The SA In Games Thread (Good Luck)
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I think about this sometimes because by isolating sexual assault as something we just don’t do, we protect survivors from encountering it unexpectedly, but it also means that if a survivor’s story is going to be told it’s gonna be allegorical. It does bum me out a little that there are whole topics we just have to avoid out of… the necessity of the commons, can we handle this with randos.
IDK. IDK! It’s become a cheap storytelling hack for so many shitty writers to add angst / depth / occasionally even manpain, but on the other hand overcoming your abuser is a really powerful story potentially that we can’t tap.
With that said, I agree that MUSHes generally probably can’t handle it.
let it be a challenge to you
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Maybe I’m being too pearl clutch-y, but I don’t want SA in my games (for the most part). If it’s part of someone’s background or whatever, fine. I don’t want my PCs involved with it, I don’t want it being something the STs can do to PCs.
ETA because hellfrog’s post, CNC is fine because it’s two consenting adults. However, again I might be clutching my pearls too tightly but I don’t want that in my online games that aren’t specifically sex games or games where dealing with that sort of trauma is a theme.
It does pose the slippery slope thing. Again, I know how conservative talking point that sounds. There was literally someone in one of the linked reddit posts in the Haven thread talking about pedophilia being okay on a game because it’s two consenting adults behind the screen.
I dunno. I just want to play a werewolf chasing spirits (or whatever fantasy/etc game it is) and not have to worry about other PCs/NPC/STs SAing my character.
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@sao said:
With that said, I agree that MUSHes generally probably can’t handle it.If you want to tell stories revolving around sexual assault you have to be willing, as a staffer, to acknowledge that you’ll also be devoting your time to litigating player disputes about it and wading through content where it was badly-handled enough to drift up to you and cause drama.
This isn’t really how I want to spend my time. If someone does, like I said, I’m ambivalent about it. A game that allows those themes isn’t a red flag for me. But running these games takes pretty intense emotional labor and everyone is figuring out how to manage that in ways that keep them engaged. Not wanting being the rape RP conflict-solver to be a part of your day is all it usually is when SA is singled-out as something that’s not a part of day-to-day RP. That’s what it is for me, at least, I don’t think I’m a pearl-clutcher.
ETA: And, like I said above, I do think more games where this kind of content is fine exist than is generally apparent here. Whether or not they’re places this audience wants to play is another question, but nobody’s gonna make My Ideal Game but me, and sometimes not even then.
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I don’t want SA in my games (for the most part) CNC is fine because it’s two consenting adults […] It does pose the slippery slope thing
I personally want SA to exist in the game’s setting, like I don’t want to pretend we live in some utopia where it just doesn’t happen anymore. I err strongly on the side of not wanting it to happen on-screen. An example I’d be completely fine with is if, for example, our adventuring party is welcomed into a NPC nobleman’s hall. He greets our party, has a feast prepared for us, a quest to offer, and it’s in our best interests to befriend him. Then he introduces us to his teenage bride, young enough to be his daughter, who looks despondent and dissociative.
If here you’re squicked out and would nope out of the setting immediately that’s fine, ydy, I get why you feel that way.
Personally, I like this kind of story because to me it makes the setting a lot more real, morally complex, and interesting. Now it raises our stakes on what the characters should do, it gives them an opportunity to try and be heroes if they want to, to investigate the situation, or to choose inaction and commiserate/despair together at the sad state of this setting. But it complicates the simplicity of “yeah let’s take his quest and feast in his hall and he seems like a really great guy”. IMO it does so much more effectively than giving him a more fantastical flaw like, he’s secretly consorting with demons in his basement and plotting to kill the king or whatever. The former presented situation is instantly more real and it tells you about how power works politically here.
Where I’m actually less comfortable is CNC between players. I go back and forth on whether I’d allow it on a game I made. Sure, in theory, if two adult players consent to their rape fantasy RP then it’s none of my business, but:
- If other player characters find out this happened, now it is our business.
- I would never want to be in a position as staff to mediate whether someone was telling the truth about a rape scene being OOCly premeditated.
- I never want to be unwittingly seated in the proverbial cuck chair of someone’s fetish scenario, especially (and this has literally happened to me) if part of their fantasy involves roping in a white knight to shower them with sympathy and fight some villain for their honour. A villain they asked to do this who is probably their OOC friend or whatever.
So I lean towards it being far better to just disallow between characters altogether, and that if it is allowed, it needs a very clearly demarcated opt-in consent system that covers not just participants, but also any witnesses/confidants, similar to Silent Heaven’s consent checklist. Like if you wanna consent to having your bodice ripped, fine, but I didn’t consent to listening to your character cry about your OOC kinks.
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game staff are in the position of basically needing to be available to potentially arbitrate whatever content they allow on their game. so if a game’s staff doesn’t want to deal with a particular topic, they should feel free to disallow it. game themes are naturally exclusionary: every game has to define what it’s about and what’s allowed there, and that includes everything from “no guns in our medieval-esque fantasy game” to “none of this particular topic that is likely to need to be arbitrated eventually that i don’t personally want to arbitrate.”
i think decisions like that can be made alongside the acknowledgment that this is just one gamerunner deciding what they want to deal with on their game, and not a statement about whether it’s okay for two adults to RP a thing. it doesn’t have to be a judgment or condemnation.
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Hello, certified bodice ripping enjoyer here.
I make no claims that my interest is in the pursuit of high literary art or sophisticated character development. It is purely for my OOC enjoyment, though I do try to also play a serious and realistic character that is not just a caricature in a porno.
It’s interesting to read people’s thoughts on what it’s like to be the annoyed bystander to this kind of play and I find myself agreeing with a lot of it. Part of the reason I don’t get to engage in this kind of content very often is that I don’t want to bother other people with it. SA as a story beat is very dramatic and very infectious and there’s a good chance news of it will escape containment once in a while and reach people who don’t want to hear about it and don’t want to white knight. Which, valid.
Another challenge is that, as others have pointed out, if there’s 99 games that don’t allow SA and one that does, there’s a good chance that game is fucking bonkers because of who they attract. Often those games feature uhhhhh other stuff too, and I don’t want to play alongside that.
At least games like Paroxysm are upfront about the kind of content that they are allowing there so people can make their own decision about what they want to be exposed to. I think the creator of is in a little bit of denial though. It’s not going to be a storytelling game with cool features that happens to have SA. It’s gonna be the SA game.
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Maybe the safest and most sensible way to enjoy story-rich CNC RP is to just do it on a game that forbids it, but behind a closed door, in a private room that can’t be spied on, and contrive a reason to never tell anybody IC or OOC.
If I never have to hear about it, I’m not gonna kinkshame it.
This applies to about 99% of things that annoy me on MU* tbh.
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Take that to its natural conclusion and make a non-canon Discord scene, I suppose.
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I think there are three types of sexual assault roleplay that are worth differentiating.
- Players consent, but characters do not.
- Purely NPC-oriented sexual assault.
- Player(s) do not consent; game code forces/enables the assault anyway.
#3 is out, period. Code should never override a player’s agency in such a way; it is anathema to how I believe MU stories should be told.
#1 is kink play, and that’s mostly fine. But you should go into it with both eyes open and maximal trust in the other person to handle the subject matter safely, like any kink.
#2 is where I pause, because though I agree with @Kestrel that having sexual assault as a thing that happens particularly in real-life-simulating settings like WoD or other urban horror/fantasy type games does add a thick layer of juicy verisimilitude, I also agree with @hellfrog in that it’s rather hackneyed as a storytelling device.
There’s also a list of, like, three people I’d trust to run a place that has SA-RP not specifically banned and part of why I trust them to do so is precisely because they wouldn’t want to.
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- Player(s) do not consent; game code forces/enables the assault anyway.
#3 is out, period. Code should never override a player’s agency in such a way; it is anathema to how I believe MU stories should be told.
This was the thing that I found most immediately jarring about Jumpscare’s story. That shit was wild.
There’s also a list of, like, three people I’d trust to run a place that has SA-RP not specifically banned and part of why I trust them to do so is precisely because they wouldn’t want to.
YEAH. Like – Third Eye made a point that SA content probably exists plenty on games I’m not playing. Hearing people talk about it over the course of the day has increasingly convinced me that it is … difficult to imagine a world where random Joes can be trusted to run with such difficult themes.
Like, IDK, maybe the internet isn’t great at nuance.
I was talking to a buddy today and I think one of the reasons I am uncomfortable with what can feel like the sanitization of themes is because there is so much external pressure in the real world that threatens to sanitize whatever the current culture finds uncomfy.
Trans kids. Queer artists. Sexual content in general, when you look at payment processors.
It’s tough.
she/they
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I was talking to a buddy today and I think one of the reasons I am uncomfortable with what can feel like the sanitization of themes is because there is so much external pressure in the real world that threatens to sanitize whatever the current culture finds uncomfy.
I definitely agree. When one is forced to censor oneself lest the entire message is lost to external censorship—using grape and sewer-slide as euphemisms, for instance—it’s a very swift slippery slope towards Newspeak-style inability to express unpalatable concepts entirely.
On the one hand, I can understand that a company advertising Uncle Pavel’s Grain Breakfast Cereal doesn’t want their family-friendly advert placed alongside/before a serious discussion on a serious topic… but on the other I feel that if you run a global conversation system like your Tiktok, Youtube, whatever, then you have to sort of absorb the cost of those serious, important conversations.
But that’s a whole different thread, and we’re three forks deep. This is a forum, not a Linux distribution.
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@Tez
Nobody’s stopping anybody from running a game that explores these themes.Nobody can make me be the Rape RP Warden because I largely believe in freedom of expression, either, and I’m not going to feel bad about that.
I don’t think that’s self-censorship, though if somebody does and feels these themes are important enough to take on with the obvious baggage that comes with them, I genuinely wish them luck.
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Code should never override a player’s agency in such a way; it is anathema to how I believe MU stories should be told.
Hyperbolic example that is hyperbolic on purpose because I think there are some things that should actually be enforced, roleplay vs rollplay (everyone take a drink!):
I dodge the attack, even though you rolled eleventy-billion successes and it cannot be dodged, getting hit affects my agency.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
Code should never override a player’s agency in such a way; it is anathema to how I believe MU stories should be told.
Hyperbolic example that is hyperbolic on purpose because I think there are some things that should actually be enforced, roleplay vs rollplay (everyone take a drink!):
I dodge the attack, even though you rolled eleventy-billion successes and it cannot be dodged, getting hit affects my agency.
nah
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Code should never override a player’s agency in such a way; it is anathema to how I believe MU stories should be told.
Hyperbolic example that is hyperbolic on purpose because I think there are some things that should actually be enforced, roleplay vs rollplay (everyone take a drink!):
note the “in such a way” in that sentence. it wasn’t using an example for a general point about code vs player consent. it was talking specifically about that specific topic. that is: sexual assault of a character forced on a player.
it’s not hyperbole; it’s the literal topic of the thread.
she/her | playlist
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Code should never override a player’s agency in such a way; it is anathema to how I believe MU stories should be told.
Hyperbolic example that is hyperbolic on purpose because I think there are some things that should actually be enforced, roleplay vs rollplay (everyone take a drink!):
note the “in such a way” in that sentence. it wasn’t using an example for a general point about code vs player consent. it was talking specifically about that specific topic. that is: sexual assault of a character forced on a player.
it’s not hyperbole; it’s the literal topic of the thread.
This is fair and I missed the ‘in such a way’ bit, despite quoting it… I focused on the ‘never override’ half. Big oopsie on my part.
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@Pavel
I’m saving this along with my MSB banning screen shot.My goal is both to leave these for my next-of-kin to find one day, and for them to a non-MUSH person to whom this will never be explained.
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I’ll actually even answer that one. The dice code isn’t deciding anything, it’s telling you the result of dice. Players can chat about the result and decide to do something else if they so choose. Generally the result is obeyed, but there’s agency there to negotiate exactly what a dice result means.
As it was described, the assault code forced the assault. You weren’t forced to RP it, but you were forced to have had assault happen to your character. No discussion, no negotiation, no wiggling. Your character was assaulted. No choice, no decision, no nothin.
ETA: Code should guide roleplay; it should not absolutely decide anything.
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I was talking to a buddy today and I think one of the reasons I am uncomfortable with what can feel like the sanitization of themes is because there is so much external pressure in the real world that threatens to sanitize […] Sexual content in general, when you look at payment processors.
There is generally a cultural pushback whenever things head too far in a certain direction. I personally think the sexual liberation movement peaked with Gen X & Millennials.
I don’t trust anyone who believes in any kind of extremes. All of life is nuanced and shades of grey. You can have too much of a good thing. All or nothing radical thinking is something I consign to my 20s. You can have too many cats. You can add too much garlic. You can have too much sexual liberation.
My generation grew up with Sex and the City, American Pie, and widely available internet porn which, I recall on first inquisitive viewing, being genuinely baffled to even try and comprehend how the depicted acts were physically possible. And in all candour, I don’t think my life has been terribly enriched by gaining this knowledge.
We grew up with Cool Girl before it had the name Cool Girl; this idea that a person (but especially a woman) is invalid unless they perform extreme sexuality without limits.
Within this framework, a person is not a person, they are parts. They do not have wants and needs, they have status to earn and prove. I do not see that as “sex positive”, I see that as a broken and fragmented understanding of sexual identity as a kind of fashion accessory, much like stiletto heels, displayed even if it hurts, and existing separate from the actual person.
I am strongly of the opinion that these dynamics play out in online games and communities as well. I’ve seen them play out on Haven, IRE games (the latter of which I played mostly while underage, and were not marketed as “sex games”), and even the chillest and most expertly run MUSHes I’ve played.
I think it is blind to ignore the ways in which these experiences can cause real harm to players, both through other players and their own choosing. A couple examples:
- A player writes a fantasy in which his adult character engages in incest with an underage character. This is repeatedly training his mind to associate sexual desire and arousal with the fantasy of an underage family member. It’s not his fault if these fantasies already lay dormant, but it is his fault and his choice to reinforce and further explore them. I cannot be convinced that this is unlikely to cause future harm to his ability to maintain an appropriate view and relationship with his own underage family members.
- A game has a skewed gender ratio, more female than male. Because of this, male characters are in high demand by partner-seeking heterosexual female characters. This gives the players of male characters an advantage to pit female characters against each other in competition. It encourages the players of female characters to seek to prove themselves sexually above other female characters, to settle for unequal nonmonogamous arrangements, to ignore mistreatment by the players of male characters, to alter their characters and storytelling for male approval, and to blur IC/OOC boundaries in order to retain their attention. I cannot be convinced that a male-led harem on this game can truly be assumed to be fully consensual, on the part of potentially lonely players using this game as a source of self-esteem and validation, or that it fosters healthy dynamics. I don’t think it’s good for men to ride this kind of ego trip, and I don’t think it’s good for women to vicariously experience this erosion of self through a sexual fantasy that isn’t even really her own.
None of this is to say that sexual RP should be disallowed or even discouraged. I engage, have engaged, and will continue to engage in graphic sexual RP.
But I personally try to be incredibly mindful of the ways that sexual RP can cause harm both to myself and others. I try to notice unhealthy dynamics, some of which spark concern, others anger and moral disgust, because I’ve been on the receiving end and know firsthand the profound degree of psychic damage they can cause. It would absolutely kill me, were I staffing any kind of game, to imagine that my action or inaction had caused that kind of harm to someone else.
I’m not just worried about children. The players of online roleplaying games tend to originate from a baseline crop that, IME, is on average more neurodivergent, less mentally and emotionally stable, less romantically/sexually successful in real life, etc., and that creates a fertile ground for exploitation and abuse. I’m not at all comfortable with anyone who washes their hands of having to ever think about that by simply saying, “they’re adults”. I’m especially concerned when game staff say stuff like this, because it makes me wonder how they handle parasocial attachment from their players, when in a position of power.
And again, this is not to say that SA RP specifically should be allowed or disallowed, etc. But it is to say that I very strongly reject any kind of blasé attitude that it is always acceptable so long as it occurs between adults and is technically consensual. Nothing is, IMO.
Consent is a lot more complex than many people here are giving credit. Consent is not a moral blank cheque or a get out of jail free card. If you harmed someone, you harmed them. You can also harm yourself. It’s not magically fine regardless of surrounding context just because they nodded and said, “harder daddy” while clearly bleeding.
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