Why is Pack closing?

[Meg]

hello, i just dropped into this thread to state that i don’t even RP anymore.

[mietze]

@Meg that’s good, it’s the first step towards being the voice for the voiceless!

[Meg]

@mietze i’m just WAITING for the DMs to come rolling in for those people that don’t feel comfortable to talk to you bullies that do RP.

[mietze]

@Polk I think that many games do have that. Or try their hardest. Unfortunately we also have long memories and many people after getting a bad experience on one game with reporting are very shy about doing it ever again. There’s no easy solution. Just that we’ll all have to keep trying. Calling out that shit when one sees it in public or in a log, even if it’s not targeted at you. Kicking people off for it, without some legalistic X amount of chances first. Making behavioral expectations clear. I think there have been huge improvements towards that culturally in many circles. There are a lot more people I trust to make good decisions now in the community that I would have felt in the past.

[Cobalt]

Woah, I took a nap for a couple of hours and the train rolled off the tracks like Charles was chasing them.

A couple of things:

1. Thank you again to everyone for the support. I appreciate it. It is nice to know that I wasn’t overreacting or being overly sensitive because of my own personal experiences.

2. This hasn’t put me off of running a game. It has, currently, put me off of running shapeshifter-centered games. I do have an idea for a new game that I’m idly workshopping the theme/setting for with friends and peeps in discord. But I’m moving in literally a matter of days, so I’m not really in the space to start actually doing the work to make it be something other than an idea in my head.

3. I do not believe anyone was blaming me for creepers being around because I opened a shapeshifter-centric game. I do, however, agree that there is something about shapeshifter-centric games that appeals to creepers. Most likely all the fiction out there where shapeshifters are primal, alpha, dominating creatures. I thought I had done enough to combat this when I wrote my theme files and that those sort of social hierarchies did not exist in my game world, but apparently I did not.

[Roadspike]

@GF I get what you’re saying, and to some degree I agree with it.

But I also don’t think that any (or at least that most) of the comments above were coming at it from that perspective. I, at least, read them as being more like, “Oh yeah, that setting/theme has some problematic structures that can draw in creepers (as well as perfectly reasonable people), so it’s extra-hard to run a game in that theme because creepers flock to that theme.”

It’s not saying that it’s anyone’s fault, or that there’s any guilt to be had, just acknowledging that certain structures and themes can draw in people who like to push the envelope – because the envelope is already larger than in other themes/settings.

To @mietze’s and @Cobalt’s points, all themes attract creepers, because creepers don’t care about anyone else. I do think that some make it easier to creep on, because more “out there” behavior is acceptable either in the explicit setting or the assumed setting (the difference between WoD and The Pack, from what I’ve read: these behaviors are baked into the WoD setting, and it was assumed that they applied to The Pack because of other similarities between the settings). Comic games can also be problematic because of histories of misogyny and sexualizing characters in comics.

That said I appreciate the vigilance against victim-shaming, and definitely see how it could have been taken that way – I didn’t take it that way, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t legit to take it that way.

[Pavel]

Alright folks, official modvoice time: If you tell someone to stop talking, and they say they’re going to stop talking, don’t just immediately tag them in the conversation again. It’s no bueno.

[bear_necessities]

For what it’s worth, at no point did I demand silence from anyone nor do I have the authority to make such demands. I merely asked for the targeting of a single person in this thread over semantics to stop because it was getting nonsensical.

But please, carry on.

[GF]

@Roadspike Your response is very nice and did not harm me in any way, but back there at the end of the argument I noticed myself having a little panic attack because the responses I’ve mostly received have stirred up some shit that I don’t want to talk about. I’m still kind of dealing with that right now, so–and again, nothing you said contributed to this; I’m only writing this as a response to you in this because, ironically, you having done me no harm gives me faith that you will be good enough to honor this request–I’d appreciate not being tagged in this thread for a little while.

I hate to ask you to do that at all instead of taking responsibility and blocking this thread in a way that prevents notifications, but I haven’t yet figured out a way to do that, if there is one. Please forgive me the presumably unnecessary drama.

[Pavel]

@GF

Set it to ‘Ignoring’.

[helvetica]

@Pavel I mean, could you have done that without tagging.

[Roz]

I also don’t know that ignoring a thread will keep you from getting notifications of specifically being tagged in it.

[Pavel]

@Roz It doesn’t. But it’s a decent enough step.

[Tez]

@Pavel It does seem to work, actually! Just made Roz be a test monkey.

[Testament]

You can also just set individual people to ignore as well. Sometimes, that’s probably more useful than just setting a whole thread to ignore.

[Pavel]

@Tez said in Why is Pack closing?:

@Pavel It does seem to work, actually! Just made Roz be a test monkey.

Huh, neat. I don’t think it used to.

[mietze]

I never played on the game but when I was looking at it I thought the policies and theme were very clear FWIW!

I do think there’s a chunk of people who just ignore and do what they want and then claim But I Didn’t Know.

Like in a certain game that makes it very clear there’s no prostitutes there would still be people putting that in their backgrounds talking about it like at least a couple of years later.

Games that say full gender equity still will have people flouting that constantly.

And a lot of the time the people doing that are the problem people go figure!

So I wouldn’t at all chalk this up to policies not being clear necessarily. I’ve just known far too many people that are purposefully ignorant, flout very clear policies, ect.

I do think sometimes folks are too nice about letting “nice, non problematic” people slip a bit (though most of the time those folks are problematic too just not to the same degree) but I also think that being overly draconian also seems to not solve them problem either.

Well, fuck. I don’t know.

[Third Eye]

@mietze said in Why is Pack closing?:

Games that say full gender equity still will have people flouting that constantly.

The amount of theme-correction I felt like I had to do when staffing on Battlestar Galactica games about this, to people who claimed to be fans of the show…idk. I do not know. I def agree people will just play the thing they want to play and ignore what the game actually is often enough, and they aren’t worth worrying about until they bring other players along for the ride (which is an aggravating amount of the time).

[helvetica]

@Third-Eye said in Why is Pack closing?:

@mietze said in Why is Pack closing?:

full gender equity

theme-correction

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Third-Eye said in Why is Pack closing?:

@mietze said in Why is Pack closing?:

Games that say full gender equity still will have people flouting that constantly.

The amount of theme-correction I felt like I had to do when staffing on Battlestar Galactica games about this, to people who claimed to be fans of the show…idk. I do not know. I def agree people will just play the thing they want to play and ignore what the game actually is often enough, and they aren’t worth worrying about until they bring other players along for the ride (which is an aggravating amount of the time).

Just blow them up in the fucking tubes

The other lesson here:

“Don’t just let players write theme wiki.”