CW: Sexual assault

The clip in question is a difficult watch. What happened there is never ok. Adam's players weren't safe. Everyone should be treated like a human, even if they're playing a robot, ghost, or inanimate object.

Thread. https://twitter.com/Allandaros/status/1245696154404356097

Safety tools in games are important because making your friends feel like shit isn't cool at all. Does that mean your game can't have sexual or violent content? Of course not. It does mean you should have a conversation about it before you play. You're telling a story TOGETHER.

If sex is on the table in your games, talk about what that means. Don't make it a free for all conversation. There are tools out there to help you, like Lines and Veils. You've got private channels and ways players can give their feelings on the subject anonymously. Use those.

If you find yourself in a situation where you're pushing the envelope to make a joke about sex or sexual assault during a game, stop and think, "Are these laughs worth the risk of ruining someone else's enjoyment of the game?" The answer is always no.

RPGs let us play non-human characters. We still bring our humanity to those individuals. Many players invest themselves in characters on a deep, personal level. A joke about a random robot having a forced orgasm strikes some differently the same joke about THEIR robot.

Many, many people hate both versions of the joke. A few might laugh at both. For me, rape jokes are never funny no matter the context. In fact, they AT BEST leave me uncomfortable. The same is true for A LOT of people. Adam should have known better.

It looks like Adam plans to make some statements soon. His first wasn't nearly good enough, nor did he apologize well. When you fuck up, which is human, own it, learn from it, and tell those you hurt how you plan to be better.

Give Adam's players some space on this. Let them process and talk about it privately or publicly as they wish on their terms. It's clear many were upset by what happened. Don't push them to make a public statement.

Oh one final thought! I would not have known about this if @Allandaros hadn't spoken up. Humza is an incredible human. You should follow him and check out his stuff. Dude spends his days fighting for human rights.