Will every MMORPG be out of control? Well, then there should be a special rating for online games. Still, there are online games where the sexual element etc is much much less common, and in still others Online games, where the chat options are strictly controlled (Disney’s Toontown), the game really is appropriately rated E. It seems to me that a modicum of common sense and effort (like actually LOOKING AT the games now and then) would make it possible to give Online Games much more reliable ratings than they are given now.

“why don’t we just worry about what might improve the situation”

good point, but i think rating TSO for adults won’t sove the real problem for MMORPGs. As i wrote before roleplaying is based on putting on masks, play someone else. So every MMORPG can be a playground for evasion. breaking out of social control is part of the fun.
acting scandalous is an integral part of roleplaying and i think the “happy-every day life- world” of the sims provokes this more than perhaps a fantasy game.
and even if you look how fans talk about the original game you will find evasiv pleasures. There a forums about how to kill a sim. fans create stories through the photo feature in which sexuality plays a big role.
from a cultural studies approach you could say: the player creates the meaning of the game in his interest.
the conflict in an online game is that those meanings come together on one screen.
so what to do ?
1. It would be possible to rate every MMPORG for Adults only.
2. Or to prohibit chatting or to stronger observe and identify players who abuse the game and punish them.

The first thing does not lie in the industries interest and
kids will still find a workaround.
And the second option will kill every roleplaying.

Both options are bad somehow. TSO is a good example for such a “battle of meanings” because of the context of kaptalist erveryday life, which is always ideolocial controversial. So playing against the grain was always a big thing in all sims games (like the nude patch). but in tso it conflicts openly with other players, Electronic arts and our society.

As long there a lovebeds, whirlpools, pixeled out nudes there will be sexual connotations, attracting players to play with them subversive. and even attracting the 50 year old pervert…

And when he can’t chat in the gam: he has message boards, internet forums etc.

To keep it short:

So rating TSO for adults is only a pragmatic step to give the responsibility back to the parents. “Hey we warned you !”
It does not solve the problem of any MMORPG- The Mask!
You can prevent all these things, when you do not allow the mask. but without it- it would not be roleplaying anymore.

“5. but the most important question : who is more responsible when a 10 year old kid chats with a 50 year old pervert- the game, the rating of the game or the parents who let their kid play without observertion.”

Is that really the most important question. Rather than worrying about who is responsible (much less more responsible) or who is to blame, why don’t we just worry about what might improve the situation. Parents are clue impaired and don’t pay enough attention to what their kids are doing online, for sure. But isn’t that a reason to alert them to what is going on?

Savages of Gor…. pg.31

toy

“Maria, I appreciate your efforts to extend olive leafs and all the rest and move the dialogue to another plane, etc. However, the fact of the matter is, by joining with you in the creation of a civic project, I would be giving tacit consent to your notion of BDSM,”

I wasn’t really asking for you to join with me in anything chere, I presented My Understanding of one of your stands and asked for confirmation or amendment. I know you and i will probably never agree on a multitude of points, but that doesn’t mean i don’t want to hear a well thought out opinion well presented.

I understand your objections to us chere, and when put reasonably, i can respect them. It should be obvious to you by now that i respect your discomfort of my company in game because i have not come to your Property, or tried to contact you in game (I know i have never place you on Ignore) As far as that goes, i only invited you to seek me out for a Dialogue, which you declined as is your right. You don’t wish to be around me, so i don’t Inflict myself upon you. but it really has little to do with my post to you.

You obviously have some Knowledge in Political Science chere. So,, let us kick around a few other idea’s for Government in AV. toy, and Lady J point out some very real flaws with a one Avatar, One Vote stratagy. I Agree with them. You added,

“construction of single-mandate districts and party lists, etc. If every neighborhood has a president, then those presidents get together for the discussion about what kind of system that would work. This is only one of a dozen possibilities, and in the virtual world, all kinds of compensatory measures have to be made.”

This would appear on the surface more like a Marxist, or Maoist soviet system (And before anyone gets their Panties in a buch, I am NOT calling Dyer a Communist, NOR am i suggesting it regarding my own political views, i only point out a similarity.). Collectives form and elect neighborhood rep,. Neighborhood reps meet in the soviet to select a leader. Workable, IF as a city, we respect ALL neighborhoods as having the right to add a representative. To set a size limit for example on a neighborhood before it could field a rep would Disenfranchize a large segment of the population, and the Principles of Democracy would then be denied.However, Allowing a neighborhood of three houses the same voting power in the representative group would Effectively Disenfranchise the voting power of most members of a neighborhood fifty houses strong. How could this Disparity be Remedied?

Expand on this one chere, I would like to see your Political Model for AV (Or Indeed any city).

Back now to the Central theme of this Thread.
Dyer, i am sure you read the rating on the box before purchasing. and you were expecting something Wholly different due to the Teen rating.
I didn’t read the rating, and frankly, could care less about it,and my discovery of adult themes in TSO wasn’t surprising to me, i expect where more than four adults get together, Some talk of sex is Inevitable, but that is our difference in outlook. My point is, Assuming Dyer read the rating, It Didn’t say “Mature: explicit sexual content, May depict alternative lifestyles.” it said something to the effect of “Teen; some sexual content.”If it had the first rating, Perhaps he would not have bought it. (Am i right chere?) As it is, he relied on the ratings system and found himself thrown in with sexual content and lifestyles he finds Disturbing. Leaving aside ALL other questions,

Was That Fair?

The ESRB was Woefully Ill equipped to Properly rate a dynamic on line game/chat platform. and as a result a consumer was not properly informed as to content (Or potential for content change).
Either the ESRB had no Business putting a Static game rating on this Box, OR it should have properly prepared itself to rate Accuratly the potential content of the game Environment.

This is the Root of the problem as i see it. Not Dyers opinion of us, or ours of him.
The Arguement would probably never have occurred had the game been rated properly (I just KNOW he isn’t going out of his way to Join Sociolotron). If it had been rated “Mature: explicit sexual content, May depict alternative lifestyles.” Dyer would have NO legitimate complaint because he would have been warned before he ever entered the game.

I hope the ESRB is aware now of it’s error, and will look to correct it, but as it stands now, being unaccountable to anyone for the results of it’s ratings, I doubt it.

Your Thoughts?

Maria.

First off all the reference in my profile is to “Dyerism” and not “Dyerbrook”. One would have to be rather well acquainted with our out of game dialogue in order to know what that phrase refers to, yet I will modify it if you wish. When you asked me to “go away”, I went away without further comment — no harassment or stalking from this end, Dyerbrook. I will not send you a message in the game again — no need to worry.

“someone who really has no interest in debate and truly having an open-mind,”

You really haven’t tried to engage me, Dyerbrook. From my vantage point it appears that you are the one with the closed mind, mon ami.

“Domme/dom power over everybody, and does not really care about consent.”

Just as when you repeatedly call Lady J “an ass” — are you hiding a dominant streak, Dyerbrook, or in denial of one? Or is it the case that when one of us decides to slam you, we are guilty of that, but an ad hominem attack or six from you is exempt from that analysis? I’m listening.

“It’s funny how my argument against BDSM as the basis for a society, and the smaller argument about BDSM to be permitted in a game with teenagers and non-consenting adults, gets transmogrified into a debate how I’m some sort of prudish, Calvinistic, witch-hunting NIMBYist, supposedly unable and unwilling to tolerate “mature” themes in my backyard. This is just too hilarious to even make me laugh.”

It was intended to demonstrate that in Second Life the geography is designed so that folks who don’t want alternative lifestyles in their own virtual world don’t need to be exposed to it. It actually was NOT a critique of your POV, in that instance, Dyerbrook.

“My beef with BDSM people is that they are unable and unwilling to modify their behavior and tone it down a notch,”

What specifically would you have us do, Dyerbrook?

“They are just one end of a RL political movement that is trying to use various highly-visible areas of public interaction, like online games, or mass media like Time magazine, to get across their point, which is that anything goes, God is dead, and it doesn’t matter, and violence and slavery can prevail under the dubious notion of consent. That’s all. There is no reason at all to refrain from pushing back against such a movement.”

Huh? I’m not a member of this movement, as far as I can tell. You sound paranoid to me, Dyerbrook. This is just a group of like-minded people sharing a common interest with each other, nothing more.

Maria, I appreciate your efforts to extend olive leafs and all the rest and move the dialogue to another plane, etc. However, the fact of the matter is, by joining with you in the creation of a civic project, I would be giving tacit consent to your notion of BDSM, namely, that anything goes, God is dead (your notions of Christian BDSM believers are just blasphemy), and it’s all OK, and violence and slavery can be declared their opposites, magically cleansed of any evil by the dubious notion of “consent”, a consent that you have never succeeded in convincing me prevails, not in a game with teens, not in a game with non-consenting adults, where you parade around (until MOMI stops a few of you evidently) with explict, hardcore sexual and violent fantasies on your lots and Sims. We have no basis for a society here. You represent the destruction of society, not its construction on the basis of tolerance, so, sorry, can’t play in your sandbox.

As I said in the AV Gov thread, you can’t start society by deciding unilaterally, or in small groups, what kind of *system* there will be, and that my RL country’s system gets to be better than your RL system. There has to be a Constituent Assembly, a Constitutional Assembly, a Loya Jirga, a Interrim Governing Council, SOMETHING that is *first* the discussion itself about what kind of system you have, you don’t come in and say, “I’m president” or “my system is what we’re all going to use”.

No one says voting has to be based on balloon popularity, or whatever player has access to the tools to make a website in-game radio station. There are other criteria like property ownership, size of ownership, or party formation, construction of single-mandate districts and party lists, etc. If every neighborhood has a president, then those presidents get together for the discussion about what kind of system that would work. This is only one of a dozen possibilities, and in the virtual world, all kinds of compensatory measures have to be made.

I personally leave all of this alone. I’m a small-holder, a single owner on a size 7 property without wealth or riches or popularity, somewhere around the 50-60 spot on the list, but only because I’ve been in the game a long time and get a lot of enemy visitors that jack up my visitor hours LOL plus a few regular friends.

We are in a system where MOMI is like God or the weather, we have little means of controlling or affecting it, although that might be a goal down the road. So creative anarchy, or anarcho-syndicalism is about the only thing you can hope for, punctuated by various revolutionary juntas and criminal gangs disrupting the merry life of the anarchists every now and then.

Any kind of open-ended system could be created. But under the TOS of the game, and the norms of the RL societies in which these games live and move and have their being, sado-masochism is not to be welcomed and tolerated, but it is to be limited heavily. While TSO remains a game with kids in it and non-consenting adults, I simply must favor the constraint of BDSM. That’s not the same as constraining all mature topics and ruining all the fun of all RP adults. But it does mean that adults bent on mature themes must use restraint, and other players must restrain them through the company’s own TOS, if they cannot use some kind of self-discipline out of respect for children and non-consenting adults.

I personally don’t find the game as much fun, populated as it is with numerous BDSM practitioners who represent the destruction of society for me, and griefers and scammers who cannot be controlled through the TOS because players cannot work in any kind of concerte method to use the existing complaint system plus the creation of alternatives. I won’t delete my avatar ever, until the Maxis servers go down and we are asked to cash in our chips and get a refund or something. But I will likely gradually delete all my other Sims in AV and other cities because it is just not as fun as it once was, and this basic dilemma of trying to mix adults and kids was just never solved.

Re:”The PG sims aren’t for younger SLers, but rather for older Slers of your demographic, Dyerbrook, who don’t want mature stuff in their neighborhood (NIMBYism).”

It’s funny how my argument against BDSM as the basis for a society, and the smaller argument about BDSM to be permitted in a game with teenagers and non-consenting adults, gets transmogrified into a debate how I’m some sort of prudish, Calvinistic, witch-hunting NIMBYist, supposedly unable and unwilling to tolerate “mature” themes in my backyard. This is just too hilarious to even make me laugh.

It’s because you don’t know my avatar and his history, and all the Sim Album stories I have written on the subject for 3 years, I guess, but just look through the tiny prism of this debate on a blog. Dyerbrook lives in a sleasy no-motel of last resort. It is populated by alcholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, and addicted Sims players and lowlifes who still search for the meaning of life and have their golden moments that serve as a triumphant affirmation of the human LOL. They have serial and polygamous relationships with others and each other, they don’t shirk at examining the seamy sides of life. There is a never-ended stream of drug-pushers, losers, cigarette-smugglers, trafficked women, etc. coming through this hotel. In fact, there is even a side story about a main love attraction of Dyerbrook, a drug addict, who is swept away by some violent practitioner of BDSM.These are all fictional characters. But when I (and for a time another player) re-enacted them in TSO, which was my original vision, I quickly saw there was a big problem with doing this. I couldn’t put my motel in the love category and have a romance lot with prostitutes because the people coming on my lot *would be kids* and half the time I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a 12 year old and a 32 year old. That sure wasn’t fun for me, because I’m not interested in a 12-year-old girlfriend, thank you very much. I revised my vision, I changed my script, I made a game-category lot, I did other things. *I modified my behavior because I saw this was a game that was not really made up of RP adults*. It was made up of kids, and a lot of adults who in fact were unused to role-playing, didn’t understand it, and in fact turned TSO into that giant AOL chatroom or matchmaker.com server that causes Squirrel to say it isn’t a game.

My beef with BDSM people is that they are unable and unwilling to modify their behavior and tone it down a notch, and wait for outraged moms and MOMI to ban the most flamboyant of their number, because they aren’t really here to play a game or even role-play BDSM. They are just one end of a RL political movement that is trying to use various highly-visible areas of public interaction, like online games, or mass media like Time magazine, to get across their point, which is that anything goes, God is dead, and it doesn’t matter, and violence and slavery can prevail under the dubious notion of consent. That’s all. There is no reason at all to refrain from pushing back against such a movement.

Warmest regards (nicer than “Go Away” which you offered me earlier today)

kelli