The SA In Games Thread (Good Luck)
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@Tez
That’s fair. This thread is, shall we say, far-reaching in what people are talking about in any given post. I’m doing my best not to engage with the broad sociological stuff, honestly, I just don’t think this is a venue where I’m going to have a conversation about it in ways that I’m going to find worthwhile, even if I might be able to do that with individual posters one-to-one. I’ve tried to keep my own thoughts on this subject to what own experiences and why I approach this content like I do in spaces I have some power over. I do think that’s important even if I don’t agree with how every game or player handles it. -
This thread is, shall we say, far-reaching in what people are talking about in any given post.
I can barely keep tense correct in my poses, you expect me to keep scale correct in my forum posts? Unreasonable!
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
@Faraday said:
Pavel is probably right
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@Pavel
LOL I didn’t mean to get judgey about anyone’s scale. Obviously some people are getting something out of it and I leave them be.I wanna be specific about the scope of my own responses, though. This is a topic I’m interested in and I think there’s been good discussion in places.
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My opinion on this is pretty simple: I don’t see a need for sex in my RP (I much prefer stories about solving mysteries, fighting bad guys, and disassembling corrupt social structures), so I definitely don’t see a need for SA in any of it.
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There’s something to be said about the fact that we are more comfy with killing someone.
When someone is killed, they don’t have to live through the trauma.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
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.
I’m going to do the really, really stupid thing and put myself in a position of defending stuff I find incredibly repugnant, because while I agree with a lot of what you say, some of the stuff I disagree with and why I think can lead to a lot more harm.
Okay so the first example I find has a few problems. First, from what I’ve read, it just isn’t true about immersion in something necessarily causes someone to adopt that sexuality. Like, we are talking about really gross things illegal for very good reasons, but I don’t see how this is any different than conservatives arguing about people being ‘turned gay’ or becoming trans or any other kind of sexual identity that’s been demonized, and people are marginalized to… well, not infect people. We’re talking about something really bad, but the argument makes me acutely uneasy because it basically embraces a lot of the most harmful ‘nurture, not nature’ beliefs imo. Yeah I mean nature and nurture are really complex, and those things are really bad and we want to prevent people being victimized, but to me this really comes across as ‘gross thing is super gross and I want to find a real harm irl as a reason why it must be banned’ and I think that’s not true, and endorses things most of us would find really bad.
The second example has really huge problems and let me talk about why. Putting people in positions to try to protect consenting adults from themselves leads to Not Great Places really, really fast. Like I do not think the way we solve the Critical Top Shortage is by implying those tops are abusers, or that bottoms are bad because they enable them. I know that wasn’t what you were getting at, and yeah absolutely if someone in a position of authority on a game is actively trying to limit other people that could try to break up their harem, that’s really fucking bad. But I one thousand percent think it will be MUCH more common for ‘protecting’ people to come from a place of resentment and intense dislike of anyone involved, and use that as an excuse to attack them. Because this is something we see in this hobby like, daily. Everywhere. Constantly. Bitches eating crackers. It is vastly, vastly more common for people to decide that one person they dislike is evil because they got locked out of RP, and go after them with righteous fury to protect every lamb that has been duped by them.
And that’s why they gotta spam every newbie warning them off, and try to isolate them from RP. For their own good, ofc.
Anyways, I have no interest in allowing deeply traumatic themes like that or supporting them by code, and sure they gross me out, but I am just not comfortable like ascribing morality to it anymore than thinking everyone that PKs someone is a closeted serial killer irl.
Now if that same player does a reeeeeeeeally graphic murder and talks constantly in ooc about how much they are into it and really wish they could do it and it is what they live for then uh, yeah, maybe a red flag there. But I do not think that is exactly the norm.
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When someone is killed, they don’t have to live through the trauma.
I’m built different.
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When someone is killed, they don’t have to live through the trauma.
90% of the time, yeah, that’s it exactly.
If your setting includes the option for living PCs to become undead… maybe not?
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A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones is a really rape-y IP. Child-rape-y, even.
MU Rools were, no child sexy stuff at all, and;
Horrible bad things might happen to your PC without your by-the-instance consent, but you can always FTB on them, and SA isn’t one – if you don’t want your PC to experience that, the PC/NPC(s) in the position to do it will just happen to chose not to, as would-be-rapist-PC agency is of less interest than your well-being.
The trouble with this is that when people do choose to portray SA, the players portraying the characters surrounding them do not.
I don’t know anything about Haven, but coded systems specifically for SA are obviously saying that you expect and want it to be a significant part of the game. I expect very few MUSH players want that and most would prefer the opposite. The question is how far can one go to downplay or remove it from the setting before a dark gritty setting is too adulterated with strawberry mousse? (Probably pretty darn far, to be honest. I’ve never thought, ‘It’s just not realistic that nobody’s raping anybody around here’ even in grimdarq WoD-worlds.)
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I don’t know anything about Haven, but coded systems specifically for SA are obviously saying that you expect and want it to be a significant part of the game. I expect very few MUSH players want that and most would prefer the opposite.
Yeah. I don’t want coded SA or even coded sex. What I do want is coded realistic injury treatment. Did your PC get stabbed? Well, you better find someone that knows how to play Surgery Simulator…
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What I do want is coded realistic injury treatment
Sorry the code is stuck in female patient mode and it’s just suggesting you need to lose weight…
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
@Faraday said:
Pavel is probably right
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What I do want is coded realistic injury treatment
Sorry the code is stuck in female patient mode and it’s just suggesting you need to lose weight…
This is when we cause realistic injury to the code.
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Code.
For SA.
Where are the games with coded SA, please, so I can avoid the hell out of them and anyone who thinks this is fine?
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I wasn’t going to say anything in this thread but this is basically why I think SA has to either be banned or freely allowed.
The middle ground where it is technically possible but only if the victim OOCly opts into it turns it into CNC fetish play almost by definition. At that point the “evil rapist” isn’t actually imposing something horrible on another character. The two players have negotiated a rape fantasy together.
And I’ve seen that dynamic poison games before. I genuinely cannot count how many times I’ve seen some supposedly awful villain doing horrific things to another character while everyone involved OOC is having a wonderful time and the “victim” is actively helping arrange it. It stops functioning as an unpleasant consequence of living in a horrible setting and starts functioning as content being provided for people who want that content.
That is actually one of the reasons I don’t want a preference flag for it in Paroxysm. If I wanted to facilitate CNC RP then an opt in system would make perfect sense. I don’t.
That also doesn’t mean someone has to sit there and explicitly RP an assault they don’t want to write. Fade to black exists. You can draw boundaries around what has to be depicted without making whether the event itself can happen dependent on whether somebody finds the scenario appealing OOC.
I completely understand the argument for banning SA outright. I think that is a coherent policy. I also understand allowing it as part of a setting where players know what they are signing up for.
I just think “SA is allowed but only when everyone involved wants SA RP” produces something very different from either of those things.
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@Shygaming I’m pretty sure that requiring consent from all participants in a scene is somewhat more important than maintaining the authenticity of your SA roleplay, and it’s concerning how the opt-out method you’ve provided is FTB aka “just let it happen”.
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The middle ground where it is technically possible but only if the victim OOCly opts into it turns it into CNC fetish play almost by definition. At that point the “evil rapist” isn’t actually imposing something horrible on another character. The two players have negotiated a rape fantasy together.
counterpoint: instead of encouraging CNC fetish play, you’re instead enabling the people who are getting off on violating the other player, rather than the character. that is: the people for whom the enjoyment is in making the other player feel upset and being able to do stuff in the game to them the other player doesn’t want.
but also you’re still gonna get plenty of folks signing up for CNC fun. seems a little silly to get precious about it. like it just feels like "okay nobody better get gross and kinky and enjoy this, we’re above all that! it’s only okay to RP this if it makes the players miserable.
And I’ve seen that dynamic poison games before. I genuinely cannot count how many times I’ve seen some supposedly awful villain doing horrific things to another character while everyone involved OOC is having a wonderful time and the “victim” is actively helping arrange it. It stops functioning as an unpleasant consequence of living in a horrible setting and starts functioning as content being provided for people who want that content.
it seems weird to frame this as “a horrible thing is no longer being imposed on another character.” cause it is? like, in this scenario the character doesn’t want it. it’s just that the players are having fun while the characters aren’t. isn’t that usually the goal? is the goal instead for players to be upset/unhappy???
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That is actually one of the reasons I don’t want a preference flag for it in Paroxysm. If I wanted to facilitate CNC RP then an opt in system would make perfect sense. I don’t.
That also doesn’t mean someone has to sit there and explicitly RP an assault they don’t want to write. Fade to black exists. You can draw boundaries around what has to be depicted without making whether the event itself can happen dependent on whether somebody finds the scenario appealing OOC.
I completely understand the argument for banning SA outright. I think that is a coherent policy. I also understand allowing it as part of a setting where players know what they are signing up for.
I just think “SA is allowed but only when everyone involved wants SA RP” produces something very different from either of those things.
Players joining your game will know what they are signing up for, then, right? No, uh, jumpscares in cgen? Like there will be a big button on the login screen that says ‘by playing here you will be exposed to SA and may not opt out’, right?
Like people know this? Yes? Along with whatever other terrible things are possible?
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And I’ve seen that dynamic poison games before. I genuinely cannot count how many times I’ve seen some supposedly awful villain doing horrific things to another character while everyone involved OOC is having a wonderful time and the “victim” is actively helping arrange it. It stops functioning as an unpleasant consequence of living in a horrible setting and starts functioning as content being provided for people who want that content.
This has to be one of the most buckwild paragraphs I’ve ever read on any RP forum. I’m actually more weirded out by this than the opinions on SA stuff which is very much not my kink.
Why do you want people’s experience of a hobby to be bad?
Seek help.
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You want it in your game but you don’t want people to enjoy it too much?
If a game allows SA at all, I don’t see anyone signing up in the first place unless they’re into that. You aren’t gonna discover a group of very serious artistic writers who are willing to do this but like, not in a sinful way. Opt-in doesn’t matter to your target audience because they opted in by playing the game.
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And I’ve seen that dynamic poison games before. I genuinely cannot count how many times I’ve seen some supposedly awful villain doing horrific things to another character while everyone involved OOC is having a wonderful time and the “victim” is actively helping arrange it. It stops functioning as an unpleasant consequence of living in a horrible setting and starts functioning as content being provided for people who want that content.
This has to be one of the most buckwild paragraphs I’ve ever read on any RP forum. I’m actually more weirded out by this than the opinions on SA stuff which is very much not my kink.
Why do you want people’s experience of a hobby to be bad?
Seek help.
A story can only really work when characters are allowed to react to things in believable ways.
I don’t want the player’s experience to be bad. I want characters to sometimes have bad experiences because conflict and adversity are what make stories interesting.
Can you imagine how compelling The Handmaid’s Tale would have been if all the women were actually secretly into what was happening to them? If everyone in Gilead had enthusiastically consented then you have not made the story safer. You have removed the entire point of the story.
The same is true more broadly. A kidnapping story where the hostage wants to be kidnapped is not really a kidnapping story. A horror story where the victim wants to be hunted is something else entirely. A dystopia where everyone genuinely enjoys being oppressed has lost the thing that made it dystopian.
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