The SA In Games Thread (Good Luck)

Third Eye

@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.

Kestrel

@catzilla said:

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.

Roz

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.