Ok, time for a small

[Thread]

on the Game Haptics Router, consent, and the Fall Guys stunt yesterday.

This is a bit of a lengthier followup to my replies to @acvalens thread on the same subject. https://twitter.com/acvalens/status/1300549566819905538

tl;dr - The Fall Guys thing was an iffy use of the GHR, which I helped drive, and should've thought on a bit more.

Building Buttplug projects while keeping consent in mind can be difficult, and this was a miss.

The rest of the thread is an expansion of my thinking on that.

First off, let's take a look at the Game Vibration Router tutorial video again. The GVR was a precursor to the GHR, but it did a similar thing: Rerouting gamepad rumble to sex toys.

In the tutorial video for it, I had a "guidelines" section.

The GVR/GHR, as programs, lack context.

They just attach to rumble functions in a game, and siphon off the commands to Buttplug to control a toy. It doesn't know or care what game/program it's attached to, or what's happening.

That leaves context up to the user.

We can put games the GHR connects to in a few buckets:

- Single player
- Local Multiplayer
- Multiplayer w/ chosen group
- Multiplayer w/ random group

Single player is pretty easy to classify for consent. It's just you.

There may be questions on the *content* of the game and what's causing the rumble, but that gets into other murky areas I'll avoid for this particular thread.

Local Multiplayer ends up being similar to your normal, in-person consent setup. You and whoever else are considered to be in physical proximity to play together, so work that out via whatever way you feel comfortable.

Online Multiplayer w/ a chosen group works as long as the group consents, and is informed.

This is how we've run things like Rocket League and the GHR with cam models in the past.

It's usually a private lobby, people who cycle in/out know what's up.

Online Multiplayer w/ RANDOM groups + GHR is where shit gets dicey. You don't know who's on the other end, which brings up all sorts of questions.

There's also how you interact with them, which can bring up even more questions, but there is no obvious green light here.

Some examples.

With the Animal Crossing stunt back in July, while that could be either known or random multiplayer, there was no real way to interact haptically with the other player. We certainly tried.

So, the most that could happen there is you post up a public dodo code on twitter then... I dunno, dig holes on your island while other people are there?

Creepy, but not exactly direct.

Rocket League could go either way. There's single player (which sucks, omfg the bots are so bad), public and private lobbies.

How you choose that is up to you, so there's a plethora of options.

And this is where Fall Guys ended up being a fuckup on my part.

There's no private lobbies or single player. It's all public, all randos, all the time, and they can trigger haptics via holding or collisions.

Now, will randos *know*? Probably not. You'd need to be announcing that you were playing, what group you were in, etc, and even then, with the randomization of names (a fantastic anti-abuse tactic I applaud Mediatonic for), it's really hard to tell who you're in a group with.

Does that make it any better? IMO Not really, though other opinions seem split here.

The whole reason I'm writing this thread is because people contacted me outside of main threads with questions on consent, but a lot of people saw public threads and thought it was awesome.

It is different than, say, wandering into a game with voice chat and putting your mic right next to the toy that's reacting haptically to events from others.

But it's still, in the general sense, not a super clear cut great thing to be doing.

Usually threads like this will turn into arguments of "but I can just masturbate to any multiplayer game and it's the same thing and people won't know", and well, that's true, but the test is here "If you say you are doing this in public, what's the general consensus"

'cause the software I write is free, open source, and in public, and therefore kinda throws that question out there whether I like it or not, *especially* since I'm the developer and putting my name on these things.

Is there any technical mitigation for this? Nope.

Any sort of game allow/deny list would easily be defeated. There's not really a great way to grab who's playing what and regulate it. The GHR in itself is a cheat program so I know what's possible. People would patch it out.

So instead, you get public self flagellation and long twitter threads on the moral ambiguity of writing open source sex software.

This stuff is hard.

What I *do* want is other people thinking and talking about this, and there are many wonderful researchers out there doing great work on this (Josef Nguyen ( https://josefnguyen.net ), people in this article: https://www.polygon.com/2015/2/15/8039455/video-game-consent-kissing-in-tune-indicade, etc)

The best I can do here is listen and learn from others while watching how people use my projects.

Writing for "generic sex tech" is a wildly difficult ethical problem, especially in the open source space where anyone can and will do anything with your code.

So yeah, no real answers here, just an apology for not quite thinking the FG project through completely.

While I don't think the project was 100% out of line, and def wasn't maliciously intended, I do think my presentation of it could've been a better.

Anyways, definitely interested to hear from you (yes, you) about your thoughts!

Please feel free to comment on the thread, discuss some of these issues. This is all relevant to future Buttplug development.

Also, if you're interested in topics of how sex tech and people collide, you may find interest in this thread on who trains ML and if/how that bestows an orientation, gender, or otherwise on algorithmic output: https://twitter.com/qdot/status/1056377347245465600

And, if you're ever considering getting in to sex tech: You have huge, unanswerable questions like these to look forward to.

GOOD LUCK. :D

Anyways.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled buttplugs.