you know?
Games set in crappy/oppressive worlds have flourished before, but it seems like there was some seismic shift over the last few years where everyone got worried they'd be labeled some sort of '-ist' and now everything's sanitized and pretty boring.
I'm pretty sympathetic to this. My take though is it's not a seismic shift so much as there just being less games. Like if someone wanted to make super grimdark gritty Gorean style Arx, I wouldn't think they were wrong or anything like that, just it isn't what I was going for, and I hope people do make more games that can appeal to things that are more mutually exclusive, like just whether something has a more competitive rather than collaborative vibe.
I'm definitely not trying to remove conflict entirely because of course that would be boring, but it's just what kind of stories staff wants to tell. Like I'm perfectly down for telling stories about classism and the abuses of power therein, and if someone was looking to play like some of the tropes that deal with hard lives on my game, I'd nudge them in that direction (and have). I think the issue is less sanitizing settings and more what kind of RP someone is looking for in an environment and whether the game is set up to accommodate it, regardless of theme, lemme give an example.
Say Jill really wants to RP a character as dealing with institutionalized disadvantages, and enjoys the RP from overcoming systemic struggles. Okay, maybe racism and sexism doesn't exist on the setting, but classism does, and she rolls up a character that's impoverished and could get pushed around for being poor. That still might not be what she's looking for, for a couple reasons, even if it fits the bill.
Because when people want these conflicts, the way they find them fun can be really wildly different. Like some people really want an organic feeling of antagonists jumping at them unexpectedly. That can be a blast for some people. But if you have a super collaborative environment, people just might not be playing antagonists at all, even if it's implicit in the setting, unless you have key ways of encouraging that and making sure it's okay. Basically it veers towards full consent, and that can be murder towards immersion and organic development as people fall back and carefully construct encounters to be mindful of comfort levels. Some people would find that zero fun, since they just want to jump right in, let people hit them as hard as they can, and roll with it. Most RPIs are like that, and other people would find that INCREDIBLY offputting, and quit immediately if they had that because they did not sign up to be bullied the moment they hit the grid.
Games might have the exact same theme, but wildly different ways of approaching player conflict, and it could either give a player what they want or not at all.
