Avoiding the Dustcatcher

All I can say is I hate drawing people, I'm no good at it, google referencing wastes too much time, and I much prefer drawing cartoon style pictures as they allow me to have more time for interpretations. That's just me though, I'm sure there's hundreds of players that can draw amazing people as I've seen it. Also, I can't tell what prompt you're talking about as I don't know what other thread you mean, so can't go into too much detail :)

Ah found it. Another reason is I barely know who Kesha is, being British and not a follower of that kind of music. Plus something as wide-reaching as 'crowd' makes me think "Oh, lots of people, too much drawing". All this is in a split second 'See the prompt, skip' decision. I wouldn't take it personally though.

Yeah, I'm the same way. I definitely don't try to draw real people (all of my Drawception people look the same), and I usually avoid characters unless it's like a cartoon character with only 2 colors in it.

Half the time I skip is because it's something I've already drawn before and don't want to repeat.

Some will hit the dustcatcher for no reason

Sometimes I skip because I don't feel like drawing something. Sometimes I force myself to do things I don't want to draw because I know if too many people skip it'll dustcatch. Luck of the draw.

I was actually planning on starting a thread like this, so thank you!

I skip: 1) Most all anime stuff. I am not a fan of anime and I feel like they're super generic. I will probably even do a google search and look at the pictures, and decide that doing just a single character I know nothing about is boring. At least when I get "Batman" I know a lot about his personality and characterization that I can do something funny with it. 2) Celebrities who are kind of generic looking. It's very hard to draw someone I can't do a caricature of, let alone with 10 minutes and a small selection of tools. 3) Big groups of people where they all need to be distinct. Exceptions I make for this are Avengers and the Justice League because I'm already pretty familiar. 4) Any time I have to google multiple different things. I'm fine with searching for one thing, but I don't have enough time to do a bunch.

If I think of more, I'll post em in here.

I just skip through panels looking for something that interests me. One day, I may be in the mood to draw space-themed panels, so I'll skip through until I find one. Along the way, if anything else catches my eye, I'll draw it, too. Other days I may be sick of space panels, so I'll skip them. I'm really not very consistent in my skipping criteria.

Sometimes I'll find a really great panel to draw, but I'll accidentally skip it because I'm trigger happy. So I'll proceed to skip through dozens of other panels, hoping I'll find that original panel again.

I won't usually draw celebrities unless they have something identifiable. For example, I'll occasionally attempt to draw Dr. House because he's identifiable from his cane, Vicodin, and lupus references. My drawing probably looks nothing like Hugh Laurie, but people know who he is by the accessories.

I don't typically draw video game characters, mostly because I'm so out of that loop, I probably won't do them justice.

I almost always skip descriptions that require the artist to draw a lot of characters. I would love to be able to draw the Avengers to a standard I find acceptable, but I can't in 10 minutes. So I skip those panels, too.

--I am a lot less likely to try to draw a "real person" celebrity. A cartoon character or comic character is much easier to get right without having every detail look perfect.
--I'm also unlikely to draw anime or manga characters, because I don't know them and know I will inevitably get something wrong.
--I generally skip panels with more than three specific characters required. Sometimes even three is too much if there is a specific action involved in the scene. I just know I won't be able to do it justice in the required time. If it's a random crowd or group and I can just draw generic people, then I don't mind doing many characters. --Like Moku, I won't draw violence toward women unless it's in the scope of a fictional character who is a fighter-- I have no problem showing Black Widow or Batgirl in a fight, but inexplicable violence toward some random person is not okay with me, and if it's a woman, that makes it extra not-okay. --I won't draw any panel that refers to a woman by a gendered insult or diminutive. If you have a panel that uses the word "bitch" or "chick" and it's clearly not talking about a dog or a bird, I will skip it. I also don't draw panels that use the word "ho" or "hoe" to refer to a woman, whether or not I can tell if the panel is actually about a prostitute.
--I also won't draw any panel that clearly relies on a racial stereotype-- for example, last night I got one for "Indian chief in headdress" and I've seen panels using the word "ghetto" where the writer clearly means "black." Not gonna touch that one. In the Indian chief case, I am sure the captioner is captioning accurately, but I don't want to draw a racial stereotype. I'll only do this if it's obviously a joke stereotype from a culture that isn't normally misrepresented-- I think I did "stereotypical Frenchman" once.
--Same goes for homophobic or transphobic language. I won't draw a panel that uses the words "fag," "homo" or "tranny" and I generally avoid panels that use the word "gay" at all, because usually I've found it means that someone in the previous panel was drawn in a pink shirt or something else that certainly has nothing to do with being gay. I make exceptions for things like "Batman in gay pride parade" because that's clearly not using gay as an insult or value judgment. --I don't draw panels that describe poo, pee, shit, or anything else scatalogical. Generally I find that these panels are not accurate in any way and the person who wrote them just saw something brown and wanted to turn it into a poo. If I were to get a panel that was clearly not simply a lack of creativity or inability to mature over the age of seven (like a 'don't whiz on the electric fence' joke), that would probably be fine.
--Likewise, I don't draw panels that are clearly insulting the previous artist's drawing ability. Something like "guy with no hands" or "badly drawn" or "blob" or anything like that, I'm not going to draw it. Like with the poo drawings, just, you know, try a little.

I know this is a hella long list, and I certainly don't expect other people to agree with me on all of these-- I'm not saying I think everyone should skip all the things I skip, but these are the things that will make me avoid a panel.

Oh, I also won't draw anything dealing with pedophilia, including Pedo Bear, molestation, or sexual advances toward/interest in children.

If it consists of more than two characters, I'm unlikely to draw it. I tend to go for the very simple, max. 5-word descriptions most of the time, because that way I know I can finish the drawing in time without compromising on the quality. If the prompt is about an anime/TV series/game/cartoon/movie/book I've never even heard of, or maybe heard but never watched or read, I skip it.

I also usually skip prompts that would require lots of brainwork/interpretation by my side (eg. "If I Dream of Jeannie would me remade today", which is an actual prompt I got today), because I simply do not have the time to first come up with the scenario and then draw it.

Also, if a prompt asks me to convey a lot of feeling ("Ominous rainbow encompasses everything", also an actual prompt), especially with words that aren't 100% familiar to me (since English isn't my first language) I skip them because I wouldn't be able to get the message across well enough.

The only things I don't draw are racist, sexist or homophobic images. Anything that would be considered 'morally incorrect' or that I'd never do in real life. I'm fine with drawing poo, though that's just my humour and I can see why others wont. I will occasionally draw a celebrity, only if he/she is distinguishable and easy to recognise, or if their clothes can give it away. Or I just write their name next to them. As with violence, I'd draw a woman and a man getting beat up the same way, just because it's a woman getting beat up doesn't mean it's meant in a sexist way. If women want equality the same way I want them to have it, then they get included in violent drawings the same way as men.

Hmm. All solid, Tea. Though I am curious about "chick". I used to hate the term myself. One time my grandma bought me pajamas that had little baby chicks all over it wearing glasses and it said "Chicks with brains" all over too. I refused to ever wear them. Including the giant chick slippers with glasses that also came with it.

Even now when I use the term myself, I still wouldn't wear those stupid things. I'm not certain what caused me to be okay with the term "chick" though, and I can't really explain why I feel okay with it now. I think it's mostly apathy?

@Taekwondogirl, the reason I stay away from "chick" is because it implies babyhood, and I stay away from infantilizing terms. I'm not even comfortable with adult women being called girls (since girl implies child, and the analogous "guy" does not imply child), but I know I do that myself and it's a hard habit to break. I just avoid language that implies that women are similar to children.

Teaberryblue has some great criteria right there. As a sociologist, I'm pleased to see that there are people who realize that words or drawings have effects in real life. Congratulations.

That said, I think this thread demonstrates how bad this new dustcatcher system is. Drawception is about miscomunication, creativity and untentional derailment and it's certainly not the kind of game in which we should plan in advance what we will or won't draw. To racist and homophobic stuff we can use the skip+report button, or flag the panels.

Think about this:

"What's happening with video games is the same thing that happens with anything new and interesting. At the beginning, everybody wants to see what it is. They gather around and check it out. But gradually, people start to lose interest. "The people who don't lose interest become more and more involved...And the medium starts to be influenced by only those people. It becomes something exclusive to the people who've stuck with it for a long time. And when the people who were interested in it at first look back at it, it's no longer the thing that interested them." — Shigeru Miyamoto

Do we really want to accelerate this process by punishing creativity?

@AdvancePlays I think the issue for me is mainly that it's very difficult to find scenarios where a man hitting a woman doesn't look like domestic violence. I wouldn't draw male-on-male or female-on-male or female-on-female domestic violence, either. That's why I draw a line between drawing, say, Brienne of Tarth, who is a powerful female knight, getting attacked by another knight, or Black Widow getting punched by a supervillain, and a generic woman getting beaten up by a generic man. Aggro battles are cool. Domestic violence is creepy, and while a generic slap might not be intended to depict domestic violence, it's always going to be hard to keep it from looking that way.

@Teaberryblue I absolutely see your reasons, and again, if it's purposefully sexist or about domestic abuse the chances are I'd skip it too.

The forums in general, but especially this thread, have shown how badly the dustcatcher is and at the same time, how badly it is needed. I wonder if the down vote didnt do the job of keeping it on the right track better. Although the comment section can re-direct players running afoul, it is not used for that reason.
With the down votes, players would ask why the thumbs down and people, more than likely the ones who did not down vote, wrote why they thought down votes were given.

@Tiago3168, the dustcatcher was conceived because Drawception was suffering from a very specific problem. The game only allows a certain number of panels in "play" at any given time. There were thousands of games submitted, and only a handful of those in play. Some of those in play were constantly skipped over because the descriptions were too vague/difficult/undesirable for one reason or another. There was no way to remove those from the queue, so it served as a bottleneck between game creation and game completion. Created game count increased to the point where Reed had to shut off game creation altogether for a period of time.

The dustcatcher was and is intended on removing those panels that would otherwise not be drawn, thus increasing the rate of game completion and allowing the Created Games queue to flow along. As it is now, that isn't happening. But as the tool gets tweaked, it may get to the point where it works as intended. I don't think punishing creativity was never an intended consequence of the dustcatcher.

We all need to keep in mind that we're playing a game in beta. That means that we're all beta testers. The game is supposed to have issues, we're supposed to report them, and the creators are supposed to fix them. Before we take a lot of these issues personally, I think we need to take a step back and realize that we're not playing a finished product.

@very: If there was ever a feature that punished creativity, it was the downvote. Artists would get downvoted (ie punished) for what others perceived as "bad" drawings.

The downvote did nothing to address the rate of game completion. Bringing it back will not allow games to finish faster. The dustcatcher is an effort to improve game completion (although it's not working like it should).

The Lemur King, very well stated. That is exactly the situation here. People, please have some patience. Continue to report issues, if you can, keep track of descriptions that get caught and post them so we can see what needs tweaking.

This feature hasn't even been live for 24 hours, calm down a bit!