@sao said in Age Verification & Games:
16+ is baffling from a liability perspective. 16-18 protects you from nothing. What?
The internet is international. The age of adulthood varies.
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
hello it’s me, once a minor who snuck onto games the entire time i was a teenager. Wanted to say, to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t the sex stuff or weird people hitting on me that did emotional damage, it was bullying/dogpiling/smear campaigns etc as @kestrel noted in their post. I’m also going to say the uncomfy thing that having roleplay as an intimate/sexual outlet at that age was formative, in a healthy way. I maybe unique in this; I can definitely imagine less outspoken underage ppl being hurt or traumatized by feeling backed into a corner by intimate rp. As an adult now, I less regret what I did more than I wish I’d been able to explore those things with fellow teenagers through the writing medium. I would feel very uncomfortable and betrayed if I found out someone I was roleplaying with like that was underage, and I shouldn’t have deceived people that way.
Anyway, pretty sure the best games can do is label themselves 18+ and maybe have a little agreement to sign like people mentioned. Also don’t be like fucking IRE that’s 13+ but has pests literally trawling newbie areas for sex with no administrative backlash, im not bitter. -
RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
@Juniper said in Age Verification & Games:
Not to mention most adults don’t meet my standards for literacy, let alone some undercover minor. I won’t find out someone I was hanging out with is a kid. It’s just not gonna happen.
I think you would be surprised. The 17 year old I mentioned in a previous post could write better than most 30 year olds, and ended up attending a university that consistently ranks in the top 10 globally. Though obviously emotionally they were still a 17 year old, which is really the main issue with kids on these games, not poor literacy.
Obviously literacy rates are in the gutter these days, but wanting to play a text-game was already weird when I started it, and we’re probably around the same age. These have always been weird nerdy games, and there will always be weird nerds.
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
@Yam said in Age Verification & Games:
I find it concerning that they default to… handling actual IDs for pretendy funtime
Of course they are. Because it’s not about it being pretendy funtime, it’s about them very likely believing that they have a legal, moral, and/or ethical requirement to ensure their participants are adults.
@Roz said in Age Verification & Games:
@KarmaBum said in Age Verification & Games:
He’s aware of MUSHing, has seen me do it, has even chatted with me and brainstormed a few times, but he’s not going to join a hobby full of middle-aged women pretending to be sexy vampires.
the contempt is dripping off your wordsSexy psychologically damaged vampires.
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
@KarmaBum said in Age Verification & Games:
He’s aware of MUSHing, has seen me do it, has even chatted with me and brainstormed a few times, but he’s not going to join a hobby full of middle-aged women pretending to be sexy vampires.
the contempt is dripping off your wordsWhile I think our janky reliance on telnet is definitely a barrier to entry, my take is just that young people aren’t joining 'cause this just isn’t fun. If you were a young person, would YOU find any of this interesting or fun? Even those of us in the hobby lament that there’s shit-all for fun new games right now.
if the hobby weren’t at all fun for anyone, it would just die. it’s not dead. because people keep having fun
i think the biggest barrier to MU*s in terms of younger generation is just ignorance. they don’t know it’s around as a medium
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
@Faraday said in Age Verification & Games:
@Juniper said in Age Verification & Games:
TBH I’m not worried about minors infesting my spaces because they’re not interested in the level of effort that is required to get invested in this stuff
I don’t think that’s true at all. My oldest plays on discord with a bunch of other teens. They are aware of MUSHing; have helped me playtest a few things on Ares. They write fanfiction. My youngest likes Dwarf Fortress and clunky RPGs grafted onto Starcraft, neither of which is that far afield from MUDs.
Agreed. Saying NO kids/teens are interested in MUSHing (or insert other old school thing here) because it’s old/outdated is like saying no kids/teens were interested in D&D in the early 2000s because it was old/outdated back then.
Plenty of minors and young adults like old school things. Are they the majority? Certainly not, but they’re out there.
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
Counterpoint: there are young people finding MUs for the first time even now and it has been an absolute fucking JOY watching them dive in and enjoy the fuck out of everything. They +comp for logs that they’ve read that don’t even mention them. Yes, even straight up just social RP.
Restorative of the soul.
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
@KarmaBum said in Age Verification & Games:
If you were a young person, would YOU find any of this interesting or fun?
I mean yeah probably, I did when I was a young person
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RE: Age Verification & Gamesposted in Game Gab
16+ is baffling from a liability perspective. 16-18 protects you from nothing. What?
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RE: MU* Wishlistsposted in Game Gab
My updated wishlist:
- LARP Rules VTM game - I firmly believe that since the LARP rules are designed with large groups and player-centric plots in mind, they’d be better at supporting a MU than the tabletop version of the same.
- Unknown Armies - Weird magick, surreal horror, and cosmic power in a smaller city in America.
- Curseborne - Not sure how to get around the shared token economy, but still, I could see it making a fairly entertaining MU.
- CoD (or NWoD) - I too wish there was a CoD/NWoD (depending on which splats, for me, as I’m split on which edition I like the best) game out there.
- Powered By The Apocalypse Multiplex - I had this idea a while ago where someone could build one server with 10-12 mini grids on it that each support a different PbtA game. Each game would have a limited number of PC spots (equal to the number of playbooks available to that PbtA game.) It’d be like a multiplex theater of gaining XP from failing.
- Cube Robots - This is an idea I have been tinkering with for a while (both in rules mechanics and universe building). It currently doesn’t have a better name, but it’s a sci-fi setting that focuses on fresh sentience and the battle between ingrained duty and personal identity. I don’t wish anyone else create this, it’s on my I would run wishlist.
