via metafilter:The Special Containment Procedure Wiki is full of grand ideas of fictional weird X-files type stuff. I highly recommend it as a good source of inspiration for a game of Unknown Armies, Delta Green, Hellboy/BPRD, or Inspectres.
Short comics of survivors and moving stories from the China Quake. These have the sort of sentimentality that you find in urban legends or folklore, so it’s kind of hard to say how much is true, but geez, they certainly hit you in the gut.
Just a week ago, I listened to Luke Crane’s interview on Fear the Boot, where he mentioned he’s doing work on Bella Sara, which was hard to imagine.
But seeing this Penny Arcade strip?
I know it to be true.
Julia Bond Ellingboe’s interview from Theory from the Closet really mirrors a lot of discussions amongst my friends about the general ignorance of the majority of white Americans with regards to major portions of American history and current American culture.
My good friend J and I were talking yesterday about the ways in which most white folks are “informed” of POC through the poor narrow lens of television or movies. That is to say, desegregation has made little inroad into building understanding- the fact that many white folks could tell you “about” black folks based on music videos, and yet are completely ignorant of the black church experience, or liberation theology (and guess which one has a few hundred years of history, and is as easy to learn about as talking to the people who live in your town?), says a lot about what I’m simply calling willful ignorance at this point.
Stereotype schlock is easy to build into games, or easy to run in games, rather than, history which has tons and tons of documentation and even living people you can talk to, in order to get the skinny. Ultimately, the problem is not a dearth of information, or difficulty in getting access to it, as many sources are quite happy to provide useful info and help dispel common myths, but rather about white discomfort about actually dealing with POC, and especially in a non-privileged position of accepting our accounts of our own definition.
And it’s not merely a matter of non-interest, as there is a continuous market for stories “about POC”, at least only in that they are put through a white lens and fulfill certain stereotypes.
Tying back into Julia’s interview, I think it’s really important to look at the way in which the participants identify, or “code” with the protagonists as a key component of the process.
What I think is the twitch issue for white folks with regards to Steal Away Jordan, is that you either have to identify with a black character as a protagonist, or you have to accept a white protagonist who has privilege and is receiving benefit from institutionalized racism, which requires thinking about the whole issue a little more indepth than “Racists are mean” vs. “Non-mean people have no part in racism”. It’s a bind because you can’t play and hide in the shell of color-blindness which is the usual defense of the modern American in regards to race issues.
In terms of coding, white folks are often shielded in a pretty strange way. For example, many fantasy & sci-fi novels put white characters on the cover, even when the story clearly indicates a person of color… You have movies like Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Road to El Dorado, 10,000 BC, or even Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, in which a white protagonist “bridge” character must be present to make palatable a non-white culture.
For RPGs, you also see that usually the portrayal of other cultures is about places where white PCs go- whether we’re talking about Vampire or Rifts, Oriental Adventures, etc. Very few games are POC culture focused, and those are all really focused on East Asia, where you don’t have to think about color or hair as differences in coding to your character.
Of course, no one really thinks about the fact that gamers of color always are used to coding to other folks all the time. Or did you think I could only play Pendragon because I’m half white? (God knows if that was the case, I’d be completely unable to play Trollbabe, unless I have some extra mixing my grandparents didn’t tell me about).
So can a hobby built on the idea of self expression and pretending to be people other than yourself break out of this? It ought to be as easy as your imagination.
The real question is whether the people involved have the courage to do so.
1.
Paizo is releasing a preview PDF of their upcoming Pathfinder RPG, which will still be using the 3.5 D20 rules.
Though it looks neat, I’m more interested in it as a design and social factor- what kind of game will they make after a year and some change of open playtesting? Will we see more pushes away from standard D20 now that it’s no longer a concern to be compatible with unseen future WOTC products? Will awesome fringe 3.5 based games emerge from a hardcore, dedicated fanbase over the next 10 years?
That and, Paizo pretty much has the best D&D artwork right now, though the EverCleavage is problematic, at least the female characters look kickass and in the mix of every fight scene.
2.
One of my players ordered her own copy of Artesia, and since she hasn’t played anything since AD&D (1 or 2E? I’ll have to ask), it’ll be interesting to see how well she can clamber through the rules and tome that is Artesia.
While the point is for us to play, I’m always looking at it from the standpoint of usability- how does the non-gamer interact with your text? Does it work as a teaching tool? What doesn’t work? We’ve got plenty of games that assume you know what you’re doing and few that do not, so while stuff like Ptolus work as excellent ways of divvying up info for the person who gets the game, how do we format info for the noob?
While the “X Book for Dummies” format is good at introductions, it definitely comes across as a textbook- it lacks flash. Is there a way to keep the artwork and design format of a normal RPG book and still up the communication factor?
3.
As a useful information tool, D&D 4E color codes the powers that the characters get- so you can easily track which ones you can use all the time, once an encounter, and once a day. Naturally, I want to break out old X-Clan before each game and hear that infamous phrase, “Protected, by the Red, the Black, and the Green… with a key, Sissy!”
