Making games is hard.
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I don’t know, man, sometimes you just have to use your best judgement. And if you’re not sure, you can ask input from others. That’s how most things in game development, and also real life, work. It doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
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Far too simplistic.
Comedy: Is it Finding Nemo, or American Pie?
Genres can range over an almost infinite number of topics. Real-life dramas can include any number of things people might have serious issues with, as can any of the other categories you mentioned.
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Yeah, maybe it should be locked until people read the six previous times we went through this.
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In general I think the lack of “you must have read this laundry list of prior discussion to be allowed to contribute”-type gatekeeping is a positive thing for this community, but if there’s any topic that merits an exception, it’s this one.
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To lower the bar: lots of good faith answers here in the thread that could have made for productive discussion, or else might have given a useful frame of reference while researching the history. But I don’t think that’s the way things went (in some cases).
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American Pie
The real question is, should Finding Nemo come with trigger warnings?
Depending when the other threads were made, opinions change. And who had contributed before, may no longer be here and others who were not, are. Fresh perspectives. Shifts in popular opinion sway all the time.
If the argument is, it’s a touchy subject, I do not know how else to respond, other than that’s life. If the argument is, it’s been done once or a few times in the past, forums are made for engagement.
And in all honesty I had not searched, so that is my mistake. If I had and they were locked, I would have created a new thread anyway. If they were not locked, do I get the ire of the community by necrosing a post? If it was done three days ago or last week, I just look like a fool.
So my apologies. But I do appreciate all the answers. I will take them to heart. As I said, the hidden link was a good medium for all involved.
Edit: [quote=“Hanon Ondricek, post:37, topic:73472, username:HanonO”]
Content warnings are accepted as a useful tool for those who need them. There are certain people who resist this and consider them “spoilers, censorship, a free speech issue, “libs” being triggered.”
The original post seemed to be about the implementation of trigger warnings and how best to include them in a game and what they should cover constructively. But then, as always, it degenerates into
[/quote]
I do not know what all this is about or what I just walked into, what issues you guys were having before I showed up. But I do sincerely apologize if I caused any one discomfort or any issues along the way. That was not my intention and what ever was quoted by the mod or admin. Thank you.
I agree that the consensus position discussed above is pretty clearly the consensus (use content warnings, ideally with additional details available for folks who are looking for specificity), but maybe it’s helpful to talk about how this stuff can play out in practice, since I think that’s where things can get complex? My game Sting is maybe an interesting example, though I’m not sure I did everything right by any means!
(Spoilers for Sting in what follows)
So the game is a memoir largely about my relationship with my twin sister, who as of its writing had recently died of breast cancer. There are also many (many) depictions of bee stings, since it’s structured as a series of vignettes of the half-dozen times I’d been stung (there’s since been a seventh, Sting 2 is only 15 more years off at this rate).
Both of these elements are potentially upsetting and perhaps would merit content warnings – I’ve told the story before on this board, perhaps in one of the threads linked above, about how I was playing Doom (2016) in the days after my sister died to blow off steam, and had an intense physiological reaction to the revelation that the main villain in that (deeply silly) game has terminal breast cancer and opened the gates of hell in a vain attempt to hold onto life. But ultimately I decided not to go ahead with any.
As to the bee stings, I mostly felt like adding “warning: bee stings” to a game titled Sting, whose cover art featured bees, and whose blurb foregrounded the role of bees, could feel like an attempt to be funny in a way that didn’t fit the tone of the game and could be seen as mocking the idea of content warnings, and was probably unnecessary besides (for anyone with a phobia of bee stings who played my game but was blindsided by the fact that it kept happening – I apologize but I feel like that’s also kind of on you).
As to a warning about cancer, that was trickier. Again, I knew that this was an element that could straight-up trigger people – I’d recently been triggered by something as dumb as the Doom remake! But I also worried that adding the warning would be at odds with the experience I was working very hard to create with the game: to simplify only slightly, much of the point of Sting is the way that isolated memories plucked at random (what’s more random than a bee sting? Well, except for the fifth vignette where I was kind of asking for it, I guess), which originally involved my sister only tangentially, retroactively became reconfigured to being about her once she passed. Going into the game thinking it was “about” cancer would make that intended experience much less likely to land, I felt.
At the same time, I was very careful – for self-protective reasons if nothing else – to keep any depiction of cancer very far away from the game. The first 5/6 of the game have nothing to do with it at all, since my sister’s illness hadn’t started yet, and the last picks up a year after her death. The conversation in that scene mentions that she’s passed away, but the only direct indication of what’s happened is the two-word bit of dialogue “fuck cancer.” And I intentionally omitted potentially painful details like the impact on her family (I didn’t mention that she had two very small children) or the suffering of her last days.
So I felt like the potential for players to suffer harm was relatively low – I did ask my testers whether they thought a warning would be appropriate to check my assumptions, and they wound up agreeing, so I went ahead without a warning. I think it worked out okay – at least I haven’t seen any reviews or direct feedback saying that they wanted a warning. But I still second-guess myself a bunch, it can be a tricky set of considerations to juggle, and like I said I’m not sure that wound up being the right call – very possibly I was just being overly-precious about my literary ambitions and should have just given people what they wanted.
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Content warnings are accepted as a useful tool for those who need them. There are certain people who resist this and consider them “spoilers, censorship, a free speech issue, “libs” being triggered.”
The original post seemed to be about the implementation of trigger warnings and how best to include them in a game and what they should cover constructively. But then, as always, it degenerates into
Now it becomes an argument of the validity of content warnings in general and this is not a constructive debate.
If you are opposed to content warnings and feel they somehow cramp your style, don’t include them. Trying to change people’s minds on this is squabbling and flame-bait because it devolves into a personal argument that someone’s potential PTSD about a subject is invalid.
It’s clear by responses and feedback we’re getting privately that this post is coming across as sea-lioning[1] which is an oblique strategy of trolling and engagement-bait.
So that’s the way this goes, and I’m going to shut this topic down.
Rhetorically, sealioning fuses persistent questioning—often about basic information, information easily found elsewhere, or unrelated or tangential points—with a loudly-insisted-upon commitment to reasonable debate. It disguises itself as a sincere attempt to learn and communicate. Sealioning thus works both to exhaust a target’s patience, attention, and communicative effort, and to portray the target as unreasonable. While the questions of the “sea lion” may seem innocent, they’re intended maliciously and have harmful consequences.
— Amy Johnson, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (May 2019), Sealioning - Wikipedia ↩︎
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