sticks and stones may break my bones but words will leave emotional scars that never heal...
it sounds funny. it sounds wrong cause most of us were taught the reverse 'words will never hurt me' but the truth is sometime words hurt alot.
D&D General The Art and the Artist: Discussing Problematic Issues in D&D
it sounds funny. it sounds wrong cause most of us were taught the reverse 'words will never hurt me' but the truth is sometime words hurt alot.
Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
I note that while I was away overnight the discussion moved on from discussing the perfectly functional and uncontroversial term "harm", and shifted to the more difficult and debatable "violence". This feels like the goalposts have been moved to make the semantic argument more difficult and thorny. While I agree that structural violence is a real phenomenon, I think it's largely applicable to larger societal structures and institutions than roleplaying games, and so it's functionally a tangent from the topic of the thread, and a distraction from the point.
We've also gotten into more sniping and sarcasm. :/
The point remains valid that when we say harm we should be able to specify what kind of harm. The only valid criticism of its use that I've seen so far is the idea that some unnamed people use the term and fail to elaborate, and that bedrockgames gets the impression that this is done to shut down debate and (unconvincingly to me) to imply physical harm.
We've also gotten into more sniping and sarcasm. :/
The point remains valid that when we say harm we should be able to specify what kind of harm. The only valid criticism of its use that I've seen so far is the idea that some unnamed people use the term and fail to elaborate, and that bedrockgames gets the impression that this is done to shut down debate and (unconvincingly to me) to imply physical harm.
Bedrockgames
Legend
I think this part of the debate is not something I want to further advance because it is a bit of tangent. But I want to be clear about what I meant here. I don't think people are using it in bad faith (though I am sure, as with any debate, a bad faith person here or there could employ the term that way). I think the term is simply a very effective, but unexamined rhetorical device that people draw on. And as with any effective phrase in a debate or discussion, when people find something that works they use it. My primary concern was the particular phrase "This causes harm" and how that gets used in, what I consider an unexamined way. Again not trying to reignite this part of the discussion but I did want to be clear I am not saying people are using it to shut down debate intentionally. I think it has that effect, and people read that effect as victory when they use it. But I don't think people use it with the intentional aim of shutting people down.
Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Ok, so we agree that people should specify what kind of harm they mean when they say harm. Or at LEAST be able to specify when asked. Am I right that we agree on that?
Yes, different people have different perspectives on whether and what things are unwelcoming or exclusionary. And, for example, some women gamers have apparently never had the experience of walking into a gaming store and being stared, sniggered, sneered at and condescended to.
The fact that there are a wide range of experiences and opinions out there doesn't negate the point that we should listen to folks who say they think things are harmful. It's perfectly reasonable to ask them to explain how and why, but we shouldn't be discrediting the premise without good reason.
I take you at your word that it is used as a rhetorical bludgeon on Twitter. I mostly stay off Twitter. That being said, while we can debate whether a thing is harmful, the better response to a reaction of disbelief there is to respectfully ask the person to explain the nature of the harm, or link us to a good explanation.
Again, since we have no such numbers, you continually bringing them up is an obstacle to useful discussion. Your smuggling in questioning people's honesty is also beside the point. I think we all implicitly get that we're taking folks' reports in good faith as part of the discussion. OBVIOUSLY if one of the reports comes from someone established to be dishonest, we discount that report.
Whether I made my logic example 50/50 or 10/1 is totally irrelevant to the point that an anecdote of something NOT happening to a given person, or to 100 given people, bears exactly zero weight in evaluating whether it happened to one other person.
MGibster
Legend
As with many long running threads, the topic has shifted multiple times over the course of more than 500 posts. The post I replied to was most certainly not about legacy products. I'm with you when it comes to contemporary entertainment. There are products that I haven't purchased because I found something off putting about the content. d20 splatbooks by Avalanche Press immediate comes to mind. I don't typically know the views of the creators' of things I purchase, but that's something that could sway my decision on whether or not I want to buy something.
TSR changed D&D to suit their customers and I expect WotC will continue to change D&D for as long as they're in business. I've liked some of the changes and I've disliked other changes, and in either way it's okay for them to make changes. I haven't argued against every change. While I've argued that it's perfectly fine to have evil races, I've never argued against WotC making it more clear that orcs or bugbears aren't evil all the time. I miss the importance of alignment, but its role in the game has diminished over the last 22 years and I've come to accept that it's a largely a vestigial holdover in 5th edition.
except the question just can not be "Is anyone ever possible harmed."
It is possible for me to make the safest game ever, and 1 in a billion players get hurt.
and that ISN'T what we are talking about anyway. we have some number of people saying "this minority dislikes it, and it caused harm" and another number of people saying "this same minority like it and don't want it removed"
Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
Sure. But as we don't have concrete numbers to support any assertion on how common it is or isn't (apart from near-universal things like talking to women about their experiences of feeling unwelcome, condescended to, or insulted in some geek spaces), you raising the rhetorical idea of 1 in a billion is for practical purposes putting an emotional thumb on the scale without factual basis.
Could you please specify an example on this one? I don't think this particular point is helpful to talk about this way.
no I am giving examples I have no dog in this fight (if anything I side with the more progressive) I am not putting my thumb on the scale (although I do fear some are on both sides) I am just asking we look at the scale.
sure earlier someone said that they knew people of a minority that wanted things removed from some adventures. this was countered with another person saying they had run said adventure with the same minority and not only did they not want it removed but they enjoyed it as is. the second one mainly (but both eventually) where told that antidotes don't matter... I made a joke about the plural of antidotes is survay data, I went back and forth with another poster until we agreed no one has a perfectly peer reviewed scientific study on this... and this brings us to where I am now.
back in 4e I started out very vocal about an issue believing I was siding with women who would be put off from gaming if we didn't change something. Within a week I was corrected (both here on these boards, and in real life) that women I respected were on the reverse side. In trying to take my own experience as a guy who tries to be an ally, I missed a part of the woman experience. Up until right before covid shut down my local gaming store, there were still jokes/arguments on this topic from 15 years ago... and I HAVE been called sexist, for pointing out that "no, that isn't the way all woman feel" but I personally have only been called such by other men.
People (minority, majority, gamers, religious sects, even populations of towns) are not all on the same page. there is no group that ALL want something one way.
So I don't want any person dismissed who says "I have X experience" but I also don't want the person dismissed who says "I had the opposite experience"
As a moderately progressive guy who has VERY progressive friends this has (and is currently) caused me some paralysis. When confronted with "Some number of people want you to do 1 thing, but some other number of people want you to do the opposite, and BOTH groups are trying to help do the most good."
I also made a joke about the trolley problem, and how I would freeze and not be able to react fast enough to make a difference, then suffer PTSD for years and need therapy for seeing it play out. I also almost side treked the conversation by giving an example not of gaming where trying to do the right thing has me currently doing LOTS of research and still not having a good answer.
You're not representing the example accurately. The hypothetical situation is that elves are persecuting orcs using what they read in a book as an excuse, not that orcs are persecuted by reading a book or playing games.
Bedrockgames
Legend
I am not advocating dismissing people’s claims. I am saying we always get any claim to see if it is reasonable and true. Not because most people are lying but because when you automatically grant truth to any claim like this, you create a tool for bad actors to exploit (and there are always going to malicious people in the world who will lie about things). If you grant this to every claim you risk exaggerating something that isn’t a problem into a problem. And if you grant truth yo every explanation of the problem, you risk oversimplifying the solution, even solving it counter productively. Now none of that means you dismiss people’s pain, none of that should be a license to kick [edit: mock] people, and none of that means there aren’t problems that need solving. But solving a problem means, accurately determining if it is a problem, gauging yo what extent, accurately diagnosing it, and finding an explanation or explanations to solve it. I think I’m these conversations, flaws in some of these lead yo more problems and lead to exaggeration if problems. All that said: the game store problem is one I 100 percent agree with. There are lots of reasons it is a problem but it is one of the main reasons I don’t hand in game stores. I think a lot of it comes down to social awkwardness around women among male gamers, and less yo do with malicious intent, but it is very easy to see (and just about every woman who wasn’t a gamer I have taken to a game store, has made this complaint yo me. So don’t get me wrong: I am not saying dismiss everything. But in these threads the problems tend yo be much less concrete: issues around things like evil orcs, old tropes in a new context, use of cultural tropes, debates about safety tools, etc.
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