Gender/Racial/Other Bias in RPG Texts

[John Kim]

Honestly, I avoided the other thread due to the "Feminism" title, for reasons I won't go into here, but it sounds like I should have been over there. However, I'm not sure my line of thought/questioning fits over there, either.

Here's what I'm on about: given certain controversial issues the designers are asked to avoid due reactions to such, why is it he has to avoid them? What is the use of the restrictions against ficitional elements like "evil Churches pretending to be good" and "evil black, female, goddess-worshippers"? Are these restrictions or avoidances in any way a healthy reaction or viewpoint?

I think this is the thread for your question.  But I'm not sure what restriction you are talking about.  RPGs aren't government censored in any countries as far as I know, and there isn't even a self-imposed ratings system like there is for movies.  If you are talking about what I and/or Chris L. or others like in games, then I don't think it is reasonable to call it a "restriction" regardless of what we think.  For example, I don't like "The Greenland Saga" and will give it bad reviews citing among other things the ahistorical negative portrayal of women.  However, I don't think this should be called a "restriction" demanding what game designers "have to" do.  

As for what I like, I don't at all believe in completely avoiding, say, evil or incompetant women.  But I do believe in avoiding an overall pattern of such portrayals -- i.e. all good societies are patriarchal, and all matriarchal societies are evil, for example.  To take a example of race portrayal, in my own Vinland campaign I have evil Native Americans.  It was very conscious design on my part to show broad range of native characters and culture.  So on the one hand there is Rowtag, the scary Mohican leader whose fanatic followers call themselves the Pequot ("Destroyers").  There are also the largely inconsequential Lenape.  There is Hiawatha, the Onondaga leader who was brutal in his treatment of the Adirondack and other prisoners.  There are the powerful Susquehannock and Narragansett, and the more accomodating Massachusett.  

I have similar distaste for sources which portray natives only as "noble savages" with no flaws or evil -- as ones which portray them as evil barbarians.

[Jason Lee]

Chris L,

I don't quite follow.  What does the distinction between Baseline and Vision have to do with seeing discrimination where there's only an attempt to make a story?  Of course one has to push against and within a kind of accepted frame of reference, but why does that entail that racism doesn't matter, or doesn't exist if we're just trying to tell a good story?

I do grant that any ethical or moral statement, since it must be based upon a metaphysical and thus non-demonstrable support, must necessarily impose bias somewhere along the line.  But I don't get the relevance here.

I'm sorry; I just don't follow your point.  Can you clarify?

Why of course I'll clarify!  Ok, first I don't mean racism doesn't exists, I mean that sometimes a bias is about theme not discrimination.  There are a lot of intelligent observations in this thread about why bias is bad.  The devil seems to need a little advocating here, and I thought I'd give it a go.

There's a big inference I'm making from the top part of my post where I'm talking about lack of racial representation, to the bottom part and your Ars Magica thing.  Let's see if it holds up.


*****

Let me throw out what I think Baseline and Vision are, just to head that off early in case my definitions are wrong.

Baseline:  
Audience assumptions.  A standard frame of reference for a story.  For example, medieval Europe.

Vision:
What diverges from the audience's assumptions.  A focus of the story.  For example, magic.

Baseline + Vision:
Medieval Europe + magic = Ars Magica.

*****

With Ars Magica part of the Baseline is the medieval Catholic Church, complete with inquisitors running around torturing and burning anything un-christian.  Whether or not this is a correct representation of the Catholic Church at the time, it certainly seems to be a correct representation of the target audience's opinion of what the church was at the time.  So, we don't need to go into details about the Church, we just say 'like the inquisition' and we're done, able to move on to the Vision - Satan worshippers (Church) versus magi.

As a less severe example, has anyone seen the movie Something's Got to Give?  (60 year old player falls in love with a woman his age after a long life of 20 year old women.)

We took Tara's grandmum and parents to go see it.  I walked out of the theatre wanting those two hours of my life back, her parents loved it, and grandmum seemed pretty all right with it.   I was not the target audience; the movie was targeted at the boomer generation.  In addition to situations that were more interesting to a different generation, there was also a generational bias I found kind of offensive.

The female lead character had a mid-twenties daughter.  The daughter is totally two-dimensional - dates/sleeps with many men, fears commitment, and just wants to have "fun".  This is, near as I can tell, the default image of how a mid-twenties person is seen from the eyes of the movie's target audience (boomers).  This is further illustrated by the fact that all the mom has to do is give her daughter a speech that sounds like it was pulled from a self help book about 'finding your joy', and six months later she's knocked up and married - "living her life to the fullest".  "If they would only listen they'd understand and their life would be better".    Gak.  Total stereotype and total crap drawn from a lack of understanding of who you're representing.

Anyway, I found the character offensive, but she was there for a purpose.  She was a Baseline (assumptions of the target audience), used to address a theme in the story.

As far as Ars Magica goes, all I'm saying is that the evil church is a Baseline.

*****

Now, does this mean theme is an excuse to discriminate.  Nope, but where you drawn the line between discrimination and thematic bias is going to shift with the target audience.  (I'm sure Something's Got to Give was not meant to be offensive.)  When you are part of the target audience I think it is very difficult to identify the bias, and hence further feed the stereotype.

In your last post I think you hit on a key technique to distinguish the two:  Making sure the bias can be questioned in play.

I guess the point here is that if you Force a story, and the story is one in which you stereotype very broadly and negatively, and the people in question are supposed to be anything like real people, then what you have is Forced discrimination.

Yeah, then you have preaching.  You have to be able to challenge a theme.  What's my word?  The literary term is 'exposition' I believe.

Let's say you have an RPG setting where gay marriage was legalized, setting off a world-ending chain of events.  Gay men could get married one weekend, spread their STDs, get divorced at the end of the weekend, and repeat the process next week.  This completely destroyed society, because city hall became swamped with gay marriage/divorce filings and decent white-folk couldn't squeeze in.  So, then non-perverts couldn't start a family and white people where eventually wiped off the face of the planet by the rampant spread of gay-diseases (because they make you work with the perverts too), and an inability to conceive children because the sanctity of marriage was destroyed.  What with all the white people being dead, all you'd have left is poor people and thieves - hell on earth.

Yeah, it's an extreme example.  Is it a thematic opportunity if you can challenge the assumptions and discrimination if you cannot?

I'm a little out of it, so sorry about the lack of clarity in this post.

[clehrich]

Let's say you have an RPG setting where gay marriage was legalized, setting off a world-ending chain of events. [etc.]
Yeah, it's an extreme example.  Is it a thematic opportunity if you can challenge the assumptions and discrimination if you cannot?

That's an interesting question.  The way I proposed it in the previous post, it does seem as though I said that if you could challenge the theme, it wasn't discrimination, but if you couldn't it was.  Hmm.  Extreme though the example is, it does neatly foreground the problem.

Off the cuff -- and I need to think this through rather slowly -- it does seem to me as though the difference is Baseline & Vision, to resurrect that old distinction.  In short, I'm cool with Vision being a challengeable and in other contexts possibly discriminatory structure.  I'm not so cool with Baseline being so.

See, in Ars Magic (late), it's really the flat assumption that Christianity is fundamentally evil that bugs me.  I mean, if you wanted to focus on this as a difference from the normal world, and thus foreground it as a potential issue, that seems entirely appropriate to me.  If you say, "No, that's just the way it is, and the point is to debate something else," then I'm really bothered.

I'm not articulating this well.  I need to think it through a bit more; anyone else have a sense of the division I'm aiming at, or is it just me?

Good point, Jason.  [you stinker...]

Chris Lehrich

[Daniel Solis]

I just wanted to drop in a couple cents on the subject that actually hits home since I'm hispanic. (Well, technically, I'm so mixed that my ethnicity is rather ambiguous, but my extended family speaks Spanish and hails from South America, so there ya go.) Further, I grew up in the inner city of New York among drug dealers and gangbangers that most RPGs' target audience will fortunately never see in their lives. It has been many years since I left that environment and I'm glad to be rid of it.

I've been blessed to have never encountered a moment of race-oriented awkwardness or implicit discrimination in a gaming situation. However, the one thing that does tend to bother me is the initial look of surprise whenever I start speaking knowledgably with another role-player. It was humorous when I met a fan of Zombie: the Coil and they were very visibly shocked to meet a dark-skinned guy with dreadlocks instead of a pasty goth. (I cut off the dreads a couple years ago.)

Actually, designing Z:tC was quite cathartic. Here were Zombies. Slow, dumb, reliable for manual labor and general mayhem but little else. I could take a group of characters who had very low expectations placed on them, then imbue them with personality, complexity and, yes, kewl powerz, much to the surprise of the other well-established supernaturals of the World of Darkness. In hindsight, I worked through some very personal issues with that game.

The phenomenon reminds me of the scene in the Matrix where Neo meets Trinity and says, "I thought you were a guy." She replies, "Most guys do." She has a point. Without a face to attach to the words, you'll just kind of assume that whoever is saying them looks like you. However, in a field like game design, it's a safe bet that the majority of folks are going to be white males. I don't presume to know the social factors that make this so commonplace. Truth be told, if I were someone else, I would be surprised to find out I am an indie game designer too.

So, how do I see race in RPGs today? Well, I never really gave it much thought. Perhaps it's an unfortunate callousness, but I've long ago come to terms with the assumption that the default "hero" in many peoples' minds is going to be a white male and deviation from that standard is something of a novelty. Also, because of my mixed background and lack of deep cultural ties to any particular ethnic group, I'm probably less sensitive to any racial biases inherent in some game backgrounds. For example, I was annoyed by the homogenous Star Trek races because they're dramatically uninteresting, without even realizing they could be considered stereotypes of Earth cultures.

I can't speak for anyone else, but my pet peeves are, in order of least offensive to most offensive:

Absence - There is no mention of race in reference to the protagonists or antagonists, leaving it wide open for me to project myself into my hero. While the creators may be white males and envisioned their own heroes as being white males, they made mo attempt to impose that assumption on me or my hero.

Tokenism - An obviously self-conscious attempt to avoid being called racist, often resulting in ridiculously admirable two-dimensional representations of the very people the creator was hoping to avoid offending.

Stereotyping - Yes, I know that urban street gangs are primarily composed of minority youths. Believe me, I know.

So, I guess my only suggestion to game designers worrying about whether there is implicit racism in their creation is to just stop worrying about it. The less you mention it, the less you can fumble, the more I am free to have my dark-skinned hero.

[S'mon]

Consider an rpg set in a modern city, with nothing but Hispanics.  It would clearly be considered a political statement.  The same rpg could be filled with white folks, and wouldn't be considered a political statement.

The 'Angel' tv show is set in LA and has basically no Hispanics; in fact the east-European Boreanaz is about the most exotic looking member of the cast (to me).  It may not be a political statement, that there are hundreds of demon species in Angel-LA but no hispanics, but it certainly seems weird to me.  The strangest thing is that every 'victim' character Angel rescues is a white female, thin and probably blonde.  Is this a statement of who the audience is interested in seeing rescued?

I'm planning to start a campaign of the new Conan RPG (which draws a lot of inspiration from Sorcerer & Sword BTW), which tends to ignore the setting's sexism (no stat mods for female PCs) but does incorporate its 1930s racism - stat mods for different races (Cimmerians -2 Int, Zingarans -2 CON), plenty of derogatory comments of the kind you get in the REH stories, and the persistent idea that race X is 'weakened' and 'polluted' by interbreeding with race Y.  I probably have most trouble with this last one since it flies in the face of what we know in modern genetics - basically the wider the genetic mix, the healthier the offspring.
I'm not sure whether to treat this 'purity' belief as objectively true for the setting - ie incorporate the racism as a basic truth of the campaign - or treat it as a mistaken-but-commonly-believed falsehood.

I guess a different GM might have more trouble with the RPG using Howard's atheism, that the gods probably don't exist - personally I love this about the RPG, it immediately makes it a million miles from regular D&D worlds.

[S'mon]

I just don't believe that all racism or other hate crimes are perpetrated intentionally.  People who deliberately perpetrate hate crimes, i.e. who get up in the morning and say, "You know what?  I hate those guys, on principle, and I think I'll go make trouble for them," are certainly beneath contempt.  They're also rare.  The problem isn't them: it's the people who say, "I have no problem with those people, they're fine with me, in fact they make such nice music (because those people have a good sense of rhythm, the same way they're all good at basketball), but I sure wouldn't want one dating my sister."  They do not intentionally perpetrate racism/sexism/etc., but it's discrimination nonethless.

The former (race-hatred racialists) are clearly worse than the latter - when the former get to be in charge of a country, you get genocide.  Genocide is worse than being blackballed from the local country club.  OTOH "I wouldn't want one dating my sister" is clearly a racist or otherwise prejudiced attitude, I think most people who held this attitude would own up to being prejudiced at least in that particular regard?  When I was a child, a little old white lady at the bus stop recounted how she didn't like her sons dating black women.  I don't think anyone was in any doubt that this was a racist attitude.  Likewise my mother wasn't so keen on my sister dating a Sicilian - this was a clear example of prejudice*, only not labelled 'racist' because Sicilians are not considered a separate race from my family's race under current classifications.

*he was clearly the least-bad boyfriend she's had.  Much better than the Austrian cigarrette-smuggler/bank-burglar.

[contracycle]

The former (race-hatred racialists) are clearly worse than the latter - when the former get to be in charge of a country, you get genocide.  Genocide is worse than being blackballed from the local country club.  

No, I don't think that division is remotely as strong as you do.  The former are, after all, powerless unless they have their position validated by the tacit approval of the latter.  Its not the former I worry about - the mad dogs are easy to spot.  Its the consent given by the many that is dangerous.

[S'mon]

The former (race-hatred racialists) are clearly worse than the latter - when the former get to be in charge of a country, you get genocide.  Genocide is worse than being blackballed from the local country club.  

No, I don't think that division is remotely as strong as you do...

Not "clearly worse"?  Um, ok.

[contracycle]

Not "clearly worse"?  Um, ok.

More precisely, symptomatic rather than causal.  The chinese have a proverb that the secret of leadership is to find a parade and to get in front.  I'm saying its the people in the parade who make the demagogue  dangerous; without them, the demagogue is just a ranting loon.

[Doctor Xero]

RPGs aren't government censored in any countries as far as I know, and there isn't even a self-imposed ratings system like there is for movies.

No, simply the self-imposed ratings system called the Marketplace.

Doctor Xero

[Doctor Xero]

keep it specifically focused on:
-roleplaying games and social justice within it
-what can be done with specific actions(as opposed to what should be done, with no actual steps)

One thing with RPGs that you're going to have to fight against is the use of cliché, and by extension stereotypes.

If you look at the arguments against it, at some point everyone seems to slide into something along the lines of "marriage has been heterosexual for millennia" or "marriage was meant to be heterosexual" or "marriage is about procreation."  Some of the Christian Right are at least honest: they say that homosexuality itself is wrong, and figure that legalizing homosexual marriage says that it isn't wrong, which is at least logically consistent (although I disagree with the initial premise).

I agree, Bankuei.  I'd like to take cruciel's insights and  clehrich's insights (and gobi's) and add on to them with my own knowledge and thoughts.

Like many of the people on this thread, I have also been a victim of bigotry, although in my case it's possible to "pass" for the mainstream majority, which adds an extra consideration.  Between this and my own civil rights considerations, I've had to think about prejudice from the perspective of the prejudiced individuals : what is it that makes prejudice a seemingly desireable perspective for them?  No one would be prejudiced if it were a horrible experience -- it must fulfill some social and/or psychological needs.  I achieve nothing if I treat them as monsters, even when their actions are sometimes monstrous.

In the 1930s, author Flannery O'Connor stated that there will always be prejudice against Black men in the South so long as impoverished White men in the South needed someone to claim they are better than (as an escape from the oppressive class system remaining in the South at the time).

Obviously, this is not the only cause, but let's consider it for a moment for the insights it provides.  One cause of racism would be thus : a White man in the 1930s South lived in a social system in which hierarchial pecking order was crucial to his sense of identity and human worth, and a poor White man would find himself on the bottom rung, giving him little reason to live.  One way to be a somebody, however, is to find a bigger nobody; by finding a group he could always look down upon, a poor White man could insulate himself against the horrors of being on the bottom of the Southern hierarchial food chain.  The descendents of the freed slaves, however, were "newbies" to the social ladder, so they had no resources to prevent being turned into permanent residents of the bottom rung.  Thus, while Black men had every reason in the 1930s South to hate racism, White men had every reason to be psychologically and socially dependent upon racism as their only way to avoid potentially suicidal feelings of worthlessness.

The same thing has been true of other bigotries.  We know that one of the (many) root causes of homophobia historically is that it has provided insecure heterosexual men with a target against which they get free validation in their manhood (hence the conflation of homosexuality and effeminacy).  We also know that in the 1900s a number of social commentators and would-be social engineers began an aggressive campaign to force all males to be more "manly", and the homosexual was an easy boogie man to use to frighten males into conforming to this anti-affection pro-competition misogynic male ideal.  (This appeared around the time of the Muscular Christianity movement in which Jesus was re-envisioned as a rough-n-tumble bodybuilder into "healthy male" rivalry with all other men, leading not as a divine visionary for universal familyhood but as the alpha male or stallion of the apostolic pack.)  Similar causes have been linked with prejudice against women and Jews.

But on one level, it makes a certain sad sense : everybody likes to feel good about himself/herself, and one way to do this is to have somebody one feels oneself to be better than.

And in times of war, it has been useful : is there anyone who dares suggest it might be wrong to make condemnatory generalizations about Germany of the 1930s into early 1940s?  Even today, recognizing the humanity underlying the Nazis is not seen as philosophical magnanimity but automatically convicted as veiled anti-Semitism.

If you take a look at RPGs, you'll see that the possibly racist elements work for the same reasons as those I've lined above -- and so long as those needs are being fulfilled in this fashion, there will be a certain joylessness in removing these "harmless" stereotypings . . .

In AD-&-D, there will always be orcs so long as player-characters need someone against whom they will look good.  Orcs give everyone the advantage in the grading curve for evil and squallid stupidity -- no matter how bad a character is, he or she can always know at least he or she is not an orc, and no matter how impoverished or ethically suspect a character may be, he or she can slay a couple dozen orcs to let off some tension and no one will bat an eye.

Someone once wrote in Dragon Magazine that demons are cool villains because there are no ethical qualms about stereotyping them and hating them all.

The above runs also true for many RPG depictions of religions, genders including sexuality, cultures, etc.

Any time an RPG provides a baseline race (or culture) -- the most evil race, the race with the automatically most skillful thieves, the most cherubic race -- that RPG has provided and installed a prejudicial theme.

Any time an RPG provides a boogie man race or enemy race -- the latest ad nauseum thinly veiled imitation of the Nazis, for example, or of the evil Star Wars trilogy empire -- that RPG has provided and installed a prejudicial theme.

Another cause is the simple fact that, to survive modern day life, it is often necessary for us to interact with people in terms of their roles rather than their individual identities.  I interact with the clerk at the drugstore as a clerk, not as William Renault.  I interact with the police officer as a police officer, not as Lynette Diai.

Cliche' generalizations provide people with a sort of linguistic hypertext not only to their roles but to a plethora of notions.  "She's as fastidious as a Brit!"  "I couldn't help swaggering -- I'm in a very Texan mood."  "If you get any more Hollywood on me, I'll scream!"  "He's very Italian with the way he uses hand gestures every time he talks."

In such fantasy chronicles as Conan the Barbarian, various tribes were used as representations of specific human traits.  This even occurs in The Professor's work (and is emphasized in Jackson's film adaptations), with almost all elves stoically melancholy and almost all dwarves gruffly greedy and almost all hobbits self-absorbed yet innocent -- notice how often Gandalf or Thorin or Aragorn will make an observation about Frodo or Bilbo and immediately generalize it to be true of the entire hobbit race!

In RPGs, this occurs continuously, particularly in fantasy RPGs.  Anyone remember the old AD-&-D chart which told a player how his/her PC felt about other races?  Fantasy RPGs aren't the only ones which do this: the World of Darkness meta-world falls apart without its meticulously drawn stereotyping (all Pookah must make a saving throw or lie???), and in the Star Trek RPG, part of the ambience includes having allegedly socially perfected humans say such things as "wow! logical as a Vulcan!" or "annoying, like all Bajoran women" or "hmph! I should have known better than to trust a Klingon!"

Why do people do this?  In addition to being intellectually easier and in addition to satisfying the human compulsion to classify and categorize, when seen as harmless, it's fun!  Some of the most blatant gay stereotypes I've seen have been acted out by gays clowning around; numerous Black and Hispanic comedians base their comedy routines on acting out Black and Hispanic stereotypes.  In Jackson's LOTR: The Return of the King, everyone laughs when Gandalf comes upon Merry and Pippin feasting at the flooded tower and reacts by exasperatedly snorting his explanation of their impractical behavior: "Hobbits!"

There may be a valid human need underlying this tendency despite its vulnerability towards prejudicial stereotyping.  After all, it is useful to know the baseline normative expectations in a new culture or community.

I'd suggest that an RPG needs to make it clear the difference between societal norms and the ways other societies stereotype this society and the inborn traits of the race itself.  For example, I recall one excellent article on dwarves in AD-&-D which discussed a certain tribe of dwarves who know they are far more complex than dour lovers of precious metals but have found it to their advantage in dealing with other races to perpetuate this stereotype, even being amused themselves by the stereotype.  The article went on to specify societal norms amongst that dwarven community and how those norms have contributed to that stereotype.

Any time an RPG reduces all members of a race to handy cliche's and generalizations, that RPG has provided and installed a prejudicial theme.

However, an RPG should acknowledge the players' human needs for roles and baseline normative expectations.

I know there are other causes of racism and other solutions to them in RPGs; these seem to have been overlooked a tad.

Doctor Xero

[M. J. Young]

The phenomenon reminds me of the scene in the Matrix where Neo meets Trinity and says, "I thought you were a guy." She replies, "Most guys do." She has a point. Without a face to attach to the words, you'll just kind of assume that whoever is saying them looks like you.

I was going to make a joke about this; but as I thought the joke, it brought me up short on something implicit in this that easily goes unnoticed.

The joke was, I was going to say that I thought from his posts and designs that Jared Sorenson was black, but how could you be black with a name like Sorenson?

Then it occurred to me to wonder this: why would I assume that anyone was black? Isn't that in itself a display of prejudice? Daniel's certainly right that I never imagined him to be Hispanic; but then, I don't think I ever really imagined him as being anything in particular--and if I had, it would merely have been a reference frame in my own mind. I was shocked when I first saw a picture of Jared, because he did not look like I'd envisioned. The same is true of the first photo I saw of Ron Edwards, and of Seth Ben-Ezra and his wife Crystal. (I'm even shocked when I see photos of me, because I never think I look like that.) We all do create mental images of other people, and they're always wrong--but if I were to assume you were black, or Hispanic, or Asian, without any basis other than the way you write, that would be prejudicial. It would in some ways be more prejudicial than if I'd envisioned you as white.

This isn't true in all cases, certainly. I get mail from people for whom English is not a primary language, and I can often identify their native tongue from the way they structure their English--but that's based on articulable evidence. On the other hand, just within the last couple nights I saw a commercial for a recording by a singer on Motown records, and I was surprised that he appeared to be white--because Motown, in my youth, was the label for black artists, and because the song he was singing had a lot of "soul" influence in it. I was fooled by the evidence. But I don't think it would have been wrong for me to have pictured this guy as being black based on the sound of his music and the name on the label, even if that is prejudicial. What would have been wrong would be for me to draw other conclusions about him based on the assumption (or even the knowledge, if it were true) that he was black.

You can't picture someone without making assumptions about race and gender, unless you have facts. Imagining them as one thing or another is not prejudicial, unless you use that image as the basis for other judgments about them.

Have I suffered from discrimination, a white male Anglo-saxon Protestant?

Well, my wife never told her grandmother that I was Eye-Talian (about three eighths, if I've done my math correctly, but culturally dominant in my mother's immigrant family with whom I had the most family contact). She would not have approved.

I also suffered a great deal of discrimination as a child because I was not at all athletic, and in some ways I think that mattered more to the kids in my school than your race or your religion--it was certainly sufficient cause to warrant beating me up on a regular basis.

I suspect everyone is on the brunt end of discrimination of some sort some times. You can choose to blame your problems on it, or you can prove yourself as an individual.

Have I drifted?

Doctor Xero's post is excellent.

--M. J. Young

[contracycle]

I also suffered a great deal of discrimination as a child because I was not at all athletic, and in some ways I think that mattered more to the kids in my school than your race or your religion--it was certainly sufficient cause to warrant beating me up on a regular basis.

I suspect everyone is on the brunt end of discrimination of some sort some times. You can choose to blame your problems on it, or you can prove yourself as an individual.

This is a world away from being relegated to menial jobs, being seen as inherently criminal, or allocated to inferior positions on public transaport and domestic zoning.  So while in a strictly literakl sense, yes your schoolmates may have "discriminated" against you, but it is by no means qualitatively comparable with real racism or sexism.  In fact, I find the comparison trivilialising such a serious problem.  Neither racism nor sexism can be overcome by just "proving yourself".

[S'mon]

Not "clearly worse"?  Um, ok.

More precisely, symptomatic rather than causal.  The chinese have a proverb that the secret of leadership is to find a parade and to get in front.  I'm saying its the people in the parade who make the demagogue  dangerous; without them, the demagogue is just a ranting loon.

Race-hatred racialists are not necessarily confined to a few rare demagogues & sociopaths, it's quite possible for the majority of a population to actively hate and fear another race/culture etc and seek to do them harm, although of course they're much more likely to express this if whipped into a frenzy by aforesaid demagogues.  I suppose you could argue that race-hatred racialists are a minor problem in the modern USA; in very large parts of the world that's definitely not the case.  I'm from Northern Ireland where ethnic religion-based hatred is traditionally very much part of the milieu.  Maybe nowadays only a minority of people on either side actively hate the 'enemy' side, but it's a pretty big minority.

[greyorm]

As John has given me the go-ahead, I'll try to drag this discussion away from the political/social soapbox it is drifting towards and back onto the topic of RPGs (Gareth and S'mon, would you please take the poli-sci argument to a more appropriate venue?).

I think this is the thread for your question.  But I'm not sure what restriction you are talking about.  RPGs aren't government censored in any countries as far as I know...

Self-imposed restriction, then -- or rather, an unenforcable cultural restriction brought to bear by segements of our society. Or as Xero states, (a specific segement of) the marketplace.

What that restriction is, precisely, is what I'm getting at. There's lots of complaints by folks about "what is unacceptable" but I want to know "why" and examine that "why" to see if the reasoning really is...well, reasonable.

My purpose, in this discussion specifically, is to determine what the limits of design are, and why those limits are (or should be) there. What are the constraints under which a conscientious writer should labor when producing fictional elements for a setting or scenario and why should he labor under those? (My specific example of "what to do with dark elves" was meant to highlight this issue.)

For example, I'll disagree with your historical interpretation of the events surrounding the Inquisition and Burning Times, but only to point out that many pagans (and specifically Wiccans) would consider the ideas you are posing as nothing short of an attempt to downplay the patriarchal domination and cultural suppression of women engaged in by the Church and the society it headed; that your rejection and criticism of the set-up of Ars Magica's background is nothing more than a continuation of the oppression of women and pagan religion by the Church, because your rejection of it as discriminatory entails support for that oppression.

Now we have ourself a nice little argument, don't we?
But where does it get us? Nowhere. I'm as right as you are.

What it does do, however, is reinforce my point: while I hear about a great deal of "discrimination" in various creative endeavors, including RPGs, from what I'm seeing, a lot of that is perceived discrimation.

So, if you see where I'm coming from, the problem with some of the complaints is exactly what you pointed out: it's fiction.

What you seem to be saying is that the only way to have good fiction is to avoid painting any particular (or particularly sensitive) group as evil (even by similarity (ie: "no dark skin")). That "element of a story" concerns must come secondary to the possibility of the element being discriminatory -- and damn the fact that it is fiction anyways.

From my viewpoint, saying "What if..." is not saying "This is...", precisely the confusion I pointed out in my lengthy previous post, and something I label as problematic to the creative process. Perceieved discrimination can't really be dealt with in any positive manner that I can see.

The problem isn't them: it's the people who say, "I have no problem with those people, they're fine with me, in fact they make such nice music (because those people have a good sense of rhythm, the same way they're all good at basketball), but I sure wouldn't want one dating my sister."

Now, see, here we disagree. That IS intentional racism in my book -- it is intentional discrimination against a real group for real purposes that is causing harm to that group. It may not be physical harm, or emotional harm to a specific individual, but creating and acting according to a false, negative perception thereof.

It doesn't matter that the speaker doesn't consider it "racist" (few racists consider their remarks racist, anyway), the content and intention of the behavior is clearly discriminatory based on illogical/irrational premises, and is designed to segregate society and individuals based on those factors.

Having "dark elves" (or insert other token person/creature here) in a campaign just doesn't do that.

So, when a conscientious writer sits down to create an interesting fictional setting and situation, how can he be expected to keep his creative freedom in light of the possibility/threat of discrimination? (ala the Nemoidians in SW:tPM; the dark elves in D&D; etc.) Especially considering how destructive such (perceived) discrimination can be to the actual value (and intent) of the work? And considering that, yes, there IS "bad discrimination" (I am not saying there is not) which a writer can and should avoid.

Any insights?