I disagree with most of this, obviously.In post 0, Titus wrote:I recently just finished Dogs v Cats mafia, a mostly excellently modded game by thestatusquo. We did have one point of contention and that was regarding the use of the word "gaslighting".
I felt that I was being gaslighted by some players in the game (accuracy is irrelevant for this discussion). I called them out on it. This triggered other players and they reported it to Shea (as is their right). Shea then asked me to stop using the word.
I disagreed with his decision but not to the point where I felt Shea should be reported. Shea was caught in a rock in a hard place. Some of his players clearly felt uncomfortable and Shea went with the decision that benefitted the majority.
I felt this was wrong for a few reasons
1) It prevented me from expressing my truth in the thread. We wouldn't censor people who accused another player of lying, so why is gaslighting different? It forced me to argue much less authenticly and that likely had a small part in me getting eliminated.
2) It's triggering to me to not be able to call out gaslighting as it takes me back to situations where I was unable to call out gaslighting in my marriage.
3) It permits the comfort of other players to dictate how players can speak. I wasn't insulting other players OoG. I merely called out what I perceived to be happening based off the info I had.
I'd like to know what can be done to prevent this situation again. Do we ban the word gaslighting so that everyone is on an even playing field or do we treat the word gaslighting like a subset of lying or do we do something else entirely.
1) I don't think its true. In fact, I think that it was using that word that stopped you from speaking your truth. Language is not prescriptive, and words are defined by how they are understood. In this case there are many ways to explain what you are trying to say, but you were doing it with a word that is commonly used to mean something quite different from what it is commonly understood to mean. In this case you were using the word in a much broader sense than people understand it to mean (and indeed, not to be prescriptive myself, but the original meaning derived from the play is to deny repeatedly easily observable facts that both parties know to be true with the intention of denying the reality of one person and attempting to get them to doubt their sanity.) But even if that isn't true I think the claim that somehow being unable to use a specific word that you want to somehow stops you from expressing yourself is just patently false. There are many ways to express yourself in the english language, and saying that one word is the only possible way to say what you were trying to say is just not true.
1a) To touch briefly on something you said at the end of this point which I think is a different point entirely: Gaslighting is different because that word is usually used for discussing domestic abuse. There is a huge difference between telling someone that they are lying to you and telling someone that they are abusing you. The first is commonplace in a game of mafia and is indeed the whole point. The second is actively prohibited by my rule set and I don't think its fair to say that people were doing that to you.
1b) Perhaps the most important point which has been touched on in the previous two points but I want to make it explicit here. No one in that game was gaslighting you. No one in that game was abusing you. Gaslighting is a very specific behavior that simply was not occurring. You are accusing people of knowingly lying about something you both know is true in order to make you doubt yourself/lose your sanity. Not a single part of that was occurring in the game. The people arguing against you were for the most part, speaking things they believed to be true. That is because the game was multiball and no one knew what your alignment/role was. I get that your point is that you suspected some of these players of being aliens themselves which is why you thought they were knowingly lying, but a) as it turned out no one in the game actually was an alien and b) even if that wasn't the case you have no way of knowing the alignment of the people you're talking to. That being said, even if all of that is untrue, the intent of the statements is super important to what is and is not gaslighting. The whole point of gaslighting is that it is intending to make the person being gaslit doubt themselves. But that is impossible in this case. You have a PM from me establishing objective truth. The purpose of the people arguing against your claim wasn't to deny you your reality, it was to express to other players in the game that they didn't believe you. Which is just a valid thing to do. And it wasn't a lie. Not a single player in the game was lying when they said they did not believe your claim.
2) I'm sorry you felt this way, but again I don't think you were prohibited from calling out the behavior you didn't like. Saying something to the effect of "I think a percentage of players who are saying they don't believe my claim are doing so because they are aliens themselves" is a perfectly acceptable thing to say, more accurately sums up your point, and does so without using a word typically used to describe domestic abuse.
2a) I don't mean to be rude here, but quite frankly being a survivor does not give you the right to call people abusers. Especially if you are wrong about it. If you sincerely feel that someone is being abusive towards you in any of my games I urge you to contact me as the moderator, and I will deal with it. In this case however, I do not believe anyone was abusing you and I believe that you are just not using the word gaslighting correctly. Even then, accusing people of abuse when they are simply playing a game is in and of itself an abusive action. I do not think it was an intentional one, but you are causing emotional harm when you use words that hurt people when you do not need to, and I can't let that happen in my game.
3) Letting the comfort of players dictate how people speak is good, actually. The whole rule set of my game is designed to draw a very important distinction between the in game play and the out of game human who is on the other side of the screen. You are permitted to make people feel uncomfortable and unhappy within the context of the game and censoring speech because it makes people unhappy as a player in the game is not acceptable. It would be absurd to stop you from saying "i think you are scum" because it upset someone, for instance. But that is different from making people uncomfortable in an out of game sense. It is important to remember that we play a very emotionally charged game which can lead to extreme emotions in people, it is by its nature a game of emotional manipulation. However, I draw a very clear line between manipulation that happens within the context of the game and manipulation that happens outside of it. In this case people weren't being made to feel uncomfortable because you were saying they were bad within the context of the game. People were being made uncomfortable because they were being called akin to domestic abusers, which they clearly were not being. I think this is definitionally outside the bounds of acceptable game play. It's worth noting that this is something that is universally accepted as being correct to do. We have site rules and have had many bans for people who are attacking others in game in a personal and non-game way. We have many examples of words we can't say because of the emotional toll that they take on the people we use them on. All of this is accepted because it is generally better to not harm people in a real life way in order to play a game on the internet. This is why we no longer say the L word. This is why you can't call people the R word. This is why you can't tell someone to go kill themselves because you disagree with them. These are all instances where you are prohibited from expressing yourself precisely because it has real world impacts that are more important than the game itself. I think this is another case of that, and given the points that I've raised prior I think that you are very capable (better off, even!) using different words to describe what you are talking about, ones that don't harm others.