Please change the content warning

[neontankdroid]

Content warning for death during childbirth, mental health and suicide

 

As someone who has a lot of problems related to childbirth, i think the way the cw is worded was very misleading and as a friend of multiple trans people, trans exclusionary. as it was written as "trauma related to motherhood" i imagined it to be something along the lines of a bad childhood with an abusive mother, however when i was met with the fact i had to play as a mother dying during childbirth, it triggered a lot of negative emotions and has #*!%ed me up emotionally for a week as warframe is essentially my safe space game and has been for 8 years. motherhood isnt childbirth for a lot of people cisgender and transgender whether that be for medical complications or for the entire fact that men CAN have birth in the real world and listing the meta real word content warning for your audience as "motherhood" is in my opinion irresponsible from a company that has previously been very good at handling its lgbt+/trans subject matter. All of this being amplified when you release the quest while you are actively supporting a trans positive charity and during pride month, and slighting trans people by this one issue.

I think the story was beautiful and is the first story ive played like it and i think it needed to be made. However on the way of how this was all handled in the context of the game is troublesome in my opinion and as a woman you cant just write complaints off as fragile men not liking what they dont understand. In my eyes for a comparison (again trigger warning for suicide), it would be like if you made a content warning for a story as "death" and then forcing the player to play as a character committing suicide then afterwards releasing the character with part of their visual identity having the thing they killed themself with on their body, then gamifying their suicide postpartum and to complete your doll collection you had to engage in such gamification of their death and if you wanted to not own that character because of how terrible it makes you feel thinking of what they went through you then rub it in the players face through an ingame event where you bury their remains. all of this can be easily translated to what happened with the jade shadows quest. this is a brilliant quest but all parts of how it was handled lend itself to being inaccessible and actively horrifying for the people its talking about which is the worst failing in my mind.

 

tl:dr

For now i dont think theres anything you could do to improve the material surrounding the quest but please for the love of god update the content warning, i understand you dont want to spoil it but thats not an excuse for the way it treats the people the story affects. Change it to "trauma relating to childbirth" or something like that, motherhood is too nebulous a thing to call it when the experience of motherhood isnt the same as giving birth for reasons such as aforementioned medical issues and trans people.

[neontankdroid]

Just as a sidenote regarding The Sacrifice quest, there are way more people that deal with child birth than people have killed their son so bringing it up is a moot point. HOWEVER, it does deal with the subject of losing a family member but the story was about healing and empathy and ended at the end of the quest, while the same issues are still there (such as being able to have umbras mask half torn for the sake of looking cool, and no content warning being there) it also never negatively gamified its subject matter nearly as much as jade shadows has, so its not a fair comparison.

edit: (cw child abuse) As a further sidenote, warframe is a game that deals a lot with childhood trauma too and as someone who has also dealt with that, there was always the veil of fantasy that lessens the blow of hard topics, instead of children being abused leading to stunted emotional growth, children were in a spaceship warp malfunction were a void devil showed up and offered a deal to keep them alive leading to them being forever children but with superpowers which were then exploited by "higher beings". All of that is fantasy babble, and as such by nature has a lot more tact given to it rather than what has happened with the new quest, you literally die during childbirth, and as such a proper, direct content warning is necessary.

Edited June 20 by neontankdroid

[(PSN)Arkel-99]

Someone explain to me without typing an entire essay why a game with a PEGI 18+ rating or ESRB 'M' rating (M for Mature) still needs a content warning in-game

[neontankdroid]

Assumptive of me but im jealous youve never had to deal with ptsd or a complex mental health issue.

Edited June 20 by neontankdroid

[ChangelingRain]

Yeah, this content warning was misleading at best, and actively incorrect at worst. They got too caught up in not spoiling Jade's thing that even the content warning doesn't actually warn you about it.

[mac10smg--Toa_of_Green]

3 hours ago, (PSN)Arkel-99 said:

Someone explain to me without typing an entire essay why a game with a PEGI 18+ rating or ESRB 'M' rating (M for Mature) still needs a content warning in-game

Believe it or not, Adults have mental health traumas too y'know

[Sverdar]

12 hours ago, (PSN)Arkel-99 said:

Someone explain to me without typing an entire essay why a game with a PEGI 18+ rating or ESRB 'M' rating (M for Mature) still needs a content warning in-game

idk how else to explain to you the concept of caring about other people

[Countess_Hapmuhr]

I think DE needs to work on this system more and let players decide the detail they want on their trigger warnings. I for one, do not need trigger warnings and I hate that it ruined the quest for me. But people like OP could have used an actual quest synopsis to determine if its something they would play.

So, I'd suggest a system like this:

"This quest has content that some people find triggering,  please indicate trigger spoiler level:"

1) Show me a full synopsis 

2) Show me trigger keywords

3) Do not show me anything, just let me play the quest.

And then a confirmation notice afterwards makes you confirm that you're fine with your choice.

Edited June 21 by Countess_Hapmuhr

[Sivos]

I understand what you're saying.  For me, suicide and molestation would be difficult and if the CW was simply death or inappropriate sexual behavior, I too would be upset.  The issue is what way could they phrase the warning that could not give a spoiler?  If I saw childbirth or pregnancy as the word, I would know the moment the Stalker walked into the room what is happening and the reveal would have been wasted.  No doubt in a similar sense if you saw suicide as the word, you'd probably be on alert trying to figure out who is going to die and possibly not form any attachments, which would ruin the experience the artist is going for.

So, I believe DE should still include motherhood, but also list what they mean by that with false possibilities included.  For example I and my friends took "trauma related to motherhood" to mean abuse from a mother as that's what you normally hear it around these days.  I expected Jade to have been the Stalker's mother, until the pieces were falling into place.  If they wrote something like, "...trauma related to motherhood, this may include child loss, maternal abuse, pregnancy complications, childbirth complications, and/or meternal abandonment," just to name the ones that come to mind, but you get the idea, I'm sure.  I think if any of those would raise a red flag in the player, they should look more into the quest and possibly take the spoiler.

Edited June 21 by Sivos