The Lord of Hats posted:

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

I'm just gonna bow out of this conversation.

The Lord of Hats posted:

I’d point out that even the people that brought this all up in the first place have been saying “this doesn’t warrant a ban, but I don’t think he should be an admin.”

I know that as the person defending him I don’t have a lot of credibility here, but despite the phrasing of the title and the original post, this is not a matter of him being a sex pest, or even a creep, and much more along the lines of poor judgment calls in community management, which he has specifically owned up to, apologized for, and learned from in the multiple years (5 and 2 respectively), since they happened.

There has been a lot of people posting “Riven Sex RP” repeatedly, but literally none of those people were a part of this—it’s pure goon telephone. It was a single scene in a long game of that had like two mods trying to manage something like 50 people, and was in no way some planned thing at the start of the game, which otherwise didn’t have any remotely sexual content—mostly just people dying to ecological disaster.

The community, as a whole, was less than great about what made for a safe and sane experience. As Jen touched on, there was this general feeling that this was all something New and Daring. Which, yeah, is kind of being full of ourselves. But it wasn’t some top-down thing, it came from pretty much everybody—including some of the posters in here, one of whom wrote an article on these games as a new thing. And that lead to a lot of mistakes. Riven was way too many people, resulting in extremely overworked mods trying to do way too much. But people had fun. Future games were smaller. The follow-up ran way too long, became too much a Part of Life, but it was one of the most fun games a bunch of us had played despite that—future games were shorter. The one after that—another adapted LARP, a later effort by the people who made IMG—was only about two weeks long, but people were on and active for too much of it, without enough time to step away and just be themselves—and it was met with as I remember universal acclaim. Future games were spaced out more to force that kind of disconnect. Every failure came with a lot of successes attached, and that lead to a widespread feeling that yes, we would stumble in the future, but that we could just learn from mistakes, because things would otherwise work out. And I want to emphasize that Podima was not kind of sole originator of this attitude.

Then the signature problem of IMG was… basically that whole communal attitude in and of itself. That self-important feeling of this being some nascent thing that was worth pushing boundaries for. And that wasn’t something that the game could just trundle on through and resolve after the fact. It was bad, it was messy, and a lot of mistakes were made. A lot of people—Podima included, and myself included, didn’t manage to step outside of that feeling to give a critical eye in the moment.

That was a lesson that we all ultimately came around on. Those boundaries, that safety, is something we proactively try to address now.Too late to avert disaster, but it did happen. Podima was never some magical realm creep, just a guy who got too caught up in a game and made some bad choices, while he was in a community leadership position. And those are experiences he learned from, as he himself said when he apologized and stepped down. He’s a person—as someone who values the ability to learn from mistakes, I would say a good person—not a cartoon pervert.

If you think that’s banworthy, that’s your opinion to hold, but I really think it’s important to evaluate this on the first-hand facts, and not the reductive shitposting that fills a lot of this thread.

The Lord of Hats posted:

He’s a person—as someone who values the ability to learn from mistakes, I would say a good person—not a cartoon pervert.

The Lord of Hats posted:

Then the signature problem of IMG was… basically that whole communal attitude in and of itself.