Romance and Goonstation RP

[jan.antilles]

4. Bigotry and sexual content is a non-negotiable hard 'no'. If you are unsure what sexual content includes: do not refer to sex acts, genitalia, or anything sexual in nature. This includes erotic roleplay, which encompasses all situations which are erotic or suggestive in nature (e.g. 'spooning', making out, etc.), and not only those which are sexually explicit. [...] If an admin tells you to knock something off because it breaks the no bigotry or sexual content rule, that is not an invitation for debate. Knock it off or go elsewhere. [...]

Hi there, RP server. We've had some questions and issues come up lately about the specifics around Rule 4 and sexual/erotic/romantic RP, so I want to lay things out and be as clear as possible about what exactly the issues are.

For starters: romance between characters is fine. The characters on the station are all 20+, and adults get feelings for one another. It happens. It can be funny, it can be heartwarming, it can be tragic. It makes for good stories. Romance is not forbidden on Goonstation. 

Now, some extremely important caveats.

1. We forbid more than just blatantly sexual content. Yes, people got in trouble for things that never included taking clothes off. We have warned/banned people for things like: referring to/implying active participation in sex work, pinning characters in blankets for forced "snuggling" without consent, sitting in another character's lap and facing them to emote making out and discussing wanting more, or locking the door, placing a "no" sticker on it, and climbing into bed together to silently roll and fart on one another. (Yes, those all happened.)

2. Not all players are adults. Even though all the characters are 20+, the players are 13+. You have no way of knowing who is on the other side of the screen. If you wouldn't say whatever you're about to say to a 13 year old, do not say it on Goonstation. If someone discloses to you that they are a minor, do not romantically roleplay with them. If you are a minor, do not romantically roleplay on Goonstation. This is for your benefit, their benefit, and our benefit.

3. Not all players, adult or not, are in a good place in life for romantic roleplay. Romantic roleplay can have a big impact on people. It can involve deep emotions in unexpected ways. It can affect relationships outside the game. It should be treated with care, handled maturely both IC and OOC, and stopped immediately if you suspect that someone (including you) is being affected by it outside the game.

4. Everything you do on this game is public. Ghosts can observe you. Admins can observe you while stealthed. We can pull logs a month and a half later. Your actions and behaviors are never truly private when you are playing on our servers. (Really they're not private anywhere on the internet, but that's for you and your internet service provider and three-letter agencies of choice to debate.)

All those being said, there's another issue at play here, and this is where things can get problematic in a way that seems innocent even when you're in the middle of doing it.

6. Be kind to other players. Be respectful and considerate of other players, as their experiences are just as important as your own. [...] Furthermore, do not advantage your friends in game or exclude others from roleplaying opportunities without good cause.

Even when your romance is the most innocent puppy love that ever was, if you are regularly and repeatedly isolating yourself from the rest of the server to quietly RP with your romantic partner/s, this is a problem. Not only are you not playing the job that you rolled, you're avoiding the actual round that's happening and all the other emergent RP with other people on the station. If you are going so far as to actively prevent/forbid other characters from interacting with you, this is a problem.

The Goonstation RP servers are public. If what you want to say or do with another player needs to be private, consider saying and doing it elsewhere.

Now, this is not a blanket ban or frown on privacy. Yes, antags can lure people away to kill them alone. That is playing your role and (hopefully) driving the round forward for everyone, not just the buddy you're with. Also, yes, you can go have private conversations, or explore in a small group, or adventure with pals. As I said before, the issue is when you regularly and repeatedly isolate yourself in order to quietly RP with a very selective group, isolating yourselves away from the round at large and excluding others from roleplay opportunities with you.

So to summarize and offer reference material:

Examples of what is fine:

• Giving someone a kiss
  
• Hugging someone
  
• Going to an isolated place to talk to someone and then giving them a hug at the end
  
• Holding hands
  
• Falling in love
  
• Going on a date in game
  
• Going on a date in game to an azone or the debris/mining field
  
• Holding a public wedding in game
  

Examples of what is not fine:

• Specifically going to an isolated place to repeatedly hug and grab someone a bunch while talking about how soft they are.
  
• Carrying one another around the station regardless of what is going on.
  
• Building walls/bolting doors in order to sit on laps and feed one another
  
• Threatening to harm/kill/maim people for interrupting a romantic conversation in order to ask you to do your job
  
• Leaving the station or isolating yourself to go on a date while being a head of staff or other important crew role
  

As a final note:

No, the admins are not prudes who hate people/sex/love/whatever. We are adults who are trying to maintain a safe and respectful environment where people can have fun with one another in the goofy space fart game. There are plenty of places in the greater SS13 space where you can do whatever you like with fellow consenting adults. This is not the appropriate space for those interactions.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to the team, whether here in this thread, or on Discord by DMing @MedicalAssistant with a ]report, or in-game with F1 to adminhelp. We would rather clarify something for you before it happens in game than have to talk to you about it afterwards because it impacted other people.

Thank you for your time, and have good rounds. <3

[Kotlol]

Ah yes I remember a "couple" players that kept disrupting RP cause: "I LOVE THEM" to the point of self-antagging. (This was years ago)
I once arrested one of the couple and the other one came in and dragged them out of my arms and arrested them too....
Turns out at the end they weren't an antag so I was like: "Why are you antagging me then?"

Heck one time I was roleplaying with one of them and the other ran up, grabbed their romantic partner and dragged them away for a partner talk.

Anyway... this is a nice clear way of telling us the rules.
Very nicely done and explaining things! Even "implying" as a joke is wrong!

[Frank_Stein]

Remember: In lore, the station is your work place. Your character is an employee, at their job. Behavior that would get your character fired will get you fired

[Zamujasa]

I should really be frying spam instead of posting this, but alas, my heart burns with passion; I have no power and I must protest.

I used this argument before, and I'll use it again. There is an entire category of "teenage / young adult romance".


christ i know this post is gonna get censored but god

referring to/implying active participation in sex work, pinning characters in blankets for forced "snuggling" without consent, sitting in another character's lap and facing them to emote making out and discussing wanting more, or locking the door, placing a "no" sticker on it, and climbing into bed together to silently roll and fart on one another. (Yes, those all happened.)

not all of these are even remotely similar. "pinning someone under a blanket", heavens. farting on one another! this is literal shit you see in teenage comedy films! i grew up with sandlot, a coming-of-age-ish comedy where they do tabacco and puke everywhere and oogle girls! this is being more prude than vhs tapes aimed at kids

2. Not all players are adults. Even though all the characters are 20+, the players are 13+. You have no way of knowing who is on the other side of the screen. If you wouldn't say whatever you're about to say to a 13 year old, do not say it on Goonstation.

this is, to put it bluntly, your (the people running this game) fault. you could, very easily, modify the parameters. you could allow peope to join as underage (16) year olds on a field trip; you could enforce a rule that says minors simply aren't allowed here; you could give them a hidden flag on their account they could use, or ask people their birthdate. i know you are all more than capable of marking and moniotiring accounts like this.

the "don't say anything you wouldn't say to a 13 year old" obviously falls apart unless you couch it entirely in "romance".

would you say "i'm going to rip off your limbs" to a 13 year old, in a position where you could conceivably do so in game?
what about "i'm going to murder your friends, in front of you, and then kill you too"? is that too far?

the obvious question is that violence is fine, but romance is not. blowing someone's brains out with a joke revolver and watching their eyeballs splatter halfway down the hall is fine; seeing two people making out is a line too far. an elite team of redsuits sent explicitly to murder you and annihiliate your entire workplace is fine, but laying in the same bed isn't.

3. Not all players, adult or not, are in a good place in life for romantic roleplay.

skill issue. not all players are in the right place in life to play this game, either, and it's their (and unfortunately, your) responsibility to make that decision and come back if and when the time is right.

if they don't want to see it, all they have to do is ... not look at it. go elsewhere. if someone is getting unwanted romantic advances, that is obviously an F1 issue, and this should be made clear. but otherwise this quickly becomes the "i consent! i consent! (jesus) I DONT!": if you aren't comfortable seeing your friend get dismembered by a rocket to the face, maybe you should play a different game




in short this entire thing seems to be a transparently prudish attempt at threading the needle of "we don't want any kind of romance here; we won't tell you where the line is, just that one exists, in hopes that it will discourage anyone from doing it".



also:

Threatening to harm/kill/maim people for interrupting a romantic conversation in order to ask you to do your job

is it okay to threaten to harm/kill/maim people for interrupting you in other cases to tell you to do your job, or is this just a really weird way of saying "someone did that, and since it was romanticly related, i threw it in the pile"?

if i'm taking a break from my in-game job to get boozed up at the bar, someone walks up to me and goes "can you build me a copy of the cloner in science" and i say "no", and then they go "i really need this right now" and i say "i'm busy taking a break, if you don't leave me alone i will punch you", is that ok? like where does the "relationship" part have anything to do with this.


signed, not trying to be toxic, just incredibly frustrated at where this is going

[OutbackCatgirl]

Zamu has a solid point. I've noticed the whole atmosphere of goon servers has changed for the worse lately. More toxicity, less roleplay, less character development, less friendliness. People are afraid to be themselves because of things like this that are aimed to help prevent abuse of minors that *shouldn't even be allowed to play.*

This is a game about space people cohabitating and having a big space soap opera or spaghetti western complete with all the things that make roleplaying games the cultural touchstone they are.
It is full of violence, drugs, gore, and things that are at best PG and at worst M to R.

It is a game. People play to have fun and escape reality a little. The focus on "this is a workplace, do your jobs" is admirable for keeping it from devolving into anarchy but often adhering too strictly to this is the opposite of fun. It feels wrong.

The sentiment and motive is honourable in wanting to protect kids but methods exist to police age and none of them are in place here. Yes, byond makes it public, yes, minors will lie to get in occasionally, but the demographic actually playing is mostly 20s to 40s.

Infantilising an entire established community without at least trying to police the underage minority is just going to alienate all the folk that helped make this server as popular and beloved as it was. Please take this as honest to god criticism, and an opinion.

[ZeWaka]

posting as myself, me, not as a Developer / admin / Administrator / etc

There is an entire category of "teenage / young adult romance".

books are an entirely different medium. you cannot talk to and form a (potentially extremely sus) relationship with someone in a book (sanely).

christ i know this post is gonna get censored

apparently not. huh.

... this is being more prude than vhs tapes aimed at kids

as a prior admin, you know very well that the same people who do weird shit like IJKL'ing and cuddling in dorms on the same bed are also ERPing when no admins are online. this has happened time and time again, and it's weird you're just ignoring your knowledge of the past

this is, to put it bluntly, your (the people running this game) fault. ... more than capable of marking and moniotiring [sic] accounts like this.

you could ...  you could ... you could ..., or ask people their birthdate.

This sounds like an incredible amount of work for a volunteer staff. You know just as well as I do how non-feasible this is.
Furthermore, lmao people are going to lie about their age, this is the Internet.

would you say "i'm going to rip off your limbs" to a 13 year old, in a position where you could conceivably do so in game?

yes. i would. i played battlefield when I was 13. sounds exactly like the chat. my cousin says the same exact shit in amog us
further, you don't know the age of the other player.

what about "i'm going to murder your friends, in front of you, and then kill you too"? is that too far?

idk this is kinda sus, and makes me both cringe and make me think someone is being weird about harming others in this silly online game
it could make more sense in context, it's just weird to see it as a standalone

skill issue. not all players are in the right place in life to play this game, either

why are you talking about ways to protect players above, and then just dismissing them here? bit rude.

this quickly becomes the "i consent! i consent! (jesus) I DONT!": if you aren't comfortable seeing your friend get dismembered by a rocket to the face, maybe you should play a different game

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman

"...we won't tell you where the line is, just that one exists..."

huh. i wonder why there's this clarifying post here to help people.


- - -

methods exist to police age and none of them are in place here

the only method that actually works is to get people to take pictures with IDs, which isn't happening anytime soon
nor are we interested in policing age like this? not sure why you think we are

yes, minors will lie to get in occasionally,

there is no need to lie? unless you mean < 13

but the demographic actually playing is mostly 20s to 40s.

you would be surprised by the amount of minors on the discord and ingame

[Zamujasa]

man these quote chains are tedious, but at least it's better than having a dedicated argument channel, huh

books are an entirely different medium. you cannot talk to and form a (potentially extremely sus) relationship with someone in a book (sanely).

at this point you are intending to police every relationship you can form. you realize there are types of relationships other than romantic, right? and that even if you try to forcibly smother this, people are still going to develop relationships with people, romantic and otherwise. that's what happens in life, in jobs; you become friends, enemies, partners.

as a prior admin, you know very well that the same people who do weird shit like IJKL'ing and cuddling in dorms on the same bed are also ERPing when no admins are online. this has happened time and time again, and it's weird you're just ignoring your knowledge of the past

and at the same time, i also know

* people who do "weird shit" like ijkl are reported in #centcom and have been for over a year
* almost every sexual term is likewise reported to #centcom

"when no admins are online": so what? people do all sorts of rule-breaking shit while the admins aren't online. this is a known thing. language is one of the few things you actually have gotten down to a admin-from-discord science.

somehow, ERPing hasn't really been "a problem" here in... forever? did it happen sometimes? of course, every now and then someone's going to do something against the rules. that's what happens. that's why there are admins. you are pretending that somehow ERPing is a huge issue at the moment that this somehow solves, when it... hasn't been the case in forever.

just enforce age policies

This sounds like an incredible amount of work for a volunteer staff. You know just as well as I do how non-feasible this is.
Furthermore, lmao people are going to lie about their age, this is the Internet.

somehow tgstation manages to do it without problems: 9. Players need to be the age of 18 or above.

people talk about playing on tg all the time in goonstation's discord as well, so i'm not sure why you're then allowing discussion of 18+ servers. (coolstation has the same 18+ players, no ERP rules, and yet as i understand it linking to it is strongly frowned upon. or at least i was last time i tried.

would you say "i'm going to rip off your limbs" to a 13 year old, in a position where you could conceivably do so in game?

yes. i would. i played battlefield when I was 13. sounds exactly like the chat. my cousin says the same exact shit in amog us
further, you don't know the age of the other player.

battlefield is rated M, so you shouldn't have been playing it. kind of like kids and this game.

i would also argue among us is a bit different; this game is clearly more focused on social interactions and personal relationships rather than among us's more arcade-like gameplay.

why are you talking about ways to protect players above, and then just dismissing them here? bit rude.

people should be trusted, on some level, to be capable of having consent. at any point, if we're going "they might be in the wrong headspace for it": then all they should have to say is "i'm not interested", "not now", or just "no". and if it continues, then like any other undesired interaction, it goes to F1.

if you are a nonantagonist, and i am a engineer, and you consistently follow me around and bother me and ask me to build you a teleporter, and you constantly refuse to leave, that is not just being annoying, that's harassment. that's an F1 issue. just like someone making unwanted advances.


from another angle, what happens when someone who gets mindhacked, or a vamp thrallled, or changelinged and hiveminded. if a player isn't in "the right headspace" to basically be under someone's command, is that on the ling or vamp or antagonist for doing it to them?

i don't think so. i think the players are capable of going "i can't / am not able / willing to do this" and using F1 if possible.

"...we won't tell you where the line is, just that one exists..."

huh. i wonder why there's this clarifying post here to help people.

because of ambiguties in stuff like this. here's one example, the spam was tasty and made me tired.

good:
Going to an isolated place to talk to someone and then giving them a hug at the end
Holding hands
Falling in love
Going on a date in game
Going on a date in game to an azone or the debris/mining field
Holding a public wedding in game

bad:
Specifically going to an isolated place to repeatedly hug and grab someone a bunch while talking about how soft they are.
Carrying one another around the station regardless of what is going on.
Building walls/bolting doors in order to sit on laps and feed one another
Threatening to harm/kill/maim people for interrupting a romantic conversation in order to ask you to do your job
Leaving the station or isolating yourself to go on a date while being a head of staff or other important crew role

at what point do you draw the line at what is a merely a gathering of innocent players and what is an illegal date? especially with the talk about "leaving the station" or the debris / azone stuff -- those are all plenty isolated, and few if any people are going to accidentally stumble onto you. there's a reason the diner npcs are considered free meals!

but this is now turning you not just into the 'is an antag bad' police, but literal behavior cops! you have to try and figure out the tone of what people are doing based on in game experience (rare, because let's be honest, few admins admin from in-game) or the incomplete logs. where are you going to draw the line? how can you draw the line?

[OutbackCatgirl]

methods exist to police age and none of them are in place here

the only method that actually works is to get people to take pictures with IDs, which isn't happening anytime soon
nor are we interested in policing age like this? not sure why you think we are

yes, minors will lie to get in occasionally,

there is no need to lie? unless you mean < 13

but the demographic actually playing is mostly 20s to 40s.

you would be surprised by the amount of minors on the discord and ingame

This doesn't address the fact that minors genuinely shouldn't be here. Anyone under the age of 15 or 16 in particular. The 13+ restriction is way too low - this isn't a game made for them, by them, suitable for them, or safe for them. Most people of that age will be intimidated enough to think twice when a box in the janky old game they decided to try on a whim tells them to enter their date of birth and that they will be permabanned if found to be lying about it.

Just because a few of them actively would go out of their way to circumvent that protection doesn't mean it's not worth trying. You have a responsability here and you're shifting that responsability onto policing genuinely harmless behaviour by saying "but what if it happens that a minor ended up on the other side of this interaction?"

Why do yall even think it's acceptable for there to be people in that age bracket playing? Instead of pointing fingers at people maybe try actually doing some policy changes to allow for the adults to continue playing in their safe space while segregating kids into a separate server or something? Yeah, you're all unpaid volunteers, and yeah, that will be work to set up, but you have a whole ass community of people and a good few of them would *welcome* this and even *help out* if you communicated with the community regarding decisions like these before settling on a zero compromise solution. i've moderated huge communities in the past and the basic trust based age verification system of "get them to say what year and month they were born in" filters out way more minors than you would expect, a good 96% in the last one I moderated, and isn't nearly as much work if you design a competent system that doesn't require you to personally dm every newbee. If you're worried about the idiots who lie to get past it *deliberately* and *stupidly*, and give them more value than the community as a whole, it kinda makes me wonder what you *have* tried so far.

I know it's stressful and every decision is incredibly difficult, i know how it feels to be crushed in the anvil of moral imperatives and duty of care, and you guys are pushing yourselves way too hard over it. How many admins are burned out right now? How many have left? Even if it isn't over this specific rule clarification, y'all might need to tally the totality of your mental health and realise you cannot achieve every single goal. You are volunteers, not our parents or teachers. You can run this place as you see fit, but a lot of us aren't gonna stick around if the focus keeps shifting to enabling minors entering spaces that they should not be in.

Does that make sense? Am I explaining myself clearly? are there any points you need clarification of? let's not lump people into the box labelled "toxic" or "groomer" without at least considering the merit in the points being raised, and if we still don't see eye to eye, then so be it, that's the way things are and will be, just know that these opinions aren't just my own and aren't some malicious plot to do whatever the heck a malicious plotter would do. All I want is to be able to enjoy the game i joined last year with the friends and new faces i meet there without being infantilised. That is *all.* it frustrates me to see the patronizing tone everywhere now, and everything being so furtive and paranoid anytime admins are involved where nobody feels safe to just be themselves due to how other people not even involved in the round misinterpret the actions taken in the round. sigh. I should get some water. remember to hydrate, i wish i could properly put into words what i'm seeing here without rambling.

[Cropsey]

Just thought I'd weigh in.
PEGI guidelines are used on the bulk of other games- unique to byond, we don't have to use them. Here is an explanation of them.
However, the game contains gambling, glorification of drug use (stimulants offer a significant gameplay advantage) violence against people who look human, blood, gore, torture...

This game is not PG. It would struggle to be PEGI-16.

[Lefinch]

To do this a different way:

Hello, I'm old. One thing I used to do a long time ago when I was less old was I was a paid employee of Iron Realms Entertainment, a company with the slightly dubious claim to fame of "inventing pay to win before it was cool" by commercializing MUDs. My job was fairly meagre to be honest: I would play one of the "gods" (if you thought admins were taking themselves seriously here) make areas, answer customer complaints. Liase with players on an RP level so on. I was pretty bad at it I can get you some testimonials.

Achaea was very definitively 18+, still is you can go look. It makes it fundamentally clear. I was also under an NDA until like two years ago so it's nice sometimes to talk about things. One thing I don't generally talk about is the skin-crawlingly bad stuff going on with underage players, player IC/OOC romances becoming a giant, catastrophic mess, and one time an event where someone was forced to come out to an admin team basically to explain behaviour in an extremely strange situation. I still personally hate myself and everyone involved for that particular event. I have absolutely no idea what it's like being an admin here, but if it's 10% of that they've got my sympathy and you couldn't pay me to do this again.

My point of saying all that is multifold:

* I suspect it's impossible to stop younger players playing if you couldn't stop them playing a text-based hyper niche game either, and you'll be stuck doing exactly the same thing we were: Just banning the underage player, reporting what you can to local authorities, and discovering you missed a significant portion of them about five years later.
* I, and this is personal I admit: Think people on average are actually not very capable of separating romantic roleplay from their out of character emotional attachment most of the time. I think people who are brilliant, wonderful and I respect them a lot and it's nice to know them here: Still screw this up regularly.
*And with this in mind, having as much clarification so that people might approach romantic roleplay with these points at least in mind hopefully means that there's still a pathway to doing it which is great, but that things that can and *would* lead to problems for the people involved, admins, and everyone are shut down as early as possible.

I'm not personally invested in this, nor am I remotely engaged with the administration. I'm not dismissing the discussion here either it's clearly an important thing to discuss. But I'm also saying it because you know what: I'm good if the admins don't want to have to deal with this because I remember dealing with it.

[junori]

This is a can of worms that I hadn't intended on weighing in on, mostly because my opinion doesn't matter and criticism hardly does either, but man. A lot of good points are being raised that I can't help but +1 onto, the fact that SS13 is a PEGI-18 game no matter which way you look at it (lovely information by the way, Cropsey), and that SS13 is not a safe game to be played by a minor demographic.

That being said, there will always be minors in 18+ communities. There will always be 13-15 year olds in 16+ communities. Unless you're doing ID checks, you can't really make sure, and even then they can just yoink their parents ID for a couple minutes if they're really that convicted. It's a lose-lose, this entire argument is, and honestly I feel like its a waste of breath, typing fingers, and brainpower from both parties.

This is clearly a topic that a lot of people have strong convictions about. I personally don't, and I agree with an earlier point made that if you want to engage in these things, then you should just go elsewhere. But I also agree with the fact that SS13 is not something that can or should be exposed to minors without explicit parental consent. I feel like getting consent forms from parents is a helluva lot more challenging than just slapping an 18+ "I pinky promise I'm 18+ I swear I swear" jig on it. I'm honestly surprised you haven't been facing lawsuits yet for this sort of blatant non-discretion

And, a question for you folks with kids under 16. Even without any sexual content, barring the romantic content drama, would you want your child to be playing SS13? Not even on Goonstation, but any 13+ server?

If I were a parent and I saw my 13 year old playing a game where people violently explode and die, vomit their organs out, kill each other, do drugs, whatever - I probably would not be very happy. The thing is, very little about SS13 is actually cartoonish as well. The gibbing animation is fucking horrific when you see it the first time. Like, jeez, that could possibly negatively rewire a child's brain for sure.

All of my prattling aside, my point is that children just shouldn't be here in the first place and, as stated before by OutbackCatgirl, the infantilization and treatment of other adult peers is honestly a bit hard to fathom how much you do it that bad. The "holier than thou" "I'm right, you're wrong, I'm big, you're little" attitude that I've seen paired with downright condescension when it comes to feedback in these sorts of topics is horrid, to say the least. There's no reason to be talking to people like they're stupid and if I had half a mind I'd open a complaints thread about it, but I don't really care that much to begin with.

If you didn't want feedback, don't make it a discussion topic. Period. And before you say you wanted this to be discussed, clearly the admin replies wouldn't be laced with blatant hostility towards people with differing opinions. Even looking at this argument without bias, there is very little defensible from the side of the administration team.

[Flaborized]

Hi, like zewaka, I'm also posting my thoughts here as Me, Flaborized esq., the person/dog on basketball hoop, and not as a person who's meant to represent what all devs/admins think. These are my words and I didn't pass them though other people to form an official reply or anything, other admins/devs might disagree with the specifics of my views or the way I phrase them. Sorry to other admins if I make us look bad by being Bad, I wanted to share my Thoughts!

This post is, in my view, a clarification of what we've already been doing for years. This doesn't represent a shift in admin behavior, this describes what we've always basically done. Again, in my view, this post was made as clarification because some people were confused about whether or not we want to ban people for having RP relationships or weddings or whatever, and admins wanted to clarify "we don't". I am not as tactful and clean in my language as Jan, and I did not put as much effort into writing this as she and other admins did, but if I were to summarize the point here, it'd be "Don't try to do softcore ERP in-game and disguise it as innocuous cutesy stuff. Don't isolate yourself with your friends and ignore the entire rest of the server for the sake of romance RP."

You might say, "When do we even know when someone has crossed the threshold for either of these?". For the former, it's usually really really obvious that people are trying to skirt the ERP rule. Annoyingly it's hard to give a true cutoff, but we know it when we see it for sure, and the usual antics listed as being OK in the top post are all fine. The admin team are a group of intelligent reasonable adults and IMO we often end up giving people quite a bit of leeway anyways in situations where it's *truly* ambiguous, nobody should reasonably bump into this rule without knowing they're doing it.

For the "Don't isolate yourself with your friends..." bit, this is also usually very clear cut when we run across it in my opinion. No, going on an adventure with your space partner or friends is not a bannable offense. It's not really rocket science here, we can tell apart deliberately exclusionary behavior and people having fun with friends. And this is something we ban people for in particularly egregious, repeated instances. Because of the nature of these things, we can't say like, "Oh we ban you when you rack up 500 exclusionary RP points" or something, but in my personal experience seeing this bans carried out and reading the cases admins make for the bans, we're pretty fair about it.

the "don't say anything you wouldn't say to a 13 year old" obviously falls apart unless you couch it entirely in "romance".

would you say "i'm going to rip off your limbs" to a 13 year old, in a position where you could conceivably do so in game?
what about "i'm going to murder your friends, in front of you, and then kill you too"? is that too far?

I don't really understand this point at all. For better or for worse, we, as a society, have decided that it's OK for teens to see violence in media. When you say "i'm going to rip off your limbs", you're adding a secret caveat, "in this video game". I know that sounds a lot like adding "in minecraft" to thinly veil a threat, but it's obviously... not that? If you threaten someone with an RPG in the game, you're not actually threatening the person in real life with an RPG. Real life threats are taken incredibly seriously, if you threaten a real person's well-being (13 or not), that's like, an omega ban. Like that's a, "Don't bother appealing this, we never want that here" level ban.

Romantic RP is not the same thing. There are, again for better or worse, real emotional feelings tied to people's roleplay. I think basically everybody would say that roleplaying a romantic relationship with a 13 year old as an adult is pretty much disgusting! I'll let other people chime in and tell me I'm wrong about this, but I genuinely do not feel the need to explain this bit and I assume we're at least all in agreement about this one thing. Even if we're not, this is the admin position, and I would describe it as immutable. Yes, this only applies to romance. It *is* a special case. 

Just because a few of them actively would go out of their way to circumvent that protection doesn't mean it's not worth trying. You have a responsability here and you're shifting that responsability onto policing genuinely harmless behaviour by saying "but what if it happens that a minor ended up on the other side of this interaction?"

Every single instance I've seen of someone getting banned for "ambiguous" behavior was actually banned for situations I would not call ambiguous whatsoever. All of the bans that have gone through would've still gone through if this server was 18+. We're not policing genuinely harmless behavior, we're policing people who are obviously ERPing but trying to tow the line. The only thing that we're not letting you do because there's people who are 13-18 here is... romance people who are 13-18. 

 I understand that lots of people are anxious about breaking rules, and want clear definitions of exactly what they can and cannot do, but we can't actually write an exhaustive list here, where it crosses over is difficult to define, but I can give a good set of personal rules if anybody finds them useful. Don't do something in-game with the intent for it to be deliberately titillating. Don't try to deliberately shut people out if they want to RP or play the game with you just because you want alone time with someone you're friends with. Again, you're genuinely not going to cross up against accidentally this if you're reasonable, and the bans I've seen are usually pretty egregious or the person has been warned several times before for the exact same behavior.

This doesn't address the fact that minors genuinely shouldn't be here. Anyone under the age of 15 or 16 in particular. The 13+ restriction is way too low - this isn't a game made for them, by them, suitable for them, or safe for them. Most people of that age will be intimidated enough to think twice when a box in the janky old game they decided to try on a whim tells them to enter their date of birth and that they will be permabanned if found to be lying about it.

I'm personally conflicted on this. There are people who are admins now who started playing this game when they were teens. (All current and future admins will be adults don't worry lol). There's quite a few people who play the game, are teenagers, and are totally fine. I don't specifically think of the violence and drugs and whatever we have in the game and go "Oh it kinda sucks that a middle schooler could be exposed to it." but I'm also not particularly *thrilled* about it. I think the main opposition from the admin team would be like, we're not actually going to take full measures to enforce it, because it's honestly not *that* sensitive. I would be, personally, in my opinion, just ME nobody else consulted, fine with saying "if we find out you're under 16/18/fuck it 21 even we'd ban you, but we're not really gonna go digging for this information particularly". I cannot promise this will actually happen and am just saying, "hey this is what I think about this hot button issue" publicly. The hardest part of this is that we would indeed have to kick out a significant amount of players who are completely fine if we put it at 18 or whatever, which would be a bit sad.


Again, I feel this post was made to clear up confusion some specific people had, and in all honestly to mostly reassure people that Yes, you can have weddings and RP having a space wife and hold hands with your dear space wife as you slip on a banana peel and all that stuff that people like to do. We're not gonna go banning innocent players because of totally innocuous mixups or anything. You will absolutely be warned if you break these rules (unless you do it in like, an obviously bad way. like explicit ERP type stuff) and admins ***frequently*** err on the side of being too lenient instead of being too stern in actually ambiguous situations. 99% of people do not have to worry about this at all and are fine I promise you it's fine to express yourself and play characters honestly within the rules of the game. If we do ban you unreasonably please make a public complaint about it and we'll be forced to show our receipts and it'll be obvious to everybody if we did actually do something wrong. 


As a side-note, I'd like if we on both sides could keep things cordial when discussing this here. This is obviously a thing people are invested in but I think it would be nice if everyone was nice to each other no matter how annoying I am with my overlong writeups. I'm not warning anybody here, just like, saying. My posts are overly long because I feel like I have a lot to say usually and I want to try and say it all in as clear of a manner as I can produce sorry for the giant essay I'm just like this!!

Also reading this back I did kinda repeat myself a bit. This doesn't make me look very smart but I'm fine with it because I believe in what I've typed out here and I don't want to restructure this to still make sense while cutting down on that. This isn't really what I *enjoy* spending time on so I'm not gonna meticulously sculpt the post to absolute perfection, I am sorry for the added hassle to reading it, I'm not a great writer.

[OutbackCatgirl]

As a side-note, I'd like if we on both sides could keep things cordial when discussing this here. This is obviously a thing people are invested in but I think it would be nice if everyone was nice to each other no matter how annoying I am with my overlong writeups. I'm not warning anybody here, just like, saying. My posts are overly long because I feel like I have a lot to say usually and I want to try and say it all in as clear of a manner as I can produce sorry for the giant essay I'm just like this!!

Also reading this back I did kinda repeat myself a bit. This doesn't make me look very smart but I'm fine with it because I believe in what I've typed out here and I don't want to restructure this to still make sense while cutting down on that. This isn't really what I *enjoy* spending time on so I'm not gonna meticulously sculpt the post to absolute perfection, I am sorry for the added hassle to reading it, I'm not a great writer.

Look, you're right there. We should bring the tone back down to earth and do this thing like grown adults. That goes for me, too. I have been thinking, and honestly the main part of this whole thing that has got me so conflicted is the fact that a friend who never did a single thing out of line in my book, and never disrupted a single moment of the game that i was *aware* of, was likely, and indirectly, the catalyst that lead to the admins discussing this behind closed doors and then putting out a clarification.

Obviously this announcement i agree has nothing directly to do with that incident. I am going to stay vague since it isn't something for public conversation, but the wording of things and testimony from multiple folk lead me to feel somewhat distrustful of that decision, which is why I started to respond to this thread as I did. Again, we will not discuss that further in public, as it is rightly a private thing and should remain so; but if that helps explain why i feel the way i do about this, having essentially lost yet another friend who i enjoyed seeing ingame to things suddenly being outlawed that were previously seen as essentially harmless, maybe that will lend perspective. 

It makes me feel uneasy about entrusting the enforcement of this to folk that have misinterpreted situations, without malice, in the past. Inferring what others are intending doesn't always match with reality.

Zamu's testimony (and the fact she left the team at all) just has red flags a-wavin' and klaxons going off in my head. I've seen this exact situation in different flavours before where an already stressed admin team implodes over something small being made into something big. If any admins still have questions in their mind or wanna talk about it privately, my discord dms are open and absofuckinlutely confidential regardless of my own biases, for as long as I still have enough spoons to talk about it. Anyone stuck in the middle of this likely feels real uneasy and stressed right about now and i want y'all to know that regardless of opinions we all human, we all need to get stuff vented, or to shout into the void frustration at people being, well, people. 

I genuinely believe everyone here is tryin' to do their best out of shitty situations and honestly it's a moral quandary that absolutely sucks to be responsible for making decisions on. Be good to each other, ok?

[bubs]

The admin team is not in turmoil or exploding over this, it doesn't even represent any kind of change in policy.

It wasn't even a itty bitty fight or anything

[klushy225]

I won't really weigh in here as it's not my argument, and I don't want to anger people. However, I do think at least a 16+ requirement would be better, in my humble opinion.
That's all, the reasons have been discussed here by others already, and I really don't care one way or another.
You all please be nice to each other please.