Thread by @coilingoracle, : agency is an always compromised state of freedom in the world [...]

: agency is an always compromised state of freedom in the world that actually goddamn exists. Most of our lives revolve around the situations in which we surrender degrees of autonomy for various reasons. There is a difference between coercively undermining autonomy & consent

Games, in theory, are a collection of rules and norms that include the rules and norms of social scenes (including explicit and implicit norms along with unspoken norms and hegemonic norms and tensions). A lot of what we think of as “common sense” is contingent social norms

The fact that hegemonic common sense is ugly and biased and unfair can be glimpsed by looking at Twitter or Facebook where people repeat just so stories or say “what people are really thinking” or otherwise engaged in casual bigotry—ubiquity is not an excuse but an explanation

So here is some unpopular

: we don’t all share norms and what we think of as common sense varies an awful lot. I try to balance practicing good consent in games with running games where players have constrained agency—railroads and quantum ogres are examples of non-agency...

Because your choices are irrelevant, yet no one runs perfectly free games other than maybe a private game in your head called “imagination” constrained only by what you know. I can save or die in B/X and die at a narratively irritating point for everyone involved—that’s chance

I can also run a game where we agree that John Waters is the inspiration and therefore playing people who aren’t a certain sort of scummy clashes with the game—that’s making a free choice but one which fucks up everyone else’s agency. That player also has constrained agency...

Because their ideal character is tonally inappropriate for the game—the same way that importing a 5e Paladin with no adjustment to OSE is a character just magnitudes more powerful and clashes with assumptions about power and damage and what rules cover and what rulings cover

The question is what do you do when constrained agency rather than guidelines keeping people on the same page (I don’t have reliable Vancian magic because I’m playing WFRP1e, my character may wind up maimed because we use wound tables) acts as coercion: violating something...

More sacrosanct than “I wanted to play a CG Drow and my DM said they don’t exist in the setting” or “hey, I’m sorry the enemy rolls a natural 20 and rolled max damage you’re dead” or “you’ve hit sanity 0 in CoC surrender your character sheet” because these are normative cases

Including some things like “hey y’all never ran down this thread so yeah the town you like got taken over by rat people because you didn’t investigate that noble cult” which can feel unfair because it wasn’t telegraphed well (which is a conversation about what is obvious) and...

A DM engaging in consent violating behavior: dictating your actions, bringing in (potentially triggering) material you didn’t sign on for, no saving throw untelegraphed death, telling you you can’t do something “reasonable,” etc. which vary greatly in distress and violation

The best safety nets we have are each other, explicit social norms (a social contract of being in some scene), safety tools (provided appropriate use since I’ve had some harrowing experiences of people abusing the language of social justice and non violent communication) and...

The ability to have conversations around moral failure that are not simply an attempt to exile and extricate responsibility but are attempts to compassionately and realistically address what moral failure looks like because SPOILER ALERT: we have all morally failed at times...

And lack of profile, young age, non ubiquity of social media, personal growth, abandonment of a social scene and other contingent factors generally keep that out of the spotlight. There are people I’ve verbally lashed out at with every valid reason to hate me

I have difficulty gauging appropriateness of content because I’m generally used to a social scene where that isn’t part of the conversation—I don’t think I’m well equipped to play or run a streamed game given a host of psychological reasons. I don’t envy choices around it but...

What is maybe most important is a recurring pattern of failed alarm systems, non apologies, broken promises, institutional short memory and scene migration mitigating people’s ability to not have missing stairs in their social scene which is a related problem

NOTE ON LANGUAGE: a missing stair is a person that it is well known within a social scene that they present a certain sort of danger and it becomes a norm to avoid certain situations—like how if your staircase has a broken stair *you* know to skip it and have to warn guests

Moral accountability isn’t fucking fun, it’s labor where you take an inventory of your behaviors, enumerate who you hurt and attempt to perform repair which is contingent on:
• willingness to admit you were wrong
• concrete goals for transformed behavior
• genuine remorse

NOTE: forgiveness is absent this list, no one harmed by a person has any obligation to forgive them and weaponizing reconciliation to force people to forgive those that hurt them for social peace is abuse and coercive and fucking depressingly common—and financially incentivized

So if we look at some high profile cases I think there is a pattern:
• they often command influence with a press or “the industry” and often allege to have the ability to financially ruin someone
• they weaponize marginalized identity to claim criticism is bias motivated

• they do not take time to work on personal failings but rush into providing a counter claim that abdicates their responsibility
• many people feel like criticism is tilting windmills and getting brigaded
• many people dismiss principled argument as disrupting social peace

ON THAT LAST BULLET: this includes tone policing to say that negative emotions, criticism and disagreement are unwelcome/hostile behavior and because it’s *easier* people keep fucking this up because it’s easy to call things “drama” rather than address them head on

• they use influence to advance marginalized people who bear the brunt of defending them and often the fallout
• an us vs them mentality enables justifying behavior that would otherwise be considered extremely troubling
• a belief that hurt people cannot perpetuate harm

• a belief that being “right” is a zero sum game and disbelief that degrees of guilt and truth and contradictory information can exist
• an unwillingness to engage in early intervention because of social cost and fear of stigma creating situations of continued harm

• a belief that a victim must be sympathetic
• a belief an aggressor must be villainous
• a metric of popularity/follower count as a metric of correctness
And fuck this goes on forever I’ll stop belaboring the point

Here’s the thing, celebrating the downfall of someone as their feet of clay are revealed is not helpful to victims, to the perpetrator, to a larger social scene or to a better conversation, it’s bitter vindictiveness disguised as self righteousness

We don’t have enough conversations that are meant as conversations rather than proclamations, affirming your own rightness is not a tactic for increasing social safety it’s a tactic for feeling better about yourself and ego masturbation is fine & healthy but it isn’t praxis

Concretely:
• pushback on dogpiling even by people you agree with against people you think are loathsome. It’s a precedent that overwhelming someone is the same as having a conversation.
• there should be a greater emphasis on principles self criticism/reflection

• less knee jerk defensiveness for people
• distrust of people who set themselves up as figureheads and arbiters of what is right and good
• distrust of scene politics
• avoiding participation without context & providing neutral assement
• avoiding cheapshots

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