Development 13 - The Ethics of Ogres

Hi all! There were some credit card issues with Patreon this month, and it would mean a lot if you could check your credit card information and make sure everything is okay. I got significantly less money this month than I normally do, and it's got me hurtin'. Thank you all for your support! 

Recently, in The Last Days of Solomon, I had an unfortunate mishap in which boundaries weren't communicated effectively and my needs were made unclear. In short - I was in the process of playing an NPC a player created and was informed by the player that her desire was for the NPC to be completely unsympathetic and malicious, who would only serve as a villain with nothing redeemable. I don't enjoy playing characters who are this way, and I doubly don't enjoy being told a character I am playing (who I am empathizing with, as that's part of playing a character) is a trauma metaphor. We used appropriate safety tools and are currently negotiating the matter, but it got me thinking about some ethical issues I'd never explored before within LARP. Predominately, I found myself coming back to a game I wrote a year ago, and wondering how to make it safe.

This is a very engaging article about the consent for therapeutic practices and space-creation in games. Many people love to talk about how useful RPGs are for therapy, but an important aspect to consider is how the RPG space can be abused in order to seek that desire. It's not uncommon for people to go into games and deal with potentially triggering material on a whim, without taking proper care of themself and putting themself and others in danger. When working with a group of consenting adults, building proper safety mechanisms around informed consent, full discussion of issues at hand, a variety of opt-out tools, and other processes are super important. But then, as I must always, I wonder about how those same tools can be applied to the children I work with at Wayfinder. 

Now, obviously teens equally benefit from safety mechanics and informed consent. However, what teens often don't have (or rather, can't be expected to have) is the ability to make rational choices about their own mental health. Many, many teenagers and children are unaware that they have a mental illness that could act up in certain situations, and (especially for first-time attendees, who don't know anything about what they're getting into) can't always say "this is too much for me," or feel to ashamed to speak up about their needs. It's a classic problem - we'll often discover we have a participant with complex needs multiple days into camp when the parents and child choose not to disclose vital information with us out of fear of judgement. The reality is obviously different (I've never judged a child for the needs they've presented, and I've always been able to work with them), but the lack of disclosure combined with a difficulty speaking up means that it's not uncommon for kids to end up in emotionally dangerous situations in game and lack the tools to address them. 

This comes together in The Ogre's Child, a game I wrote last year that handles some explicitly very dangerous topics. About half of the players are the children of ogres, and spend a portion of game being basically abused by their ogre caretakers, before escaping and seeking another way out (ultimately killing the ogres triumphantly). This is a landmine! This is a field of landmines! I'm nowhere close to running this game and I'm already worried about all the ways in which this can be mishandled. My two main fears regard the safety of the participants playing children, and the safety of the staff playing ogres. If the game doesn't have the appropriate framework around it to keep everyone involved supported, there can be the potential for a lot of people at each other's throats, in ways they can't easily talk about. 

There is, simply put, something viscerally upsetting about playing a character who exists only to perform banal evil. By that, I mean characters who are shitty parents, toxic friends, petty bureaucrats, or cruel thugs can make you feel like shit. You're spending hours occupying the mind of someone who is mean to people in such an eminently personal way, and it can fuck with you. I've had to leave games before because I was playing someone who just wanted to make people hurt, and wasn't able to take refuge in the over-the-top scene-chewing that can make that sort of character bearable for me. Like, there's a difference between Skull-Lady and Jon the Cop, y'know? 

I guess in the end, I wonder if there's even a way to have staff play ogres and present such a clear and obvious allegory for child abuse in an environment where I can't always trust the participants with making healthy emotional choices. The only reason I'd run the game is because I think that the emotional arc of getting to stab your abuser with a sword would be so worthwhile for the participants who need that. But does the risk outweigh the reward?