What handling is there needed, really? We play games where murder, betrayal, and torture are the norm, and we're going to get our knickers in a twist about the idea of someone having some prejudices IC, or making inappropriate remarks (by today's standards anyway)?
What's more outrageous than prejudiced characters is that there are players who flip their wig over them.
I try to use portraits of people from the era in question. Since I don't want to go for anything too obvious, I try to pluck out minor historical figures that only a handful of people would know about. Extra points if I loosely base my character off of them.
I think trying to boil it down to "how much" code one should have is reductive. It's like people who try to reduce economic regulation to "more government" or "less government." Just imagine trying to quantify how much code is in a game. How are you going to measure it, by the number of lines?
Some qualitative assessments should be made before adding any code:
There are probably more valid questions, but if you answer the right way to enough of these questions you should probably code it, and otherwise you shouldn't.
@faraday This is fair, actually. Setting content expectations is exactly what MU*'s and other online games of this sort should be doing. If you step outside those boundaries as a player, then you're out of line. But if you're within them, and someone on the outside gets "triggered"? Tough luck, buttercup.
It's the fairest compromise one can reasonably arrive at. And it's not even really a compromise, it's just good policy to let people know what the deal is on your little outpost in the Interwebs.
EDIT: Also, the reason I'm getting so loud about this topic is I'm used to people going on horror games and throwing tantrums when it turns out there is horrifying content therein. It's utterly obnoxious and childish. Frankly, it's not acceptable.
@apos said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
@louis-manigault Nah that's being hypocritical cause you don't wanna use the word 'offended', since you associate that with snowflakes. Being irritated or annoyed or angry -is- being offended, it counts. It's not all clutching pearls while a monocle drops into a tea cup in horror, man.
Please tell me more about how I feel, since you're such an authority on the matter.
@apos said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
@saosmash said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
@arkandel You know you're feeding the troll, right? Roll your eyes and move on. Their stated position is as far from constructive as it is possible to be.
Yea, registered recently. I've never met anyone that held those kind of stances that didn't also get extremely offended when similar stuff was directed at them, so their life philosophy is easiest summed up as, "Any kind of offense directed at me is bad and should stop immediately, any offense directed at others they should suck up because they are oversensitive."
I mean, what exactly are you going to do, give me a raft of shit for being a fucking white male? I'm not really offended by that sort of thing, I just think it's retarded.
@arkandel said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
@louis-manigault said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
What handling is there needed, really?
Read this thread. There is no question handling these themes carefully is necessary since there are players who are affected by them; the question is only what kind and to what degree.
We play games where murder, betrayal, and torture are the norm, and we're going to get our knickers in a twist about the idea of someone having some prejudices IC, or making inappropriate remarks (by today's standards anyway)?
Yes, because very few of us have been murdered or tortured, but some of us have been victims of sexism, racism, etc. It's easy to say "don't take it personally" when it has been personal to someone for most of their lives.
Most of us have been betrayed, yet we don't make an issue of that IC. Having trust weaponized against you is one of the most awful experiences to live through. If one has never been betrayed, then they truly have lived a sheltered existence, and their cries of "racism!" or "sexism!" are very likely from petty experiences to the effect of being asked "Can I help you?" in a snotty fashion at an upscale department store or being told they can't join the boys' football team.
Just as betrayal can lead to trust issues, being subject to some kind of -ism can lead to oversensitivity issues. However, in both cases, the issue is still with the person holding the issue. Just as people with trust issues are behooved to get over it, people with oversensitivity issues are behooved to get over it as well.
The real issue is not with the portrayal of -isms IC, but the expectation that they don't get portrayed because you personally have been subject to that kind of -ism. The expectation that the world conforms to you is one of the most puerile, self-centered, childish outlooks one can have. These people need to grow up and get over themselves.
There was a Werewolf: the Forsaken game I played when I was 17 with my high school friends. It was a tabletop game around my mother's kitchen table, and we all knew each other, so a lot of the tensions that typically come with meeting new people on a MU* simply weren't there. That is, we could bust on each other and do memey shit without anybody getting too upset over it.
It took place in the Wild West, and I played as an escaped slave. My character ended up killing a majority of his owner's family very early on, allowing only two of them to live -- one of the sons of the plantation owner who my Elodoth regarded as "Honorable" for some reason that I forgot (it's been 12 years) and a granddaughter who was too young to really be responsible for much of anything.
That "Honorable" son ended up becoming a Sleepwalker with some Artifacts who kept on returning stronger and fighting less fair each time trying to avenge his family. He was one of the Pack's main antagonists, and I really liked how much sense it made given what we did in-game. Another main antagonist was some weird wolf-violence magath that was borne of all the violent shit we did, which also made sense in a really cool way. I liked our ST a lot.
I had a lot of fun in that game, because while I played a character who was on his face sympathetic, I made the character also do some pretty bad things, like the aforementioned mass murder. The Pack also took rather coercive measures to produce more Wolf-Blooded, most notably capturing a few small towns (under 20 people) and expelling the women who refused to have our kids into the wilderness, where they would very likely die, which I consider "bad" by modern -- or should I say, human -- moral standards. That said, I liked how there were other dimensions to it as well. For example, we were after all playing monsters in a horror game, so why shouldn't we treat the Herd as, well, a herd, to be commanded?
All-in-all, it was one of my favorite games.
I try to use portraits of people from the era in question. Since I don't want to go for anything too obvious, I try to pluck out minor historical figures that only a handful of people would know about. Extra points if I loosely base my character off of them.
What handling is there needed, really? We play games where murder, betrayal, and torture are the norm, and we're going to get our knickers in a twist about the idea of someone having some prejudices IC, or making inappropriate remarks (by today's standards anyway)?
What's more outrageous than prejudiced characters is that there are players who flip their wig over them.