The X Card Will Not Save You

In 2020, running a game on camera in his popular Actual Play “Far Verona”, game master Adam Koebel described a sex crime happening to one of his players’ characters. A robot PC had gone to see a mechanic, who introduced a technological process that forced the robot to orgasm – for the pleasure of the mechanic. It was not something the player wanted or appreciated; the other players also found it unsettling to say the least. It is not surprising that the game master was male and the player female.

The game and the stream was shut down and Koebel has since mostly been out of the industry or keeping a low profile. In one of the few statements he made about the incident, Koebel explained that the cause of the problem was a lack of “in the moment” tools for controlling content.

This post isn’t about Koebel, although one has to ask how anyone could be a professional game master in 2020 and be that careless and cavalier. Or let such things go to air, because it was apparently not streamed live (and is still online, oddly). The combination of getting into that situation and not taking particular responsibility for the subject choice could suggest that safety tools would have been little help here. If post-facto editing didn’t suggest not to broadcast this moment which was if nothing else in bad taste for the audience, I imagine that the game master would not have checked consent regardless of priming, and may have overridden their use if engaged.

I am a great believer in systems and systemic approaches. I used to work in public health after all. Individual bad actors are not why safety problems occur, and only through properly adjusting everyone’s approach can we change a culture. Safety is a discipline of forethought that as can only learn through practice and rehearsal. This is why we do fire drills. Why we have seatbelts and speed limits and road rules and driving tests.

But just as nobody would treat a car roaring along at the speed limit as inherently risk-free, systems alone do not make us safe. Bad actors exist, but more importantly mistakes occur. No system is perfect and certainly no system allows us to turn off our brains and coast. But we do know safety processes can cause the latter. People will allow their dogs to act more irresponsibly at the dog park, or stop watching the dogs welfare, because there is an idea of safety inside the fence. I work as a dog trainer: safety and safety culture is my business.

As well as dog training and public health I have some experience in the kink subculture, where safety is the most important factor of all. Everyone in kink has some experience with the safety issues of kink. And everyone I’ve ever met has a story of safety being violated and tools failing to be applied correctly.

One of the biggest safety tools used right now in roleplaying games is the X card. Formally coined by John Stavropoulos in 2013, an X-card is a way for players at a table to indicate they are uncomfortable with the current nature of a scene by touching or picking up the card. The advantage of the card is it can be activated without words, which can be a crucial thing for those with social difficulties or if actual traumas are engaged or simply because it’s hard to say no, stop. The X card is a great idea. But I also think it is on its own not enough. It is at best incomplete safety culture as it is currently used. X cards are slapped on tables as a prophylactic, as if they are infallible. They may have short explanations but that’s not the same as proper training in their use. They have been used as a signal of virtue rather than a tool: games without them must be recklessly, brutally unsafe; games with them must be totally safe. And we act like they solve everything.

Understand that I’m not saying x-cards are useless or always make us complacent. But I have seen them and other tools fail. They will inevitably always fail. If we act like they are the beginning and end of safety culture, and a pathway to virtue, we’ve learnt nothing and have done nothing. Too often the x-card is not a part of good safety culture, but exists instead of one.

Safety culture is the name for the discipline of building environments which minimize our exposure to harm. (By which I mean actual harm to our physical and mental health , to be clear: the term of late is often broadened to the point of uselessness, which makes us actually less safe.) Safety is a much-studied area and we know very well what contributes to strong safety culture. Key principles of good safety include things like:

• Acknowledgement of the risks that exist
• Determination to change that
• Understanding responsibility lies with everyone
• Focussing on solutions not blame
• Education and training at the core
• Buy-in to all of these at every level but especially by leaders, mentors and managers
• Continuous monitoring and ongoing improvement

But the good news is, the X card has all this stuff. Not in the card, but in the text around it. Go and read the whole goddamn document. I’m not sure how many folks actually have. (If you all have, write in and tell me I’m wrong). That document is long. REALLY long. Because safety culture is complicated. The most important parts to read are the latest update notes on page 3, and this quote from page 12: “The X-Card talk is more important than the X-Card itself.” Between those two things we get most of those above bullet points: that we need to acknowledge risk, that we need to all decide together to buy in on changing the level of risk, and that responsibility lies with all of us, without blame. It doesn’t quite get into monitoring and checking in (not even in the whole essay) but it points the way to other tools like the completely free TTRPG Safety Toolkit and the great book Consent in Gaming. It does not phone it in.

But the thing is, we have not risen to that. The essay and accompanying material is forgotten. I see very empty X cards in use. No links. Low explanation. I see people NOT using John’s spiel – and not because they are replacing it with something better. The X card is at risk of becoming a victim of its own success and its own succinctness. The whole brilliance of the card is that with one card on the table, we can shift an entire culture. The terrible risk of the card is we stop there. I was there when this conversation about safety began in the 90s, and I’ll be damned if we stop the train now it’s finally moved an inch forward in public acceptance. You could draw a parallel to pride flags: important, clear messaging. But easy to wave. Easy to be a t-shirt for a clubhouse instead of a process of dismantling assumptions. Easy to co-opt. Not complete proof that the waver actually gives a damn. Not the end of the process.

I haven’t read Consent in Gaming but being autistic as well as all those other things above means I’m an expert in how games are full of danger because they have the illusion of safety without any actual safety at all. So I may do another blog soon about how I think about safety in gaming. For now though, I want you to say to yourself: The X Card Will Not Save You. The buck does not stop there, and neither should you. Read further, understand safety, and deal with it properly.

EDIT: As always, I’m far from the only person who has found that a more abrupt version of safety leaves out variations – safety is rarely one size fits all. Beau Jagr Sheldon points out here that if your ONLY response is to completely remove a topic, it might feel pretty bad too.