Shame On You All

[necaladun]

Clickbait title woo.

So let's talk about shaming culture.

Shame is an important social tool to indicate a societal attitude towards behaviour. Go look up sociology shit on wiki.

As crew, comments on your coworkers shape their actions. As admins, it can be our job to shame people for their behaviour. This can be done appropriately some times - but someone shouldn't feel too ashamed over a simple mistake, especially newbies.

This needs to be done carefully and correctly to ensure that it stops the behaviour, and teaches people the correct action.

You should avoid direct insults to the persons intelligence. This can cross IC/OOC boundaries, where your IC insults are being reflected at the person behind the screen.

Several people have talked to me recently about how they've been shamed by admins OOCly and ICly in a variety of circumstances. Some of these times have been appropriate to shame someone for their behaviour. 

The degree to which this has been done and ways has not always been to my liking - I'd like to take this opportunity to remind admins that even a minor comment from someone with the power of a banhammer, comes across very strongly. Calling them an idiot in front of the entire station can be mortifying, and totally turn a new player off the game.

This is something that should be remembered when you play the game too. Everyone has off days, and abusing the CE for messing up the singularity isn't going to stop anyone getting sucked into it or make the shuttle arrive faster. When you criticise someone's actions, try to do it in a way that teaches them what the correct thing to do is, and doesn't humiliate the person behind the screen too much.

Over this weekend especially I'll be collecting various feedback etc on this, so feel free to message me. If you're reading old forum posts a year from now, also feel free to message me. It's literally my job to talk to players and the community about things like this.