Between this and what Adam Koebel did recently, there's been some ugly stuff in JP's orbit.
"What Adam Koebel did" was a monumentally bad idea from an RPG perspective, but holy shit is far removed from the other things going on in this thread.
It's still worth talking about. It's part of the entitled attitude that underpins the issue. That kind of cavalier relationship to women's painful reality is part of the stew that we're all simmering in.
Some bad choices in narrative structure, and bad communication of players comfort in an RPG rollplaying game, of things happening to a fictional character, at a distance (it's an online streamed show), is just...again, not remotely similar nor should it be considered similar, to the direct real world sexual harassment claims peered in this thread.
Like..."what happened" isn't hidden or secret - I was a follower of Far Verona, the stream is on YouTube for anyone to watch. It was a bad scene, where they pointed out after the fact - they hadn't given enough thought to how to let a player abort a scene they were uncomfortable with on stream, and he didn't realize he wasn't really giving Elspeth enough queues to abort the moment either (go and watch it: you can see he's dropping hints that she could back out, they're just obtuse from the perspective of the character she's playing, and he misses that when she speaks about what she thinks should happen out of character that's a real good queue to back off).
It's a really good example of why you need to have conversations about this stuff in advance with your players, and how it can go badly wrong for everyone if you get overconfident that you know what you're doing or you know your players. But if it's anything, it's an example of the sort of accidental disaster that can and should be dealt with and forgiven.
Like...I don't know what "entitled attitude" I'm suppose to assume Adam had there?
I like the theory of jail because you serve your time and then hypothetically (if not usually in reality), you get a second chance to try to get your life going again. There's something much more uncertain about the cycle of justice for someone like Noah Bradley. He loses his job (and I assume he can't do much else besides illustration) but there's never really time to serve. There's no sentence. At what point do we let people back into society and give them another chance? The internet never forgets. Or maybe it will in x years?
After seeing the absolute shit conditions prisoners suffer through, it's REALLY hard to say that just losing your job and social standing can compare, but there is something about an end up that at least gives the criminal a hope to better themselves. The ability to say "I served my time." I'd hire an ex-con at my business. I think a lot of people in here would approve of that. If I hired Noah tomorrow, people would be upset. If I hired him a year from now? 2? more?
A big issue here isn't so much ethical, as it is being unable to separate the artist from the art. I'm not interested in listening to R. Kelly songs, not because it will affect R. Kelly in any way, but because having my mind automatically append rapist to his name makes for an unenjoyable song. If, on the other hand, I found out that one of the dozen developers on a AAA game was a bad person, that's less of an issue, because it's not "their" art. And if you hired Noah Bradley to install flooring or something, this wouldn't apply at all.
Another aspect is basically an HR problem. Hiring someone who has abused people in the past means you had better be really sure that they're reformed, or you have created a hostile environment for their potential victims. At a time when people are trying to address the gender imbalance in many geek-centered companies this is a serious concern. Then there's the issues inherent with giving a management role to someone who has leveraged their management role in the past to abuse people, which while (probably?) not an issue with Noah is an issue with quite a few other people who have shown up in the news.
In the end, if you have someone who keeps stabbing their co-workers, it is perfectly reasonable for that person to have trouble finding work. The lack of a proper social safety net in the US is a problem, but that's a different problem, and most of these people are landing on their feet anyway.
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WhiteZinfandelYour insidesLet me show you themRegistered Userregular
There's also the issue of what "serving your time" can possibly mean in the context of not working at a certain place any more (but probably still working) and having a damaged social life (to a questionable extent; less so, I imagine, than that of a convict in prison). It seems to me that people seek to protract extrajudicial consequences as a way to correct for the mildness of said consequences.
I like the theory of jail because you serve your time and then hypothetically (if not usually in reality), you get a second chance to try to get your life going again. There's something much more uncertain about the cycle of justice for someone like Noah Bradley. He loses his job (and I assume he can't do much else besides illustration) but there's never really time to serve. There's no sentence. At what point do we let people back into society and give them another chance? The internet never forgets. Or maybe it will in x years?
After seeing the absolute shit conditions prisoners suffer through, it's REALLY hard to say that just losing your job and social standing can compare, but there is something about an end up that at least gives the criminal a hope to better themselves. The ability to say "I served my time." I'd hire an ex-con at my business. I think a lot of people in here would approve of that. If I hired Noah tomorrow, people would be upset. If I hired him a year from now? 2? more?
The core problem with this argument - the core problem with the rehabilitation narrative - is that the only obligations are put on society, not the individual in question. You ask at what point does such an individual get a second chance, but such a question ignores the obligation of the individual to demonstrate that they should be given that chance - this is the purpose of serving one's time, and tends to get particularly messy in the matter of sexual assault because of how our society treats it. As was pointed out above, Bradley has openly subscribed to a philosophy in which demonstrations of contrition are tools to gain breathing time - something that should bring greater scrutiny to his performing such acts, and which demands greater obligations on his part. At this point, the argument of "should he be allowed back into proper society" shouldn't even be on the table, because the prerequisites on his part to bring it there haven't been met yet.
And yes, this means that if he refuses to do that work, society is not obligated to turn a blind eye to that refusal. Nor is society obligated to accept whatever he presents as evidence, either. As I saw pointed out elsewhere in response to the argument of stigmatization:
Do you want to know who else besides rapists spend their entire lifetime wanting to avoid talking about an event in their past because it makes others give them dirty, disapproving looks?
Yeah, I think that true contrition, which most people agree is necessary to be able to come in from the (self-inflicted) cold, requires an understanding that you have harmed someone and you don't get to dictate when you've earned forgiveness, your targets do. And maybe you never get it.
I don't think that a person should be prevented from making a living (although on a tangent I also think you shouldn't have to 'generate value' to 'earn' the right to live), but you're not entitled to any specific job, and not earning a second chance is different than "can't make money doing work". Maybe your bad acts make it impossible to get a job in the industry in which you committed those bad acts, and maybe a step on the road to forgiveness means understanding that you did it to yourself.
Yet again I find myself not knowing who or what you're talking about.
Adam Koebel is/was a somewhat talented RPG designer & publisher. He took parts of the core rules from Apocalypse World and turned it into Dungeon World. In the IPR scene this kicked off a huge surge of games in the same vein. Other notable TTRGPs so spawn are Blades in the Dark and Spirit of '77.
Adam without much other design work started down the same record your game session with friends path that Critical Roll laid out. On what now is the end of his show, an NPC controlled by Adam
turned on the sex parts of a PC
. Which isn't what he and the player discussed would happen and is explicitly what the player asked not to happen as part of their character's backstory is one of slavery and assault. This was done on live YouTube. The reaction was visceral and immediate. Link goes to Polygon's coverage, not the YT vid itself.
All opinions are my own and in no way reflect that of my employer.
Yet again I find myself not knowing who or what you're talking about.
Adam Koebel is/was a somewhat talented RPG designer & publisher. He took parts of the core rules from Apocalypse World and turned it into Dungeon World. In the IPR scene this kicked off a huge surge of games in the same vein. Other notable TTRGPs so spawn are Blades in the Dark and Spirit of '77.
Adam without much other design work started down the same record your game session with friends path that Critical Roll laid out. On what now is the end of his show, an NPC controlled by Adam
turned on the sex parts of a PC
. Which isn't what he and the player discussed would happen and is explicitly what the player asked not to happen as part of their character's backstory is one of slavery and assault. This was done on live YouTube. The reaction was visceral and immediate. Link goes to Polygon's coverage, not the YT vid itself.
Jesus tap-dancing Christ. Really?
Anyone who's ever played a game with possible mature or adult themes knows you're supposed to a) clear that everyone at the table/in the game is cool with playing said situations of things, b) have a way for PCs/the DM to wave a flag and say "okay, fade to black, this has gone off the rails/somebody is not comfortable or is disturbed by events" at any time during said scene, and especially c) when a player says "I don't want my PC in this kind of situation" you don't put them in that kind of situation while making it a big fucking joke you goddamned monster goose. Especially fucking live on YouTube.
You also don't grin and smile and make light of the fact you're sexually assaulting a PC and trying to make it seem like there's nothing wrong going on with it.
This was horrendous and he damn well deserved to be publicly shamed for it. It's put Dungeon World on my "do not buy, this person doesn't deserve my $$$" list.
I'll just say Adam and JP built up a number of folks who wouldn't go to their table because of shit off camera. The fact that he got no leeway in this case was because he'd already burnt through all of it off screen, with a number of folks who would not work with RollPlay anymore already.
Between this and what Adam Koebel did recently, there's been some ugly stuff in JP's orbit.
"What Adam Koebel did" was a monumentally bad idea from an RPG perspective, but holy shit is far removed from the other things going on in this thread.
It's still worth talking about. It's part of the entitled attitude that underpins the issue. That kind of cavalier relationship to women's painful reality is part of the stew that we're all simmering in.
Some bad choices in narrative structure, and bad communication of players comfort in an RPG rollplaying game, of things happening to a fictional character, at a distance (it's an online streamed show), is just...again, not remotely similar nor should it be considered similar, to the direct real world sexual harassment claims peered in this thread.
Like..."what happened" isn't hidden or secret - I was a follower of Far Verona, the stream is on YouTube for anyone to watch. It was a bad scene, where they pointed out after the fact - they hadn't given enough thought to how to let a player abort a scene they were uncomfortable with on stream, and he didn't realize he wasn't really giving Elspeth enough queues to abort the moment either (go and watch it: you can see he's dropping hints that she could back out, they're just obtuse from the perspective of the character she's playing, and he misses that when she speaks about what she thinks should happen out of character that's a real good queue to back off).
It's a really good example of why you need to have conversations about this stuff in advance with your players, and how it can go badly wrong for everyone if you get overconfident that you know what you're doing or you know your players. But if it's anything, it's an example of the sort of accidental disaster that can and should be dealt with and forgiven.
Like...I don't know what "entitled attitude" I'm suppose to assume Adam had there?
We really going to do the "that's not real harrasment" song and dance?
Just because it happened in game, does not mean it did not happen, or that real people were not involved, or that what was done was not reprehensible, or that people were not hurt.
Let's not do the "that's not real harrasment" song and dance.
Nyysjan on
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited June 2020
I have run Vampire the Masquerade for over 20 years. It’s an edge lord game with a lot of sexual content. Not once, in 20 years, have I ever contemplated sexual assault or rape of a players character. I haven’t even bothered ever asking either.
You just don’t do it and ESPECIALLY not to a woman.
What disgusts me is the refusal to acknowledge the mistake and instead foist this onto nebulous “game mechanic failures”. That’s bullshit and any GM with more than 5 minutes experience can smell that a mile away.
You shouldn’t need game mechanics as a GM to immediately read the disgust and discomfort of the players there.
Consent in Roleplaying is a really big thing and it is just as important as anywhere else. The entire point of roleplaying games is to have an enjoyable time with your friends. Finding out the limits of certain topics for the people in the group should be done session zero and regularly checked in on as things go forward.
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Mx. QuillI now prefer "Myr. Quill", actually...{They/Them}Registered Userregular
I have run Vampire the Masquerade for over 20 years. It’s an edge lord game with a lot of sexual content. Not once, in 20 years, have I ever contemplated sexual assault or rape of a players character. I haven’t even bothered ever asking either.
You just don’t do it and ESPECIALLY not to a woman.
What disgusts me is the refusal to acknowledge the mistake and instead foist this onto nebulous “game mechanic failures”. That’s bullshit and any GM with more than 5 minutes experience can smell that a mile away.
You shouldn’t need game mechanics as a GM to immediately read the disgust and discomfort of the players there.
Yeah, my friends and I are currently playing VtM for the first time (except our GM, who has played it before), and we talked a lot during our Session Zero about "okay here's all the shit we just straight up do NOT want to deal with in this campaign".
We've still had some really dark other sorts of stuff happen, but this campaign has also resulted in some of the hardest laughs we've had in over 16 years of tabletop games together.
I've seen other tabeltop groups abuse the Chaotic Neutral I Can Do Anything crap. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Mx. Quill on
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
I have run Vampire the Masquerade for over 20 years. It’s an edge lord game with a lot of sexual content. Not once, in 20 years, have I ever contemplated sexual assault or rape of a players character. I haven’t even bothered ever asking either.
You just don’t do it and ESPECIALLY not to a woman.
What disgusts me is the refusal to acknowledge the mistake and instead foist this onto nebulous “game mechanic failures”. That’s bullshit and any GM with more than 5 minutes experience can smell that a mile away.
You shouldn’t need game mechanics as a GM to immediately read the disgust and discomfort of the players there.
Yeah, my friends and I are currently playing VtM for the first time (except our GM, who has played it before), and we talked a lot during our Session Zero about "okay here's all the shit we just straight up do NOT want to deal with in this campaign".
We've still had some really dark other sorts of stuff happen, but this campaign has also resulted in some of the hardest laughs we've had in over 16 years of tabletop games together.
I've seen other tabeltop groups abuse the Chaotic Neutral I Can Do Anything crap. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Yeah. I've tried out a few IRL RPG groups and I've found none of them are doing the kinds of games that I'm interested in. And much of it has centered around the chaotic neutral or "thin excuse to actually be chaotic evil but pretend I'm not".
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Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
Add the power dynamics of a workplace environment, which for those streamers it absolutely is, and the situation becomes even more fraught.
I have run Vampire the Masquerade for over 20 years. It’s an edge lord game with a lot of sexual content. Not once, in 20 years, have I ever contemplated sexual assault or rape of a players character. I haven’t even bothered ever asking either.
You just don’t do it and ESPECIALLY not to a woman.
What disgusts me is the refusal to acknowledge the mistake and instead foist this onto nebulous “game mechanic failures”. That’s bullshit and any GM with more than 5 minutes experience can smell that a mile away.
You shouldn’t need game mechanics as a GM to immediately read the disgust and discomfort of the players there.
Yeah, my friends and I are currently playing VtM for the first time (except our GM, who has played it before), and we talked a lot during our Session Zero about "okay here's all the shit we just straight up do NOT want to deal with in this campaign".
We've still had some really dark other sorts of stuff happen, but this campaign has also resulted in some of the hardest laughs we've had in over 16 years of tabletop games together.
I've seen other tabeltop groups abuse the Chaotic Neutral I Can Do Anything crap. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
If a chaotic neutral character starts acting chaotic evil the GM should inform them of their alignment change and assuming the game is good or neutral characters only, their need for a new PC as their old one is now an NPC villain.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
I have run Vampire the Masquerade for over 20 years. It’s an edge lord game with a lot of sexual content. Not once, in 20 years, have I ever contemplated sexual assault or rape of a players character. I haven’t even bothered ever asking either.
You just don’t do it and ESPECIALLY not to a woman.
What disgusts me is the refusal to acknowledge the mistake and instead foist this onto nebulous “game mechanic failures”. That’s bullshit and any GM with more than 5 minutes experience can smell that a mile away.
You shouldn’t need game mechanics as a GM to immediately read the disgust and discomfort of the players there.
Yeah, my friends and I are currently playing VtM for the first time (except our GM, who has played it before), and we talked a lot during our Session Zero about "okay here's all the shit we just straight up do NOT want to deal with in this campaign".
We've still had some really dark other sorts of stuff happen, but this campaign has also resulted in some of the hardest laughs we've had in over 16 years of tabletop games together.
I've seen other tabeltop groups abuse the Chaotic Neutral I Can Do Anything crap. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
If a chaotic neutral character starts acting chaotic evil the GM should inform them of their alignment change and assuming the game is good or neutral characters only, their need for a new PC as their old one is now an NPC villain.
That only works when the DM and other players want to call them on it instead of merrily going down the path towards slaughtering the villagers and burning their town down to make a distraction.
I have run Vampire the Masquerade for over 20 years. It’s an edge lord game with a lot of sexual content. Not once, in 20 years, have I ever contemplated sexual assault or rape of a players character. I haven’t even bothered ever asking either.
You just don’t do it and ESPECIALLY not to a woman.
What disgusts me is the refusal to acknowledge the mistake and instead foist this onto nebulous “game mechanic failures”. That’s bullshit and any GM with more than 5 minutes experience can smell that a mile away.
You shouldn’t need game mechanics as a GM to immediately read the disgust and discomfort of the players there.
Yeah, my friends and I are currently playing VtM for the first time (except our GM, who has played it before), and we talked a lot during our Session Zero about "okay here's all the shit we just straight up do NOT want to deal with in this campaign".
We've still had some really dark other sorts of stuff happen, but this campaign has also resulted in some of the hardest laughs we've had in over 16 years of tabletop games together.
I've seen other tabeltop groups abuse the Chaotic Neutral I Can Do Anything crap. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
If a chaotic neutral character starts acting chaotic evil the GM should inform them of their alignment change and assuming the game is good or neutral characters only, their need for a new PC as their old one is now an NPC villain.
Ugh, no, don't do this, just have a conversation like reasonable adults about how it's not fun for everyone, please tone it down.
Conflicts at the tabletop should be resolved like any other interpersonal dispute, with open discourse.
I like the theory of jail because you serve your time and then hypothetically (if not usually in reality), you get a second chance to try to get your life going again. There's something much more uncertain about the cycle of justice for someone like Noah Bradley. He loses his job (and I assume he can't do much else besides illustration) but there's never really time to serve. There's no sentence. At what point do we let people back into society and give them another chance? The internet never forgets. Or maybe it will in x years?
After seeing the absolute shit conditions prisoners suffer through, it's REALLY hard to say that just losing your job and social standing can compare, but there is something about an end up that at least gives the criminal a hope to better themselves. The ability to say "I served my time." I'd hire an ex-con at my business. I think a lot of people in here would approve of that. If I hired Noah tomorrow, people would be upset. If I hired him a year from now? 2? more?
The core problem with this argument - the core problem with the rehabilitation narrative - is that the only obligations are put on society, not the individual in question. You ask at what point does such an individual get a second chance, but such a question ignores the obligation of the individual to demonstrate that they should be given that chance - this is the purpose of serving one's time, and tends to get particularly messy in the matter of sexual assault because of how our society treats it. As was pointed out above, Bradley has openly subscribed to a philosophy in which demonstrations of contrition are tools to gain breathing time - something that should bring greater scrutiny to his performing such acts, and which demands greater obligations on his part. At this point, the argument of "should he be allowed back into proper society" shouldn't even be on the table, because the prerequisites on his part to bring it there haven't been met yet.
And yes, this means that if he refuses to do that work, society is not obligated to turn a blind eye to that refusal. Nor is society obligated to accept whatever he presents as evidence, either. As I saw pointed out elsewhere in response to the argument of stigmatization:
Do you want to know who else besides rapists spend their entire lifetime wanting to avoid talking about an event in their past because it makes others give them dirty, disapproving looks?
Rape victims.
This is exactly the attitude that leaves people stuck in prison because they don't act sorry enough to please the parole board. And highlights the entire issue notya is talking about. The law has codified sentences and does not necessarily care if you are sorry for what you did. You serve your full time and you leave. Attempts at social and workplace ostracization, which is ultimately what this stuff all ends up being, has no defined sentence.
And we already know from the stigmas against ex-cons that these kind of persistent negative effects on peoples ability to function and support themselves in society.
Your entire framework here is very similar to the one used by "tough on crime" advocates when it comes to how incarceration and afterwards should function.
I have run Vampire the Masquerade for over 20 years. It’s an edge lord game with a lot of sexual content. Not once, in 20 years, have I ever contemplated sexual assault or rape of a players character. I haven’t even bothered ever asking either.
You just don’t do it and ESPECIALLY not to a woman.
What disgusts me is the refusal to acknowledge the mistake and instead foist this onto nebulous “game mechanic failures”. That’s bullshit and any GM with more than 5 minutes experience can smell that a mile away.
You shouldn’t need game mechanics as a GM to immediately read the disgust and discomfort of the players there.
Yeah, my friends and I are currently playing VtM for the first time (except our GM, who has played it before), and we talked a lot during our Session Zero about "okay here's all the shit we just straight up do NOT want to deal with in this campaign".
We've still had some really dark other sorts of stuff happen, but this campaign has also resulted in some of the hardest laughs we've had in over 16 years of tabletop games together.
I've seen other tabeltop groups abuse the Chaotic Neutral I Can Do Anything crap. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
If a chaotic neutral character starts acting chaotic evil the GM should inform them of their alignment change and assuming the game is good or neutral characters only, their need for a new PC as their old one is now an NPC villain.
That only works when the DM and other players want to call them on it instead of merrily going down the path towards slaughtering the villagers and burning their town down to make a distraction.
At that point I’d quit.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
I know I’m late to that particular chunk of the thread, but, the Warren Ellis stuff is giving me a lot to think about. It’s not even the easiest thing to explain, but Transmetropolitan in particular was a big deal for me, and as recently as, well, current events about police brutality brought the whole Angels 8 subplot (and all the according white power and political corruption detailed in the Transmet books) rearing back into a scalding relevance.
I remember back when diepunyhumans was his active site and there were certainly, amidst the futurist posts and generalized Warren Ellis weirdness, an unmistakable smattering of posts and links to obviously younger women who were promoting themselves through photoshoots and the like. Even as a guy in my early twenties I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow. Something about it seemed incongruous, but at the same time I couldn’t isolate anything overtly objectionable, unless I was to have problems with the photos themselves. At the time I basically accepted that these were various artist friends of his who he was signal boosting and so on. Seeing now, seventeen or eighteen years later, that this wasn’t necessarily the case...
I guess I’m just appalled. I thought he was better. I thought a lot of the social justice stuff that can be found running through much of his output informed a reading of the behaviors of the man. But more and more I’m finding that it’s entirely possible for there to be a crippling lack of self-awareness juxtaposed with the exceptional things a person can be capable of. I’m not saying he didn’t know it was wrong. But somehow, somewhere along the way he decided maybe it wouldn’t be wrong for him to do.
Consent in Roleplaying is a really big thing and it is just as important as anywhere else. The entire point of roleplaying games is to have an enjoyable time with your friends. Finding out the limits of certain topics for the people in the group should be done session zero and regularly checked in on as things go forward.
I need to emphasize in a very clear way that this level of streaming is employment, not your friends having fun at your table. Adam is the contracted DM for the RollPlay company. He is the functional supervisor who determines what players get continued employment. These are professional entertainers and actors, who create content as the way they eat and pay rent.
Forcing a rape scene, unexpectedly, is sexual assault by a person in a supervisory position over an employee. This is world's apart from just table manners.
And that's a big part of the core of this discussion as well. When normal people go to cons, they do it for fun. When these entertainers go, they're going to a work convention to network employment opportunities. It is the hustle of the job. And having all the drinking, misogyny, and sexual bro culture built in to the industry is so different from just this being more misogyny in gaming.
I have run Vampire the Masquerade for over 20 years. It’s an edge lord game with a lot of sexual content. Not once, in 20 years, have I ever contemplated sexual assault or rape of a players character. I haven’t even bothered ever asking either.
You just don’t do it and ESPECIALLY not to a woman.
What disgusts me is the refusal to acknowledge the mistake and instead foist this onto nebulous “game mechanic failures”. That’s bullshit and any GM with more than 5 minutes experience can smell that a mile away.
You shouldn’t need game mechanics as a GM to immediately read the disgust and discomfort of the players there.
Yeah, my friends and I are currently playing VtM for the first time (except our GM, who has played it before), and we talked a lot during our Session Zero about "okay here's all the shit we just straight up do NOT want to deal with in this campaign".
We've still had some really dark other sorts of stuff happen, but this campaign has also resulted in some of the hardest laughs we've had in over 16 years of tabletop games together.
I've seen other tabeltop groups abuse the Chaotic Neutral I Can Do Anything crap. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
If a chaotic neutral character starts acting chaotic evil the GM should inform them of their alignment change and assuming the game is good or neutral characters only, their need for a new PC as their old one is now an NPC villain.
That only works when the DM and other players want to call them on it instead of merrily going down the path towards slaughtering the villagers and burning their town down to make a distraction.
At that point I’d quit.
Well, yeah. Which is why I've given up on IRL RPGs.
I know I’m late to that particular chunk of the thread, but, the Warren Ellis stuff is giving me a lot to think about. It’s not even the easiest thing to explain, but Transmetropolitan in particular was a big deal for me, and as recently as, well, current events about police brutality brought the whole Angels 8 subplot (and all the according white power and political corruption detailed in the Transmet books) rearing back into a scalding relevance.
I remember back when diepunyhumans was his active site and there were certainly, amidst the futurist posts and generalized Warren Ellis weirdness, an unmistakable smattering of posts and links to obviously younger women who were promoting themselves through photoshoots and the like. Even as a guy in my early twenties I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow. Something about it seemed incongruous, but at the same time I couldn’t isolate anything overtly objectionable, unless I was to have problems with the photos themselves. At the time I basically accepted that these were various artist friends of his who he was signal boosting and so on. Seeing now, seventeen or eighteen years later, that this wasn’t necessarily the case...
I guess I’m just appalled. I thought he was better. I thought a lot of the social justice stuff that can be found running through much of his output informed a reading of the behaviors of the man. But more and more I’m finding that it’s entirely possible for there to be a crippling lack of self-awareness juxtaposed with the exceptional things a person can be capable of. I’m not saying he didn’t know it was wrong. But somehow, somewhere along the way he decided maybe it wouldn’t be wrong for him to do.
He used to write articles that were on the suicide girls site so I figured that was his thing. I remember finding some version of his site and spotting some stuff that sort of stuck out, but in all honesty, he was always sort of out there with the sex, drugs and violence compared to the more mainstream stuff I read. I wasn't that surprised I guess about his site's content.
edit:With regards to the time served bit, Louis CK got ~2 years and a $35m fine. I mean, no one actually pressed charges, but buying back that flick he did and other loss of work was about $35m and time away was about 2 years. He's back to selling out smaller venues again. If he'd been convicted, I'd guess it would be felony indecent exposure because he did it a few times, so he'd be looking at...$10k and up to 3 years in the can per charge? Dunno if they'd go concurrent sentences, if that's a thing in the states or not. I assume that movie will eventually be released, years from now.
Nosf on
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
I know I’m late to that particular chunk of the thread, but, the Warren Ellis stuff is giving me a lot to think about. It’s not even the easiest thing to explain, but Transmetropolitan in particular was a big deal for me, and as recently as, well, current events about police brutality brought the whole Angels 8 subplot (and all the according white power and political corruption detailed in the Transmet books) rearing back into a scalding relevance.
I remember back when diepunyhumans was his active site and there were certainly, amidst the futurist posts and generalized Warren Ellis weirdness, an unmistakable smattering of posts and links to obviously younger women who were promoting themselves through photoshoots and the like. Even as a guy in my early twenties I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow. Something about it seemed incongruous, but at the same time I couldn’t isolate anything overtly objectionable, unless I was to have problems with the photos themselves. At the time I basically accepted that these were various artist friends of his who he was signal boosting and so on. Seeing now, seventeen or eighteen years later, that this wasn’t necessarily the case...
I guess I’m just appalled. I thought he was better. I thought a lot of the social justice stuff that can be found running through much of his output informed a reading of the behaviors of the man. But more and more I’m finding that it’s entirely possible for there to be a crippling lack of self-awareness juxtaposed with the exceptional things a person can be capable of. I’m not saying he didn’t know it was wrong. But somehow, somewhere along the way he decided maybe it wouldn’t be wrong for him to do.
He used to write articles that were on the suicide girls site so I figured that was his thing. I remember finding some version of his site and spotting some stuff that sort of stuck out, but in all honesty, he was always sort of out there with the sex, drugs and violence compared to the more mainstream stuff I read. I wasn't that surprised I guess about his site's content.
Well, sure. It wasn’t that I didn’t see the sex stuff and his willingness to write towards a proto-edgelord audience when the opportunity arose, it was really more learning about his systemic grooming habits to manipulate multiple people at the same time and connecting odd posting behavior to it years later.
How hard is it, really, to not fucking sexually harass someone? I mean, I'm a straight guy. I find plenty of women to be incredibly attractive. But I don't accost them. My penis doesn't actually do my thinking for me. I can control myself. And it's not all that difficult.
IDK, having a proclivity for reposting that sort of stuff doesn't really say to me that the person is a creeper. Alan Moore writes some pretty out there stuff and to the best of my knowledge hasn't been associated with any of this.
How hard is it, really, to not fucking sexually harass someone? I mean, I'm a straight guy. I find plenty of women to be incredibly attractive. But I don't accost them. My penis doesn't actually do my thinking for me. I can control myself. And it's not all that difficult.
I just don't get it.
It's the same, old, tired line from George Carlin. Figure that at minimum that half the people out there have less impulse control than you do. Figure that many of those don't or won't understand things like consent because we don't live in a world where that's taught much, if at all.
Also, consider yourself lucky that you've lived long enough and see enough to learn from mistakes like that. I do. I did some pretty stupid stuff when I was younger but it was in small groups of friends and I'm glad we didn't have the kinds of social media we have now, because I'd be in just the same amount of hot water without call-out culture and whathaveyou to try to educate me.
All opinions are my own and in no way reflect that of my employer.
Consent in Roleplaying is a really big thing and it is just as important as anywhere else. The entire point of roleplaying games is to have an enjoyable time with your friends. Finding out the limits of certain topics for the people in the group should be done session zero and regularly checked in on as things go forward.
I need to emphasize in a very clear way that this level of streaming is employment, not your friends having fun at your table. Adam is the contracted DM for the RollPlay company. He is the functional supervisor who determines what players get continued employment. These are professional entertainers and actors, who create content as the way they eat and pay rent.
Forcing a rape scene, unexpectedly, is sexual assault by a person in a supervisory position over an employee. This is world's apart from just table manners.
And that's a big part of the core of this discussion as well. When normal people go to cons, they do it for fun. When these entertainers go, they're going to a work convention to network employment opportunities. It is the hustle of the job. And having all the drinking, misogyny, and sexual bro culture built in to the industry is so different from just this being more misogyny in gaming.
You're right, this is a different situation since it's not a group of peers. Thank you for pointing that out.
Consent in Roleplaying is a really big thing and it is just as important as anywhere else. The entire point of roleplaying games is to have an enjoyable time with your friends. Finding out the limits of certain topics for the people in the group should be done session zero and regularly checked in on as things go forward.
I need to emphasize in a very clear way that this level of streaming is employment, not your friends having fun at your table. Adam is the contracted DM for the RollPlay company. He is the functional supervisor who determines what players get continued employment. These are professional entertainers and actors, who create content as the way they eat and pay rent.
Forcing a rape scene, unexpectedly, is sexual assault by a person in a supervisory position over an employee. This is world's apart from just table manners.
And that's a big part of the core of this discussion as well. When normal people go to cons, they do it for fun. When these entertainers go, they're going to a work convention to network employment opportunities. It is the hustle of the job. And having all the drinking, misogyny, and sexual bro culture built in to the industry is so different from just this being more misogyny in gaming.
You're right, this is a different situation since it's not a group of peers. Thank you for pointing that out.
Being a work environment definitely elevates it, however, let's look past the fact that the actions are being performed by and against fictional characters: The DM in this situation is attempting to force the player to take part in a sexual fantasy against their will. A good analog would be if I started texting a woman and describing the sexual things I could do to her and demanding she reciprocate.
I like the theory of jail because you serve your time and then hypothetically (if not usually in reality), you get a second chance to try to get your life going again. There's something much more uncertain about the cycle of justice for someone like Noah Bradley. He loses his job (and I assume he can't do much else besides illustration) but there's never really time to serve. There's no sentence. At what point do we let people back into society and give them another chance? The internet never forgets. Or maybe it will in x years?
After seeing the absolute shit conditions prisoners suffer through, it's REALLY hard to say that just losing your job and social standing can compare, but there is something about an end up that at least gives the criminal a hope to better themselves. The ability to say "I served my time." I'd hire an ex-con at my business. I think a lot of people in here would approve of that. If I hired Noah tomorrow, people would be upset. If I hired him a year from now? 2? more?
The core problem with this argument - the core problem with the rehabilitation narrative - is that the only obligations are put on society, not the individual in question. You ask at what point does such an individual get a second chance, but such a question ignores the obligation of the individual to demonstrate that they should be given that chance - this is the purpose of serving one's time, and tends to get particularly messy in the matter of sexual assault because of how our society treats it. As was pointed out above, Bradley has openly subscribed to a philosophy in which demonstrations of contrition are tools to gain breathing time - something that should bring greater scrutiny to his performing such acts, and which demands greater obligations on his part. At this point, the argument of "should he be allowed back into proper society" shouldn't even be on the table, because the prerequisites on his part to bring it there haven't been met yet.
And yes, this means that if he refuses to do that work, society is not obligated to turn a blind eye to that refusal. Nor is society obligated to accept whatever he presents as evidence, either. As I saw pointed out elsewhere in response to the argument of stigmatization:
Do you want to know who else besides rapists spend their entire lifetime wanting to avoid talking about an event in their past because it makes others give them dirty, disapproving looks?
Rape victims.
This is exactly the attitude that leaves people stuck in prison because they don't act sorry enough to please the parole board. And highlights the entire issue notya is talking about. The law has codified sentences and does not necessarily care if you are sorry for what you did. You serve your full time and you leave. Attempts at social and workplace ostracization, which is ultimately what this stuff all ends up being, has no defined sentence.
And we already know from the stigmas against ex-cons that these kind of persistent negative effects on peoples ability to function and support themselves in society.
Your entire framework here is very similar to the one used by "tough on crime" advocates when it comes to how incarceration and afterwards should function.
The dude's entire mental framework is "hurt people, fake apology, hurt people again". I'm not sure why it should be on anyone else to trust or want to work with someone like that.
There has to be a path to rehabilitation or why would people ever bother to amend their ways. I don't believe in retribution because what's the point other than gratification? You can't undo what you've done, but we expose people who do these things to protect others from them, not because we are specifically looking to cause suffering.
That said rehabilitation requires acceptance and a genuine desire to change. And that takes time.
How hard is it, really, to not fucking sexually harass someone? I mean, I'm a straight guy. I find plenty of women to be incredibly attractive. But I don't accost them. My penis doesn't actually do my thinking for me. I can control myself. And it's not all that difficult.
I just don't get it.
Sexual assault isn't about horniness or attraction, it's about power and toxic masculinity
Consent in Roleplaying is a really big thing and it is just as important as anywhere else. The entire point of roleplaying games is to have an enjoyable time with your friends. Finding out the limits of certain topics for the people in the group should be done session zero and regularly checked in on as things go forward.
I need to emphasize in a very clear way that this level of streaming is employment, not your friends having fun at your table. Adam is the contracted DM for the RollPlay company. He is the functional supervisor who determines what players get continued employment. These are professional entertainers and actors, who create content as the way they eat and pay rent.
Forcing a rape scene, unexpectedly, is sexual assault by a person in a supervisory position over an employee. This is world's apart from just table manners.
And that's a big part of the core of this discussion as well. When normal people go to cons, they do it for fun. When these entertainers go, they're going to a work convention to network employment opportunities. It is the hustle of the job. And having all the drinking, misogyny, and sexual bro culture built in to the industry is so different from just this being more misogyny in gaming.
You're right, this is a different situation since it's not a group of peers. Thank you for pointing that out.
Being a work environment definitely elevates it, however, let's look past the fact that the actions are being performed by and against fictional characters: The DM in this situation is attempting to force the player to take part in a sexual fantasy against their will. A good analog would be if I started texting a woman and describing the sexual things I could do to her and demanding she reciprocate.
Which is not what happened, and again, in the context of the episode, there are a number of points where Adam attempts to narratively elicit a go/no-go (they're not very effective hence the problem and the whole thing again is badly structured - but it's the tail end of a 4 hour episode as well, which doesn't excuse it but highlights the issue).
The problem I'm having with the way people have reacted is that unlike almost everything else in this thread, this wasn't concealed or hidden, or a pattern of behavior on Adam's part towards his players. It was one scene, where communication in the scene went badly. And a ton of people have gone "Ah hah! We got him! Cancelled forever! Here let me go through all his prior work, see how when he plays characters he's always choosing...."
Which I suppose ties into the whole sentencing discussion above. No one seems to have a solution for how to deal with a social situation that was blundered into, or wants to consider the possibility that this was in fact a mistake, which is sure looks like given that it's the only (though significant) one like it.
EDIT: I was a fan of the show, and a lot of Adam's content. I came out of that episode feeling bad because it was a bad scene which some second pass thinking or editing would've gone "oh, wait the best case outcome here is not good". The reactions and damage to the show are all reasonable. The way it's tossed around, the way it's been dropped in this thread, the way up-thread its been used to imply "ooh there might be more because Adam works with JP and JP has this other thing...". What is that? It doesn't feel like justice, or even something useful.
We are a nation that consigns people to lives of poverty because they got sick, injured, of had a mental health issue at the wrong moment in their careers or education and never got back on track.
My cares for whether there is a “path back” for these fuckers is way, way down the list. A lot better human beings have had to work minimum wage for the rest of their lives because of shit luck that wasn’t even their fault.
sooner or later, and hopefully sooner, somehow our society needs to figure out how to deal with people who have been outed as abusers. if nothing else the last few years should have shown that there is a lot of abusers out there.
I don't have an answer but I know for a fact that just going "fuck em' who cares" doesn't work. there's too many people who are abusers. unless the answer is to literally just kill them outright then the fact that they still exist in society has to be dealt with somehow. for example, blacklisting an abuser out of their industry seems morally right to me. but somehow that abuser must be able to find work of some kind to the point of being able to keep themselves alive. otherwise that blacklisting actually is just a death sentence that everyone is too cowardly to actually own up to.
throughout nearly all of human history the answer to this problem was banishment or outlawing. it was possible to remove someone from a community without killing them. that is no longer an option. and it was never a great solution as nothing was stopping the banished from moving to another community and continuing whatever behavior that got them in trouble in the first place.
if nothing else, publicly outing abusers seems a good and necessary first step. but what comes next is tricky. for example it would be an enormous good if all the outed abusers in the games industry were somehow blacklisted and unable to work in that industry ever again. there are so many people who aren't abusers, including the victims of said abuse, ready to take their place. but what happens next. if the answer is something like "well they get a job at McDonalds / as a janitor / as some other low status job" then really all we are doing is removing abusers from high status jobs and high status victims and dumping them on people who already have enough shit to deal with.
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We are a nation that consigns people to lives of poverty because they got sick, injured, of had a mental health issue at the wrong moment in their careers or education and never got back on track.
My cares for whether there is a “path back” for these fuckers is way, way down the list. A lot better human beings have had to work minimum wage for the rest of their lives because of shit luck that wasn’t even their fault.
It also bears repeating that more often than not the people who are recognized for their abuse tend to continue in their existing careers or successfully pivot to something adjacent.
I like the theory of jail because you serve your time and then hypothetically (if not usually in reality), you get a second chance to try to get your life going again. There's something much more uncertain about the cycle of justice for someone like Noah Bradley. He loses his job (and I assume he can't do much else besides illustration) but there's never really time to serve. There's no sentence. At what point do we let people back into society and give them another chance? The internet never forgets. Or maybe it will in x years?
After seeing the absolute shit conditions prisoners suffer through, it's REALLY hard to say that just losing your job and social standing can compare, but there is something about an end up that at least gives the criminal a hope to better themselves. The ability to say "I served my time." I'd hire an ex-con at my business. I think a lot of people in here would approve of that. If I hired Noah tomorrow, people would be upset. If I hired him a year from now? 2? more?
The core problem with this argument - the core problem with the rehabilitation narrative - is that the only obligations are put on society, not the individual in question. You ask at what point does such an individual get a second chance, but such a question ignores the obligation of the individual to demonstrate that they should be given that chance - this is the purpose of serving one's time, and tends to get particularly messy in the matter of sexual assault because of how our society treats it. As was pointed out above, Bradley has openly subscribed to a philosophy in which demonstrations of contrition are tools to gain breathing time - something that should bring greater scrutiny to his performing such acts, and which demands greater obligations on his part. At this point, the argument of "should he be allowed back into proper society" shouldn't even be on the table, because the prerequisites on his part to bring it there haven't been met yet.
And yes, this means that if he refuses to do that work, society is not obligated to turn a blind eye to that refusal. Nor is society obligated to accept whatever he presents as evidence, either. As I saw pointed out elsewhere in response to the argument of stigmatization:
Do you want to know who else besides rapists spend their entire lifetime wanting to avoid talking about an event in their past because it makes others give them dirty, disapproving looks?
Rape victims.
This is exactly the attitude that leaves people stuck in prison because they don't act sorry enough to please the parole board. And highlights the entire issue notya is talking about. The law has codified sentences and does not necessarily care if you are sorry for what you did. You serve your full time and you leave. Attempts at social and workplace ostracization, which is ultimately what this stuff all ends up being, has no defined sentence.
And we already know from the stigmas against ex-cons that these kind of persistent negative effects on peoples ability to function and support themselves in society.
Your entire framework here is very similar to the one used by "tough on crime" advocates when it comes to how incarceration and afterwards should function.
So, we instead get a culture where victims of sexual/gendered/domestic violence become more and more alienated, because we prioritize the "rehabilitation" of abusers and routinely push their victims (often to the point of outright gaslighting) to have to "accept" their abuser back into the community (which often forces those victims to have to leave for their own safety.) And since you brought it up, it's worth pointing out that sexual and domestic violence is a long-running weak point for the anti-carceral movement because of the nature of such acts of violence and why normal paths of rehabilitation don't really work (this was why the movement really showed their ass during the Persky recall drive.)
I'm a big believer in restorative justice - but as I've said before, the first step (and this goes triple in cases of sexual/gendered/domestic violence) must be contrition. Furthermore, victims must not be forced to be part of the rehabilitation process.
Maybe we should worry more about the victims. Because when we get past the fantasy of the abuser forever shunned, what you see is that a huge percentage return to their careers quietly while the accusers see their careers wither and die.
I mean, this is like round three for Mel Gibson. Brian Wood still gets work. I imagine I’ll see Avellone’s name pop up in credits again in a year or two.
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Some bad choices in narrative structure, and bad communication of players comfort in an RPG rollplaying game, of things happening to a fictional character, at a distance (it's an online streamed show), is just...again, not remotely similar nor should it be considered similar, to the direct real world sexual harassment claims peered in this thread.
Like..."what happened" isn't hidden or secret - I was a follower of Far Verona, the stream is on YouTube for anyone to watch. It was a bad scene, where they pointed out after the fact - they hadn't given enough thought to how to let a player abort a scene they were uncomfortable with on stream, and he didn't realize he wasn't really giving Elspeth enough queues to abort the moment either (go and watch it: you can see he's dropping hints that she could back out, they're just obtuse from the perspective of the character she's playing, and he misses that when she speaks about what she thinks should happen out of character that's a real good queue to back off).
It's a really good example of why you need to have conversations about this stuff in advance with your players, and how it can go badly wrong for everyone if you get overconfident that you know what you're doing or you know your players. But if it's anything, it's an example of the sort of accidental disaster that can and should be dealt with and forgiven.
Like...I don't know what "entitled attitude" I'm suppose to assume Adam had there?
A big issue here isn't so much ethical, as it is being unable to separate the artist from the art. I'm not interested in listening to R. Kelly songs, not because it will affect R. Kelly in any way, but because having my mind automatically append rapist to his name makes for an unenjoyable song. If, on the other hand, I found out that one of the dozen developers on a AAA game was a bad person, that's less of an issue, because it's not "their" art. And if you hired Noah Bradley to install flooring or something, this wouldn't apply at all.
Another aspect is basically an HR problem. Hiring someone who has abused people in the past means you had better be really sure that they're reformed, or you have created a hostile environment for their potential victims. At a time when people are trying to address the gender imbalance in many geek-centered companies this is a serious concern. Then there's the issues inherent with giving a management role to someone who has leveraged their management role in the past to abuse people, which while (probably?) not an issue with Noah is an issue with quite a few other people who have shown up in the news.
In the end, if you have someone who keeps stabbing their co-workers, it is perfectly reasonable for that person to have trouble finding work. The lack of a proper social safety net in the US is a problem, but that's a different problem, and most of these people are landing on their feet anyway.
The core problem with this argument - the core problem with the rehabilitation narrative - is that the only obligations are put on society, not the individual in question. You ask at what point does such an individual get a second chance, but such a question ignores the obligation of the individual to demonstrate that they should be given that chance - this is the purpose of serving one's time, and tends to get particularly messy in the matter of sexual assault because of how our society treats it. As was pointed out above, Bradley has openly subscribed to a philosophy in which demonstrations of contrition are tools to gain breathing time - something that should bring greater scrutiny to his performing such acts, and which demands greater obligations on his part. At this point, the argument of "should he be allowed back into proper society" shouldn't even be on the table, because the prerequisites on his part to bring it there haven't been met yet.
And yes, this means that if he refuses to do that work, society is not obligated to turn a blind eye to that refusal. Nor is society obligated to accept whatever he presents as evidence, either. As I saw pointed out elsewhere in response to the argument of stigmatization:
I don't think that a person should be prevented from making a living (although on a tangent I also think you shouldn't have to 'generate value' to 'earn' the right to live), but you're not entitled to any specific job, and not earning a second chance is different than "can't make money doing work". Maybe your bad acts make it impossible to get a job in the industry in which you committed those bad acts, and maybe a step on the road to forgiveness means understanding that you did it to yourself.
Adam Koebel is/was a somewhat talented RPG designer & publisher. He took parts of the core rules from Apocalypse World and turned it into Dungeon World. In the IPR scene this kicked off a huge surge of games in the same vein. Other notable TTRGPs so spawn are Blades in the Dark and Spirit of '77.
Adam without much other design work started down the same record your game session with friends path that Critical Roll laid out. On what now is the end of his show, an NPC controlled by Adam
Anyone who's ever played a game with possible mature or adult themes knows you're supposed to a) clear that everyone at the table/in the game is cool with playing said situations of things, b) have a way for PCs/the DM to wave a flag and say "okay, fade to black, this has gone off the rails/somebody is not comfortable or is disturbed by events" at any time during said scene, and especially c) when a player says "I don't want my PC in this kind of situation" you don't put them in that kind of situation while making it a big fucking joke you goddamned monster goose. Especially fucking live on YouTube.
You also don't grin and smile and make light of the fact you're sexually assaulting a PC and trying to make it seem like there's nothing wrong going on with it.
This was horrendous and he damn well deserved to be publicly shamed for it. It's put Dungeon World on my "do not buy, this person doesn't deserve my $$$" list.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
Just because it happened in game, does not mean it did not happen, or that real people were not involved, or that what was done was not reprehensible, or that people were not hurt.
Let's not do the "that's not real harrasment" song and dance.
You just don’t do it and ESPECIALLY not to a woman.
What disgusts me is the refusal to acknowledge the mistake and instead foist this onto nebulous “game mechanic failures”. That’s bullshit and any GM with more than 5 minutes experience can smell that a mile away.
You shouldn’t need game mechanics as a GM to immediately read the disgust and discomfort of the players there.
Yeah, my friends and I are currently playing VtM for the first time (except our GM, who has played it before), and we talked a lot during our Session Zero about "okay here's all the shit we just straight up do NOT want to deal with in this campaign".
We've still had some really dark other sorts of stuff happen, but this campaign has also resulted in some of the hardest laughs we've had in over 16 years of tabletop games together.
I've seen other tabeltop groups abuse the Chaotic Neutral I Can Do Anything crap. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Yeah. I've tried out a few IRL RPG groups and I've found none of them are doing the kinds of games that I'm interested in. And much of it has centered around the chaotic neutral or "thin excuse to actually be chaotic evil but pretend I'm not".
If a chaotic neutral character starts acting chaotic evil the GM should inform them of their alignment change and assuming the game is good or neutral characters only, their need for a new PC as their old one is now an NPC villain.
That only works when the DM and other players want to call them on it instead of merrily going down the path towards slaughtering the villagers and burning their town down to make a distraction.
Ugh, no, don't do this, just have a conversation like reasonable adults about how it's not fun for everyone, please tone it down.
Conflicts at the tabletop should be resolved like any other interpersonal dispute, with open discourse.
This is exactly the attitude that leaves people stuck in prison because they don't act sorry enough to please the parole board. And highlights the entire issue notya is talking about. The law has codified sentences and does not necessarily care if you are sorry for what you did. You serve your full time and you leave. Attempts at social and workplace ostracization, which is ultimately what this stuff all ends up being, has no defined sentence.
And we already know from the stigmas against ex-cons that these kind of persistent negative effects on peoples ability to function and support themselves in society.
Your entire framework here is very similar to the one used by "tough on crime" advocates when it comes to how incarceration and afterwards should function.
At that point I’d quit.
I remember back when diepunyhumans was his active site and there were certainly, amidst the futurist posts and generalized Warren Ellis weirdness, an unmistakable smattering of posts and links to obviously younger women who were promoting themselves through photoshoots and the like. Even as a guy in my early twenties I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow. Something about it seemed incongruous, but at the same time I couldn’t isolate anything overtly objectionable, unless I was to have problems with the photos themselves. At the time I basically accepted that these were various artist friends of his who he was signal boosting and so on. Seeing now, seventeen or eighteen years later, that this wasn’t necessarily the case...
I guess I’m just appalled. I thought he was better. I thought a lot of the social justice stuff that can be found running through much of his output informed a reading of the behaviors of the man. But more and more I’m finding that it’s entirely possible for there to be a crippling lack of self-awareness juxtaposed with the exceptional things a person can be capable of. I’m not saying he didn’t know it was wrong. But somehow, somewhere along the way he decided maybe it wouldn’t be wrong for him to do.
I need to emphasize in a very clear way that this level of streaming is employment, not your friends having fun at your table. Adam is the contracted DM for the RollPlay company. He is the functional supervisor who determines what players get continued employment. These are professional entertainers and actors, who create content as the way they eat and pay rent.
Forcing a rape scene, unexpectedly, is sexual assault by a person in a supervisory position over an employee. This is world's apart from just table manners.
And that's a big part of the core of this discussion as well. When normal people go to cons, they do it for fun. When these entertainers go, they're going to a work convention to network employment opportunities. It is the hustle of the job. And having all the drinking, misogyny, and sexual bro culture built in to the industry is so different from just this being more misogyny in gaming.
I mean I send out an anonymous survey for content when I begin a new game to make sure content warnings are applied
also all players know they will get a PM warning if anything triggery might happen to their character and have veto power
Well, yeah. Which is why I've given up on IRL RPGs.
doubly so when it's a live broadcast
He used to write articles that were on the suicide girls site so I figured that was his thing. I remember finding some version of his site and spotting some stuff that sort of stuck out, but in all honesty, he was always sort of out there with the sex, drugs and violence compared to the more mainstream stuff I read. I wasn't that surprised I guess about his site's content.
edit:With regards to the time served bit, Louis CK got ~2 years and a $35m fine. I mean, no one actually pressed charges, but buying back that flick he did and other loss of work was about $35m and time away was about 2 years. He's back to selling out smaller venues again. If he'd been convicted, I'd guess it would be felony indecent exposure because he did it a few times, so he'd be looking at...$10k and up to 3 years in the can per charge? Dunno if they'd go concurrent sentences, if that's a thing in the states or not. I assume that movie will eventually be released, years from now.
Well, sure. It wasn’t that I didn’t see the sex stuff and his willingness to write towards a proto-edgelord audience when the opportunity arose, it was really more learning about his systemic grooming habits to manipulate multiple people at the same time and connecting odd posting behavior to it years later.
I just...
How hard is it, really, to not fucking sexually harass someone? I mean, I'm a straight guy. I find plenty of women to be incredibly attractive. But I don't accost them. My penis doesn't actually do my thinking for me. I can control myself. And it's not all that difficult.
I just don't get it.
It's the same, old, tired line from George Carlin. Figure that at minimum that half the people out there have less impulse control than you do. Figure that many of those don't or won't understand things like consent because we don't live in a world where that's taught much, if at all.
Also, consider yourself lucky that you've lived long enough and see enough to learn from mistakes like that. I do. I did some pretty stupid stuff when I was younger but it was in small groups of friends and I'm glad we didn't have the kinds of social media we have now, because I'd be in just the same amount of hot water without call-out culture and whathaveyou to try to educate me.
You're right, this is a different situation since it's not a group of peers. Thank you for pointing that out.
Being a work environment definitely elevates it, however, let's look past the fact that the actions are being performed by and against fictional characters: The DM in this situation is attempting to force the player to take part in a sexual fantasy against their will. A good analog would be if I started texting a woman and describing the sexual things I could do to her and demanding she reciprocate.
The dude's entire mental framework is "hurt people, fake apology, hurt people again". I'm not sure why it should be on anyone else to trust or want to work with someone like that.
That said rehabilitation requires acceptance and a genuine desire to change. And that takes time.
Sexual assault isn't about horniness or attraction, it's about power and toxic masculinity
Which is not what happened, and again, in the context of the episode, there are a number of points where Adam attempts to narratively elicit a go/no-go (they're not very effective hence the problem and the whole thing again is badly structured - but it's the tail end of a 4 hour episode as well, which doesn't excuse it but highlights the issue).
The problem I'm having with the way people have reacted is that unlike almost everything else in this thread, this wasn't concealed or hidden, or a pattern of behavior on Adam's part towards his players. It was one scene, where communication in the scene went badly. And a ton of people have gone "Ah hah! We got him! Cancelled forever! Here let me go through all his prior work, see how when he plays characters he's always choosing...."
Which I suppose ties into the whole sentencing discussion above. No one seems to have a solution for how to deal with a social situation that was blundered into, or wants to consider the possibility that this was in fact a mistake, which is sure looks like given that it's the only (though significant) one like it.
EDIT: I was a fan of the show, and a lot of Adam's content. I came out of that episode feeling bad because it was a bad scene which some second pass thinking or editing would've gone "oh, wait the best case outcome here is not good". The reactions and damage to the show are all reasonable. The way it's tossed around, the way it's been dropped in this thread, the way up-thread its been used to imply "ooh there might be more because Adam works with JP and JP has this other thing...". What is that? It doesn't feel like justice, or even something useful.
My cares for whether there is a “path back” for these fuckers is way, way down the list. A lot better human beings have had to work minimum wage for the rest of their lives because of shit luck that wasn’t even their fault.
I don't have an answer but I know for a fact that just going "fuck em' who cares" doesn't work. there's too many people who are abusers. unless the answer is to literally just kill them outright then the fact that they still exist in society has to be dealt with somehow. for example, blacklisting an abuser out of their industry seems morally right to me. but somehow that abuser must be able to find work of some kind to the point of being able to keep themselves alive. otherwise that blacklisting actually is just a death sentence that everyone is too cowardly to actually own up to.
throughout nearly all of human history the answer to this problem was banishment or outlawing. it was possible to remove someone from a community without killing them. that is no longer an option. and it was never a great solution as nothing was stopping the banished from moving to another community and continuing whatever behavior that got them in trouble in the first place.
if nothing else, publicly outing abusers seems a good and necessary first step. but what comes next is tricky. for example it would be an enormous good if all the outed abusers in the games industry were somehow blacklisted and unable to work in that industry ever again. there are so many people who aren't abusers, including the victims of said abuse, ready to take their place. but what happens next. if the answer is something like "well they get a job at McDonalds / as a janitor / as some other low status job" then really all we are doing is removing abusers from high status jobs and high status victims and dumping them on people who already have enough shit to deal with.
It also bears repeating that more often than not the people who are recognized for their abuse tend to continue in their existing careers or successfully pivot to something adjacent.
So, we instead get a culture where victims of sexual/gendered/domestic violence become more and more alienated, because we prioritize the "rehabilitation" of abusers and routinely push their victims (often to the point of outright gaslighting) to have to "accept" their abuser back into the community (which often forces those victims to have to leave for their own safety.) And since you brought it up, it's worth pointing out that sexual and domestic violence is a long-running weak point for the anti-carceral movement because of the nature of such acts of violence and why normal paths of rehabilitation don't really work (this was why the movement really showed their ass during the Persky recall drive.)
I'm a big believer in restorative justice - but as I've said before, the first step (and this goes triple in cases of sexual/gendered/domestic violence) must be contrition. Furthermore, victims must not be forced to be part of the rehabilitation process.
I mean, this is like round three for Mel Gibson. Brian Wood still gets work. I imagine I’ll see Avellone’s name pop up in credits again in a year or two.