Frank discussion on failures in gaming safety

#21

This!

The X-Card doesn’t supplant other forms of necessary communication, it’s an addition.

The very first safety tool for me often is CATS for that reason; so getting on the same page/expectation setting. Talking about those four things and what they mean to us, not just hand-waving it with shortcut terms like “genre”.

And it’s a thing not just before the first session but something to revisit as the game plays out over multiple sessions. It’s only after a few sessions of “play to find out” that major themes of a specific game crystallize, right?

End of session debriefs and decompression are also part of that that can help us identify issues before they become a problem for anyone.
@Gerrit’s blog entry talks about a number of helpful ways for this in the second half of his blog entry Sharing the Cognitive Load.

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#23

The worst part is:
Now that I’m producing & distributing a safety card for the German RPG day, I hear stories from quite a few players who did have safety issues in the past and just shut up about it. They didn’t say anything, kept it to themselves and never returned to that group or meeting.

The worst failures may be the ones you have never noticed.

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#24

CW: Homophobia, Ableism, Physical Assault, Xenophobia, Mysoginy

I have experienced three broad categories of safety failure in my times as a player and game master.

The most common of all has been “X-Card regret”. When you ignore something because you are willing to compromise, are on an emotional strong point when it comes up or just do not realize how much it is taking you to go along until later on. It is when you realize “I should have said anything before and now I do not know how to handle this with the safety tools” we are using. One of the most recent examples of this kind of regret that are very representative of the circumstances behind such regret.

  • A character of a unique cultural background was confronted due to their sexuality; there was some borderline xenophobia in the reaction to the cultural background, but it was talked and safety-handled as something the bigot character would react in such manner and everyone at the table was comfortable handling. However, the way the “safe” edition worked, it ended up with very weirded worded dialogue. Hours later, when there was a confrontation between characters, it reframed the whole thing as instead of xenophobia, there being an attitude of the queer character being “broken” or “incomplete” or in general, less of a whole human being. My failure to use safety tools to address that implication I was not comfortable with having surprise-dropped on me has haunted me for weeks.

  • In a game where character creation was collaborative, I ended up forced to play a character that had a more advanced version of one of my own disabilities. At the beginning of the game I did not thought about it; cool, cool, cool, I am probably the best at this table at portraying it anyway. What ended up happening instead was a torrent of micro-aggression starting with ableist assumptions and language going down to outright harassment and abuse towards the disabled character. I brought the safety tools on that instance as much as I could and that only seemed to escalate and until I had to make it “A THING.” The facilitator of that game is still to this day upset for me “talking down to them” instead of “using the safety tools.”

The second category of failure I have experienced is player-empathy failure: when a player at the table - GM or otherwise - does not interact with the safety tools in a safe way. It can be pretty obvious, such as refusing to interact or acknowledging with the tool at all, force-forwarding everything a X-Card or Script Change happens; it can also be very subtle, like players that present the false veneer of a safe space, but when it actually comes to use the tools, they are harmfully ignorant and/or do not know how to handle something actually is used rather than theoretical rules. These faults are very rarely from the tools themselves, but the failure of empathy at the table: when I X-carded multiple times a misogynist chauvinist portray of a character’s gender, it was not a failure of the X-Card that said player continued as if I had not X card nor that the other players refused to join in X-Carding that. Or when you are going through a CATS procedure and when establishing Lines and Veils, players pressure you to “change your Lines to Veils”. Safety tools are not a replacement for empathy, they are a vessel to it: some tables do not understand that.

The third type I most encountered is safety failure by design. Some games are just plain and outright unsafe. Indie games in particular, so in love with elaborate rituals, sometimes create environments and rituals that allow unsafe behavior to fester without uncontested. The biggest culprit of that, to me, has to be Ten Candles: there has not been a single game of Ten Candles that did not end up with me having a nervous breakdown. Everything on the game rituals strives the most to make you more isolated as possible; it actively gets in the way of using most safety tools; when you use a safety tool it twists and hampers it and keeps forcing you into situations you don’t want to unless you want to be the one interrupting its many rituals. It is a game that revels in making its players the most vulnerable and then denies them access to safety. Of course, not all games are like this, but the most ritualized a game is WITHOUT having safety tools built within, the most unsafe by design it runs the risk of being.

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#25

Over the last year I started GMing all the time for my son (age 10), his friends, cousins, etc. Safety failures have come up for me in games with kids. In fact it’s a looming issue all the time, since the kids don’t share the social cues and background that would steer them away from wanton violence (even in a game focused on violence like D&D) and various asocial behaviors. I have definitely blown this. The first time I did was playing solo with my son. He was an assassin who could disguise himself. He had come across the body of a group he was trying to infiltrate to get information. That was all fine. But he chose to disguise himself as this particular guy. And then went into the community and everyone was like, “Mike, you’re still alive buddy, I’m so glad. Where have you been? We all thought you were dead.” I was playing it up for humor, but it was way too sad for him, because he saw that he was making them believe their friend wasn’t dead and then later they would realize he was dead. There was another time I was GMing and a PC died (everyone knew that was a possibility), and the girl who was playing her was normally incredibly plucky and game and not particularly attached to D&D. But this time she just began to cry, maybe because she also had a headache and was feeling sick and vulnerable. So yeah, a lot of screwups there.

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#26

It sucks you had that experience. From what you wrote it seems like a social contract issue - your friend was trying to set something up they thought you would enjoy, and they were mistaken but got no feedback to course correct. This less-formal piece of system (friends sitting around a table) feels best addressed with less formal tools (friends checking in with one another). A mid-session check-in (“How is everybody feeling? Is there anything we absolutely want to see in the second half tonight? Anything not catching fire?”) has been successful for me - the timing is right to make it constructive rather than critical, and people are in the moment and engaged with a clarity that rapidly fades post-session.

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#27

Sometimes you can see this in real time at conventions - somebody at an adjacent table being badly run just shuts down, their eyes go dead, and you just know they will never be back. I feel like this happens a lot. I often meet people who are returning to try again a decade or more after a bad experience and am always a little amazed - if I’d tried bird watching and had a horrible time because the other bird watchers made me feel awful, I would not look back.

@William_Nichols to keep the thread focused on failures: People treating the X-card like a joke and not calling them on it instantly.

Rushing after someone who walked out of a larp to make sure “everything is OK”.

Doggedly sticking with an “important” plot point even though it was obviously making someone else unhappy. Hey, they could use the safety tools, right?

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#28

The mainstay of failures seem to fall into two related components:

  1. Not knowing ourselves: We encounter novel situations or material and, well, play to find out. Sometimes this hits us in ways we don’t expect. I absolutely do not have a good solution for this and, well, I’ve learned a lot about myself from some of the worst experiences.

  2. Lack of player empathy: Sometimes other players (sometimes, I think we all fall into this) value The Game over The Players. This is completely understandable: We are here to play a game. This is dangerous, and it is a good idea to both better understand why we do it, and how to notice when others are doing it.

The second one I think we can do something about, as described by many others:

  • Normalize the use of safety tools. I know I do OK-check-in quite a bit more than I think necessary, both because it is only minimally invasive and because it normalizes the use.

  • If others do not treat these tools as important, use what privilege and social standing we have to ensure they are treated as important. This can include calling people on the bad behavior, but also providing the positive example.

What have I missed?

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#29

I think it is important to note that the safety tools need to be calibrated to the game and experience. Not every tool is the right fit for every game/experience/situation. The affordances of tabletop make it a little easier to standardize, but even then, I strongly feel that you need to tune your tool-set appropriately.

For example, I don’t use an X-card with my home group, who have been playing together for almost 20 years. We have a good idea of our boundaries and limitations and we love and trust each other very much. But if we invite a guest I totally will put one on the table.

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#30

For sure @Jmstar. We just had a bit of a shakeup, with a friend having an amicable split out and bringing in another friend.

You can bet for sure that before we had a game, I made sure we had a discussion about safety tools, and that we stressed You Are More Important Than The Game. We usually have the x-card, and made sure it was out in the open.

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#31

I would say one thing I’ve been working on in home games in support of my work on Script Change and my own table experience is creating a culture of care rather than a culture of play. It’s based on stuff I learned based in caring ethics, and something I hope to integrate into Script Change. I’ve addressed bits in the recent Leading with Class episodes.

The steps are:

  • Changing from caring about to caring for, basically refocusing from “sure, I care about this person/these people” to “I will make an effort to give care to these people” - it takes more work but refocusing helps us do the following steps.
  • Asking questions - what do you want to see in game? What don’t you want to see? How can I help you enjoy the game? How can I mitigate harm? What is a soft line, what is a hard line? Etc.
  • Using the answers from the questions to customize safety tool use for the table (maybe you need Script Change and the X-card, etc.) and ensuring everyone has access to the tools outside of game.
  • Framing the game and environment as an environment where play is happening but care comes first - “it’s fun” does not override “it squicks/triggers/bores a player.” Check in regularly to ensure one person’s fun isn’t another person’s harm.
  • Normalizing checkins and asking players how they feel, how they can be supported, and how the experience can improve. (Pause is good for this.)
  • Being willing to stop doing what is happening, even the whole game, to care for someone.

That’s what I’ve got so far!

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#32

Oh, and in this model, everyone is responsible for this - not just facilitators or people with trauma!

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#33

My worst experiences probably fall into this category. Specifically, I play a lot of games with something like the Belief mechanic from Burning Wheel. When I need to create my own belief from scratch, especially if I need something quickly so I don’t hold up character creation, I’ve noticed a tendency to default to things too close to my own experience which leads to bleed happening a lot easier.

I’ve since learned to try and play characters with very different beliefs from my own experiences, but it made me wish more games had example beliefs to pick from so it would be easier to quickly choose something deliberately very different.

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#34

I had a rough time playing a story-game at a convention recently, even though we were using X-cards, Veils, the whole nine yards. I excused myself from the game maybe 2/3rds of the way through cuz of the emotions and feelings the game was bringing up. It was one of those “everyone dies at the end” type games, and not in the “fun” way like Fiasco. It was my first time playing a game like that, and it was probably a mistake on my part to try it out in a convention setting with strangers. The lesson I took away from it is that Safety tools aren’t 100% effective, especially if you’re not really sure what it is you’re getting yourself into / it’s your first time playing an “intense” game.

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#35

Sorry for the double-post, but reading some of the other comments brought up some more thoughts.

I feel like sometimes the use of X-Cards can be seen as / used as an excuse to “push” on more edgy content, ie “I can do this and if someone is uncomfortable they can just X-card it.” I’d be interested in getting people’s thoughts on how to counteract this, without playing down the good the X-card can do.

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#36

@ErikTheBearik I think you used the zeroth safety rule at that convention: Walking away from the table. It’s not always discussed, but an essential component to safety in games. Sometimes the only thing you can do for your safety is to walk away. It’s important that we not stigmatize that behavior in any way, ask questions, or interrogate someones desire to walk away.

On your X-card question:
I think it’s important to explain that it’s purpose is not to explore potentially dangerous content, but to provide relief from content not anticipated to be dangerous. That’s why it’s so often tied with lines and veils. @JimLikesGames does the most stellar safety discussion before every game. He reminds people of the open door and inclusivity policy, does CATS, works through lines and veils (importantly allows players to submit them anonymously), and ends with X-card for all the things that the previous tools don’t cover. That conversation is abbreviated, but recurs with every session and if a new player joins everything is re-stated and re-calibrated.

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#37

Question, @Jmstar: if I’m reading this right — you are saying that rushing to check that someone is OK after they walked out of a LARP is not a good approach. Is that always the case? If someone doesn’t follow up with them, are you potentially exposing the person who left to a worse experience of whatever happened because they may not get support they need and be vulnerable in a public place? How do you know when to follow up with them and when not to?

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#38

Thanks! Being someone who thanks people for doing it in a way that helps you feel safer helps propagate best practices!

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#39

My Worst Game Ever: a few years ago, many of my tabletop friends were leaving tabletop gaming for the new hotness of freeform LARPs, particularly the Nordic stuff.

I wanted to keep playing with them, so I decided to try joining in on on one of the high-bleed high school simulators. It was a poor fit and I probably should have known that going in.

The place where it really broke down was in being a game where players were supposed to use the face/arm touching technique for simulating sexual activity. There was extensive safety discussion, practice to get us comfortable, and the ironclad assurance that we were free to opt out of anything we didn’t want to do. All very conscientious.

And then I’m handed the in-game plot for my character, a torrid secret affair including lots of sex with an older girl… who was played by a woman in her early 20s. I was in my mid-40s.

I completely melted down and had no idea what to do. RPing sex in secret with her was just a deeply uncomfortable proposition, but bailing entirely on the game removed a major aspect of HER character, and isn’t she an adult who can say no if she’s uncomfortable, and Jesus Christ how many times has some creep laid THAT line down?

It was a nightmare, I wondered for years (to this day) if it was trolling me on purpose. I basically stopped being friends with the host and a bunch of people involved, not because they’re bad, but because I was, and remain, so ashamed at totally fucking up that night. Actually getting beaten up would have been less upsetting to me. I haven’t really LARPed since and the thought of participating in a game without the safety tool of the table itself can bring on panic.

There’s two obvious-to-me morals, I guess? One is to trust your instincts about what you’ll enjoy and not. The other is a corollary to @Jmstar’s note about outside factors: no amount of pre-game prep would fix needing to stand in a bathroom and pretend to fuck some girl young enough to be my actual daughter. The table is the first, best safety tool, and consideration of the outside-of-play social factors going into what you’re asking players to simulate (and with whom) can prevent situations that force folks to reckon with them.

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#40

“The Door Is Always Open” is predicated on not stigmatizing the behavior, so part of the spiel is usually:

“You can check out at any time, for any reason. You can take a break, or leave forever as necessary. No one will question your choice and you won’t wreck the game, so take care of yourself. If you are leaving permanently it is a courtesy to let the facilitator know so we don’t worry about you.”

With this in mind running after someone and asking them what’s wrong focuses unwanted attention on their perfectly normal choice. It’s the exact opposite of what the technique espouses. it disincentivizes the technique for others.

Of course you should check in and make sure everyone is OK, but the moment someone walks out is not the time to do it unless there are obvious signs of distress. That’s a real judgement call but I tend to err on the side of leaving people alone. After the game, definitely check in.

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#41

Jim that’s awful and highlights a gigantic smorgasbord of failures, both on the organizer’s part and on yours. Would it be helpful to break those down or would you prefer to leave this one alone as a monument to awfulness?

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