Posts made by surreality

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

BUT this specific category of bad thing, that the majority of players don't have to deal with shouldn't be an extra hurdle to my fun.

You realize 'straight white male' is not actually the majority in this hobby?

Pretty sure female players outpaced men a long time back, and female players absolutely have this hurdle IC and OOC commonly put in their path. A number of those women are bi or lesbian. Some are also people of color.

Please stop talking to us like we have absolutely no idea what it is to face discrimination or abuse in this way. We do.

Other than @Apos, @ThatGuyThere, and @Thenomain, so far as I am aware, all of the repeat posters on this subject are women. (I am not even considering that generic dude's drive-by pot-shot post, because why would anyone.)

@saosmash That you would normally have to be up at 5:30am seems like something well-worthy of disgruntlement in the first place. Yeesh.

Cats are lucky they're cute, because they can be major assholes.

Please ignore this tangent, but goddamn. Watching this argument occur the way it has...

...I still think the conceptual framework I had in mind would be of help to resolve these issues.

Dammit, people. I don't know if it'll ever have a game or setting attached to it, but I'm back to basic bare-bones dev for something someone else may potentially be able to use some day to see if it helps.

(We need a user named Khan for me to yell at for this moment to feel appropriately conveyed, y'all.)

@three-eyed-crow Agreed in full. I don't think it's terribly uncommon, either.

It looks uncommon when it's being defined as 'wants to demonstrate what a jerk their character is by slinging around slurs', but that's not the sum total of this kind of interaction with these themes and I really wish people would stop characterizing it as though this is the case.

I mean, I genuinely can't really understand how you'd be able to allow most religions in the world as part of a character background at all if 'any and all discrimination is verboten', since many aspects of the dogma of many religions do either set their followers above others, demonize others, promote an imbalance among genders, demonize sexual preferences or sexuality period, etc.

Even if you only allow 'casual believers' and no zealots, these are beliefs people are legitimately raised with and even casual believers struggle with it. So do we outlaw real world religion on games, even games set in the modern real world, because they contain indoctrination into these biases to a greater or lesser extent? Because you frankly just don't have anything that even remotely resembles the real modern world on any level at that point. And wouldn't outlawing religious with some form of bias be, in itself, discriminatory on an OOC level?

What about the forms of racism practiced in some parts of the world in which nothing is ever said that is hostile or rude, but native citizens of <country> simply know they are superior to all others. They simply are; this is how things are to their way of thinking. (Many view Americans this way, for instance.) The rest of the world is inferior, and should be treated as one would treat a dim-witted child, because they are simply not as evolved and couldn't possibly understand. How would one even begin to reliably distinguish between one of these characters being genuinely kind and accepting, and being 'compassionately condescending to the lesser being' in most cases? On the surface, things may be fine and dandy and civil and almost zealously polite and there's always a plausible reason <other> didn't get that position, or didn't get invited to the dinner party for <non-others>, etc., and so on, but this is a particularly insidious and demoralizing form of discrimination with as broad-reaching effects as the much more easily identified and dismissed radical slur bomb-thrower.

What about characters that are enlightened enough now but went through periods of their life -- which may come up in play in some form or another -- in which they were not?

One of my favorite characters was a concept that I'm sure would never get approved today under such restrictions, and I'd be a monstrous asshole for even considering her. She was the daughter of a former 'fire and brimstone' scam artist televangelist with an empire of 'pray away the gay' camps and 'teen re-education facilities' outside the country and similar horrors. She didn't really believe this was a good idea, but she still had no real comprehension of what they really were or what they were like until she was sent to one for not being on board with this grand plan to convert the world. "Lucky" her, she got spared the private jet crash that killed off her folks due to... being incarcerated in such a facility outside the US, and only got let out and found out this occurred at all because she was now the one who had to sign their paychecks. Did she? No. She did everything she could to dismantle that family legacy, and to track down the people it had harmed to do everything within her power to get them real, actual help and correct what little she possibly could of the harm that had been done, because she knew. She was just as zealous about stamping this stuff out as her family had been about promoting it -- and, ultimately, guess what? She was a very vocal non-fan of most evangelical Christians, as she saw them as complicit in doing this kind of harm. As such, she was, herself, a bigot.

Yeah, it hits all the right current social justice notes -- boy howdy, does it ever, dialed up to 12 -- but it's still something that anyone being even slightly objective would reasonably have to NOPE the shit out of, and how.

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

In-sphere, there are often reasons. How many games are single sphere? Not many. There's plenty of totally thematic murderfacing to be had.

With that in mind, a bar against killing other PCs is far different than staff acting when players engage their PCs in IC discrimination based RL identity groups or barring it entirely.

I still disagree with this. I don't see them as different, save for in one way:

Generally, nobody gives a damn about killing NPCs in any given plot, unless it's someone's cherished child or similar NPC. That is not going to be the case with discrimination; if a PC aims it at an NPC in front of a player sensitive to the subject, it's still going to be a problem for them.

That said, stories like the ones @faraday described a handful of posts back are incredibly compelling to me. I think they're interesting, I think they are fantastic stories, and I don't see them as lacking depth or creating real world hurt or expressing any form of player-side vileness whatsoever.

I wouldn't roleplay them with someone who wasn't equally interested in the roleplay of that story in that way, but I completely discard the notion that they are universally damaging and worthless, garbage, or are replaceable by some other 'bastardry for the sake of bastardry'. (None of those examples involved someone deliberately being a jerk, but instead focus on someone coming into inner conflict with their upbringing or environment and learning and growing from the experience.)

The number of compelling characters this would exclude is enormous and I firmly believe we would be significantly worse off for their forbidding.

@ganymede To claim murder is unthematic on WoD games would be a huge stretch.

"Killing that guy so I don't have to deal with him again instead of letting him linger to potentially interfere with my future plans," has long been considered an acceptable reason to PK with no consent, no discussion, no staff permission, on every WoD game I am currently aware of. The closest thing to a restriction on it is FC's 'you must be this old to ride that ride' policy, so far as I know.

Does it happen often? No. That doesn't mean it is unwelcome, frowned upon, prevented, restricted, consent-based, etc.

When MSB began, which was not that long ago in the greater scheme of this hobby, the attitude described above was considered standard practice. As someone who stood very firmly and aggressively by full nonconsent-with-FtB for many years, even if your views have changed since, you really should know that, come on.

You can put people down about being 'Dan Brown crap writers' if they find the subject interesting, but that's not exactly adding value to the discussion right now, either, yeesh.

Plenty of art is not pretty, and it is not the purpose of art to be pretty or only show us what we want to see. A great deal of art is explicitly created to show the ugliness, pain, unfairness, cruelty, or despair in the world. Art has often been explicitly created to show us precisely the things we don't want to see, and don't want to have to think about or confront, and this is not simply the domain of 'modern shock crap/offensiveness by design' -- go google Goya or Picasso's Guernica or something -- and in no way does this invalidate it as art.

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@surreality said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Thing is, the same would be true for the choice to attack someone instead of negotiate, to murder a rival, etc. We wouldn't -- rightly -- think the player is violent or murder-happy RL based on this choice, and it's also a choice that is reasonably going to create some unhappiness or discomfort or upset on the part of the targeted player.

You've moving the goalposts. I wasn't talking about assaults or murders; I was talking about IC discrimination, which is the topic here.

I see this as the same thing: you can't and shouldn't assume someone is RL what they are playing based on 'they made the choice to play that thing'.

That is not something that I see as having any special exceptions for any subject matter. Not murder, not rape, not discrimination, not sex of any kind with anyone or anything, nothing. Not when it comes to 'make negative value judgements about the player based on their choice to consider this concept or course of action'.

So, as an idea, then, I would say that there is no objective in portraying a character that cannot be done without engaging in IC discrimination based on RL "classes." And, if this is the case, then there's really no harm in banning that kind of behavior everywhere.

That pushes the notion of this not being acceptable subject matter period in the hobby, and I can't get behind that at all. Not even the tiniest little bit.

I see a lot of harm in it in a variety of ways, and a lot of them are very obvious to me beyond the really, really obvious slippery slope "What next, then?" argument about banning certain subjects from being permissible in the hobby.

It is pretty much the epitome of 'identifying a subject as wrongfun, regardless of whether or not the participants in the roleplay are wholly consenting and respectful of one another's boundaries and personal comfort zones or not'.

Bear in mind, by this logic, games like the all-male superhero adult game would be labeled wrongfun top to bottom for not even permitting female PCs to exist. I'm completely supportive of that game's right to exist, and to exist precisely as it is, even though its actual OOC policies are intentionally and overtly discriminatory as a necessary function of defining and retaining focus on the game's intended scope.

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

This is true, but the choice to engage in IC discriminatory behavior or language is an OOC one.

Thing is, the same would be true for the choice to attack someone instead of negotiate, to murder a rival, etc. We wouldn't -- rightly -- think the player is violent or murder-happy RL based on this choice, and it's also a choice that is reasonably going to create some unhappiness or discomfort or upset on the part of the targeted player.

This is why I think we need to be careful about blurring the lines too much around this issue, because that's a really big can of worms (and I am convinced some of them have rabies).

As another example, if I'm doing on-stage improv and a partner decides to use derogatory or abuse language I am well within my rights to stop what I'm doing and demand that the partner stop as well. Even if that language is reasonable within the scene in which we are acting, the choice to demand the cessation of such language is also reasonable.

I don't disagree with this in the context of improv theater. That said... some pedantry not entirely without a point: I don't know how well the improv parallel works here, in part due to the above considerations. Improv typically doesn't have long-running persistent characters that can be removed from play in the same way as a M* character, essentially, and that is something worth keeping in mind as it is a profound difference. (There are some long-running characters in improv -- ren faire roles being a good example -- but they reset at the end of the day even if dead... )

@the_generic_one said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

That people are having a fevered argument over whether playing a character in the proper mindset or theme of a particular game is something that translates to OOC racism is idiotic.

...then don't participate in it?

There are adults who play these games who are not hypersensitive Cult of The Victim worshippers.

There sure are! And the people who don't want to deal with this in their pretendy fun times are almost universally amongst them -- 'them' being 'NOT hypersensitive Cult of the Victim' worshippers'.

Somebody losing their cool because they got called a fag IC while playing a homosexual character, it's perhaps the most pathetic thing ever.

And yet...

It's not like unconsentual TS.

Actually, it's exactly like that.

Some people actually don't care about non-consensual TS, though many obviously do.

This is for the same 'it's just a character, why should I get worked up about it?' reasons you're describing above in the case of those who don't care about issues of discrimination or -ism-based abuse.

Some people care about not getting shit they put up with all day shoved down their throat when they're trying to engage in some enjoyable escapism, and some don't.

@faraday said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

What you described sounds an awful lot like the FTB policy - written or unwritten -
that's been present on every game I've played in the last ten years. I seriously have never seen a situation - any situation - where somebody was forced to endure RP they found unpleasant. Endure the consequences? Sure. But not the scene itself. If all you're asking for is the ability to FTB out of abuse, then I don't see the controversy, at all. But it has not been clear to me that that's what you were asking for.

I see 'opt-out' and my mind goes to consent-based games where you could nope out of being robbed, or beaten up, or killed, or having your house burned down, or any other consequence you didn't like. That is very different from FTB, and I and others have provided various examples of where that could be problematic to implement.

I can opt out of an assault just by saying "I got away somehow." I can opt out of dying by saying "The bullet hit a book in my pocket" or whatever. Yeah, it might stop you from "winning" but it doesn't force you to act in ways contrary to your character's belief system. Opting out of discrimination in its entirety might lead to things like "your bigot must hire my (group he hates) character" or "your sexist must treat my female character as an equal".

FWIW, I described a consent-based approach to these subjects earlier, though it was on the basis of opt-in, not opt-out, so that confusion might be my fault.

So less 'I feel like noping out of the RP but am OK with the consequences' (that would be covered by FtB quite well in most cases) and more 'before you bring up a super controversial thread of RP, get (informed) consent from your scene partners'. There's a short list of controversial or sensitive subjects I'd (personally) require this about, but 'abuse on the basis of -isms' is definitely going on it.

This may require a mutual 'tone it the fuck down' from both parties and reasonableness while in groups, which is realistic enough if people have to work together for some reason.

For instance, going to the character who is an avowed sexist and demanding a job? Yeah, you should likely ask about that first OOC, too, to not attempt to or accidentally corner that player in the position of having to agree to something they wouldn't.

The respect thing goes both ways, or, well, like I mentioned before, it doesn't get very far.

@deadculture I'm hoping we can all agree as a board that nobody should ever, under any circumstances, be that egregiously OOCly gross again.

Like, if we can't even collectively get past that dazzlingly low a bar, it's time to take up the fiddle, 'cause Rome's a-burnin' bright.

Actually, Firan... sigh. I remember the 'only RL women can play prostitutes' thing mentioned long ago. (I never played there, but it appeared to be confirmed by multiple sources, and was not just some random rumor.)

I think we can all agree that is a disturbingly gross example of sexism on all possible levels, though.

I do not think this would not help do what they think it would ideally do, but that someone tried makes me snicker merrily anyway.

Oh, mediawiki. I just can't quit you.

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

But ... surely you can't be saying that I should moderate my words because they can be painful to real people behind the screen?

In a purportedly constructive discussion where you're trying to be heard and have your concerns taken seriously? You're damned right I am saying that slinging around accusatory language in such a way that it characterizes anyone who disagrees with you as desirous of being vile as a person (not a character) is not the smartest way to get people to be eager to listen to your perspective or give much of a damn at all about how you feel. Respect either goes both ways, or it doesn't get anywhere.

I mean, do I need to playing a character on a MU to get immunity from that obvious bit of common decency?

A character on a game, again, is not real. You, the actual person, are slinging insults at other actual people. The difference is non-trivial. You and your targets are real people.

The most irritating aspect of this is that most of those targets are already very aware and empathetic toward this issue and do not believe in forcing this kind of play on others who want no part of it.

Here's the thing: Why is it hurtful to suggest that it's hurtful to use that kind of language and bring those situations into play? Why is calling a gay player's gay character a fag okay, but saying 'I have to wonder why you want the right to call somebody a fag' not okay?

Except that's not what you said. Nobody would have a problem with that being said, and that is exactly the sort of question that could generate reasonable debate. Claiming that people who are interested in this discussion and finding means to create games that may have these elements as consensual or opt-in aspects of the setting -- of which I am one -- would still be allowing people who are interested in exploring these themes with fully informed and consenting roleplay partners, and, as such, are getting accused of encouraging 'human beings to be vile and hurtful to one another'.

And that's just bullshit.

I'm having a problem with the disconnect in logic and empathy here. And this is, by the way, a textbook conversation about dealing with Others. One of the quickest responses is always, 'How can we make this about how uncomfortable it makes me when you talk about how uncomfortable I'm making you by doing/saying this thing?

Sorry, nice try, but no. Own your fucking words already: you wrote them, and you clearly know what words would not have been damning of others but still conveyed the same reasonable question for debate because you used them above. You don't get a pass on saying something nasty and hurtful any more than anybody else does.

For the record, I'm not accusing anyone of anything. I AM bringing up the obvious and fundamental questions that underlay the whole disagreement. And that is, yes, uncomfortable.

When you are claiming that people are asking for the right to be vile and hurtful as players, yes, you really actually are accusing them of something pretty horrible.

I am unironically sorry folks are having to think about this stuff. Apparently for the first time.

Maybe try not saying that to a bisexual fat woman if you want to have a reasonable discussion of any kind, as if there's no discrimination that person might have encountered in their life. Particularly one who started a thread on this very same subject months ago.

@collective I should be out the door already, I really should, but I think you maybe need to look at that statement again.

It's very easy to infer what @faraday did, and I read it the same way when what is literally stated is that people are "arguing for the right to be vile and hurtful" by discussing any inclusion of these subjects at all, no matter what checks, balances, or protections might be in place.

That is a pretty serious accusation to make, and it's an accusation about people behind the screen and those having the discussion, not any hypothetical character they might be playing. Please re-read; I think you'll see why this is a problematic statement and why it's being interpreted in the way it is.

And on that note, I'm actually out the door, because work's a thing.

@auspice I am horrible. I saw that an my first thought was: I WANT A HOUSE BIG ENOUGH SO I CAN HAVE A TABLE LIKE THAT FOR MY AWESOME SHELLS, TOO!

@collective Agreed.

I went with 'you have to opt-IN' to those subjects, and direct OOC consent was still required.

It had a setup for 'RP preferences' where people could write their personal comfort zones for various forms of content. All the controversial content was there. As in, you could detail exactly what was, and was not, OK with you, on any given subject, since a lot of this stuff is fairly nuanced. For instance, somebody might be OK with hearing 'bitch' thrown around, but find 'no, I'm not hiring you because you're a woman and thus too emotional!' -- or might be fine with some kind of Gorean whatever, but only with negotiation first, or... the list is endless, and giving people a neutral space to outline their personal OK/NOT OK boundaries strikes me as helpful. (Many people disagree. Still doing it if I do a thing.)

Stuff can exist in the world, but whether someone engages with that stuff or not absolutely should be up to the player, because the player is ultimately more important than anybody's character.

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I honestly don't get why there is such resistance to the idea that it is okay to have your character opt out of dealing with racism/sexism/homophobia, etc that may hit you on a personal level.

My take on this is to require direct consent for it to occur, like many other controversial themes.

I heard this was completely stupid crazy talk and it should be banned outright if people could just 'opt out' and got aggressively browbeaten about it from both sides of the argument -- as in, 'it even existing in the world where it might be read in a log in which consensual participants go there' was unacceptable, and 'allowing people to opt-out breaks immersion and that's important above all!'

I find both attitudes to be complete bullshit nonsense, but I am apparently stupid and crazy. <shrugs>

(This isn't the first time this topic has come up.)

@faraday I think, realistically speaking, the storylines you're describing are the most likely by far, and anything else would be an outlier at best.

You do end up with a lot of exceptions, though, that are interesting characters in their own right. The Walking Dead has a lot of examples of these, and many of them flip back and forth along the protagonist/antagonist divide depending on the circumstances and experiences the character has. Black Sails is another example.

The freeform nature of a M* lends itself a lot to the above, too.

I embrace the 'ensemble cast' notion a lot in part because I believe it's an important ideal to reinforce -- that it's a group, we're supposed to be cooperating and playing off each other, collaborating with each other, etc. (The Avengers example is a great one of an ensemble cast in which everyone involved is a hero in their own right.) I tend to shy away from 'protagonist' or 'hero' terms as they tend to imply increased importance being placed on one head, which cannot be the case on a M* in the way it could be in a movie or otherwise standalone story.