Unsafe Sense of Security
Why do safety tools fail?
Safety tools have become increasingly popular among the indie TTRPG space for the last decade, starting to make ventures even into mainstream games through pressure from external actual play, consultants and/or influencers. While this is a welcomed change, speaking to an intense interest and concern with safety and comfort, it becomes quite apparent for many of us they often fall short of their stated goals. In fact, a culture of safety tools has replaced the strive for a culture of safety and comfort, which can, and has, created a false sense of security that this is very much a “solved” “problem” - an attitude that endangers those that agree to leave themselves vulnerable and thread into things that tests their comfort. This is a known issue, at all levels of the artform but seldom openly discussed. From conflicting emotions about the events of a roleplaying sessions, to messy debriefs, and outright situations where one was unsafe and uncomfortable and safety tools were weaponized by designfluencers that made a concern with a culture of safety and comfort part of their identity or outright associated their brand to them. There is something unsafe about how safety tools end up being used, something that everyone has a vague feeling about and nobody can really pinpoint.
A common strategy to this felt inadequacy is, well, compensation through volume: each safety tool has limitations and issues, so by getting complementary and overlapping safety tools. There is a logic to that, and barely anyone relies only on a single safety tool. And yet, they fail. We need to understand that better, if we are not actually make things safer.
However, one cannot glean further understanding without open discussion, and if there is one thing I learned seriously considering these issues for the past five years, is that everyone is unhelpfully defensive about even acknowledging failure points and/or that safety tools are insufficient on their own. This is baffling; safety tools will fail, so we endanger everyone by not accepting this will happen. I have seen this whenever I publicly talk about my experiences, and when others in private report similar encounters. How groups tear apart when one member stating they feel unsafe, with this being taken as a personal attack. When I complained how the structure of Alice is Missing gets in the way of using the safety tools it tells me to use in a game that knows it is going to tangle with some very unsafe stuff, everyone “did not have an issue with the game when I played, maybe it was a your group thing”. Even the designer of Ten Candles, on one of many times in which I recounted my repeated bad experiences with the game, as the darkness and smoke and flickering flame was intentionally uncomfortable and made using safety tools harder without compensating for the limitations created by the pageantry, was very concerned with making clear their stance on endorsing safety tools and safe play, deflecting it to a lack of culture of safety on groups where this happened, which they in no way endorsed. An unfortunate consequence of the design of the ubiquitous general and universal safety tools is the unstated assumption that one is responsible for their own comfort and safety, and nobody else can be counted on. This is further exacerbated with general and universal technologies, as they carry further assumptions, needing to establish and assume a baseline ability, flattening individual needs, cultural contexts, and so on with anything involving local and specificity accommodations. Be it as a group, and within a group, as an individual.
“Why did you not use tool Y the way Z?, when it is Available?”
This tendency to pin on the group and human-scale may be on to something about safety and comfort, betraying the degree of understanding of the inadequacy of the common throw safety tools and why that is so, even if not discussed. But to find that needle, we need first to talk about technology.
Safety tools are social technologies. They are, however, technologies that are designed for everyone, everywhere, in every situation. They are universal and general technologies, treating safety and comfort as an issue to be technofixed by the application of the right mix of social technologies. But, safety and comfort are not problems to get a stamp of “we addressed that”, or one size-fit-all to every group, every game, all systems, every culture, every time, and every place. There is a reason why some of the most successful at ensuring safety tools are things like Lines and Veils and/or Consent Levels. To be useful, they have to be deformed by the local conditions. They give way into them, and let themselves be changed - ever so slightly - until something that can be an actual tool emerges1.
Ecological and indigenous sciences have deeply developed the concepts of local and appropriate or convivial, which we would do well into translating into other artistic and scientific fields2 3 45. The cooperative collaborative storytelling artform of TTRPGs is no exception. A local technology is one that stands in opposition to an ontological “technological progress”, challenge the idea of Civilization style tech trees with an unitary form of technological development and knowledge formation, instead centering local actors and places — environment, material needs, culture, people, etc6. A local technology is made at the human-scale, between and within communities, focusing in addressing their needs, giving them autonomy and agency. An appropriate, or convivial, technology is one that can easily overlap with local, is a technology that fits the labour and needs and means available to the people involved, and for their needs. Where general technologies, due to their scale, remove autonomy and possibility, going out of control from their users and leading to negative consequences and alien to its original case-use and intent. Technology that remains appropriate is technology that remains tied to a community, letting it autonomously negotiate their use and keep the consequences to those desired by them.
And this, dear reader, is why safety tools fail. Safety and comfort is a local and appropriate concern; it has to be, there is no measure of comfort and safety for a human being that is not at the human-level, human-scale and maintained by a community. From the overview of the general and universal, it can only be seen as a problem to solve, addressed as such and resulting in unexpected negative consequences from this high-scale deployment. In the process, they may achieve the original goal of making play safer and comfortable, but with how many unintended effects that may cause more danger and discomfort? Pinning the blame on a group, individual or play culture is a roundabout acknowledgement that the only technology that really works for safety and comfort is a local and appropriate one. It is about making a community safe and comfortable, as well as the community it wants to be; as such, it needs to be under the autonomy and possibility setting by said community, at a human-scale of concerns.
Every safety tools out there started as someone’s local, perhaps even appropriate, technology. It was shaped into a local but inappropriate technology, allowing it to be transmitted, made general. Because — when taken into the play culture and/or assumptions of those positioned in the hegemony, — it was found to be useful, it was taken as universal, so it was made so. And so they become the global and universal, taken as equal to local and appropriate technologies, because for the people that pushed them to be general and universal, they may as well be. Of course, what is true to an arid plain is to those marginalized by the hegemony: those environments that may need local and appropriate technologies the most end up overlooked or endangered by this general and universal tech.
But what if we want actual safety, rather than safety theater?
Well, we need to implement our own local and appropriate tools. Each group has to decide what they are as a community, what they value as a community, what they want as a community, what they give their members in agency and autonomy as a community, and what range of possibilities they want and can accept for their people. Go beyond session zero, and make check-up session a regular thing between sessions of play. Have your own briefing and debriefing procedures. Include check-ups. Take regular breaks whenever someone is unsure7. Do not invest a single person — either a game-related authority figure and/or the unsafe, uncomfortable individual — as the sole arbiter of dangers to comfort and safety. Truly center the people, and give them agency as actors of creating a culture of safety and comfort, rather than one that was allegedly made for them.
But how one comes to develop such technologies? Is this not a lot of work? Well, local and appropriate innovations are small, and should be small, but they can also be transmitted. This does not mean you have to do it all your own, in fact, that is counterproductive. Local and appropriate technologies can be easily transmitted and stewarded by communities. Look at other communities, how they center their members, which technologies they have, and what possibilities they seek and accept. Play with them, and see them play, and then take what possibilities you accept and not; what innovations you would like to see in the local and appropriate. This is the best way to use the safety tools: do not see it as universal and general tools, but as something used by other communities. Then you can make the best of use for their power in cultivating a culture of safety and comfort and leave all those unintended negative consequences.
But what if I’m not a member of a community, what if I am a game designer? What should I do? First of all, how dare you expect prescriptions from me. But we can have a think together for a bit.
What may have caused the most damage alongside the widespread of safety tools as general and universal technologies has to be the token 1-2 pages acknowledgement of them and the same three blurbs of the same safety tools you have read countless times. It is bizarre how many games that every other page include a variant of “or not, I’m not your mom” — and thus, acknowledge the uselessness of these universal systems of technology if not given any a local affordance, — treat safety and comfort and something granted and preserved at the general and universal level. This is the key point for a designer to contribute to the emergence of local and appropriate technologies that create many safe cultures of play.
This may seem intrusive, as you are not part of said community. Except you are; you are fellow player, a fellow collaborator in cooperative storytelling. You just happen to be an asynchronous one. If you do the same processes: taking breaks, talking honestly about expectations and needs, flagging stress points, etc, and if you do so at a human-scale, you are already helping to make this a thing that is centered in the communities of play. Because of your restricted form of participation, it may benefit to breakdown types of intervention for a designer in local and appropriate social technology creation. From least to most effective interventions: you can provide safety technologies (present and refer to existing technologies), like say, “The X Card is and so on and so on”8; you can share your own community innovations, like the ways you have used certain tools with certain communities, or, as a fellow member of the community, you are proposing a custom safety tool for the game design you made that you find may facilitate the development of similar local tools, or it can be just having an honest discussion of what the game tries to do and struggles so the technology implemented is appropriate; integrate some appropriate tools with local levels and control as part of the systems you design to be inserted into local systems and make a game, for example, “your character does not die unless you say so”; you can outright substitute an unsafe and uncomfortable part of the game with a safer and comfortable equivalent, or present replacement technologies, like say, “this game is going to played with limited communication, in the dark, with smoke and candlelight. Maybe X card and Script Change is going to be a nightmare to implement. Maybe I should come up with a modified technology and share my experiences with it” ; and finally the most effective, but both restrictive and hard to implement, is to negative the unsafe and uncomfortable threat to manifest, perhaps the closest example may be, Olivia Hill’s Rule “if you are a fascist you cannot play this game”.
To sum it up, good local safety design is about deferring and feeding into local innovation and implementation, but not in a “you got this, I have nothing to say”, but in an empowering, resourceful, useful manner. Perhaps one of the hardest challenges for a designer.
Making technologies appropriate rather than general is, however, much easier. From the assumption that good design is design that creates a desired gamestate, the good designer then knows their gamestate. If you know your gamestate, there are things that will happen in game that you can be pretty confident will happen. If they know the dangers and uncomfortable and challenging aspects of their gamestate, they can act accordingly, in the same type of interventions we discussed for shifting from universal to local, but easier to implement as part of the systems being designed, a move from the general to the appropriate. You change an existing tool to have a version for your game or you design a new tool; you talk honestly about what the game is doing and what you are assuming and when to deploy which part of the system; you make safety and comfort check-ins part of rules and procedures; you replace a dangerous mechanic that serves the gamestate the same way; you remove something from the capacity of your systems to replicate, so it has to be brought externally and locally — and thus outside of your scope as a collaborator.
Finally, one needs to put the two together, and not many attempt and fewer succeed. One of the best parts of Wanderhome and Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast is how well it is at deferring and empowering local culture emergence around safety and comfort, while utterly rejecting general and universal technologies and being in community with you at the human-level to great effect at transmitting appropriate technologies for either game. Rare success case in the cultivation of local and appropriate technologies, and I would not be surprised if they were significantly successful at creating local innovations in play cultures of safety and comfort. And so do Dungeon Bitches, iHunt or Entombed , showing that this is a fruit of technology rather than harmless vibes; games that pursue local and appropriate cultivation,. cultivate a culture of safety and comfort, no matter their trappings or aesthetics. But not only there needs to be a synthesis between these two goals externally, there must be internal cohesion in pursuing appropriate/general or local/universal technology.
The most resent disastrous example of such dissonance has to be Eat the Reich9, a game fighting itself between universal statements vs local empowerment, backtracking what their own gamestates and appropriateness is. The game claims to be customizable and simple, and indeed, it seems as so in the first places, laying a lot of concessions to local — even if erring on the “you kids got this” side. However, then we have a lecture on what not to do when making a game about WW2, an universal and appropriate technology. However, at same scale there is contradiction, as you have an universal and appropriate split, with the game breaking many of the very rules it seeks to impose local replication of: the Nazis get to be cool, mortal characters literally have no agency per rules and exist to make the vampires look great, nazi paganism is right enough that it gives you super-powers, nazi superscience not only works but their experimental weapons are the most powerful in the game, etc. The game never gives in to local cultivation, down to laying down hard-mechanic stops and a framework of actions that can or not be done in play by characters and players. This could work great, if what is “appropriate” laid out by the game was not constantly fighting itself: it comes up as confused or as “do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do”, and treating the game designer as a fellow collaborator in this artform and engaging at the human level, it comes up as the sole actor getting do something, while the rules laid over this collaboration forbid others from doing the same — rules the collaborator designer brought into this collaboration in the first place. Perhaps the most egregious example of the game fighting itself, and thus, the socials are technologies it designs appropriated to one function are very inappropriate with others is in its statement of what the game is and what it is not. Its systems and premise sells itself as campy, hyperviolent, inaccurate and harebrained Inglorious Hellsing, very important, makes it clear that this is not a game about the Holocaust or portraying the Holocaust, do not ever use this game to portray the Holocaust. Then we have the aforementioned universal appropriate technologies that itself does not follow, and finally, the heartbreaking moment when early stages of the Holocaust and degenerate culture are anachronistically moved to occupied Paris to be portrayed in an action set-piece. This nullifies any work the social tools of Eat the Reich could have done to help cultivate local culture of safety and comfort. This is not helpful for cultivating local and appropriate cultures of safe play engaging with this game; these efforts come at best as confusing, at worst, disempowering and arbitrary.
In the end, it is about clarity: you know the desired gamestate, and you know where you threat. Approach this as if you are approaching peers and fellow artists, not clients: share your concerns, the dangers and the possibilities and risks opened by venturing so to them as you would to other designers, illustrators or writers. Be appropriate and know what you are being appropriate to, do not wobble. And avoid staying at the universal and always remember that at the end of the day, the artform will only be safe and comfortable if you are giving the means for people to make their games safe and comfortable at the local level, by having autonomy and means.
And tragically, since it is preventive rather than standing out as a barrier when things go wrong, they prevent things from ever get that unsafe or uncomfortable, and are working best when they seem useless.
Smith, A., M. Fressoli, and H. Thomas. 2014. “Grassroots Innovation Movements: Challenges and Contributions.” Journal of Cleaner Production
Hossain, M. 2018. “Grassroots Innovation: The State of the Art and Future Perspectives.” Technology in Society
Smith, A., M. Fressoli, D. Abrol, E. Arond, and A. Ely. 2017. Grassroots Innovation Movements.
Illich, I. 1973. Tools for Conviviality. New York, NY: Harper and Row.
Escobar, A. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
“Taking a break” before comitting to something anyone seems unsure about still remains the move to get the actual safety and comfort accommodations implemented.
This is the level most games end at.
Daggerheart playtest none-standing