Age Verification & Games
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I have encountered multiple confirmed underage players on MUDs.
In one incident about 4 years ago, the game had a Discord server with an active voice chat. A player told us openly they were 17 and applying for university the following year. A second player whom I believe was roughly my age (Millennial) then proceeded to repeatedly and frequently hit on the underage player. What frustrated me is that when I tried reporting the issue, I was told that the underage player had a reputation for acting horny and liking that kind of attention, so it was probably OK. I spoke to the underage player directly about the issue, who made clear to me that the older player hitting on them made them extremely uncomfortable, and that they wanted it to stop.
It does happen, and people should be extremely vigilant about it.
In all candour, I started playing MUDs when I was 11. Stuff did happen. I recall a 12 year old girl on the same MUD had that same kind of “reputation” with older male players in the community, and in hindsight, I genuinely can’t believe staff just let that happen. Dark side of the freeze-peach crowd, IME.
Personally, I am fully in favour of age verification laws, based on these experiences. And I’m in the UK where they’ve already been rolled out.
The issue generally isn’t TS. Like, whatever, teens masturbate. It’s that people tend to take these conversations OOC, where there is a power imbalance between younger/older players, which enables predators. Particularly on games which tend to be rife with mentally unstable individuals, and settings which tacitly promote all kinds of fetishes (and I’m not just talking about sex games), I don’t want these to be the formative sexual experiences of any child.
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@Kestrel Yeah, one of my kids told me about seeing “RPs” on Scratch of all places several years ago. Their friends play via discord - only with people they know, but it’s a short hop from there into other forms of text-based gaming with strangers.
As a parent, this stuff concerns me greatly. People can bark about “just use parental controls”, but I wonder how many of them have actually tried to keep a kid safe on the internet these days.
Even so, I take issue with the current laws because they are a massive invasion of privacy and a security risk. There have already been instances of leaked documents and other identifying info. It will only get worse. The anonymity of the internet certainly has its problems, but tying your RL governmental identity to every platform you visit is a free speech and information nightmare.
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Some sort of online verification is something I don’t want to see (privacy issues), but at the same time, it’s going to, and has to, happen. And as much as I hate it, I do agree that something should be done, exactly what is open for argument. As far as MUSH’s go, even if you had that “18 or else” line I don’t think that would matter if someone was really wanting to make things happen. And not just keeping things safe from an OOC perspective. What happens when someone who isn’t 18 gets into the spicy RP, never goes OOC about anything, gets caught by their parents, and the parents decide to make it a federal case? I can’t even fault the parents here: if that was my kid, you best believe I would be going off the rails. But the person on the other end had no clue who they were playing with, but the law doesn’t care about all that. They did; they are therefore toast.
Sure, that might only be a one-in-a-hundred case, but let’s be honest, we all know it has happened over the decades this hobby has been a thing. Age verification of some fashion protects everyone - just I don’t know how it can be done without messing everything else up.
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@Muscle-Car said in Age Verification & Games:
@RightMeow Discord tried to roll out user age verification by ID or facial photo in the US and were met with massive backlash
@Prototart said in Age Verification & Games:
They haven’t asked for mine bc my account’s so old, but I’m 100% out if they ever do. I don’t even trust them enough for to pay for Nitro, no way am I giving them my ID.
I’m not even talking about Discord’s age verification. I’m talking about RP servers on Discord being like ‘verify your age by sending us your ID’. I’m talking about users feeling like they need to do it.
ETA: I need to clarify. This is on top of Discord’s systemic age verification. This is an additional layer of USERS asking OTHER USERS in SHARED SERVERS to send them their ID.
she/they
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@Tez Trust a private party with my government ID in exchange for the privilege of using their role play space? I don’t even trust the government with my government ID. Hard pass.
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@Tez said in Age Verification & Games:
This is an additional layer of USERS asking OTHER USERS in SHARED SERVERS to send them their ID.
We barely trust other users to make judgement calls for our pretendy fun time games, much less giving them access to documents that can very easily (for the determined) lead to identity theft, other forms of fraud, or simple doxing.
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@Tez said in Age Verification & Games:
I’m not even talking about Discord’s age verification. I’m talking about RP servers on Discord being like ‘verify your age by sending us your ID’. I’m talking about users feeling like they need to do it.
ETA: I need to clarify. This is on top of Discord’s systemic age verification. This is an additional layer of USERS asking OTHER USERS in SHARED SERVERS to send them their ID.
Girl that is nuts there is 100% some ID theft ring running a Sonic RP server with five thousand defense contractors in it
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@Prototart said in Age Verification & Games:
@Tez said in Age Verification & Games:
I’m not even talking about Discord’s age verification. I’m talking about RP servers on Discord being like ‘verify your age by sending us your ID’. I’m talking about users feeling like they need to do it.
ETA: I need to clarify. This is on top of Discord’s systemic age verification. This is an additional layer of USERS asking OTHER USERS in SHARED SERVERS to send them their ID.
Girl that is nuts there is 100% some ID theft ring running a Sonic RP server with five thousand defense contractors in it
I’m not sure what’s worse. Sonic TS, or Sonic TS with a Raytheon employee.
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I am all about protecting minors from abuse. Full stop. There is no ‘but’ added to that. I think children should be protected and be allowed their very short time as children in life to be children.
When it comes to age verification, I don’t even like to confirm my RL anything OOC. I mean, I will confirm I’m over 21 if asked OOC for … reasons. However, I don’t want any of my personal information out there to people I don’t know. Let alone my address or those weird states that have your SSN as your DL number (Do they still do that?).
I understand that for safe space it might be something a game runner wants for whatever reasons (I hope good ones), but I also will not be playing there. It’s just too much trust to a computer screen and no clue the reasons and the person behind it.
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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.”
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@Pavel said in Age Verification & Games:
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.
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That’s assuming you trust Yoti. Do you really want to give THEM your government ID? ETA: Are you comfortable with them being able to build a database of all the sites that ask: “Hey, is Faraday over 18?” And then sell said database to marketers, the government, or heaven-knows-who?
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Services like that cost money, putting them out of reach for your average free-to-play online RP game/group.
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@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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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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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.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst said in Age Verification & Games:
Extremely controversial opinion: Minors on games aren’t inherently bad.
I don’t think it’s that controversial in theory, but in practice it’s a bit more complicated. In that specific case they obviously knew that the player was a minor with their parent’s permission, but I have no freaking clue how I, as a game-runner, would figure that out.
In terms of the broader tech sphere, I think non-sucking parental controls would be a better solution to the issue than this crap, but there are problems: a) it’s really hard to make something robust and standardized, b) there’s no profit motive for them to do so, especially when c) there’s a perverse incentive for the age-gate systems in data harvesting.
