[maxbond]

(TW: Suicide)

I'd like to share a personal annecdote that I think may be instructive to people who have never found trigger warnings to be useful.

Once a friend of mine wanted to show me a visual novel. They skipped the trigger warning at the beginning because they felt it was spoilery. We played through the whole thing in one night; about halfway through the story (given the path I took), we were lead to believe a character committed suicide (and that it may be because you rejected them romantically), and then at the end it's revealed they were literally trolling you.

I had fairly recently gotten out of a traumatic relationship with someone suicidal. When I would try to leave the relationship, they would threaten to kill themselves. Sometimes they would beg me to kill them. Needless to say, suicide was a difficult topic for me to engage with in an immersive, RPG-like setting.

I felt blindsided & stopped having a good time after I was lead to believe the character took their life. I was uncomfortable but didn't know what to do but keep playing. When I finished the game and the twist was revealed, I didn't feel pathos. I think some of you may relate to the moment you realized the show Lost was never going to resolve the mysteries it was putting forth, that the show runners were throwing things out to grab your attention with no plan to resolve them; like my emotions had been manipulated in a cheap way to engage me. I felt toyed with.

I think if I had had the trigger warnings, I would've been able to mentally prepare myself. Or I'd have the opportunity to decide I didn't want to play.

I want to make informed choices about the media I consume and how I consume it. Make of that what you will.

(This was all many years ago & I'm doing well.)

[tomjen3]

I am sorry that happened to you. However that points to a real problem: how do you make a CW system without being spoilery?

[maxbond]

From where I'm standing, either making them opt-out, or making them out of band.

I've never really found them to be spoilery though? So perhaps I'm the wrong person to ask.

[Gare]

Was it DDLC? A 12-year old boy in Croatia commited suicide partly because of emotional trauma caused by it.

[zimpenfish]

Do you have a reference for that? I can only find a 15 year old in Manchester vaguely linked to it (without any real evidence the game was involved.)

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches...

> Ms Kearsley said it was 'commonsense' to question the game's emotional impact but recording a verdict of suicide, she said: "We can make no direct link between Ben's death and his online gaming. Ben was a young man who potentially had a number of complexities."

[Gare]

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6638858/doki-doki-litearture-c...

[maxbond]

No, I don't remember the title (and I feel like the post is better with keeping it abstract, I don't want to get into the weeds of discussing this particular story) but I have played DDLC and it wasn't that one in particular.

That's terrible about the 12 year old boy. I would say DDLC is a powerful and compelling piece of art that subverts & interrogates it's own genre and reveals the flaws of that genre, and I'm certainly not advocating for people not to make really challenging art like that. I wish things could have been different for that boy, but I'm not sure that's something better trigger warnings would solve.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

Hmm. I am torn for several different reasons including the topics I would want to address, but I feel I should focus on one thing.

<< I want to make informed choices about the media I consume and how I consume it.

That is a reasonable statement and even expectation on the surface. I might accept it as rationale for graphic movies and so on, but your example is visual novel, where you choose your own adventure - a form of media that is almost guaranteed to put you in unusual and unexpected situations? Unless you play a game built around satire of everyday life ( say.. Stanley Parable ), is it not expected to expect unexpected including some questionable predicaments?

But more to my real point, should art imitate life or should it be a 'safified' version of it? I can absolutely relate to seeing something you should not see ( my buddy dared/forced me to watch "Hostel" with him and it was not a pleasant experience and have stumbled onto some real bad stuff on the 90s net - I completely buy it can mess you up if you are not mentally prepared ).

In your example, how would you know this could have been the outcome without having gone through it? It seems like catch 22. Trigger warning would give you only a very general idea.

[maxbond]

There was a TW on the opening screen about suicide. I'd have liked to see it. Obviously that was my friend's error and not the game's, and we discussed this afterwards. What I wanted to highlight is that a trigger warning was erased, and this was a very vulnerable time for me when it would have been very useful.

I'm not entirely sure I've understood your objection properly, but I'll try to address your questions.

Yeah it's expected that I'll be put in unusual situations, no I don't expect authors to anticipate each trauma I could possibly have, but surely the very obvious ones can be covered.

Should art immitate life or be safe? Neither and both, there's plenty of room in this world for the most gritty horror movie and for Blue's Clues.

How could I have known it was the outcome? The trigger warning was as specific as it needed to be - "TW: Suicide" is plenty.

ETA: The general vibe I'm getting here is you're asking, "where do you draw the line?", as if this were a slippery slope. The answer is, it's a matter of taste and judgement. It's not any less tractable then the question, when do you decide a work of art is done?

Naturally this opens up the observation that, if it's about judgment, one could decide to include no trigger warnings, like my friend did when presenting the game to me. And sure, I'm not saying that's invalid. More that its bad taste, and I've elaborated as to why I feel that way.

[esperent]

I usually see two viewpoints on trigger warnings from reasonable people (i.e. not people caught up in US identify politics).

Those who oppose trigger warnings like the commenter above you, who believe that you should be ready to handle anything a piece of fiction throws at you. After all, it's just fiction, right? Generalizing, this usually comes from people who have never experienced deep trauma or at least who have never confronted it. Or possibly they have, but they were lucky enough to have an upbringing that gave them the tools to remain mentally stable while doing so. They also tend to be low in empathy - they believe everyone has a mental state similar to them so they can't understand, at an emotional level, why other people would need trigger warnings. For them, quite reasonably, trigger warnings are annoying spoilers and they dislike that.

Then there's the people who support trigger warnings. Often this comes from having experienced deep trauma without a support system (internal or external) that was strong enough to deal with it. Or they have observed this in people they love. These people know how fragile mental health is for many people and they want to start building a more supportive society, one small part of which is adding labels to fiction that will let people know when dangerous traumas might be triggered by reading it. And undealt-with traumas are dangerous - they are the basis for all kinds are dark behavior which I won't list here.

And then there's me. I just don't wanna read about sad shit. Give me happy fantasies man, not that dreary misery loving suicidal bullshit.

(Or maybe I'm in the second group but I've reached the denial stage)

[maxbond]

For what it's worth I would totally support a mechanism, like a registry key, environment variable, wherever configuration information can be accessed, to opt out of trigger warnings. Software should work for everyone and everyone means everyone.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

<< I'm puzzled by your objection, I don't exactly understand what it is. I'll try to address your questions however.

First, thank you for your answers. Some disclosure may be necessary. I am a strong free speech proponent, which colors my views of the world somewhat. I will admit that in this case, I had no real objection, but I was more trying to understand how you see the world and to what extent some things are ok ( which you correctly identified anyway ). In other words, I found your post interesting and decided to engage.

Believe it or not, I think we are oddly closely aligned based on your answers.

<<as if this were a slippery slope.

If there is a place where are not aligned, this may be it. Having seen ( sometimes heard of, sometimes read about ) some of the horrific things people can do to one another ( sometimes willingly and enthusiastically ), I have certain level of discomfort of trying to hide reality from people ( and trigger warnings enable that ). I do not mind those for movies and, say, other forms of entertainment, but I worry that it is going to move to other non-entertainment spaces, where, for example, augmented reality will be asked to remove all traces of 'unpleasantness'.

In other words, I do see a slippery slope here, although I can give you that is a gentle and slow one.

[maxbond]

I appreciate your engaging, and doing so respectfully and open mindedly. I never took the impression you were unreasonable or that our dialogue would be unproductive.

I do think you're mistaking a mistake that I see many free speech advocates make, which is to confuse criticism with compelled speech or compelled silence. A critical benefit of free speech is to make an argument that something is bad, including even that something shouldn't be said or done. But when people use their voice to do that, sometimes free speech advocates get confused and think this is limiting someone's rights.

But it's actually the very discourse and truth seeking process that speech is meant to enable at work. I'm not asking for compelled speech or silence, I'm making the case and hoping people will do so voluntarily. And if they don't, then I'll simply repeat my objection, incorporating new evidence and better arguments.

Reading between the lines, I think perhaps you're worried that governments may use this metadata to limit the distribution of media? And that's a reasonable concern, but I'd describe that as two separate problems; the need for metadata, and the tendency of overzealous regulators to react to something once it's been made legible to them, despite it not previously being an issue.

(Just a note, I apologize for the phrasing "I'm puzzled by your objection", I edited it to make it clearer that it was my not understanding and not something wrong with how you expressed yourself. That your quote uses the older version shows you spent quite some time considering this. I appreciate it.)

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

No worries. I never got that impression either. Your interpretation and argument is reasonable. As you noted, my concerns hover around compelled speech/silence ( and issues surrounding it ). At this time, I think I accept your argument as presented.