Thoughts on poor taste.

[sirogit]

I've been thinking over an idea in my head and wondering if it is's good taste. Not that it's offensive, because I am most sure that it would offend somebody.

The concept, is that in an extremely whimsical fantasy rpg, there is a town of people who speak entirely in profanity. This ofcourse makes diplomacy very difficult for them, luckily, there's someone who can speak both profanity and english, a diplomat who has tourette's syndrome.

(With a closer eye to logic, you could say that the town speaks compulsarary profanity, as does the diplomat with TS opposed to an average person, but the idea isn't supposed to be logical)

Now, I figure it would be in bad taste because
A) Its in a silly context, if not really for the purpose of humour.
B) I have a very minimal, watched-some-primtime-tv-show-about-it understanding of tourette's syndrome.
C) Its a painfull disease.
D) In the game, Tourette's Syndrome is a gift in that it allows the person to be billingual.

But the fact that it is not designed to be a comment on people who have tourette's syndrome makes me feel that it isn't in poor taste and shouldn't be rejected as such.

Now, I'm not asking whether this given idea is in poor taste, but morever, I'm wondering about what you consider the limits of good taste towards this or your own ideas, and how that limits your use of such ideas in RPGS.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Now, I'm not asking whether this given idea is in poor taste, but morever, I'm wondering about what you consider the limits of good taste towards this or your own ideas, and how that limits your use of such ideas in RPGS.

From what I've seen of the world, good taste is a typically English and bourgeoisie value, and it's not in a very central place in my own interactions here in Finland. I, and people here usually, don't seem to worry about good taste, but rather about what others will think, will something cause them pain. This is especially true in roleplaying, as it simply isn't something that belongs to middle class culture here. The people who worry about good taste go to theatre instead of roleplaying here. I understand that this is different in Anglo-American culture, at least roleplayers seem to spend an inordinate amount of time worrying whether someone will be offended by something.

So generally the question for me would be if your example scenario would be uncomfortable to the people I'm playing with. If I knew that a player was the high-strung type who gets kicks out of drawing unlikely parallels and getting offended ("HOW dare you mock tourette's, my grandaunt has it!"), I most likely would avoid the above to curtail his unhealthy hobby. Apart from that, no reason really.

I consider Ron's terminology of lines and veils an especially lucent way of handling these matters, as it's entirely relative and doesn't use such umbrella terms as "good taste", which will anyway mean different things to people.

Based on the above, my final answer would be that I consider the limits of good taste to reside on the limits of human interaction. If it's OK for me to bring this and this up with the play group, then it's good taste.

[Henri]

Is it necessary to bring Tourette's syndrome into this at all?  Why not just say there is someone who is gifted with the ability to speak normal English, and leave it at that?  I think this would be less offensive, and I don't think that saying that the diplomat has Tourette's really adds anything anyway.

[ethan_greer]

I agree - the TS isn't necessary, and doesn't really fit with the "silly fantasy" elements already in place.

[Tomas HVM]

I don't think that saying that the diplomat has Tourette's really adds anything anyway.

Well... I found it funny. One kind of "fun" is to make a mirror of the real world, but turn it upside down.

In other words: a diplomat which is able to function because he has tourettes, is kind of funny to me. So it clearly adds something...

[Andrew Morris]

B) I have a very minimal, watched-some-primtime-tv-show-about-it understanding of tourette's syndrome.

Yeah, TS might not be the way to go for what you are describing. Most TS cases don't involve profanity, though a significant minority of TS cases do. Usually TS shows up as nervous tics or making repetitive nonverbal noises. Some people with TS do utter profanity or compulsively repeat what others say. But a key point is that all TS is uncontrollable. In fact, the more you try to control it, the more out of control it gets. I don't see how that would help someone "speak" profanity. If all it took to be understood by the profanity-speakers was random curses, why couldn't a non-TS diplomat simply be trained to throw in a curse every few words?

As to whether or not the idea is offensive or in poor taste, I'm totally the wrong person to comment, since I think most people are too damn sensitive anyway.

But the idea of finding diplomats with TS just doesn't make sense to me. I think it would be funnier (and make more sense) for the non-profanity-using nation to "recruit" the dregs of their own society (criminals, drunks, etc.) as their ambassadors, which has lots of potential for chaos.


Edited to add:
Oh, and let me say that I'm in no way an expert on TS either, I've just read about it.

[MarktheAnimator]

HAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Thats a hilarious idea!  

btw, I have tourette's syndrome and I'm not offended at all.  I don't have the version where you swear all the time.  My version mostly just gives me insomnia and an occasional tick.


However, selling a game like this probably won't work, because most game stores sell to children and they don't want to promote swearing... bad for business.

Its sometimes hard to determine whats in bad taste.  I just use the rule, "If you want to say something bad about a person, then instead you should just not say anything at all."


How to determine the limits of poor taste in a game?  
Well, you have to consider that you want to sell the game, right?  
South Park is never in good taste, which is the point of the show.  
Its very popular though.....so perhaps you shouldn't think about the games saleability.

When I think of designing games, I generally try to stay away from what I think of as poor taste, namely to prevent from hurting someone's feelings....

If the result of people playing a game that is in poor taste is that the players start making fun of people, it could hurt people.... so you would have to do it in a way that would prevent this.


Anyway, just a few thoughts. :)

[sirogit]

Eero:

Besides what flawed terminology I use, I'm not talking about the quality of offending people or politics therein. when I say Good Taste, I mean, there are some ideas that I don't think should be expressed. Not because they're disgusting or hurtfull, but there's something intristically wrong with them.

Henri:

I really don't have to use the word TS, but that's the concept, anyway, that I'm drawing inspiration from something in the real world(Albeit one with little recognition to the actual phenomenom and morever something abosrbed from pop culture.) Therefore to someone who is just as informed on my creative decsisoins that I am, there isn't really any difference. I acknowledge I'm using an ignorant idea, but it's still based on a perception of the real life phenomenom.

Now, for the purpose of theoretical discussion, let's say this is in a game where the particpants would not be offended in the slightest. Is it wrong to include such and idea in the game? Have you previously expierenced times when you censored your imagination for such purposes?

[lumpley]

Sirogit, hey, are you asking us to talk you into writing your idea, or talk you out of it?  Because you could just skip that and do what you want, instead.

-Vincent

[Doctor Xero]

Here're my two primary concerns about "good taste" :

1) does it victimize someone?

2) is it appropriate for the context?

For example, if I tried to convince small children to play a game which rewarded them for ganging up ten-against-two against anyone with dark skin, I would be promoting victimization (through violence and racism in this case) and promoting among those too young to ignore me and too naive to recognize that I'm promoting idiotic ideas.

In the terms of victimization, I don't want to thoughtlessly encourage any on-going prejudices.  On the other hand, well, as they sing in Avenue Q, "everyone's a rittle bit lacist!"  (For those not in the know, the song makes fun of the ineffective tactic of responding to possible racism with a self-destructive oversensitivity and defensiveness.)

In terms of appropriateness, well, the television series Southpark makes it quite clear what sort of series it is, so anyone who doesn't like it can simply avoid it.  Anyone who chooses to watch it knowing what it is really has no grounds for complaining about it.

There's one other consideration I would like to point out to you : sometimes it's not a bad idea to be "tasteless".  To use a painfully easy example, by the standards of the day, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was being "tasteless" in demanding racial equality, and the better social critics and satirists are often derided for being tasteless.

Remember, in the United States, it is the ultimate in bad taste to point out the elephant in the living room!  < wry grimace/grin >

Doctor Xero

[sirogit]

Vincent -

Neither, really, I don't care about the idea, only what its portends are to the concept of self-censorship.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Besides what flawed terminology I use, I'm not talking about the quality of offending people or politics therein. when I say Good Taste, I mean, there are some ideas that I don't think should be expressed. Not because they're disgusting or hurtfull, but there's something intristically wrong with them.

Wasn't this what I commented upon, or did I misunderstand? What I said was that IMO there is no such thing as intristically wrong in this context. There's just things people want to discuss and things they don't.

Now, for the purpose of theoretical discussion, let's say this is in a game where the particpants would not be offended in the slightest. Is it wrong to include such and idea in the game? Have you previously expierenced times when you censored your imagination for such purposes?

I've sensored myself for two reasons:
1) my pals would be offended
2)I myself would be uncomfortable.
Sirogit: could you expose a little more of your background on this matter? I'm not sure if I have anything to say about this if you don't give us some axioms to work with. Do you believe that there are some intrinsically unmentionable ideas? What are they? Why they are that? We hardly can analyze the idea of good taste without knowing your ideas about it.

[Doctor Xero]

when I say Good Taste, I mean, there are some ideas that I don't think should be expressed. Not because they're disgusting or hurtfull, but there's something intristically wrong with them.

Ah, I have a better grasp of what you meant (I think).

Forgive me for a right-angled answer, but it seems to me that, because the questions of intrinsic right and instrinsic wrong are volatilely personal, I don't think you're going to get the sort of response you seek at The Forge here, or at most other online forums.

I've noticed that the general attitude of The Forge is strongly anti-censorship at any level.  Consider it this way : in the Real World, some people would consider all public references to sex to be intrinsically bad, and these people may go so far as to deny to people who have no problem with such references the right to post online their more sexually open RPG concepts.  The currently favored way to handle this is to avoid as much censorship as possible, with warnings included instead of censorship (as in the Twisted Sicken postings).

For example, I consider gays and straights both to be valid and morally acceptable sexualities.  However, there are those who consider any sexuality other than strictly heterosexual to be intrinsically wrong, so they would condemn any RPG which treated homosexuality as anything other than a curable disease or repentable sin.  For another example, I consider racism and sexism to be intrinsically wrong, but there are those who consider only certain forms of racism and sexism to be intrinsically wrong and others (such as the sexism of gender-based differences in intuitive powers or agility) to be not only acceptable but perhaps even allegedly fact-based.

The point I'm making is that whether I decide that an idea is something I refuse to express is a personal ethical statement, not one for which I can find objective truth in The Forge or any other such online forum.

As to how I would deal with those postings which I find offensive . . .

Well, I'll ask this to Ron Edwards or Clinton R. Nixon (or any other administrators I may have accidentally left out) : what would you do if a member of The Forge chose to post a work-in-progress RPG based on the film Birth of a Nation, in which players acted out a glorified Ku Klux Klan rescuing a beleaguered South from the recently-emancipated former slaves?

Doctor Xero

[M. J. Young]

As an aside, I wondered for a long time, on and off, what effect Tourette's would have on someone who had never heard any profanity. I still don't know the answer to that; but having mentioned it to a pastor who has been a good friend of mine for thirty-some years, I learned that there is a Tourette's-afflicted deacon in his church whose verbal tics are always praises to God.

But I recognize that the profanity thing is the part most of us associate with the syndrome.

I'm particularly hard on profanity. Use it in my presence, or in your posts, and my opinion of your intelligence will probably decline. That, I recognize, is a personal prejudice. My parents never swore in my presence, save twice in my entire life. Once was when my father and I were alone in a canoe going through an overflooded rapid and I froze. The other was when I was in his office and one of his co-workers said something profane to which he calmly replied in the same language to tell the man to fix the problem. I grew up with the idea that swearing was for people who couldn't express themselves intelligently, and that sticks with me.

I wouldn't play the game, and I probably would object to it being played in my house.

However, that's no reason not to go forward with it. It has a clever concept that might make an interesting beer and pretzels game, and probably would have a decent following.

Of course, I don't care for beer, either; the stuff is bitter, and I'd rather drink something sweet.

So I'm a heretic. At least I don't force my ideas on others. I run games in which everyone in the world believes things that the players are going to find horrible; I just let the players decide how their characters react to this. A good example would be Orc Rising, the Multiverser world in which the humans, elves, and dwarfs are making slaves of the orcs as part of efforts to "civilize" them, while destroying their culture and claiming their lands. These otherwise good peoples accept everything that is worst about slavery and colonialism, and think these are perfectly good things to do. This gives the players the chance to confront these issues in tangible ways in game. I have no problem with that, even if they choose to stay with the status quo. Of course, the game as described isn't supposed to deal with profanity as an issue, really. Nor is it really about Tourette's syndrome. But it could be, and it wouldn't be wrong to do that.

As Eero says, if your group is comfortable with it, go ahead. If they aren't, you owe it to them not to cross their lines. As to the rest of the world, you can offer it to them and see what they think. Kill Puppies for Satan is a name for a game that's bound to get negative reactions, and there's certainly a lot in the game that some people would find offensive; but I think I'd like to try it sometime, because talking to Vincent I'm persuaded that this has some real moral foundations to it that are worth examining. Your game might sound really offensive in brief, but it might be a really good game. I'm not going to condemn it based on the blurb.

--M. J. Young

[Doctor Xero]

I've been thinking over an idea in my head and wondering if it is's good taste.
---snip!--
I'm wondering about what you consider the limits of good taste towards this or your own ideas, and how that limits your use of such ideas in RPGS.

It just occurred to me :
one simple way of assessing this question for yourself is to ask yourself whether you consider this a topic you shouldn't address.

If you consider your idea to be in bad taste, you will write it in bad taste, just as the sexual humor told by snickering adolescents comes across as ridiculously trashy sex jokes because they are already convinced their jokes are in bad taste before they even tell them.  Yet the same jokes, when told by a savvy adult who is intentionally transgressing social conventions about sex with an eye towards irony, social commentary, or simply adult playfulness, will come across as clever rather than as bad taste.

I would suggest one of the things which made Lenny Bruce brilliant was that he had confidence in the humor he knew others would dismiss as bad taste.  I'd suggest the same level of conviction applies to most other acts of purposeful transgression.

Doctor Xero