Additional content warnings for IFComp games

Competitions IFComp
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I’ve played a few IFComp games that I think warrant additional content warnings beyond what’s on the comp page or provided in-game (or that have no CWs at all, but have content that players may appreciate being forewarned about). I’ll note them here, and invite others to contribute any you notice.

This first post is a wiki, so feel free to edit it to add any CWs that you find. Note that if you edit it, you can see all the blurred spoilers, so if that’s something you want to avoid, you can write your contribution elsewhere and copy/paste it while trying to avoid looking at the others. Use [spoiler] and [/spoiler] to make your own blurred text. - Hidnook

(Authors, please don’t view this as a judgement on you or your work—these are just things I think some players would like a heads-up about. And to anyone who dislikes CWs or doesn’t see the need for them, please just pass this thread by.)

  • 198BREW: References to cannibalism; on-screen blood and murder
  • Awakened Deeply: Mass murder, dismemberment, blood, brief descriptions of corpses and injuries. Ending spoiler: One ending has the protagonist die in a suicide mission.
  • Big Fish: Investigating child sexual abuse is a major plot element; body horror; execution
  • Deliquescence: Body horror
  • Focal Shift: Dead body with mild description of injuries
  • First Contact: Lactation kink, explicit sexual content
  • Imprimatura: Brief description of a car accident, mention of a loved one’s death in a car accident [Has been updated on the comp page]
  • LLLLL: Anxiety, self-loathing
  • The Saltcast Adventure: Descriptions of injuries including blood; depictions of violence, death, execution, and torture (none particularly graphic)
  • String Theory: While the CW on the comp page says “indirect descriptions of a car accident,” depending on your choice at a certain moment you may get a very direct depiction of a car accident
  • Traffic: Description of pedestrian being hit by a car
  • Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe: Mass death and injury caused by an explosion and general descriptions of the aftermath in a hospital setting, descriptions of severe burns, discussions and portrayal of alcohol addiction
  • When the Millennium Made Marvelous Moves: Death of spouse, blood, armed robbery, pedestrian hit by car
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(Also, you can update your entry’s content warnings at any time during the competition, so if an author wants to add these to the game itself, they can!)

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Not sure if you can make a post a wiki page after the fact, but if you can, I’d recommend doing so so that the warnings are in one centralized location instead of throughout the thread.

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Good point! I’ll try to figure out if it’s possible tomorrow.

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I don’t know if the original poster can, but mods can. I’ve done that now.

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Personally, as Italian and European, I disagree on one specific word, but I follow your suggestion; this is also my stance on the content warning, at least during the judging period.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Oh this is a good point. I had not considered the car accident description!

Edit: I have updated the CW to say the following: “Brief verbal descriptions of a loved one dying of cancer; a verbal description of a car accident involving a death; some descriptions of anxiety, depression, emotional abuse, and the threat of physical abuse. Light cursing.”

I added “threat of physical abuse” because there is a passage where an adult threatens to hit a child and raises their hand as if they may do it, but ultimately does not.

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Thank you for updating it, it’s appreciated!

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A belated follow up to this now that IFComp is over! If you scroll back to the original post, you’ll see that a LOT of games were added (most of them by me, and I only played about half the games, so likely there are more that could be included). The ones listed are a mix of games that had no content warnings on the IFComp page and games that did have some warnings, but that (in my opinion) needed additional ones.

So thinking about this, and as kind of a follow up to this thread, I wanted to talk some more about best practices for writing content warnings (CWs) for one’s work. These are my own opinions/thoughts based on time spent thinking, reading, and conversing with other people about content warnings. Please chime in with any constructive additions you may have! (Conversely, please do NOT take this as an opportunity to argue about the validity of content/trigger warnings. I’m posting this for people who see their value and want to utilize them.)

General thoughts on what to include

The easiest rule of thumb for what warrants a CW is the depiction of anything that would or could be traumatic if it happened to someone in real life. Examples include physical harm, mental or emotional suffering, or death of a loved one.

There are also things that warrant CWs despite not being in and of themselves negative or traumatic, like sexual content. My rule of thumb here is considering whether your work includes anything that’s commonly considered or likely to be a sensitive subject. Besides sexual content, use of drugs and alcohol also falls into this category. There are many reasons why someone might not want to be surprised by this kind of content in a work, from personal to practical (for the latter, I’m thinking about if you’re playing at work or with a child around). Including a CW for this type of content isn’t saying there’s anything wrong with it, but just acknowledges that it may be a sensitive subject for some players.

Of course, people also have triggers and sensitivities that don’t fall into either of these categories. I’ll come back to that at the end of this post!

Tips for writing CWs

Try to find a balance between too vague and overly specific. Just “death” isn’t the most helpful; instead, specify whether it’s death of a parent/child/spouse/pet, death in the context of war/illness/accident, etc. But on the flipside, being overly specific isn’t helpful either. CWs are meant to give a quick rundown of the content, and should be simple and easy to take in. You don’t need to summarize plot events in your CW; just be straightforward and factual.

Specifying the degree to which the content is described or featured in your work can be helpful. A brief mention of alcohol is very different from a depiction of excessive drinking, so it’s nice if your CW makes it clear which applies.

If you’re unsure of the level of detail to include, or are concerned about the CW containing spoilers, one possibility (which IF as a medium makes particularly easy) is implementing a tiered content warning. E.g., “Contains scenes depicting violence and death. Click here/type [command] to see more details.” And then your more detailed version might say, “PC participates in a knife fight and kills several NPCs.”

What if I'd rather not?

To anyone who’s read this far and doesn’t want to include content warnings with their work, I offer the suggestion that you add a note saying that you’re choosing not to include them. This will at least give readers/players a heads-up that your work may include disturbing or potentially sensitive content, ensuring that they won’t assume the lack of CWs means there is no such content in the work.

Crowd-sourced CWs for the IntFiction community

I started making a list of things that I think generally warrant CWs, but as mentioned above, even the most exhaustive list I come up with won’t cover everything that everyone might like a warning about! So I am going to put that list in a new thread and make it a wiki so that anyone can edit it, whether to add common ones that I’ve missed or to add ones that are more personal/idiosyncratic. Then authors will have an easy reference for what kinds of things this community would like warnings about. It’s never going to be perfect or exhaustive (for one thing, not everyone who plays our games frequents this forum!), but I figure it will be helpful to some extent, at least. Will edit this post with the link shortly! Link!

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Thank you for your work towards making this a more inclusive space. Content warnings allow people like me, someone who lives with PTSD, the ability to meaningfully consider and consent to a particular experience that may be distressing or harmful. It helps make gaming more accessible to a wider audience, and for that, I am appreciative.

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This is really helpful actually, there is at least one which I need to include in my WIP which I hadn’t before!

[Question moved to new topic by Mod]

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4 posts were merged into an existing topic: “Gaslighting” and “Unreliable Narrator” in IF

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Perhaps you have find the solution to the “Isekai conundrum”: NSFW is the perfect, all-encompassing and non-spoilery, context warning I need. and being an acronym originated in the US milieu (in EU, firing because of NSFW content on the office machine is a sure-fire way for losing the inevitable legal cause, often against the powerful Unions…) clearly points that is a CW related to the “other side” (of the Atlantic…)

a thousand thanks ! (“Grazie mille !”) and

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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It might be perfect for what you need. But it may not be perfect for what other people need. If you intend for this to be seen by other people, know that their experiences differ from yours. There’s big difference between, say, consensual sex and sexual abuse, but both are considered NSFW. There are people who are okay with one and not the other, and one may be traumatizing if they read it. You can include only an NSFW tag if you want, but know that it might not be enough detail for some people.

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