sex, drugs, politics, religion, bigotry, childhood pain

[Doctor Xero]

Reading Ron Edwards' links to the Famous Five, particularly the discussion on
parallels between how gamer culture relates to mainstream and how gay culture
relates to mainstream, made me curious.

Keeping in mind that games are designed to appeal to potential players but not
necessarily to all possible players, and that this is a hobby more than a tool for
propaganda, and the balance between accuracy and escapism/fun:

What considerations do you take when it comes to such modern controversies
as sexuality (gay, str8, bi, etc.), gender (female, male, etc.), recreational use of
drugs (evil? good? neutral act?), political systems and patriotism vs. nationalism
(particularly relevant in this day and age), religion in RPGs (avoiding offending
sensitive Christians or sticking to historical fact even when it might offend sensitive
Christians, etc.), realistic presentation of bigotry or ideal world with no bigotry,
accurate presentations of wife or husband abuse and child abuse (as in *Little
Fears*), and so forth?

For example, I recall a controversy a number of years ago when some RPG gave
all female PCs automatic penalties to their strength scores.  I remember a similar
controversy when some RPG listed homosexuality and feminism as possible
psychoses in its madness tables.  And who can read *Little Fears* without a
shudder?

Doctor Xero

[clehrich]

I've got a honking big essay which will soon appear in the articles section which addresses some of this.  I think that RPG's have the power to effect real analytical and emotional consideration of such issues, although I think we need to go a lot farther.  I'd love to see, for example, some more explicitly political games, feminist games most especially.  I think Jonathan Walton's column will soon be doing feminism and gaming, as well.

Of course one has to be wary of causing offense, but I think making players deeply uncomfortable can be a good thing; it's just a very, very fine line.

Chris Lehrich

[Lorenzo Rubbo-Ferraro]

You may find this post of interest, from Ed, who found the encumberance rules in TROS regarding peoples weight, offensive:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=7322

[contracycle]

I think, system is essentially a view - hopefully coherent - of how the world works or at least can be described as working (having a legitimacy rather like that of impressionism).  I think all of these therefore exhobit the authors opinions on all of the above topics; I don't think the writer of an RPG is any more capable od distancing themselves from their own analysis and ideology than anyone else.

I could give capsule statements on any of the above queries, but they would be largely useless.  You'll either agree with me during the discussion, or you will not, just as you would have found game I wrote convincing, or not.

[jhawkins]

I find this topic very provocative.

Think about a game like The Puddle where characters are defined for rules purposes by a list of traits. What traits can I write in?

Can I write "black" or "feminist" or "gay"? How about "bigotted" or "child abuser"?

OK, traits don't depict the whole character; traits are just the way in which your character can effect how in-game situations get resolved.

So, if I'm playing a gay character who does not have the trait "gay" written in, then I guess he just happens to be gay. Now what do I do when a female from the opposition tries to seduce him?

I don't think traits are simply about how the character differs from what is normal, since that pre-supposes that there is such a thing.


On the point of offensiveness, suppose I handed somebody at a convention a character sheet with the trait "child abuser" written in, and that player had been abused as a child. I think they'd be offended.

I can offer a two-fold defence aginst being offensive. Firstly, tell people what they're getting. If I tell you we're playing a game where the characters are a Roman Catholic priest, an angel and a devil and you take your religion seriously you probably won't play. Secondly, write the character from its own point of view. As an atheist I'd quite happily write "delusional" against the above RC priest. But how does the priest see himself? As "traditional" maybe, or "strong in faith" perhaps.


It'd be nice to think that role-playing could be an opportunity to analyse our own prejudices, instead of articulating them in rules-form.

Cheers, Jim

[Doctor Xero]

Well, here are a few examples of problems that can crop up in this regard.

I had one player who was highly offended when I refused to give penalties
to female characters in their muscular statistics.  He insisted that I was
foisting "feminist propaganda" upon him by declaring in game that men and
women could be equally strong.  It became a fairly loud problem for that
game, to the point that I presented some scientific findings to support my
contention that men and women of the same size with the same history of
physical exercise and training could be equally strong -- and when I showed
him research articles, he became livid, as though I had betrayed him by
bringing in outside research to the argument.  Since I was the only G.M. in the
group, he eventually backed down, but for the rest of the campaign he would
grouse that in my campaign world human females were biologically different
from "the real world".

At the same time, he was right: I ~was~ operating off my personal understanding
of human biology and its relation to gender, and I was operating off a personal
understanding which clashed with his.

I had one player claim I was disgusting him and ruining gaming for him when
I ran a game with several gay/bisexual PC/NPC heroes.  He told me he wouldn't
mind if there were gay villains or sexy lesbian villainesses to rehabilitate . . .

(I concede that, in this case, I was trying to loosen sexuality stereotypes of
some of my players.  I had a similar experience with a player who was
outraged when a hero turned out to be dating a woman of a different race.)

I think most of us can come up with his/her own anecdote about player
quarrels over political systems.

Religion can be a particularly contentious issue in a game set in modern day
real life, no matter how fantastical.  If a PC prays, will his/her prayer be answered
in some subtle fashion?  I remember one atheist player who told me I ruined
suspension of disbelief for him when a PC's prayers seemed to have some
influence in the gameworld.  (He was a big fan of vampire games in which
vampire PCs merrily chomped down on helpless priests waving crucifixes and
holy water.)  Once a PC prays, great subtlety is required to avoid declaring
whether or not there is an interactive God who heeds prayers.

It's sort of like the controversy dealt with (often crudely) in the superhero
comic book *The Authority* -- if we aren't changing the world, are we still part
of the problem?  Is this art or is it shared onanism?

Yes, this is not just an RPG issue, it's an art issue in general, whether literature
or painting or sculpting or whatever.  (I've recently read about the tremendous
controversies over the nudity in the Sistine Chapel, a reminder how very
much this is not a new issue.)

Doctor Xero

[DevP]

I had one player claim I was disgusting him and ruining gaming for him when I ran a game with several gay/bisexual PC/NPC heroes.  He told me he wouldn't mind if there were gay villains or sexy lesbian villainesses to rehabilitate . . .

(I concede that, in this case, I was trying to loosen sexuality stereotypes of some of my players.  I had a similar experience with a player who was outraged when a hero turned out to be dating a woman of a different race.)

First, my personal reaction, Dev-as-Dev: wow. But then again, my "upbringing" is very socially libertarian, so I probably wouldn't expect to have friends with these biases. (My best friends still have plenty of others, like politics, but yeah, that's striking me hard.) If nothing else, I'm glad that you're trying to jar people's sensibilities a bit.

Secondly, Dev-as-gamer/designer: you can't avoid some sorts of choices in these controvertial areas when you're putting together a game. When it comes down to these categories, I come to the following actions:

Come to Consensus, Play in our Dream World. My friends see no controversey on straight/bi/etc stuff, so we don't play it that way either. I try to overcome my heteronormative tendencies and make gender/sex/race as transparent and uninteresting as possible. (So it's not "ze Hott Lesbian Temptress" but just another bickering couple on the boat.) I love sci-fi and spec-fic for basically enabling this.

Slightly differently, if we all feel that Banning Drugs Is Silly, then we may agree to point fun at this - the Bad Worlds ban drugs, the rest of the world doesn't care.

We Love To Argue. My group loves to argue politics, at least in some form or other. Therefore, rampant political content, because that's something we dig into.

Just Not Cool. Me personally, I don't enjoy too much story that involves sexual aggression, especially as a plot device. That's basically my veto (and anyone else has that same power).

So what's going on? We figure out our boundaries are our fantasies explicitly, and enable both; then within that space, go full hilt with the topic we are eager to argue about, that we find meaty, that will spur the major gameplay. Of course, this is all of a single-group; it scales up to design, but I'll need to take a rest of it for now.

A paraphrse from Eric Katz, and NYU philsopher (and a guest at VeriCon!): "Science fiction is the literature of philosophy." I'd include good RPG design under potentially specualitve fiction, and ther's a lot of potential in our art.

[clehrich]

I admit it, the examples from Doctor Xero shock me personally.  I'm horrified that these things came up this way:

I had one player who was highly offended when I refused to give penalties to female characters in their muscular statistics.  He insisted that I was foisting "feminist propaganda" upon him by declaring in game that men and women could be equally strong.

And

I had one player claim I was disgusting him and ruining gaming for him when I ran a game with several gay/bisexual PC/NPC heroes.  He told me he wouldn't mind if there were gay villains or sexy lesbian villainesses to rehabilitate . . .

Sounds like this player would find Diamonds are Forever and Goldfinger demonstrations of good family values.

I had a similar experience with a player who was outraged when a hero turned out to be dating a woman of a different race.

What did this player think of Uhura and Kirk kissing?

I remember one atheist player who told me I ruined suspension of disbelief for him when a PC's prayers seemed to have some influence in the gameworld.

Ah yes, the old "all religion is untrue and a crutch for the weak" sort of nonsense.

All of these seem to point to quite the reverse of what the players claim.  It's not that the players are bothered by "suspension of disbelief," but by the fact that they have not in fact suspended their own prejudices.  In fact, they have simply brought their personal ideologies to the table and demanded that any universe, however fantastic, must meet their agendas.

The question, for me at least, is whether one wants to try challenging these players on such grounds, and if so why.  I think of old Star Trek, with its first interracial kiss on TV, and so forth.  One value of RPG's, like sci-fi and fantasy, is that they can present challenges to such deep-rooted assumptions and beliefs in a relatively non-threatening manner; the idea is that since "it's only a fantasy," we can react to these things dispassionately, and as a result perhaps come to recognize that the reasons we are so bothered by them in the real world come from unanalyzed and unconsidered assumptions and prejudices.

But if you have players who will take deep offense because a character is gay, or there is a biracial couple, or religion can have validity, there may be no point in challenging them on such grounds.  It's just not worth it.

I have played in a few games with a lesbian, Wiccan couple who have very strong opinions about lots of things, and they cannot be dissuaded.  In essence:

[*]All male characters are probably misogynists;
[*]All organized religion is oppressive and misogynistic;
[*]All heterosexual marriages oppress the female partner;
[*]All application of authority to enforce rules is bad.[/list:u]We tried to push on this last by having what amounted to a UN of galactic peoples require non-governmental trading vessels register any significant offensive weapons, or not carry them at all.  These two responded essentially by saying that people should be free to do whatever they want, and the governments are evil to try to stop them; they demanded that we fight this assertion of vicious authority.  When we pointed out that this was a very NRA position, they took offense and more or less refused to go on.

My conclusion is that while pushing the envelopes of prior beliefs is a worthy endeavor, and for me one of the most important aspects of gaming as a social practice, there are some people for whom the very "fantasy" nature of it means that they don't have to think deeply about anything and shouldn't be asked to do so.  With players like this, I think any sort of moral Premise work (defined very broadly) is simply not worth the trouble.

In this instance, I concluded that these players weren't worth the trouble, actually, and haven't spoken to them in a year or so, but that's because I'm basically not very tolerant of people who won't examine their beliefs dispassionately.

[edited to add something I forgot]
At the same time, I think that with players who will examine things, stuff like sexual aggression can be very powerful and worthwhile.  So long as everyone is on-board with the agony of such a situation, this is a great opportunity to explore something that we hope will never actually arise in anyone's actual life.  If someone in the group has experienced anything like rape, however, you'd better be quick to drop it like a hot potato if that player decides he or she does not want to investigate this.

Chris Lehrich

[contracycle]

Well, the problem with the above is that depending on the readers personal opinions, the side of the debate that appears fixed varies.

I could just as easily argue that your inability to be dissuaded of the neutral or even potentially positive implications of the exercise of authority are just as dogmatic as you perceive their rejection of the concept to be.  It all depends on which position I find prima facie convincing.

[Doctor Xero]

I think this points out the concern with which I grapple when it comes to
controversies and RPG design (or campaign design).

Assuming that sexual/romantic interaction is relevant to the system :

If I design a game system in which same-sex romance or sexuality is a norm,
I limit my appeal to people who are lesbigay, gay-friendly, or open-minded
about such things.

If I design a game system in which same-sex romance or sexuality is an
incontrovertible taboo -- a sin, an illness, a social faux pas, whatever -- I
limit my appeal to those people who hold such beliefs/opinions.

(I also end up indulging a belief/opinion I personally consider prejudiced
and waste an opportunity to challenge attitudes about sexuality and romantic
interests.  How's that for revealing in this forum my own attitudes/biases on
this matter?)

If I take the safe route and design a game system in which I avoid all issues
of sexuality (nothing encouraging nor condemning homosexual or heterosexual
behavior of any sort), I run the risk of bland pablum in my game.

When to challenge, knowing it may ruin marketability or it may turn out to be
needlessly rude and gratuitiously controversial, and when to avoid any sort
of challenge, knowing it may forfeit an opportunity to make my game more
than mindless escapism . . .   All I am certain about is that the wrong answer
is to go to either extreme (courting controversy or cowering from it).

Doctor Xero

[Callan S.]

You may find this post of interest, from Ed, who found the encumberance rules in TROS regarding peoples weight, offensive:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=7322

That post was annoying

There are two types of fat. One is correctly used when it applies to peoples who's health are affected adversly by it (or will be affected soon). The other is used INCORRECTLY...these are naturally heavy set people, who are genetically destined to fill out to a certain size and structure when given healthy food and exercise. These people aren't fat and are perfectly healthy.

Then this guy in the post goes on to call himself fat, but then describes himself as the latter type of person (who isn't fat, and that's a fact).

Ignorance producing prejudice against the book. That really shtz me.

[contracycle]

If I design a game system in which same-sex romance or sexuality is a norm,
I limit my appeal to people who are lesbigay, gay-friendly, or open-minded
about such things.

If I design a game system in which same-sex romance or sexuality is an
incontrovertible taboo -- a sin, an illness, a social faux pas, whatever -- I
limit my appeal to those people who hold such beliefs/opinions.

Well, yes.

But, that just means that you have to decide what it is that you are setting out to achieve.  Are you engaged in what is essentially an art project, and intend to express yourself and your views of what and how the world is; or, are you engaged in a commercial project whose only aim is to appeal to as broad an audience as possible?

To an extent, so what if you limit your appeal?  If your potential consumer base is cut from say 50 million to 30 million, is that such a big deal?  Even if it was cut to 1 million, would that be so bad?  Probably not for a startup company, right?  A million sales is probably way, way more than you anticipate at all.

And to the contrary, sure you can produce a piece of inoffensive, necessarily unorginal pablum that essentially contributes nothing to thet stat of the art, and it will (if it even sees print) go on a shelf alongside many other such products.  Maybe it will even sell, but if it does, your own input will have been of negligible value, given that you consciously compromised your own opinions in order to pander to the lowest common denominator.

Publish and be damned.

[Doctor Xero]

I think there's a third to the commercial/art dichotomy : propaganda.

In the United States, obvious propagandizing (whether political or religious or whatever
doesn't matter) still carries a major stigma.

On a personal level, I agree: Publish and be damned [with what others think].

On a theoretical level, I wonder about whether it is misusing the potential of gaming to
reduce it to such a tool.

Doctor Xero

[contracycle]

Point taken.  But propaganda, like beauty, seems to me to be in the eye of the beholder.

You raised yourself the experience you had of being accused of producing or buying into "feminist propaganda".  Do you feel you were engaging in propaganda?  Or does the expression of any opinion at all constitute propaganda?

[Christopher Weeks]

There's another side to the commercial/art quandry that y'all are focussing on.  These RPGs just aren't going to sell hugely.  You might actually sell more by appealing to a relatively fringe* subgroup (e.g. homosexuals, negroes, whatever).  In so doing, you might even pull non-gamers who fit that niche into gaming by making something that is fun for them to do that also explores topics of particular relevance.

Chris

*Fringe isn't exactly the right word, but I'm having a brain-fart.  I mean people who belong to groups that have a history of second-class citizenship in some ways...damn, it's early.