If you haven’t checked the CoC in some time, it would be worth pointing out that it currently recommends both content warnings and trigger warnings, and distinguishes them in the way that severedhand did.
I don’t think anyone would fault that example trigger warning, which is really just a general content warning. It’s the purpose behind trigger warnings which is fairly questioned.
Agree: I don’t care if you call it a trigger warning, a content warning, or a headsup. I do care if your game is effectively R or NC-17 with no external indicator whatsoever.
We have the ESRB, PEGI, and related bodies to handle this in professional video games. We don’t have anything like this here. It’s up to the author’s common courtesy - but saying “hey, my game is not appropriate for kids/people who want to avoid sexual assault content!” is, in fact, common courtesy.
I do think trig warnings can be more specific to the point of being spoilery. “Graphic Violence” might be not a problem for many people in a standard horror movie, but a specific trigger notice for “animal death/cruelty” or “scenes of child abuse” can save someone from viewing content that they may be particularly sensitive to.
It’s possible I misunderstand “graded exposure,” but doesn’t that imply having some control over the exposure?
Sure, but warnings are less like medicine and more like etiquette. (Similar to other sections of the CoC, like posting things in the right topic category.)
A tangent, but I find the “it’s not backed up by science!” argument here very disingenuous. It’s a code of conduct, not an academic text. There is no scientific research on the effect of bumping dead threads, or not cross-posting topics to several subforums; should those go, too?
I have been wondering if that particular argument in the argumentosphere traces back to a particular source, and if so, what that source was pushing towards.
Your tangent is ridiculous. You are comparing the blanket advocation to this forum of a contentious political movement trivialising properly diagnosed PTSD … To whether we should bump dead threats or not, also because of science?
It is absolutely medical. This is also why Zarf is wrong to label the basic concern as petty.
This code should simply remove advocation of trigger warnings. It’s actually not much I’m seeking given how vehemently i oppose them and that I personally dont go around policing them at that level. If you want to do them, do them. Do NOT tell everyone to do it. They are completely unfounded. They are not ‘just etiquette’.
Wade
Even granting for the sake of discussion that the warnings are completely unfounded, that doesn’t entail that they are not just etiquette.
Saying “bless you” when you sneeze has no health benefit, either, (despite some superstitions to the contrary), but it’s still polite to say something nice to someone who sneezes (perhaps “gesundheit” if you don’t like “bless you”).
The scientific literature doesn’t show that the warnings are actively harmful. That’s a political argument you’re making. You might well be right that the warnings are politically incorrect, but in that case you should be making a political argument, like Wes.
Saying “bless you” is completely medically unfounded, but it is just etiquette, and it almost certainly isn’t damaging the moral fiber of our youth. Maybe warning people about violence is hurting our moral fiber, but non-evidence of benefit is not enough to make that case.
I have medically-diagnosed PTSD. Some people here are throwing “medically-diagnosed PTSD” around like it’s some sort of Ultimate Argument-Winner, so I felt I should mention that.
Warning people that a piece of media may have something that’s upsetting — to them in specific, to people in general — seems like common courtesy. And you know what? I’m not actually materially harmed by someone calling these content notes “trigger warnings”. However, it does harm me, someone who prefers to avoid certain kinds of content because it causes visceral, unpleasant PTSD episodes that sometimes continue affecting me for days, when people tell me that warning people about unpleasant content (such as, let’s pick an example: homophobic child abuse at the hands of one’s parents, which I suffered up until I severed contact with my family entirely) is bad because it’s “bad science” or because you think it’s “ridiculous”. You think it’s ridiculous, so you don’t label your discussion of teenagers getting thrown out of their homes for being LGBT+, and I end up in the closet hyperventilating and crying because I clicked on your thread not expecting — not psychologically prepared for — something that literally, factually, I can scan the letter with the diagnosis if you want, causes me to experience a PTSD episode.
People with PTSD are not a hypothetical. We’re everywhere. We’re in this forum, making interactive fiction and we want to participate in the community, too. And as someone who has other problems besides the PTSD, I appreciate it when people go out of their way not to push the big red button that says “give Zack a panic attack”, because a PTSD episode worsens my functioning overall and leads me to neglect my boyfriend, my bird, my apartment and my art. Leaving off trigger warnings or content warnings or whatever you want to call them can be equivalent to pushing that big red button, depending on what kind of content you neglected to label.
Secondly: since you’re talking about medicine and science, I would appreciate it if you provided peer-reviewed articles from legitimate, mainstream publications, written by experts in PTSD that support your assertions.
@OP: I’m kind of at a loss as for what assertions you think are being made that are “scientifically unfounded.” You talk about “health or psychological benefits,” but I don’t think you set forth a clear idea of what those benefits are supposed to be that people are advocating for.
Do you mean the established fact that people with PTSD* can experience panic attacks or similar episodes from exposure to material that relates to their trauma (ie, triggers)?
Do you mean the almost tautologically obvious fact that if you tell someone ahead of time about content with certain type of material in it, they will know that the material is contained within ahead of time?
Or do you mean the notion that exposure to triggers is invariably bad and total avoidance of them is a good idea? Because that’s a straw man; trigger warnings are not intended as a protective bubble, and their usage is not advocating for total avoidance of triggering material or telling people to stay away. Trigger warnings are also not about trying to take someone else’s treatment in your own hands and dictate what is best for them. Their usage is informational in nature, as the word “warning” implies; so that people who deal with triggers can make informed choices about when and how to deal with them, in accordance with their lived experience, the qualified orientation of a medical professional, etc. If anything, it seems to me that you’re asserting the opposite proposition that unguarded exposure is always good and preventing that is harmful, which is curious to say the least.
I generally prefer to use the phrase “content warning” because it’s more general, myself, but these days I kind of appreciate the secondary value of “trigger warning” as a sort of reverse shibboleth - it very quickly identifies people of a certain socio-political persuasion by their pointlessly exaggerated recoiling from the term, which in today’s climate is sometimes usefully revealing.
This thread has already got to the point where people disagreeing with me will apply words I typed to anything. Eg I say that Lucea’s tangent is ridiculous, which it was, and then someone puts quote marks around that and applies it to what they just typed as some accusation. At that point, and with no real keyboard and while on holiday, im not going to keep on at any length.
I’m at least sympathetic when people realise they could use ‘content’ and describe why. That said, Sequitur then sought to generalise me into some broad political camp of right wingers or something with his sinister italics.
If I had the time to dig up the articles, I would proceed to do so. But I am angry people think I even should when they are advocating a contentious and unproven medical thing in the bloody code of conduct! You should dig up the articles! The rational starting position is to not advocate the fringe position.
Re: dfab…Not your moral fibre. It reduces your resilience and promotes unfounded fear as CBT research has already demonstrated.
I discussed at length the fundamental issue that this is a political argument that has taken from medicine. It’s an abuse of psychological and medical practice. Yes, lack of proof of benefit is enough to shut down a medical advocation.
I’ve listed a solid range of rational reasons this forum should not be recommending to a general audience come up with trigger warnings. And this is even though I personally don’t want to see them but won’t stop anyone using them. They make a mockery of real PTSD and anxiety issues, including my own, with which they overlap. If this forum is progressive, it should consider whether that mockery is something it’s going to keep endorsing to all comers. I am not going to participate here again until the code removes it.
Wade
trigger warnings are not mockery. but on the off-chance there’s something i’ve missed, and i’m actually, inexplicably being mocked, please do all of us the courtesy of posting even a single peer-reviewed source rather than gesturing towards their existence somewhere off in the ether.
It’s not a ridiculous tangent if one of the reasons you state in your OP to remove it is “there is no peer-reviewed advocation of their health or psychological benefits.” The code of conduct is not a “medical advocation” – it’s a list of rules for an Internet forum.
If there’s a more civil way to respond to my argument being called “ridiculous,” it is beyond me.
I hope you are aware that you are fighting over whether to use word A or word B.
well we know triggers are indisputably real, and we know that by and large people with PTSD prefer to know when they may be coming into contact with triggering material (mental health professionals also recommend knowing when you’ll be coming into contact with triggers if at all possible, in my experience), so the idea that trigger warnings need to somehow be ‘medically proven’ to be a valid form of warning someone about what they are about to engage with seems very off-base to me
i prefer the term content warning myself since it does feel more all-encompassing, but waging a war against the term ‘trigger warning’ is a pretty silly hill to die on
Both in this thread and in a previous discussion about trigger warnings on this forum, some people have objected to the phrase “trigger warning,” for various reasons.
Does anyone actually object to the term “content warning”?
I get that you have a strong opinion about this, but I’m afraid it’s not clear what you want the forum (or the comp) to do.
The IFComp page has several warnings (posted by game authors as part of their submission blurb). Examples quoted from that page: “Murder, torture and asphyxiation”; “violence, surreality, possibly gore”. Authors have variously labelled these “Triggers”, “content warnings”, or just “warnings.”
Are you objecting to the existence of these declarations, or to use of the label “trigger” / “trigger warning” for them?
If you’re objecting to the terminology, I can understand that position (although I have not yet been convinced of it). But you seem to be taking care in your replies to not make this about the terminology. E.g. on page 1 you wrote a long reply, but the idea of “content warning” as an alternative was a parenthetical at the end. It sounds like you are objecting to the recommendation itself, not to how it is labelled. And this is what I do not understand.
Wade has said in the past that he puts content warnings on his own games, so I doubt he is objecting to the existence of general content warnings.