My focus is on spider art here, but other common phobias, like trypophobia and thalassophobia
You taught me about thalassophobia and I just realize I'm unsettled by pictures of people swimming in the ocean...
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Maybe you should had worded this part differently; you know how people around here will look for the worst possible interpretation.Is there a good way to interpret "toxic positivity?"For anyone who hasn't heard it before, "toxic positivity" is actually a real thing, regardless of how the phrase gets misused.
And I think that's the end of my mental energy for this thread.
And that is a very important concept for people to understand. Especially when someone like Kobold Catgirl comes on here talking about a problem that they have that we ourselves don't have.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Can we talk about trypophobia and thalassophobia?
From what I understand, trypophobia is a misnomer as the phenomenon describes a disgust response rather than an actual phobia. But there's normally not a compelling reason to "draw a sponge" in fantasy game art. So I'm not sure when this one would come up.
Thalassophobia seems like one that's either impossible or automatic to avoid based purely on the premise of the book or adventure. Like in a book about "deep sea adventures" it's going to be present in a way you can't avoid and in a book of "desert adventures" it's clearly never going to show up. So like people who are Thalassophobes can pretty clearly determine that "well, I don't want to play Skull & Shackles or Ruins of Azlant" Is this something that gets triggered by the regular "wet dungeons" that Paizo sprinkles in sometimes? (e.g. Chapter 2 of book 2 of Blood Lords)? None of the art there shows like "A PC being underwater" but this one seems more conceptual, and IIRC there's a trap there that could drown you (which is NBD if you're a skeleton I guess.)
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
The term is fine. They used it sorta incorrectly. Toxic positivity is usually a dismissal of something negative and an insistence on pretending everything is okay. Bringing up that phobias affect people is categorically the opposite. Saying phobias are not a big deal could itself become a toxic positivity. I also don't appreciate how I took the time to carefully mention that phobias are serious and people should seek out the fairly effective treatments for them and then "TheMetricSystem" just was like "oh they got mental disorders they need to sort out, not be catered to". Which is counter productive to how something like exposure therapy works. Which is incremental and controlled. Things being sprung on you can reverse your progress, so the content warnings seem like a good idea across the board hereMaybe you should had worded this part differently; you know how people around here will look for the worst possible interpretation.Is there a good way to interpret "toxic positivity?"I think the way he phrased it was probably too strong, but the sentiment behind it seems like its very much rooted in being realistic. That is:
Paizo and/or other publishers cannot possibly make everyone with a phobia, trauma, or dislike happy without effectively deciding to print nothing: But you, your family, and your friends can do that better than any company can. Specially when something that bothers you is something that another person likes.
As for the "toxic positivity" thing. I don't see how it was misused. The article that was posted included "shaming others for not being positive" as being toxic positivity. It also included not accepting other's feelings as valid and making it so people don't have a chance to feel negative emotions (where ever they might arise from).
* P.S. The content warning is a strange situation because some warning make sense. But other warnings would be excessive. Who decides what should be warned...
Just so you know, Paizo has been putting content warning about their products for YEARS.
| 13 people marked this as a favorite. |
Deleted lots of baiting, harassment and off topic posts.
| 9 people marked this as a favorite. |
you had to remind me those frogs existed
I came back in today to find 60 new posts, the latest one being moderation. Oof. Not backlogging that. I guess I'll try to acknowledge some of the highlights I get from skimming, though:
1. I actually have a much more serious revulsion than my arachnophobia. The scraping of charcoal is extremely painful to me, and even seeing it in use, or being reminded of its use, can make me anxious and nauseated. I didn't mention it because it's not a very common phobia, nor is it often triggered by Pathfinder. Arachnophobia is among the top three most common phobias in the world (and a lot easier to trigger in art than, say, acrophobia), and yet spiders are among the most ubiquitous monsters to face in fantasy RPGs. That's a lot more worth talking about to me. So that's why "if we address fear of spiders, don't we also have to address people who are afraid of frying pans?" feels to me like a bad-faith argument.
EDIT: "Who decides what should be warned?" I dunno, maybe start with the top ten most common triggers and work from there? There's a reason we include epilepsy warnings on movies nowadays--it's a prominent and highly debilitating trigger that is easy to give a warning for if you care to do so. This isn't a really serious criticism. Obviously some phobias and traumas just aren't very common.
2. I never called for the removal of spiders (except from my house, constantly), though I do think that deemphasizing their art in favor of art of other creatures could be a good change to move towards. For example, in Kingmaker there are quite a few meals you can cook. The spider's legs weren't more important to depict in art than the other recipes, so choosing to commission art of them in particular was an unnecessarily (and likely unintentionally) hostile editing choice.
3. I brainstormed a bunch of potential solutions to the problem. Some don't work, but some could, and I think focusing on the ones that could work, and offering feedback on them, might be a tidge more constructive here than reading one or two, deciding they wouldn't work, and dismissing the problem as unsolvable (or reading none of them, as it seems some people here did). James Jacobs seemed to agree, for example, that downscaling the focus on spider art could potentially work sometime in the future, albeit not anytime soon. There's no reason content warnings wouldn't work, either.
4. Just as wheelchair users can ask someone to lift them up the steps, but might still prefer access to a ramp, many people with phobias would rather just be able to open a PDF and not have to worry so much about being jumpscared without warning. Personal solutions can be useful, but they don't address the broader accessibility issue. We all know about the Archives of Nethys, or that you can print out a PDF and ask a friend to tape over the images.
To be blunt, it's a little funny to be offered these personal "solutions" as if I'd never thought of them before. I've kind of had to, in order to take part in this hobby. I just thought I'd get people talking about ways to make it easier on us! :P
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm afraid that the only solution for this would be digital. There is already mounting pressure to go more (or fully) digital, and you could add this to a very long list.
The printed book is already creaking under the weight of low economic viability, adding basically *any* extra effort is frankly not an option.
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
Do you think content warnings with page numbers at the start of the book are too high-effort? :P
Literally, people, I love this community, but read the OP. I tried to include a variety of solutions, and not all of them are actually very extreme at all.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
and yet spiders are among the most ubiquitous monsters to face in fantasy RPGs.
Are they though? Like I can't speak to fantasy video games (which have their own solutions to these problems) but in Pathfinder specifically I don't recall encountering that many spiders. I feel like this would stand out to me because I would always want to try to make friends with them if I was a player (or make it possible to make friends with them if I'm the GM.)
Like one of the issues I have with "just de-emphasize them in the art" is that no depictions of anything are strictly needed. You can always justify not depicting something. So like if you wanted a "students hard at work" image for a Magaambya setting, you could always say "well, the Anadi student shouldn't be in spider form" which I think would be unfortunate. The frequency of "upsetting images" is going to seem much greater to people upset by them just because of normal serendipity/zemblanity issues (i.e. one rarely clocks the stuff that doesn't make any impact.)
Like if an NPC is a Kobold Ranger with a Spider companion (whose webs the ranger uses in order to build traps and snares) that's a thematic thing, and you could always justify "only showing the ranger, never the companion" but should you?
I note that it is possible in adobe acrobat (not reader) to either excise or just blank out images. Admittedly, full Acrobat is a bit pricey, and you do have to have someone interact with the images long enough to blank them (a few clicks), but it's an option to consider for home use, if you have the funds.
Unless the PF2 PDFs would be somehow locked to prevent such editing? I have no particular reason to think that they would, but it seems like the sort of thing to check before ponying up the cash.
Creative Director
|
| 18 people marked this as a favorite. |
Do you think content warnings with page numbers at the start of the book are too high-effort? :P
I do, honestly, and unfortunately. Verifying page number references is one of the last steps of the process before sending a book to the printer (it has to be, since up until that point, shifting pages still happen), and we're always pressed for time at that point, and I worry that adding in something like this, particularly with the element of "it'll change every single volume what sort of thigns we're watching out for" is probably a step too far for our process. It's a worthy idea to consider, but in this case yeah, I think it's too complex.
As for the choice to illustrate spider leg soup in Kingmaker... That one IS intentionally meant to be somewhat shocking and surprising, and I do apologize for if it went too far for anyone... but art will do that for different reasons for different people, and part of my job is helping to decide what to illustrate and why. A bit of behind the scenes why that was chosen as an illustration, to show how it's NOT only about trying to trigger aracnophobia, though, and to show insight into how we decide what to illustrate...
When I wrote the art brief, this was months before anything got laid out, so I had to guess what illustration would land on what page. It's no good to, say, illustrate dragon pudding and then have the rules for dragon pudding appear on a different page than the illustration!
I wanted there to be an illustration on each "spread" (every 2 pages) of the section, so that there's art to break up the text each time you open a page to the special meals section.
That meant I had to guess for what illustrations would show up where. Baked Spider Legs, being the first meal in the section, is guarenteed to show up on the first page... PLUS it's the most unusual-looking meal of the first several meals (everything else for the first several meals doesn't look particularly fantasy and could all just be real-world food illustrations, something I wanted to avoid).
Hearty Purple Soup was a pretty solid "middle of the alphabet" (and this middle of the section) choice, plus purple soup filled with purple meat ALSO felt sufficiently fantasy to spend money on illustrating.
And then at the end, it turned out we had to cut an illustration, I suspect, to make room for things. Can't remember if that was the case, but certainly looking over the food on pages 118–119, nothing there would have been particularly "Fantasy Looking" enough to justify keeping it when the more outrageous spider meal and purple meal did.
|
Creative Director
|
| 17 people marked this as a favorite. |
In any case, we'll continue to publish content warnings in our products (be they at the start on the Table of Contents page, in the text itself in the form of sidebars or even just in running text, or both) as we deem the situation needs such a warning. But after speaking with several folks here—it's not going to be particularly feasible or workable given our workloads, schedule demands, and staffing resources to be able to do much about offering warnings about potentially phobia-triggering images.
The best solution all around, at this time, is a combination of crowd-sourced solutions (folks here or elsewhere maintaining a fan-created resource of trigger warnings for phobias) and relying upon friends who can scan products for someone to let someone know if something in there might be upsetting; friends will know more about a person's specific fears than we ever could.
In the meantime, keeping in mind that certain types of creatures might trigger phobias (spiders, snakes, etc.) is very helpful feedback and important for us at Paizo to keep in mind when we decide what to illustrate.
I know that's not the ideal solution in this case, but it's the best we can do at this time.
(And again, to get out ahead of things... you'll want to avoid Season of Ghosts if you're aracnophobic. There are literally spiders on EVERY PAGE of that Adventure Path, as they're an integral part of the theme and appear in the page border art.)
|
Creative Director
|
| 13 people marked this as a favorite. |
I feel like this thread's perhaps covered the bases now—certainly if folks want to keep discussing in a respectful and non-antagonistic matter about the topic, please keep going, but if it veers into producing a lot of flags again, it's best for us to just lock the thread.
That said, I'll get back to my vacation day! :)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Do you think content warnings with page numbers at the start of the book are too high-effort? :P
Literally, people, I love this community, but read the OP. I tried to include a variety of solutions, and not all of them are actually very extreme at all.
I don't want to talk out my rear about the costs involved, but book printing is already teetering on the edge of non-viability. In order to do the content warning work you propose, and the research and review it would take, they'll have to look for ways to fit it in the budget that already has the Paizo staff grossly underpaid. Whether that's shaving off yet another bit of those raises, reducing art costs, or leaning more heavily on a digital distribution model with better margins, something has to give.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Can we avoid micromanaging Paizo and its employees by arguing with each other about how to implement production process changes and how to manage Paizo's financial business decisions. That is so severely off-topic for this thread.
I don't think it really is necessarily off topic given that it's being used explicitly as a reason the OP's requests are unworkable.
A broader discussion about how broken Paizo's workflow seems to be might be for another thread, but in the specific it seems at least worth a nod since it's come up.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I feel like this thread's perhaps covered the bases now—certainly if folks want to keep discussing in a respectful and non-antagonistic matter about the topic, please keep going, but if it veers into producing a lot of flags again, it's best for us to just lock the thread.
A very prudent decision, and one I support. In fact, when I saw this thread take off again, I opened it to suggest exactly that.
|
|
Do you think content warnings with page numbers at the start of the book are too high-effort? :P
Literally, people, I love this community, but read the OP. I tried to include a variety of solutions, and not all of them are actually very extreme at all.
I don't want to talk out my rear about the costs involved, but book printing is already teetering on the edge of non-viability. In order to do the content warning work you propose, and the research and review it would take, they'll have to look for ways to fit it in the budget that already has the Paizo staff grossly underpaid. Whether that's shaving off yet another bit of those raises, reducing art costs, or leaning more heavily on a digital distribution model with better margins, something has to give.
Increasing the price of the product is a possibility too.
Unfortunately, based on what industry vets have said on streams, buyers of TTRPG books are very sensitive to price. It's why the price of rulebooks has been so incredibly slow to rise over the years. They could raise prices and not actually increase revenue.
This feels like a problem best dealt with via community projects that produce phobia-friendly versions of RPG material. As James has said it's more work than you think to do this and even addressing the 10 most common phobias is only a value add for a small fraction of RPG buyers. There's just not enough margin in RPGs to make multiple versions viable.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Do you think content warnings with page numbers at the start of the book are too high-effort? :PI do, honestly, and unfortunately. Verifying page number references is one of the last steps of the process before sending a book to the printer (it has to be, since up until that point, shifting pages still happen), and we're always pressed for time at that point,
I'm a bit surprised and curious. Why are you not using some document creation software that lets you use page references? Like LaTeX, for example.
But again, I'm not a publisher - so I'm not trying to throw shade.
|
Creative Director
|
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm a bit surprised and curious. Why are you not using some document creation software that lets you use page references? Like LaTeX, for example.
But again, I'm not a publisher - so I'm not trying to throw shade.
That's a better question for the editors, not me. Regardless... It's all part of the editorial process—whether it's by hand or with a tool, page numbers still need to be checked, and even if it's a relatively short process, it's still a process—one of MANY—and those all add up to take time. Adding more steps to any process will increase that time.