what means ?
SA = “sexual assault”
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ah, OK. Now I have got what you mean.
I remember there was thought about Inform being installed in school settings, at which point it’s an easy decision to just not implement swears in the base kit.
It turns out you can just let the kids imp the swears. This topic reminded me of an early BASIC game that learned from user input. My dad set up ANIMAL on an Apple II at the high school he taught in in the 80s. This is a game where the game tries to guess an animal you’re thinking of by asking questions. It stores questions and answers to become smarter as more people try it, and build a database of what it knows.
Just keeping what it knew in RAM (it wasn’t saving data to disk) my dad found you could play at the end of the day and it would ask you questions like ‘Does it suck? et al’. Teens had been working this thing over all day. 
Wade
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lol, teaching a computer to ask naughty question 
We should phear the day when AI software will be programmable by kids and teens !
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
So first: I think it’s fine for an author to decide not to implement ‘rape’ or similar verbs (in any game; but especially in those intended to be lighthearted and family-friendly). Every player is also fully within their rights to refuse to play a game that includes themes they find objectionable.
I also agree that including rape as a joke is in very poor taste.
That said, I’m not sure a general proscription makes much sense. The monks in Vespers canonically commit multiple despicable acts—enough to damn the entire monastery—and while nothing in the game encourages the player to rape Cecilia, it’s not especially out of character, either. It seems a bit weird to me to say, “murder, cannibalism, condemning a village to cruel death—that’s all ok to represent in IF, but rape is a bridge too far.”
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Concur and agree; I’ll write my rationale in private, for avoiding fanning unneeded flames.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I think a better way to phrase what I was thinking of is, for authors who don’t want those kinds of actions in their game and want to actively discourage it, it’s better to code nothing at all than a negative response. Coding a response like ‘You just did something bad!’ highlights the player’s action and makes the game draw attention to the action, while coding nothing just tells the player to move on.
(the rest of this post is a mostly non-related rant)
And while I do have a double standard in regards to murder vs sex in games, Vespers in particular did actually disturb me quite a bit in responding to my attempts at cannibalism, and with its questioning of religious faith.
I was like Bainespal where I thought that every ‘adult’ thing was what the real world was like and that if I ever lost my fragile faith then I’d have to be like them. I even remember when Porpentine was the only big Twine star and thinking that if I was going to love Twine I’d have to love weird cybersexual gore/fluid fests. I was so relieved when Brendan Hennessy became popular with ‘normal’ stories.
Now I realize that people that put messed up stuff in fiction are often just messed up adults. Like David Eddings putting in disembowlement and teens marrying their father-figure bodyguards. Turns out that author and his wife went to prison for keeping a kid in the basement. Now I’m older and more confident, I realize that most ‘adult’ things are awfully childish, that my faith has nothing to do with what others think, and I have the greatest respect for authors who know how to write without leaning on raping and profanity and grimdark things like George R R Martin.
Edit: by the way I realize some of my favorite of people have gory games (like Chandler Groover) or sexual games (like Hanon). But what I’m saying is instead of thinking I have to copy them to be cool I can just realize that that’s their peculiarity and I can stick with my own style.
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Decades ago I tried reading Pawn of Prophecy. Didn’t get far before realizing I couldn’t stand his writing. I don’t remember much about it or the content, just that it was very, very boring.
Wow. While I can dig the idea that a container must be big enough to contain its content… isn’t this a little bit too judgemental?
Sometimes authors are just bridges to places others can’t reach. It’s not like they LIKE what they write about, I think. The abyss looking into you is fun but it doesn’t mean it’s 100% true.
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I have many comments, but I’m under a crippling chilling effect; suffice to say, for now, that Brian is right that NOT implementing nasty words can be the best answer, albeit sometimes a generic response is more appropriate with the context; e.g. in a detective story, is legit asking witness about XXXX or YYYY (choose your own nastiness, sorry…); having a witness answer along the lines of “huh ? but I’m summoned because I witnessed that heist/murder/burglary…” is much more consistent with narrative.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Re David Eddings, I was in my early 20s when I read most of one as part of a book swap. It was the first time I thought ‘this is really racist’. I mean, I don’t know if I ever had that reaction again! I can deal with tons of racism as part of a story in context, but the fundament of the way this fantasy world worked was by race. Each race was so essentialised and predictable (their actions forgone conclusion by race) it seemed pointless to read. It actually amounted to making it… boring, as is all you can remember @Mike_G
PS I had the book swappee read Ruth Rendell’s ‘Heartstones’. She said it made her feel sick with anxiety. So she made me suffer and vice versa.
Wade
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This comment stuck with me today. I’m reminded of the dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe:
My Dear Lucy,
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result, you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say but I shall still be,
your affectionate Godfather,
C. S. Lewis.
Something I dwell on quite a bit when reading literature (including IF) is “how does this author view the nature and purpose of reality?” There is quite a lot of horror in reality, and literature is a potent tool for meditating on its causes, meaning, and proper response. But there is also a richer river of glory underneath that we often only grasp in part, if at all. I think a great deal of what we do and write fundamentally represents a child’s-eye view of the world—the grown-up version of “and then the dump truck EXPLODES and it’s SO COOL!”
This is not necessarily bad, of course. Child’s play is beautiful in its own way. But I love finding those rarer works that seem properly “adult”: not in the sense of being developmentally inappropriate for children, but in the sense of coming from someone with their priorities screwed on straight and a clearer sense of reality that they can teach me. Sometimes, “childish” fairy-tales have more truly “adult” content than something you have to show ID to see.
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I realized I wrote something that was too judgmental, and I woke up this morning with 5 notifications and I put off reading them for three hours because I knew I had gone too far and didn’t want to read the consequences of my actions. I’m glad when I finally clicked on it it was you responding very reasonably. But I agree I went too far!
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No, Brian, don’t worry. It was not my intention to drag you so low
I felt the same about me using the word “judgemental” (which I had too lookup with no hope of finding the exact spelling, which is probably wrong) and couldn’t wait for you to answer.
Btw, I understand your point. Sometimes the abyss DOES look in you.
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Again, we don’t call rapeseed oil “canola oil” in the UK. There isn’t any problem with using the term “rapeseed” and it is widely used on products. It’s interesting to hear that isn’t the case elsewhere, because there really isn’t that connection in UK English.
Getting back to the topic at hand, it’s a crappy thing to put in the game, even as a synonym. People do stupid things when they’re younger. Thankfully, the world has hopefully moved on from the time where that particular term was almost seen as an acceptable punchline to a joke.
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I think, for future games, having no response to that word at all is good.
But it’s not true that there is “no response”. You’re going to get the system default or whatever, such as, “You can’t do that.”
As an author, people are going to type these things and you must decide what you want it to say. Unless you want the system default, there needs to be a different message in there.
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I believe that ignoring such words is better. It’s what I would do with my son, with an added bad glance that cannot be in a text game.
“You can’t do that” means the parser knows you used a verb.
If a word isn’t recognized at all, wouldn’t you get some variation of “I don’t know the word…”?
I used to go to a bookstores, navigate to the fiction section in the vain hopes of seeing a paperback by George Alec Effinger, and then be disappointed when I got to where Eddings was and saw that GAE wasn’t there. So, I was disappointed through no fault, really, of David Eddings’s own.
(But now, reading this thread, it seems people have been disappointed very much of his own.)