Age Verification & Games
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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. -
@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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@Evilgrayson I was going to reply with this as well. Age of consent even varies between US states, and Romeo & Juliet laws make things even weirder. However, this would be more like sexual communications and there may be stricter or less strict regulations than the age of consent in various jurisdictions. Sort of like how there is fraud and then there is wire fraud or how a jurisdiction can have an age of consent under 18 but minors still can’t perform sexually in front of an audience or for a camera. Someone with more legal knowledge would have to opine.
EDIT: I should also point out that Bahrain and Cameroon have an age of consent of 21. So even a minimum age of 18 could arguably not be safe from liability.
Age of majority (adulthood) varies even more. Alabama, Nebraska, South Korea, and several Canadian provinces have ages of majority of 19. New Zealand and Thailand have it set at 20. Mississippi, Puerto Rico, Singapore, and several African and Central American/Caribbean countries have it set at 21.
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@Ominous On the forum PBP and Discord game side of the RP world, I see a lot of 21-25+ minimum age.
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I started MU*ing in elementary school but I was 100% raised wrong.
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@Evilgrayson Fair. As an American I sometimes forget the rest of the world exists except in so far as their time zones are inconvenient to my rp.
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@catzilla said in Age Verification & Games:
@Ominous On the forum PBP and Discord game side of the RP world, I see a lot of 21-25+ minimum age.
I suppose an easy way to see if someone is 25+ is to show them various kinds of painkiller and ask which they take regularly.
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@Pavel Ask them to name their favorite two Nirvana songs that aren’t Smells Like Team Spirit.
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@Ominous we’re still waiting for you to name one Nirvana song
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@hellfrog said in Age Verification & Games:
@Ominous we’re still waiting for you to name one Nirvana song
omg, needed that laugh.
