What is creepy?

[popecrunch]

Hello! Lately, there's been a discussion over in the appeals thread about the application of the 'don't be creepy' rule. Specifically, this series of messages was posted in the OOC channel, and the person who posted it received a temporary ban:

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.

Please note that the BYOND id of the person who posted the message was not included in the snippet here. That is because the identity of the person who posted it is not relevant to the discussion of the rule, and there's enough controversy surrounding the person who posted it that I really don't want what could be a very useful rules discussion derailed by the screaming and hollering that often happens around that person.

WHAT THIS THREAD IS FOR: Let's talk about the 'don't be creepy' rule, and hopefully we can come to an understanding on why the rule is in place and what it covers. I can't promise that admin application of the rule will change to fit any one person's definition of what should or should not fall under this rule (mainly because I can only speak for myself, and everyone has different definitions of 'creepy'), but I'm confident that we can find something approaching a consensus. Ideally, I'd like everyone to come out of this thread with a good guideline in their head for what sort of behavior is and isn't acceptable here, and feeling like they had some input.

WHAT THIS THREAD IS NOT FOR: Let's NOT talk about the controversy surrounding the person quoted above. This thread isn't about them, it's about the rule and the interpretation thereof. The person who posted the quoted text above isn't banned from the forums, nor are they prevented from participating in the thread (in fact, I would greatly appreciate it if they did participate in this thread) - that said, if the thread turns into 'hey let's scream at that guy about WHAT HE DIIIID', I'm going to start editing posts.

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.

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. (edit to add: the issue isn't with the kidnapping ITSELF, but when the kidnapper gets super duper into it and it gets into like hardcore torture stuff - yikes.)

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.

So: Let's talk! Is there stuff I've pointed at as creepy in the above that you disagree with? Did I miss something you think is worth pointing out? Anything else you want to discuss on the topic? I'M ALL EARS

[TheTrixRabitt]

In my opinion I would probably let most borderline creepy jokes go as long as others and me actually laugh at the joke instead of a instant reaction of, "What the hell is wrong with you?" Of course I'm not saying any weird rape or sexual jokes should be let go, those jokes almost never have a good reason for being said, and are usually not too funny since its again, creepy as fuck.

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.

Welp, good thing I never actually did this because I remember thinking of doing that like a year ago. I really wanted to do it to some specific security officer too.

[BadClown]

The first OOC wasn't that creepy, thats just him being a butt. The second one is a bit worse, but still not "creepy" level.

Third and fourth OOC get progressively worse I think, to the point where they could be considered creepy.

I don't think theres anything wrong with getting "really into it" as it's still a farting simulator, but you've still got to own up to your actions if you go too far.

WHAT DID I JUST SAY?

[wabash1]

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. (edit to add: the issue isn't with the kidnapping ITSELF, but when the kidnapper gets super duper into it and it gets into like hardcore torture stuff - yikes.)

This is too much of a grey area and shouldn't be enforced either way, if someone is a traitor and wants to murder their victims gruesomely oh well. Now if someone were to emote sexual things while doing this nope that's bad.

[ISaidNo]

my take on the original dialog:

Code:

OOC: i want to fart inside every admin

mostly ok but the "inside" specification is a bit weird

Code:

OOC: my ass gas billowing angrily past their lips

okay so this is describing farting in someones mouth specifically which is going a bit too far

Code:

OOC: taking seed in their stomach

yeah no, jizz in someone's stomach is pretty much 100% nope in our servers

Code:

OOC: turning them into pruney men full of hate.

this is just really silly and i'm ok with it

[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.

[Zadeon]

So "how long" can you kidnap a person? As in, when is it a good time to stop holding a person hostage? What if you kidnap somebody who did something good for the station and then the entire station tries to get the hostage back? But then it starts to go on for a long time. The crew and kidnapper are having fun in a struggle for the hostage, but he's just sitting there basically an observer who can't do anything (this is just an example, not any previous round).

[Readster]

I'm just going to repost what I said in the admin IRC.

<Readster> creepiness feels like a very difficult thing to be specific about
<Readster> different people find different things creepy
<Readster> what I really think is that creepiness is something that should definitely definitely DEFINITELY always get a warning
<Readster> because if an admin finds something creepy they need to let the person know instead of expecting them to think the same
<Readster> Unless it's just outright ERP

[wabash1]

So "how long" can you kidnap a person? As in, when is it a good time to stop holding a person hostage? What if you kidnap somebody who did something good for the station and then the entire station tries to get the hostage back? But then it starts to go on for a long time. The crew and kidnapper are having fun in a struggle for the hostage, but he's just sitting there basically an observer who can't do anything (this is just an example, not any previous round).

If traitor: forever in my opinion.

[popecrunch]

I expected to be called out on that example! I included it specifically as something that could be COMPLETELY NORMAL or WHOA HOLY CRAP CREEPY depending entirely on context. It could be something as minor as a couple lines in chat that rocket it from normal to weird. THREAD CHALLENGE: Construct a scenario in which a kidnapping would be PERFECTLY OKAY by your standards, and turn that scenario into something creepy by changing as little as possible. One or two of these should illustrate my point that 'creepy is a moving target' and 'context is everything'. I'll begin!

PERFECTLY OKAY, ASSUMING ALICE IS A TRAITOR:

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.

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.

[ividyon]

It feels to me like you got a bit sidetracked there on your Alice & Bill example. Initially it was about the creepiness of Alice's actions, then it's suddenly about "stripping away the player's control"? Yeah, I also hate it when I get bucklecuffed to chairs and kept in rooms without any way to interact with anything, or if security strip me of all my possessions/my ID and never return it, and I believe that such "cooperative play" should be enforced/encouraged more openly. However, that's nothing to do with creepiness.

I believe the 'creepy' rule should universally apply to anything sexual, but you guys should be REAL careful about non-sexual/deviant examples. The Alice/Bill example, to me, looked totally fine; what is a better place to go crazy than a barely intact space station filled to the brim with the most abusive and disgusting humans an oppressive space megacorporation could pick up from the slums? Violence and being (sort of) an asshole is part of the Goonstation experience, and to me that doesn't deviate too far from it.

By all means, keep all sexual content away from the servers; not only are people comfortable with varying amounts of sexual humour, the absence of is also forces people to be more creative. It also makes it really easy to ban potential stalkers/otherwise creepy fuckers, particularly when REAL WOMEN ON THE INTERNET!!!! are involved. Think twice about other types of "creepiness" though. I wouldn't want to be reported and banned for things like standing at the RD's office and *staring at him through his window to incite a reaction.

[ividyon]

Re: pope's above post; personally I don't think anybody will even get that far on goonstation, because their target will be *farting and *flipping and talking shit all the way through their roleplay session. It simply doesn't fit the nature and mood of goonstation, and I have a feeling that this sort of play will essentially punish and govern itself.

[trtkszyx]

my take on the original dialog:

Code:

OOC: i want to fart inside every admin

mostly ok but the "inside" specification is a bit weird

Code:

OOC: my ass gas billowing angrily past their lips

okay so this is describing farting in someones mouth specifically which is going a bit too far

Code:

OOC: taking seed in their stomach

yeah no, jizz in someone's stomach is pretty much 100% nope in our servers

Code:

OOC: turning them into pruney men full of hate.

this is just really silly and i'm ok with it

This is very clearly talking about the fart blooming in your stomach like a seed, you would have to be really bad at reading or trying hard to make this look creepy to interpret it otherwise.

[trtkszyx]

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'

Big lols @ this also

[Splatpope]

seeing this guy's attitude, I'd have just hit the "fuck off" button immediately, I don't get why you're letting him make fun of you like that, he's obviously fishing for reactions, no one can be "that" stupid

i realize people can be that stupid but yet the point still stands

popeedit: this is exactly the sort of post i don't want to see in this thread, this thread is NOT about trzxkrtkxrztkz and that whole drama, it is about discussing the rule and how broadly or narrowly defined it can or should be.