Goddammit Steam Sale.
"9 of your Wish List items are on sale."
sob
Goddammit Steam Sale.
"9 of your Wish List items are on sale."
sob
@insomnia said in Hey you motherfuckers.:
@peverel I'm having giant black dildo flashbacks now. Thanks!
And not Cheese Log flashbacks? I'm jealous.
@meg said in Hey you motherfuckers.:
Idk who you are, but hi yourself!
Probably the only sane administrator the Wora line of websites has ever had.
Yes, I'm calling you out, @Arkandel.
I think that it's interesting and indeed very important that the other person involved, really the person who was the victim of her passion play, said they didn't want it retconned. While I go on about how "The Game" is more important than a single player, players do make up The Game, and it must have been a hellish situation to find yourself administrating.
Finding the importance in balancing respect toward multiple people is when you can't just say "Don't Be a Dick" and when you can't go with strict policy. A mix of both can inform without demanding, and I appreciate it when people try.
@gangofdolls said in Reasons why you quit a game...:
Yeah, it is. But I think there’s also a basic confusion for some people about what they think is actually fun. People will scale a lot of drama thinking they have to in order to get to the fun, not necessarily realizing that games shouldn’t be a stinky onion where of you just keep trying- the fun will show up. Or if they’re not having fun but most other people seem to be so maybe their standard is wrong. And it might be but it might not? It’s hard to get perspective when the game is a feedback loop that reinforces the wrong thing for the player in question.
I don't mean to be correcting this or saying it's wrong, but it's a topic in this hobby that's near and dear to my heart:
I think what you're saying is what is fun for the individual is not always fun for the game.
I personally think that we should all be playing for the game. The more of a leadership role a character has should increase that player's awareness that what they do should net a positive toward the game's activity or other players' involvements or whatnot.
But I also don't think hanging on to a character too long is the criteria I would put on someone having to give up that character. Someone sitting on a leadership position, not available for scenes, or using their character's God-Level Stats to absorb game-play from others is when I think they need to give it up. Otherwise it's the TS discussion: If your character neither adds to nor removes from the game, who cares what they do?
That's Thenomain's Gaming Philosophy Minute for Wednesday November 22, 2017.
@arkandel said in Staff and ethics:
So while we're on the subject of rules... do you think it's better for staff to create a detailed set of policies, or keep it to generic "don't be an asshole" guidelines?
Yes.
Policies are there to create a direction, and that direction should absolutely be "don't be an asshole". When you work for a company, you can't easily claim that something wasn't explicitly written down as a reason why they can't fire you. And yet companies still have a detailed set of policies known as The Employee Handbook.
In fact, companies start with a general statement, often called a Mission Statement, and break it down by degrees from there. It works. You know that if you take a Tier Four character then you're expected to submit two scene logs a week in order to encourage scenes and RP on the game. You shouldn't need to be explicitly told that you also shouldn't use those scenes as a way to hilite your other character.
There are things you shouldn't need explicit rules about, because the implicit rules already touch on it. But there should also be explicit rules so that people can have a reference.
There are things that shouldn't even need implicit rules. "Don't be a jerk" is one, though as quickly mentioned that's an opinion as much as anything else. Every game should have a section called "What We Expect", or "What We Don't Do Here".
So yes. "Don't Be a Jerk" means ... what? Also, what else should I know?
--
And for fuck's sake, people, make sure the staff are seen following the rules or someone knows they're being talked to when they're not.
I've seen this as staff and player too many times to count:
Staff: You were a jerk.
Player: I was being goaded by this other staffer.
Staff: This isn't about them.
Yes, yes it is about them. This is about staff not upholding the values that staff is talking down to a player about. Not talking to this other staffer makes this staffer complicit and undermines their ability to effectively dole out ethics-based punishments. All that the staffer would need to say is:
Staff: I'll be talking to them shortly.
Or even:
Staff: We can talk about them in a minute. For now, you were being a jerk.
That's it. Cronyism is bad enough in our daily lives; we don't need to continue it in our funtimes.
@arkandel said in Celebrities that are Dead To Us:
I don't know about you but I'd watch the shit out of a sitcom of @kanye-qwest being married to Mr. Rogers.
I too enjoyed Season One of "The Good Place".
@gangofdolls said in Reasons why you quit a game...:
I think half the battle is getting people to recognize that it is time to go. Alot of people hang on too long out of some mix of stubborn refusal to tap out, because they think they're having fun, or because they're staying for their friends (who are often also just staying for them right back).
Isn't "I'm having fun" a decent reason to stay with a character? Or is there something else that you mean by saying that people think they're having fun?
Bill Cosby.
I grew up with him. He did work for children's programming, education, applying his PhD, throwing a positive image to millions of households with Fat Albert and with The Cosby Show. Most of his stand-up humor was pretty goddamn funny, too.
But now? The man should be in jail. I think he will be lucky if there is a second mistrial.
Louis CK I believe (and I will be the first to change this if I'm wrong) is sincerely apologetic and is looking to make a change. We shall see.
But Cosby? I hope he pays. With cash. A lot of it.
Point. I’ll blame other distractions and that it’s hard to come up with a more cogent reply on a tablet, which I also do too much.
Working as a professional, I see “professional behavior” as what you choose to do and how you choose to do it and after that it’s a cultural thing. The more we dig into this answer, the more we will probably quibble and tangent.
I’ve also played on many games in which the staff were not ethical, yet still had strong convictions and logical arguments that they were. For the sake of this discussion, I will not go on about Dark Metal, Firan or the like, but I think it’s important to note that staff ethics have never really made or broken a game.
And finally, my own personal edict: Understand and accept.
Understand that nobody is perfect. Understand your own limitations. Understand the words being said to you. Understand your own convictions. Understand that others might not share those convictions. If you don’t understand then there’s no way you can even begin to act ethically.
And accept the reality of yourself and others.
I should note that I haven’t come with a pithy way to add, “DO NOT be a Welcome Mat and DO NOT forget, Hell you don’t even have to forgive.” But you should sure as hell be accepting in this hobby, and all the messy imperfections that means in our post-political, sometimes-SJW, belief-heavy world.
What is staffs policy on it?
It sounds like you hit an All Or Nothing game. That is, either the situation is bad enough to “fix” the situation, or it’s not worth fixing.
This is a horrible management style. Nobody needs a rule to say, “Yeah, I’ll talk to them about this, see what’s up.” And yet, because this is so often not the case that your typical scarred player is going to assume that staff is going to brush them off.
I don’t think this is enough to say nothing, though. It’s possible that staff will misunderstand, mock, cause problems, but if the worst that can happen is they ignore you then the worst in saying something is the stress coming from putting your trust out there and having it betrayed.
Don’t trust, but don’t avoid the problem. Give all staff one chance to do the right thing. Then I figure it’s okay to give up on them, tho I’ve tried to turn this around when I heard it on my watch.
This is just advice, to try and soften the blows of trying again, and again, and again, knowing that there is a bad pattern that needs to be reversed. I’ve been where you’ve been, again and again. There is a reason I prefer code to trying something new.
Staff need to try again, and again, and again too, starting with understanding the words being given to them, and trying to offer a reasonable response.
We have more than one thread on Soapbox about people talking about their demanding reality. I love it that’s people feel this place is safe enough to share. What they are not doing is using it as an excuse. Sometimes as an explanation, and sometimes to preface an apology, but not as an excuse.
To paraphrase a different quote: Start the thread you want to see. I would bet you a dollar that we would get all the stories possible. Heck, keep that dollar; save up for the bottle and pass it around.
@ixokai said in Reasons why you quit a game...:
On the one hand, establishing what is right and good behavior is... right and good.
On the other, going heavy into [...]
And here's where need the human element. No matter what your rules, your culture starts at the top of the staff and goes all the way down. That, and anything can be used as a weapon to attack someone, or as a shield to defend yourself.
But if you're too loose with the rules, then they have no meaning.
What good starting guidelines do is establish intent, at least from my perspective. Once you can agree on intent, or have a (hopefully benevolent) dictator willing to enforce it, a lot of the rest follows.
@saosmash said in Reasons why you quit a game...:
I found it helpful writing out our guidelines if only because it helped ensure we were all on the same page.
@EmmahSue and Troy and I once wrote out our guidelines. It was late into the game but they were clear. They didn't help ensure anyone was on the same page because we never enforced them.
If you have rules, enforce them. Not draconically, but consistently enough that everyone else knows what to expect.
If you do something consistently enough, people will assume it's the rule. If you break the presumed rule for someone, you will come off as a bad staffer.
A game I was super invested in?
I have never left a game I was that invested in.
I have become less invested because of basically the three reasons mentioned by @Ganymede, but I will find a way to stay on a game if I enjoy my character enough.
I’ve even played a game through three months of being actively campaigned against by several players, behind my back. And I’m glad I did, because I am still telling stories about the experience, and made some very lasting friends from it.
It's important to know something about a game before playing it, yeah.
Here's the aforementioned beta documents.
Others can help you with theme and setting.
And saying, "You've got to be shitting me!" should not push a post into the Hog Pit. Nor should it prevent it. Passion is not trolling. Passion is not disgusting. Passion is passion, and everyone should have the right to offer their side of a story and to say, "No, I don't accept this."
@Carnivale talks about repetition, what I call "dog-piling", and that could indicate that the thread or at least parts of it are in candidacy for the Hog Pit. Disassembling a thread to do so, though, diminishes it and can pull context out of both halves. (Except tangents. Tangents are fun and easy.)
It's easier to just have someone or someones take a moment and say, "This is enough." And if someone else says, "Yeah, I was and still am pretty burned about this" then the living discussion is brought to a more realistic angle.
This is my completely non-administrative thought on it, though. There's a lot of quite creepy information floating around here, but is that not constructive? Only Ark & Aus can tell us for certain.