What is creepy?

[emarl]

MY POSITION: There is absolutely no place for sexual material on the servers. Pretty much, if it involves your genitals, it doesn't belong here. There are a bunch of people who play this game on our servers that aren't 18 yet, and the admin staff in general has neither the ability nor the inclination to agewall the server so that nobody under 18 can connect. As a result, we have to err on the side of 'not winding up with the server owner being sued for allowing sexual material to be transmitted to a minor'. The server owner is a pretty good dude and I do not want him to get sued! Therefore, genitals are right out.

I think this has always been the stance for goonstation. We've always humiliated and banned ERPers or people being weird and overly sexual.

Other stuff that puts one player in positions of exploitative power over another player is also something we don't want here. This is a little nebulous simply because it's impossible to really nail down in a way that doesn't cause more loopholes than definitions! Examples: Alice grabs ahold of Bill, straps him to a chair, monologues at them for a while about how they've just been kidnapped and nobody will ever see them again and really goes into it for a good long time and does some Reservoir Dogs shit like dancing around them a bunch, cutting them up a little, and lighting them on fire. That's sort of messed up! That's not okay. (Sidebar: It might or might not be okay if Alice is a traitor this round, but that would depend on the circumstances. Context is everything!) To me, that's not okay because that's a situation where Alice is forcing their control of Bill's ~game experience~. Granted, if Alice just straight up shot Bill in the hallway, that's still forcing their control of Bill's experience, but it would be PERFECTLY OKAY if Alice were a traitor that round. The difference is the time spent exerting that control, the context in which it was done, and the general 'feel' of the whole thing. This is pretty hard to verbalize, and I think that's where the bulk of the conflict comes from.

This is definitely where the problem lies, in the subjective nature of the "don't be a jerk" and "don't be creepy" rules. I don't think tying a player to a chair and reenacting Reservoir Dogs is creepy because that kind of stuff has always been part of the emergent gameplay of ss13. ss13 relies on being an open-ended space station sandbox game and it's better to let players do what they want as long as we don't enable sexual content and crack down too hard on murders (like giving security reasonable buffs and pushing more non-lethal methods to bust offenders instead of admins policing the servers 24/7).

Essentially by enforcing the "don't be a jerk" rule too hard, we're turning ss13 into a single player hugbox game where you're not allowed to interact with other players in any remotely negative way, and as a result we get pestered by adminhelps nonstop because player agency is dramatically reduced from what it was in the old days.

Regarding farts: Fart jokes are in general pretty funny. They get a little weird sometimes when people get REALLY INTO THEM - one of the main reasons McRib was removed was that there was a worrying segment of the userbase who were REALLY INTO literally wallowing in feces every round to the point where a bunch of the admins honestly worried we were enabling a cadre of shit fetisists. That's... that's pretty plainly creepy, in my view.

Fart jokes are really funny but it is a slippery slope (though not as bad as poo).

At the time poo was really funny to tweak hardcore RP people out but eventually it became a defining point of our version rather than an accessory piece. That being said, catbeasts have definitely supplanted poo as the new terrible pervasive ss13 feature.