I don’t care if there’s magically no creeps on my game, I still don’t want to deal with having minors on it.
When I was 15, I thought games not letting minors on was AN OUTRAGE.
I was not correct. I was 15.
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
@Jennkryst said in Age Verification & Games:
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They also had a big colorful sign that was basically ‘this player is a minor, do not even consider stepping out of line around them, we will ban you immediately’. Basically, it was the boiler plate ‘if you’re under 18, you can play with a parent’s permission’ that actually got the permission, instead of just lying about their age as others might do.
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Anyway, TLDR: protecc the kiddos from the creeps by keeping out the creeps.
Couple issues with this. I’ve numbered your points for ease of response.
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I, an adult, don’t want to have to monitor/censor my own language out of concern kids might be observing. I don’t want to feel guilty when I jokingly quote a Chuck Tingle title. I also may want to play in a game that grapples with adult themes (not just sex.) It’s also not just about controlling my own behaviour; any time I play games with public lobbies like Among Us, or hang out in a public Discord server, I end up having children hitting on me. I obviously tell them to knock it off, but every time it happens I find myself thinking about the next person, who doesn’t tell them to knock it off, who likes that attention and encourages it.
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I’m immensely sceptical of anyone who believes their game is creep-free, or that they have foolproof creep-radar and always know how to deal with creeps. You just don’t know. Creeps can be extremely nice, friendly, respectable. They can have great public decorum, and then be a different person in DMs. It’s not even just sexpests we need to worry about, but more subtle things like cyberbullying. This hobby is well-known for dogpiling, hate/smear-campaigns, etc. And while I’m not going to lose sleep over an adult being made fun of for their awful desc-writing, I do think that can have a much more serious and long-term impact on a developing brain.
So if you wanna have, say, a LotR-themed MU* that’s explicitly child-friendly, that’s fine, but you need to commit. That means no Discord, no DMs, no TS, for anyone. If it’s intended to be a child-friendly game, then there should be no adult content on it for anyone, and no encouragement of private communications that enable predators to target and groom children. Strictly anonymous, public channels, should be kept free of adult humour, etc.
But if you wanna have a GoT-themed MU* that includes mature themes, then I think you need to commit to that too, and you just cannot allow children to play that game. You can’t have a game where adults are openly discussing rape, gore, torture, where players are given both adult freedoms and expectations/standards of behaviour, and expect that to be a safe or healthy environment for teenagers.
Even if an adult joined this kind of game with their teenager and said they’re fine with it, I still wouldn’t be fine with it. Because while you have the right to decide you want to be responsible for your own child, I don’t want to be responsible for your own child. I don’t want to feel helpless and unable to do anything about the brothel PC hitting on your teenager and sending them weirdly affectionate DMs or selfies. That’s stressful for me.
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RE: MU* Wishlistsposted in Game Gab
@MisterBoring This reminds me, over Covid I found an archive where she provided all of Remnants for free, I should see if it’s still around so I can finally finish it.
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RE: MU* Wishlistsposted in Game Gab
@Jennkryst said in MU* Wishlists:
That, or somehow be on LegallyDistinctEarthlikeLocation, as written in Trans-Ally Katherine Applegate’s second-greatest work, Everworld.
Controversial opinion: While Animorphs definitely makes her an amazing Trans-Ally, they are, from a literary standpoint, worse than Everworld. (I have enjoyed all three of her book series, and think that people regularly sleep on the Remnant books.)
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RE: MU* Wishlistsposted in Game Gab
@Livia said in MU* Wishlists:
Well that’s suspicious.
But I’ll take this opportunity to pine for Vampire the Requiem once again. All the WoD games have returned to 20th Anniv. edition of everything.
People are too invested in THE METAPLOT… which also sort of happened with Requiem/nWoD. ‘I am part of this bloodline, let me name-drop the person from the book instead of seeing if we should alter stuff for game setting’.
Which, I mean, fair. I still think that the ideal WoD game should build out a wiki of the world as players submit new characters. If the game is in New York City, staff obviously have NYC history in mind. But do they know who is in charge in Philadelphia? The first character submitted from that area gets to canonize the lore from there, and then it gets integrated. Second player now has to deal with Philly being Carthian (because who else would riot in both celebration AND defeat?)
That, or somehow be on LegallyDistinctEarthlikeLocation, as written in Trans-Ally Katherine Applegate’s second-greatest work, Everworld.
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
Extremely controversial opinion: Minors on games aren’t inherently bad.
No wait, don’t ban me before I can explain!
So in the long-long ago, before Shadowrun: Denver endorsed blatant staff cheating which they continue refuse to walk it back or even apologize for it happening… there was a whole household of folks who played on there. Everyone was all on the same IP address, so there were extra steps added to account for who was which +alt, as there were (and still are) limits to the number of characters you can have.
Included among the players from there was a then-16-year-old, as well as their father (who eventually did join staff for a time and was not among the dirty cheating cheaters). There could have been others, but this was 2010 or so, my memory is more hyper-fixated on the aforementioned cheating and the players I actually did play with.
They also had a big colorful sign that was basically ‘this player is a minor, do not even consider stepping out of line around them, we will ban you immediately’. Basically, it was the boiler plate ‘if you’re under 18, you can play with a parent’s permission’ that actually got the permission, instead of just lying about their age as others might do.
Anyway, TLDR: protecc the kiddos from the creeps by keeping out the creeps.
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RE: MU* Wishlistsposted in Game Gab
@Pavel i actually think night court of the freehold would be really fun to rp.
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
Even asking for gov’t-issued ID as a private RP server is opening yourself up to wildly unnecessary liability IMO. You don’t have the capacity to effectively check it, for one thing. There’s no way you’re secure from, as others in this thread have pointed out, the obvious hazard for identity theft.
Like, there’s so many things wrong with this it makes my head spin. I was already not going to rp on discord, but it hurts my heart to know that the next generation of RPers is doing something this potentially self-destructive and dumb in the name of protecting the children. Y’all, the children who want to get in can fake IDs and the adults you’re turning off with your overreach were never at risk.
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
@Faraday Personally I’d rather not give my ID over to anybody and the laws that require it are hamfisted and poorly thought out. But they’re here, and I only foresee them getting stronger.
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
I’m weirdly okay with services and websites having some sort of secured way of accessing, from a ‘trusted’ source, that a person is 18+. In the same way we all sort of trust the security of our banking app. So if a MU wanted to connect with, say, Yoti ID and could get a token from them that “the person you’re asking about has demonstrated to us that they are over 18” that would be a different question, and I’d encourage such a thing.
I’ve no idea how to do that in a way that isn’t easily falsified by children, but I think it should be sufficient for a MU to cover themselves from legal rammifications. “Hey, we went the mile you asked of us.”
