Posts made by Ghost

Social combat is important because nearly every player is interested in their social game succeeding, but very few players are willing to organically choose to lose in social situations.

Almost every time I've chosen to lose on a MU (because it made sense ICly) I tend to get pages asking if I'm ruining the character on purpose

These games have plenty of win and lose, but combat is avoided altogether by certain players because there is dice supported winning and losing in combat.

For this reason alone, social dice rolls are important and should be used.

PT is cheeseball garbage designed to fill out a character sheet will all kinds of higher-priced items for cheap. I absolutely hate it. Players should earn the dots on their sheet through RP, not cheese the system to get better dice rolls.

Flash is currently in Boston, going on adventures with Marky Mark and his talking bear.

Is there a good wiki or other site with a font of information on the setting?

I'm totally intrigued by this game, but my knowledge is limited to SAM JONES and BRIAN BLESSED. I'd totally like to see a writeup on the general structure of the universe and cultural stuff on the various alien types.

@kitteh Yeah I learned a long time ago to never stay or return to a game with unethical staff. Nothing is worse than the passive aggressiveness that comes with the abusive marriage feeling of needing to stay at a game, but hating the game itself. It's also not just staff that can make people feel that way. Abusive/unethical players? Vicious mean girls gossip rings and people who will listen to them?

There are dozens of other online games to play. It's not worth it.

And if you feel that all of the games eventually turn out this way? Then in any order, I highly recommend Overwatch, Masturbation, and Ash vs Evil Dead

Those three things in any order will seriously clear that aggro right up.

@Paris said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

If people have a problem, log and file a complaint. If folks don't feel safe talking to staff, they shouldn't be playing there, imo.

+10

Log and file is necessary and if people are unwilling to report unethical behavior, then the behavior persists. If they're uncomfortable with staff to such a degree that they fear repercussion (or if the complaint is about a staff alt), then why continue to play? Throw the log here, or something. Fuck them.

No one should continue in this hobby under duress or threat of ramification. No form of entertainment is worth being stalked, abused, harassed, or threatened.

@Arkandel said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

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?

If anything, I think that false positives related to subjective, emotional responses are muddying the water when it comes to actual complaint-worthy behavior. These false positives make it harder to identify unethical behavior due to the number of accusations related to intent.

In the end, I think it all still circles back to the psychology of emotional attachment. Stalkers, creeps, cheaters, and predators tend to leave an audit trail of logs that can be forwarded to staff, but a lot of the major drama comes from emotional attachment and accusations of alleged intent.

Fuck, god knows myself as well as half of us would be fucked on an anonymous +complain system based solely on the crazy shit we've been accused of intending.

Edit: will note, I'm still a fan of my idea of a toggle command that silently forwards incoming pages to and from from a target, one-way only, to staff channel. Like a silent alert.

@surreality said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

When someone hits a trigger in the course of RP, it isn't that they suddenly think they are their character, and what is happening to the character is happening to them as a player. That would, yes, indicate an attachment problem.
The reality is almost entirely the opposite. Events in a scene hit a real life traumatic memory, and forcibly jar the player completely out of the character and the scene, and in the case of flashbacks, entirely out of the actual reality they are experiencing at that moment, and into the traumatic memory.

I understand that distinction. You're saying that it isn't about emotional attachment, but that in the event of an anxiety episode, there's a trauma that takes place on the other end of the keyboard that can be quite disabling and painful for the person experiencing it.

The logical debate that is happening here seems to be between two high-level viewpoints:

1. That the people who suffer from these kinds of PTSD/anxieties/etc are a part of the community and that specific policies or practices should be in place to allow them to participate in a way that's comfortable for them.

and

2. That some of these extended OOC emotional needs can result in dangerous, disruptive, or unhealthy situations outside of the expected behaviors of the playerbase, and that many of the themes central to these games include content classic to many emotional triggers. Reasonable attempts can be made to help players with these needs, but in the end, the responsibility for the emotional response of players to in-game, within-bounds content ultimately falls onto the player.

I kind of feel like a color-coded list of what is Amber level sexual content versus Red level sexual content would only result in arguments about whether or not certain situations belonged in which category, and will drive us further away from the point.

Also, constructively, I feel like a complex system that players would potentially need to consult a chart to determine how to code the content in their scenes, tag them appropriately, and label them to avoid offending anyone, would just lead to confusion and a grand amount of work that would dissuade players.

When someone posts an event and lists the rating as "R"-rated with elements of violence, sexual situations, and gore, I think this gives the players a definite idea of what to expect from the scene. I really do think that this system is simple, gets the point across, and does a good job as it is.

But when it comes to non-events, such as random pickup scenes, the majority of people don't exactly know where the scene is going to go.

There are rules and guidelines as to what is acceptable or not in the game, and I feel like roleplaying in this nervous environment where people have to be constantly careful and pre-approve player decisions with other players works against the concept of healthy emotional disconnect, and instead encourages a lack of OOC emotional detachment.

Why aren't the rules, guidelines, some well-placed ratings and warnings before +events, and proper conduct behaviors not enough?

On a long enough timeline, if the expectation is that we are pre-approving already pre-approved roleplay behavior with the OOC personalities who control the characters, then aren't we technically creating an environment where extreme levels of OOC emotional attachment can fester?

Being communicative is one thing, but having to fear people with a lack of emotional disconnect is a whole other ball of wax.

@Ganymede Fair enough. I've seen the absolute worry in the restaurant's eyes and I've been close enough to a few of those situations to know the tiny grade of freak out on the receiving end. It's not the best analogy, but I meant to tie it more towards the greater concept of how it's a risk introduced into an environment otherwise designed for the risk being the very occasional corner case.

Yourself having a food allergy, I hope you didn't feel like I was belittling people with such allergies. The statement wasn't about excluding people with allergies as a whole, but the all around risk in vague relation to MU-hobby.

But even then, I think that cooks in a restaurant are better equipped to handle working around a very specific set of food allergies than the random Joe/Jane on a MU is with handling emotional attachments, triggers, PTSD, etc beyond their control.

@surreality said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

The way you are putting this, it is coming across -- to me, at least -- like so: "If you think any combination of circumstances might at any time cause you to lose objectivity, you are not welcome here."
But you, yourself, are not approaching this issue from a position of objectivity. Nobody is.

I don't think that that is an entirely accurate, or fair, assessment. I think plenty of people are being plenty objective on the topic, without resorting to taking it to the personal arena or losing their temper.

So let's turn it down a notch, please?

I think the food allergy analogy actually works pretty well.

When someone with a food allergy goes into a restaurant and sits at the table with an epi-pen, a lot of things happen. They:

• inform the staff that they have a serious food allergy and may go into shock if the slightest drop of peanut oil is cooked in with their food
• tell the server that the staff has to cook an entirely fresh batch of food
• need to find a pan in the back that hasn't been cooked with at all that night
• need to prepare their food on a cutting board in which no peanuts had touched that day
• serve the food to them and be very careful because if the customer gets sick or dies because a drop of peanut oil forced them to go into shock.

I'm sure using this analogy, the person with the food allergy might believe that they're an excited customer taking on all of the risks to try this wonderful food!

However, they're also stepping into a restaurant and directing traffic, seeding all kinds of risk that most people would want to avoid, and whether or not the customer is assuming the risk, they're also assuming that the restaurant is willing to assume the risk of lawsuit if some kind of mistake is made. Now making their meal becomes an actual life or death task, and the other customers in the restaurant get to wait and see whether or not they get some mid-meal death/shock action with their dining experience.

Now, I am sympathetic to people with food allergies, even violent ones, and it must be very hard to work with, but when customers do this in restaurants, it's not that the customer is assuming all of the risk. They're introducing the risk, to themselves and others, and have decided that since they're willing to accept the risks, then the other people present should be willing to accept the risks on their behalf.

Just because guy with peanut allergy wants to assume the risk to eat at my Chinese restaurant doesn't mean that I'm required to be in any way okay with the discomfort that comes with cooking a meal that may inadvertently poison someone and get my business sued.

Mistakes happen, but when peanut allergy guy decides that it's going to be a risky night, the expectation is that you will not make a mistake on their behalf.

@Arkandel said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

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.

While I'm not of the way some companies hide behind dreadful EULA's and "I ACCEPT" statements, I think they apply.

By clicking +accept, a player is stating that they have read and have agreed to the policies and behaviors of a game. While it doesn't help much in the heat of the moment, it is entirely fair game for staff to note that they +agreed to the policies and rule on behalf of them.

Whether or not they took the time to read them or take them to heart (or memory) isn't the fault of every other staffer or player on the game.

Blah blah blah fuck it I don't care; let me make a character already.

Crude wording for the moment? It isn't the purpose of the game to entitle players to a place to roleplay without agreeing to certain behaviors. Fuck off with your policies and let me play already might get you through to CGen more quickly, but once you're on the game, that lack of care taken towards policies might be a big part of the problem.

Game is fun. Game is what we want. Game should not be placed in front of proper behavior for many good reasons.

@Roz I think that's a fairly accurate assessment.

@Thenomain touched on it briefly, but I think part of the impassioned response to this topic is somewhat self-defense in nature, like an emotionally guarding response to protecting oneself against the dangers of triggering content and the uncomfortable feelings that may come from the onus being placed onto them to maintain objectivity.

Accidental tripwire to some, thoughtless attack to others.

@Arkandel oh yeah, staff is a very mixed bag, and such a policy could also lend to staffside gaslighting. I've seen it happen before, where staff decides someone has lost their objectivity and a player is forced from a game, seemingly, due to emotional issues, yet strangely everyone in the player base knows about it mid-process. Tread lightly.

I agree more proactive measures are needed, which is why I think the +accept process is important. People need to read the MU-style policies and EULA things.

I think the first proactive step is a well-written explanation about reasonable purpose and conflict resolution written as a two-way contract, something like this:

BlahBlahBlahMUX deals in mature themes that may be considered, at times, emotionally impacting to characters and players. We've painted guidelines in our content and behavior policies to provide what we feel is an acceptable and reasonable series of boundaries that will allow for safe, productive role play within the theme and setting.

It is our goal to provide a safe environment and in issues of harassment or abusive behavior outside of these lines, request an open dialogue between staff and players so that we may help the playerbase protect said safe, productive environment.

Because of this, behavior and responsibility on the game is a two-way contract. In joining this game, the acceptance of risk of being emotionally affected by this theme, content, or IC actions of other players, is to be accepted by each player and mitigated in a mature, communicative manner. Players are expected to maintain objectivity and resolve personal and emotional conflicts peacefully. In joining, players are signing a two-way contract to accept the reasonable attempt for a safe playspace with rules and appropriate theme, but the player's end of contract is maintain a separation between OOC and IC, to truly accept the OOC perils of role play in such a theme, and in the event of issues, maintain fairness and objectivity, as well.

It's a game. If the themes and content within are potential triggers that a player cannot emotionally distance themselves from, then BlahBlahBlahMUX kindly requests a reconsideration of joining this game. We care for the mental and emotional health of the individual, but as part of our contract to our players, it is our intention to provide a safe, productive playspace, and that will always include protecting our playerbase from players who have lost their ability to separate IC from OOC.

I dunno. Rambling. Something like this.

Staff should make a reasonable attempt to provide rules and preview of the themes included in the game. They should make a reasonable attempt to create a safe playspace, and give players enough details on the content to provide the players with the information required to determine whether or not they want to opt out before becoming too invested in the game.

The majority of these games are come to for role-playing the dramatic; Improv drama theater, in a sense. They are not safe spaces to work emotional issues out or test life alongside triggers. The staff and players do not qualify as therapists or a representative population that can assist someone with a lack of emotional separation.

In short, the people who come to these games, come for the IC drama, the danger, the plot twists, the horror, the darkness, the sex, the loss, the story. Asking them to place the responsibility upon the game and player base to cater with utmost care for those choosing to enter the funhouse despite their lack of OOC emotional separation to the themes, is kind of like asking strangers to provide a heroin addict for a safe space to do heroin, but to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't OD from it.

It's uncomfortable. It's dangerous.

The concept that one's IC interactions could be deciding very real OOC mental and emotional health issues is heartbreaking.

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.

That's reasonable to me.

Edit/note: And I know there are those of us out there, the medicated and objective, who have our own emotional issues and diagnoses, who do just fine on these games. We weigh our own level of involvement and attachment, deal with our psych/emotional issues on our own terms, and maybe ninja-style test run concepts through our characters. This statement doesn't apply to the people who control their levels of emotional distance. This comment is for the ones who cannot.

@mietze @surreality I think, in a way, it's all connected. The panic attack that comes from extreme content can be just as bad as an emotional response due to extreme attachment, which can both tie to feelings of self worth, exclusion, ostracism, lack of safety, insecurity.

In the end, communication is great, but in cases where there is something unhealthy in the lack of emotional separation, the equation of self with character, even the most accommodating of players simply aren't equipped for the task. There are people who use these games (knowingly or not) to work through very real emotional issues, and because of this, unwittingly pit other players against these issues in a testing grounds of the sort.

I've seen failed marriages being worked out through RP resulting in nasty jealousy fits when other players are drawn into TS.

I've met quite a few people hiding online through relationship rp while avoiding difficult RL marriages.

I've met people who don't have many friendships, romance, or a feeling of belonging outside of MU, and the games represent the whole of their social circle. Like Second Life, the text version.

As much as we communicate or try to accommodate, there are simply some scenarios in play where the emotional separation will not be possible because the hobby itself, or someone's presence in it, is skating a healthy line, and I think there are plenty of us (people who approach this hobby as a team-based creative hobby) who run into these emotional separation issues and think: "Fuck, I'm sorry, that sucks, but I'm...not a therapist? I wish I could help but I can't and I've got my own RL to put first, and I wish you the best, but please, please, PLEASE don't put the responsibility for that stuff on me.

I found a constructive point to ring in once more.

What about the non-extreme triggers?

We've waxed philosophical for a bit on the extremes, themes such as rape, incest, etc. I don't think we're at the point of a dead horse on the topic yet (because finding new ways to better communicate harsh themes without coming across as some kind of edgy-kink-drama monster to unsuspecting players never, ever hurts).

The non-extreme triggers so to speak, are more common, harder to identify, and harder to control. The original topic being about emotional separation from fictitious content, I feel this applies.

• Self Worth
• Romanctic Fulfillment
• Abandonment
• Rejection
• Isolation
• Feelings of not being wanted

I could write a list a mile long, but I think we tend to come across emotional separation issues surrounding the more mundane concepts listed above than we do themes of rape, incest, mutilation, extreme misogyny, stalking, etc.

As someone who's tripped a few wires before in the past, I'll openly state that when it comes to the people who have trouble separating themselves on an OOC level from the IC equation, the majority of trouble and drama I've come across in the hobby has been due to these mundane attachment issues and not the extremes.

(Spoiler: This is PROBABLY because I've never ever ever ever been involved in rape or incest roleplay? Might be a reason why.)

HOWEVER, how often have we come across nasty interpersonal issues where the core hurt stems from OOC attachment to an IC situation, and the likelihood that the IC situation strummed one of these more mundane attachment concepts?

This hobby is impermanent. The games are impermanent. The character relationships are impermanent just as much as we are strangers and we cannot guarantee even our closest roleplaying partners that a particular bit of RP meta will last as long as we think it could/should. Life happens. Games shut down. People move on.

...but god-damn do some people place a lot of emotional attachment stock in certain characters, relationships, etc despite the fact that years have data have shown us that we don't really get to keep characters; we get to rent them.

These mundane concepts are so subjective, but when paired against a personality that has placed a certain bit of self worth, wish fulfillment, escape from reality, emotional attachment, etc into these concepts, we run into regular issues.

At some point we may want to move away from the extreme to discuss how to mitigate these mundane attachment problems.

Yanno. I think I've gotten my point across and I heart @surreality to pieces. So I'm gonna do something here.

I'm going to say " @Thenomain , @faraday, and @Arkandel tend to be more eloquent and less blue-collar offensive in delivery than myself. Some of them are extrapolating on points that I agree with, so I'm gonna step back and let their views keep things civil while avoiding my delivery causing issues or misconceptions."

I respect people as individuals and people with personal stuff. We've all got it, myself included.

I'll chime in later if the dialogue results in something that wouldn't be me repeating myself.

@surreality said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

Re: @Ghost, I similar do not consider this to be 'catering to someone's disease', I consider it to be demonstrating respect for fellow participants on a game and allowing them to make decisions for themselves about their participation.

@faraday nailed my emotional feel of it personally by saying that it must be horrible to have to nitpick forms of entertainment based on anxieties. That can't be fun.

Personally? I stopped watching The Walking Dead after the Negan finale because I decided that it didn't make me feel good. I chose to stop watching for my own health, rather than watch and get mad at the script for making me feel bad.

You wrote:

I consider it to be demonstrating respect for fellow participants on a game and allowing them to make decisions for themselves about their participation.

However, my counterpoint to that sentiment is this:

On online games with mature themes (troubled relationship to, horror, violence, etc), when a player triggered by these very themes chooses to join, despite, the other players do not get the option of deciding whether or not they are participant to said player's difficulty with emotional investment and/or triggering. It becomes their problem, like it or not. On a respect level, they didn't ask to be made to feel guilty for someone's OOC RL triggers.

There has GOT to be a responsibility placed on behalf of the sensitive player to understand that they chose this arena. These people, these strangers, are a constant x-factor on a playspace that the player has already identified as having themes that trigger them. I sympathize and many others do as well, but at the end of the day, it is my responsibility as a player to behave reasonably on a game with mature themes without forcing my RL issues on other players, too. They came for the game and accepted the themes involved.

If someone is playing with a toy box of things that trigger me, or knock me off of my emotional equilibrium, and I decide to go and play with them with things that tend to make me feel that way, it is not their fault when I end up distraught.

I chose that toy box.

It's wholly reasonable for that other kid playing with the toy box to not be reaponsible for my reaction in that scenario.

@faraday said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

@surreality said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

That separation going !!!KABOOM!!! and causing a flashback or panic attack is the actual thing that occurs when an actually real trigger gets tripped. As such, if it possibly might happen? Then, yeah, the way you initially put this... they are simply not welcome.

There is a huge difference between saying: "This game has mature themes. If that has the potential to stress you out, then you should take steps to protect yourself." and "You're not welcome here."

I have immense sympathy for anyone who has to police their own entertainment for the sake of their emotional well-being. I can only imagine what it might be like to walk into a movie and not know if you're going to half a flashback in the middle of it. That's horrible.

But I still don't feel that anyone has a right to foist the responsibility for their well-being onto someone else. Be proactive. Communicate with plot runners. Communicate with staff. Make your needs known. Most people, I think, will be reasonably accommodating.

Expecting people to fill out a "what might bother you" questionnaire or expecting people running an improv scene to try and forsee all possible triggers in advance just seems unreasonable to me.

I wish you were my spirit animal.

I think you worded this very eloquently and appropriately, and I think this approach is very reasonable.