Welcome to the centre for HSWS
(the Husky Standard for Warnings and Safety)
About
The Husky Standard for Warnings and Safety (HSWS) is a standard for the rating of media and the warnings used in said media produced by, well, anyone who can convince me to rate their media.
This would usually just mean me, and any content created by me (found on the ArcadeZ YouTube channel, or on other related channels). However, if you want to attempt to convince me to rate something you made, go to the contact page for more information.
An example HSWS warning image
How content is rated
As seen in the image above, a warning image is made up of four areas:
- At the top, a short message is displayed stating that this image is a HSWS warning.
- On the left side, short descriptions of any content deemed potentially triggering due to commonly found sources of trauma, or sensitive subjects that the typical viewer might find uncomfortable are listed.
- On the right side, short descriptions of any content deemed potentially harmful to the viewer, or potentially harmful to the viewer's health are listed.
- On the bottom, a link is provided to a page which more thoroughly describes the warning.
Of course, what could be considered harmful is quite subjective, and something that one person finds completely fine could be considered harmful by another person. However, this rating system is only supposed to be used as a basic description of the content, and―while attempting to be somewhat more nuanced than typical rating systems―cannot be guaranteed to cover every potential hazard that could be found in a given piece of content.
Some information regarding health warnings
In the example, or in a piece of rated content, you may have noticed a warning for something like Photosensitivity triggers or Loud noises. As the definitions for what may constitute these ratings are somewhat more well-documented, for the sake of the potential viewer as well as the potential producer, the process of what constitutes a warning is as follows:
Photosensitivity
All content is ran through the UW Trace Center Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool (PEAT) to determine if the content contains any photosensitive triggers. If this produces a positive result, the content will be rated as so. However, even if a negative result is produced, the content might still be rated as so depending on the subjective opinion of the person who rates it.
It should be noted that neither this tool, nor my opinion, should be considered as a guarantee that the content is not potentially triggering. This is not a substitution for professional photosensitivity analysis.
Loud noises
Currently, this rating is rather subjective, and will usually be determined by the person who rates the content. However, you can probably expect something to get rated with this if there are long sections of your audio track that hit 0dB. This method of rating may be changed in the future, however as most platforms already perform automatic normalization of audio, it is unlikely that this will be a problem.