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Your Game Is Not A Nordic Larp – And That’s Okay!

by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Game Design, LARP Discussion and Theory, Not Ready To Make Nice

[Please note: This article was written in 2018 during the height of a debate about Nordic Larp and American Larp. I hesitated at the time to get involved in the debate due to health issues, but now think I’d like to contribute this follow up to the question. Please read with the understanding the information is a little dated, and updates may occur.]

 

Nordic Larp. What does that even mean?

I had the same question myself when I headed over to Europe for the first time six years ago for Knutpunkt, the large Nordic Larp conference held once a year in either Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Finland. I had the opportunity to drop myself into the middle of a larp discourse already in progress there, at the crossroads of many countries all discussing the different aspects of the art form/hobby of live action games. While there I learned that the Nordic larp tradition was spreading in a big way, fostered by outreach from the Nordic countries to other larp traditions across the world.

Since that outreach began, Nordic larp and its design ethos and ideology has become a part of many local larp communities, its influence offering tools to designers outside of their normal design choices. This exchange is, at its very heart, a fantastic way to grow larp as a discourse and a design practice and art form, inspiring new creations across the pond. But things haven’t been entirely… smooth in this cultural and design exchange. Not by a longshot.

For the last few years, a growing rift has begun between the centralized (as it is) Nordic larp community and the American community, driven by the way in which certain conversations have been going between the two groups and certain ideological differences. At the core of that discussion is a single idea: Nordic Larp and the ideas it espouses are rooted in a specific tradition, and to take that name and brand your larp that way outside of the community can be a problem.

More plainly: hey, people on the outside, Nordic Larp is not necessarily yours, and taking the name for your own buzz and hype is maybe not okay.

And you know what? For a number of reasons, that’s a really good point.

Your game probably isn’t Nordic Larp – and that’s okay too! Here’s why.

I opened this article with a question: what does the term Nordic Larp even mean?

There’s a lot of answers to that question. And if you think that makes the arguments about the appropriation of the term difficult, you’re absolutely right. Ask Larpers in the movement there what Nordic larp means, and you will probably get a lot of answers that seem hand-wavy and unspecific. However, there are certain key ideas behind Nordic Larp you can point to as being “very Nordic.”

This definition (which is a little long) comes from the NordicLarp.org, a website which focuses on collecting articles, videos, and documentation all about the evolving Nordic Larp tradition and discourse.

Nordic-style larp, or Nordic larp, is a term used to describe a school of larp game design that emerged in the Nordic countries. Nordic-style larp is dramatically different from larp in other parts of the world – here are a few examples of aims and ideals that are typical for this unique gaming scene:

Immersion. Nordic larpers want to feel like they are “really there”. This includes creating a truly convincing illusion of physically being in a medieval village/on a space ship/WWII bunker, playing a character that is very close to your own physical appearance, as well as focusing on getting under the character’s skin to “feel their feelings”. Dreaming in character at night is seen by some nordic larpers as a sign of an appropriate level of immersion.

Collaboration. Nordic-style larp is about creating an exciting and emotionally affecting story together, not measuring your strength. There is no winning, and many players intentionally let their characters fail in their objectives to create more interesting stories.

Artistic vision. Many Nordic games are intended as more than entertainment – they make artistic or even political statements. The goal in these games is to affect the players long term, to perhaps change the way they see themselves or how they act in society.

We’ll come back to some of the elements in this description in a moment, but keep in mind as we go forward the following descriptions: Nordic Larp is focused on Immersion, Collaboration, and Artistic Vision.

Alternatively, Jaakko Stenros, a well-known researcher, academic, and speaker gave a lecture at the Nordic Larp Talks in 2013 about just what is Nordic Larp, a talk that’s been shared the world over.  I’d encourage everyone to give it a look before going any further (it’s not that long).

Stenros points out that early on in the Nordic larp scene, those within the community would label a larp Nordic when they thought it was a Nordic Larp – using the “I know it when I see it” method to build a body of work that helped define the later discourse. (And if you think that’s round-about, you’re not wrong). Yet within a few short years, the definitions of what is Nordic larp, while still widely debated, were solidifying to provide a larger context for those outside the culture and within.

During Stenros’ talk, he defines contributing elements to the definition of Nordic Larp. Some of them include:

  • Larps coming from the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland)
  • A social phenomenon and an ongoing discourse focused on playing styles and design ideals, rather than just geography, inspired and informed by other scenes originally such as Fastival, improv theater, and larps from other countries which helped build the basis of the Nordic tradition.
  • Other elements to consider in this social phenomenon is the migration of influences, social situations that created the creation ground for the tradition, key works which influenced the discourse, social network structures within the key communities, and the people involved.

His stricter definition (influenced by the work done by Markus Montola and Bjarke Pedersen) is (at minute 10:19 in the video):

“A larp that is influenced by the Nordic Larp Tradition and contributes to the Nordic Larp discourse.”

Yup. A definition which is defined by itself. As my mother would say: Oy. Vey.

Please note that Stenros’ entire first ten minutes of the talk or so is about how his definition is not “the answer, but an answer” which he’s sure will be disagreed with, dissected, and transformed within a short period of time. What does that tell us? That Nordic larp was and still remains a shifting creature which is an all-encompassing term for a larger community, often defined less by what it is and more by where it comes from, what basic artistic principles created the initial cornerstone, and then set against the context of what it actually is not.

It’s also important to note that this definition, though I’m using it as the basis of a good deal of my discussion here, is also five years old. And as Jaakko notes, the tradition is ever-evolving. So by looking at the definition listed above from NordicLarp.org and then looking at Jaakko’s definition, the terms have evolved and narrowed down to identify specific design factors as key to the Nordic larp experience. There are also plenty of different introduction videos as well by thinkers and designers like Petter Karlson and others within the scene trying to define and identify what has become a slippery monster of a catch-all design ethos.

“[Nordic Larp is] a great term to describe a wide-cast net,” says Johannes Axner, editor-in-chief of NordicLarp.org and Swedish larper, “it’s pretty useless to describe individual larps.”

It’s that ambiguity, that wide net, which stands at the heart of this controversy. Nordic larp itself is a shifting mirage, defined by all those involved in the process over and over, grinding down the ambiguity to try and distill the essence. That essence is then interpreted, delineated, and slapped on games which run the gamut from block-buster big-ticket events to black box, small-scale experiences. And perhaps that defining and attributing is for more than just design reasons.

“Five years ago, no one cared what the exact definition [of Nordic larp] would be,” says Stenros. “This has changed. The term has now brand value. It is worth something.” This worth is at the heart of much of the argument going on within the larp communities, a brand value which, when attached to a game, evokes a certain response in players looking for that ‘Nordic Experience’ (capital N, capital E) they’ve heard so much about. The brand value, when added to the advertisement for a larp, interests those who have heard about games like College of Wizardry and Just A Little Lovin’ in Europe, who’ve seen documentation about games on battleships and in castles and yearn for something bigger than perhaps what they’re used to.

Similarly, organizers have deployed the branding of “Nordic Larp” or “Nordic Inspired” to evoke the specific school of design Stenros has described in his talk – and perhaps rightly so. These games can be said to have been heavily influenced by the Nordic larp design elements learned by engaging in spaces like Knutpunkt or online groups, or even by those who have hopped the Atlantic to play the Nordic larps themselves.

“If you brand something Nordic Larp, you might get cool indie cred in the US, or you might get some players who wouldn’t have considered going to your game.” Is that really what we’re doing when using the term in the United States? Relying on the branding of Nordic larp to bring in players who might be looking for that indie cred, or else looking for a new hotness they’ve only heard of and not seen elsewhere? I think (in part) the answer is yes. Stenros may have been writing about this in 2013 but in the years that followed, we’ve seen an uptick in games in the US using the term, and those games have been very high profile and considered en vogue right now. And that attracts attendees.

And that isn’t bad. In fact, for larp designers bringing in players from across traditions, having the brand recognition of Nordic Larp can spread a new tradition of ideas to audiences which might never have had access to it before. This especially works for those American larpers who can’t hop the pond or spend the money to attend Knutpunkt, whose finances don’t allow European trips, or whose mental bandwidth doesn’t allow them to engage with ongoing (and often complex and heated) debates in online spaces. Nordic larps or “Nordic inspired” games coming to the US allows people to see just what the (rightly created) fuss is all about.

However, in deploying that brand name, not only are organizers evoking an entire larp culture’s identity, but sometimes imposing their own outsider’s opinion on what exactly makes that culture tick.

It’s coming into someone’s home and asking for a recipe, then going home to make the thing and say their food is the same as the authentic cultural cuisine. That’s been happening for generations, as Americans recreate food (which is a cultural medium by the way) and define what it is and how it should be prepared based on their own internal design/creative choices. Or else they create food fusions, taking traditions and smashing them together to make new and interesting takes on traditional recipes.

And that’s what’s happening here. “Nordic-inspired” games are the fusion food of the larp world, considered pretty trendy, attention-grabbing and fun. Fusion is sexy, it’s mysterious: what can this combination create, bringing together the best of both worlds for something we’ve never seen before. And you know what? Fusion is AWESOME. Fusion dishes are exciting and innovative and create new and fabulous tastes based on cultural exchange. Fusion is a valid and impressive form of food evolution.

Where it can become a problem is where people misidentify or else co-opt food origins altogether for their own ends without giving credence to where it came from, or considering just how they may be erasing traditions from BOTH cultures to create this newly created dish… game…

This analogy has gotten away from me here. But I digress. Let’s look at some of the factors involved in this erasure.

We’ve looked a lot at the Nordic larp tradition across the pond and how it developed, but looking at the other side of this potential appropriation debate, we must also look at the development of larp cultures across the United States. Plenty of research has gone into the myriad traditions and groups which have deep cultural roots across the US, work done by academic powerhouses like Jonaya Kemper and journalists like Lizzie Stark. The United States has decades-long histories going back to the days of the evolution of simulationist gaming into live action spaces, and non-nerd community organizations like Model UN or murder mystery weekends.

These traditions are vast and wide-spread and often developed in tandem with one another over the years. Due to geographic isolation, lack of communication between groups, and schisms splitting communities over the years, different larp traditions have evolved to create design tools that can be both similar to those from other communities and also flavored with their own experiences and innovations. And due to how massive the United States are, that decades-long artistic growth from untold separate communities has created a tapestry of American larp culture which reflects the diversity which makes America what it is today: a complicated, culturally diverse, and often fraught hotbed of inter-community cooperation and friction.

It’s because of that complexity that United States larp doesn’t have a centralized definition, even though many from the outside have struggled and often erroneously attributed one to the scene (if there can be said to be a single scene). “American Larp” is often defined as “a form of roleplaying game where participants physically portray their characters” (Wikipedia) while engaging in competitive play, sometimes involving heavily controlled plotlines, live combat with contact safe (boffer) weapons, and “crunchy”, number-based systems which rely heavily on chance and competition rather than negotiation. American larp is also sometimes split in definition in an attempt to encompass those many traditions by putting them into several sub-categories: live combat (boffer) games, theater style games with no physical contact (like the far-reaching Camarilla Club or Mind’s Eye Society for White Wolf games), and the emerging and ever-growing freeform scene, with smaller and more personal games and less scenography or 360-degree immersion involved.

As you can imagine, these definitions are almost just as broad as the term Nordic Larp, even in their broken down form, and contribute to a generalization of what “American Larp” really is that does no one any favors. One could then instead go in and deconstruct just what design practices are employed by these American traditions, and you do come down (in my opinion) to some important cultural touch points which are pervasive in many designs, specifically:

  • a reliance on chance rather than negotiation,
  • a competitive spirit between players and therefore their characters,
  • a focus on secrets kept by characters rather than open sharing of plots beforehand or during play, and
  • stories heavily driven by centralized storyteller authority rather than created cooperatively and predominantly by players.

Yet even with these pinpointed overlaps in communities, these elements barely touch the complexities developed in US larps over the years. And many of the games being created defy these elements, operating outside of the definition traditionally ascribed to much of the American larp scene. These games instead incorporate perhaps some of these element – or none at all – and instead employ design choices we might more closely attribute to Nordic Larp games. This includes design ideological choices like cooperative narrative development, culturally important thematics, emotional roleplay focus over story and simulation, and strip-down of mechanics to more freeform design.

In that way, these games have more in common perhaps with Nordic design than with their American counterparts. But that does not make them any less a product of the American larp system. And to say these tools haven’t been employed by American larpers for years now is to erase literally generations of work by talented designers and powerful communities in favor of claiming techniques to a single community. Everyone in larp has been reinventing the wheel for years, but in the end a lot of our wheels ended up looking very much the same, and all doing the same job: rolling the hell along.

But then we come back to branding. And though a game might be incorporating elements which are recognized now during international discourse as “so Nordic,” the use of the term serves to attract players while largely undermining the complexity of the larp development in the United States and the world over. It appropriates the ever-evolving and often ephemeral Nordic Larp label for the sake of defining a game against the ‘American larp scene’ while still employing some of the techniques shared by both communities. And usually for the sake of creating distinction between what has come before, and the new hotness now.

In fact, many of the games being created are not Nordic Larps. They’re games which share design elements with Nordic Larps, elements which have been in use in the United States larp scene forever. And so the distinction belittles American larp while taking the brand of another community for our own. Essentially, it’s causing erasure on BOTH sides and causing further friction between American and Nordic larp communities.

Nordic Larpers express frustration about their culture being taken for profit here.

American Larpers feel under-appreciated, their traditions slighted and ignored in favor of the European import.

And so the fight has simmered, and recently exploded, and here we are.

But we’re missing a fundamental answer to this discussion altogether: games in the United States don’t need to be Nordic Larps to have the same elements. We’ve had those elements all along! We just didn’t have a brand, a label, and certainly not one with as much recognition as the hip Nordic Larp brand. (And I’m sorry for those who bristle under the use of such a capitalistic terminology for an art movement, but it is a brand today, used to sell experiences. And that class/political/economic issue is an internal debate for the Nordic community which has complicated the problem of tensions even further.)

American larpers don’t need to label their games as Nordic for them to be cool, and immersive, and emotionally intense, and freeform. We’ve had those for the longest time. In communities, for example, like Intercon and the Double Exposure communities, larps like these have been evolving for years now. Across the country, we’ve had people discovering these changes on their own. But because we’re not united in a single art scene, we needed a lable. And I believe for that reason, and for branding power, Nordic Larp was borrowed, the tradition imported, the ideology embraced.

Unless these games are run by Nordic teams in the US, even working with American larp designers (such as the teams running Just A Little Lovin’ in the US in 2017 or the newly merged Turtle House, made up of US company Imagine Nation and Dziobak Studios from Denmark), these games remain strongly American.

And I repeat. That’s okay. We can have our own hotness too.

In fact, I believe it is VITAL to the health of American larp and our pride as a larp culture that we embrace having our own hotness. That we work together in the spirit of growing national community connections to create discussions of commonality, and even perhaps create a term for our own adaptations of what traditions people are calling Nordic. “Nordic Inspired” doesn’t really hack it anymore and evokes that erasure again.

We’ve got our own thing going here. Why not find a name that serves to both give credit to the American developing scene and also detach ourselves from the appropriation of Nordic Larp? We don’t need to borrow anything when we’ve got our own sexy fusion going on, ready to evolve our larp communities to a bigger and better tomorrow.

On the opposite side of this argument is perhaps a valid point brought up by Jaakko Stenros within his above video, a point which sits strong in my mind when I feel a sense of irritation at the idea that Nordic Larp has been appropriated. As Stenros says:

“No one owns Nordic larp,” says Stenros in the introduction to his definition. “Not the designers, not the larpwrites, not the organizers. Not the journalists, not the experts, not the academics not the researchers, not the event organizers, or popularizers. Not the web service providers or the editors in chief, not the people who are working to import larp or export larp, not even the players.

“For we all own Nordic larp. There simply is no central bureau of Nordic Larp. And if there was, I can promise you that splinter groups would surface faster than you can say “Fucking fascists trying to limit my imagination to copyright my reality hacking tools, to steal my status and funding, and to take away my fun and misery.”

Nordic Larp in itself not only evolved, as mentioned above, by its creators and trend setters attending other larp traditions and creative communities to borrow techniques, but the community is defined by an ideology which does not belong to any individual group. It in and of itself is built around dozens of smaller communities, each networked together to define their games based on a shifting rubric. So then how can the Nordic Larp community claim ownership of this brand – simply because it’s Nordic? If the idea was to share ideas and continue to evolve Nordic Larp as a tradition, as it has continued to do over the years, then why invite outside input from (for example) Americans only to become upset when that input is given and swapped back to the US. Sharing ideas doesn’t necessarily happen the way one wants, nor produce some sanitized results. Cultural exchange is messy, and getting your peanut butter in your hummus can make some weird results that change the context of both ingredients for mixed results.

If you can’t own Nordic Larp, then is it fair to say you own or control the overall discourse? Especially when that discourse invited in the very voices now being criticized for appropriation? Is it appropriation or a cultural sharing, a blending? Or is it a one-way theft of ideas? That is at its heart the essence of a lot of discussions of what is appropriation in the first place in all media and art forms, and is now being reflected in the larp world, underpinned by a current of fear about American cultural colonization which has existed the world over since America rose to super-power and international media influencer status.

But is that what this is? Is this appropriation or exchange? The debate goes on.

While we fight about the issue, however, are there any solutions to positively influence this contentious debate?

I believe there are three major solutions.

  1. We as American larpers have a vested interest in discovering a new definition for what is coming out of the new evolution of larp right now, influenced as it is heavily by these ideas which appear parallel to Nordic Larp design. Nordic-inspired doesn’t cut it and does little for either us American Larpers or the Nordic community. Whatever we come up with, I’m sure we’ll fight about constantly. But having a brand new hotness all our own to reflect the hard work and in-house evolution we’ve done here in America would let us define ourselves a little more based on American ethos and make us look a little less like we’re blatantly ripping off another culture (which in fact we are not).
  2. American and Nordic larp communities must have conversations, both internally and between one another, about the manner by which people are sharing information, and whether or not it feels appropriative or acting as an exchange. A two-way street is an important start to making the cultural discourse feel mutual rather than either appropriative or elitist, depending on the interpretation of the side of the argument. Americans aren’t coming over to steal ideas and just be prescriptive about their ideas, and Nordic larpers aren’t demeaning all American larp as lesser and imposing their European ways on American larp communities. And if it feels that way, we should talk about why and try to mend those fences, for the sake of larp development and community relations.
  3. Last but not least (and perhaps harder still) is a revisiting of the way conversations about these issues are happening. Individuals are not only becoming burnt out, but there is very little benefit of the doubt happening. Instead, battle lines are becoming highly contentious, leading to many great designers and thinkers checking out of the conversation and perhaps even communities. We are imploding in on ourselves in an effort to preserve what we feel is vital to our identities, and a lot of that is based on the tensions rising and no assumption of positive intent. I believe that positive intent exists, and where it does not, it needs to be fostered to explore our commonalities and embrace our growing future as an international community. The alternative is cultural schism once more, something which has plagued larp communities everywhere forever.

I believe we are on the cusp of a very important turning point in international larp discourse, where the decisions we make now will cement either a continually evolving design exchange which could improve everyone’s games and communities. Or else we’re going to continue fracturing under the weight of our factionalism and concerns about appropriation and political/ideological entrenchment. And if that happens, what we will lose is the chance at a brilliant future of creation together that could be wonderful, if allowed to flourish and survive.

The decision on how to proceed is largely in our hands. We just have to communicate and do the (often) hard work to get us all there together.

Gaming Communities And The Bystander Effect

by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Geek Culture, LARP Discussion and Theory, Not Ready To Make Nice, Personal, Speaking Out

[Note: This is a post written back in 2018. At the time I was too nervous to put up this post due to the intensity of my feelings. I think now it’s as important as ever to talk about and so I’m posting it.]

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I owed someone an apology, and it wasn’t my fault.

There’s nothing worse than being involved in a situation where due to someone else’s actions, your very presence caused a problem or harmed someone else. You might only be tangential to a situation, but through the confluence of events, you’re suddenly aware that for your sake, someone else was hurt. For you, someone else was put on the spot.

I had this happen to me recently. I was put in a situation where due to my needs, someone else was put out. Not only put out but hurt, where they should have been cared for and their needs met. I felt the need to apologize, even though the situation wasn’t my fault. And it gave me a great deal of insight into a problem I’ve seen going on for some time but didn’t have a chance to articulate until now.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up and start again.

We have a problem with safety in the gaming community. And that problem is complicity.

We live in an era of pretty awful social breaches within our communities, social breaches which run the gamut from rude and inappropriate behavior to all-out situations of sexual harassment, assault, and violence. From politics to Hollywood, from bigger cultural institutions to our own gaming backyards, online movements like #MeToo and other online threads have brought out stories of harassment, degradation,  misogyny, mistreatment, and more, leading me to wonder sometimes if there’s any place safe from the predations of bad actors (the answer, my pragmatic side replies to my oh-so-innocent inner naivete, is no).

Yet in the face of all this ongoing horrific disclosure from men and women who’ve suffered some truly horrible nightmares, we’ve seen communities responding in positive ways. Safety policies are being developed and organizers and leaders are finding ways to safeguard their populations by recognizing bad actors and weeding them out for the safety of everyone. The arrest of people like Harvey Weinstein in Hollywood and the indictment of actor Bill Cosby have given people hope that justice, albeit slow and often full of compromise, is possible. Slowly but surely, we’re hopefully climbing towards a better tomorrow.

The fact is, however, there is still a huge stumbling block in the face of truly transforming the spaces we inhabit. Though our communities are (usually) full of well-meaning and positive individuals, whose aim is to be in a social space with others of like minds and interests for the purpose of finding unity of purpose and commonality, there are those who are around because they want the community to fulfill their own destructive, selfish needs. They bring damage in their wake, sometimes unconsciously and sometimes consciously and sometimes based simply on a view of reality so different from everyone else it boggles the mind. These people are the abusers, the manipulators, the tragically thoughtless, the hopelessly deluded. And they are within every community, acting in various degrees of inappropriateness, from the simply hurtful to the downright criminal.

We all have them, in every community, in every space.

And we still put up with them.

Sure, the most egregious bad actors are easier to recognize and target for removal. Those who act for example in an overtly aggressive manner or are violent or caught in a flagrant bad act are easier to target for exclusion from the community. Yet for every bad actor extracted from the community for safety, there are a thousand other little infractions, cuts of various sizes inflicted, which go unaddressed and unattended. These are not simply the sort of slights one does to a single individual, but rather a pattern of systematic abusive or selfish actions which harm others over and over. Often, these individuals are recognized, their behaviors identified as problems, and they garner a label as a ‘problematic’ person. And yet-

And yet these people don’t receive any adjustment in behavior. And yet the bad behaviors continue unchecked. That is until things become so bad they can no longer be ignored, often coming to a head in an action which causes intense harm to one or more people.

How does this happen? How do these ongoing bad actors and their harmful actions continue on and on until things get out of control and implode into traumatic and hurtful events?

The answer, in my mind, is complicity. And we’re all a part of the problem, each and every one of us, one and all.

I had to explain to my father about the internet the other day. Or specifically, the realities of being a woman on the internet.

I was busy trying to listen to the announcements about video games announced at E3 and at the same time trying to explain to my father what some of the terms I mentioned about video games meant. When I expressed my dismay that a particular game was going to have an online multiplayer mode, my father didn’t understand what that meant. I told him about online play, about teaming up with others and getting a chance to play together remotely. He said that sounded like a fun thing to do, playing with others instead of alone.

So then I had to explain to my father about the internet and how it treated women. I had to explain online harassment, the term incels, and Gamergate. It branched off into a discussion about SWATing, about the harassment of women like Anita Sarkesian and Zoe Quinn, of death threats and unsolicited sexual advances, and of rampant misogyny. I had to tell him the story about coming back from speaking at PAX back in 2013 and finding my inbox full of death and rape threats and pictures of decapitated animals and people because I’d been on a panel about feminism in gaming and nerd culture.

It wasn’t the first time I tried to explain things like this to my father, who sometimes just seems boggled by the issues of modern communities. This time, he was horrified and furious. He didn’t understand how this stuff happens today. As he’s often said when I tell him about awful things going on, he’ll blurt out, “But it’s 2018! How does this happen?”

And every time, I keep coming back to the same answer, over and over.

“Because we let it happen.”

With that answer, I in no way mean to blame victims for what happens to them. Far from it. The ‘we’ I mean when I give that response is the collective we of communities at large, who see issues going on and remain in said community without causing disruption to protest bad actors or horrific events. Faced with reports of bad behavior, plenty of communities choose to turn a blind eye or refuse to engage with individual problematic events, or even escalating patterns of bad action, for the sake of maintaining the status quo. Instead, we fall back on the idea of “it’s not my business” or “there’s two sides to every story” or my favorite, “I don’t want to get involved.”

When trying to explain this to my father, I was reminded of a situation from my childhood. There was a family I knew growing up who had serious problems. The father was a violent person who abused both his wife and daughter on a regular basis, while the mother had mental illness issues to contend with while trying to raise her child. The husband’s malicious actions were widely known among both the adults around me and, as I discovered later, the community at large. But no one did anything. In the end, the wife was so badly damaged by the events she was forced to be institutionalized, while her daughter finally ended up in foster care for her own safety. The trauma went on for years with so many people aware of the problems going on. Yet no one acted, because to act would involve them in another bad situation outside their own lives. Members of the community were complicit, and the damage was done.

And back in the gaming community, the damage is being done. And we are all complicit too.

The gaming community has seen an escalation of toxic masculine behavior, fueled by the anonymity of the internet and the lack of repercussions against those who harm others. From verbal and written harassment to stalking, death threats, and harm against property and data, behaviors which many consider harmless have led to real and lasting damage to marginalized populations and women, in particular, to name one group.

Yet with every outcry, there is a larger policy of deaf ears to overcome, a general epidemic of see no evil, hear no evil to contend with. When presented with the stories of harassment and harm, repeated over and over until a larger pattern of toxic encouraged behavior becomes apparent, the population at large seems unable or unwilling to stand up and in one voice say they simply will not abide this behavior. Everyone has heard the same stories, seen the same social media posts, and yet the behavior continues unabated. And those fighting to make it stop happening, who work to mitigate the damage or present new options to change the community for the better, are fighting a downhill-flowing tide of tireless work and horrific situations intending to bury them whole.

They’d have a better chance, however, making a difference if they weren’t surrounded by people unwilling to interrupt their regularly scheduled programming to help make a change.

There’s a very famous story out of New York about a young bar manager named Kitty Genovese. Back in March of 1964, the 28-year-old woman was on her way back from work when she was stabbed repeatedly in the courtyard of her apartment building in Kew Gardens, Queens by Winston Moseley. Kitty Genovese lay dying in the chilly night air outside her building, crying for help, and receiving none. The New York Times later reported that 38 people were witnesses to the event, either hearing Ms. Genovese crying out for help or seeing her lying on the pavement, but each chose to do nothing. The incident became the origin of the term bystander effect, a sociological phenomenon in which people are unwilling to offer help when others are present for fear of taking responsibility or ‘becoming involved’ in the trouble.

Years later, researchers have discovered many holes in the Genovese story casting doubt on the validity of many of the details of that night. But the concept of the bystander effect has remained a replicatable sociological phenomenon. When presented with a situation that is difficult or requires direct action, people will often decline to act because they either believe others will take care of the problem instead or else they don’t want to get involved out of fear of reprisal or simply due to indifference or lack of willingness to become involved. People don’t want to complicate their already complicated lives by involving themselves in the problems of others, in disrupting their status quo to introduce an unstable element that might end up causing them trouble.

Looking at the gaming community, we have a hell of a lot of bystander effect going on. Because we, like many other communities, are either full of folks who are simply deeming themselves too busy to get involved in standing up against problems, or believe someone else is going to fix the situation for them, or feel powerless in the face of such overwhelming negativity, or are the victims of it themselves. And many are simply too frightened to stand up and make a change, afraid of being targeted themselves or perhaps even having their own actions picked apart and targeted.

So we all sit back and wait, wait for someone else with the power to make the decisions, or for someone else to seize that power to change things up. We hear the cries of the women harassed by Gamergate, or harmed in our tabletop RPG communities, or in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy fiction world like those bombarded during the Sad Puppies debacle. And rather than speaking up in one voice, we do not seek action. We remain complicit. We continue to enjoy our social activities and communities without taking an active role in solving the problems at hand.

We may not agree on solutions, or even if the problems are necessarily what they seem to be. Communities can disagree over problems, but as long as they engage with them in a direct manner, they are breaking the chain of disinterest which allows problems to fester. By bringing them to the forefront they allow the problems to go from being problematic to being recognized problems with the possibility for solutions. By burying problems instead and avoiding conflict, we leave the work to a few individuals to make the change for us. And when it doesn’t happen, we bemoan the difficulties in our world. But in the end, we did little to nothing to change things for the better.

This makes us complicit. And therefore, in our own way, part of the problem.

And yes, I’m saying we. Because I am certainly, in my own way, part of the problem.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m someone who knows how to speak up for myself. When I need to, I’m capable of making a lot of noise to raise awareness of an issue, be it personal or otherwise. And yet faced with the situation I mentioned at the article’s opening, I didn’t do a damn thing to mitigate the damage done in my name. In fact, I sat there quietly and profited from the experience. I was complicit.

During an event I attended, I needed assistance from a member of staff. To provide me with assistance, that staff member callously brushed aside the needs of another person who was in crisis and needed, at the bare minimum, to be left alone. But instead, my needs were put ahead of this person’s and they were hurt. Now, I could go on about how that situation needed to be addressed, and what the staff member should have or could have done to not harm another person in question to help me out. Yet the part I keep coming back to since the event isn’t what this other person could have done in the situation – but what I could have done better.

Instead of speaking up at the time, I remained silent in the face of someone else getting hurt. I saw someone’s feelings get ignored by a person in power, someone whose job it is to look out for others at an event. I don’t know that it was done maliciously – in fact, I believe it was a thoughtless action brought on by short-sightedness. Yet that is no excuse for the harm caused, and I’ll do you one more: there’s no excuse for me not speaking up. By keeping my mouth shut, I made myself complicit in the actions taken. By not speaking up, I was implicitly aligning myself with the bad behavior.

To twist the NYPD slogan: I saw something, and didn’t say something. And I profited from the situation at another person’s expense.

And so we’re back around from my experience to the larger bodies involved. Take my experience and expand it to how many other incidents, how many other safety questions and harmful situations ignored. How many issues exist, some as tiny as mine and some massive problems that cause life-threatening incidents in communities, which go unresolved, festering and growing, until they boil over?

“But Shoshana,” you may ask, “how can we make change? We’re just little tiny parts of a larger system? A larger body that drowns out little old me?”

Well sure, it can drown you out. If you’re only one voice, it might. But if we changed the culture of complicity, if we really took up the idea of “If you see something, say something” and stood up for our fellows, we would disrupt the power structures enough to see real change on a faster timetable. We might be able to disrupt things enough in fact so things can change on a more permanent basis and quicker so as to make sure fewer people are hurt as we press towards a safer and more progressive tomorrow.

How do we do that? There’s some simple ways to disrupt rather than be complicit:

  • Speak up about larger issues: If you are aware that your community has a problem that is systematic and widespread, take a stand publicly against it. You don’t have to be on a soapbox and yelling constantly about it, but in the face of harmful behavior, if you stand up and say something it might encourage others to do the same.
  • Vote with your dollars and presence: If an event, a product, a community or a team does not address toxic situations, removing yourself or protesting will hit their bottom line if you remove yourself and therefore your contributions. That includes not buying products whose communities or companies don’t address bad actors or situations.
  • Intervene on a personal level: Bad behavior on a wider scale is perpetuated onward when small incidents are allowed to fester and remain unaddressed. Bad actors can be identified and either situations resolved or individuals removed but ONLY if people curb their conflict avoidance and instead engage the problem directly. Speak up and handle the situation or else seek help to mediate out the issue. If your problem is harmful and even dangerous, seek community leaders for backup. But don’t let your unwillingness to confront difficult situations help make you complicit in the harm they’ve caused.
  • Recommend solutions: Identifying problems is only one step in the process. But making sure once you stand up you contribute resources to solving the problem? That makes it all the better. It might take some energy to get involved (and you should not feel obligated to put out more energy into a situation than you can handle) but with what energy you CAN spare, help present possible solutions to the problem to your community leaders. This is an active step not only beyond complicity all the way to becoming a community reformer.

And above all: do what you can. Not everyone’s ability is going to be the same. Not everyone has the same physical ability, emotional bandwidth, psychological make-up, time, responsibilities, or wear-with-all to take on problems. We’re all different and have different restrictions to keep in mind and respect. We can’t judge how much someone else is doing necessarily in terms of hours put in and content. But every person can do SOMETHING at a minimum to confront problems in their community, each within their own capability. Together we can take on issues, each in their own way, supporting one another and aligned towards a goal of a better tomorrow.

I hope I’ll get the chance to someday to make up for being complicit in that uncomfortable situation I mentioned. I’ve already made my apology, but I’m not sure that’s enough. Instead, I’m using the situation as a reminder that the communities around us are made up of individuals, and if each person stood up for what they believed was right, then we could transform our spaces towards a shared goal of social and justice evolution.

I’m Not Too Fat For Your Larp

by Shoshana, posted in Body Positivity, Criticism, Game Design, LARP Discussion and Theory, Not Ready To Make Nice, Speaking Out

I’ve got a pretty lousy memory, but I remember a lot of firsts in my life.

I remember the first time I got a solo in a choir performance. I was so excited, I could hardly stand it. I remember going in to get fitted for my costume and the seamstress frowning. “She can’t be up front,” she said, “what’s that going to look like? Put her in the back row.” I didn’t realize then she meant because I was fatter than the other girls. I didn’t figure that out until a bully in my class made it abundantly, loudly clear at recess the very next day.

I remember trying out for the role of Ms. Hannigan in Annie. I told the drama teacher I wanted to be on Broadway when I got older. “You’ll need to lose weight for that,” she said, “being heavy doesn’t work on Broadway.” I didn’t learn until later she, herself overweight, had tried to be on Broadway once. Learned from experience, I guess.

I remember the first time I got up the nerve to ask a guy out in college. It was at a sorority party at a bar. He was a little drunk. We’d been hanging out for weeks. I’d been over his house, we’d talked video games, I thought he was wonderful. When I asked him, out in the rain, I’ll never forget what he said. “Sorry. But you know how some people don’t like some kinds of porn? I don’t like fat people porn.” I never spoke to him again.

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I remember. I might not remember what I ate for lunch two days ago or where I left my bag some days, but I remember every damn comment. Every doctor who never took me seriously and told me I just needed to lose weight. I remember every comment, every time I got laughed at in the street. Stories like those are memories worn into my mind. I won’t forget them any time soon.

But there are good memories too.

I’m going to tell a story here about a poignant fat-related story. And then I’ll get to my point. I was at an event where a number of small larps were being showcased. I signed up for one game because it abstracted emotions and events using music, which I thought was cool. Little did I know until too late that the game was about relationships, people falling in and out of love. I panicked. I was afraid of seeing the disgust in someone’s eyes knowing they’d have to date a fat girl in character. I was so cautious and scared it almost made me leave the game. But I stuck it out. And in that game, a guy I didn’t know at all played my love interest with such care it made me glow. When he stood up and asked me to slow dance, I nearly burst into tears. It was all I was able to do not to step on his toes. I’d never slow danced with a man before. I’d never had the chance.

Larps have given me experiences that escaped me in my life because of a lot of social anxiety due to weight. I experienced what it was like to be a woman in a position of power, confident and powerful, when before I would hide. I got a chance to be on the arm of the most handsome men and women at a game. I’ve had the chance to play out love stories, stories of triumph. To lead battles and armies. To learn to be confident in my own skin.

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To play a badass teacher at Wizard School (Photo: New World Magischola)

I’ve also had a guy at a convention game look at me and then go to a game organizer and say he needed to trade characters because “I would never date THAT.” He was meant to play my husband.

I’ve had a guy meant to be an enemy of mine in a game say, “I’d feel bad beating you up, I can run rings around your fat ass.”

I had a woman tell me I wasn’t allowed to play a sidhe in a Changeling: the Dreaming larp because “there aren’t any fat sidhe.” (Jokes on her who helped put THAT change in the 20th-anniversary edition, but hey…)

I remember a lot of stories about what it’s like to be fat in this world. And to be fat in the larp world too. And I have only one thing to say about it after all these years:

I’m not too fat for your larp.

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Because screw you, I’m a goddamn badass. (Photo: Dystopia Rising NJ)

You heard me. Larp is a fantastic place, a blank canvas upon which to build whole new worlds, worlds where you decide the structures, the rules, the norms. And as the designers, writers, organizers, and producers of games, it is in your power to challenge the status quo of how fat people are treated in your games. You have the power to make the decisions about how people are treated in your community and in play based on the atmosphere you cultivate and the games you design. So why do so many games still have atmospheres where people who are fat are mistreated? Where being fat marginalizes the positions you’re allowed to have? Or the fun you’re allowed to enjoy?

The simple matter is being fatphobic and hurtful against fat people is the last socially accepted bigotry enacted by almost every single group anywhere. Otherwise progressive communities and marginalized populations will still turn inward on fat members and harass, shame, ostracize, or minimize them when they would never consider letting that treatment go unchallenged to their own group. We as a society celebrate striving for tolerance in much of our media, giving us feel-good messages about love and kindness and acceptance with one hand, and making awful fat jokes with the other. And this same process happens everywhere, in every subculture group. Including larp.

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Don’t be that person. Just don’t.

The problem is universal and yet hits different groups disproportionately. For example, it’s no secret that fatphobia affects women disproportionately more than men (although mistreatment of fat men is absolutely a thing). Women are put under the lens, pulled apart by people of every gender for the way they look, and their fat pointed out at every turn. Yet in a medium where we create our worlds, why is this still the case? Because we bring our bigotries with us. And in a real world where we can’t imagine not picking everyone apart for that stray pound, why the hell would you not do it in your games?

Because it’s not right. And by continuing to do so, you’re creating hostile larp environments. Even if your game purports to be progressive, if you don’t consider fat bigotry in your events and designs, you’re not making progressive environments that are equal for all. You’ve failed in your inclusivity.

Here’s a handy dandy list of how you might mess up at including size discrimination in your larp. We’ll call it the “If You ________ Then Your Game Might Be Fat Phobic.”

  1. If you don’t have any fat people playing characters of social status or power.
  2. If you don’t cast fat players in romantic roles.
  3. If you design costume requirements for games which won’t allow fat people to participate comfortably (such as providing costumes for the event and make the sizes inaccessible to fat people).
  4. If you use fat-phobic language in your game descriptions of characters (associating fat with evil, slovenly, lazy, disgusting, etc.)
  5. If you encourage social stratification based on appearance in your games.
  6. If you do not use people of all sizes in your larp promotion, instead relying on people who represent only the status quo in your advertisements and documentation.
  7. If you make being fat an accommodation one must ask for when participating rather than considering people of all sizes from the beginning.
  8. If you allow fatphobic comments or mistreatment to continue on in your game, either from other players or from your staff. (Bonus points on this one if you accept “being fat is unhealthy” as an excuse).
  9. If you adjust the power dynamic of a character being played by a fat player once they’ve been cast because they’re fat.
  10. If you accept bullying in character based on someone being fat and accept that as just the status quo (bonus points if you make a whole game about this, or try to subvert it and fail miserably *ahemFatManDownahem*).

Okay. So here we are at the end of this rather scathing list. And you might be asking: so what do I do to make sure my game isn’t fat phobic? Well, take a look at that handy dandy list and don’t do those things. Work hard to make sure people who are plus size, people who are fat, are in positions of power. Fight back against fatphobic jokes. Make sure you recognize the power dynamics being played out against fat players and their characters and help adjust the narrative so they are not pushed out by those who equate fat with things like laziness, slovenliness, lack of power, etc. Do the work to represent the life of fat people accurately and do not focus your games on the life of fat people and their challenges unless you know just what you’re doing.

As for me, I know that the world isn’t going to change overnight. I’m aware that there are plenty of places which will never shift the way they think about fat bodies (the clothing industry, for example…) But I solidly believe with a little conscious work we can make larp spaces more accessible and friendly towards body types of all kinds. By making sure people of all sizes fell comfortable coming to your game, you’ll enrich your game by bringing new experiences and new voices into your space. And you’ll prove that you recognize that fat people need not and should not be erased from your stories.

Embrace a new way of thinking. Or join in fatphobia as a phenomenon. There is no middle ground. And if you’re about bringing fatphobia into your games, just tell me so. Because then you get from me a big old…

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A Single Piece Of Paper And The Lies It Told

by Shoshana, posted in Personal

I got an email this afternoon. It, like many other emails recently, disappeared into my overzealous spam filter (which rules my inbox like a terrifying digital helicopter parent) so I only discovered it late after midnight. It was a message from Ancestry.com. At first, I thought it was spam and therefore had been sent appropriately into the oubliette to be forever ignored. But then the subject caught my eye. “LOOKING FOR MY DAD.”

I stopped. It wasn’t an ad. It was an actual message from someone who was looking for her father. I didn’t hesitate. I clicked on the link. In the message, a young woman asked me if I knew about my biological family. She said Ancestry.com had matched our DNA and said we were cousins. She’d been looking for her father, could I help her out.

It was only then I remembered I’d done one of those swab-your-mouth DNA tests and sent it off months ago. I’d forgotten all about it. I politely penned back a message apologizing for my inability to help the young woman. I explained I was adopted and didn’t have any information about my biological family. I clicked send, then looked up at the menu bar across the top that said DNA.

This is it, I figured. The moment of truth. I’d get a chance to prove what the adoption papers said was true, justify every time someone asked me about my ancestry and I proudly recited what those dang papers told me. See, I’d been told by some very vague pieces of paper that my genetic family was Irish and Scottish and Scandinavian and Native America. Specifically, that they were at least 1/4 Cherokee. And there was going to be my DNA results, right there for me to see.

So I clicked the button.

And apparently discovered I was complicit in some serious multi-generational cultural appropriation.

When I was eleven years old, my parents told me I was adopted. There’s a weird story involved, in which I was reading a Babysitter’s Club Book in which Claudia believes she’s adopted and goes on this wild goose chase to discover why she’s so different than her family. And I laughed about it in my eleven-year-old way to my parents, who then sat me down and told me I actually WAS adopted, unlike Claudia, who only learns a valuable lesson about being different in her own special way. I instead learned that sometimes, the universe has a perverse sense of humor.

My parents didn’t have a hell of a lot of documents about the adoption. I’d been given up as an infant by my birth family, signed away in a closed adoption before I was even born to a private agency who specialized in matching couples by their ‘appearance compatibility.’ By the time years later I wanted to look into my biological family, that agency had long since closed and their records disappeared into the darkness of the pre-digital age. ‘Uncle Ray’ and ‘Auntie Barbara’ were the adoption brokers, the heads of the agency, and not just family friends as I’d imagined when I was growing up.

I remember being my eleven-year-old self, sitting on my parents’ bed while my mother pulled out a manila envelope. In there were some documents, like the adoption certificate, and some papers she kept, photocopies of records about the birth family. The adoption was sealed but there were some basic intake records of the family, descriptions of their background, heritage, what the family members were like, without names or indications of where they were from. They listed in those documents their heritage as Irish / Scottish / Scandinavian / Native American. In fact, the descriptions of the family members had been very specific that they were Cherokee, that they were about one quarter Cherokee in fact, and they were closely tied to that heritage. That was right there, in the descriptors.

As a little girl, I’d clung to that information. There I was, eleven, having just found out I was genetically not related to my adopted parents. The family and community I had was mine by adoption. And while that means they were indeed my family, I developed that yearning a lot of adopted kids talk about to connect with something from their biological past. I looked at that paper before my mother whisked it away, hid it from me, as she did many things about that adoption. But later, when kids would tease me in school for being adopted (and they did, telling me the reason my parents wouldn’t send me on trips we couldn’t legitimately afford was because I wasn’t their real child), I’d proudly recite what I knew about my lineage. It became my only connection to my past. In a school full of Eastern European descended Jews, I was the Irish/Scottish/Scandinavian/Cherokee girl. I was different.

By the time I was in college, however, the information on that little piece of paper wasn’t a way to be different. It was a lifeline to somewhere out in the rest of the world, beyond the walls of my orthodox upbringing, to a place where there might be other people who were my genetic relatives. Maybe, somewhere out there, there was someone who knew where I came from. And that road led to a community of people indigenous to this continent, not far away in Europe. A group of people who, if you tied together the pieces of information in that long-ago read document, were from Kentucky and lived close to a Cherokee reservation in recent generations. I held onto that information ferociously, as my only link to the somewhere I’d come from and might eventually find again.

Everyone wants to know where they belong. And I know for me, a huge part of feeling unmoored in this great wide world has been because of a lack of knowledge of my biological heritage. To many people, ancestry isn’t important. They are happy to live in the now. But I believe connections to the past help us point proudly to where we’ve come from and say “Come better or worse, this is where I began, and this is where I walk now.” And you root yourself in the stories of that culture where you can, make it a part of your story, your identity.

When people asked what it was like to have Native American ancestry, I’d say, “I don’t know, I don’t live that cultural life, but I’m 1/4 by blood” because that’s what the paper told me.

And the paper. Fucking. Lied.

People criticize these new DNA tests that have become all the rage. It’s been discovered some of the companies might be selling our DNA information. After tonight, I figure I’ve got other things to worry about rather than being concerned someone is going to map my lost little genome.

You see, it turns out, whoever filled out those papers my mother showed me when I was eleven was either tragically misinformed or had a very estranged relationship with the truth. Otherwise, there was one HELL of a mix up with the copy machine that day.

If Ancestry.com is correct, I’m actually not even a little Native American. Not one lick. I’m indeed Irish/Scottish/Welsh by a good mount. I’m also super British (like 54%). There’s some mixed up western Europe in there too. And yes, I am Scandinavian – I’m Finnish! But there isn’t a single lick of Cherokee in there. In fact, somewhere in my ancestry someone apparently dipped their toes into the gene pool in India. I’m more INDIAN than Native American. But nope, not a little Cherokee. Not a bit. Zip.

It took a few minutes for this to settle in on me. I’ve been having a weird week, or at least I’d thought it was weird BEFORE this happened. As I’ve said, the universe just has a perverse sense of humor. Because just when you think you know at least some basic things about yourself, the universe yanks the carpet out from under you once again. And here I’d sent an email to this nice young woman saying I didn’t know anything about my ancestry. But I’d at least believed I had a few pieces of information settled. Turns out that wasn’t the case after all.

Then I thought about the last few months, and some work I’d done in my professional career, and a whole other consideration came crashing down on my shoulders.

See, I’d spent time talking in my career about representation in games and fiction. I’d talked about the importance of avoiding cultural appropriation and identity appropriation. And while I had NEVER represented myself as someone who lived the life of an indigenous person, I had in the past talked about feeling connected to my heritage and the importance of recognizing the confusion over being someone who had ancestry that was from indigenous people of the United States while being disconnected from that heritage and overall also white. I stated again and again that though I had no connection to my biological family, I had grown up (from that age of eleven) acutely aware of the weird place of being someone white as hell who had native ancestry, even a little. I winced at every person who made claims about how much they were an “Indian Princess” and never tried to be THAT girl. Instead, I tried to cultivate a sensitivity to the idea of appropriation, of issues facing indigenous people, all the while balancing it out with the one drilled in thought: the paper might say you’re 1/4 Cherokee, but you are a white girl. That is your privilege. Don’t forget that.

And yet.

And yet.

Some part of me said, “this is also a part of you.” Some part of me said “those documents tell you who your family is genetically, who they are by blood, who YOU ARE by blood. And that has to mean something. Do you have the right to say you’re happy about your connection to a background? Not happy or proud in the shitty superiority way, but in the speak with joy and happiness about coming from somewhere kind of pride, somewhere vibrant and real?”

And I was happy, even proud (though isn’t that a loaded word these days?) I was happy that little document had given me something to say about where I came from. It made me develop a personal relationship with the historical narratives I came in contact with of native people, of rich cultures and diverse voices and also of ongoing genocide and destruction in the United States that felt a little bit more personal for the connection I felt to my genetics.

Now as I look back at those feelings, I want to laugh at myself and hide. Because of course that narrative of the genocide of native people was always important, and I’d never take away from it. But it was never my narrative. A little paper lied to me. Whoever told that story had appropriated a culture for their own needs, whatever those were at the time. And thanks to that little paper, I’ve been appropriating native identity since I was eleven and didn’t even know it.

The idea makes me sick to my stomach. And ashamed. And more conflicted then ever about what the hell being adopted and unmoored from my genetic ancestry means. It makes me question whether genetic ancestry means anything at all, whether a person in my position is just stuck in the middle, neither the bearer of a long legacy by blood or the bearer of a legacy of another legacy not entirely ever your own. I thought these feelings were complicated BEFORE. Now I’m not sure what the hell to do with them at all.

So I’m dealing with it the only way I know how: by feeling guilty, by being overly intellectual and analytical, and by writing about it.

I’m recontextualizing my feelings on a whole part of my identity I thought I’d known for certain. It’s not as though I have to go out and rescind some grand letters, resign from organizations, hand in some cred card. When it comes to personal relationships with identity, that’s not how shit works. (Or it might if you found this out and were legitimately part of some heritage organization. Thank God that’s not the situation here). But in the meanwhile, this whole thing has brought to the forefront two feelings:

One: someone in my background needs to get kicked seriously in the face for lying on a very important piece of paper.

Two: Feeling connected to your identity is a complex relationship when you’re adopted, and it can lead to trying to find anything, anywhere, to give you a sense of belonging. And in this case, it led me to a lie which I then apparently perpetuated without even knowing. A lie which only further tangles up my feelings on identity as a whole.

I’m not entirely sure how I’ll unfuck that particular Gordian knot. I’m writing this blog post, first of all. And I may have made a number of jokes in the last little while about now being absolutely CERTAIN I’m the whitest white girl I know. Most of them were told in my typical sardonic sense of humor sort of way. But this time they’re laced with a layer of serious self-depreciation sprinkled with a whole lot of embarrassment and shame. Because like it or not, I did appropriate another culture. And maybe that says more about where we ought to hang our hats in regards to appropriation and identity politics in the first place.

There have been long talks about what makes someone ‘count’ when speaking about their particular heritage. I’ve had friends talk to me about not feeling ‘enough’ of something to count as a member of their own genetic background. And I previously thought I’d had a dog in that fight, conflicted about whether or not having a quarter Cherokee blood meant I had a right to feel any connection at ALL to a group of people whose plight I’d never experienced due to being, well, who I am in appearance and life experience. I grew up a New York very white Jewish girl who, I thought, was also a quarter Native American. And I’d had a complicated relationship with that.

And now it’s even MORE complicated knowing I’ve been effectively perpetuating a lie.

There’s going to be more sardonic self-deprecating humor, and embarrassment, for at least a little while. But one thing I’m taking away from this whole debacle is this:

I’d spent my time since I was eleven years old supremely conscious of the plight of indigenous people, not only because it was an important issue and cause on its own, but because I’d felt a personal connection. I’d engaged in conversations about identity politics and complicated relationships with race, culture, and representation overall because in one moment when I was eleven, a single piece of paper set me on that path. I tried (often in my own inept way) to be well-informed, well-spoken, respectful, and helpful, as much as a woman in my privileged position could be without falling into the hole of being a white feminist of the worst sort. A lot of the origins of my interest in these things, even when I was growing up in a very sheltered and very xenophobic community, was based on this knowledge given to me by a tiny piece of paper, telling me I was someone with a background rooted in the history of a marginalized people.

And even if that paper lied to me in the worst way, the years of trying to be conscious of these issues can’t be erased by a single genetic test. I won’t ever, EVER, claim again a familial connection to indigenous people – of course I wouldn’t. But my concern over issues of representation, of equality, of justice for native people? That’s not going to change. And my stumbling, earnest attempts at being a good ally continue as they are, mired in their privilege even more now than before. If anything, this revelation just makes me more aware of the complexity of cultural identity and appropriation, and how conversations need to continue happening about what identity truly means to us in our modern world.

Meanwhile, I’m going to look through my mother’s things, put aside in a box after her death, to try to find this damn piece of paper again. It seems to have disappeared along with many of my mother’s other important papers (she wasn’t very organized). But I am going to try and find it so that perhaps one day soon I can have the joy of crumpling it up, kicking it across the room, yelling at it, and then maybe burning it. Because sometimes you just gotta get out those complicated feelings the old-fashioned way: through an expression of well-justified fury.

Or I might just hang onto it as a reminder of how real and serious appropriation is and the damage it can do in so many different directions. And of the universe’s ongoing and perpetual sense of perverse humor.

A New Home At Meow Wolf

by Shoshana, posted in Chronic Illness, Game Design, Personal

I’ve been quieter lately than usual on both social media and here on my website. That’s for a lot of reasons. The first is I was head-down for most of September-November developing and running games, including the blockbuster 1878: Welcome to Salvation (which will have its post mortem post on this blog). However after that, a curious thing happened: I got a job.

As many people might know by now, I was freelancing full time after being laid off from John Wick Presents and 7th Sea. That was a long stretch of me going from check to check and paying for private health insurance to stay alive. Trust me, it was a lean time and a very stressful one. So I started looking for full-time work again. I never expected to get the job that I eventually landed.

After returning from Texas from running 1878, I packed up all my things and moved across the country from New Jersey to Santa Fe, New Mexico to work at one of the coolest places in the world…

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Photos by: Meow Wolf website

I am now a Santa Fe resident, working as a Narrative Lead with some of the most creative people I’ve ever met in my life at the immersive art installation Meow Wolf. I will admit, it was a difficult move, and I would not have survived it without the help of so many good friends. There are too many to note, but Craig, Nico, Josh, Abigail, Ariella, Ennis, Katie, Allie, Abby, MayaBe, Travis, Sean, Gia, Megan, Alex, my father, and our rockstar Sean Foster were primary to this adventure. I was also scammed by movers, drove five days across the country with Nico, slept for nearly ten days in a scary motel and then on a couch in an empty apartment, ended up getting super sick from the altitude here and battled chronic health issues upon arrival. But here I am, with a new home, far from my old original home, under glorious blue skies in Santa Fe.

Meow Wolf itself is amazing. I get to write and ideate and create all day. And that is the dream of so many artists and writers that I feel so blessed to be here. I want to thank Danielle Harper, Jeff Gomez and Ryan Hart for pushing me to apply for this job when my confidence wasn’t there. I wouldn’t be at this great job without their support. And the support of so many others who nudged me along until I did the thing, posted the thing. (Also Nico for pushing me to finish my writing sample even when I was in the hospital – written with an IV in my arm!).

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I was never much for day-glo paint until I came here. Now it’s all up in my head.

Life-wise, things have stayed a little rocky. Those health issues I mentioned are still in play, which has kept me from doing a lot of things I wanted to do. I thought I’d land right on my feet here, but I’ve been in and out of the hospital constantly since arrival. I can’t tell you all how many times I’ve been writing or online lately with an IV in my arm in a hospital bed (or how much my hospital bills have become – $40,000!). But it also means I’ve had to be very serious about what I do with my spare time… Which is why, for now, I’ve taken a break from writing tabletop RPG content. I want to thank so many people who have contacted me recently with work, but with being so ill and still recovering from the move, I’ve had to take a hiatus. Because sometimes, you need to admit when you have to take care of yourself first.

My move has also made me have to recenter my larp design. I’m now far from the East Coast and far from the people I’ve worked with for so long. That doesn’t mean I’m done with larp design by far (or tabletop for that matter!). But it means I won’t be able to come back to the East Coast for every event… which makes me sad. But it also means maybe designing things on the West Coast…? I’m excited.

So what am I saying? I’m not done doing games just because I’m working here:

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I’m not being egotistical or showing off, I promise. I’m showcasing this gorgeous place.

It just means I’ve got to take it easier and make sure I take care of my health, so I can continue to make creative things both for my day job and for myself. Projects like Arksong, Immortal Flight, Affinity, my writing, and my comic book are still going on, plus some things you’ve never seen or heard of yet. But they’re going to take some time to pull off now as things change. As life often does.

So I’m not done.

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And I need to accept that slowing down is the right thing to do, while still telling myself:

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Instead I’ll say this: life changes. And I’m going with those changes. And I hope you’ll come with me. Thanks everyone, and thank you to Meow Wolf for this opportunity.

 

 

The Emotional Ledge and Larp

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, LARP Discussion and Theory

It’s been a long time since I wrote something on this blog, and there’s good reason for that, which I’ll be getting into in another post. However, after attending the Midwinter Gaming Convention this weekend, I had some rambling thoughts about live action games I wanted to put together before they all slipped away.

Let’s talk about those squishy things you don’t like speaking about at parties. Let’s open up and talk about feelings.

 

A group of players stood in a circle in the middle of a fake party. One held a tiny green container full of viable human embryos. Well, not really. They held a tiny vial of green liquid stuffed full of tiny plastic baby dolls whose legs had been cut off (the funny things we make for larp). The player stood in a circle and discussed just what they should do with these embryos. Some wanted to take them, bring them to maturity, and raise them as their own. Others wanted to destroy them. And still others wanted to turn them over to the highest bidder. It was an emotional conversation among the most unlikely of custodians of these future babies. You see, each of the players in the conversation were playing robots recently brought to sentience who had become the inheritors of mankind’s future.

These players were the first to ever try my newest game AFFINITY, a game about sentient robots inheriting humanity’s legacy when the human race is dying out. Think CHILDREN OF MEN meets AI. It’s been a passion project of mine for several years to see this live action event come to fruition and finally we had a chance.

I listened in on the conversation as a Non-Agency Character, a character played by a staff member meant to steer the story a little and keep the plot moving if necessary. But really, I didn’t need to do much during this game. The players had embraced their new Mechanica characters with both hands. They stood and discussed humanity’s future while outside they knew a human’s first hate group was closing in on their location to murder them. They had to escape.

And as I listened, one character named Cassandra gave an impassioned plea for keeping humans alive, because how could they truly learn and understand feelings and emotions if the originators of that sensation were to die out.

Just as Cassandra gave her speech, the music for our fictional party changed. The Beatle’s “Hey Jude” started to play. As Cassandra made her plea, two of the other Mechanica named Joy and Watt took each other’s hands and began to slow dance. And I sat in wonder at a small moment that touched me down to my core. Because all I could think was, “You can’t write spontaneity like that. And you can’t write emotion that comes from nowhere.”

There was only one word I could find in that moment: profound. It was profound.

True emotional moments in live action games are a gift. And they are a gift given by the spontaneous expressions of one factor bouncing off another, of the improvisation + character immersion + opportunity. That’s always been my formula for seeing real deeply beautiful, powerful moments come together in a larp. However I’m now starting to understand there is another piece of the puzzle we must have to make it all come together: feeling. And now just the surface level emotion we throw out for games. I’m talking about the kind of emotion that makes us vulnerable, the kind we save for our most precious moments or unexpected outpourings.

These emotions aren’t always expected. We may come into a game believing we are going to keep our emotions to ourselves, just play the game, and leave without getting too embroiled. But many times we find ourselves embracing those offered opportunities and something strikes just the right nerve, and we’re off to the emotional races. Other people come in expecting emotion, seeking it, and when the chance comes grasping it with two hands. It’s that kind of emotional preparation that can provide the opportunity as well and the character immersion into emotion that offers up chances for profound moments. But in many cases, those long preparations into character or bracing one’s self and stating in advance that one is seeking emotional role-play (saying things like “I can’t wait to cry all weekend” or calling one’s character a suffer puppet) sets expectations about the emotional weight of a game that might not be filled.

I have a suggestion inspired by what I saw this weekend: radical vulnerability. Instead of preparing for the emotional expectations of the game, or the character’s emotional journey to begin, or even planning your character’s plot trajectory, prepare yourself instead to step out into the space and just open up your emotions. Be ready to feel whatever comes and roll with the experiences that come with it. And in the process, be ready to feel things you may not have expected, good and bad. Be ready to be touched by those emotions and have them leave marks.

Experience them together with others or alone in the quiet moments. Experience them in combat scenes or dinner parties, long walks in a forest or in a wizard classroom. Because larp still is about improvisation + character immersion + opportunity. But now embrace a frightening fourth, a hot potato that asks you to unlock parts of yourself you might not be entirely comfortable with, or even entirely explored. Here you are, and you have a chance to tap into that place when at game.

There are caveats and concerns for radical vulnerability as a process when at larps. First, there is a chance you might encounter some serious emotional bleed when pursuing this kind of openness. Bleed meaning the emotional conveyance of either your real life emotions in character or your in character emotions out of character. Radical vulnerability makes the chance of of bleed very high and so players must consider this before engaging this practice. I’d say it is necessary even to embrace metatechniques which help to deroll (deconstruct the experience) afterwards in a safe and comfortable environment.

Another consideration is the idea that larp is not therapy. There is a great deal of a difference between coming into a larp with an open emotional slate for experiences and coming to a game aiming to explore one’s deepest emotional traumas with your fellow players as part of your attempt to exorcise your demons. There are a lot of discussions going on about whether it is fair to other players to come into a game to attempt therapeutic catharsis if other players have not opted into being part of that kind of experience. But for the sake of the idea of radical emotional vulnerability, that is not the intent of this experience.

That being said as well, this kind of vulnerability might not be for everyone. People who already feel as though they are in an emotionally shaky place (either for temporary reasons or due to neuroatypical or emotional/mental issues) may find this kind of vulnerability uncomfortable or even destabilizing. This technique is not, repeat not, suggested for everyone. There are those who might simply find this kind of vulnerability too uncomfortable. Choosing not to engage in it does not in any way invalidate any other kind of engagement with larps. It’s just a suggested tool and nothing else. 

The last issue is this kind of vulnerability might bring up emotions previously unexpected during play. There are techniques which allow players to check on one another during play if someone seems in distress, as well as allowing yourself to leave the game if needed to reassess, take care of one’s self emotionally, or just leave if things become too overwhelming. This kind of self-check in and community care becomes vital the more open and emotionally vulnerable one allows themselves to become.

 

I believe this concept of radical emotional vulnerability is not new. It has been spoken about by other blog posts and larpers for ages. But as live action events pass more into various forms, including forms like immersive theater, I believe the chance for emotional vulnerability on this scale (with the proper safeguards) can open up experiences as vehicles for all kinds of unexpected emotions created not by the spectacle provided by the event’s creators, but the players themselves thanks to their willingness to step off an emotional ledge. 

Motivation And Competition, or How To Play To Win At LARP

by Shoshana, posted in Uncategorized

First, I’m going to start off by saying this essay is a direct response to a conversation going on in the larp community right now, started by a few other essays including one by Ericka Skirpan regarding Playing To Win at larp. This article stirred up some controversy recently because of the stated thesis that should a player approach larps with the aim of ‘winning’ as a solitary goal, then perhaps larping isn’t for that player. The article states:

“If you are in LARP to play solo-Nerdball [a term originating in an article by Matthew Webb regarding inherently selfish, individualistic style play], LARP is not the right hobby for you. If a player’s pure and only enjoyment in a game comes out of the fact that they need the most points, stats, or mechanical advantages over other players, then LARP is not the gaming medium that person should be devoting their energy to playing.”

This in itself, in my opinion, is not as controversial a declaration as some might think. The notion of viewing one’s own empowerment and achievement in a shared environment as more important than the fun and achievement of others is a problematic one at best because it recognizes the selfish goal of self-fulfillment over the needs and wants of others. However, is there a way to strive for your own goals in a game while still recognizing the needs of others and even go so far as to help the other achieve their goal? All the while still allowing for the drama and potential excitement of antagonistic play?

The fundamental answer, I believe, lies in a single question, one often thrown around by actors everywhere: what’s my motivation?

Who Doesn’t Want To Win?

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Before we get into the solutions, let’s take a look at how we got here a little bit. I’m going to throw on my Game Studies brain for a second, and thank the NYU Game Center Masters program for making me learn all this game history. Strap in, folks, here we go.

The notion of Play To Win, with its origins in competitive gaming culture, has its roots in the early simulationist styles of play which historically predicated much of what we’d call modern gaming. Many early games, from chess to old Kriegsspiel (or war games), were conflict or competition simulations, intended to replicate states of power struggles between armies or oppositional groups. They replicated standard power structures we expect out of our world: people or groups strive against one another, winners beat losers, the game ends.

 

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H.G. Wells playing “Little Wars” in 1913 (Wikipedia)

Tabletop roleplaying games and video games copied these same models for much of games history, providing goals for the players which involve striving against a competing power structure to achieve their goals. They need to overcome obstacles, slay the foe, even outthink an opponent. Some games even perpetuate a culture of considering the game system itself (be it the video game and its designers, or the tabletop GM) to be a force they strive against for victory. This gave rise, in my opinion, to the notion of the game master or game designer as the enemy, the obstacle to be outmaneuvered and conquered to achieve victory.

 

This perpetual state of striving against an oppressive force, battling for power against an oppositional system, is baked into even the most story-driven game. By nature, dramatic action is created by striving against something to attain a goal. Even in the more recent evolution of games which accommodate more narrativist thinking copy these power dynamics in many (if not all?) their narrative choices. It’s the tale as old as time. Beowolf strives against a monster and its Mommy Dearest. David against Goliath. Oppositional forces create tension. Without Sauron to fight against, Lord of the Rings would just be about a brisk jaunt to see a very pretty volcano. Without Panem’s oppressive government, Katniss’s story in The Hunger Games would be about a girl getting her chance to be on television. And while those stories can be fun (pastoral narratives can be very pretty), dramatic storytelling – and therefore in games oppositional design creating dramatic and exciting play – are driven by competition.

 

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“We’re just off for a lovely walk. Don’t mind the weapons!”

 

If that is the case, then I believe expecting competitive attitudes to be absent or diminished in live action games is, inherently, expecting people to embrace a massive shift in their expectations about dramatic structure. We as players and consumers of narrative content have been hardwired to expect our characters to have to strive against power structures and opposition. How then do we expect characters and larpers to not identify other characters and their players as oppositional forces to be overcome?

How can we deny that these ideas have been baked into our game culture so long so as to become second nature? And how can we expect players to ignore actions taken by others in opposition to their goals, when even the narratives we create in cooperative story environments are predicated on the idea of striving against forces in competition for our own prefered win state?

In short: we have been telling stories about competing since the dawn of time. Then we’re putting our players in situations where they must strive in their narratives against forces put in place by the game designers. If they’re recognizing the game as having competitive forces anyway, why wouldn’t they see their fellow players as antagonists? Plenty of other things in the dramatic structure are their opposition already!

With this giant structural framework already in place encouraging competition for resources in our players and their characters, the question becomes: how do we aim to de-incentivize Playing To Win for individual goals so we can have the cooperative space for play we want?

And my answer is: you don’t. You don’t deconstruct the instinct to Play to Win. Instead, you harness it by refocusing just what Winning means, looking past viewing goal based achievement as a win state, and instead creating shared win conditions based on recognized motivations in opposing characters.

Simply put: we look not at the goal, but the WHY behind the goal. Because in recognizing WHY characters compete and identifying just what they’re competing for, we can not only construct a framework for combating toxic Play to Win play strategy, we can encourage cooperative play and reframe the dialogue about what winning truly means.

“Part fools! / Put up your swords. You know not what you do.”

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This quote from Romeo and Juliet, delivered so well in my opinion in the 90’s Baz Luhrmann retelling, is the quote that comes to mind when I think of the motivations behind play styles in larps. When players enter a play space, embodying their characters for a play session, often times there isn’t a lot of time for examining a character’s motivations. The immediacy of larps, much like the immediacy of events in real life, requires players to react much faster than, say, a player might when playing a tabletop roleplaying game. There, players may break character to discuss their options more freely (although many playgroups cut down on that sort of behavior to simulate that said immediacy). It is far easier to examine the motivations behind a character’s actions when you have the chance to break character and really have a good think.

In larp, the actions one takes are often quick, driven by the mindset a player has taken on for the duration of character play. This embodiment of the character simulates in many ways the immediacy needed to engage in improv acting. One must react spontaneously, driven only by the way a player understands their character. When reacting, a player in a larp may engage in actions that are driven by the fundamental needs their character has as they understand them in the moment. And when presented with obstacles to overcome, challenges to their goals or their authority, or simple antagonism, a player may respond as their character would – with the knee-jerk one would expect in a real-life antagonistic situation – rather than sitting back to examine the full motivations behind why the scene has become antagonistic.

It is this why I believe lies at the heart of how we can tackle the issue of truly antagonistic situations in larp, and address why Play To Win can be a toxic mindset – and how it doesn’t have to be.

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When engaging in a struggle between two characters over a goal, a player is recognizing only their own goals as valid in the situation, and view the other character involved in that struggle as an oppositional force rather than a cooperative element in their play. They push aside the needs of the other, often times not taking the time to consider why the other character has become said obstacle. Yet should lines of communication be opened between players during play, both players may find by understanding each other’s motivations rather than relying on a knee-jerk reaction, they can find ways to achieve both goals in a satisfactory manner.

This adjustment to a player’s mindset does not mean the players require long negotiations to make sure the antagonistic situation just ends and has a happy ending for everyone involved. Antagonistic action has a place in narrative, as we’ve pointed out above. However, instead of recognizing only their character’s motivations and actions as valid, understanding the other character’s needs and motivations can allow the players involved to course correct in their own playstyle. This correction makes room for both to reach a fulfilling end to their antagonism rather than focusing on only one successful outcome: an outcome which leaves one the winner and one the loser.

 

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An Example: Susan and Edward’s Characters And The Fiefdom Fight

I’ll provide an example:

  1. Susan and Edward are playing two characters who are fighting over the same fiefdom in a medieval fantasy game. Susan’s character is driven by the motivation that she must take the fiefdom so she can bring its armies to bear against her brother’s kidnapper. Her character is driven by the need to save her brother, not by the need for power and glory. Meanwhile, Edward’s character’s goal is to gain the fiefdom to attain personal power, because he is driven by the need to control the chaos of the world around him and provide what he perceives as order. He is driven by his own view of the world and what he believes is serving the greater good.
  2. Susan and Edward’s characters are striving against one another for this fiefdom. Without understanding the reasons behind the others’ character motivations, their reactions in game would be uninformed by what the other player needs to get out of the circumstance to achieve a satisfactory result in their play. As Susan makes moves to get the fiefdom for her character before Edward’s character can, Edward can become increasingly frustrated because his play is not reaching a fulfilling goal, his character’s motivations (and therefore a core tenant of his character’s mindset) going unfulfilled.
  3. To avoid that unfulfillment creating tension between Susan and Edward, when the two recognize their characters have entered an antagonistic situation, they share a conversation regarding just what their characters want in the game. Not simply what their goals are, because that has become obvious. But what MOTIVATES those character’s actions. They begin to understand the psychology behind the other character’s actions, outside of the player’s own need to fulfill those character’s goals.
  4. Susan and Edward then reenter play, now understanding the needs of the other. They can then shape their play accordingly, understanding also that the other player is not there to ruin their time, but is informed about what the other would want as part of their resolution. Susan’s character isn’t interested in the fiefdom, for example – she just wants her brother back. Edward can then steer his character towards recognizing Susan’s character’s need and find a way to achieve a solution that works for both of them. They continue their competition, but if Edward wins, he pledges to help Susan’s character get her brother back. While if Susan wins, she brings on Edward’s character to help achieve order in the fiefdom, satisfying his need as well.

So What’s The Catch?

Now, this strategy for cooperative play requires several accepted rules, better explicitly shared rather than implicitly expected, going into the game. These social contracts must be laid out as part of the play culture of the game for this motivation-based Play To Win style to work.

  1. Players must accept that antagonism is only in character and not motivated by player antagonism (CvC versus PvP).
  2. Players must assume positive intent when entering into this style of play. This is a fundamental social contract which I believe should be expected as part of larping in general to create a cooperative narrative environment, but it is explicitly required when sharing motivational-driven play.
  3. Players must consider each other’s character goals as just as valid as their own, to be respected as co-evolving story threads rather than simple oppositions to be destroyed in the pursuit of their own character’s success.
  4. Players must embrace a level of trust, that the other player – once they understand the other character’s motivations – will consider a blended ending to the competition which allows even the ‘loser’ to achieve a satisfactory stepping stone to their own story’s goal achievement. The losing character may not win their initial goal, but the winning character’s player will help steer the outcome towards a next-step for their co-player to achieve their aims.
  5. Players must maintain out of character communication (as laid out in Craig Page’s response essay entitled “How Playing To Win Can Work”) to make sure the players can check in with one another should the level of antagonism begin to bleed into the out of character realm.

Sounds complicated, with a lot of caveats? I never said this style of gaming cooperation would be entirely easy. Yet this kind of paradigm shift, I believe, can open up a whole new way of looking at what Winning really means in our games. Winning becomes a state of motivational recognition and fulfillment rather than goal-oriented success. For the ‘losers’ in a competition in character can then know they may have lost initially, but their striving to win will have satisfactory opportunities just around the corner, facilitated by their co-players.

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So after all that, here’s my suggestion: let’s try to look at one another’s characters not as obstacles, or another player as an opposing force, but simply as a force with separate motivations to be respected as you play to fulfill your own character’s motivations. Together, by respecting what drives both characters (and therefore what drives a player’s actions in-game) we can better understand how to make us all win in the end, together.

Falling/Burning: Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, and Being A Bipolar Creator

by Shoshana, posted in Personal, Speaking Out, Television, Writings

[[Note: trigger warnings for mental illness, bipolar disorder, medication, and some spoilers for Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette.]]

These days, I call it burning, but for most of my life, I called it flying.

It’s that feeling when you’re wrapped up in a writing project so hard you look up, and half a day has gone by. You haven’t moved, you haven’t drunk or eaten or talked to anyone. You work and work until your knuckles hurt, and there are words flowing out of you, and you can’t stop until it’s all done. Then you look up, realize what time it is, and fall over because the words are done for the day and you’ve been doing it. You’ve been flying.

That’s what writing when you’re me feels like.

Well, a lot of the time. Some days it’s just normal. I get up, I do my morning routine (take my meds, get some grub, boop the cat, check my email, mess around on Facebook) and then it’s off to the word mines. And on those days, they are indeed the word mines. I check an outline, I write notes, I putter around, I get the words going however I can, tugging that little mining cart up the hill towards those far-off paragraphs and… y’know, this analogy has gotten away from me. I digress.

Those are the hard days at the job because that’s what it is – writing, like making any art, is a job. It’s craft and talent and passion rolled up into one ball. It’s doing a thing you worked hard to learn to do the best you can. You’re capturing those weird little ideas rolling around in your head and making them into words, then lines, then paragraphs, and somehow they’re all supposed to reach out to someone who reads them and make their brains go POOF, I LIKE THIS. No pressure or anything, writer, just take the ephemeral and translate it onto a page.  You make it happen as best as you can.

Then, there are the other days. The days when BLEH becomes BANG. The days when something just clicks and comes roaring down the pipe inside my brain and it’s all I can do to get to my computer because it’s ready to go and that’s it. Get out of the way.

fantasy-2934774_1920I call it burning these days because that’s what it feels like: like there’s an idea inside me burning its way out. But when I was younger, I called it flying. What I really meant was controlled falling. Like there was a tornado going on and I would leap off something and ride right through the middle of it, all the way up, chasing words. Because that’s what it felt like for me, rolling on through the manic energy that comes with being bi-polar.

There’s a lot of folks who equate the manic energy of being bi-polar with the creative spark that drives artists to brilliance. They point to so many great artists in history who lived with mental illness and say, “there it is, that energy, that’s what made them great!”

Except for so many artists, mental illness didn’t make them great. It made them ill. And if they weren’t careful, it made them gone.

MV5BY2I3MThmYTctZTU4YS00YWNmLTg4YzktNDY0ZGE5MmQ3Y2Q3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTMxODk2OTU@._V1_Hannah Gadsby’s blockbuster comedy special “Nanette” was billed as exactly that: a comedy. She was meant to get up on stage, make some jokes, and entertain us all on Netflix. Instead, Gadsby delivered what I can only call a commencement speech for comedians, a bait and switch that took the audience from laughter to silence and ultimately to a standing ovation. Gadsby, a queer comedian with a career going back over ten years, started her performance with a fairly standard routine, drawing in the laughs. Then she started explaining how jokes worked, about how they increased tension and then broke it into laughter.

Then, she stopped breaking the tension. And just rose it higher and higher by telling the truth.

She spoke to her audience about a lot of things. Her family, and what it was like coming out to them. About violence, about triggering subjects. She broke from the funny parts of her routine a little over halfway through and talked about quitting comedy because she was tired of making people like herself, a lesbian still fighting with some deep shame issues, into a punchline. I watched in spell-bound silence as Hannah Gadsby deconstructed comedy to its most basic building blocks and rebuilt them into a soapbox, a grand forum where she read the audience a monologue of pain and vulnerability, her farewell to wisecracks and the opening of perhaps a new chapter of honest, open speaking in her life. She was out to speak her truth, and by the end, I was in awe.

It was somewhere in the middle where she told people to fuck off when telling artists to “feel” for their art that I felt the ground open up beneath me a little and I cried.

 

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Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh

She talked about Vincent Van Gogh, the artist who suffered during his life from mental illness, self-medicated, was treated by doctors and struggled to succeed despite his obvious impossible talent due to his sickness. She talked about her knowledge of his life, thanks to her art history degree, and how he only sold one painting his entire life – not because he wasn’t recognized by his community as a genius, but because he struggled to even be part of a community due to his illness.

 

And I thought of the flying and the hard days at the word mines. I thought about the days when I heard the tornado in my head and couldn’t make the words get to my fingers. I thought about the frustration, the depression, the difficulties talking to people about what it sounded like inside my skull some days when I could barely pay attention because of the rush of words and ideas.

Hannah Gadsby told people artists don’t have to suffer for their art, and I’ll forever thank her for having the guts to stand up and say that to the world. Because I used to believe it was true.

anxiety-1337383When I was sixteen, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 2.

I came from a family that didn’t really get what being bipolar meant. My parents tried to get it, but when I’d do something irresponsible, it was always because I was ‘bad.’ I tried to explain how it was impossible to keep my whirlwind mind straight sometimes. How it was a battle against depression to get up in the morning and go to class. When I flunked in school, I tried to explain why, when I overcharged my credit card on a manic binge, when I cried for days and couldn’t stop. But those were the bad days. And the good days – those were the days I could take on the world, where no one could stop me, where I was manic off my head. I was out of control.

I went to a therapist when my school suggested it to my parents. The therapist took one look at my behavior and referred me to a psychiatrist, a loud and overbearing man who listened to me talk a mile a minute for fifteen minutes, heard my symptoms, and pulled out a giant prescription pad. I started taking the drugs he gave me but received no explanation about what being bipolar really meant. He never explained what behaviors were unusual, or what could be attributed to the illness, or any coping skills or resources to better understand my situation. He gave me pills and saw me every two weeks. I knew almost nothing about what was going on with me but was even enough to realize I needed more information.

So? I went online.

Because my family didn’t know much about bipolar disorder and my doctor wasn’t telling, I learned a lot from the internet. Those were the wild and wooly early days of the internet, when it was the 90’s and everyone was in AOL chat rooms and the world was a wacky, wacky place. It was on the internet I found a community of roleplayers that eventually led me to the career I have today. It was also where I got a LOT of bad advice about mental illness.

I read a lot of stories about people being overmedicated or given the wrong medication. I heard stories about people being committed by their families if they didn’t hide what was wrong with them. But I especially came across the same story over and over from people who had been medicated. “If you go on the drugs,” they said, “the creative drive goes away. You’ll lose that spark inside you. If you want to be an artist, stay away from medication. It’ll kill your art.”

I didn’t believe it. I was taught doctors were to be trusted. And besides, I knew I needed help. So I took the drugs the doctor gave me and fell into the worst confluence of events you could imagine. Because the medication the doctor gave me DID kill my creativity. It also made me sleep too much, have no emotions whatsoever, destroyed my memory, and made me gain tons of weight. And every time I brought this up to my doctor, his answer was to add another pill to balance out the others or up my dose.

mental-health-1420801_1920I didn’t realize it until later, but I had a bad doctor. What I did know was at the height of this medicine dance, I’d spend my days sleeping, or staring at a television, and feeling nothing at all. I couldn’t even cry. But maybe worst of all, I struggled to create. I couldn’t find that spark inside me like I used to, that flying feeling that gave me inspiration. In the moments when I could feel something, it was the overwhelming terror of going back into that stupor once again.

This went on from the time I was seventeen, when I was so messed up I dropped out of high school, until I was nearly 19. In between, I struggled to get my GED so I could at least get into college and proceeded to flunk there too due to the medication’s impossible weight on my mind. I went through so many ridiculous emotional issues I can’t describe, but all of it was through a curtain of medication so thick I can barely pull up memories from that time.

The times my emotions would push through was during what I discovered later were hypomanic phases, mood swings so strong they butted through the haze and made me wildly unstable. All the while I struggled to get my life in order, and every time I did, it was under a fog of badly managed medication, or through the adrenaline of mania so strong I could barely function. I didn’t understand I was badly medicated, of course. All I knew was everything was falling to pieces, all the time, and I couldn’t feel a solid, real emotion long enough to care.

So in 2002, in one of those moments of emotional lucidity, I made a decision to stop taking my meds. I suddenly thought: the internet is right, this is a horrible, horrible mistake. I trusted my experience and my terror and I stopped taking my meds.

And well, to quote one of my heroines from the time, Buffy:

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What followed were ten years of the roughest, rockiest, unbelievably manic, altogether difficult experiences of my life. I had bouts of going back on medication, but would always stop for one reason or another. I’d make excuses but each time it was the same thing: I convinced myself I didn’t feel right on the medication. That I couldn’t feel that creative spark I so relied on as part of my life. I was afraid of going back to that medically-induced haze I’d been in before. I hid from it and kept riding the tornado, every day. And like any tornado, my instability left chaos and destruction in its wake.

I can’t say I regret those ten years. They taught me a lot. I regret a lot of the horrible decisions I made, the people I hurt, the situations I got into where I got ripped up myself. I have memories I’ll never forget, instances of realizing too late I’d gotten into something because of my mania that led ultimately to disaster.

But I remember the creative highs. The way I could just fly like the wind and produce 12,000 words in a night. How I could map out entire novels, series of books, all the things in the world I thought I could create. I wrote papers, read whole book series, stayed up for days on end, played role-playing games from morning until night, and never, ever saw anything wrong with where I was in life. Because I was living that artists life and I thought, hey, this is me. This is who I am.

I know now the truth: that was the illness talking. The living high on life, throwing caution to the wind, tornado voice? Is the manic voice. And unless tempered with medication and coping mechanisms can lead to disaster.

From 2002 until 2012 I remained largely unmedicated. And those ten years are, in hindsight, an unspoken cautionary tale of someone not flying, but falling without recognizing the drop in altitude. A tale of someone on a corkscrew through rough weather, catching fire all the way down.

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I went to grad school in 2012 and thank god for so many reasons that I did. It’s not even my education I laud when I think of those years, but a single day in November 2012. I’d only been in classes for two months and already I was starting to lose it from the stress. The day I broke down with a massive anxiety attack after a critique from a teacher, hiccuping with tears and hyperventilating in a bathroom, I walked across the street to the health clinic and got an appointment with a mental health counselor. There, a very nice man named Bob talked to me about my experiences, about what I knew about bipolar disorder.

Bob told me some truth about where I was at and what I needed. He said he was surprised I’d gotten as far as I did going the way I was. He listened to my fears about going on meds and what had happened in the past. Then he calmly explained how he was going to give me medication and we’d work together to find what worked.

The first day I took medication, I woke up in the morning and the tornado was quieter. Not quiet, but less a twisting funnel of noise and more of a loud echo. I called up someone who was then a friend (who had experience with the medication I’d started taking) and broke down crying. I asked him: is this what normal felt like? I had no idea it would get even better.

Six years later, I’ve never been off my medication a single day. And I’ve graduated from grad school, survived a brain surgery and being diagnosed with two serious chronic illnesses, ending up using a wheelchair, running my own business, becoming a writer, and too many personal ups and downs to count. Each of them I tackled with a surety in myself I never could have before, because I was no longer screaming through a tornado all the time. More importantly, I’ve spent those years creating games and writing work I’ve made with deliberateness and careful consideration. When I create, it was no longer controlled falling, but dedicated flight on a controlled course. Well, most of the time.

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I won’t say everything became perfect after I started medication because I won’t let blogging make a liar out of me. Being bipolar is a constant system of checks and balances. These days, I fight against needing my medication adjusted a lot, against depression and anxiety, mania and hypomania. I still end up flying some days, sometimes for days at a time, because as time goes on the body changes and you have to adjust to new needs, new doses, new medication.

Coping mechanisms change, life situations go ways you never expected, mania and depression rear their ugly head. But the day I went on medication was one of the greatest days of my life, because it was the day my creative spark stopped becoming an excuse to keep putting up with an illness that was killing me.

I did some research online (now responsibly!) about artists who were known to have fought with mental illness. Google it some time and it’ll be a stark look into some suffering for art you might not know about. People know about Van Gogh, but what about Beethoven and David Foster Wallace, Georgia O’Keefe and Sylvia Plath, Goya and Cobain, Robin Williams and Amy Winehouse. I did research and discovered artists like Mariah Carrey, Demi Lovato, Catherine Zeta Jones, Vivien Leigh, Russell Brand, Linda Hamilton, and of course Carrie Fischer all have/had bipolar disorder. Their stories, their struggles, are well known.

I read books about people theorizing about the connection between mental illness and creativity and shake my head. I don’t need to know the connection, because if there is one, it doesn’t matter to me. I take my medicine and work my craft at the same time because I don’t need to suffer as an artist. I don’t need the mania to take flight and reach inspiration. I can do that on my own.

 

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So speaketh the General, the Princess, Carrie Fischer

 

Mental illness and the struggle against it is one I’ll tackle for the rest of my life. But to quote Hannah Gadsby: “There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.” The day I started on my journey to getting better by taking medication, by denying the world my suffering and instead gave myself permission to live healthier while making art, was the day I started rebuilding myself into the strongest version of me. Every day, one more brick, with every word I write, I build myself higher.

And so I offer a special thanks to Hannah Gadsby, and her brave “Nanette,” for reminding me of how important that choice was to my life. For reminding me I owe nobody my suffering to make what is precious to me, and that a creator doesn’t need to push aside their own mental health to be hailed as an artist. Thank you, Hannah, for your strength. May you find your inspiration wherever you walk.

Welcome to Salvation: A Wild West Larp

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design

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Tumbleweeds rolling across a buckboard-lined street. The wide open prairies baking under a hot sun. A shot of whiskey at a rowdy bar. Cowboys riding across the range on beautiful horses. Gunfights at high noon.

The Wild West frontier, as we know it from legend and Hollywood, is the backdrop of a brand new project by Dziobak Studios and Imagine Nation Collective. It’s called 1878: Welcome to Salvation and it’s a four-day larp experience set in a fictitious town outside of Austin, Texas. For one weekend in November, guests will descend on the J. Lorraine Ghost Town under the hot Texas sun and play the citizens and visitors to Salvation, a town on the edge of the ever-shrinking western frontier. And I’ve had the pleasure of being the project lead for this immersive historic-ish event.

Taking on a project like 1878: Welcome to Salvation has been a monumental experience so far. Though I’ve been running larps for quite some time, the scope of a blockbuster larp like this has been a learning experience every step of the way. Backed by the phenomenal people in Dziobak Studios and Imagine Nation Collective, I’ve been supported so I can take the reins and take this event from the original concept phase to the eventual staging in November. It’s honestly been my humble pleasure to be given the space to create as widely as I have been, especially in a space as dynamic, complicated, and exciting as the Wild West. And in this post, I want to talk a little bit about the process going into the creation of 1878: Welcome to Salvation and some of those choices.

How The West Was (Not Really) Won

30709539_2122418241313618_5521391024074653696_oIt’s no secret that the Wild West setting comes fraught with a lot of problematic content. The history of western expansion is laden with horrific historical events, such as the genocide of the First Nation people of the North American continent, the discrimination against people of color, and the exploitation of the less fortunate by wealthy expansionists. Many of those events were later white-washed away in the media representations of the Wild West, out to create a thrilling backdrop for cowboy-and-Indian stories made popular in propaganda stories as early as the push west in the 1800’s and continuing down to modern day Hollywood representations. Television shows of the mid-twentieth century showcased heroic cowboys and lawmen rescuing damsels from marauding ‘savages’ and desperados, all the while brandishing their guns to protect the good folks of the west from danger. Even as media evolved and stories about the dark side of the west began to leak into more progressive television shows or movies, there was still a glamorous sheen on the Wild West ignoring the most difficult events for the most part in favor of adventure.

And that is the fiction of the Wild West, just like much of the history of the United States is full of its own fictions. The War of Independence. The story of Pocahontas and the early settlement of the Puritans and the first Thanksgiving. The legend of Alexander Hamilton made popular in the Broadway play. The heroic grandeur of the greatest generation in World War II. Each well-known story has created the majestic tapestry of American history when, in fact, most of these stories have been mistold, the darker truths massaged away to create more palatable tales to make up the American identity.

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History is complicated and full of dark spots. So when tackling a larp like Salvation, it was important to look at the history of the Wild West and recognize just what we were trying to accomplish in our design. Was Salvation going to be a game tackling the darker parts of the Western experience head on? Was it a game about post-slavery bigotry in a Western town, or the tensions between Texans and Mexicans over territory and culture? Was it about the First Nation genocide and loss of land?

These issues loomed large over the design, dictating we question just how we were going to design everything from the town of Salvation to the backstory of the area around to the characters players could take up for the weekend. It would be too easy to handwave the harder parts of the history of the Wild West in favor of the cleaner Hollywood version. Yet we as a team wanted to create something different, a play space between the Hollywood adventure and the reality of the historic Wild West.

What we’ve come up with is what we’re calling a historic-ish representation of a fictional Wild West town, complete with space for all kinds of iconic western characters and adventures. We’ve acknowledged the game space is not equipped and not supposed to be a place where the complex history of the Wild West will be interrogated as core thematics, though they’ll serve as part of the backdrop and influence for the development of our fictional town.

31732294_2132258743662901_4395690279160512512_oWe also made a conscious effort to look at the way certain groups – women, queer people, immigrants, people of color, people of different religions, the disabled and more – were treated in the 1800’s. Our goal was to find a way to design a way for players to not only play whatever they’d like within the town, but to have in and out of character issues of race, gender, sexuality, origin, and ability to hold back the in-game adventures. We certainly couldn’t go back in time to fix the bigotries of the past, but we didn’t have to allow them to plague our setting or our out of character space.

The design of this game presented some serious challenges, and a catch-22 many designers face when setting their game in time periods beset by horrific inequality and dark historical events. On the one hand, a game can focus on these events and make them a part of the game design. Yet often that means derailing more light-hearted adventures as the more intense thematics take center stage. This was certainly not the intent of Salvation, as we were aiming for a more thrilling, Hollywood Westworld influenced day-in-the-life adventure game.

Yet there is no way to ‘sanitize’ away the darker parts of the history without being unfair to the groups whose suffering were endemic to those time periods. Go one way, and you’re white-washing. Go another, and you can create a setting where dark content can drive away players due to triggering material. That material can end up forcing people whose backgrounds include ancestry related to the historical events to be pigeon-holed into characters they might not wish to play. If a woman comes to a game and wishes to play something outside the gender norm for the time period, there needs to be a place for that in the game, even though it breaks from historical precedent.

And so, a delicate balance has to be struck between history and fictional ‘adjustment’ for the sake of play.

In the end, the design and writing team tread that delicate balance and ended up with the setting we’ve created for 1878: Welcome to Salvation. With a backdrop of historical events and a town created to be a more tolerant and open location than other places during that time period, I believe we’ve found a fun and respectful middle ground that will make Salvation a weekend players won’t forget.

Wild West Adventures For All

So what does this mean for Salvation? With the work we’ve done, we’ve weaved a little Wild West town bringing together card sharps and law dogs, sex workers and desperados, undertakers and homesteaders, all centered around their proud little piece of the frontier and out to survive in an ever-evolving and shrinking West. For one weekend in November, players from around the world will don the spurs and hats (black and white) to bring Salvation to life. And as I said before, it’s been my honor to work for Dziobak and Imagine Nation to bring Salvation to all of you.

The next few months will be full of character creation and player communication, larp practicality planning and finally my first trip to Texas for the main event. And I really hope to see some of you there as we bring the town of Salvation to life.

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[[All graphics and photos are courtesy of Dziobak Studios and Imagine Nation Collective.]]

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Nostalgia Warriors And The Backlash Against Progress

by Shoshana, posted in Feminism, Geek Culture, Not Ready To Make Nice, Politics, Speaking Out

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I recently saw a video online taking pot-shots at an academic whose studies included deconstructing the representation factors in older roleplaying games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons. The video by Michelle Malkin is a screed against the supposed politically correct ‘party poopers’ intent on ruining games like D&D by bringing ‘social justice warrior’ politics into the picture. I won’t link the video itself (because it’s from a Facebook channel that’s pretty horrendously conservative) but I think the tag below it on Facebook…

Social Justice Warriors are the biggest party-poopers on the planet!

Is there no realm safe from the diversity police?!

… that really says it all.

It’s no secret the last few years have seen an ongoing march towards progressive creation in the creative arts. The fight for better representation in comics, film, television, toys, and games have sparked debates that have reached from the smallest communities to the largest stages of media coverage. You can tell how big the discussion is when films not yet released are dissected for their representation of minority groups and feedback is received by companies immediately from consumers. And whether you like this immediate feedback loop or not, it’s clear the days of companies simply producing material without considering the economic ramifications of a growing progressive demographic are over.

Still, in the face of such creative evolution and representational progress, there has been a significant backlash by those who believe progressives are trying to ‘ruin fun.’ People calling for better representation in creative fields are labeled ‘liberals’ and ‘social justice warriors’ and far worse terms. They’re called crybabies, party poopers, people out to turn everything into a political debate rather than just letting others have a little harmless fun. (Clearly, they never ascribed to the idea that everything is inherently political, but that’s a debate for another time). Instead, their response is to decry any discussions about progressive feedback so we can all just sit back and have a good time without interrogating what we’re enjoying.

The funny part is by making this very discussion, they’re doing exactly what they rail against: they’re looking critically at the material they’re being presented with and making an opinion on its content. They ARE questioning the politics of their media. They’re just choosing a different response than progressives. They’re choosing a different view, an opposition to growth, which I’m calling protective nostalgia. They put down ‘liberals’ for being social justice warriors when they’re taking up their own warrior mantle themselves. These ‘traditionalists’, these ‘conservatives’, are what I like to call Nostalgia Warriors.

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Picture it with me: a new game hits shelves, and the hordes are attacking. They come with their banners of ‘Better Representation Now!’ and chants of ‘What About Us?’ They bury fun new products in political discussions, drowning out the chance of escapism with constant reminders of blah blah representation and blah blah stereotyping and blah blah blah. The noise distracts from the chance to just sit back and have fun, like in the days of yore, when no one assaulted the fun! When it was just about basements and friends, sitting together and enjoying without complications or political rhetoric! Yes, these fun times and beautiful memories are under assault by the SJWs and are in need of defending!

And lo, the defenders arive, with their cries of ‘Party Pooper!’ and ‘Can’t It Just Be Like It Was?’ Their shields are the memories of times gone by, when things were simpler, and media was just fun. They are the Nostalgia Warriors! Ready to tell you you’re wrong for having progressive opinions! Ready to insult, degrade, and dismiss any idea challenging the status quo! And all armed with the greatest cry of all…

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These Nostalgia Warriors stand on their ramparts, zealously protecting new media in the name of what’s come before. They use the happy memories they have of simpler times, when people didn’t talk about the politics of media creation so actively, as proof that such conversations are ruining fun now. After all, they had fun in the past with their TV shows and comic books without these silly discussions about race and gender representation, why would it be needed now? In fact, looking back at the media before and criticizing it only defiles the memory of their beloved favorites. And how dare those pesky Social Justice Warriors go after their favorites, entwined so deeply with the sugar-coated memories of the past.

To take a step back for a second, I don’t want people to think all nostalgia is bad. Nostalgia can be a good thing! It gives us a chance to look back over our lives and see the good things amid the bad, the positive experiences we had cleaned up so they provide bright spots in otherwise complicated lifetimes. It lets us hold up things we find beautiful, things we find important to our identity, and present them with all the love we had for them when we were younger. Nostalgia can be beautiful, our memories can be beautiful, and the way they formed our fundamental years is a testament to experience building the people we are today.

To my people, those who hold fondly to the television shows and comics and films of the past with love and true nostalgia, I embrace you as brothers and sisters! The past gave us amazing, wonderful, fantastic things that should be cherished. This argument isn’t here to dismiss or attack all Nostalgia, or all media in the past that is important to people or beloved.

But.

But.

It’s hard to accept that our pasts are as fraught as our presents and that our futures are going to be just as hard. So we shine up our best experiences and hold them up as examples that in the past, everything was better. Everything was easier then and our precious favorites had no problems, or else those problems didn’t matter, because we loved them. And they gave us joy. And no one can assault our joy without assaulting a fundamental part of ourselves.

This progression into nostalgia defense is when nostalgia slips into toxic territory. When defending our sacred cows becomes a roadblock towards creative evolution.

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It’s no secret to anyone paying attention that our society is evolving away from shitty behaviors we once found acceptable in the past. I think most middle-road Nostalgiacs (new word again!) would recognize things like systematic slavery, for example, is an institution we thank god destroyed over a hundred years ago. Most would even say things like the civil rights movement, the evolution of the rights of women, all these things were great. Heck, most would say going across the ocean to punch Nazis and stop their genocidal reign of terror was a good thing! These were all examples of Good Progress.

So why is it when talking about the continued progress of our society in media, we see such a vicious backlash, even from people who would otherwise say Big Issue Progress (like those listed above) is a good thing?

This is where Toxic Nostalgia comes in.

(Sure, there are people who would question whether these were good events. They’re called Ultra Conservatives, Neo-Nazis, Misogynists, Racists, Bigots, and all around Backwards Problem Children. And this article isn’t going to find a solution for them, so we’re just going to move the heck on from THAT giant problem. Instead, to them I say this).

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Look, change is difficult. Change makes people look at themselves and the world around them with a critical eye and makes them question what they really believe. It makes them wonder if they’re complicit in big bad things like racism and intolerance, in systematic oppression and institutions of privilege. It makes people feel like they might be the bad guy, or part of a bad group, make them feel vilified and ashamed and attacked.

And when the whole world seems to be talking about rectifying centuries-old systems of oppression, people start taking a good long look at where they are on the power pyramid and all these complicated feelings start coming up. They have to ask ‘am I really profiting from oppression?’ They get defensive, responding: ‘But I can’t be privileged! My life is hard, I suffer too!’ They bring out words like reverse racism and tout the suffering of the white lower classes, of the nice guys being ignored by ‘militant feminists’ and cry about how ‘All Lives Matter.’ And this is in response to the Big Issues being brought up across the media, across the internet. It’s everywhere they live. They can’t get away from it. They have to consider it.

And then, just when they’re sure they’ve had enough attacks on their identity and their status quo, the progressives come for their fun.

And so they cling to the last shreds of safety, the last places where they felt they were comfortable and could forget the politics of progress for a little while. When they watch TV or a movie, when reading a comic, they don’t want to think about the Big Issues. They want to escape for a little while. But unbeknownst to them, the progressives are looking at these media and questioning loudly whether the status quo was representing them well or at all. Whether the people whose representation was always there have taken a look at their privilege lately. Progressives are asking for equality, and to the Nostalgia Warrior, that is a challenge to the last bastion of escapism they’ve got.

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And so, the backlash begins. The outright dismissal and attacks against those calling for critical analysis of media has been unbelievably harsh. But what’s worse is it’s often without substance too. Instead of engaging with the Big Issues being presented in the context of media critique, Nostalgia Warriors deny the need for discussion outright and banish anyone trying to have a dialogue with labels like ‘party poopers.’ And to those who agree with them, it’s the best defense, because who wants to have party poopers around? No one! So get rid of these SJWs and their party pooper ways, ignore them! There’s no need to have an actual conversation about issues! We can just label them with names you’d throw at kids on a playground and call it a day.

Because that’s all the conversation is to the Nostalgia Warrior: a throwback to days gone by, when you could talk about fun things with the simplicity of school age name-calling and maturity. Why be an adult when talking about play? Simply regress to those childhood feelings and defend your stance with the same playground mentality. Hold tight to your play as the last vestiges of childhood you’re allowed and don’t let anyone damage that with talk about Big Issues. Because that would require the adult in the Nostalgia Warrior to have to face change and its complexity.

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Some of the worst offenders in this progressive backlash in entertainment have unfortunately been creators whose work is being critiqued. Whereas these creators, still relevant and important to the evolution of their mediums, could join the new generations of artists and contribute in new and fun ways, they often doggedly cling to the work of the past, defending their creative choices against critique and driving away new thinkers with their derision. What they fail to realize is their defensiveness about their nostalgia, fed by fear of being vilified and becoming irrelevant, is driving them TOWARDS irrelevancy as their mediums march on towards a progressive future. Simply put, the harder they cling to the past, the easier the future and their part in it slips through their fingers.

The sad part about the backlash against progressive thinking by Nostalgia Warriors and conservative thinkers is the ultimate damage it does to creative evolution. Creative mediums have come a long way since the days of cave paintings, Shakespeare, the Rennaissance and even the beatnik generation. Every wave of creation builds upon what came before, informed by the politics and social movements all around them. The fact that each generation has also participated in the see-saw of progress towards greater equality has informed said artistic creation, and to ignore those influences in favor of nostalgia only stunts the growth of new ideas and new forms of art.

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They say there are no new ideas under the sun, only new ways to express them. Yet if we’re only ever looking back to those so-called ‘better days’ thru the lens of willfully ignorant nostalgia, we’re cutting new creative expressions off at the knees. People yawn at remakes and rehashes of the old, asking for new movies, new television, innovative creations, and then complain when those new expressions involve evolving social thematics.

You can’t have it both ways, Nostalgia Warriors. Either you want new ideas or you want things to stay the same. And I have some bad news: things won’t stay the same, no matter how much you shout about it. Progress happens. The world moves on. And your sacred cows lose their shine under the scrutiny of the future. The only question is: will you put aside your blinders and accept the complexity of media and the critical analysis around you, or hold on stubbornly to the past?

The battle for progress continues across all mediums. And wherever people believe fun is under assault, the Nostalgia Warriors will be there, ready to refute every claim with childish rhetoric and nay-saying. And all the while, they don’t even realize they’re already involved in the political conversation: they’re just not doing a very good job at it.

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