Best posts made by Staricide

I think there's a difference between boycotting, not buying something and encouraging others to do the same. And cancelling which seems to involve more shaming people for not doing the same, is more likely to be targeted at people and not companies, and usually comes along with a lot more personal attacks in general.

My biggest issues with cancelling are:

• It only really affects small/midsized creators. Big creators or corporations who it would matter most to be held to account just shrug it off.

• It only works if you're cancelled by your audience, white supremacists authors writing white supremacists books can't be cancelled unless white supremacists don't like what they did.

• It almost always seems to lead into personal attacks and online bullying.

This is a video about the experience of being hated online I found somewhat eye-opening.

What areas do you find there's the biggest difference between what you imagine doing with your character before you start playing them and how things always seem to go once you're actually playing them?

For me, I think it's usually the conversations I'll have. I always imagine having deep and meaningful conversations where I explore my character's philosophies and morality and personality in relation to other characters, or just ones that are witty and fun.

In reality, it seems like most people are afraid to have any kind of conversation that might make their character look foolish/bad and so you end up with a lot of just, state things that have happened, talk about stuff they know, brag about things they did/have, or complain about other characters. Which are all things I find it so hard to get interested in.

There is a downside to adding more tools for people to remember, but it's a very similar downside to adding more policies for people to remember.

To my mind the benefits of a tool as opposed to a policy here are:

• It will be interpreted as staff caring more. The fact that staff went and messed around with squiggly brackets and weird indentation will make it seem a lot more like they care than if they add a sentence to a policy file. It will seem a lot more like concern for personal boundaries in RP is a core feature of the game that staff cares about and is making central to their design. That might be an unfair interpretation but it is how it will read.

• It can simplify complicated social situations. If I page you 'Do you mind FTBing this?' and you reply 'Well I'd rather not because la la la.' is that arguing back about the FTB? I may have intended the question rhetorically but you interpreted it, or claimed to interpret it, literally. There are millions of edge cases like this where people squeak around rules or policies or things get complicated. Different communities might develop unofficial standards for how you're supposed to ask for an FTB or respond to one. Maybe some people start responding to FTB requests with not just an agreement but also with checking on the person's OOC welfare, you don't know this and don't do it and now you're a 'bad guy' There's a lot of potential value to coded tools in the simplicity of use, if you're in this situation, you type these letters, you hit the enter key, it's done.

• It can have additional bells and whistles. Like auto-generating tickets with relevant info, maybe a yellow flags to staff so they know there might be something coming up they need to deal with, maybe red is logged so if you have accusations against a particular player you can check the logs and see a bunch of people red-flagged them previously, maybe the command whisks you back to your +home and stops all pages between you and the other person for the rest of the day.

Mildly offtopic, but I had a thought once that you could do a game based in three simultaneously played time periods. One where the characters were in some sort of 'war college', one where they were in a terrible battle against an alien threat, and one after they'd lost the war and were eking out some sort of existence in a post-apoc setting. Some technology had been invented to allow people to influence the past and the metaplot would revolve around the older people trying to change the past so the war never happened or was won which also explains why the older characters might suddenly remember being friends with someone in their youth when they weren't yesterday.

I guess my constructive suggestion out of this would be maybe consider putting some weird timey-wimey stuff into the setting to help explain why the newly written past doesn't always go exactly how previously expected?