My friend and I have been working on a rather interesting little project recently. The idea is that you’re a resident of Compton, Los Angeles, California and you go about your life doing extraordinarily stereotypical things. Is this concept okay for StoryNexus? We do not mean to offend anyone with this, it is meant to be satirical and humorous. This is absolutely not intended to be racist.
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We do not usually censor StoryNexus Content (for example, sex and violence, or use of bad language, are usually permissible). We do require any World with ‘mature’ Content (i.e. only suitable for over-18s) - to be clearly indicated as much in the login page. If in doubt, mark it mature!
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I’d hardly call stereotypes of disadvantaged minorities “satirical”. Satire criticises social norms; stereotypes reinforce them. Even satire -of- stereotypes needs a very skilled hand - and, even then, falls flat more of then than not - hence the continuing debate over, say, the sincerity of The Prince or A Modest Proposal.
First of all, thank you for the quick replies. Satirical was perhaps the wrong word. We are looking to build a type of pure joke world, where currencies are replaced with arbitrarily stereotypical items, to the point where it’s not even to be considered for racism. It’s just terribly crude jokes, but if it is the kind of material people won’t get a laugh out of or is otherwise too inappropriate, then we won’t hesitate to pull it off the site.
After thinking it over, discussing it, and verifying with Failbetter directly, we’ve decided that it’s best if we just pulled the world outright. We tried to make it so over-the-top it was obvious it was a joke, but unfortunately, the line between “over-the-top humour” and “racism” is so blurry it might not even exist at all, no matter our intentions, and given what we had so far, and our plans for further development, we couldn’t find a way to make it work. We approached the subject matter with inspirations like gangsta rap, GTA San Andreas and the Boondocks in mind, but distilling all that into a world left us with stereotypes that turned out to be more racist than humorous. We were just so caught up in what we thought was funny that we failed to notice until we were two days in.
The world is now marked Unpublished, for lack of a delete option, and we’ve already started planning a new world with a completely different premise. We apologise if we offended anyone.
[quote=Strategia]After thinking it over, discussing it, and verifying with Failbetter directly, we’ve decided that it’s best if we just pulled the world outright. We tried to make it so over-the-top it was obvious it was a joke, but unfortunately, the line between “over-the-top humour” and “racism” is so blurry it might not even exist at all, no matter our intentions, and given what we had so far, and our plans for further development, we couldn’t find a way to make it work. We approached the subject matter with inspirations like gangsta rap, GTA San Andreas and the Boondocks in mind, but distilling all that into a world left us with stereotypes that turned out to be more racist than humorous. We were just so caught up in what we thought was funny that we failed to notice until we were two days in.
The world is now marked Unpublished, for lack of a delete option, and we’ve already started planning a new world with a completely different premise. We apologise if we offended anyone.[/quote]
As a suggestion - why not go Clockwork Orange on it? Keep your same themes but disassociate them from the “real” world by making up your own slang and skew the situations enough that it’s more of a parable than satire?
For the record? It is never a good idea to bet on this working. Because the thing you think is so offensive that no-one could really say it, or believe it, or think it? You’re probably wrong. And then you’re in the position of explaining that people should somehow be able to know that you deserve credit for being secretly nice and funny and innocent, as opposed to being one of the other people who go throwing around nasty stereotypes. “I Am Totally Not Like Those Other Guys Who Say Those Things, You Just Caught Me Saying Those Exact Same Things” is not a fun thing to find coming out of your mouth. ;)
(The light of my life, looking over my shoulder, suggests also checking out: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-clever/ . That said, given that you posted the link to the world, I don’t know if you care to edit the description, since it’s not entirely clear if the joke is meant to be “ha ha, we’re using stereotypes but don’t mean it” or “ha ha, look at the creepy black people”.)
But yeah. Yay for the enthusiasm, (and oh thank you so much for realizing that such a stereotype-packed game might have hit the bigotry limit), and best luck with the new world!
Yeah, we were too used to our own level of (admittedly crass) humour. We (obviously) knew our intentions, and we thought it’d be a funny, non-serious world concept, which is why the realisation that we miiight be crossing the line came far too late, and why we actually posted this thread and contacted Failbetter directly rather than pulling it immediately (also partially because we’d spent some time working on it already). It should’ve been obvious from the start, but “should’ve” isn’t worth anything.
The joke was more along the lines of GTA San Andreas and taking (as wrong as this phrase sounds) “black” music like hip-hop and gangsta rap literally. So I guess it was closest to the first one you said. We did mark the game as unpublished, but if it’s still appearing through the link - we thought “Unpublished” meant that the world would become inaccessible, essentially putting it in isolated stasis, so since my friend’s the actual owner I’ll need to get on his case to change the description, and block the starting card.
Thank you for the vote of confidence, despite everything. At this moment, we’re working on a way to modify what we have to take out the racism, roughly along the Clockwork Orange suggestion Hanon made (thank you for that btw), and we’re not sure whether we’re going to put our effort towards the new world or this rework.