Underage Players
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I’d ban minors from a game I ran, but I wouldn’t be mean to them about it. I’d gently invite them back later.
But I’m one of those who don’t think kids belong on the Internet at all. Too dangerous.
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I would not want my kids into mush. One of them wants to now and I told him due to theme and safety he has to wait till he turns 18. So instead, I run a PnP game for him and his friends once a week.
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Christ, it’s confronting to know that some of us who played when we were underage, back in the day, have kids now…
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Pavel said in Underage Players:
Christ, it’s confronting to know that some of us who played when we were underage, back in the day, have kids now…
You know, they could easily have grandkids, too.
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Soooooooo I just found out about 2 days ago that my 13 y/o son is into RP. He’s been playing on Discord.
Pokémon RP.
FML
Anyway. I don’t want to MUSH with my kid. Or any of your kids (no offense), but it’s coming for us whether we like it or not.
I intend to ban him if he ever shows up on a game I run.
He’s a combat twink anyway.
(my actual feels as a parent about this are not the business of you internet strangers. suffice it to say - this parenting shit is getting complicated af)
On Dragon Wings · https://pern.gaslightswitch.com · pern.gaslightswitch.com port 4201
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@KarmaBum said in Underage Players:
but it’s coming for us whether we like it or not.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if some of the new crop of young folks joining the community are literally the second generation. Things are getting weird, it’s time to go home from this particular bar.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@KarmaBum said in Underage Players:
Combat
As someone who used to roam around games as a ‘badass’ with an unthematic katana at that age, this tracks.
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Hanging out in the rafters of a DALnet vampire chat room at 14 had a pretty big impact on me as a developing human. It’s hard for me to feel like those are experiences that we should prevent people from experiencing. Like if you can’t start learning all your lessons about complicated issues until 18, whoa. Like on one hand parents should be doing their best to protect their kids, but on the other it’s normal as well that kids do and frankly should be doing everything they can to circumvent that sort of control. That’s just how the human is.
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@shit-piss-love They can learn to lie about their age the same way I did. AND GET OFF MY LAWN.
(More seriously, I think it’s a complex question. I don’t really want to play with underaged players, particularly in any context where that could turn romantic/sexual, but I don’t think it’s necessarily bad for the underage player if they’re choosing to engage with it - there’s a whole complex interaction of effects there regarding sexual exploration online possibly being safer than doing so in RL - but /I/ do not want to do it. Despite having done it as a teenager. But, on the other hand, putting underaged players in a position of feeling like they’ll be kicked off a game for being underaged may inhibit them from reporting creepers, ESPECIALLY if they’ve given the creeper their real age.)
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Thank god none of my older kids have wanted to do MUSHing, though I know 2 of them started doing online RPing through other means in their teens. Like anything else, this is just something we’ve talked about. I do think folks under 25 these days are in general a lot more versed in consent and all that than people my age. And I think they’re also more aware of certain kinds of predatory online behavior than I was when I first started MUSHing, that’s for sure.
But we have absolutely talked about while no one is owed proactive disclosure of ANY rl details, if they’re going to engage in multi-age spaces, then they need to be aware and respectful of the fact that the majority of adults in a space probably are very not comfortable engaging with minors in explicit play particularly but probably in most other forms as well; but the biggest fear and why there’s all those no minors rules is largely centered around adults not wanting to engage with anyone underage in that kind of play, and it’s important to consider that their consent is important too. It was a pretty good discussion to have, along with all of our others about our expectations around online behavior, ect.
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@Pavel said in Underage Players:
Christ, it’s confronting to know that some of us who played when we were underage, back in the day, have kids now…
“Want To Feel Old? These Neglected Children Of MUSHers Have Already Aged Out Of The Foster Care System!”
I’d read that Buzzfeed listicle.
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@Pavel said in Underage Players:
@KarmaBum said in Underage Players:
but it’s coming for us whether we like it or not.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if some of the new crop of young folks joining the community are literally the second generation. Things are getting weird, it’s time to go home from this particular bar.
If MUSHer traits are heritable, I’d hate to see what sort of cringey nonsense RP my kid churns out when she comes of age. But she’s very small and surely MU*s won’t be around by then.
…
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@somasatori said in Underage Players:
@Pavel said in Underage Players:
@KarmaBum said in Underage Players:
but it’s coming for us whether we like it or not.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if some of the new crop of young folks joining the community are literally the second generation. Things are getting weird, it’s time to go home from this particular bar.
If MUSHer traits are heritable, I’d hate to see what sort of cringey nonsense RP my kid churns out when she comes of age. But she’s very small and surely MU*s won’t be around by then.
…
Just make sure to teach her what a smirk actually is, and other words for eyes that isn’t “orb”.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
I was definitely one of those kids that was online and RPing before 18, not disclosing (and occasionally lying about) how old I was, and occasionally engaging in explicit RP. Mostly mildly explicit RP which was maybe a few steps ahead of what I was doing in real life at that age. Again, as mentioned above, “exploring”.
One of the major differences that I see now, though, besides just me being one of the “olds” and getting to shake a “do as I say, not as I did!” stick at the youngin’s…
IIRC, most of the people I was playing with were either people about my own age who were doing the exact same thing, like my now-husband and several other friends I made, or people who were in their early to mid-twenties. There was a pretty core 18-25 demographic on the game I was on at the time with some players being older than that, but not many. I remember many of us thinking that Conrad Hubbard, who was responsible for the servers at White Wolf, was a cranky old man despite the fact that he was several years younger than I currently am and I’m still in my thirties.
Compare that to the age demographics on most games now. Most of the players I encounter are in their late 30s to their early 50s, with some folks in the far ranges of the bell curve. I think I’ve run into exactly two people who are working on their undergraduate degrees in my last six or so years of playing. (And the thought of someone my age romancing their character still made me cringe, despite the fact that they’re a few years past legal age.)
So I’m not advocating for underage players being allowed on games, but the mental prospect of a 17 year old hanging out with a bunch of 45 year olds squicks me out way, way more than my memories of being 17 and hanging out with 22 year olds does. I think that discrepancy does a lot to explain the mindset shift we’re seeing even in people who were doing the exact same thing themselves back in the day.
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@Aria said in Underage Players:
I think I’ve run into exactly two people who are working on their undergraduate degrees in my last six or so years of playing.
Which isn’t a very good judgement of someone’s age, jussayin’. In Australia, at least, the rate of people entering undergraduate programs at 25+ is on a steady rise.
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@Pavel said in Underage Players:
@Aria said in Underage Players:
I think I’ve run into exactly two people who are working on their undergraduate degrees in my last six or so years of playing.
Which isn’t a very good judgement of someone’s age, jussayin’. In Australia, at least, the rate of people entering undergraduate programs at 25+ is on a steady rise.
Ohh, I finished mine at 30. But no, these players are both absolutely tradiational college kids who are, like, 20-22.
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I have no issue with underage players exploring themes much like a lot of us did. Sometimes they are exploring parts of their identity and this does seem safer. I’m not going politics but at least in the U.S. we aren’t exactly moving towards a welcoming arena of exploration. If you know, then you you know. If you don’t, count yourself lucky.
HOWEVER
I also don’t want to be an adult who has a logs of my character (not that I log) engaging in an activity with a person I didn’t know was underage. Then for it to come out in my RL area as well. There are very RL things that can happen depending on your job (especially if government is involved) or your life or other things. I mean look how we’ve seen people twist real lives between adults – now add that aspect and just Nope. Gonna nope right out.
That’s my take mind you. I mean I also know that I lied about my age IRL. I had a fake ID. I did things. I saw things, but still on this side… yeah. I’d ban them, but that’s all that could be done I think. It’s very complicated on both sides.
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For a long time I’ve wondered how people didn’t figure out that I was a 14 year old masquerading as a 19 year old when I starting MUSHing. It’s probably more likely that it’s not that they were just oblivious or didn’t realize it, but that the people I played with at that time and I were all four edgy teenagers in a trenchcoat pretending to be adults in a Sabbat pack. I guess the real Masquerade was the friends we made along the way.
@Pavel said in Underage Players:
@Aria said in Underage Players:
I think I’ve run into exactly two people who are working on their undergraduate degrees in my last six or so years of playing.
Which isn’t a very good judgement of someone’s age, jussayin’. In Australia, at least, the rate of people entering undergraduate programs at 25+ is on a steady rise.
This is also fairly common in the US, from what I’ve seen while working on my PhD and doing community mental health work with emerging adults (recently anyway). And look, I don’t want to get into politics or blaming everything on certain economic principles like I tend to do, but in this case we have a very bloated and unwieldy educational system that ties into all of the other systemic issues in the States, which goes beyond the undergrad level. Shit, at Stanford they recently built these (actually pretty nice) “low income housing units” for the postdocs to live in. However, what Stanford didn’t realize is that the management company they hired to rent these apartments out have disqualified nearly all of their postdocs due to lack of income from Stanford.
Mind you, this area is exceedingly unaffordable, like I live in a place that’s notably considered to be a bad area and I’m still paying an exorbitant amount, but rising costs of education alongside rising costs of housing have made it hard for people to get into school without either getting tied up in loans, getting good enough grades/being good enough at sports to get scholarships, or working full time while going to school, so it would make sense to save money for a while.
Anyway! Yeah, kids in games. I would prefer to not have it happen. It’s extremely hard to enforce. As far as I know we didn’t ban anyone who was underage on the Reach or Metro2, I wasn’t staff at Fallcoast long enough to really learn, but I’m 100% sure that there were people who were underage and kept it to themselves. The question is how to detect someone underaged. In the case of SH I guess the player outed themselves, but it’s hard to count on that.
they/them
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When it comes to enforcement, you just do what you can. Make a rule to point to (and cover your own ass with), and if it comes up, then you politely explain why they’re being removed and just remove 'em. Gently.
Overthinking things and burdening yourself with too much responsibility isn’t gonna be helpful. There’s a point at which it isn’t your job and becomes a parent/guardian supervision issue. You’re not responsible for that.
Additionally, if you’re going to twist yourself into knots over potentially playing with kids… you’re absolutely potentially going to be playing with kids. It’s not a guarantee that you are, but anyone you meet on the internet could be anyone. So, if that risk hits your threshold, that’s up to you to think about and act on. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that.
