Haven

[Yam]

@bear_necessities That sucks too! It all sux! BOO HAVEN

[Kestrel]

@Yam said:

I thought we were just dunking on the people that coded a system where you lose attractiveness points if you EAT TOO FAST and lose points for fucking someone unattractive but it’s ONLY IF THEY ARE A WOMENS. That’s fuckin’ nuts!! Here we are as a community dunking on it!! WHAT THE HECK

So like I’m confused, why does all this suck then?

What if I’m a guy and my kink is subby chicks who wanna be slut-shamed and told to wear make-up and heels or they’re not attractive. And if they’re not attractive I can’t be seen banging them because then I’d be seen as less attractive for having banged an uggo.

What if my five gfs are into that, who are you to tell us that sucks? Everyone consents! I mean maybe they’re desperate for the validation they derive from this game and the attention of its limited mens, and they know that if they say they don’t like it they’ll be told they aren’t cool and are annoying. And maybe I’m friends with staff, so they worry they’ll be excluded from story if they aren’t part of my inner circle. But so what! Still, they consent!

And if none of that makes you uncomfortable to think about then so be it, you’re ideologically consistent in also being a free speech absolutist who sees kinkshaming as tantamout to bigotry.

But if it does make you uncomfortable, then own up to the fact that you do not genuinely think that what two (or in this example six) adults type to each other on the internet to get off is, in fact, totally meaningless and harmless so long as the magic spell of “consent” was cast.

[Yam]

@Kestrel I was honestly just trying to make a thread and hear about what kind of game Haven was. It sounds bananas. I think that the shit that Jumpscare described is absolutely bonkers. I hope I made that clear! I thought it was so absurd that it didn’t need clarification, but I realize that things have gotten a bit muddied.

I don’t agree with some of the folk in this thread. Pure kink games kind of stick out like a sore thumb in this forum, and it feels like Haven was a pure kink game.

To be crystal clear, it’s fucked up. The SA button is fucked up, the coded sexism, anything with kids, christ, apparently that was also against the rules at Haven? I’m not sure, I didn’t look too hard at that thread. I think even Shang doesn’t allow the underage stuff? So it seems we as a community decide it was a no-go!

It’s fucked and it sucks! I can’t speak for anyone else. Genuinely sorry if I wasn’t clear.

[Kestrel]

Purely for clarification, paedophilia RP was not against Haven’s rules, as set out by Tyr and largely enforced by Discordance.

Daed, as story staff, largely did not have the authority to enforce rules, nor to act against players who irked his personal distaste. His job was just orchestrating the game’s overarching metaplot.

When he PK’d a character played by Tykune, whom he caught engaging in paedophilia RP, that was actually not within the technical scope of what he ought to have been doing as story staff. In the most technical sense, arguably that was an abuse of staff power. It’s just that literally no one was mad about it, except I guess for Tykune, who still crashes out about it on Reddit every so often. Also about being denied the right to play an anthropomorphic bunny rabbit by Legend of the Jedi’s staff, but that’s a whole other story.

I think I probably hold some sort of record for most forum-banned/channel-muted Haven player so it probably goes without saying that I don’t give a flying fuck about whether Daed was allowed to do that or not per Haven’s largely unwritten, vibes-based rules, and I’m not saying any of this to shame him, because I don’t think he was in the wrong.

But it’s probably a good example of how Wild West Haven’s community management style is, with no actual bannings or rules, just the unspoken expectations that players/staff will bully each other in a prolonged war of attrition if anyone does anything widely regarded as objectionable. Which doesn’t mean objectionable stuff didn’t happen. But if anyone is under the impression that Haven’s playerbase was largely fine with or involved in that stuff, that would be demonstrably incorrect. I guess it would be analogous to saying anyone still on Twitter is a Nazi paedophile because of Grok. I mean, I’m not on Twitter, I think Twitter sucks and we should boycott it, but a relative of mine is an incredibly unopinionated STEM professor who mostly just uses it to post links to recent studies and congratulate his students on their accomplishments.

[Jumpscare]

@Kestrel said:

What if my five gfs are into that, who are you to tell us that sucks? Everyone consents!

Nobody consented to the hidden sexist game mechanics that apply to every character universally.

[Trashcan]

I’m reluctant to make this post but I can’t not make this post.

It reads to me that, in the interest of avoiding kink-shaming, some suggestions have been made in this thread about how to approach determining whether something is okay to write about and that the line should be set where “the authors are consenting adults” and “no actual X are involved.”

I don’t agree. “No actual X are involved” allows any sort of activity to be written about and as long as it’s somebody’s kink this is meant to be okay. It frees me to open Auschwitz MU, so long as no actual Jews are involved. I strongly hold that there is a line where something being a kink does not excuse engaging with that topic unequivocally, where it should not be shielded from society condemning engaging with that topic, and that “no actual X involved” is a terrible test for drawing that line.

I agree that kink-shaming in most cases is bad. However, if your priors could lead you to write things like “no actual children are involved in AI-generated or artist-rendered CSAM, so what is the harm?” you need to reexamine your priors.

[sao]

@Trashcan i kind of agree with you but going to the Aushwitz place during the week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is a flag on the play.

[Juniper]

For all Haven’s flaws it does wonders for the activity of this board.

[Pavel]

So whenever someone says that they’re not worried about the extremes when it comes to MUing, you can remind them that Haven existed and enough people thought it was neat for long enough that it’s getting a spiritual successor.

[NotSanni]

@Pavel said:

So whenever someone says that they’re not worried about the extremes when it comes to MUing, you can remind them that Haven existed and enough people thought it was neat for long enough that it’s getting a spiritual successor.

technically still exists as the developer constantly reiterates the game, with two spiritual successors currently (duskholm i think, and then this paroxysm one now) done by people who aren’t the OG dev

[Yam]

I regret this thread so much

How do I delete my life choices

[junipersky]

@Yam

Live and learn young one.

[hellfrog]

@Yam said:

I regret this thread so much

How do I delete my life choices

drugs

[Shygaming]

@Pavel said:

So whenever someone says that they’re not worried about the extremes when it comes to MUing, you can remind them that Haven existed and enough people thought it was neat for long enough that it’s getting a spiritual successor.

People generally do not take on a massive unpaid second job as hobbyist developers unless the thing they actually want to play cannot be found somewhere else. If there were more roleplay focused games with a genuinely competitive focus I absolutely would not be putting this amount of effort into Paroxysm. I would just go and play one of them.

So I would not really take the existence of successors as evidence that people thought everything about Haven was great. Sometimes it just means there were parts of the game people genuinely liked and nobody else is making anything that scratches the same itch.

I also think people pleasers usually make terrible hobbyist developers. If you are constantly compromising your vision to try to keep everyone happy then eventually you stop making an actual game and end up with a chatroom that has some mechanics bolted onto the side.

I’m not going to play defense squad for anyone here. But I do think Tyr left the hobby in a better state than he found it.

Whatever criticisms people have of him personally or of the direction Haven took over the years. The codebase itself is an incredible starting point for anyone wanting to build their own project. It represents years of work and an enormous amount of his life. People can now build things that otherwise might have taken years just to get off the ground.

I think that deserves some acknowledgement.

[Jennkryst]

@Trashcan said:

I strongly hold that there is a line where something being a kink does not excuse engaging with that topic unequivocally, where it should not be shielded from society condemning engaging with that topic, and that “no actual X involved” is a terrible test for drawing that line.

I agree, and would like to curveball this into a somewhat silly scenario that gives further reason why ‘no actual X involved’ is a dumb defense. In the form of a meme. Perhaps a GIF, even.