Paul Beakley I was neither rejecting nor ignoring your premise. I was attempting to contextualize it.

Choosing to engage with difficult material is a risk, and in so doing, a potential player must make a form of risk assessment, and it brings in a huge number of factors. Your trust factor is a really key one, because a high level of trust in the people at the table and the game designer are probably going to be the chief factors in the “pro” column of choosing to engage (and, in typing that, I’m thinking that they are distinct enough that we might actually want to discuss the “two trusts” separately).

That said, I think you might sufficiently trust (or want to trust) the people at the table and the designer to handle the material in a way you find tolerable (as oppose to comfortable, which is probably the wrong way to feel about challenging material), but then find out that either:

a) you were wrong to trust one or the other; or
b) you overestimated your own capacity for the material;

and thus you are forced to withdraw, which carries with it social consequences that aren’t present in noninteractive media. If one is aware of that risk, then one might choose to shut down the interaction early, rather than take the chance.