Goonhub
08-31-2025, 12:10 PM
I don't want a giant tag on my character saying if I have epilepsy or are photosensitive or whatever. It sounds like a terrible idea.
I don't mean this in a mean way. People aren't nice. I've had someone come up to me and shine a strobe torch in my face upon finding out i was epileptic. It's even easier for people to pull that sort of thing online- you're not attaching your face to you being a shithead. A marker like that is something that weirdly singles someone out and also sticks a target on your back.
It's also to an extent not your responsibility to manage other people's triggers, whether for epilepsy or anxiety or anything else- given you interact with so many people on the internet it's not possible to keep track of what triggers whose what's. You are, in turn, responsible to some extent for your own shit.
It is also NEVER possible for a video game to guarantee safety for a photosensitive epileptic. I know we're all used to seeing those "consult your doctor" screens and laughing them off, but the truth is moving images do flicker, and even in an incredibly static video game (which ss13 is not) things can go wrong. Think Cyberpunk accidentally mimicking Intermittent Photic Stimulation simply because they didn't know better, or that bug in the Sims 3 that turned your sim into a giant flashing ball of flesh. Sometimes risk is inherent and you have to decide whether to risk it or not.
That being said, there are some high-hertz effects in the game that really could use a toggle to a single frame of colour or something. There's that gene that strobes your character, the radstorm effect, and there used to be intermittent bright flashes to simulate lightning in some azones- though I believe those can now be toggled.
These things don't need to be removed from the game, and i think a lot of players would complain about that, but an option to "freeze" their animations could be more feasible, particularly the whole screen overlays since they're all (I think?) managed the same way in the code.
There's my two cents.
I don't mean this in a mean way. People aren't nice. I've had someone come up to me and shine a strobe torch in my face upon finding out i was epileptic. It's even easier for people to pull that sort of thing online- you're not attaching your face to you being a shithead. A marker like that is something that weirdly singles someone out and also sticks a target on your back.
It's also to an extent not your responsibility to manage other people's triggers, whether for epilepsy or anxiety or anything else- given you interact with so many people on the internet it's not possible to keep track of what triggers whose what's. You are, in turn, responsible to some extent for your own shit.
It is also NEVER possible for a video game to guarantee safety for a photosensitive epileptic. I know we're all used to seeing those "consult your doctor" screens and laughing them off, but the truth is moving images do flicker, and even in an incredibly static video game (which ss13 is not) things can go wrong. Think Cyberpunk accidentally mimicking Intermittent Photic Stimulation simply because they didn't know better, or that bug in the Sims 3 that turned your sim into a giant flashing ball of flesh. Sometimes risk is inherent and you have to decide whether to risk it or not.
That being said, there are some high-hertz effects in the game that really could use a toggle to a single frame of colour or something. There's that gene that strobes your character, the radstorm effect, and there used to be intermittent bright flashes to simulate lightning in some azones- though I believe those can now be toggled.
These things don't need to be removed from the game, and i think a lot of players would complain about that, but an option to "freeze" their animations could be more feasible, particularly the whole screen overlays since they're all (I think?) managed the same way in the code.
There's my two cents.