Age Verification & Games
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Guys, do you know that if you want to RP on discord, people want to send you a picture of your GOVERNMENT ID?
It made me think about our community, age verification, age verification attempts of yesteryear. I feel like at a certain point I stopped saying all players should be 18 or older because I just assumed that anyone who showed up would be.
Do people still try to verify player ages? What do you do?
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@Tez I don’t discord. I know. I know. I’m old and out of touch or something. But… they want your ID? I guess I get it, but that makes me uncomfortable. Is that normal?
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@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.
Got what you wanted, lost what you had.
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@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.
Got what you wanted, lost what you had.
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I still see the blanket ‘if you agree to the terms of service you state you’re over 18’ pretty often but I’m sure not giving my driver’s license to some random MUSH admin lol. I can’t imagine anyone asking, people used to get up in arms about giving out even their email address, idk that it would fly.
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@RightMeow said in Age Verification & Games:
@Tez I don’t discord. I know. I know. I’m old and out of touch or something. But… they want your ID? I guess I get it, but that makes me uncomfortable. Is that normal?
They haven’t asked for mine bc my account’s so old, but I’m 100% out if they ever do. I don’t even trust them enough for to pay for Nitro, no way am I giving them my ID.
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@Muscle-Car said in Age Verification & Games:
especially in this hobby the chances of encountering underage players is slim
Underage players have been playing in this hobby since the 90s. With the resurgence of TTRPGs among teenagers, I wouldn’t be surprised if some number of them stumble into text-based games.
But regardless of whether they’re there or not, MUs most likely do (or will) fall under some of the recent age verification laws imposed by places like Texas and Australia. EU regulation is probably coming soon. A “I’m over 18 I swear” tickbox is not sufficient under these regulations.
Even big companies are struggling to figure out how to conform to these rules. On a MU? Good luck.
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I have encountered multiple confirmed underage players on MUDs.
In one incident about 4 years ago, the game had a Discord server with an active voice chat. A player told us openly they were 17 and applying for university the following year. A second player whom I believe was roughly my age (Millennial) then proceeded to repeatedly and frequently hit on the underage player. What frustrated me is that when I tried reporting the issue, I was told that the underage player had a reputation for acting horny and liking that kind of attention, so it was probably OK. I spoke to the underage player directly about the issue, who made clear to me that the older player hitting on them made them extremely uncomfortable, and that they wanted it to stop.
It does happen, and people should be extremely vigilant about it.
In all candour, I started playing MUDs when I was 11. Stuff did happen. I recall a 12 year old girl on the same MUD had that same kind of “reputation” with older male players in the community, and in hindsight, I genuinely can’t believe staff just let that happen. Dark side of the freeze-peach crowd, IME.
Personally, I am fully in favour of age verification laws, based on these experiences. And I’m in the UK where they’ve already been rolled out.
The issue generally isn’t TS. Like, whatever, teens masturbate. It’s that people tend to take these conversations OOC, where there is a power imbalance between younger/older players, which enables predators. Particularly on games which tend to be rife with mentally unstable individuals, and settings which tacitly promote all kinds of fetishes (and I’m not just talking about sex games), I don’t want these to be the formative sexual experiences of any child.
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@Kestrel Yeah, one of my kids told me about seeing “RPs” on Scratch of all places several years ago. Their friends play via discord - only with people they know, but it’s a short hop from there into other forms of text-based gaming with strangers.
As a parent, this stuff concerns me greatly. People can bark about “just use parental controls”, but I wonder how many of them have actually tried to keep a kid safe on the internet these days.
Even so, I take issue with the current laws because they are a massive invasion of privacy and a security risk. There have already been instances of leaked documents and other identifying info. It will only get worse. The anonymity of the internet certainly has its problems, but tying your RL governmental identity to every platform you visit is a free speech and information nightmare.
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Some sort of online verification is something I don’t want to see (privacy issues), but at the same time, it’s going to, and has to, happen. And as much as I hate it, I do agree that something should be done, exactly what is open for argument. As far as MUSH’s go, even if you had that “18 or else” line I don’t think that would matter if someone was really wanting to make things happen. And not just keeping things safe from an OOC perspective. What happens when someone who isn’t 18 gets into the spicy RP, never goes OOC about anything, gets caught by their parents, and the parents decide to make it a federal case? I can’t even fault the parents here: if that was my kid, you best believe I would be going off the rails. But the person on the other end had no clue who they were playing with, but the law doesn’t care about all that. They did; they are therefore toast.
Sure, that might only be a one-in-a-hundred case, but let’s be honest, we all know it has happened over the decades this hobby has been a thing. Age verification of some fashion protects everyone - just I don’t know how it can be done without messing everything else up.
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@Muscle-Car said in Age Verification & Games:
@RightMeow Discord tried to roll out user age verification by ID or facial photo in the US and were met with massive backlash
@Prototart said in Age Verification & Games:
They haven’t asked for mine bc my account’s so old, but I’m 100% out if they ever do. I don’t even trust them enough for to pay for Nitro, no way am I giving them my ID.
I’m not even talking about Discord’s age verification. I’m talking about RP servers on Discord being like ‘verify your age by sending us your ID’. I’m talking about users feeling like they need to do it.
ETA: I need to clarify. This is on top of Discord’s systemic age verification. This is an additional layer of USERS asking OTHER USERS in SHARED SERVERS to send them their ID.
