Is it good form to put topics or trigger warnings on games?

Authoring
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Personally I feel it ruins the experience. Granted, if it is a “kid’s” game, I would mark it such. And an “adult’s”, I’d mark it as well. Unless all my games by default are adult. But “adult” does not mean it has sex, just not Barney or My Little Pony.

I may tag it as sci-fi, horror or mystery, as those are wider tags. But as far as announcing other keywords like topics of suicide, sex (not full on), drugs, etc, it kind of takes away from the experience. A player will expect it around every corner till it comes.

Or… I’d mark all my games with trigger warnings, even if they do not have all or any of them. That way no one knows what is actually going to happen and if it does come, the warnings are there. But then quite a few people may over look them, because they do not want to encounter such triggers in a game.

How do you realistically go about it? Put all triggers up and some may get upset the triggers that were posted never happened? Or no warnings and people upset they encountered them? What to do, what to do, what to do…

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This topic has been hotly debated in the past on this forum. See the previous discussions on it, including:

Personally, I support having content warnings, but many strongly disagree.

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I think it’s always best. Or at least, in the start of the game (or under a details) make it that you are able to look at more extensive content warnings if they want. That way, those that want to see the content warnings can, and those that don’t want to don’t have to. But always make it clear that you are able to see content warnings if you want. Just my thought.

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My opinion: content warnings are metadata that belongs alongside the media credits and the IFID and the ABOUT information.

Put a link to content warnings on the title screen and it won’t spoil anything for anyone who doesn’t want them. People for whom content and trigger warnings are important know to look for them and understand they are likely spoilers.

If you don’t like writing them and prefer not to - or don’t feel you understand how your story can be triggering, get feedback: have your testers submit triggers to you, or ask a trusted reviewer to help.

I actually find creating my own list is illuminating about what I write and part of the process. It’s possible to think of it as a positive supplement to your work, like a discussion guide.

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Yes, I think so. If you are really worried about spoiling people, put a tiered warning in your game.

I think overdoing them (long description delving into minutiae) and underdoing them are both mistakes. Including fake trigger warnings is a bad idea, and I’m surprised it has been mentioned.

I don’t want anyone who doesn’t want to play my game to play it. Reactions may be poor if I’ve been coy about what the game is.

Include them in your playtesting!

One thing to remember is that if you don’t tag your games, someone else might. Perhaps in a frustrated way.

But my suggestion is to make the game and then decide. That is a good answer to many questions!

tiered warning example:

>cw
Content Advisory:
According to playtesters, Game is recommended for persons eighteen years of age or older due to its characterization of…

Would you like more explicit information, even if it could spoil your sense of discovery?

yes

Some audiences may be troubled by… Please consider whether this content could affect you adversely.

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I would just piggyback off using the established ESRB game ratings. I dont know if the IF world needs to create their own standards. If you want to do more, then by all means, you can. But at a minimum, put the appropriate ratings icon and verbage on a title screen and that should suffice for most.

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That idea has come up before… Commercial ratings systems are meant to appease legislators and big companies, not authors and players. They don’t really address the kind of details that we talk about here.

The kind of content warnings that we deal with are modeled off of what writers and readers use for online stories. That fits a lot better.

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Similarly, the line between content warning and advertisement can get really blurry here. Tagging your game as “contains sexual content” will inevitably attract more people than it repels, and even tags like “gore” or “psychological horror” will act as a bat signal for people who are interested in them. There’s no bright line distinguishing trigger warnings from other information you decide to disclose about your game

As an example, Charm Cochran’s EctoComp game Sundown contains no trigger warnings in the description but the title was a red flag that it wasn’t going to be for me. I gather it’s quite good! But for personal reasons I’m not ready to engage with the subject matter right now, so I’m glad I had the advance warning.

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I think it’s a craft element, like varying sentence length or whatnot. So a problem with the question of ‘what should I do’ is that its answer is highly situational. I think testers should evaluate warnings. Authors can do it badly or do it well, and tester feedback can help with that. Whether the tag sends the right message or not is going to take some reflection and feedback from others.

Sundown had a nice warning in-game that warned the player that its advisory would spoil content. The player had to confirm that they wanted to see it. That’s a good practice! I decided not to look at it, but I also appreciated it being framed in that way.

I don’t know what tags are appropriate hypothetically or generally. If someone says, ‘what tags should I use,’ I guess my first question would be ‘where’s the game?’

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If you look at the content warning for Cragne Manor, it is purposefully exhaustive since it contains varied work from 85 people, but can serve as kind of an overview of the types of things you should look for:

Cragne Manor's CONTENT WARNING

Please be warned that this game contains:

cosmic horror, body horror, psychological horror, gore, violence, murder, death, self-harm, suicide, mutilation, decapitation, racism, spiders, snakes, rats, aggressive birds, deceased animals, insects, incest, nonexplicit references to uncomfortable sexual situations involving minors, abusive relationships, domestic violence, pregnancy loss, ghosts, mental illness, homelessness, alcoholism, oppressive religious organizations, bullying, kidnapping, hostile vegetation, fungal overgrowth, creepy dolls, creepy children, references to human/anthropomorphic animal sex, eyeball contact, scatological references, strong language, virgin sacrifice, demon summoning, demon possession, blood, skeletons, viscera, infectious disease…

…and possibly several other types of disturbing content we forgot to include.

Would you still like to continue? (Please type yes or no.)

Cragne Manor is a bit absurdly maximalist but that’s what they’re getting across since this is an exquisite corpse anthology where authors were basically solicited to explore any and every facet of horror and storytelling they wanted to.

One big one is animal cruelty, death, or violence. Even in movies, that is a major third rail they avoid if possible since most people have developed empathy with a pet and depending on the narrative, experiencing that can take people right out of the story if not handled correctly.

In Cannery Vale I made sure to specify “animal violence” meant “animals are not harmed, but dogs can attack and violently kill the player” since fear of dogs and other animals is a lot more common than you’d imagine.

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My impression from past discussions here is that the majority of people are okay with the existence of content ratings or notes or warnings in some form. Calling them “trigger warnings” (vs. some term that sounds less medical) seems to be the more controversial piece of it.

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Yeah, my intention was to avoid another heated discussion that would just rehash what’s already been said…but it looks like that didn’t really happen.

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Movie ratings came about to give parents information necessary to judge whether a film was suitable for their children.

The idea of adults needing detailed movie-rating-like explanations of content is… disturbing.

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As far as I’m concerned, giving potential audience members an idea of what they’re getting into is just common courtesy.

And as far as I’m concerned, the MPAA, ESRB, whoever issues the TV-Y/Y7/G/PG/14/MA ratings and what I’ve seen of their foreign counterparts all suck in that their content descripters are often vague to the point of carrying no information and often hidden while an arbitrary* age rating takes center stage. In other words, they are less a tool of informing the consumer and more a tool of ageist censorship.

*And yes, they are arbitrary with how often the exact same piece of media gets wildly different ratings In the US versus Japan versus Europe versus Australia or how often media has to be censored to avoid getting a rating that alienates the target audience in some regions

@ [Melendwyr: And yet, those ratings give parents no information unless they’re just going to blindly follow the institution’s flavor of ageism. Also, I’m more disturbed by the idea adults should be expected to consume media ignorant of its contents than the idea adults might wish to be informed about what they are consuming.

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There’s nothing disturbing to me about accounting for people who want to make an informed choice about the media they consume, which is arguably most of us. If you’re not interested in romcoms, then you probably won’t watch them. That’s choosing what to watch based on what’s suitable for you. If I write a game with graphic violence in it, I think it’s cool that I can give someone the option to choose what’s suitable for them. It costs me nothing but a little anxiety about how much I might spoil the plot, but that never stopped trailers.

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The age levels are linked to generally-understood levels of content, and movie ratings have explanations for what features of the film motivated the assigned rating.

It’s become such common knowledge which specific things trigger a given rating that filmmakers are known to deliberately include or exclude things for the purpose of motivating a rating level they desire.

The system is actually quite clear, it’s just not up-front. There’s a lot of assumed background knowledge that’s assumed to be possessed by the users that isn’t visible to outsiders.

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I did just say that movie-style ratings are a lousy model for game content warnings. You seem to be agreeing with me.

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…and to replace the Hays code which was targeted at everyone.

I don’t see why that should disturb anyone. It’s definitely much better than a bunch of self-righteous twits deciding what is and isn’t appropriate for anyone to see.

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I see this has generated a few bumping of elbows… :sweat_smile:

Obviously if it’s horror themed, someone(s) is going to die, horribly. It’s a western, most likely someone is going to die and there will be revolvers and Winchester’s involved, possibly Native Americans. Something to do with the Civil War, slaves will be in it.

But at what point do we say enough is enough? Do we post every single thing or phobia as a trigger warning? That could be a laundry list that reaches the floor. I prefer Quest’s way of doing it. You choose basically one (or a lot of games only have one) tag. It’s either a Comedy, a Mystery, a Sci-Fi, a Puzzle, a Simulation, etc. A game might have several themes, but what tag describes it best? That seems the most straight forward.

Best case scenario, I won’t say anything outright, find a way to keep it hidden like suggested, unless further clicked on and go about my day. I feel I have not tipped off the player and they won’t feel they were dupped if they choose to inquire further.

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…and this is why I didn’t want this thread to continue.

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