Offtopic. The Eaten by a grue Podcast, in the last episodes, has some ongoing discussion about what’s a good first starter from Infocom games. I would totally recommend Wishbringer.
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This is a very significant concern. We have had villains in stories since prehistory. They’re villains because they do evil things. Heroes, since prehistory, fought against villains and are held up as role models for doing so. If we remove characters doing and saying evil things from our stories, then the stories lose a lot of their worth – what then is the hero’s business? Why bother telling the story at all?
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I can’t wait for A Clockwork Orange to be sanitized into a story about four young men who play rugby.
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Maybe a NSFW tag?
well, if one write a 1930s/WWII espionage IF, and a scene involves being in the backstage of a nazi rally, and enduring whatever shit spew the nazi orator ? by your “safely ban” is a banned game…
OTOH, indeed during the 80s there was some (rather crude and substandard by the era) nazi-apologetic textual adventure floating around, written with quill or other table-driven language, and I reckon that these things fit your bill.
so, perhaps is best having guidelines instead of rules…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I think framing of the speech should be something to be considered. Nazi propaganda coming from what I’m assuming is the villain leads the player (of average reading comprehension skills) to understand that the propaganda is not something that you should should agree with or take at face value. If the same thing were to be the main characters inner monologue, that’s very much a different thing.
On the other hand, H.P Lovecraft was extremely racist and you can see it in his stories. He named his black cat the N word, even. But could you imagine what we would have lost if we threw the baby out with the bathwater? Literally an entire genre of horror and ripples that carried over to non-horror stories.
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The first example is exactly what I mean by a villain doing/saying evil things and why such a game should NOT be banned. The second is rather grey and could be taken as parody if done poorly enough to be funny (see “The Producers”), garbage if not, or something to be kept behind curtains only for people mature enough to deal with them.
Something that could work well for the specific cases (but less so the general) would be to maintain a personal blocklist via localdb. An individual story could be added to the blocklist simply by clicking a delete icon next to its entry (with confirmation), and perhaps something similar for an entire tag. The site would then avoid showing such entries in the future (though they might still appear in an obscured form in search results to let you un-hide the entry later).
Or you could have two levels, with one hidden outright and another merely obscured.
This way, if a particular story or a particular topic offends you, you may instantly banish it from view without affecting anyone else’s experience.
With a suitably AJAX-empowered site this could even all be done client-side, so your personal blocklist is never even revealed to the backend server. (Although there are some things that would be easier if it were sent to the server, such as saving it across different browsers for logged-in users.)
“This offends me and I don’t want to see it” is personal taste, and is entirely valid (if potentially short sighted when taken too far, but that’s offtopic).
“This offends me and I don’t want anyone else to see it” is censorship, and I don’t support that.
LOL, David, escaped me that bad works can have unexpected lampooning/comical side-effect… Plan 9 from outer space, how I can have forgotten !? 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Indeed there have been a few IF works that are pastiches of “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” wherein some rather bad IF is wrapped around Joel and the robots who then make fun of the bad IF.
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FYI, I’m finally starting to work on this. Here’s how I’m imagining a “content warning” system would work.
- If you navigate directly to the page, initially there should be a full-screen interstitial saying “Content warning: this game contains ______” with an “OK” link to click through, and a “Don’t warn me in the future” checkbox
- There should be a user setting allowing you to disable/re-enable content warnings
- Don’t show content-warning games on the home page (New on IFDB, IFDB Recommends…) unless you’ve disabled content warnings
- Don’t show these games in “more like this” recommendations (unless you’ve disabled content warnings)
- Hide content-warning games in search results by default, but add a banner saying “some search results were removed, click here to see them all”
- Hide the games in IFDB Lists as well (including the IFDB Top 100), again including a banner “some entries were removed, click here to see them all”
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Sounds sensible to me. I assume there would be a reason shown as to why some search results have been removed from the list.
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Am I correct in understanding that this proposed system would result in people not seeing the full contents of IFDB unless they:
- create an account
- log in to that account
- adjust the necessary settings?
If so, Do Not Recommend.
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So I would assume that no account necessary to see everything, just a few extra hoops to jump through.
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The default experience is the real experience.
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The home page experience is the most-default experience of all and there wasn’t even that fig leaf mentioned in “Don’t show content-warning games on the home page (New on IFDB, IFDB Recommends…) unless you’ve disabled content warnings”
If we have content warnings at all, it makes sense to enable them by default. The goal is to keep people from seeing offensive content on accident. You may not feel like it matters a lot, but there have already been complaints, even in this thread. Couldn’t someone who’s really interested in seeing all porn games that come out just make an account?
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? The default experience may be the most common experience, but I would hardly say that I — a logged in user — am not experiencing reality when I browse the site.
Logged out users still have access to all the games via search. That some games aren’t randomly thrust into the spotlight on the home page hardly seems like a heavy burden.
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I guess the main problem is to avoid that people see something they don’t want to see. I think the following would fix that:
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Whenever an IFDB-user click on a game title with content warnings, a window opens and tells the user about the content warning and asks: Do you want to proceed?
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At the moment, whenever a user does a search, a list of games is given, unless there is only one game that matches the search criterias. If there is only one game, the user is taken to that game. I think that if only one game matches, this should be changed so that a list with that one game is shown. And the content warning for each game should be shown together with the title.
In this way, no one will see a game they do not want to read about. I think this should be the behaviour when you are not logged in. When you are logged in, you can choose all the preferences mentioned in other posts.
PS: A bonus question: what about recommended lists? How would they handle content warnings?
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The goal is to keep people from seeing offensive content on accident. You may not feel like it matters a lot, but there have already been complaints, even in this thread.
I guess the main problem is to avoid that people see something they don’t want to see.
I just want to toss in a reminder here that the reason that this whole topic was started was not protect sensitive snowflakes, but to protect children since IFDB is being recommended to gradeschoolers but it’s currently promoting porn on the front page.
So when people get insulted about having to click an extra button or sign up for an account to see the adult content, just keep in mind the focus here. It’s not censoring or trying to diminish the works of those that venture into adult territory; it’s age-gating so that educational sites can continue recommending the library of games to children in the hopes of creating a new generation of IF players.
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Thank you for the reminder, I appreciate it and needed it.
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