Players 'distressed' by gang-rape role-playing game

Immortal Sun said:

I don't understand the objection to shaming people for bad actions. Society has been founded on this principle for thousands of years. Word gets out that you're doing something nasty and then other people remove you from their social circles. If at some point down the road you clean up your act, you might be able to rejoin. THIS IS NOT NEW. It's not a "new climate" or a "new culture", this is how humans function. "Social media" just makes it easier for humans to be the social creatures they naturally are.

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My theory on this is because it’s the combination of two major forces: male supremacy and social media amplification. Male supremacy has been taken for granted, basically forever, and now there is more pushback on that (pushback that started a while back but has been gathering steam now that stories are easier to share via social media). Social media also makes it possible to shame people on levels never before seen, it is a second’s effort to learn some dirt on a stranger and join a pile on.

We’re in uncharted waters and things are going to get uncertain for a while, I’m hopeful the culture will produce new charts to navigate them because the old ones definitely needed to be thrown out.

I’m not certain the social media companies have our best interests at heart though, they want money and unfettered desire for that has wrought havoc for a few centuries now.

Gradine said:

So, you know that old saw about how when people see the phrase "political correctness" and immediately replace it in their minds with "treating others with respect"?

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I’m not aware of that old saw. I thought “political correctness” was invented to dismiss people’s efforts to “treat people with respect”?! That’s how it seemed in the 90s at least...

robus said:

I’m not aware of that old saw. I thought “political correctness” was invented to dismiss people’s efforts to “treat people with respect”?! That’s how it seemed in the 90s at least...

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It came from a Neil Gaiman Tumblr post.

https://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/43087620460/i-was-reading-a-book-about-interjections-oddly

robus said:

I’m not aware of that old saw. I thought “political correctness” was invented to dismiss people’s efforts to “treat people with respect”?! That’s how it seemed in the 90s at least...

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Yeah, that's mostly the point.

Gradine said:

Yeah, that's mostly the point.

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A “whoosh” for me then!

robus said:

I’m not aware of that old saw. I thought “political correctness” was invented to dismiss people’s efforts to “treat people with respect”?! That’s how it seemed in the 90s at least...

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Usage of that term has varied, over time. George Orwell was socialist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and after his service in the Spanish Civil War, anti-Stalinist. He used the term "politically correct" to mean something like this: "the view which the Party has declared as orthodoxy, regardless of its objective truth". Classic example: The Party shows Winston Smith four lights, but the "politically correct" count is five... and the Party uses harsh methods, motivating Smith to see five lights. Another old-school example: Lysenkoist agriculture, which was politically correct according to Stalin, and thus according to the Party, but which in practice resulted in disastrously low crop production.

Whether those who *currently* toss the term around most readily, are mainly acting in the service of objective reality, or whether they're more often aligned with ideological rather than strictly factual declarations, is a political question, and there are limits to engaging political topics in an EN World forum.

Meanwhile, a mod has (if I understand the mod's point accurately) warned against excessive speculation on situations other than the one at hand, that is, the game at UK Expo, the BBC's article about that game, and that actual convention's response to that actual incident. I have my opinions on the use of Twitter during *that particular incident*. Others may hold other opinions.

Bedrockgames said:

My thoughts on this are the game sounds like a very odd thing to run at a con. That said the two news reports I saw on it, looked very poorly handled (like they were primarily relying on a handful of tweets and not investigating the matter and interviewing everyone they could who was involved).

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Someone has already linked to a blog post by one of the con organizers, who explained exactly what they did, who they talked to, and why they took the actions (banning him from the con) that they did. And he did not name the person or encourage anyone to shame or shun him.

Where on earth are you getting this idea that it was 'very poorly handled'? Is this the thing where we assume exclusion is probably bad and mean, and therefore anything that resulted in exclusion must have been a flawed process?

Look, kindergartners can grasp the concept of "If you are mean to the other kids, they won't want to play with you anymore". We as adult gamers should be able to understand that too. And we should also be able to expend a little emotional energy on worrying about the aftermath for the people who were on the receiving end of the crummy behavior, instead of focusing solely on whether the dude who experienced the natural consequences of being a jackwagon got a feelings-booboo.

mythago said:

Someone has already linked to a blog post by one of the con organizers, who explained exactly what they did, who they talked to, and why they took the actions (banning him from the con) that they did. And he did not name the person or encourage anyone to shame or shun him.

Where on earth are you getting this idea that it was 'very poorly handled'? Is this the thing where we assume exclusion is probably bad and mean, and therefore anything that resulted in exclusion must have been a flawed process?

Look, kindergartners can grasp the concept of "If you are mean to the other kids, they won't want to play with you anymore". We as adult gamers should be able to understand that too. And we should also be able to expend a little emotional energy on worrying about the aftermath for the people who were on the receiving end of the crummy behavior, instead of focusing solely on whether the dude who experienced the natural consequences of being a jackwagon got a feelings-booboo.

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I was saying the news coverage was poorly handled in my view

Bedrockgames said:

I was saying the news coverage was poorly handled in my view

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Let's be fair here. How much effort are you actually going to expend on a news story where a guy gets booted out of a gaming convention? Sure, they may not have the details exactly right, but, by and large, they've got the gist - guy goes way beyond the pale when running a game, players complain on Twitter, guy gets expelled from Con. That's pretty much the long and the short of the story.

Which, frankly, is as it should be. There's no reason for extended drama or hand wringing or anything like that. We've got the con doing due diligence, we've got at least one player flatly contradicting the GM in question, and we've got the results - the GM is banned from the con and won't be running games some other cons as well.

What more is expected here? Isn't this pretty much textbook for how this should work?

Like I said earlier, it's baffling how much hand wringing folks are willing to do in order to "protect" us from "the mob mentality". Yet, of the past four or five examples that have come up on En World over the past couple of years, every single one of them have been pretty much open and shut issues that were handled. Where are these multiple examples where the "mob mentality" ruined some GM? Where are the actual examples, not hypotheticals, but actual, recorded examples where the "mob mentality" harmed an innocent victim?

Because I keep seeing how "fake news" and "mob mentality" and whatnot keeps getting brought up again and again as reasons we have to be extra careful, yet, I'm still waiting for an actual example. If it's so dangerous that the "mob mentality" is witch hunting innocent people all the time, then, it should be pretty easy to come up with a shopping list of examples. Yet, those examples remain conspicuously absent while verifiable examples of wrong doing keep being brought up again and again and again.

At what point do we start accepting that people do bad things in social situations and it's okay to boot those bad actors from our hobby?

Hussar said:

Like I said earlier, it's baffling how much hand wringing folks are willing to do in order to "protect" us from "the mob mentality". Yet, of the past four or five examples that have come up on En World over the past couple of years, every single one of them have been pretty much open and shut issues that were handled. Where are these multiple examples where the "mob mentality" ruined some GM? Where are the actual examples, not hypotheticals, but actual, recorded examples where the "mob mentality" harmed an innocent victim?

Because I keep seeing how "fake news" and "mob mentality" and whatnot keeps getting brought up again and again as reasons we have to be extra careful, yet, I'm still waiting for an actual example. If it's so dangerous that the "mob mentality" is witch hunting innocent people all the time, then, it should be pretty easy to come up with a shopping list of examples. Yet, those examples remain conspicuously absent while verifiable examples of wrong doing keep being brought up again and again and again.

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It may not be the gaming community, but there's always the Central Park 5 (recently in the news again thanks to documentaries). We certainly don't want the mob mentality and fake news to reach that point too often.

Within the community, I'd have a hard time saying the Satanic Panic of the 1980s wasn't driven by mob mentality. Think of the kind of power it would have via social media. I know people who were banned from participating in the hobby by their parents as a result.

There's also evidence that people are deliberately weaponizing social media mobs with varying degrees of success. It may have worked in getting conventions to back off honoring Bill Webb and Frank Mentzer (I still can't figure out why Tim Kask was included in at least one of those social media campaigns). But it also derailed a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel for a while by convincing Disney to fire James Gunn (at least for a while). Meanwhile, people like Anita Sarkeesian and Felicia Day get doxxed.

So, yeah, mob mentality has been a problem, is a problem, and will be a problem and it shouldn't be brushed off as necessarily harmless to innocent people just because it sometimes takes down people who deserve it.