Where is the line for Frontier with terrorism and cancer?

[Alex Brentnall]

Posting this here to avoid the mess that is Dangerous Discussions and I want this to be an adult discussion not the usual decent into madness..

Where is the line between roleplay and pushing boundaries. Is it ok for an Elite Dangerous fiction group to basically glorify terrorism and claim to be a "jihadist group"? Is it ok for people to make fun of cancer in a video game? Is it ok for player groups to openly mock the developers on their own game?

In short where is the line between roleplay and being an <redacted>? At what point do/should Frontier step in and say this isn't what we want in our game?


If a dev/mod wants the details and/or a link please ask. This isn't specific to the 2 groups out there doing this at them moment as anybody out there can copy them in an instant if they wish.


Personally (as you may guess) my line is that it doesn't belong in the game but i'd be interested to here where others see the line is and importantly "why". My "why" is because I use games to escape reality so would rather not have such things being made fun.

 

[Toumal]

Why is this an issue? If someone makes fun of YOU or your experiences, then that's obviously a no-no. If someone makes fun of cancer itself, I don't see the issue. Same with terrorism. We had a slave discussion in another thread, claiming that the depiction of bad things in ED would "normalize" them. I don't see how.

P.S.: My father died of intestinal cancer at the age of 65 and I was there. I say let people make cancer jokes (of course I don't mean making jokes about you or your relative having cancer). The jokes don't kill anyone.

 

[Alex Brentnall]

Why is this an issue? If someone makes fun of YOU or your experiences, then that's obviously a no-no. If someone makes fun of cancer itself, I don't see the issue. Same with terrorism. We had a slave discussion in another thread, claiming that the depiction of bad things in ED would "normalize" them. I don't see how.

P.S.: My father died of intestinal cancer at the age of 65 and I was there. I say let people make cancer jokes (of course I don't mean making jokes about you or your relative having cancer). The jokes don't kill anyone.

Fair question. For me its the nature of it. I'm not saying we need a safe-space rubbish where the things arn't mentioned at all but it really really saddens me when I see things in video games that would get people arrested if they said/did the same in a in real life setting*. Whilst it's not personal it kinda sets the tone and personally I don't like that tone at all.

*Edit: One particular video that sticks in my head is the one where said player group played middle-eastern sounding music through voice chat then the whole "god is great" in Arabic thing and self destructed and found it truly hilarious..... Harmless fun to some, much less so to others. All I could think of watching that is: "and gamers want to be taken seriously and treated like adults when the adults are worse than the children"...