I've personally benefited from the discussions of sexism and racism; I think it's helping me make richer/deeper game characters.
While I agree that arguments about whether discrimination and sexism is occurring in the USA or in the game industry has led to some flamewars, in the midst of those flames we've had some great discussions.Absolutely, this sort of discussion can be important not only for people to grow as designers, but also as people; through exposure to different viewpoints and mature discussion people can broaden their experience and hopefully end up better off.
For people to benefit however, we need conversations to be civil enough that we can allow them to continue, and we need people with differing viewpoints to be able to express those views. We also need views to be presented intelligently in a way that people can understand and discuss.
This is also a business, albeit not a profitable one or even one we really want to make a profit from, and that does come with certain concerns about what can and can't be allowed. We would prefer to allow people to speak freely for the most part, but also have to avoid unnecessary liability -- we do have a duty of care not to allow harassment and bullying, and morally a lot of us feel obliged to disallow some of the more bigoted or offensive comments.
To be clear, I personally don't have an issue with implementing a warning-escalating-to-ban policy for anyone espousing racist/sexist views on these forums, instead of placing the various topics off-limits. I do expect, however, that a small-but-vocal minority of users would consider that a form of censorship as well.
Yes, unfortunately some people are going to be offended by whatever we do. Some users are also offended by us doing nothing though, so we need to try to walk that delicate balance of doing the right thing by the majority and minimising discomfort for negatively affected minorities. This is certainly not the place for derogatory or insulting comments, and ideally we want to allow discussion of these comments without providing a platform for hate-speech.
The hard truth, however, is that when it comes to discussions of topics such as racism and sexism, right and wrong are very clearly defined.
Agreed, but it seems like not everyone agrees on those definitions. Perhaps it would help to decide on the definitions our community wants to represent and make that position clear.
If I am one of those people - since my views certainly are offensive to many people - I'd appreciate some form of private message from the moderators.
Not at all, you're actually a great example of moderation gone right -- I remember you clashing with the community a lot when you were new, being down-voted quite a lot and facing multiple suspensions and warnings -- you're now one of our top rated members and very well respected.
You always seem to take care to respect and listen to the views of others, and always seem to take care when presenting any of your own views that might be more controversial.
You do have another tool already in the forum software that may be useful: You can ban people from individual sub-forums.
Yes, that hasn't been utilised much for a very long time, but it's probably something we should look at using again -- it's actually pretty ideal for some of these sort of problems.
1. to take excessive pressure off the mods:- when mods get to the stage of making sensitive decisions and you are at a point where the subjective bias of mods might be an issue. You could do it the way its done in the society- Have a jury system and make a quick "jury call" (of course this means you randomly select members, perhaps up to 15 - to eliminate bias- to vote on a particular member behavior). And of course the mods are still the equivalent of the judge. This would be a swift process and not a time consuming process as it is in the real world.
Interesting idea, but potentially problematic. What criteria do we use to select the pool of members? What if they don't respond promptly. It probably involves a bit of development effort as well if we wanted to make it work well.
Something I'd like to do in future is add a "vote to <x>" option where some minor moderation actions could be taken automatically in response to a certain number of member reports being made. We could for example automatically flag an account as spam if five or more members with >1000 reputation flagged it -- of course with a moderator follow-up to avoid abuse.
To insist that we can't talk about these things because they sometimes get uncivil strikes me as choosing the easy way out.
Absolutely, and that's not what we want to do. Contributions from yourself and other members with similar backgrounds are exactly the sort of thing we want to encourage so that others can learn and improve themselves, and what we're really trying to do here is find a way of allowing these discussions to continue without opinions like yours being buried amongst bigoted comments that end up resulting in topic-closure.
Our community -- and indeed the industry -- does have an inherent bias, and maybe that's something we need to make more obvious for those who don't realise it.
My worry about this, particularly in the light of there already being support for permanence is that we're moving from "these conversations are a pain" to being a banning offence to talking about and it's a short step there to it being a banning offence for starting the conversation about when the ban on them will be lifted (if ever).
Absolutely not something we want to allow to happen.
I mentioned the support for permanence only to show that there's another side and good reason for not simply lifting the restriction immediately. The overwhelming majority of response to this topic has been against the ban, and it's therefore easy to think the whole community supports that position.
This was never intended as a permanent rule, and will not be allowed to become permanent; I would in fact prefer in remain in place for as little time as possible.
I was planning on also addressing some potential changes to rules right here in this post, but I think it's getting long enough and unfortunately I'm a little low on time, so I'll be back to check up on responses and start off that discussion tomorrow. I will be heading over to the post with the rules to make the first set of minor adjustments as well.
As always, please keep all your thoughts coming, and let's try to get this ban lifted ASAP. :)
