Primitive and Icy

Ganakagok is, “a quasi-Inuit Silmarillion as seen from the inside looking out”. A bunch of folks had recommended it as a great game. It uses a sort of tarot-system to set up the situation, the characters, and play out the game. I picked up a copy yesterday, as I’ve been meaning to check it out for sometime.

Skimming through, my first big twitch was the images of the example cards, using Pacific Northwest NDN artwork… UM. And then stuff like character names: “The name should be primitive and icy, vaguely Inuit in sound and form.” WTF is “icy”? Then there’s “Shaman”, “Good Medicine” and “Bad Medicine” …

For a game that claims to be a look from the inside-out, it’s chock full of exotification.

This brings us back to the larger media issue- we’re forced to either only indulge in things where we’re invisible (“Look, we don’t show up, so no problematic imagery… uh, yay, I guess?”) or things where we show up distorted and stereotypes (“At least I get to have media with people who look vaguely like me… I’ll just imagine there’s scenes and spaces where we get to see them as normal”). Which pretty much sums up my love/hate relationship of L5R.

And beyond that, the bigger social issue of why us telling stories, about ourselves, is absolutely required in the face of cultural genocide.

I suppose that’s also why roleplaying as a hobby, is where it is.

Who gets to tell your story? Right?

Discussion Spaces- Circles

Over the last few years, I’ve been less and less interested in the types of dialogue produced by forums and the blogosphere.

The problem isn’t just the need for filtering, there’s also the major issue of attention posting, status games, and the simple but also real issues of signal to noise, produced in part by numbers of people and by the need to constantly educate folks to get up to a minimum standard.

At the same time, having a group discussion to bounce ideas off of is useful. So I’m toying with a different setup for online discussion that maybe some folks will find useful.

1. Small group (12 members, 6 men max, 6 women max)

Enough people for multiple ideas, and enough people assuming that not everyone will participate or care about any given topic. This is based on seeing most functional forum threads, or blog posts discussions, usually revolve around 4-8 people.

2. Private, but quotable w/permission

The discussion is private to the group, though anyone can talk about their own thoughts publicly, or quote others with permission.

Keeping it out of the public eye cuts out a lot of the attention posting, plus it also allows people to start doing a lot of the exploratory/unfinished thoughts stuff that tends to get pushed aside on the public spaces.

3. Limited Duration, forced mixing

If you form this kind of group, it needs to have a deadline, an endpoint. My suggestion is something like 3-6 months. After which, the group breaks and if you choose to form a new group, at least half the people must be new people. (And, it might make sense to form multiple groups, if you have specific topics).

The deadline does two things- one, it pushes folks to try to make the most out of the time people have committed to being available- if I have access to 5 really smart folks who really know the topic, and there’s a good gestalt, I better use it! Second, it stops the other major problem that shows up a lot- the formation of identity around spaces- “We’re Forgies” “We’re Storygamers” (or, equally problematic, “They’re Forgies”, “They’re Storygamers”).

The point of the group is the function of what it produces, not just having a new set of buddies (and if you are buddies, you don’t need to be in an online group just to maintain that friendship…)

At the end of the duration, it makes sense to have a followup on how things shook out, and what, if any valuable ideas folks got from it.

Airbenders and more

The Avatar series bible has been leaked.

The question that hella folks been asking since the series ended, is, “What happens now with the airbenders? Will there be no more?”

The series bible points out three really interesting things. First, benders can be born to normal people. Second, that not everyone lived at the Air Temples- so the air nation wasn’t just monks. Third, that they were generally nomadic.

Just because someone hasn’t seen a Sky Bison in 100 years doesn’t mean the nomads all got killed- there’s pretty good odds a bunch of folks would have fled or simply not been present for the Fire Nation attacks and taken to going in hiding.

Which means you could easily have secret pockets of Airbenders, or, perhaps a lot of people who have the ability but none of the training, and are just waiting to learn their hidden talent.

Interesting stuff!

Conflict vs. Conflict

There’s been this interesting debate going on about whether every scene in a game should have a conflict.

It occurred to me today, while prepping for play, that the two camps really mean two different things when they have this discussion.

The thing that I’ve been doing is writing down a list of all the NPCs, and a sentence or two about what they want to do about the current situation or how they feel.

Some of these are probably going to lead to dice roll conflicts, some of these are either foreshadowing for probably conflicts later on, and some are fallout and consequences from previous conflicts. For me, this is all conflict – the groundwork for, the decision/action point, and the results of.

“All scenes should have a conflict”, is not an injunction that everything has to be “Make an UBER decision. Make another UBER decision. Make ANOTHER UBER decision”… What it means is that scenes need to provide context and meaning that leads towards or from those decisions, and makes them possible. Context must be built for these things to have meaning.

It doesn’t help that the word “conflict” is used interchangeably for both immediate mechanical conflicts AND the larger narrative term.

Undustrial Revolutions

I got a chance to have a good conversation with several folks down at World Fantasy Con today, and though I didn’t see it, we were talking about the Steampunk panel, where Nisi Shawl pointed out that Steampunk is often a reaction against us getting into genre writing.

There’s some serious truth in this.

Sci-fi asked, “How does technology shape society?”, Cyberpunk asked, “How does technology enforce/break status quo?”, whereas Steampunk asks, “Is Colonialism excusable and/or a necessary evil?”

All of the above can try to dodge their questions by retreating into tropes and cliches, only Steampunk ends up answering the question even in evasion- retreating to a colonial culture and painting it as a golden age is not different than many history books or current news today. Expecting the fruits of colonialism whether through “Manifest Destiny” or “Just Because” is effectively the same answer.

Do we get to be people in these stories? Do we get to be more than a source or obstacle to resources? Are we co-creators of the world that is, or just people waiting to be discovered and enlightened from our benighted ways? The retreat into colonial culture either becomes an criticism or an excuse in the way it answers those questions- is “a product of the times” a horrifying concept to realize what it says about the culture or is it an excuse to normalize it?

Of course, the fact that the question is even where’s it at says a lot about how backwards the discussion is. Whereas Nisi pointed to it being a reaction to us in genre fiction, I say it’s more part of the larger trend in N. Americas and Europe- about pining for “the good old days” and backlash against changing demographics and immigration.

The fact that some of us subvert the trend and call it out is nothing new, and I expect will be the clash for as long as Steampunk exists as a genre.