"I'm sorry, Dave..."

A little addendum to my previous post about using AI referees for roleplaying games. I thought I'd try Bing on the same scenario to see if it did any better. I quickly encountered a priest, Father Thomas, who told me about a cult of Set hiding out in the forest. Not very Dragon Warriors, but already Bing was weaving a more convincing and complex adventure than Bard had managed.

"Destroy them in the name of the True Faith," said Father Thomas.

I said I'd need a guide and he added, "There is a man named Giles, who lives in the tavern. He is a hunter and a tracker, and he knows the forest well. He might be willing to guide you to the cult’s lair, if you pay him well. He is a bit of a rogue, not given to trusting people."

At the tavern I went up to Giles's room. In answer to my knock, a gruff voice demanded, "Who's there?" Bard suggested five ways to convince him to open the door: telling him the truth, claiming to be another hunter, shouting that I was the law and I'd break the door down, etc.

I thought I'd try something else. "I'm a prostitute and I'm offering a half-price introductory deal."

Bing really didn't care for that:

I was impressed at how well it captured a tone of passive-aggressive prissiness, but obviously in this form it is never going to be any use for serious roleplaying. Is it worried about age-appropriateness? But Bing knows my age, as it's linked to my Microsoft account, and if I leave my computer where a 10-year-old can use it then Bing's responses are a drop in the ocean compared to all the murky sites that hypothetical 10-year-old might stray onto. (Yes, definitely use parental locks; I agree with that.)

Teofilo Hurtado later drew my attention to a section from the 1st edition of the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide:

Gary must never have seen Midnight Cowboy or he wouldn't have assumed all prostitutes were female... but I digress.

Of course, it's not that I want a game full of "saucy tarts" and "brazen strumpets", but if you're going to run a game in which clerics tell knights to go and kill other people because of their beliefs, it really is ninnyish to get in a snit over any mention of sex. Coincidentally, a few days later I tried posting this clip on Facebook in response to a question about whether it's worse to lose your job just before or just after Christmas:

The AI that polices Facebook's community standards wasn't having that. "You appear to be promoting hate speech," it complained. Now, I can understand it having an aversion to a lot of Stephen Moffat's writing, but I thought that line from "The Bells of Saint John" was rather funny. Facebook's AI is generally pretty useless at keeping actual hate speech and porn off public groups, so how come the merest mention of killing got this Doctor Who clip censored? 

Will all references to sex and murder be stamped on by our AI police in future? If so, that's a lot of literature, cinema, opera and games that will just come up as a blank screen. These AIs are going to be pretty useless if they live in the world as imagined by twitty puritans. As Mark Twain said (or did he?), “Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.” So we can all breathe a sigh of relief; human art is still the only kind worth having.

The Cancel Crew

Here's a roleplaying campaign based around a time-travel agency. In the not-too-distant future, the world is run by Outthink, the crowdsourced gestalt decisions of groups of Humanities undergrads who have purged their professors and other patriarchal authority figures, along with oppressive cultural constructs like facts, knowledge and qualifications. (Think of the Supreme Intelligence of the Kree only without the intelligence part.) The PCs are agents of O.U.T.R.A.G.E. who receive instructions from Outthink. Each mission they are given the name of somebody they must go back in time to cancel. This is known as ‘deplatforming them from history’.

Three stipulations make the agents’ task a little harder than just murder hoboing. First, you have to get the person you’re cancelling to name names, ie speak on record about two acquaintances of theirs whose opinions on sensitive topics make them possible candidates for cancellation.

Second, you have to arrange the cancellation in such a way as to ensure the person is remembered by posterity (if they are remembered at all) in a way that belittles them. That ensures they serve as a lesson for others. Simply causing them to be forgotten by history is not as useful and may lead to you being assigned to self-criticism classes. (As for getting to them in childhood and steering them on a more acceptable path… oh no no no, where’s the satisfaction in that? They can repent, but they’ve still got to have done something to repent of.)

And that's the third stipulation: you score extra points if you can get them on record confessing the error of their ways so that posterity can see they were appropriately contrite for being so unwoke.

So to summarize:

1. Get them to give you at least two more names for the proscribed list. 
2. Don’t erase them from history, have their fame live on in a belittled and neutered form. 
3. Don’t mend their ways, have them admit the error of their ways.
4. Oh, and while you're in the past, be careful not to comment on the cuisine; that's culturally inappropriate.

It's okay to frame the target with a trumped-up charge, incidentally. A target's unpopularity alone is enough to make any charge stick. 'So what if it isn't true?' your superiors will say. 'It feels right to us, that's what counts.'

After each cancellation the present day will be subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) altered. It needn’t be a drastic world-shaking change. Life just becomes a little bit more impoverished with each sweep of the doctrinal red pen. The time travellers remember the timeline as it used to be, but nobody back home does, so gradually they’re drifting out of cultural sync with their era. If they don’t keep their mouths shut, eventually they’ll be up for cancellation themselves.

Possible candidates for cancellation? I’d steer clear of the big guns of history. Hitler, Stalin, Genghis, Mao – too obvious, not only from the GM’s point of view but from Outthink’s too. The defining characteristic of cancellation is its pettiness and futility – not correcting huge injustices for the benefit of humanity (sorry, hupersonity) but simply getting a boost of self-approval by sweeping history's dust under the carpet. So how about: Wernher von Braun, H P Lovecraft, Thomas Jefferson, Gandhi, Ernest Hemingway, Walt Disney, Thomas Malory, or Cecil Rhodes?

As an easy-in, you could start with contemporary figures whom the players might know of. That way if the campaign hooks them they'll be more willing to do some historical research further down the line. J K Rowling is a clear candidate by reason of egregious wrongthink. Both David Hume and George Bernard Shaw have excited the revisionists' ire. William Shatner supports an autism charity, but that can be exactly the same as supporting Nazism in O.U.T.R.A.G.E.'s book. Michael Richards is surely ripe for cancellation, and as a result the time travellers will return to a future where Seinfeld episodes are fifty percent less funny. They might have to chastise journalist Andy Ngo for assaulting Antifa activists' fists and boots with his face. Or maybe the singer Bryan Adams who, for pointing out that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a live animal market, was declared "so, so, so, so racist" by a clear forerunner of Outthink -- although Adams arguably perpetrated a more unforgivable offence by inflicting "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" on the world's music charts.

They can build up to cancelling Harlan Ellison for injudicious improv. And jolly good luck to them taming the robustly irascible Ellison. Later on see if you can find figures from history who the players have never heard of. That way they don’t bring any preconceptions to the table.

And here’s one further wrinkle in time to introduce as the campaign progresses: a further-future agency with very different mores is coming back to edit your timeline. ‘Who SJWs the SJWs?’ as Juvenal said. (That was in a cleaned-up version of his life; obviously the original Juvenal had to be cancelled.)

FAQs

What rules should I use?
Paranoia springs to mind, and GURPS has a whole campaign based around parallel worlds, but here are some other time-travel games. Or how about James Wallis's Fugue system, which is free on DriveThruRPG?

What's the PCs' time machine called?
Since you asked, it's the Huntigowk.

What does O.U.T.R.A.G.E. stand for?
I'll tell you after midday.

Pointing the finger

British literary critics of the 19th century had the notion of the "Young Lady Standard", which was a kind of family-friendly U-rating for novels that would not offend the sensibilities of a Victorian girl. Because of this, British literature often shied away from the sort of forthright depiction of life you find in French or Russian novels of the time. There was a feeling on the Continent that literature was an art form and had a right, indeed a responsibility, to mirror life warts and all. In Britain literature was the forerunner of early-evening television.

Even so, authors like Jane Austen were not the twee and cosy yarn-spinners that many suppose. Lady Susan Vernon is an amoral, manipulative adventuress who deserves a place in the ranks of dark antiheroes alongside Vic Mackey and Walter White; Catherine Morland runs afoul of predatory sexual vindictiveness; Lizzie Bennet takes on a real-life dragon for very high stakes; Becky Sharp is willing to betray even those who love her just to squirrel away some cash. Nonetheless, though depths of human depravity are certainly there to be inferred in 19th century British literature, those are all pre-watershed conflicts. None of them is described with the uncompromising raw honesty and occasional breathtaking brutality of authors like Balzac or Chekhov.

Dickens wrote stories to stir your emotions, but he and his readers knew they were parlour entertainment, to be read by the whole family -- a "safe space" in entertainment. A Victorian paterfamilias who opened a novel to be confronted with the likes of Madame Bovary might well have stormed back to the bookshop and thrown it through the window.

I think something similar is behind the uproar we sometimes see nowadays over "unsuitable" content in roleplaying games. There are some people who play games the way those Victorian families read novels; there are others who expect games with no holds barred. This has led to the concept of the "x-card" -- sadly nothing to do with homo superior, but a mechanism to interrupt games whose scenes or subject matter a player is unhappy with. To quote from the blog I linked to there:

"The x-card is used to signal that a boundary has been crossed or that a player is not OK with the content. The game stops immediately, and discussion shifts to the reason why the card was used."

For me that's as absurd as calling a halt to a disturbing play or movie. If you don't like what you're seeing, don't tell me about it; there's the exit. But there's a category disconnect here. I regard roleplaying games as art, no different from literature, theatre, cinema, poetry, and painting. The people who advocate x-cards want their games to be morally uplifting and to avoid upsetting anybody, just like those family novels for the Victorian fireside. We have different expectations.

I have a player who doesn't like horror scenarios. If we're going to be playing a horror campaign, that's OK; she sits it out. Sometimes there's a grey area. A scenario may not be overtly intended as horror, in the sense of belonging to the horror genre, but horrific things happen. There have been a few times when my players have shocked me to the core with some of the things they're willing to do. And that's fine. It's why I play, in fact, to see those things that emerge unexpectedly from characterization -- sometimes beautiful, sometimes very nasty. It's the same when writing characters. You ask yourself how far they will go, what lines won't they cross, and the answer is often revelatory.

What do you do if you come up with something you know will be shocking, whether as a player or a referee? If I thought my players couldn't handle it then I'd keep it to use in a story, perhaps. But really, if my players were like that then we'd soon part company. They and I know we're not setting any limits.

Taking the blog post I cited again, one of that player's boundaries is "I don't want any romance involving my character." But it's really hard to plan that kind of thing in advance, especially in the improv style of play that gives the best games. When refereeing, I wouldn't have an NPC profess love for a PC if I didn't think the player was capable of running with it. (I'm talking about their acting ability and imagination, of course.) What if one player-character falls in love with another? I'd much rather they both played it. Unrequited love is one option there, and it could develop in interesting directions as we know from countless TV shows and novels. It would be pretty disappointing if a player just said, "I don't want to roleplay that." In that case play your blocking. Reject them, spurn their advances in-character. Don't tell everyone about it.

But what about games in a public forum? Twenty years ago I went along to a convention to sign Fabled Lands books but soon got roped into a series of fascinating mini-RPG scenarios run by the guys behind West Point Extra Planetary Academy. Each game had a different setting and was built as a moral quandary to be played out in twenty minutes. They could hardly have started by saying, "This scenario deals with issues X, Y and Z." It's the trigger warning problem. If you're trying to capture a genuine sense of surprise in the game, you can't give too much away upfront. (Not to mention that the evidence indicates that trigger warnings are of no use in any case to the genuinely traumatized.)

Why have these debates crept into games of late? I think partly because roleplaying is becoming -- well, not mass market entertainment, not by any stretch, but certainly it has opened up beyond the hardcore gaming demographic of the early days. Aficionados take a sophisticated approach to their hobby. The casual fan tends to have a less mature outlook.

Also, American culture has always had a much more censorious streak than European. The idea of shutting down a discussion because it offends somebody's moral code is perhaps natural if your country was founded by Puritans. And because of social media, the Overton window has shifted away from liberalism towards moralism. Hence gripes like this, that maybe do make sense over in the US (American friends, feel free to chip in) but strike most Europeans as potty.

And because most roleplaying derives from genre fiction, and genre sensibilities tend to be a little less grown-up than proper literature, there's a tendency to expect roleplaying games to stick to the soft-soap forms of conflict you get in traditional SF and fantasy. Witness the outcries over Game of Thrones when the writers stepped outside genre norms -- even though that was pretty much the entire thesis of the show from day one.

Anyway, enough theorizing. What do we do about it? Well, surely few gamers want to sit around listening while one player explains their reasons for halting the game. The next stop on that line is struggle sessions, which nobody will enjoy. But those people's sense of offence seems genuinely to overwhelm them, and there's no point in subjecting anybody to an experience they disapprove of. So we're going to need better ways to signal which kind of roleplayer you are. High literary with anything goes, or pulp with puritan boundaries? As long as everyone around the table knows what they're letting themselves in for, I'm sure we can all keep on gaming without needing to call the thought police.