Surge in SR4 Options

[Patrick Goodman]

How very odd. It's worked here on three or four different PCs. I was going to save you the boredom of reading a blog entry, but since the picture itself won't come up any other way, I'll just send you to the aforementioned blog entry.

[SirBedevere]

Your fiancee is a very pretty lady Patrick. Just remember to pack lots of vitamins for your honeymoon :D

[Penta]

[Penta]

I'm not a big fan of editing my posts on idea grounds, so I'll add this...

The way I see it, what scares me isn't that they put it in. I hated it, but still.

What scares me is that they're marketing this to 12 year olds...And not even blinking at including it.

Which brings up the question...Who is SR aimed at, now?

Is the primary audience European? Is the primary audience American?

That question needs to be answered, because that effects rather hugely where the red lines lay in terms of content, and whether the red lines even exist. (And no, "It's marketed at X age in Europe, but Y age in America" doesn't cut it.)

Certain topics, frankly...I would talk about them with a 12 year old in the US only if they were family or I knew them similarly well; Parents notwithstanding, in some cases. There are certain things you just don't touch with a kid that age unless you're their parent. On the other hand, there are things that, while parental unit might not like em knowing, I'll talk about if they bring it up, because I'm talking to family.

Much of this, yes, relates to sex. It's something that I think everybody knows kids have a decent grasp of by age 12...But unless they're family, I ain't going to touch. If they are...I'm family, I'm clued in. But does that mean it should come up directly (or near-miss) in gaming I might do with that kid?

No chance in hell. Gaming writer ain't family. Gaming writer doesn't know the situation. Gaming writer damn well better not touch some things if he's writing something aimed at 12-and-up.

But, it's violence, too. Most of my cousins that age...Yeah, they've seen some pretty dark stuff, read pretty dark stuff.

But they can handle it. More than a few kids can't.

And since gaming is usually done with friends the same age, not family...There are certain topics you shouldn't go near. You can hint, you can draw outlines...But you don't touch them directly.

And I know the lines are different in Europe. More tolerance for sex, less for violence.

That's fine. But I'd prefer to know who you're aiming at, not have to guess as I read, particularly if I'm at all pondering introducing a preteen to the game.

[Adam]

[Cynic project]

And what is worst, the fact that the game deals with things that kill and eat poeple, or the idea that two men could have an legal contract that states they are "married"?

Idea that some NPC is said to be a porn star is not that bad. Hell, shadowrun has rules for "sex toys" that will never remember you. But hey, blood is better than cum. Death is better than love....

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

Touché, cynic.

[Penta]

Thanks for the headsup, Crimson. I read SSG and SoNA at the same time, so they kinda merge together in memory.

Adam...I see some rephrasing is in order. I misread. Apologies, all.

Looking at it again...

What has me a little scared is that...OK, it was considered and rejected, fine.

But with that the case, why is FanPro still marketing it to 12 year olds? There's an incongruity there.

Cynic pokes rightly at the incongruity re a sensitivity towards sex but not violence.

The sensitivity, though, isn't mine. It's the general culture's. It's what I have to deal with when family read my SR books, which I often bring on travel so I have something to read in the car or during quiet moments.

With that general surroundings...I can defend SR being violent as hell.

The genre is violent as hell. SR, too, isn't much more violent than, say, CSI or Law and Order, or most action movies.

It's harder to defend stuff re sex. Because sex, like it or not, is tied up with values and morals.

Now, does that mean SR is totally indefensible?

No. I can defend an awful lot, still.

But in order for me or anyone else to defend SR when asked about things like the bunraku chips, it can't be gratuitous.

Which is my objection.

SoNA mentioning gay marriage was gratuitous. It had no connection to anything else, it was just thrown in there, and lays out a minefield. SSG built upon SoNA, which makes it easier, but it's sitting on a weak foundation. One could have left it out and the text would have been none the worse.

The catgirl was really gratuitous. It wasn't just pointless and unnecessary, it had little connection. It was like, "Yeah! We can include porn and bestiality! Yay! Look at us!"

Why?

Why?

I mean, hell. The catgirl thing could be said to break one, perhaps two out of three prongs of the Miller Test. (The first two, if you're wondering. WotC easily passes the third.)

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

It's sad to say that while I felt that mention of it in SoNA was annoying and gratuitous and rested on a shaky foundation (at best), it's not even close to my disappointment with the rest of the chapter. It seemed perfectly reasonable to be in SSG since the general premise was to be about daily life in T6W, and that includes sex and sexuality, and it could even be extrapolated from RL without too much injection of authors' personal politics into how open T6W society would be to sexuality (which is a concern of mine as to why it's in SoNA). However, it was gratuitous in SoNA. I'd be all in favor of SR being focused towards more mature audiences (I'm a big fan of Chris Hepler's old Amazon.com rant about his vision of Cyberpirates! for some reason).

Overall, though, the fact that she's a porn star is the least of my concern with her or SURGE. I'd expect it in porn, especially in simsense porn (Dennis Miller was right, IMO). I don't think she was the most appropriate spokesperson for SURGE in general when it can be construed as adding furries and dumbing-down SR by allowing people to create them through magic (as if cyber isn't bad enough) while creating a set of edges and flaws (16 Characters, not one SURGEd. I know of only 1 in maybe 50 PCs who did.) that basically allow you to add animal traits to metahumans like that atrocious 7th season episode of ST:TNG where the crew devolved into animals they shared genetic lineage with.

[Penta]

Crimson, it's scary. You're actually managing to reflect my thoughts...in infinitely more developed and expressable form.

On second thought...Yeah. I think it was less the porn than...well, damn. It was just so mind-blowingly stupid.

Stupid is bad. Stupid that also gets me stuck in embarassing questions when someone leafs through the book and asks is just infuriating.

I could take pornstuff. That's...OK. To be expected.

But...could we not be so giggly stupid?

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

I also hope that Miller doesn't apply because then we won't get more images like the one on page 114 of SOTA63.

[Penta]

It doesn't, don't worry.

No SR book yet has met prong 3. You have to get 3/3 for something to be obscene.

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

*whew*

[Ellery]

Why is it that 12 year olds are supposed to be able to watch piles of violence and be fine, and yet any mention of sex will--what, kill them? Turn them into sexual deviants later in life?

(That said, I suppose one could argue that the catgirl thing would make anyone who read it, 12 year olds included, groan for dear life, but that's different.)

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

Because sex is evil.

Violence is just good, clean, wholesome family fun.

[hobgoblin]

heh, ellery, i have asked myself that same question more then ones of this forum. and the only good answer i have gotten pointed to the first american settlers or something like that. ie, sex was bad outside of marriage and a nono subject at any time, while guns (and by extention, violence) where a-ok as you used that to drive those troublesome indians and any stealing nonbelivers of your lands. therefor kids needed to know about acts of violence at a early age so that they could help defend the land :silly:

ok im flipping here but one can never stop to wonder.

and this thread made me want to get hold of yotc just for the catgirl :P
hell, we have detailed descriptions of virtual bordellos in matrix (somplete with a illustration of a orc girl in a chatolic schoolgirl outfit. the fact that the image is kinda hot scares me. and i may never understand why that kinda outfit can turn me on).

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

I don't know, but I just can't help noticing how we have an incredible collective fascination with violence, and warfare especially. Newt Gingrich wrote an article about ten years ago describing the future of war and live-feed broadcasts (like during the invasion of Iraq) and did so with a certain amount of excitement (including the possibilty of people literally playing armchair general, I shit you not.) that just blends in with the fact that history classes seem to be a collected list of wars and conflicts, and people love that stuff (take Civil War re-enactors... please! *rimshot* Ah... I kill me).

It's a sick, sad country.

[Edward]

From reading the books I would guess that the TARGET audience is 16 and up but the game is designed to be playable by 12 and up.

To a 12 year old that read the cat girl porn star article and didn’t already know about such things it would have just been confusing. And resulted in “mommy what’s a porn star” you get worse than that article on weekend daytime TV.

Just like the forget full sex toys wouldn’t make sense if you didn’t know what a prostitute is and it didn’t specifically state that they where younger than would be considered acceptable today.

And frankly I would be more comfortable with a 12 year old that was knowledgeable ad comfortable about sex ad making dirty jokes than I would be with one with a similarly casual attitude towards lethal weapons (I have been in these situations so I know what I am talking about, the girl with the dirty jokes was cool and mature (if I couldn’t see her I would have thought she was 20) the kid that wanted the guns and knives just scared me, if he doesn’t grow up before he can get those things people are going to die, I wish I knew who his parents where so I could warn them). The popular opinion that is not ok to mention consensual sexual acts (ether desired or for an agreed fee) in a setting that may include children but you can kill people in any number of ways makes very little sense to me.

Edward

[Hell Hound]

Violence and warfare are drawcards because it's the simplest and most primal demonstration of power. People can watch an action hero blow away faceless goons and cheer him on because he is the good guy. He's the person the audience want's to see win and he is winning, in the most straightforward manner. Deliberately leave out the moral ambiguity of killing another person and the audience can watch the bad guys die and the good guys live happily ever after and then go back to the far more complicated and less cut and dried real world believing there are simple solutions to life's problems. Also, death itself is a powerfull tool in media, you can generate a lot of emotion in an audience by having a lead character die in a movie or TV series, or by having a powerfull and menacing villain killed off by the underdog hero. Works in RPGs too. :D

When it comes to the portrayal of sex is the problem that sexually oriented material is out there in a public forum or that the material presents sexual topics in a frank and objective manner? And is it uniform across the whole of the western world or are some countries better/worse than others?

I know of one british TV show made in the 60's that included regular comedic innuendo for sex (heterosexual and homosexual), crossdressing, relationships outside marriage, and even two references to bestiality, and this was broadcast on Australian TV as a kids show. Is the problem when actual acts of sex or nudity are presented or when alternatives to heterosexual monogamous union are presented without overt criticism or parody? I personally only see the former as a problem but unfortunately the latter seems to generate more response. Here in Australia last year a kids TV show, and the national broadcaster that produced and aired the show, suffered a lot of vocal backlash after featuring a piece about a real life family, a little girl providing the voice over to video of how she and her two mothers spent an afternoon as a family.

[Penta]

Guys...You're missing the pont of what I said.

*Why* an attitude exists is, frankly, unimportant. Nevermind that in this case every possible explanation put forth is wrong in a lot of ways.

The key is that it does. It does exist, and it is something we have to deal with.

The reality is that, for whatever reason, violence elicits less of a reaction than sex. When kids are involved, this is even moreso the case. And in some cases, this is a perfectly normal thing. Sex is values-laden, moreso than violence in many ways (and certainly in more complex ways). Values are the preserve of parents. I think most people can agree with that.

Now...

When gaming just idly drags up hot-button issues like gay marriage, and implicitly expresses a viewpoint (which is inevitable even if unintended), that will cause problems. And...don't say "But it doesn't express a viewpoint!" It does. Merely writing on a topic expresses a viewpoint.

Now, you can make a point in some cases that it's necessary, something that would leave a gaping hole if it's not addressed.

This is not one of those cases. One could have just said that conflict still continues, not saying either way, and left it there. It would have no impact. Nobody would have a trout-slapped moment where they stare at the page and go "why did they do that?"

It offends nobody to say that, yes, it is an issue. It offends to impose a resolution, particularly the way SR did here, in a tone that sounded sort of preachy.

And then we hit the catgirl issue.

That was just over the top. If they had chosen anything else, it would have gotten the point across to the same degree.

All that, without causing concerns of "would I really want a 12 year old reading this?"

Which is the whole point. SR has typically not needed that question to be asked. Sure, it's been edgy. Sure, it's been violent as hell. Yes, it's had some fun insights on sex in the Sixth World.

But it's typically handled it all in a fairly restrained fashion. The extremes of sexual fetishes could be left to the imagination quite happily before. Why not now?

[Penta]

With that said:

OK, since you all started this, I'm going to do something stupid and jump in.

Edward: It varies by country. It varies by region. It varies by city.

Most importantly, it *varies by family*.

Now, I've known 10, 11, 12 year olds who were pretty worldly. Who knew a hell of a lot more about sex and the seamier side of things than I ever did at that age. Some are family.

The same goes for violence.

On the other hand, I've also known kids (not family) who were the complete opposite. They didn't know.

With all that said, let me lay out what I see, in the Northeast US. I live in suburbia. Not as conservative as, say, the Deep South, but not nearly as liberal as, say, New York or LA.

Violence is tolerated because, frankly, there's no getting around it. Kids see more death and violence on the evening news than my parents' generation ever did. Suicide and homicide are realities, the former particularly for teens and preteens. Death is something you deal with.

It's unpleasant, and perhaps kids are desensitized by the sheer volume. Certainly there is a level of desensitization.

Sex, on the other hand, is different. Sexual morality truly is one of the last real red lines in American culture.

The general rule I've found: You can hint at it. If it's necessary (see an episode of Law&Order: Special Victims Unit), you can actually get fairly graphic.

But you treat it with respect. With...I don't want to say detachment, but it's not something one generally expects to see.

Overt sexual activity on-screen is just not going to fly, period.

On what I'll call sexual-political issues like gay marriage, it gets tricky. Abortion is not quite the nuclear weapon it was 10 years ago, able to unleash hell wherever it appeared, but gay marriage is. Gay marriage is something that has lots of tolerant, perfectly neutral people regarding gay rights doing 180s.

Abortion is something we deal with. Most people know someone who's had to at least consider the issue. Positions are moving to the right (or, on the right, becoming a lot less shrill) because of that.

Gay marriage is something that still has a lot of people uneasy. One because of a damn good question as to what marriage is. There's been, until this arose, a general understanding everybody had: Marriage is one man and one woman. It is a good idea to have kids within marriage.

This is, mind you, coming in an age where Americans have seen *everything else* change. Marriage used to be permanent. It's...not, anymore, and an awful lot of people now in their 20s and 30s are kids of divorce. Most are damaged, to say the least, by it.

As everything else in America changed - the social order, gender roles, work, community relations, and virtually everything else...

Marriage was the one constant. The *family*, what a family meant, was a constant. (And before you say "Well, what about people who are married but don't have kids?" That's unusual, to say the least. Unless you can't have them, it's very unusual to be married and not have kids eventually. It happens, and it's not unheard of, or necessarily rare...But it's not anywhere near mainstream.)

Now, that's being challenged. And, frankly, America hasn't digested everything else that's happened over the last 50 years. Not even close.

However...That does not mean people are anti-gay. A lot of people look at the issue and go "Er, yeah...But it's not marriage. Don't call it marriage, don't call yourself married. It's not." Perfectly accepting people, who have no problem with homosexuality as such.

Why?

Because America is family-focused. In particular, kid-focused. European-level birthrates would be regarded as deep, deep crisis by the vast majority of Americans.

Marriage is the foundation of that. I've never seen polls, but I'm willing to bet that if you grabbed most Americans on the street and asked, you'd find the overwhelming majority saying marriage isn't about the people getting married, it's about having kids. Naturally. (Adoption still has a stigma about it. A light one, but still. It probably always will.)

Most people would probably never admit it, but that's a lot of the foundation behind things. Marriage is about providing a structure for a relationship approved by the community (which, frankly, homosexual relationshops haven't gotten to yet) aimed at having kids.

Which is one big reason why most people will probably never accept gay marriage, not internally. Kids need both sexes. That's fairly obvious on a lot of levels. (Which is a big reason, I suspect, again not really spoken about (it's not really politically-correct), why the "two mothers" stuff rubs people the wrong way. Society's been trying *really hard* to press the point home to fathers in particular that they're needed, and for more than money, for the last decade or two. Gay or lesbian parents kinda blow that to hell. They may be perfectly decent parents, but...it's probably not a good thing if one side in the relationship thinks they're just a stud horse or a cash machine, society seems to be trying to say.)

Marriage to most people is about having kids.

If the only way you could ever have kids is through artificial means, the whole point of marriage kinda dies. (There's a difference between trying to have kids and being unable and being simply not possible.) Getting married and choosing not to have kids without a pressing reason is looked at oddly generally.

Getting married without even the possibility of having kids?

Well...why?
---

And, with that said, let's head back to SR?

[Critias]

Because marriage quite simply isn't all about procreation. Marriage is about relationships taking on a sense of permanency and validity. It's about commitment becoming a legally binding, almost physically tangible, thing. Straight or gay, doesn't matter. Marriages are about permanence of commitment, not just spitting out kids.

And, for the record? It's absolutely ridiculous to post an essay on the state of marriages and families in the US, and then slap on a little "but, that said, let's get back to SR." It's like kicking someone in the balls and then saying "But, now that that's out of the way, let's get back to my job interview."

[mfb]

that, and because marriage has legal and financial advantages that homosexual couples are getting screwed out of (heh). if steve kenson's partner died in a car wreck tomorrow, steve would be privileged to none of his partner's death benefits, because steve isn't legally bound to his partner in any way (not counting a will). steve can't claim he's married on taxes; he and his partner have to file seperately, thereby paying more (i think. right? somebody who's married correct me if i'm mistaken). and god help them if they decide to try to adopt--not married? that's not a stable home environment, bad for the kids!

[Ellery]

[Patrick Goodman]