I want to object explicitly to something I see implicitly and semi-explicitly in various people’s message. Preferring not to engage with something in gaming is not, not, not the same as refusing to engage with it at all, dammit.
I live with varying degrees of chronic pain and mental illness, and have for most of the last forty years. I support activism around issues of pain diagnosis and treatment, and likewise for mental health. I could probably horrify and then stupefy most of you were I to start writing up what I know about it. In recent years I’ve been reading a lot of pessimistic and nihilistic philosophy and a a side order of theomachy, and discussing it in appropriate places. And virtually none of that will ever appear in in games I write or run, because I’m not up to it.
Or to take a more drastic example: one of my trans friends was for several years one of the principal gatherers of info for the Trans Day of Remembrance, which honors the trans people murdered the preceding year. If I were able to run a game for them, I would never, ever bring in institutional transphobia into a game setting, not unless they took the initiative in requesting it.
There’s a very unpleasant air of machismo in a lot of talk about this kind of thing. But horror and tragedy are not actually more mature than comedy. Gaming in brutal, degraded, degrading environments isn’t more mature or serious than adventure and cooperation. Gaming is one part of a life, and saying “not in my gaming” is no more demonstrative of some basic lack of moral seriousness than, say, a anting people not to wash their feet and pop blisters at the meal table. Foot and blister care are important! But not all the time, in every circumstance! Gaming means different things to different people at different times. It’s best to allow rhetorical room for others to be as with it as yourself even if they load their gaming differently.
And that’s about all I’ve got to say.