What We Lose When We Eliminate Controversial Content

[Justice and Rule]

To be clear about the content here, it didn't feature the holocaust itself. But in Falkovnia demihumans were rounded up and branded as property of Vlad Drakov and there was a very WWII Hitler vibe about it (just posting this for clarity).

Well, the clarification is appreciated.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I missed this, but...

but creators aren't lawyers. I don't need a better defense from an artist or writer than I thought it would be cool. I would honestly want more to be going on in many cases, but I am entirely fine with a designer saying "this just felt right". That doesn't mean it was the best choice, maybe there was a better one, maybe the choice was even bad, but it is an honest and authentic choice, which is what I like to get from creative people.

If you can't stand up to the most basic level of critique, then maybe you shouldn't really be doing it. If a designer includes an element and does it badly and their defense is "this just felt right", then they really can't complain if they get dragged by people for it.

At the end of the day, no one is saying you can't do this. But you're going to be critiqued for doing so, and it feels like a lot of people are very sensitive that people are not going to take very perfunctory justifications for including things that might need more care than "I just thought it'd be cool". If you can't defend yourself, maybe that should spark self-examination instead of a persecution complex.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Say for a moment that we all agree all references to slavery must be purged from RPGs; what do we do with dominate, the school of enchantment in general, curses, some forms of undeath, and necromancy in general?

None of those things are real, so I guess it's ok?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Why put warning labels when you can just remove something if it's not a big part of the setting? Still don't have a good answer for this sort of thing other than "What if we really, really want to play with slavery?"

Still don't have an answer you like, you mean.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Still don't have an answer you like, you mean.

I mean, yeah? It's pretty bad when your answer doesn't talk about the usage or the importance of the thing being talked about, but only references the fact that it was there before, thus it should continue to stay there. It's basically conceding that it has no place or importance beyond a strict adherence to previous lore.

That's, like, the poster-child for the bad usage of something if you can't think of a better reason to keep it than "It was already there".

 

[Hussar]

That is an argument to remove anything that someone might consider offensive from the public eye, because if they might be offended, they definitely are.

I frankly don’t care about this mythical”they”. I am telling you that “I”, me, the person talking to you is being made to feel uncomfortable.

I’m not trying to make grand appeals here. I am directly telling you that I would not be comfortable playing the game in a public space with this content.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I missed this, but...



If you can't stand up to the most basic level of critique, then maybe you shouldn't really be doing it. If a designer includes an element and does it badly and their defense is "this just felt right", then they really can't complain if they get dragged by people for it.

At the end of the day, no one is saying you can't do this. But you're going to be critiqued for doing so, and it feels like a lot of people are very sensitive that people are not going to take very perfunctory justifications for including things that might need more care than "I just thought it'd be cool". If you can't defend yourself, maybe that should spark self-examination instead of a persecution complex.

Again I wasn’t saying this is my explanation (I feel I have given a lot more than ‘I thought it would be cool’). I was saying for creatives and designers I don’t need more of an explanation than that. Sure people can critique. I am a fan of criticism. But I also think a lot of social media raking through the coals of creatives for things they simply thought were cool is excessive and even cruel. A lot of it begins to stifle the free expression of artists, writers, etc. ideally people can defend their work perfectly. Not every artist is good at that. Doesn’t make them a bad artist or a bad person.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I can't speak for you and your experience, I can only say that the Jewish gamers I play with would probably be very squicked out by something like that being a mainstream setting.

This was not the case with my group at all, or with most of the Jewish people in my life. Which again, the difference experiences we’ve had here speak to how these things aren’t monolithic.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I frankly don’t care about this mythical”they”. I am telling you that “I”, me, the person talking to you is being made to feel uncomfortable.

I’m not trying to make grand appeals here. I am directly telling you that I would not be comfortable playing the game in a public space with this content.

Fair enough. If you're not trying to make a sweeping generalization, then that makes sense to me.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Again I wasn’t saying this is my explanation (I feel I have given a lot more than ‘I thought it would be cool’). I was saying for creatives and designers I don’t need more of an explanation than that. Sure people can critique. I am a fan of criticism. But I also think a lot of social media raking through the coals of creatives for things they simply thought were cool is excessive and even cruel. A lot of it begins to stifle the free expression of artists, writers, etc. ideally people can defend their work perfectly. Not every artist is good at that. Doesn’t make them a bad artist or a bad person.

I feel like this is just a bunch of pearl-clutching and trying to avoid critique by appealing to the idea of "social media" inherently just going off on people. If you write about something, you will be critiqued. You seem to be afraid of what that critique will be. If that's the case, then maybe you should think about what you write before you write it. If you have a bad reason to justify how or why you wrote something that is being critiqued, that is more your problem than the person critiquing you. These are things artists should think about when they broach sensitive topics. Would we give a pass to someone putting a poor portrayal of sexual violence in their game if their reasoning was "It felt right"?

This was not the case with my group at all, or with most of the Jewish people in my life. Which again, the difference experiences we’ve had here speak to how these things aren’t monolithic.

I find people are generally way less likely to air their discontent with stuff because it gets perceived as "rocking the boat". But also this was largely talking about a Holocaust comparison that was not actually accurate to the game being played.