@Tez Trust a private party with my government ID in exchange for the privilege of using their role play space? I don’t even trust the government with my government ID. Hard pass.

@Tez I think that with the collapse of regulation in the US, you can probably cover your ass with a weasely enough “terms of use” mandatory click through if you’re the kind who cares about such things. I agree that especially in this hobby the chances of encountering underage players is slim, but I also wouldn’t neglect to have at least a stated age policy that reflects whatever level of intensity my game’s plot and themes would include.

Players are always going to TS, and that’s not a bad thing, but one who claims responsibility for a game (which not all game runners will do!) should at least make reasonable accomodations to their game’s longevity and success that include dealing with the potential for inter-player abuse. Then again, for many I’m sure the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

@RightMeow Discord tried to roll out user age verification by ID or facial photo in the US and were met with massive backlash, partially because the company they were using to do the verification had ties to Palantir and partially because the stored data has been hacked with a few guesses and was breached totally. Sadder still, this isn’t the first time they had stored ID info hacked and pushed to the web. Further, it exposed the fact that they’ve been using “AI” to make dossiers on their users and determine their likely age based off behavior and what they engage with, which they are still doing. They said they will push for some kind of age verification again down the road. Totally enshittified.

@hellfrog If they already think the rest of humanity are NPCs then it’s real easy to make the jump to outsourcing their writing to a plagiarism engine.

@Prototart How fucking dare you call me out like this. I mean, what?

Every single time I discovered that a staffer was behind an unmarked player character I felt a sense of violation. I felt like players were automatically presumed to be guilty of something so bad it mandated a system to allow them to be spied upon. Distrust as a default.

I absolutely believe staff deserve to play on the game they help run. I absolutely also believe that they are to be held to a higher standard that should not make them afraid to reveal who they are. If they want to play without that pressure they can go to other games or they can find other outlets or just become a regular player. Nobody forced them to be staff.

Please consider my remarks in light of the notoriously OOC masq-heavy WoD games which make up nearly all of my MUSH experience. And thank you to nearly all staff of the games I’ve been on, because the majority of them were open about these things and their hard work and trust made the fun for me and countless others possible.

@Jennkryst

@catzilla The relationship is that I experienced a wave of traumatic memories at the sameness of behavior from the player of Haruka on Liberation when the behaviors of the above troublemaker in this thread were described, so much as to feel like it’s the same person when it was quite likey not.

The commentary I’m making is that there are far too many people with that behavior pattern in this community.

The follow-on is that for as traumatized as I have been by the experience, I am thankful it was not worse, as it demonstrably could have been.

I’m so glad I never knew who Haruka wanted to fuck, and I’m even more glad it was never my character. IYKYK.

@Superbia That’s a “Y’all are going on The List,” kinda situation. :v

I wonder how well Index Card RPG could translate to MU*. It’s been my favorite tabletop system for years because it is sufficient to distinguish your character and handle power scales while also staying out of the way and being blessedly lightweight.

@MisterBoring This sounds dangerously close to caring for and protecting the player base. Is that even allowed?

Gene Shalit. One of those people I’d just subconsciously presumed would never leave us.

@howyadoin When it works it’s so good. I am acutely sensitive to the question, “Are you sure?” XD

I have had someone try to weaponize this the opposite of this concept against me, an online game’s GM telling me, “I don’t think that’s what’s what your character would do,” and it’s one of the most infuriating memories I have from tabletopping. Turned out they were very corrupt and regularly gaslighted many of their players.

Now that I vented lol, nice article, thanks for sharing. The “Same Page” tool they reference is a great concept to apply, this is a huge part of what session zero is about for me. I think you can articulate this well enough to translate it to online games and even online games with strangers, you just gotta make sure your leadership reports on and enforces it broadly which means they need to be personally aware of what players are up to.

Speaking from personal experience here, as a helper to staff and a player in a place where I dealt with Wikibara for about a year, Numetal/Retromux staff made the right call. Wiki made the wrong call, and keeps calling back. Having seen the ban post in whole, all I thought was “lol, lmao.” As my grams would put it, “He’s a pill.” But anyone who’s read this far already knows it.

For the record I have never made contact with Numetal/Retromux, so the below is no apologism for a certain game or policy, just my general views.

Community curation is often as vibes-based as it is formal. This means that statistically sometimes a person will be excluded from a game when they could have made it better, but it also means that a good leadership team will be erring on the side of caution so that players who could have brought cultural dissonance to a whole game are less likely to make it through approval.

Imagine or recall if you’ve already seen it, how long it can take to eject a bad-for-the-community-but-not-technically-rule-breaking player from a game after approval and then let out a sigh of relief along with me that in at least this case, nobody had to go through that.

What’s the real takeaway, here, though? Always keep receipts. 🧾

@Juniper You’d hate Luffy.

@Jennkryst Skanking? Squicking? Skullfucking? The people need to know!

@Gashlycrumb I showed my husband the series The Human Animal last year and it took me back to when I watched it during the original US broadcast. I had to sneak watching it because my religious household forbade secular television, and looking back I’m pretty sure it is part of what helped me eventually break the spell of religion and find peace with a scientific world view. Thanks for everything, Desmond.

Here’s a link to the mini series. https://archive.org/details/vid-20230113-091100

@Ashkuri
Schadenfreude.
It’s easier than keeping up with telenovelas.
Camaraderie in that I’m not the only one in the world recovering from the worst of such places/people.
Nostalgia that I’m not the only one who also had some incredibly lovely experiences with some places/people.
Confirmation I did the right thing by moving on to other hobbies.

Human complexity, in short.