The world loves the bears too much.

THANK GOD I was worried

You have earned the retirement, thanks for keeping the lights on and giving us all a relatively soft landing spot. I sometimes remember that the big drama that created this board took place in the Year of our Beelzebub 2022 and crumble to aged dust.

@nobody said:
The full post is about 5x longer that the section you cut it into, doesn’t ping as LLM written on any of the detectors, and, a bit more significantly considering the timing of your post, the bbpost and all of this happened 4 months ago.

This reads more like sour grapes than anything else.

Yeah this is kinda why I wanted more information, it feels like the kind of claim that’s sometimes designed just to get sympathy in these parts. Who the hell knows, though? I literally don’t even go here.

@MidnightCreature said:

I think if there’s any credibility behind that the staff was earnest in how difficult banning me was the right choice should be fairly easy. But these are also the same staffers that rammed one of my game lore write-ups through an LLM and posted the sloppified version of that document up on the game boards so… ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Mostly I’m quoting to highlight. Would love a Liberation staffer to respond to this because this hits me as pretty deeply Not OK if this is an accurate account of wtf happened.

I continue to genuinely think there are lurkers on this board who will be interested in this game and check it out based on this ad, even if I am…to put it mildly…not its audience. Which is why I have basically nothing to say about the use of LLM in it or any of its coded systems. It’s not for me and I shouldn’t opine on it. There are more players in the MU community than I think is readily apparent, even if they just dip in and out of new games more often than not, and there are always more people who just casually read a board like this than post on it actively. Especially if saying they like something is unlikely to be received positively by the regulars. So I think advertising here was kinda laudable given it got exactly the reception one would expect…up to a point. There’s a point beyond which you’ve done all you can do and just have to do your thing and see how people respond to it when it’s live, though. The ad post is there, people will read it, it’s not bogged down in all the tangents.

Also, yes, as @catzilla said there are currently more active threads about this game/tangentially related to this game than there is about anything else, and they are asking questions.

FUCK YEAH IT’S TIME

@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.

@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.

@Tez said:
There’s something to be said about the fact that we are more comfy with killing someone. This might not be the best venue for that, but there is something to be said.

I’m not unsympathetic to the view that violence in media gets a pass and sex in media doesn’t, at least in American media. I agree with this broadly speaking.

But.

I think there’s a mischaracterization here of how at least some games, including ones I’ve been a part of, draft rules around this and Social Contract type language. It’s not like rape RP is always put in its own box as the only thing anyone cares about. Sometimes it is but it’s often not. These have also included broad language on what kind of violence is and isn’t going to be involved in plots, how physical and psychological torture is handled, etc. I’ve seen red/yellow/green lights players list on their character pages becoming more common and like…some of it’s sex, some of it’s torture, some of it’s spiders.

This thread’s about sexual assault, though, so people are talking specifically about rules around SA content.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@Pyrephox said:

I think there’s a difference between allowing IC sexual assault (or other taboo) content, and providing code that allows one player to expose another to that content without their OOC consent.

Yeah, I think these are two pretty separate conversations. I’m largely ambivalent to sexual assault themes as just part of RP, except that I think they’re frequently poorly-handled. But it’s up to staff how much they want to deal with that. Your game doesn’t get totally taken over by that because one PC runs a personal plot involving SA imo.

If you’re taking the time to code a whole system for something then I assume it’s a focus of RP that’s going to come up a lot and attract people who are on the game for that.

@Tez said:
I am increasingly in the place where I would prefer to see as place that allows SA content as long as it is tagged and people can avoid as appropriate.

Is there a lack of these places?

This is an actual question since it’s not really a space I play in, so I’m working off some suppositions that may not be accurate here. But I think you might also be perceiving a lack of it because of the spaces you typically play in and the people you typically play with.

I haven’t spent a lot of time on games like Shang but I assume non-con RP is fairly common, since it’s a fairly common sexual fantasy.

Sex games and fetish RP isn’t really what the question is about, though, I think. But this thread was prompted by a non-sex (or at least non we’re all about sex all the time idk that guys’ life) game that has literal coded ways to handle rape RP. And I wasn’t aware Haven closed (???) until the threads about the person using parts of its codebase popped up. I also don’t presume it’s unique in terms of the type of RP it has, just how detailed the code around it was.

@Shygaming
What’s your relationship the original staffers on Haven?

This might’ve been covered elsewhere but also maybe not.

TBH we’re probably entering a ‘there should be a split-off discussion thread’ portion of the proceedings. I suspect some lurkers would be interested in this (it ain’t my bag but I wish it well in its travels etc).

@Yam
Such is always the way.

Mostly I’d find the idea of a game where someone declares ‘no children NPCs exist’ an overreach that’d makes the world feel less real. Humans, especially if they aren’t all 22 years old, end up with children. I barely see them, anyway, it tends not to be part of the RP fantasy for most players, so to me it’d feel like a solution in search of a problem. I’ve played characters with kids before and it’s generally added an interesting dimension to that RP, though I usually contrive reasons for them to be off-screen a lot of the time.

@Pavel
Grammarly is the tool I assumed was being referenced without anyone saying it directly. I used to use it just as a spelling and grammar-checker, too, but it’s been completely taken over by AI ‘features’ in ways that people seem to feel gives them cover when they say ‘oh I didn’t rewrite this with AI I used just Grammarly’. My friends in Beelzebub, you had Grammarly rewrite it and AI it up, that is what happened.

I have no doubt there’s more going on under the hood with Word these days than just spell-checking in ways where I don’t want to turn it loose on something I wrote but I haven’t felt like the red under-lines are doing anything too weird…yet.

Their “game info” guide pulled what appears to be a picture of random Meta/Facebook employees to show what kind of character you can play.

The depth of gibberish is kind of amazing, I thought I’d seen some clanker slop before but this is the MOST clanker.