@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.
@Tinuviel said in Privacy in gaming:
@Derp Even logs from private scenes can be made public. So perhaps 'public log' rather than public space?
Sure, I'm good with that. I can't remember what the exact policy wording is at the moment.
@Tinuviel said in Privacy in gaming:
@Derp said in Privacy in gaming:
it has to happen in a public space on the game
And how do you define public space?
Say two people made some agreement in their room or an office or something, does that count?
Given that this is Ares, 'public' means 'happened in a public scene'. You want us to take it as game-canon, there'd better be an available log of it, and if your log violates our theme, we'll chat about it.
@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:
"Do what you want in your own little corner without oversight."
Seems nice in theory, til you have a group of <insert special race/class/faction here> or whatever over there making up their own elaborate alternative history via Discord with the caveat 'this is just backstory stuff for our own interest' but then the group grows and they pull in new people and the line blurs and a year down the line you have an established <whatever> stating emphatically that they're the first person in their long family tree to speak <insert language every character speaks>. At that point, the mess is much bigger than smacking Bob and Jane's wrists for their dumb incest plot, it's a whole theme breach you had no idea about.
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.
That said, we did explicitly include a policy that if you want it to be game-canon, it has to happen in a public space on the game. Whatever you do in private is on you, but you aren't gaining any sort of benefit from it and we absolutely will not be treating it as written in stone. We'll just treat your PC as if they've had some sort of delusional episode if need be.
Our policies so far are about -- eightish pages in google docs. Maybe on the long side, but they cover a lot of ground.
On that note, as a staffer, here is my thoughts on 'have the ability to see everything':
If someone is doing something grossly unthematic, I probably want to be aware of that so I can correct it a bit. If someone is doing something grossly unthematic in a private space that doesn't actually make it onto the grid? Meh. Whatever gets your rocks off. So long as you aren't trying to bring it into the rest of the game, I have better things to do than police the sarlacc pit you wanna pretend is on the Dune game because it makes your TS hotter and riskier. You might as well have dreamed it, for all I care.
You bring that shit somewhere on grid, or try and claim some kind of in-game benefit from it, and we're gonna have a chat about it. Because it's gone from 'personal fantasy' to 'canonically problematic'.
ETA: But if you wanna keep it to yourself and do it on your own time, I'm not gonna go tracking you down, either. Good lord, that would be a full time job in and of itself, and I already have one of those.
Why do people think the Y2K issues weren't real? The reason we didn't see anything seriously fuck up is because of how much work people did to prepare and update systems so they didn't break.
I was literally just talking to someone about this yesterday. It's weird when something from 20 years ago that's super niche now and largely forgotten comes up twice in 24 hours.
First time that someone mentions penetrating a cervix:
Since we're discussing privacy policy and what does and doesn't get looked at in another thread, it reminded me of this thing that happened today:
We were working on privacy policy, and what gets posted where, etc. Naturally, the subject of TS came up, and so we kicked that around for a bit. We eventually agreed that "logs with sex in them are fine, but please don't post just pure TS logs unless there is some kind of character or story development in them, and mark them as NSFW as appropriate. It's 2019, come on."
Which lead us back to the privacy policy, and the basically "we promise we don't want to spy on your hawt sexxors or whatever. It's probably boring and we have more important stuff to do, really."
Though it did make me want to add in the joke-clause: "If you are really desperate for someone to read this, send them to Derp. But be warned -- he's basically Gordon Ramsey. Nobody has scored above a 2.5 out of 10 so far, and you open yourself up to public criticism just as if it were a reality show. Take your chances."
Though somehow I think that people would miss the joke and take it way too seriously.
@Sunny said in Privacy in gaming:
Thanks Dew, wherever you are, yes, for that gloriously colorful code.
Stooorytime!
@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.
@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.
Woops,.didn't refresh the page. Replied to a thing he already beat me to.
@Wretched said in Privacy in gaming:
This is about ethics of MUing
No, it's not. That is kind of the point here.
The ethics of MU can be whatever, but the reality of MU is what's been said so far. The ethical arguments are all well and good, but they're ultimately toothless and armchair philosophy, whereas the reality of MU is important to keep in mind.
This isn't defending bad actors. This is reminding people that there are bad actors, and there is absolutely no real system of accountability, so the only people that can actually protect you from having your privacy invaded is you.
@faraday said in Privacy in gaming:
Setting up a SSL certificate and getting the server settings right is not trivial. You have to remember that most folks running MUs are not professional server admins. I've made it as easy as I can to set up HTTPS for the Ares web portals, but it still trips people up sometimes.
adds this to his to-do list
And yet, it's a reality of the medium.
Players can value privacy. Staff can respect privacy. But there is no barrier there. Staffers can invade it if they want to, because you are essentially walking into the ultimate surveillance machine, and players have to accept that it is entirely possible that their privacy is being violated, and they'll never know unless that information is somehow misused.
And it has been misused. Repeatedly. Yet we still continue to play these games and hope for the best.
Ultimately, there just isn't much you can do about this, ETA: other than make a big noise about it and hope that someone cares, though there is precisely zero action that you can really take, short of quitting the game (or really, the hobby, since it's possible on every game). It's a great armchair argument, but in practical terms, you have zero control over this. Whoever has access to the server/code does.
@SunnyJ said in City of Shadows:
This is a beautiful wiki!
Plus one to this. This wiki is very pretty.
@Bananerz said in Digital Ocean for Ares:
do you have that Discord chat? I'll send my account # over via PM. I'd like to chat about costs, what is available, what I need I think now and just general user experience with it
Ares can run fine on the $5/month DO droplet. Probably forever. It's got 25G of disk space, and there is a referral bonus where you can get your first month free.
Yep. That's a very real thing that @faraday will do. Will attest, it is totally painless.
