Raising IC Age of Consent to 18

And if it's not going to be raised, can Rule 5.B be amended to remove pedophilia from the list of forbidden topics? Just because the IC city of Withmore allows for a forty year old man to groom a sixteen year old child, doesn't mean that characters are going to be okay with that and should not be gagged on OOC level to not to talk about it.

Also, nowhere in any OOC communication does the staff explicitly state how old a player has to be to sign up and play this game, or at what age they consider someone to be an adult. The only language used is "Intended for Adults". And "You must be an Adult to play". However the number that delineates minor from adult is never specified.

That should probably be fixed.

I think its weird so many play such young characters as it is (seems to be around 18 average? Id actually really love to see a poll), but below 18 is a nah for me. I don't want to rp with children or children characters.

There is a line in the sand at 18. As a society we have created the adolescence period to extend childhood. I recognize this is a relatively (in world history) thing to do. There are difficulties with that of course, but this is what we've agreed is acceptable for the past century or whatever for good reasons. I wouldn't mind it being 20 either, just to scoot away from "I was 17 last week" rp. Nopity nope no thanks. The UN says adolecense is until 19 anyway.

I'm sympathetic with people who want to play coming of age arcs, but I think you can explore the same themes in less potentially abusable ways.

I admit it is a lil immersion ruining to have a lil kid running a gang or a club.

Not exactly immersion breaking.

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IRL Gang structure:

There are different roles and levels of authority within gangs.

These roles include:

Teenies – generally those under the age of 10 – below the age of criminal responsibility – who are used to carry drugs and weapons, or move parcels between older members

Runners, Shotters – generally aged between 12 and 15-ish, those who move drugs between older members, sell drugs in the streets, arrange street deals, stay in 'trap' houses where drugs are sold or made

Youngers – generally aged under 18, they have some level of authority over teenies and shotters, are street dealers of class A or B drugs, can set up trap houses, recruit teenies, runners and shotters, report directly to elders

Elders – generally aged over 18, they are in charge of running street operations and trap houses, deal in larger amounts of class A and B drugs, facilitate purchase of firearms and other weapons, have authority over street dealers and youngers, respected

Faces, Olders – those at the top or higher end of the chain, limited contact with street level operations, not often seen or known by street level members

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB8DQpR6uIw

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Robert Thompson and Jon Venables - Two 10 years old boy murdered a 2 years old for the sake of fun of it.

James Arcene - Bank robbing and murder at 10 years old

Jose Reyes - 12 years old, school shooting. Committed suicide

Evan Drake Savoie and Jake Lee Eakin - 13 years old, murdered his 12 years old friend for the fun of it.

Derek and Alex King 13 and 12 years old, killed father by beating him to death with baseball bats

Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden 13 and 11 years old, shot a school up. Killed five people.

Dylan Klebold - 17 years old.

The list goes on.

Although, kids should be NPCs, not PCs.

Yes, human beings can be disgusting at all ages. We are not playing that. We are not endorsing that.

People's pasts before coming to Withmore are just that, backstory, and do not count for their current story inside the Dome. So if in the past they've been running drugs or hurting people, it doesn't change the fact that when they got to Withmore, they are at the bottom of the ladder and are new.

I took Risikio's original post to be referring to both IC and OOC age. The first two paragraphs of Risikio's post refer to IC age of consent, while the third shifts to OOC age and adulthood. I was addressing that third paragraph because it states that there is no OOC posting of what is meant by "You must be an adult to play". There is at least one OOC posting that explains what we consider an adult for purposes of playing this game. It's in the link I posted and it is pinned to that section.

Risikio also appears to have used the word player to coincide with the shift from IC to OOC. I differentiate character from player. Character is IC and player is OOC. I assumed Risikio does the same when I read it (feel free to correct me if that's wrong).

This is important because SD has two separate metrics regarding age. One is the minimum character age (IC). The other is minimum player age (OOC).

Character Age:

Last I knew, minimum character age is 16. This is also the most common age of consent in the United States - where the game is hosted from OOC and where Withmore exists IC. There has been staff discussion in the last few months about raising it to 18. I think our discussion on this was lost amidst our other tasks and we're checking logs to see if we came to a resolution on this or forgot to conclude it with a vote etc.

Player Age:

Adulthood is determined as Johnny puts it in the link I posted above. We currently determine adulthood based on your home location's legal age of majority (aka adulthood). This means that a 16 year old Scottish person can play this game while a 19 year old from Japan (where age of majority is 20) or a 20 year old from Mississippi (a U.S. state where age of majority is 21) can not.

Staff does enforce the first metric (character age) as part of the history screening process. This is one reason character birthdate is required in every history.

As far as I know, the OOC metric is pretty much impossible to enforce. We can only take people's word that they are the age they say. But again, we do have a metric that can be viewed OOC.

I hope that helped a bit.

As someone who has rolled 16 year olds before and walked this line - I feel hypocritical calling this out, but I find it increasingly disturbing, and it seems to be turning into a growing trend.

Am I an outlier here or do we want to support this?

I can see an appeal to wanting to play an urchin, but even if staff were to selectively allow "urchins", the potential aspect of someone having to witness a "child" being dismembered, etc. is a problem. It is easier to just disallow it. I think 16 is a safe line.

The game and rules seem to make it clear that you don't play a child already. If some players are pushing the line with that by using baby talk and other shit to represent being younger than they ICly are, is raising the age going to solve that? Seems like those people are just going to do the same thing but their characters will be aged 18 instead of 16?

Doesn't seem to solve the problem and restricts players who aren't doing that and do want the experience of playing a teenager growing up in the Mix.

18 years of age being a legal restriction is a threshold that needs to be maintained because any ages lower than that allow people to roleplay legally underage characters, and once the mental switch of the character being legally underage has been flipped, it is much easier for people looking to roleplay as children to justify that their character can act in such a way because they are below 18 years of age.

Yes, it's a slippery slope, but I think it's one that is actually not fallacious.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_by_country

Feels like there needs to be a different solution than further tightening the reigns on the age of characters to limit a few people from doing something people find distasteful. I dunno. Maybe this just comes down to our player base being generally older than it was 20 years ago and having shifting views. ERP was also a much smaller part of the game in the past.

I dunno. Maybe we need a poll to get more people to weigh in.

Not everything is a fucking fetish, not everything is about sex. Whenever I play someone younger or less developed emotionally, I go in with the mindset not to do anything ERP related at all.

I don't think the 'baby talk' is as commonplace as people think, and honestly some accents in this game are way more annoying than some people talking simpler. The bwokken boys were definitely baby talk and I don't remember people being this loud about it, though that was borderline annoying.

Urchins are a big thing in Cyberpunk, and 16+ is not a weird age of consent in a lot of countries, I feel like this is a very American argument to be triggered by anything below 18. Alas, raise it to 18 so people can stop being angry and assume that playing someone younger means you're a perv. It's not like you wrote a whole story, personality and spent hours on a character to get them the way you want. It's not like maybe you want to play someone unexperienced so you can watch them grow as a person. No, obviously, everyone is gross and should be excluded from RP if they're not 21+.

I did grow up in country and culture where age of consent was 15, and it was not just normal but also kinda 'promoted' for 15 year old girls to date 40+ guys. And… Yeah, living that very radicalized me against anything below 18. Nothing do with western world, the very opposite of it.

Making blanket statements steeped in western sensibilities that ignore the rest of the world, is not a winning argument in my book.

It's an English-speaking (by enforcement) game hosted in the United States, whose sensibilities are we intended to be emulating? Some might call pro-inclusive community policies towards women or LGBTQ+ players as western sensibilities, by the same token.

16+ is not a weird age of consent in a lot of countries, I feel like this is a very American argument to be triggered by anything below 18.

Age of consent is a non-issue, all players (who themselves can consent) are 18 or older by requirement. What is an issue is the creation and depiction of sexual content involving minors and created by adults which is a different moral and legal distinction. As someone not from America, I can say with confidence this isn't something uniquely of concern to Americans.

It's not exactly a mystery to me what's happening when there is a character who is depicted as extremely young and small who are very sexually active what's happening. And yes, I'm afraid that does taint my perception of other players playing underaged or underaged-coded characters as to that being their main interest.

I am specifically referring to Rule 5.B that says it is a permanently bannable(sic) offense to ICly accuse another character of engaging in pedophilia.

Pedophilia. Online grooming. Child exploitation. All of these are VERY REAL things.

Is that the kind of game play we want here? Is that the kind of thing that we want to expose staffers to?

RL tangent - I know people who have worked abuse at Facebook. I know one of the founders of Thorn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/thorn-digital-defenders-of-children/posts/?feedView=all)

Even dealing with enforcement of this kind of content is traumatizing.

You can't toe a line here. You can't hand wave this away as being just a game.

We are either consciously communicating "adults doing adult things with children" is part of the Sindome / bastardized cyber-noir-punk theme here. Or it isn't.

I am not making this personal. I am not oversharing here with the specifics of how I was groomed. Etc.

But, seriously here people.

How is "no kids" even a controversial topic that needs further debate or consideration?

Do we really have people wanting to play the Jeffery Epstein simulator? Do corpies really need adults messing around with kids to engineer the falls of their rivals?

Change my mind here.

Tell me the game play loop, the game play experience that is SO MIND BLOWING AMAZING BEYOND ALL BELIEF that requires an adolescent character.

And tell me why that experience is so amazing that it's worth literally facilitating all of the negative consequences that come along with it.

Seriously. Do the basic ROI here. I saw someone said something like, "95% of us can play teenagers 'appropriately'" (This is my paraphrasing.)

The fact that the 5% is even implicitly acknowledged is already too much.

Do we want the limited admin staff monitoring the MOO to police that 5%?

Is this community going to be a worse off place if that 5% ends up leaving to play on Shangrila or whatever the taboo, "it's just writing and not child abuse" M* home is these days?

I just feel like we don't lose anything by making this change and even those who are against it aren't going to give up on the game for it but it's sounding like more than a few have strong feelings if it were to ever be removed, lowered or even stay the same and we just continue seeing more people playing characters on that line.

…but have voiced no qualms about letting people potentially as young as 12 (because there are places where 12 year olds are adults) play this game under the current rules.

I don't see that being in contention at all.12 year olds shouldn't be playing Sindome. I didn't realize there were qualms that had to be raised about that or that it was even in debate or allowed for. A 12 year old is not considered age of majority in any country, unless we're talking about Yemen.

In any case, thank you for letting me know that the chart you're using there is not accurate.

However, as I said in my post, the simple allowance to play underage characters in the game is enough to potentially attract people who do wish to do those things in the game, especially knowing how rotten the MUD community can be at times.

I also don't think appealing to global age of consent variations makes sense since the game is primarily based in the United States. Yes, it is available globally, but game tend to abide by the cultural norms and especially the laws of the nation it is hosted in, and for the USA, under 18 is considered a minor.

And, as I said previously, I don't think the difference between 16 and 18 is very large in the first place and I am not crying 'pedo' on every European nation or individual state in America that has their age of consent set to 16 years of age, but it's important to recognize that part of the breaking of cultural norms is often important to the fantasies we are trying to avoid, and nipping that at the bud can save us all a lot of headache.

This is one of the major issues I had with the Rule 6 re-write and messaging about it, whatever it actually did it literally had players joining saying they were glad to see the SJWs weren't in charge anymore, it was a horrible look that sent the wrong signals to the wrong audience.

There are a lot of articles about it. Here is one of them.

https://www.iflscience.com/does-the-brain-really-mature-at-the-age-of-25-68979

I would say if we really want to play this game with other "adults" , the closer we set the minimum PLAYER AGE to 25, the better.

To quote the article…

Dr Jay Giedd, who led the research, told the Death Penalty Information Center in 2004, “When we started, we thought we’d follow kids until about 18 or 20. If we had to pick a number now, we’d probably go to age 25.”

For me, I was not able to instinctively comprehend how I, as the consciousness inside of my body, was entwined with to the point of affecting and being affected by those around me, until my mid-20s.

Until then, it was very "Me, me, me." By the mid-20s, it evolved to "Us." and "A world of individual Me's who are just as much about themselves, as I am about myself."

I'm not a neuro-biologist. But it does seem like the actual wetware. The grey matter that gives our consciousness the ability to fully perceive that, doesn't show up until our 20s. It's not a cultural thing. It's a hardwired, DNA, genetic, human development kind of thing.

All that said, there's value in PLAYERS in their late teens and early 20s who quite literally don't have full self control, being a part of the community.