Consider this hypothetical scenario. Having somehow come into
ownership of a scrap of land which is not part of any country, state,
county, city, or other legal jurisdiction, a group of people decide to
create a new suburb, a gated community which is open only to what they
consider the "right people". Styling themselves as the Town Council,
they draft a set of Bylaws which they're confident will make their town a
fun, safe, and satisfying place of residence for an entire community;
at first they hand-pick everyone who can come live there, but eventually
those people start inviting their friends who start inviting their
friends, and a large, vibrant community grows. Because all of these
people are cool and they're having fun living here together, it never
occurs to any of them to, for example, commit rape against each other. And they happen to overlook the fact that, when
drafting those Bylaws, the Town Council neglected to specify anything
about how rape is a crime, since they were perfectly (and sub-consciously) confident it would
never happen, among the various cool people who were going to come live
in their town.
Then, one day, a woman moves into the
town, a somewhat disturbed woman who is absolutely phobic about the idea
that she might be raped, with a completely unrealistic notion of how
likely it is to happen. And when she happens to notice that the law
doesn't say anything about rape being prohibited, she flips out, and
decides to hold a one-person protest rally outside the town hall.
There, she harangues every passer-by she can catch, lecturing loudly and
stridently about how utterly necessary it is that every community, no
matter how cool its people think they are, MUST make it explicitly
illegal to rape anyone, or else they are tacitly sanctioning the act of
rape even if it never actually happens. Most people she's shouting at
are good, decent folk who would never rape anyone, and to them, she's
just being ridiculous and annoying.
But here's the key point. If she keeps
belting out that spiel at the top of her lungs, day after day, right
outside where the Town Council are having their meetings, what does it
say about them that they continue to not have a rape law on the books?
Whether they're intentionally ignoring her, or have just managed not to
notice her, should not someone perhaps stop kvetching at the deranged
woman's unreasonable behavior, and start trying to find out why her
concerns - however little validity they have outside of the purely
theoretical - are not being addressed?
What is all this
an analogy for? Believe it or not, it started with a GAME, of all
things, and the original issue was pretty insignificant, but I've kept
pushing the matter because I found it profoundly disturbing that
nobody besides me could see a problem here. Whether or not it ever
actually happens, the ability to betray someone on the most fundamental
level is an Alpha-Level Offense against the social contracts upon which
gaming relies; if you can be "griefed" in the game, and have no defense
whatsoever other than to stop playing with the jerk that did it, then I
see that as a serious failure on the basis of the game itself. Nobody
in their right mind would want to live in a town that allows its
citizens to rape each other, and a game which fails to police griefing
is very much the equivalent on a smaller, more trivial scale. But just
because it's all fun and games doesn't mean it should be taken lightly;
behavior in a game is a microcosm of behavior beyond the game, so if
inappropriate activity is allowed to flourish, even if it never actually flourishes, the failure to actively curtail it sends a very bad message, about the people who are supposed to
be taking responsibility for the space they've provided, whether that's
the physical space of a city or the ideological space of a game.
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
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