@Auspice A coworker of mine was really sleepy when he got on the subway and figured he'd close his eyes and take a nap there even through he was worried he might miss his stop. He woke up and saw - to his relief - he was just two stops from his destination.
Then he realized it was three hours later. 
@kitteh The difference being intent. My proposal is only meant to use it for one reason - borderline inappropriate behavior. Not conflicting opinions, bad typing, terrible English or bad grammar, generally not-liking-them, them not supporting your views on a different issue recently or just for the hell of it - all of which have arguably been reasons for people to downvote each other here.
But also - and the reason my comment was admittedly kind of flippant - not everyone has to agree with a system in order to use it. I kinda liked downvotes, it was useful (to me) to see which direction the consensus on a matter was moving towards, but I'm okay with not having them either. It just... doesn't mean anything either way.
And also also! All this stuff's effectiveness is really hard (probably impossible) to gauge; does it work? Is this better or worse? Would we have avoided <thing> if we had done <other thing>? There are no control groups here, no studies, small numbers of players in the pool, lots of baggage between us... we're all stumbling in the dark hoping shit we try doesn't go horribly wrong. But the way I see it we've learned some lessons over the years, some things have been improved because on average we're handling stuff better than we used to.
Maybe.
@kitteh said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
I mean, you guys apparently removed downvoting here, what does that say about the ability for this same community to use it maturely on a game where the stakes are just a little higher?
Who's "you guys"? MSB's admins decided it, which doesn't say anything more about what we're discussing here than me and @faraday disagreeing on its usefulness.
@surreality Some people go the other way with this.
I was listening to the radio in the car yesterday and this lady was saying she's 'trying to teach her daughter values' by not having her be spoiled by getting everything when she wants it, like they did back in the day! So for example she only lets her watch Netflix on pre-determined hours - as in, at 8pm instead of on-demand.
The old paradigm didn't arise because it was the choice but due to technical limitations which have been lifted since; perhaps there's something to teach a child about instant gratification, I don't know. It just sounds a bit backwards, like forcing a kid to watch black and white TV when color ones came out because that's how they did it until then.
@faraday said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
Either people trust staff to take their concerns seriously or they don't. If they don't trust you to deal with a problem, they'll let things fester or they'll just leave. I don't think you earn trust by having an anonymous complaint system that tries to track creepers. You earn their trust by dealing with issues quickly and conscientiously, so people feel comfortable coming to you when there's a problem.
"Be good and do the right thing" is not a solution for staff though; of course if you have proactive, available, open-minded and fair staff it'll probably work out. But that's like saying you shouldn't offer RP-finding tools either since great players will reach out, communicate and work it out.
You aren't offering solutions through code, you're offering tools.
Staff... get distracted. They have a ton of shit to do, from +jobs to running plot. It's easy - it's been proven easy, historically - to overlook things happening right under their noses. That shapes the perception of their role over time, which combined with the fact certain vulnerable players don't want to bring attention to themselves by speaking out too aggressively (what if they are judged? or told they are the problem? both have happened, by the way) they let things slide.
Again though, this isn't an anonymous system that I proposed but one where incidents aren't immediately actionable. It's meant to raise awareness about a potential issue, not to alert to an immediate present one. If people think including a justification is preferable ("he paged me saying some weird things about my PB's looks") then so be it.
But relying on thinking that if you're great people will feel comfortable coming to you isn't a solution, it's a goal. That's preferable, but what do you do in the mean time? Nothing?
@saosmash said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
I'm completely mystified at the idea that a sex-rated rant out of the blue wouldn't be across the line. I mean ... what?
That's the one thing I can guarantee, 100%, that it happens - because I've specifically spoken with people on the receiving end. Their reasoning was actually very close to Gany's - "yes, that person is a creep, but I can handle myself". And that's often true, but the person in question isn't only talking to them, and the next person might not be able to handle it as well, and if they don't bother reporting them either before just logging out never to go back...
Lowering the report-bar seemed like an idea to consider.
However @surreality is correct in that this is probably off topic at this point, so I'll stop bringing it up.
@Ganymede said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
The issue isn't whether a transgression is significant or not. That depends on the complainant. Failure to file a complaint means that staff may not notice what's going on. It's important to put in a complaint. I'd make this very clear. If something bugs you, report it. I don't give a shit how small it is.
A question we need to look at though is... are such things getting reported or do those who could, or should, simply take their losses and stop logging on instead? Whatever the cause may be - insecurity, staff in general being perceived as not being sympathetic, not knowing if you won't be judged or told you're too sensitive... whatever it is, my concern is it might be taking a toll. And that maybe making it as easy as typing "+complain Arkandel" knowing no one will ask any questions right at first unless there are more similar complaints might at least help get some feedback.
I agree with you if something bugs players even slightly they should report it. But staff (in general) have often been terrible about handling these things, requiring too much evidence before they do a thing, or not thinking what your problem is is enough or... whatever. So people stop saying anything. This needs to stop.
Sidenote: no one is fucking interested in your sex-related rant by page, and that to me is something I would report. Because that's how Rex/Sovereign and other "predators" get started. (I put that in quotations because he's the sort of stupid predator that gets shot apart real fast.)
Those kinds of players are actually the ones I was hoping to catch early. Sure, this particular guy playing the numbers by paging every female around was too overt and got dealt with but others might do it slightly more subtly, and they're not as easy.
@Coin said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
But if you page me, I ask you to stop, and you keep going, I will tell staff if I can't handle you on my own.
Sure, but what if you ask me to stop and I did so, but it still bugged you? Again, what I'm trying to do here is crowdsource detection of those 'under the radar' creeps. The others are already hopefully being reported.
@Ganymede Alright, that's fair enough. Do you think though that tracking down general misbehavior isn't worth/fair to track? What I'm attempting to eliminate here is people flying just under the radar; those somewhat minor things that might make playing a game unpleasant to someone, perhaps to the point where they stop logging on but where each trasgression isn't significant enough to report on its own, still take a toll.
For example it's debatably hard to justify reporting a guy to staff because he just paged out of the blue with a sex-related rant if he didn't actually cross the line, or stopped when asked to, or...whatever. But it still has an impact in making players uncomfortable.
I'm proposing trying to track the unreportable stuff down but in a way that's not punitive to random people who might have made a risque or off-color comment one time, or who might have just rubbed that one person the wrong way, by making only repeat offenders visible to staff. Is it worth doing? Would it have a positive effect?
@Ganymede said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
@Arkandel said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
Do you think something like an anti-vote system might help? A sort of "this person creeped me a bit OOC just now" anonymous, silent vote, if you will.
I don't see how what you're proposing is any different that crafting a @mail to staff generally.
I am against the idea of anonymous complaints where the conduct complained of is a serious problem. It makes investigating the allegations very difficult.
I misspoke, I didn't mean anonymous to staff, but silent to the target. I.e. if you complain about me I won't be informed of the fact (although I suppose the 'creep counter' might be visible to me if it starts climbing above minimal levels, to act a warning for me to smarten up - people are getting creeped out by my behavior).
As for the difference is that it's automated and it's not an actual complaint. This isn't "Bob started nagging me about TS and wouldn't leave it alone even after I said no", it's more "I don't even know Bob but sent me a page out of nowhere complimenting my PB and then randomly ranted about BDSM without any encouragement on my part". It's a counter. Staff shouldn't do anything based on a single individual... anti-vote (?) but they should look into it if someone's score starts to go up.
Do you think something like an anti-vote system might help? A sort of "this person creeped me a bit OOC just now" anonymous, silent vote, if you will.
Essentially the idea was if someone did something weird - maybe they hahah-but-no-really got pushy, hit on you persistantly but not quite to the point where they could be reported, whatever... you could use that command. You don't need to explain anything on the spot, but it needs to be something you witnessed first-hand - not a "this guy did <X> to a friend of mine" kind of thing. It needs to be something they did to you.
You only get one of those per player per target, but staff shouldn't do anything less someone's "creep score" goes up. The intent is to try to differentiate between someone being a jerk under the radar because no one's reporting them, but also to try and eliminate false positives because one person tried to get someone they don't like into trouble.
It's not fool-proof (for example a clique might try to use it as a group effort) but that should be more transparent, and in either case an investigation would hopefully clear things up.
My hope is taking out the more undesired elements in our community, or at least painting a target on them, our overall trust for each other will increase. The Juerg-types are far and few in between, for all the press they get. Thoughts?
@Thenomain I remember that. What had surprised me even more was the programmer's arrogance after this had gone down - I can see how someone might get carried away, not realizing they are being assholes to their own customer, but the fucker doubled down on it when confronted.
The future of not owning any of your stuff but just basically the (revoke-able) license to them sucks.
So to go back a step a bit and maybe work the issue from a different angle...
If you are staff, what is the best way to investigate an issue like this? Consider at that point they are probably dealing with defensive people regardless of who's right or wrong (the accuser doesn't want to be labeled as a creep, the accuser is likely triggered), evidence may just be logs and the narrative itself matters.
To rephrase: How do we prevent someone from being unfairly portrayed as the bad guy (there was an incident earlier where someone was explicitly asked to play one, then afterwards was accused they should have 'known better') and at the same time to not blame the victim and protect an asshole as has been the actual case many times in MU*?
We all know in advance there's no way to do this 100% of the time, but how do we improve the chances of getting it right?
About online racism, something I ran into:
Pepe is considered a hate symbol because if you go over to 4chan's /pol board right this very moment you will find a huge number of anti-Semitic, racist and and hate-mongering memes featuring him. 4chan users use Pepe as an image macro, a short-hand for far right political views that are mainly defined by a hatred of almost anyone non-white. In fact, a common question on /pol, so common in fact that the pinned first post warns about asking it, is if a certain group is "white", since all non-whites are degenerate in their eyes.
Remember kids, if you think any place on the internet is bad... there's always 4chan.
@surreality said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
Let's take this analogy further: say you know you have a food allergy that could cause this to occur. Like everybody else, you have stuff that doesn't agree with you, but you have a food allergy that could potentially cause anaphylactic shock. We see the same kind of warnings as the one you're proposing on menus all the time, sometimes posted on the front of the restaurant before you even go in the door. There's a warning on the menu that tells you: fish and shellfish are prepared in our kitchens. If you have a strong enough allergy to fish and shellfish, even if you don't eat them, you may choose to avoid that restaurant. Let's say, though, it's a restaurant that's actually known for it's beef and chicken BBQ. That's its primary draw and what it specializes in, and they only have one fish item on the menu.
Do you still avoid the restaurant?
I think the issue here is that it's not a restaurant. It's a back-yard BBQ people are offering for free to all comers. The implication is that anyone can come and have something and they'll try to not put peanuts in any of the food, or warn if they do, but there's only so far they're willing to go... so if someone has a peanut allergy they should stick to the back ribs.
So while we're all mostly agreeing there should be some form of communication - maybe it's a sign "May Contain Peanuts" over the salad, or the cook saying "hey, if you have any allergies ask me about the food before you have some" - we're still trying to figure out how to do this right. More so since some of the cooks really fucking like their peanuts and put them in everything, even the back-ribs sauce.
@Ganymede said in State of Things:
This document reveals a failure rate of roughly 10% back in 2011. The software for the federal court's PACER system is largely unchanged since then, but let's suppose that the rate is reduced to 5%. Based on the same paper, roughly 0.1% of papers filed have an SSN on them. So, that means, for 500,000,000 million documents, there are 500,000 documents with SSNs, and of these there are 25,000 failures. I suppose that 25,000 revealed SSNs -- for bankruptcy clients too -- isn't a huge data breach, but it is a substantial ethical breach as far as attorneys go.
Allow me to play devil's advocate. Giggle. Ahem.
Isn't this assuming that given such a massive number of documents human beings would have had a significantly better rate of success reading the numbers?
With humans there are tiny margins to improve the failure rate; you can offer better training, fire employees and try to hire better next time, but you might or not be successful. With software you can identify potential problems (is it the camera? the lighting? the OCR algorithm?) specifically try to fix them.
Accuracy might be important but so is speed. If processing all those millions of documents takes 100x the time machines do it then the end result might be worse than having to deal with the failure rate (and always factoring in (1) above). Oh and cheaper. Much cheaper.
How wrong am I?
@Ghost said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
While I'm not of the way some companies hide behind dreadful EULA's and "I ACCEPT" statements, I think they apply.
I hate saying @Coin is right because, come on, but he had a point earlier in the thread when he said some games are pretty much guaranteed to contain certain sensitive themes by definition - Changeling to involve kidnapping and stalking, Vampire to portray addiction, objectification or mental influence, etc. They are in fact such intrisic part of the material you probably don't even need to ask players to +agree such things might happen on the grid since of course they will! You can (and should) have FTB, you can even have strict levels of consent so they don't happen to your character but they will absolutely exist in the MU*.
Even so people get into hot waters - not can, they do, we've all seen it. I'm not talking about Juerg-level shit but just normal playing the game as written, someone will treat their ghoul as an object rather than a human being with feelings and ambitions of their own and... boom.
At that point it's not an answer to remind them it's what they signed up for; they know. The reason it's not an answer is we're not robots, we're not trying to shred responsibility here - in fact, to address @mietze, I'd say that's a hefty word, and that it's not necessarily the Storyteller's 'responsibility' past a certain point to ensure this doesn't happen, or at least to be able to point at some point in time - where that player typed +accept, or where they joined the +event even after tags were in place or... anything - and go "well, it's your fault".
It doesn't matter whose fault it is. I think looking for that is wrong in the first place because really, who cares? Knowing it's my fault for playing or yours for not warning me doesn't fix anything. What matters is trying to somehow mitigate the problem (we can't eliminate it) and give everyone the tools to avoid stepping lightly around each other. Or... after something does go awry to make sure staff at least recognizes their role in all of it, and not try to overreact either by swingin' the old banhammer around wildly or by dismissing an upset, hurt person's feelings as improper.
I am not a therapist, I don't know what's best for someone who's struggling with certain things, but I do know I'd like to help not make it worse for them - if I can. But they do need to meet me halfway for that.
@Roz said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
And yet I've seen people on this thread basically misreading stuff to be like, "You're saying that I'm a terrible person because I don't want to put up an outline of my entire plot!!!" I don't know. I feel like people are not so far apart on this as it seems to have come about in this thread.
And that's one of the reasons we need threads like this. Think of it this way - if we can't avoid such miscommunications or taking things personally here, where we're in an emotional vacuum since nothing has actually happened we're already upset by, and where we're just talking about it from a theoretical point of view, how worse is it usually when this thing comes up in games between players who might not be in good terms (or any terms) with each other, burdened by perceived agendas ('he's Invictus, of course he wants to screw me over') and already triggered by whatever's happening?
@Ghost said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
People need to read the MU-style policies and EULA things.
Although I still do think these need to exist I'm dubious about them doing anything. Most of the time they're just a wiki page very few people will ever read or even just glance at.
Culture is shaped on a day to day basis primarily by the tone staff gives their game through their actions and their inaction.
@mietze But would you say that's the exception or the rule, from your observations?
@Ghost said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
Which is why I think there's nothing wrong with staff creating a policy that states that if staff decide by consensus that a player's mental and emotional health is being affected by the game, then requesting the player take a break or freeze their character until their objectivity returns is wholly acceptable.
There's nothing wrong with it, but it's just not how it plays out in many cases. Staff is a very mixed bag, you know? We tend to talk about it here like there's some sort of hive mind but it's just a microcosm of any other groups of MU*ers; outside truly tiny well knit groups there are a lot of opinions, life experiences and yes... triggers.
The effect is that many times the outcome when an issue comes up depends on the player and the staff member who handles it. Be honest here for example, would you treat someone you know - perhaps a friend - the same way you'd treat a stranger if both of them seem to be emotionally affected by the game, going to the extent of force-freezing their character? It's so much easier to do that for someone else '*for their own good' when there are no consequences to your relationship with them.
And similarly having seen the range of reactions on this thread alone can you say we'd all have judged the exact same issue in a similar matter? That's got nothing to do with experience, willingness to be fair, empathy... it has to do with who we are as people. Some of us might go "hey, if you were so emotionally affected then you shouldn't have joined, or left when you saw where it was going". Others would have thought the ST "you didn't communicate with your players enough, you saw that player was vulnerable so why didn't you do something more than suggest they leave?".
In other words, I don't see staff being less divided on this issue than we are here, man. We need more preemptive prevention, IMHO; after shit hits the fan it's usually a crapshoot.