The Role of Fantasy Races in FRPGs

[Doctor Xero]

To me, the idea of treating orcs as more than the enemy or potential cannon fodder is somewhat anachronistic.

I disagree with your baseline assumption that anachronisms are intrinsically bad.

Technically, it's anachronistic for a film to depict medieval heroes with no warts, blemishes, broken teeth, etc.  It's anachronistic to depict women or blacks or Jews treated with any human decency in most stories set in the past.  If one wants to be anal retentive about it, it's anachronistic to have anyone speaking our current dialects of English in a film set before the mid-20th century.

However, as Gene Roddenberry noted in his first drafts of what became the *Star Trek* series, audiences most often want people with whom they can identify.  He uses the example of a Western film in which Gregory Peck wore a mustache in the authentic style of the setting and elicited only laughter from the audience because it was too incongruous for the audience.

The question is whether the anachronisms serve a dramatic function.

So yes, realism and distasteful subjects in the name of exploration, by all means.  But stock villains identified by birth and who appear as non-human for no reason other than they can be killed without moral consequence, no.

I agree.  To address Itse's and contracycle's comments together : If I were to attempt a medieval re-creationist campaign, yes, I would have to include racism, sexism, short life spans, carbuncles and crippling illness, and a host of other problems which are alien to modern players and a host of attitudes which be horrifiying to anyone with whom I would wish to associate much less play a  game -- and it would be absurd of me to include magic or any sort of fantastical race when I'm pretending to such a degree of authenticity.

However, most of the time I am not running a campaign for medievalists or other scholars, and I am not running a campaign as an excuse to assign copious amounts of homework to my players before they can be permitted to play their characters.  I am running a campaign for entertainment with some thought and theatre involved.  But not everyone runs campaigns for such reasons.

Mythology/folklore and the fantastical literatures have all had as one common function the presentation of a cleaner and clearer and more intense (whether more virtuous or more horrific varies) story world.  The differences are part of the thematic/mythic function of the story world, and I cope with them through suspension of belief and other audience participation techniques.

Doctor Xero

[Doctor Xero]

Medieval fantasy is very appealing among other things because it has "simpler" morals.

I think that the "purpose" of having fantasy races in fantasy is that they enable the designer to focus on specific themes more readily.

I would suggest the morals have been more overt rather than "simpler".  As has been noted several times in this and similar threads, one function of fantasy races seems to be the convenience of having social characteristics and ethical tendencies easily recognized by the appearance of the fantasy race in question.

I remember a fantasy story in which the virtuous race was "white as celestial purity", and another fantasy story in which the evil race was "stark white as madness and the corpse".  Both the same denotative pigmentation but with very different connotative colorings as a means of externalizing that race's ethical metaphoric function in the storyline.

I think it's important to remember that, in many Christian philosophies (and other philosophies), a major virtue is the Gift of Discernment, which is the ability to recognize an individual's moral/ethical character and potential for rehabilitation as easily as one recognizes an individual's hair coloring and relative height.  This rare gift was seen as divine by the more spiritually oriented and a powerful sense or tool by the more economically/politically oriented.  In other words, for many centuries the average man or woman has envied and admired those people who can "see" a person's true motivations and character regardless of surface appearance and dissembling.

With most FRPG races, almost anyone has that Gift of Discernment because the race type makes true motivations and character obvious (and unvarying for almost everyone in a particular fantasy race).

That doesn't mean that I don't like non-human races. But I do think that they should serve some thematic purpose in the game. Just as with magic, coolness isn't a good enough reason to include non-humans in your campaign world. There needs to be someting more. IMHO anyway.

I agree.

What annoys me most about the "orc" type approach from a gaming perspective is that it appeals to and encourages the "nerd machismo" of mad slasher types (as Aaron Allston put it) and power gamers (in addition to my own aesthetic and philosophical dislikes of this approach).  That said, I suppose even mad slashers and power gamers deserve their own games, and if couch potatoes flexing fictional muscles by killing everyone in sight (and then boasting about it afterwards) is part of the gaming group's social contract, I have no authority to tell them they ought do otherwise.

Doctor Xero

"There are two types of people in the world:
those who divide people into types,
and those who don't."
- - Barth's Distinction to Murphy's Law

[M. J. Young]

I would be very interested in hearing from those of you that have different folklorish sources concerning orcs and their kindred.

When he was writing OrkWorld and discussing the process on Gaming Outpost, John Wick commented that the ork was mentioned in Beowulf. I subsequently read Beowulf in modern translation, and did not recognize the word anywhere within it, although I think I found ogre mentioned (if memory serves--it's been a couple years), and that might have been it.

Regarding Tolkien, Orc was suggested to be an anglicization of the elvish Yrch, a rather expressive name for the creature. Yrch was actually the elvish name for goblin. Goblins, in turn, were a race created by the evil powers by twisting and perverting elves into something horrible (and thus the name that sounds like an expression of disgust). In The Hobbit, the creatures are called goblins by the party of primarily dwarfs; in Lord of the Rings they are called orcs fairly consistently, but the strong elvish influence in this group (Aragorn is actually part elven, and has been immersed in the elvish culture of Rivendell) explains a significant part of that. I recall that there is one passage where all three words (goblin, yrch, and orc) are used in close succession to name the same creatures.

In OAD&D, orcs were smaller, not larger, than humans (about the same size as elves), and there is no mention of them having dark skin. I am unfamiliar with AD&D2's treatment of them. I was rather appalled by 3E's presentation of the half-orc as larger than humans, particularly ugly, and dark skinned--in OAD&D, the half-orc player character was presented as indistinguishable on sight from humans, although shorter on average and never stunningly charismatic.

As to Klingons, in the original series they were not dark skinned; they were generally pale and cultured with an agenda of conquest and domination--charicatures of the Soviet Union. It wasn't until Next Generation that they became dark and violent, a different kind of threat for a different kind of audience.

Has anyone considered that the connection between evil and dark skin comes not from "primitive Africa" but from the Middle East? The wars of the middle ages between Islamic efforts to conquer the world and European efforts to install Christian monarchs would certainly have contributed to this fear of dark-skinned peoples. In this connection, Islam swept through northern Africa and across Gibralter into Spain, leading to the Moorish domination there (and the Moors were darker than their eastern brethren, because they were more drawn from Africa), but that created a two-pronged assault on Europe as Middle Eastern powers pushed through Turkey (Asia Minor) toward Greece. Just because the villains are described as "dark skinned" doesn't mean that they're about Africans. I note in this connection that the Calormenes in Narnia are strongly based on Middle Eastern culture, and thus their dark skin is not African but Arabian.

Anyway, these are just some ideas on the subject.

--M. J. Young

[Doctor Xero]

Has anyone considered that the connection between evil and dark skin comes not from "primitive Africa" but from the Middle East? The wars of the middle ages between Islamic efforts to conquer the world and European efforts to install Christian monarchs would certainly have contributed to this fear of dark-skinned peoples. In this connection, Islam swept through northern Africa and across Gibralter into Spain, leading to the Moorish domination there (and the Moors were darker than their eastern brethren, because they were more drawn from Africa), but that created a two-pronged assault on Europe as Middle Eastern powers pushed through Turkey (Asia Minor) toward Greece. Just because the villains are described as "dark skinned" doesn't mean that they're about Africans.

Excellent point!

The notion of extremely white or extremely dark skin as evidence of something 'unnatural' is found even in whiteskinned cultures which had not had exposure to darkskinned cultures at the time and vice versa.  One theory for the origin of the association of night-black skin with danger is far more practical than racially charged (and therefore less popular in this day and age) : in areas with particularly fierce night predators in the days before electric lighting and flashlights, a black-skinned night predator would be virtually invisible.  Similarly, particularly pale monsters were likely associated with corpses.

Sometimes simple survival factors rather than ulterior racism may explain a common image, however politically dull that might be.

(This is not to pretend that racists have not often co-opted such images to support their racism!)

Doctor Xero

[greyorm]

I've been pondering this reply for quite some time, a couple weeks, in fact. I finally feel confident enough to post it, as I believe I've managed to get to the heart of the ideas I've raised or commented on elsewhere regarding these issues.

-- from Orcs to Klingons, I don't think there's any doubt why brutish & violent races are often depicted with dark skin.  Whether subconsciously or not, there is a not-so-subtle racism against people of African descent that influences the invention of fantasy humanoids.

Black has been associated with danger and evil in western culture for far, far longer than Africans have been sold as slaves, or skin color was even an issue to mankind. Black equals darkness equals night equals danger.

For example, black generally equates to evil in Norse mythology, but the Norse had little concept of "race" or judgements of a man regarding his skin-color, and in the time periods we are talking about, a black-skinned man would have been an oddity, but not considered inferior or a thrall simply because he was black.

So, yes, for me there's a lot of doubt as to why brutish and violent races are depicted as dark-skinned, and it isn't as clear cut as it appears to be to others.

So, I guess I just want to point out that there's a lot of ugliness inbedded in many of these ideas, something that we can't really ignore.  Personally, I have a hard time with a lot of D&D-esque fantasy gaming for exactly this reason.

See, now, I can ignore it just fine, because I don't see it -- and when it's "pointed out" to me, vile heathen that I am for being so blind, I just raise an eyebrow think it's bloody ridiculous. I'll try to explain that.

What Jonathan's post made me realize was something I've been trying to think of how to say without the words. The words I finally realized is that it appears the more about history and culture you know, and the more immersed in modern struggles you are, the more you tend to see racism or discrimination in things.

But, I don't think it is real racism. It's standard human connection-making...standard human intellectual processing: looking for patterns. But just as in scientific processes, just because X looks like Z does not mean X is Z. Honestly, I think it's mostly strawmen created by overactive imaginations.

I mean, seriously, gnomes as Jews? Um...ok? I never saw that one coming. Folks writing this stuff are generally unaware of much of these items as issues (mostly because they're all semi-educated midwestern white males), and are just trying to create interesting "stuff" without ulterior meaning.

Of course, the counter is that they're simply expressing subtle cultural behaviors in such...but I find that nonsense, at best, without some sort of exacting proof of such an occurence. Otherwise I see it as nothing more than pattern-making on the part of the viewer, not the author.

I was pointed to the following URL (VDARE.COM) in another discussion, and think it relevant to this discussion.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up:
Anti-Racists Say Lord of the Rings too Eurocentric
By Sam Francis

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a self-appointed "watchdog" organization in Montgomery, Alabama that purports to keep a sharp eye out for "racism" and "hate."

The SPLC's website, tolerance.org, last week reprinted an op-ed from Pacific News Service by Andrea Lewis, a San Francisco based writer who has discovered that at least the current film in Peter Jackson's stunning cinematic version of the three-volume novel by J.R.R. Tolkien should really have been named "The Return of the Patriarchy."

There just aren't enough fighting females in the movie for Miss Lewis, but she also doesn't like it because "Almost all of the heroes of the series are manly men who are whiter than white" and "exude a heavenly aura of all that is Eurocentric and good. Who but these courageous Anglo-Saxon souls can save Middle Earth from the dark and evil forces of the world?"

...What Miss Lewis and the SPLC boys who chose to reprint her article like is not "tolerance" and what they oppose is not "hate."

What they oppose is any positive portrayal of white people.

What they like is any production that writes whites out of the picture.

Well, not entirely. Another reason Miss Lewis likes "The Matrix" is that it depicts whites as villains.

"Most of the really bad guys in 'The Matrix'," she gloats, "are Euro," including a Frenchman, two British albino twins and "a rather stuffy and pompous white guy with white beard and white suit who reeks of imperialism."

What she really approves of is any production that not only demotes whites from heroic roles but serves to demonize them in new anti-white stereotypes. Nothing more clearly exposes the SPLC's real anti-white agenda than Miss Lewis' silly article. The "multiculturalism" that obsesses her and the SPLC is just as steeped in hate of whites as any of the goof balls they "investigate" (and maybe a good deal more). It's just hate of a different hue.

The fact is that "Lord of the Rings" is an important, beautiful and entirely healthy movie, more or less faithfully based on an important, beautiful and entirely healthy book, which itself draws from some of the deepest springs of Western culture, the myths and folklore of Northern Europe, and tells an important, beautiful and entirely healthy story that white Western men need to hear.

I'm probably going to be labelled a racist for saying this, but, "damn straight."

I think there's some measure of racism in the full article (I've quoted only the relevant portions), but that last bit is nothing less than right on.

Why? Because it's all about positive role-models. It says to the white american male, "Hey, you can be JUST LIKE THIS! HE is. Now, GO, and DO." Rather than "You must be this tall to ride" or "Bah, you're evil oppressors! See?" Which is precisely and constantly what modern "anti-discrimination" groups spew at nearly every turn, which is nothing but pure discrimination "in reverse."

I think that is what really explains my dislike of the whole "casually discriminatory" criteria which seems to pervade modern discussions of this issue.

And you can also see from the above why I grow less and less sympathetic to the cries of the "discriminated"? All these folks ever seem to do is tear down; they never build up. They focus on the negative for political, self-empowerment reasons which have nothing to do with the betterment of society, and more to do with finding "bad guys" to lynch, or at least holler about the "terrible, awful, wickedness" of.

It's modern witch-hunting, plain and simple, and disguised in the same moralistic, protecting-the-moral-fabric-of-society cloth of the Puritan inquisitors.

That's why I bring it up as well...no matter how you look at these sorts of criticisms, there's no fix which doesn't leave someone discriminated against. It's all negative. There's nothing positive in "pointing out" supposed hidden racism in works of literature and film. The only viable solution is to act as though the racism doesn't exist...and viola, as the Tao even predicts, it's gone.

Racism is real, no doubt. But "revealing it" tends to look a great deal more like a lot of fluff and nonsense based on modern fears and cultural conditioning. After all, if it doesn't matter what we look like, then it doesn't matter what we look like.

Here's my point, and the main reason for brining that article into it: that's what I'm seeing a great deal of -- conincidental evidence of racism being decried as "the real thing," followed both by lots of expressed disappointment at its existance by some and distressed scowling and criticism by others, and lots of hand-wringing about what to do about it.

Look at orcs in this regard: there are claims they're stand-in African men, or at least supporting that view, yet it can clearly be shown from studying Tolkien's works that orcs were meant as a social commentary on the uneducated masses in the civilized world.

Given Tolkien created orcs whole-cloth from nothing, specifically for his work, his development of them is truly the only valid source to examine as to "what they are" and hence "what they mean." Everyone else is just borrowing, and can't really "make" them mean anything else if they borrow orcs as written (evil, violent, dark-skinned, corrupted humanoids).

In Ainur Elmgren's excellent and though-provoking essay, "The Image of the Enemy" she mentions a number of letters passed between JRR Tolkien and his son, and which existed as part of his papers.

The content of those letters clearly identifies that orcs were meant as represenational of certain individuals who gloried or found pleasure in the crude, in physicality, in abuse of power, cruelty, and greed.

He doesn't use it to reflect social class so much as the fears of the century, that globalized democracy and the destruction of class boundaries would create countries run by the uncultured, uneducated masses, damaging civilization immensely through the enforcement of their base ideals upon society.

In his letters, he refers to the British media and public as "orc-crowds" in certain cases, where he feels they are acting and reporting basely, in uncivilized, uncompassionate manners...but without reference to actual class.

It is easy to imagine Tolkien would have lumped aristocracy exhibiting such behaviors into that same "orc-crowd" especially in light of letters to his son, in which he notes that British officers are certainly not exempt from being orcs, because such beasts of men come on both sides (he notes, "only in real life are they on both sides").

He also mentions it is easy to see them in Middle-earth because they all look like orcs, but harder in real life, because you never know who is an orc until you observe them...they're in every strata of society, and among every nationality.

So, they're not Africans. Or Germans. Period. Indisputable. A person can point to all the "evidence" they would like, but it's coincidental and casual: just because a turtle shell is "as hard as a rock" does not make it a rock. Orcs are symbolical, certainly, but of corrupted goodness, of the crumbling of civilization by revelry in crude and (especially) unethical behaviors.

Orcs work perfectly fine when they're used as they're supposed to be, but I think "what they're supposed to be" has been muddled considerably, as I'll explain shortly. However, this muddling hasn't helped matters, as their existance and nature are more easily used for the above described criticism and hand-wringing.

Could this interest in fantasy races also come, then, from the part of us that wants to be able to judge a book by its cover?

I think it has far more to do with mythology.
Take the Norse myths -- giants are evil. They are representations of all that is chaotic, terrible, and destructive in nature. They are evil incarnate. That is their function in stories -- easily identified allegories, not an actual race.

It's mythology. I think the main problem with "orcs are evil" comes from a severing of fantasy from its mythological roots -- and by that I mean not simply fantastical events dealing with supernatural entities and events -- but the very loss of inherent cultural and moral meaning in the stories themselves, the symbolic representataions of nature and being which have been utterly and unforgivably stripped from modern fantasy.

"Simulationism by habit" isn't just a thing that happens to gamers, it happens to all fiction readers, who want to "invent" the fantastical world as a place to explore, which exists without subtext as a seperate entity from the underlying story of which the events and beings are simply representational. Writers of fan-fiction are especially prone to this thinking. They're trying to codify an abstract painting, rather than seeing it as a symbolical representation.

So, when Gareth states he is bored by depictions of good vs. evil, I can only shrug and say, "Sure, real life isn't like that, but we're not talking about real life...we're talking about stories, which are symbols on top of the actual meaning. Allegorical representations of events and beliefs."

As such, it doesn't bother me much, because being "like real life" isn't their function -- "being people" isn't their function, either. Gaming itself appears to have lost this completely, and has led to poor fiction which does nothing more than strive "to tell a story" quite literally and with all the t's crossed and i's dotted, with nothing more to it than "guys, some of them funny-looking, go do stuff that sounds cool" and when examined is really bereft of any meaning or importance.

This is the role modern fantasy races have failed to grab...they're nothing more than cultures of people in funny hats existing in an allegorical vaccum in a story -- which, by nature, tend to need allegory to be good stories.

In this sense, orcs do exist to be slaughtered without pause by the heroes, because they are representations  of sadism, cruelty, crudeness, and wickedness -- they are a creature spiritually corrupted by dark forces seeking to dominate all under a reign of fire, blood, and enslavement of the will. They are vicious beings whose only nature is to do what they feel, kept in check by a will greater than their own to which they submit out of fear and weakness. They are representations of what a person, in the medium of a game through their character, must fight and overcome in themselves in order to become a hero.

[Scourge108]

There is a tendency in children of all races to be somewhat lighter in hair and complexion when very young.  It is obviously more prevalent in "toe-head" caucasian kids, and of course there are many, many glaring exceptions, but this is a general tendency.  As a result, light hair and complexion is associated with youth and harmlessness, while darker tones are seen as more mature.  This can be an attraction, such as the "tall, dark, and handsome" stereotype.  You want a big mature strong protector.  And statistical studies have shown that women prefer dark-haired men in general.  (Oddly, men are the opposite...they prefer light-haired, youthful, harmless women.  But that's a different post on a different forum).  But if it's a stranger, someone different, darkness is seen as dangerous and scary.  People feel more threatened by males with darker hair and skin, even if the same race.

Of course, there's also lots of social, political, and economic causes that contribute.  But we really don't need to get into all that here.  But I think a lot of politics is the result of people trying to rationalize misplaced instincts.

[contracycle]

I'm probably going to be labelled a racist for saying this, but, "damn straight."

Yes, here you go, <staple>.

I think there's some measure of racism in the full article (I've quoted only the relevant portions), but that last bit is nothing less than right on.

Some?  As is, it was NOT a relentless spewing of racist bile?  Just click Home and see the agenda, notably the article on 'immigration, unsafe at any speed?'.  Keeping America White is the overt message of this site, as exemplified by the credit to: 'Peter Brimelow, editor of VDARE.COM and author of the much-denounced Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster (Random House - 1995).'

Disaster?  A whole state built on immigration is a disaster?  Oooooookayyy...

And you can also see from the above why I grow less and less sympathetic to the cries of the "discriminated"? All these folks ever seem to do is tear down; they never build up. They focus on the negative for political, self-empowerment reasons which have nothing to do with the betterment of society, and more to do with finding "bad guys" to lynch, or at least holler about the "terrible, awful, wickedness" of.

So, how is this different from yuour own criticism?  Here they are identifying where things are done according to racist convention, and where not,. and approving the latter.  I say they are building up... but your argument is that they should stop, that you fail to sympathise... where are YOU building up, rather than venting about the terrible, awful wickedness of it?

That's why I bring it up as well...no matter how you look at these sorts of criticisms, there's no fix which doesn't leave someone discriminated against. It's all negative. There's nothing positive in "pointing out" supposed hidden racism in works of literature and film. The only viable solution is to act as though the racism doesn't exist...and viola, as the Tao even predicts, it's gone.

I'm afraid that rreall;y is totally, utterly ridiculous.  If you act as if racism doesn't exist.... it CARRIES ON.  You have given your tacit approval that theres nothing wrong, nothing to see here, you're perfectly cool with it.

Discussion of Tolkien snipped as irrlevant; if RPG and other literature stuck religiously to Tolkiens construction, I agree many analogies would not apply.  But it does not, and an analysis of the original inspiration has little to do with actual, later implementations.  While YOU may know that orcs are symbols of the working class, does that necessarily occur to a racist reader?

So, when Gareth states he is bored by depictions of good vs. evil, I can only shrug and say, "Sure, real life isn't like that, but we're not talking about real life...we're talking about stories, which are symbols on top of the actual meaning. Allegorical representations of events and beliefs."

Actually, we are talking about games.  But aside from that, yes I find them boring, and predictable, and lazy.  To each their own.

In this sense, orcs do exist to be slaughtered without pause by the heroes, because they are representations  of sadism, cruelty, crudeness, and wickedness -- they are a creature spiritually corrupted by dark forces seeking to dominate all under a reign of fire, blood, and enslavement of the will.

Fine.  Much the same could be said of the Alien... but the Alien fills its role as monster much more completely, much less ambiguously.  What is it that the Alien cannot do that the Orc can?

[Itse]

Itse wrote:

To me, the idea of treating orcs as more than the enemy or potential cannon fodder is somewhat anachronistic.

Doctor Xero wrote:

I disagree with your baseline assumption that anachronisms are intrinsically bad.

Well, not always bad but mostly bad, especially if not in any way recognized, IMO. I also wanted to point out that there's nothing intrinsically wrong about signpost badguys, which seems to be something that some people take as a given.

My "agenda" here was to encourage the idea that just because there's "stupid black evil brutes who you are expected to kill on sight" in the game doesn't mean there's something wrong with the game. Okay, it can be about poorly hidden racism and encourage violence as a solution, but it can also be a brilliant and deep and enlightening whole. It's not about what you have but how you use it. Political correctness can be seriously damaging to any art form, and personally, I don't give a shit about it.

[Doctor Xero]

I've been pondering this reply for quite some time, a couple weeks, in fact. I finally feel confident enough to post it, as I believe I've managed to get to the heart of the ideas I've raised or commented on elsewhere regarding these issues.
---snip!--
in the medium of a game through their character, must fight and overcome in themselves in order to become a hero.

Excellent points!  And exceptionally brave -- even heroic -- to post this, considering the voluble exciteability of the self-appointed thought guardians in these fora who, while few, are loud and "snarky".  (You and I both know there will be those posts condemning you, more often with kneejerk sarcastic quips than with logical rebuttal or any effort to engage you in intelligent discussion.)

I'd like to address one point about racism, however.

I mean, seriously, gnomes as Jews? Um...ok? I never saw that one coming. Folks writing this stuff are generally unaware of much of these items as issues (mostly because they're all semi-educated midwestern white males), and are just trying to create interesting "stuff" without ulterior meaning.

that's what I'm seeing a great deal of -- conincidental evidence of racism being decried as "the real thing," followed both by lots of expressed disappointment at its existance by some and distressed scowling and criticism by others, and lots of hand-wringing about what to do about it.

I think you're missing one crucial point :

Regardless of how something once affected its original audience, it may have a different effect upon its modern audience.

Therefore, even though there may be absolutely zero racism in the origin of the image of orcs, even if every legitimate scientific and scholarly inquiry proves that the image of orcs has no racist basis on even the most tangential level for its original audiences,
the average American in the year 2004 doesn't know these scientific and scholarly facts and was born long after those original audiences died off as individuals and, in some cases, as cultures.

So it is not completely untoward to worry about blackskinned orcs accidentally supporting modern racism against Blacks in the racially/politically charged United States, despite the origin of orcs  being racially innocuous.

Does the folkloric/mythological origin of gnomes have anything to do with the Jewish culture?  Not the origin, no.  Has the image been highjacked along the way by racists?  Quite possibly, as in the anti-Semitic image of the Gnomes of Zurich.

In a world in which the most dangerous racists are those who lack the inclination and likely lack the intellectual sophistication to investigate the historical and social roots of the orc and the gnome, their superficial association of orc slaughter with lynching and of gnome disrespectability with a legitimation of anti-Semitism is not an invalid concern.

It may not affect the majority of us who post on these fora, but we are also discussing designing games which might appeal to a far broader audience, and sometimes current responsibility trumps historical roots.

Doctor Xero

[Doctor Xero]

In this sense, orcs do exist to be slaughtered without pause by the heroes, because they are representations  of sadism, cruelty, crudeness, and wickedness -- they are a creature spiritually corrupted by dark forces seeking to dominate all under a reign of fire, blood, and enslavement of the will.

Yes!  This reminds me of one function of the monster (individual or race) in the faerie tale according to Bruno Bettelheim and in folklore/mythology in general according to Carl Jung -- as the shadow creature.

In the metaphor of myth and modern fantasy, in the act of rallying my folk to kill off our shadow folk, yes we are denotatively killing off another race, but since that other folk is simply our own shadow side, we are connotatively and allegorically killing off our own nasty, negative, dangerous side.  It is not unlike the trope of having the protagonist fight against a mirror image of herself or himself in which he or she combats and kills/absorbs/reconciles with the id, the shadow side, the negative side.

(For an easy modern pop culture example, look at the Kirk-vs.-Kirk events in the Star Trek episode in which id and superego were severed into two human bodies as the result of the transporter accident, with the only way to regain the adult function i.e. ego requiring these two sides re-merge, with the implication that the adult function or ego is the resulting matrix of superego and id -- heady stuff for a 1960s SF series which masqueraded as an innocuous adventure show!)

Political correctness can be seriously damaging to any art form, and personally, I don't give a shit about it.

YES!

Doctor Xero

[Henri]

Frex, my great undeveloped game world is a conventional fantasy version of the American Civil War (of freedom, between the states, etc etc), with african-orc slaves, native american elves, etc. etc. as a tool to talk about the implied racism of fantasy.
.

I had a similar idea of a game setting that was basically the American West circa 1850-1860, but with natives as elves, orcs as slaves (and sympathetic), dwarves as industrialists, and gnomes and bankers and businessmen.  Then I decided that the racism made me really uncomfortable and abandoned the idea.  

One thing that I like about races is that they let us tackle themes of race and discrimination, without having to make reference to real human races and, potentially, being discriminatory against those races.  Although we can draw connections between fantasy races and "real" races (actually I believe race is a social construct, but lets not go there), these links are not one-to-one, as the discussion in this forum shows.  Therefore by transporting a very sensitive theme like racial discrimination to a fantasy world, we make it safe.  

For example, as a white male, I would find it interesting to explore being an oppressed minority by playing a member of an oppressed fantasy race in a fantasy rpg and I would feel comfortable doing so.  However, I would feel significantly less comfortable playing an African American character in modern setting rpg.  I think that if I were to attempt the latter, the result would come off as racist, despite my best intentions.  But in the former I feel safe, because orcs aren't real.

[Doctor Xero]

actually I believe race is a social construct,

Agreed!

but lets not go there

AGREED!

I would find it interesting to explore being an oppressed minority by playing a member of an oppressed fantasy race in a fantasy rpg and I would feel comfortable doing so.  However, I would feel significantly less comfortable playing an African American character in modern setting rpg.  I think that if I were to attempt the latter, the result would come off as racist, despite my best intentions.  But in the former I feel safe, because orcs aren't real.

You remind me of a parallel.

Because I consider sexism to be both ethically absurd and biological fallacious, I have always run campaigns in which female and male characters have complete equality and are utterly indistinguishable outside procreative functions.  I had a female player who asked me to run a campaign in which women were victims of sexism and gender role oppression a bit more like the Medieval European perspective.  She told me that she wanted to play with being a victim of misogyny within a game so that she could experiment in ways she did not dare in our real world.  I had some difficulty at first running such a campaign, but I researched and figured out how to handle a sexist world without losing my lunch, and it turned out quite well -- particularly after she was transformed by a sex-change artifact (random roll but fortuitous one!) and ended up having to cope with misandry and gender role oppression as a male after having experienced misogyny and gender role oppression as a female!

Fantastical races in the right game master's hands can provide a chance to experiment, whether Narrativist or Simulationist, that can be most rewarding.

Doctor Xero

[greyorm]

I have no idea how to bring half of this back to the subject of gaming...but I'll try.

Some?  As is, it was NOT a relentless spewing of racist bile?

In the portions I quoted? Well, sure, there's plenty of racist bile in those bits, but it's all directed towards caucasians. Keep in mind, I'm not discussing the politics of the full article, especially because I do see racism in the site, just a few facts it presented, which I quoted -- but we find our gems where we may, and often in the roughest of places.

Thus, keep in mind that I'm quoting bits of the article, not the philosophy of the site it was hosted on, or the political agenda it was written to support. Facts are simply facts.

Note as well, I was given that article by an Astruar woman who was recently kicked off a mailing list for being too liberal, for challenging the list's racist beliefs and undertones. I'm guessing you would label her a racist as well, because she agrees with the overall content of the article? That this anti-white, "too Eurocentric" attitude is, in her words, the work of nutters?

I do note that you are completely unshocked and unfazed by the statements made in the article about caucasians depicted as heroes, or rather how these "anti-racists" believe white men deserve to be depicted as villians.

Are you saying that you agree with Miss Lewis, then? That caucasians are a villianous, imperious people fit only for the role of villians in film and literature, and should never be portrayed as the hero because (for some unexplainable reason) that's just wrong and terrible? That white people suck? That their culture has nothing of value?

I'm sorry, but that's racist, too, Gareth.

And I'm further sorry, but based on the very strong subtext that goes along with articles such as these, that seems to be the overriding opinion of modern equalitists. Where's all the ranting and incensed howling, the endless words devoted to racism that doesn't involve white men? I don't see one of these "watchdog" places complaining about how there's not enough white men in a Spike Lee movie, or in popular asian films like "Crouching Tiger."

Until then, they're hypocrites, pure and simple, waving (however intentionally or unintentionally) the flag of white men as the enemy and white, European culture as somehow corrupt. Because the undercurrent to all the "pointing out of bigotry" is that white men can never be the hero or the focus, because that's "racist" or not "multicultural" in every single instance it occurs.

And I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that multiculturalism meant "Everyone else's culture but mine."

Folks will boo and decry that all they want, but it's nothing more and nothing less than the truth.

Yet, here we are on a gaming board discussing how to handle it in gaming, and coming to no decent conclusions, because any non-human race depicted in any way insults someone somewhere; and gods forbid that white males be in any positions of authority in fictional worlds, because (apparently) that's just "reinforcing racism" rather than "being racism."

So, how is this different from yuour own criticism?  Here they are identifying where things are done according to racist convention, and where not,. and approving the latter.  I say they are building up... but your argument is that they should stop, that you fail to sympathise... where are YOU building up, rather than venting about the terrible, awful wickedness of it?

Gareth, how is gleeful enjoyment of the tearing apart and degredation of anyone white not racist? How is dissecting a classic piece of heroic literature, "an important, beautiful and entirely healthy movie, more or less faithfully based on an important, beautiful and entirely healthy book, which itself draws from some of the deepest springs of Western culture, the myths and folklore of Northern Europe, and tells an important, beautiful and entirely healthy story" not racist? How is that, in any way, "building up"?

It's completely trashing a people and culture according to their skin color; destroying an important work of fiction with deep spiritual meaning and heroic character for spurious and ultimately unconstructive reasons. Calling Tolkien's work racist, however subtly, because he specifically wrote a mythology for British Europeans to identify with, is the height of stupidity. Perhaps, Gareth, you'd like me to make Odin or Thor dark-skinned? Just change the whole mythology because it isn't "multicultural" enough? How about we make Jesus not a Jew any longer, since him being a white guy is not PC enough? Or him being a Jew is too controversial?

Where does it stop? What sorts of ridiculous hoops do we all need to jump through to satisfy these sorts of would-be "anti-racists"?

"Oh, look! Racism!" and then "Look, more!"...great, and..? There's always going to be "more"...you can find whatever you're looking for when you look hard enough. So, no, I don't buy for one minute that "identifying instances of racism" is getting anyone anywhere. Being more politically correct as an author or person is not the answer, because you can never be politically correct enough.

In cases like this, the problem doesn't lie in the work, but in the individual viewing it.

I'm afraid that rreall;y is totally, utterly ridiculous.  If you act as if racism doesn't exist.... it CARRIES ON.  You have given your tacit approval that theres nothing wrong, nothing to see here, you're perfectly cool with it.

As I said, if color doesn't matter, if what we look like doesn't matter, then it doesn't matter. You can't have it both ways. You can proclaim the evils of depictions based on skin color, and simply reinforce the prevalent attitudes that race actually does matter, or you can ignore race as irrelevant and treat it as such, thus making it so. You've obviously decided that it does matter, and are reacting to situations as though it does. That, to me, is the height of racism.

After all, if you act as though racism doesn't exist, how can it? If you aren't judging based on the color of a person's skin, if that thought is completely off your radar, then how can there be racism? There can't be. It dies a forgotten death because nobody pays attention to or reacts according to such details.

I was brought up this way. My father always told me that what a person looked like didn't matter, what color their skin was was unimportant. I had no clue what he was even talking about until high school, when I was first exposed to racism.

Yeah, naive of me. But frankly, never having been immersed in a home culture where a person's skin color was important, I never paid it any mind. Call me racist if you want, Gareth, but I'm the one who doesn't see skin color. I don't see racism in the Phantom Menace, in drow and orcs, in gnomes, and so forth.

I'm living proof that acting as though skin color isn't important, actually means it isn't. If you want to keep hollering about how it is, while saying it doesn't matter, and we're all people, fine. I don't see that's going to do anything but reinforce the idea that it does matter.

Like I said, the Tao supports this idea fully -- that problems are often created and sustained by their regulation. Consider the situation of sex crimes...if sex isn't considered a dirty thing, the number of sex crimes which actually occur (according to our definition of such) in that culture goes down considerably. Not "they aren't reported" or "they aren't considered such" but "they don't happen," literally. Ignoring the issue (not the problem) causes it to vanish.

As I said, the problem is internal in cases like these.

While YOU may know that orcs are symbols of the working class, does that necessarily occur to a racist reader?

You reacted pretty strongly to what I wrote. Please read what I wrote, though: I did not say orcs are the working class...I made that distinction from such quite clear. Orcs are the masses -- when a group of people act as a group with vulgar, crude, base behavior, when they become a mob, and especially when they are guided by a will other than their own. Could be aristocrats, the wealthy, the poor, the middle-class, the unemployed, workers, blue-collar, white-collar, anyone.

That you've conflated "masses" with "working class," or "uneducated masses" with "working class" is no reflection on my view of the orc. That said, your following question makes my point for me. "Does it occur to a racist reader?"

Exactly. If orcs are X, but not to a racist reader, it must all be perception, meaning that orcs don't mean anything, and the true responsibility for "racism" lies solely in the lap of the individual, not in the film, literature, or other media in which it is supposedly portrayed or reinforced.

After all, if this guy here doesn't see it, and he over there does, then does it really exist? Or is the perception solely an internal event? Meaning that the individual is predisposed to see racism, and the racist thoughts are their own? How else to rationally explain such an event, where overt and blindingly obvious discrimination (as defined in my post on the recent thread about feminism) is not occuring?

So what does all the above have to do with gaming?

One can write fiction whose elements in one of two modes: allegorical, or simulatory. The former can be disguised as the latter, and often is in good fiction, but the allegory is still easily retrievable with discernment on the part of the reader. Much of the above problem is caused when these two items become muddled (often), usually for political reasons, and allegorical representations are instead created to be, and/or accepted as, simulation.

There is confusion of "what it looks like" with "what it represents" or "what it means."

To avoid this unintentionally, the author or game group must know what they are doing, avoiding this conflict and settling on whether perception is meant as-is, or perception is just a cloak over the real thing.

But as Xero brings up, an outsider may confuse the two items, despite historical roots, despite best intentions of the author -- and it is an unfortunate and common event!

The author or game group can do nothing about this, n o t h i n g, though countless words and criticisms will be expended in chastizing them for "doing it." So what's the author, whether of fiction or game setting, to do when there's nothing he can do?

What I'm doing is calling for greater education of the difference, so as to avoid the nonsense created by those who fail to seperate the allegory from the simulation, or confuse the simulation FOR the allegory. The only way I see to do that is to affect a change in mass culture and thought patterns via education as to the difference.

And that sucks as an answer, because it is untterly beyond your control as an author/creator/individual, but it's the only workable one in existance, because you can't avoid a problem you have no control over -- another person's reaction or internal state.

All you can do is do what you're going to do.

Does that mean I'm supporting racism? Just "be racist...it's ok"?
No, there's a huge difference between ignoring race, and racism. Because your internal attitude is the only thing you have control over, and over whether or not you're being racist -- so you have to do what you're going to do, and if other people accuse you of racism despite this, all you can do is shrug and say, "I'm sorry you see it that way."

EDIT:

It may not affect the majority of us who post on these fora, but we are also discussing designing games which might appeal to a far broader audience, and sometimes current responsibility trumps historical roots.

I agree about the nature of our responsibility as creators. So here's the question you have to ask yourself: where, as individuals or as authors, does our responsibility for the choices or behaviors of other people begin and end?

[greyorm]

Xero...about orcs: Damn right! You've written exactly what I typed out this morning as my response to Gareth about the difference between Alien and the Orc, but I'll post my wording of the same nonetheless.

Discussion of Tolkien snipped as irrlevant;

If it was irrelevant, I wouldn't have brought it up. Its discussion formed support and required definitions for the point about the mythological, regarding the allegorical function of fictional elements within a narrative structure -- including gaming.

Actually, we are talking about games.

Yes..? And that's what I was talking about, too, you'll note. Orcs, gaming, allegorical representations, better ways to create play utilizing such elements? That was pretty much the focus of my post to which everything else was but supporting premise. So I'm not sure what you're getting at with "actually...etc"?

Fine.  Much the same could be said of the Alien... but the Alien fills its role as monster much more completely, much less ambiguously.  What is it that the Alien cannot do that the Orc can?

The Orc is human, or vaguely so, representing human corruption, rather than a thing or threat from outside which must be survived against. The Orc is a mirror of the dark portion of the human soul, and thus it is not an external threat, but an internal one. The Alien is, by nature, an outsider, an outside force or entity, which seeks to destroy the hero or the hero's culture. The Alien cannot function in the role of the Orc, because it cannot be us.

[Doctor Xero]

I appreciate everyone's input in this thread which I had begun.

I would like to ask people to leave the question of whether or not there is an overt or unconscious racism in fantastical races alone for a while (or begin a new thread).

I'm more interested in why[/b] so many of us enjoy having culturally-monolithic fantastical races in our gaming experiences -- what functions the inclusion of races fulfill in terms of narrative, player identification, thematic/metaphoric concern, suspension of disbelief, fidelity to the fantastical genres in literature and/or film, the inclinations of human nature in general, etc.

Might we focus more on the why than on the whether in this thread?  (There's another thread on fantastical races which is more involved in whether they ought be included at all.)

Doctor Xero