What is creepy?

[trtkszyx]

Don't tone police me shitlord

popeedit: this too, i would really appreciate it if you didn't derail the conversation into yet another big crappy screaming match when it might just turn out to be a useful discussion

[Lantern]

I agree that sexual jokes should just be banned outright. I don't want to read them here, and a lot of people I talk with on IRC don't want to hear them. In regards to what else is considered creepy and against the rules, well, that is subjective and in my opinion, should be left to the admins.

[Broodlines]

I agree with erotic dad in that kidnappin' and torture is part of the open ended feel to ss13, Violence and mayhem is what keeps the game interesting for many people, just as trying to quell the violence and mayhem is to others. But at the same time I agree with pope because its easy to get really creepy when it comes to torture and *custom emotes and there should be some kinda line, but then again many people will probably not understand this line as its very hard to determine how much torture is too much torture? So basically I'm conflicted.

[popecrunch]

Sure but one person's 'let's leave that to the admins' is another person's 'THEY'RE NOT LISTENING TO THE COMMUNITY'. Here's us, we're listening. What stuff makes you uncomfortable, what stuff makes other people uncomfortable that you think is fine, and where does the line fall FOR YOU between 'that guy's being a creepo and i'm going to yell at him about it' and 'that guy's being a creepo and i'm going to adminhelp it and let them work it out'.

By getting a large enough sample size of people discussing those ideas, we can all (players and admins alike) hopefully decide where those lines should be drawn, and how it should be handled when someone crosses them.

[Spy_Guy]

To touch on the kidnapping example, I feel that a lot of it can be in good fun if it's done in a kind of over-the-top slapstick kind of deal. If we look at the extra creepy example below, the primary difference is the loving detail which goes into making it weird.

ALICE, IS THERE SOMEONE WE SHOULD CALL TO MAKE SURE YOU'RE TAKING YOUR MEDICATION:

Alice shoots Bob with a tranq dart. When Bob wakes up, he's lashed to a chair in a dark room somewhere with a couple dead bodies around, and Alice is laughing. She tells him that he can't escape, that he's going to die here, and starts hollering on the radio that unless Jones The Cat is taken safely to the owlry and arrives unharmed, she's going to mail pieces of Bob to various parts of the station, starting with beakers of blood, going through the limbs, then ending with his brain. Nobody responds to the demands, so she extracts some blood, *laughs afterward and does a custom emote about licking the needle afterward,then mails that to Chemistry, hacks off his limbs, does a custom emote about slapping him with his own severed arm and hollering STOP HITTING YOURSELF and mails those to the Bridge, and finally mails his brain to the kitchen after doing a custom emote about licking it clean.

For instance, both of the red sections are text in which I feel the player crosses the line between scary violence and goes into creepy (here defined as the gross kind of creepy; not the atmospheric kind) detail that subtly suggests they might be enjoying this a tad more than normal, they're clearly aiming to make this a lovingly rendered torture scene above and beyond the call of duty.

However, the blue example still falls under the slapstick comedy violence bit on its own and I'd find it quite funny if done in-game.

Overall, however, I feel that the tone of the entire scene is way too lovingly crafted to not appear skeevy as hell and in the end I think this is the kinda thing that a person should get a talking-to for.

To take the example that set this off:

Code:

OOC: i want to fart inside every admin
OOC: my ass gas billowing angrily past their lips
OOC: taking seed in their stomach
OOC: turning them into pruney men full of hate.

If this was just said as something like "I want to fart in the face of every admin" it'd be a kind of slapstick thing that nobody would take seriously. As it stands it's a pretty deliberately and detailed crafting of someone's farting fantasies and it's clear they've given the subject more thought than can be considered normal and triggers the natural "what the fuck is wrong with you!?" response.

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The exception is, of course, for sexual things. There's really no doubt about the whole "if it involves your genitals it has no business being here" clause in the rules and people in violation of this should be slapped harder than above as there is no real ambiguity here as to whether or not their actions are in violation of the rules.
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In cases where there's ambiguity regarding the creepiness of the act the person carrying it out should probably be told that "this is gross, stop" and then be expected to respect this, much like how people get told off for using the really bad words before getting a proper smackdown if it's clear they just slipped up.

[Kaet]

The fart joke in question was not so much of a joke, but a strange and gross description of what he'd like to do. I don't care much for it and I wouldn't like to encourage that kind of "jokes".

As for a hostage situation.. I think they're perfectly fine, but if you start getting weird about it I'd say it would be creepy.
Tweaking your nipples would be really creepy in a hostage situation. But honestly I don't know why that emote is in the game since I find it creepy regardless of the situation.
Slapping, punching, poisoning or keeping the hostage on the verge of death all is fine by me though. Just don't make it out to be something more than what it is.
Though.. If I was taken hostage by the chef in the kitchen and he somehow got all my limbs off, fried them and ate them/forced me to eat them/served them to others and made me watch, I'd find that funny.
But it is definitely weird and could be considered very creepy.

Honestly I think the only thing that would make a hostage situation creepy enough for me to want to bail out and tell an adult would be any kind of sexual hinting or someone taking unusual amounts of pleasure in it.
I also wouldn't want to be farted into while being a hostage. That would be exceedingly creepy if you ask me.

[Sundance]

There's no need to make sexual jokes of any nature. Besides the rules, it's just not really in the game to be regarded bar the assless-chaps uniform you get in that crate (never remove), and just use your brain when talking about shit IC and OOC.

That said we really shouldn't read into something that is too ambiguous to be regarded as a sexual act. The trtskyzx OOC comment was not ambiguous. However the Alice and Bob examples:

Alice shoots Bob with a tranq dart. When Bob wakes up, he's lashed to a chair in a dark room somewhere with a couple dead bodies around, and Alice is laughing. She tells him that he can't escape, that he's going to die here, and starts hollering on the radio that unless Jones The Cat is taken safely to the owlry and arrives unharmed, she's going to mail pieces of Bob to various parts of the station, starting with beakers of blood, going through the limbs, then ending with his brain. Nobody responds to the demands, so she extracts some blood, mails that to Chemistry, hacks off his limbs and mails those to the Bridge, and finally mails his brain to the kitchen.

This is fine.

Alice shoots Bob with a tranq dart. When Bob wakes up, he's lashed to a chair in a dark room somewhere with a couple dead bodies around, and Alice is laughing. She tells him that he can't escape, that he's going to die here, and starts hollering on the radio that unless Jones The Cat is taken safely to the owlry and arrives unharmed, she's going to mail pieces of Bob to various parts of the station, starting with beakers of blood, going through the limbs, then ending with his brain. Nobody responds to the demands, so she extracts some blood, *laughs afterward and does a custom emote about licking the needle afterward,then mails that to Chemistry, hacks off his limbs, does a custom emote about slapping him with his own severed arm and hollering STOP HITTING YOURSELF and mails those to the Bridge, and finally mails his brain to the kitchen after doing a custom emote about licking it clean.

This is a little less fine. The stop hitting yourself is fine, but the emoting licking needles is getting pretty close to erp, but I could see how the player Alice may argue that it is not creepy, when there are players who go around *consuming raw rotten bodies. They should be given an admin warning about where they're threading.
As far as i'm concerned torture and kidnap should not be regarded as "creepy" as it's not fair to assume it's always sexual AND it's done all the time, the alice and bob situation happens quite alot.
Anything sexual, emoting, or saying shit OOC/IC is bad. That's granted.

But people should be careful what they emote and try not to go too off the hook which falls into heavy RP territory and starts to go off fantastical tangent I think falls less into the being creepy, and more that they are emoting something that goes beyond the normal realm of which emoting should be used.
For example emoting:
"Sundance Feely gnaws on Assisant Joe's misplaced limb.' This is fine imo
But
"Sundance Feely viciously gnaws on Assistant Joe's misplaced limb, tearing off the flesh between his teeth, gnashing the bloody tissue between his molars, [etc]" While not sexually creepy, is fantastical and messed up.

[popecrunch]

Yeah i tossed in stop hitting yourself because I wanted to add SOMETHING there, and that amused me too much not to include it. Hell, if not for the horrible things it's bookended by, i'd count that toward the hilarity clause if it still existed.

My greater point here is that CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING. This was perhaps a bit too much exaggeration to prove a point, but what I was going for was that it only takes some fairly minor changes to turn something from acceptable to unacceptable. It's interesting that you mentioned an ERP component to the needle-licking, when that hadn't occurred to me at all - which supports my point that it's something of a moving target. What's creepy to one person isn't to another, and there's where this comes off the rails, and the heart of this discussion. How would you like an admin to handle a case where Eddie points at something and says 'that's creepy' and Frances points at it and says 'that's totally not'?

This is an honest question, I'm not being sarcastic or anything here. I am genuinely interested in people's opinions on how this should be handled, since this seems to be a point of occasional friction.

[Sundance]

Bigotry of any form isn't acceptable on the servers. There is no acceptable excuse for using homophobic, racist or sexist language. We don't care if you are gay, black, Latina/o, etc. in real life. D”on't use bigoted language, period. This also applies to names, including spoonerisms (e.g. "Digger Nick"). Creepiness is also unacceptable. This includes rape jokes, roleplaying sex, sexual harassment/assault or rape. If it involves your genitals, it doesn't belong here. There is absolutely no reason to use the word 'rape' on our servers, in any context, at all, forever. This is neither negotiable nor up for debate.
Don't import drama. What people do on the internet outside of SS13 is not the concern of any of us. We don't know, we don't care, we don't WANT to know. Harassing someone in-game, on the forums, or in IRC about things they do or say outside of it is terrible. If it didn't happen here, then it didn't happen as far as we're concerned.

What is clear here that homophobic, racist or sexual language IC/OOC is a no-no.
What isn't clear is about roleplaying nasty shit like torture, which isn't on the rules page whatsoever. There should be an extra set of rules underneath the above stating that while roleplaying is fine and emoting is fine, goonstation is a lighter-rp server and heavy RP that involves heavy meticulous emotes should be avoided, especially if it's particularly sadistic in nature.

[Vinny]

How would you like an admin to handle a case where Eddie points at something and says 'that's creepy' and Frances points at it and says 'that's totally not'?

there seems to be a toss-up here between taking each case individually and in-context or just listening to the most easily offended person, because we don't want to offend ANYONE.

it'd be really unfortunate to have to limit player interactions to counter-strike-in-space combat and stock emotes because anything more involved might be construed as "creepy".

[popecrunch]

Bigotry of any form isn't acceptable on the servers. There is no acceptable excuse for using homophobic, racist or sexist language. We don't care if you are gay, black, Latina/o, etc. in real life. D”on't use bigoted language, period. This also applies to names, including spoonerisms (e.g. "Digger Nick"). Creepiness is also unacceptable. This includes rape jokes, roleplaying sex, sexual harassment/assault or rape. If it involves your genitals, it doesn't belong here. There is absolutely no reason to use the word 'rape' on our servers, in any context, at all, forever. This is neither negotiable nor up for debate.
Don't import drama. What people do on the internet outside of SS13 is not the concern of any of us. We don't know, we don't care, we don't WANT to know. Harassing someone in-game, on the forums, or in IRC about things they do or say outside of it is terrible. If it didn't happen here, then it didn't happen as far as we're concerned.

What is clear here that homophobic, racist or sexual language IC/OOC is a no-no.
What isn't clear is about roleplaying nasty shit like torture, which isn't on the rules page whatsoever. There should be an extra set of rules underneath the above stating that while roleplaying is fine and emoting is fine, goonstation is a lighter-rp server and heavy RP that involves heavy meticulous emotes should be avoided, especially if it's particularly sadistic in nature.

So let's stick the bolded bit above in the rules page. Anyone else want to chime in? Agree / disagree? It still has the problem of being unspecific and nebulous, but I think that's just the nature of the beast because it's impossible to really nail down.

How would you like an admin to handle a case where Eddie points at something and says 'that's creepy' and Frances points at it and says 'that's totally not'?

there seems to be a toss-up here between taking each case individually and in-context or just listening to the most easily offended person, because we don't want to offend ANYONE.

it'd be really unfortunate to have to limit player interactions to counter-strike-in-space combat and stock emotes because anything more involved might be construed as "creepy".

Agreed. We don't need to babysit things to the point where a success state is LITERALLY NOBODY IS OFFENDED AT ALL, BY ANYTHING, EVER, but 'taking each case individually and in-context' has the problem of perpetual arguments over the definition of 'creepy'. I'd really, REALLY like the admins to do things that way, but I'd also really like the playerbase to have a chance to have a say in it.

[Spy_Guy]

How would you like an admin to handle a case where Eddie points at something and says 'that's creepy' and Frances points at it and says 'that's totally not'?

Is Eddie the victim?

If he is, then it might be a good idea to tell the perpetrator to chill a bit while getting some second opinions on whether or not it's creepy, then move from there.

Is Frances the victim?

Then it could be said that there's no real harm done, unless the kind of stuff taking place is of the magnitude that ghosts / onlookers might actually be offended by seeing it.

Getting second opinions would be important if the admin themselves feel like it's ambiguous enough that Eddie's and Frances' differing opinions weigh into the case.
At the same time, a higher value should be placed on the victim's opinion than that of an independent third party and especially that of the perpetrator. That being said, if the perceived creepiness is something par for the course like facefarting sans horrible custom emotes, then it doesn't have to be creepy just because Eddie feels that way.

[...]There should be an extra set of rules underneath the above stating that while roleplaying is fine and emoting is fine, goonstation is a lighter-rp server and heavy RP that involves heavy meticulous emotes should be avoided, especially if it's particularly sadistic in nature.

You know, this is where we have to weigh the benefits against the costs. We're not machines operating on some kind of if (gross) {ban()} logic where we need to define each case where gross == true.
This is where we have to use judgement based on context in order to select an appropriate method of dealing with the issue. The issue isn't with people doing heavy rp things on goon with custom emotes, the issue lies with those who take it too far and those people can be told off.

[...]
There should be an extra set of rules underneath the above stating that while roleplaying is fine and emoting is fine, goonstation is a lighter-rp server and heavy RP that involves heavy meticulous emotes should be avoided, especially if it's particularly sadistic in nature.

So let's stick the bolded bit above in the rules page. Anyone else want to chime in? Agree / disagree? It still has the problem of being unspecific and nebulous, but I think that's just the nature of the beast because it's impossible to really nail down.

I disagree with putting this on the rules page for the reason mentioned above. The issue is not with people doing heavy rp stuff on goon (if they pull it off more power to them, etc) but people going too far.
If there is a need to add a clause to the "Creep" section of the rules I think it would be better done as something along the lines of:

Creepiness is also unacceptable. This includes rape jokes, roleplaying sex, sexual harassment/assault, rape or extreme torture. If it involves your genitals, it doesn't belong here. There is absolutely no reason to use the word 'rape' on our servers, in any context, at all, forever. This is neither negotiable nor up for debate.

If the extreme torture clause requires clarification I believe all that should be necessary is a "when in doubt, don't" statement, or even using popecrunch's example as a display of where the line is drawn.

[Noah Buttes]

I disagree with putting this on the rules page for the reason mentioned above. The issue is not with people doing heavy rp stuff on goon (if they pull it off more power to them, etc) but people going too far.
If there is a need to add a clause to the "Creep" section of the rules I think it would be better done as something along the lines of:

Creepiness is also unacceptable. This includes rape jokes, roleplaying sex, sexual harassment/assault, rape or extreme torture. If it involves your genitals, it doesn't belong here. There is absolutely no reason to use the word 'rape' on our servers, in any context, at all, forever. This is neither negotiable nor up for debate.

If the extreme torture clause requires clarification I believe all that should be necessary is a "when in doubt, don't" statement, or even using popecrunch's example as a display of where the line is drawn.

I think this is the best possible solution to the issue.

[RedbeardRum]

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 poo 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.

Just out of curiosity, is possible that this discussion might go in a way that will bring back poo? The creepy problem might be circumvented by removing, say, the ability to shit in a glass, and the ability to eat it. Slipping people up with diarhhea and assistants smearing shit on the captain as he walked by were both pretty hilarious.

[Broodlines]

Just out of curiosity, is possible that this discussion might go in a way that will bring back poo?