Let's Do This Now

[simon_hibbs]

Obviously your non-gender examples were rhetorical questions, but actualy I think there is value in examining them because the way you phrased the questions was so open to interpretation.

Is it racist to acknowledge that aboriginals show consistent differences in I.Q. score compared to caucasian Australians?

No because it's true as a whole. However it would be racist to say that aboriginals are less inteligent than caucasians, because it's been shown that the formal IQ tests have deeply ingrained cultural biases in the forms of inteligence and kinds of problems they test. If you wrote a game with a stat called IQ and defined it as IQ as defined by the IQ tests, gave Aboriginal characters penalties on their IQ stats, then used it for tests involving tasks outside the areas of ability tested by IQ, that would betray a bias against aboriginals by the game designer.

If you wanted to model this, you'd need another inteligence attribute of some type that took into account those mental tasks at which aboriginals do better than caucasians on average. Also the differentiating factor should be based on culture not race, since aboriginals raised in 'western' cultures from birth do not have a lower average IQ. If my character concept was of an Aboriginal raised as his son by a university professor I'd be pretty pissed if you hit my character with a stiff IQ cap because the character is aboriginal.

Is it racist to acknowledge that there is a correlation between dark skin and polygany?

No, of course not, but it would be biased to assign any meaning to that correlation since the two factors are in fact orthogonal (there's no causative relationship). Game mechanics that enforced such a correlation would therefore be unfairly biased.

Why is it not sexist to acknowledge that men are taller than women? Why? Because EVERYBODY agrees. Why don't I stick this in my game? Because you can't change it, so you can't explore it, so it serves no function except to enhance scores

Yes, so you just factor that directly into the scores if you want to. Not that height correlates very well to strength, for example.

Now, what the fuck is "sexist"? What does this word mean? dictionary.com gives two definitions:
"Discrimination based on gender, especially discrimination against women."
Firstly, I love that last part. It implies that the reverse is less common. Hilarious. Especially hilarious because such an implication is inherently sexist according to the next definition: (!!!)

In the english language (some other languages such as French differ in this), dictionary defenitions are based on the language as it is used. They document use of the langauge, but do not attempt to define how it should be used. So yes it is sexist to some extent, but it's also accurate because most of the time when people say 'sexist' they mean sexist against women but don't bother to qualify the statement. You could argue that this means english language cultures are sexist because of this, but you can't blame the dictionary for simply documenting common usage.

To say to someone "you cannot lift this because you are a women" is sexist. To say "you cannot lift this because you are not strong enough" is not. Not even if the reason they are not strong enough is their gender. This is logic, it'll help you.

There can be many reasons why a person might be as strong as they are, one of which is gender. Singling gender out arbitrarily in a particular case and saying 'this is the reason' would require some justification. For example it might be justifiable for identical twins that only differ in gender and were otherwise raised in the same way. However for a random person there could be many factors.

To get right down to the point though, your character generation system is going to be used to generate small groups of characters, sometimes and perhaps often of mixed gender. If we were to randomly select people from the population, most often the strongest characters in the sample would be men but sometimes, on occasion the strongest character will be a woman. You want character generation rules that simulate this so that most often characters will be generated so that the strongest characters will be men.

That's fine logic so far as it goes, but of course the characters aren't being chosen randomly. They're being created by players who get to choose their character concept completely arbitrarily. It would be entirely reasonable for a particular group to generate a bunch of male scholars and merchants accompanied by a female warrior. Not a typical bunch of people, but a perfectly valid group to generate. We're not interested in the question 'of a random sample of people, hom many women would make good warriors'. We're interested in the question 'of the women who do want to be warriors, how many are up to the job'.

Looking at the rules as they are, it seems to me that they make female warrior characters pretty much unplayable because there's such a large difference between male and female max strengths (28%) and strength is so important for that activity. Obviously I've never played the game so my analysis in this can only be speculative. I think if it was a small factor of one or two points most people wouldn't be bothered by it, but the handicap is so great it may be a character concept killer. Your answer to the question of how many women are up to the job appears to be 'none'. I may be wrong, and if I am please do say so since obviously you know the system much better than I.

Best regards,


Simon Hibbs