Real life atrocities?

[taalyn]

I'm wondering what the general thought is on incorporating real world nastiness into game history. For example, does anyone have strong thoughts or feelings about incorporating 9/11 into a world history, in game? Is this a bad idea, at least until it's faded into history (e.g. 20 years)? If I do so, would it affect my sales? Ideas? Comments?

Aidan

[lumpley]

This is one of those "why does it matter what we think?" issues.  Write your game the way you want it.

But no.  Anybody who says we game designers should just categorically avoid mentioning 9-11-01 gets my vote for mayor of Wrongsville.

-Vincent
Registered voter, Wrongsville

[Brian Leybourne]

So.. you think it would be wrong to mention a tragedy where 3000 people died, but that it's OK to refer to events such as the purge of Jews in Nazi Germany where six MILLION people died?

That's a strange set of priorities you have there.

I think that it's OK to use ANY historical events in a game. Most people are mature enough to handle it. You may get a few people who knew people who died on 9/11 say, who wouldn't read your work because they're offended, but you're probably just as likely to have children or grandchildren of Jewish survivors of Nazi Germany who wouldn't read your work either.

Brian.

[taalyn]

The issue isn't about how many poeple were killed, or how atrocious the atrocity, but about how fresh the wound.

Also, I'm not asking from a "should I or not" perspective, but rather from a "what are thoughts on the issue" POV. I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do ( as you rightly suggest, lumpley!),  but I was curious what people had to say about the issue.

Aidan

[Matt Wilson]

Aidan:

Thoughts would be easier if I knew more about your why/why not dilemma. Is it a question of either including it in a timeline or having it never happen in your world? Or is it something more than that?

What are your worries? That people might not want the sad reminder? Is there a political tie-in?

[taalyn]

Suppose that all of the major atrocities are retooled, given new explanations, because in the game, they were actually caused by other forces than what we accept in RL. Hitler was a vampire, AIDS is a magical effect created by Fundies, 9/11 was arranged by anti-human forces, and the murder of EarthFirst founder Judy (B something - I forget her name) was engineered to same humanity from her grand plans for our extinction.

The question is whether it is possible to go too far and alienate everyone (or a large number of people), and if so, where is that. If the numbers killed were huge? If they're minority groups? If it's a significant source of pride and mourning for a nation? If it turns a hero into a monster?

My worries: objections and outspoken disavowal of the designer. "I can't believe anyone would do that - what an a-hole!"

Is a explanation that I don't think Judy B. was a bad person, and that I'm not dishonoring the dead of X event enough? How do you deal with these issues?

I know some people will get upset no matter what - they're free to have that opinion, just as I'm free to think they're simplistic morons, but I'd rather avoid huge numbers of people upset at me.

Think of it like this - if all African Americans were portrayed in the game as sorcerers wielding demonic magic to destroy Whitey - is this a step too far, and why?

Or perhaps I'm just unduly influenced by college-aged liberals - I run a coffee-shop, and hear about these things every day, see, so...

Aidan

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Question: Does this have anything to do with RPG Theory? Tangentially, yes...but (and forgive me for saying so), this is a question for RPG.net, not the Forge.

- J

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi all,

Jared is right.

To answer the question: There's no way to know until someone published something and you see how the world reacts. After that, it's just opinion, speculation and hersey.  

Whether not not such a topic belongs on RPG.net (and it certainly seems the sort of thing to fly for 9+ pages over there), it's simply not a Forge thread.  It's *too* open-ended, too lacking any concrete means of proving progress through a discussion.

Neither Jared nor myself are in a position to shut a thread down, but Aiden, I'd suggest calling the thread over.  It's already heading down a slippery slope.

Take care,
Christopher

[deadpanbob]

Obviously the moderators would have to say for sure, but I disagree with both of the previous two posters.  

This question may not be appropriate for the RPG Theory Forum on the Forge, but if Adain is asking this about a specific game he's designing, it could belong in the Indie Game Design forum - although I'd suggest that we would need more information and a more focused question related specifically to the game in order to respond.

It could also fit into the Publishing forum here, again presuming that this issue is related to the publication of indepentent RPG material in so far as this issue might affect the format, content and audience for such material.

In terms of the topic at hand - my best advice when making such whole-cloth revisions to accepted history for a game's background is to be totally up front about it in the introduction.  Take a look at the "Disclaimer" in the first section of Exalted, where they go to great lengths to point out that their game isn't really the secret history of the world.

The only thing that you'll have to keep in mind is that the more radical and politically incorrect your game backdrop/history re-writting is, the smaller your audience is going to be.  Depending on how far you take it, you could even engender protests, hatemail and the like from certain segments of the RPG target audience.

So, Adain, can you focus the question more for us in terms of an actual game design?  Put another way, what's the point of making such changes aside from just trying to be provocative?

Cheers,


Jason

[taalyn]

Perhaps it should be moved elsewhere - publishing or indie. I put it here because I thought it could be an issue within design in general, not just my game - apparently I'm wrong in that. I'm also coming to realize that these sorts of questions I keep coming up with a simply better discussed in person or with a small number of people. Either my phraseology (likely) or the people here (unlikely) aren't conducive to the discussions I keep trying to start.

The point of such changes is to provide in-game context to real-world events, obviously useful only if the game has some connection with reality. The events chosen are chosen not because they're provocative, but because they are important and/or significant. They have affected reality greatly, and if the nature of reality is, in game, affected by other things not normally accounted for (magic, aliens, the Illuminati), then theoretically one would want these other factors accounted for in history. How do aliens and the Black Plague relate to each other, if it all? Did they introduce the virus in an attempt to eradicate humanity, so they could colonize? Is the Illuminati manipulating terrorist organizations to produce useful effects (for them) on the economy? Are ecoterrorism and magic closely related somehow?

The question is, I guess, about the degree of relation between reality and the game world - how far to go, does it provide opportunity for immersive gameplay, support a particular GNS mode, or otherwise influence the how of game design. This is why I thought it was a theory issue.

I'm happy to drop the thread altogether if people don't find it useful, interesting, or apporpriate.

Aidan

[clehrich]

I'm just going to assume that the moderators will move the thread to the appropriate forum when and if they choose to do so; in the meantime, I'll respond to it here, because that's where it is.

Let me see if I understand you correctly, Aidan.  You're talking about a game in which a kind of X-Files like interpretation of major world events is a significant part of the experience.  This could be Unknown Armies, but it could also be Call of Cthulhu, or lots of others; the point is that in the particular setting you're imagining (or designing?), part of the force and power of these events and theories rests upon the fact that these major world events are not pure fiction, but absolutely real, and some of them are open wounds in the players' psyches.  For example, as the players investigate this vast alien conspiracy cover-up thingy, it turns out that the 9/11 Pentagon strike was not Osama's plot at all; the CIA knew about the 9/11 plot a few days in advance and decided to make use of it to cover something up by having certain files and specimens destroyed in a crash at the Pentagon (of course, they also considered that the end of the WTC and all those people was less important than the cover-up).  Now this sort of thing is intended to shock the players in a way that a hypothetical plane being hijacked, or a hypothetical building catching fire, is not.

Now if I have this straight, you're asking:

1. Is this appropriate, politically?
No answer to this; I'm with Vincent.  Depends on the players.  I'd be real careful about publishing it, though; the current public climate is not good for this sort of thing.  Kind of like making jokes at the airport, you know?

2. Is this worth doing?
I think the question is whether a heavy load of shock is valuable for your game, and whether there's any chance of going Much Too Far.  I mean, are you 100% sure that none of your players lost anybody on 9/11?  Or spent 24 hours thinking he had?

3. Can this be reasonably done?
Well, bear in mind that when Frederick Forsythe blurred historico-political modern (then) reality with extremely violent fiction, lots of people felt it had never been done before, and they thought that it made his work The Day of the Jackal far, far more powerful and gripping as a thriller.  So theoretically, yes, it can be done.  But I don't think I'd start with 9/11, personally.  Here's the kind of sicko I am: I'd start with the Oklahoma City bombing instead.  And a few really big famous plane crashes.  And maybe Exxon Valdez.

The issue here, I think, is really that you're blurring player and character, because you're using player shock to drive character intensity.  I like this, personally; I think the claim that we can or do keep these separate is a load, and it numbs us as players.  But there is a real danger in that blurring.  If you offend someone a little bit by having a really gross scene, oh well.  If you offend someone a whole hell of a lot by appearing to make light of the way his mother died, it's kind of a different thing.  

Where's the line?  That's like asking whether it's appropriate to make art about the Holocaust.  Of course it is; as my poet friend Tino Villanueve (big gun Latino poet; look him up) said, "No poet can visit Auschwitz and not write a poem about it."  The question is whether you're making art or making light, if you see what I mean.  And frankly, very few people take RPGs so seriously, or sufficiently as art, that they're going to accept Holocaust: The RPG as in any way appropriate.

I'm game to debate this endlessly.  I think it's really one of the most important debates we could ever have, because it can shake out a great deal of what gaming is really about, and what its potential is, and whether people really mean what they say when they talk about it as an art form.  Shall we see whether anyone else wants to take it on?

[Bob McNamee]

If I were designing this game, I would hit a variety of known events, but avoid most of the charged ones, as well as some of the most well known ones.

If it were me, I would just provide enough examples to let local GMs get the types of ideas, and styles of conspiracy, that the game is suppossed to be about. I'd leave whether to tie in 9/11 trade center, Kennedy assassination, or what have you, up to local GMs and group.

This game canon-lite philosophy also has the benefit of keeping Conspiracies more mysterious, since Players can't just buy the same game and know all the secrets.

[clehrich]

If I were designing this game, I would hit a variety of known events, but avoid most of the charged ones, as well as some of the most well known ones. ... This same canon-lite philosophy also has the benefit of keeping Conspiracies more mysterious, since Players can't just buy the same game and know all the secrets.

Yes, a good point: it's very important to distinguish between describing Known Fact Background in a published game and setting some stuff up for your own campaign with your friends.  Unknown Armies tries to have it both ways, by having a huge list of rumors, but not saying either what they mean or whether they're true.  At the same time, they blow it by having a pretty silly background Real Story that undermines the whole thing.

Flipping it around, I would in any case agree with handling "a variety of known events, but avoid[ing] ... some of the most well known ones."  I'm not too concerned about whether the events are charged, but there's a big danger here, aesthetically.

Suppose 9/11, the Holocaust, the Kennedy Assassination, the Hindenberg, and the Black Death were all caused by the Illuminati?  Suppose, in fact, that every really famous big tragedy were caused by the Illuminati?  Instead of adding meaning to tragedy, you've emptied it all out.  Suppose, on the other hand, that the PCs are tooling along, happily finding grand X-Files conspiracies, and they bump into the Kennedy Assassination.  And then, after months and months, they find out the real answer: lone gunman, total nutcase, bang.  No meaning, no reason, no nothing.  Isn't that cooler than, "Oh yeah, here we go again, it's all aliens..."?  You can't lose track of the horrible pointlessness of mass deaths and public tragedies.  If you do, then the whole exercise really does start to border on the immoral, IMO.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Here's my call. The designer of an RPG which brings in real-world issues of some emotional weight is in precisely the same situation as a film producer or director, a book publisher or an author, or a song producer or writer who is doing the same thing.

Same issues. Same design concerns. Same marketing & publishing concerns. And therefore, the same range of options and risks.

Aidan, on a more general note, I think the problem you're running into is that you're asking for opinions. Opinions, bluntly, are worthless in the discourse arena (as opposed to acknowledged judgments and personal solutions, both of which are worthwhile) - and both the somewhat strained attempts to answer your inquiry and the discomfort you're seeing with the whole endeavor come from that understanding.

Best,
Ron

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi,

I'd follow up and say that clehrih opend up the discussion into an interesting area: How much do you design a game to fuck with the actual players?  That brings up issues of social contract, mechanics, and more.

I playtested the original V:tM rules back when it was a manuscript.  Tom Dowd was the GM.  We went through the session of...  What was it called, the Embrace?  And it was all about Tom trying to make us feel really, really bad when we went through it. Icky, rape kind of stuff.  During the playtest discussion I asked Tom about this and he said, "That's the way it's supposed to be from what the manuscript says.  In fact, it suggests the players play themselves in the game world.  In one playtest group a girl was crying, and the whole group, including the girl, considered it a success."  (Clearly, the game line ended up going down a more fun, gun-toting route.)

The connection is, how much does a designer set up a game to touch players on a real life, this actually cuts to the core level of life.  Whether its terrorist attacks or killing the wife of a player character with the player's wife was killed, is there any design advantage to this.  How do you do it.  And so on.

I don't have any real desire to go down this road, myself. But, like clehrich, I see it as a way of shaping the discussion so that it might work as a thread.

-- Christopher