Hi, I was reading your rules about what needs to be submitted (gotta admit i’m not too familiar with hexcrawls, I was honestly just curious) and I wanna bring a potential accessibility issue, specifically around needing a pen-and-paper drawing of the map
A lot of autistic people have issues with touching paper, myself included. Now, for me personally, there are certain types of paper that I can bare enough that it isn’t too bad, drawing pad paper is atrocious-feeling but notebook paper works fine, and not every autistic person has this type of sensory trigger, but it’s one of the more common ones and some ppl have it even worse than me
Tbh, I wouldn’t normally comment about something like this (i don’t personally believe literally everything needs to be accessible to literally everyone, bc there is nuance to all that, of course) but if my speculation is correct, you have a very valid reason for this rule: So someone can’t pass off AI slop as a mouse or tablet drawing
My concern, if I’m being quite honest, is as much about AI propaganda as it is about accessibility. AI bros love invoking the name of the disabled community and using us as a crutch to justify the AI bubble. My main concern lies in the fact that if AI bro find this, and they know what autistic sensory issues are, they might use you and your jam as a scapegoat for their “pencil bros” or “inkcel” rants…
tbh there’s probably a much better solution to this problem than getting rid of the paper-drawing rule completely with no safeguards against AI, maybe you could require them to upload a speedpaint of the hexmap? To fair some AI “artists” have faked speedpaints which are not at all convincing, but if you don’t watch a lot of speedpaints that could be a problem (the thing they always get wrong is that a real speedpaint is wildly chaotic and messy, if that helps). Maybe you could have them take a video of them at a camera of the process, since that’s harder to fake, since AI videos look so overpolished and “stock photo”-y, when it tries to replicate regular videos that lighting is always too professional the camera is usually too neat, even if it looks like the “person” is holding it with their hand. Or just let autistic ppl draw it on a surface that doesn’t bother them, that isn’t a perfect solution but it’s better than nothing
Anyway, the AI thing kind of sucks bc a lot of things to protect artist from it end up hurt a lot of artists, really creates an air of distrust which is I think kind of what the anti-art AI ppl want, to pit artists against each other by making everyone have to be paranoid. But it does concern me when anti-AI protection for artists comes specifically at the cost of disabled artists, bc my brain immediately goes to tech bros using it for their bad-faith arguments :/