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…
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!).
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:
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.
And I need to accept that slowing down is the right thing to do, while still telling myself:
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.
Recently, I gave a lecture at the first ever World of Darkness convention in Berlin, run by the fantastic people at Participatory Design and the team behind World of Darkness. And I was fortunate enough to be featured in a post on White Wolf’s Facebook feed with a couple of my slides. Since then a lot of folks have contacted me wanting to know if my talk was recorded. Sadly, the answer is no. However, I decided to not only make my slides available online, but to do a post here outlining the talk a little more. So, without further ado, a little post on what I call Integrating History In Your Game With Respect. ( You can download and follow along with the slides here.) Enjoy!
Back in 2004, I joined the New York Larp community. Until then, I’d only done roleplaying online, where I’d participated in online chat RPG games since as early as 1994. And like most RPGs, there was an element of incorporating historical events into the history of those games and characters. I’d played vampires who lived through the American revolution, or else explored steampunk settings with plenty of historical baggage (a favorite was the Hindenburg explosion). But it wasn’t until after 9-11 that I encountered a personally difficult historical event that intersected directly with my own background.
In The Shadow of 9-11
Before 9-11, a lot of the larps in New York City used a location called the Winter Garden, which sits just across the street from what used to be the Twin Towers. It was a beautiful building with a glass atrium that gave fantastic views of both the waterfront on one side and the World Trade on the other. But, like many buildings, it sustained heavy damage when the towers fell. In the wake of the terror attacks, the larp community of New York not only had to face the psychic and emotional trauma of a heinous terrorist attack on their city, but on a smaller level had to face losing a larp space they considered welcoming, available, and safe.
This almost symbolic violation of the Winter Garden represented an equally difficult question facing the gamers of New York, who often used the city as a backdrop for their games: how do they incorporate a major current event like 9-11 into the settings of their games? And more importantly, should they?
As I said above, I didn’t join the larp community in NYC until three years later. Yet even then the ripples of 9-11 were felt. Every game I joined had made the same decision: 9-11 was not to be made the focus of the game, and the event itself was not to be considered a supernatural event in its origins. Though there were repercussions to, for example, Changelings in the New York area due to psychic trauma, the event itself was respectfully left to be an example of very human monstrosity and inhumanity.
More than years later, I recently checked in with a friend of mine regarding games being run in the area, only to be told that 9-11 was a major part of the plot line of a local game starting up. And they were including 9-11 as a plot point, supernaturally motivated and part of a greater conspiracy of monstrous darkness. I made it a point to say I’d never go to that game, no matter what.
Today, the Winter Garden has been rebuilt and I’ve visited to run scenes there when I ran larps in New York City. But only once. The place stands in the shadow now of the Freedom Tower, but its proximity to the 9-11 memorial and the ground where so much pain happened in September 2001 leaves a scar I, as a New Yorker, can’t face on a regular basis. And that same scar haunts any game I know that includes 9-11 as a plot point. For me, there is not enough distance, not enough time. I don’t know if there ever will be.
It’s this situation that made me consider the historical events of the past and the ways in which we include them in our games. There is an inherent question to fictionalizing events that challenges us as creators and writers: how do we respect the immensity of tragedies gone by, of wars and genocides and monumental losses across history, enough to include them in our work while still giving weight to their historical importance? We can’t tiptoe through art, but how do we avoid using history as a convenient plot point, without acknowledging the very real scars these events have carved through history?
History As Set Piece, Plot Point, And Setting
There’s no question art and specifically fiction has been made about historical time periods forever. Shakespeare wrote pieces set in the time of previous monarchs. Folklore is chock full of retellings of wars long past, starting as early as the stories of Troy. Art has been as much about capturing sentiment and idea as it has about recording the events going on in our cultures. When writing, history is the backdrop of the stories we want to create, whether serving as the framework for a period piece or acting as inciting incidents to other stories. We fictionalize historical events to explore them further, to put them in new contexts, and to give them new life in our memories.
When including historical events in games, however, we are taking that fictionalization one step further. We’re asking our players to inhabit those time periods, or to directly reflect on the historical events in question as they relate to the characters they’ll be inhabiting for a time. Using the example of World of Darkness games, immortal monsters like the vampires in Vampire: the Masquerade and the New WoD Vampire: the Requiem have existed for hundreds of years and bore witness to countless horrific, cruel events. Some of them, the game books posit, were even influenced and made worse due to the machinations of these inhuman beings. Even the slightly brighter settings of Mage: the Ascension and Changeling: the Dreaming have deep historical ties, reframing historic events like the first nuclear tests or the moon landing as part of a tapestry of events influencing the game setting as a whole and player characters on a microcosm.
While including those historical events is a very typical artistic and game design choice, a difficult problem occurs when facing the enormity of context in connecting to a historical time period and its events.
For example, three games in the White Wolf catalogue are setting books directly framed by historical time periods with deeply troubling events going on within. Games like Vampire: Dark Ages, Werewolf: The Wild West, and Victorian Age Vampire provide settings with rich, engaging, and honestly just fun time periods to explore. I mean, who wouldn’t want to play a werewolf in the Wild West, or a vampire sweeping through the salons of England during the Victorian era? But each of those time periods carries with it burdens of difficult historical context, some of which lies outside of what many deign to include in their retellings of the past.
A setting like Vampire: Dark Ages carries with it not only the historical complexity of Dark Ages Europe, but the weight of hundreds of years of mass religious persecution and violence. Werewolf: the Wild West exists in the shadow of American expansion and the genocide of the native populations of North America. And let’s not even get started on the horrors of colonialism, sexual and gender repression, and economic disparity often ignored when exploring the ‘glorious’ time of Queen Victoria.
It’s easy to gloss over hard truths about what went on in a time period in favor of just engaging with the fun parts for our games. But in doing so we are washing away the trauma for watered-down, stereotypical, lionized history. There is no separating the hard truths about the past without making a tacit choice to ignore them in favor of your fun. And while that may be a choice you as a designer and a player, it is just that: a choice. And every choice has implications, and says something about the ethos you’re backing with your design.
How To Integrate With Context
So looking at this enormous question, how does one integrate historical events with respect?
The first step, in my eyes, has already been mentioned: provide context. When creating your game setting or your game, acknowledge the difficult historical events and societal troubles, explore the complexity of them from more angles than just the dominant narrative, and reflect on how those tragedies affect people not only in the setting but perhaps even around your game table.
I’m a particular fan of using examples for things, so let’s explore one of my favorite time periods to pick on…
Look at our columned buildings! Come play your games here! We’re all cool and stuff.
…ancient Rome!
Now, as a setting, ancient Rome is a pretty cool place to set any piece of fiction and especially games. I mean, you get to explore some fun material. There’s Politics! Intrigue! Polytheism! Conquest! Sexual politics! Cool robes! Murder on the senate floor! Caligula! (I mean who doesn’t love Caligula?) There’s so many things to draw players into rich, complicated stories in an exotic and appealing time period and locale.
But historically, Rome was also kind of a shitty, horrible place.
Hey dude, cool toga. Also, nice genocide there.
Rome as an empire was built on the back of the conquest and near extermination of so many other cultures. The Romans rolled into other countries, slaughtered thousands, murdered religious leaders, raped and pillaged, and then subjugated the conquered people to be ruled and controlled by them. They systematically interrupted the course of cultural evolution of entire civilizations to expand their empire. Because really, that’s kind of how empires work and have worked since maybe the dawn of time. This stands true for the Mongolians, the British, and the ancient Egyptians. Check out non-fictional stories about those time periods any time and you see, beyond the glitz of the beautiful centers of power, you get the story of the categorical destruction of millions of people’s lives.
Now one might say ancient Rome is far enough back in history, you’re certainly not going to run across someone who was directly involved in the horrors of ancient Rome enough to be offended or hurt by the white-washing of the follies of the Roman Empire. (Unless you have a real immortal at your table, in which case my next advice is even more important). But what you might have at your table is someone whose family and culture was directly influenced by the slaughter the Roman’s perpetrated during their marauding conquests. While many can look at the Romans and laud them for their efficiency in bringing new evolutions to society as a whole, others are descendants of those whose people were massacred in the name of that progress, who still have stories passed down about the losses their people suffered. And the history of those events is still deeply felt.
A good example, honestly, comes from Jewish history. While lots of people think the Romans are pretty cool, Jews have an entirely different context for Romans. For anyone who hasn’t read Jewish history or watched Ben Hur, The Passion of the Christ, or Jesus Christ Superstar, the Romans were utter dicks to the Jews. They occupied and ruled Judea from the sacking of Jerusalem in 63 BCE all the way thru the reported life and death of Jesus until about 313 CE. The Romans sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Jewish Temple, the center of Jewish spiritual and political life, and massacred not only huge parts of the population, but systematically tortured the greatest thinkers and leaders as an example to the population to make sure they wouldn’t revolt. For nearly four hundred years, the Romans committed atrocities to suppress the population and put down revolts, many of whose stories are now largely ignored. And Judea was only one of the many provinces conquered. Countless cultures, religions, and countries had their histories forever negatively impacted by the Romans. But when have you explored all this in your tabletop or larp campaign?
Remember: one person’s ‘cool setting’ is another person’s ancestral horror story. And sensitivity to that fact provides a cornerstone of looking at respectful representation in your game’s narrative design.
How Hollywood Is Just Messing With Us
Another great example is the fun parts of Roman society people love to lionize. Specifically…
Are you not entertained (by my blog post)?!
…gladiators!
What isn’t fun about gladiators? You’ve got tough guys in armor fighting each other for the evil leaders of Rome, all decked out in armor, facing the chance of death for the glory of the crowd and the slim chance of surviving long enough to be freed. It’s glitzy, sexy. It’s full of half-naked people running around, chopping off heads. It’s basically a sexier version of a dungeon crawl in D&D, only with the kind of raucous audiences that’d make today’s WWE fans look like polite little lambs. It’s dueling with a ten drink minimum and a TV-MA rating. Basically, to look at it in modern media, it’s hella sexy and fun. And whatever parts of it are considered wrong are framed in the typical two-dimensional good-and-evil questions. The rich Romans are WRONG, the gladiators are GOOD, and that’s about it. There is no complexity involved.
In other words, even the more complicated stories about gladiators (such as the Spartacus revolt) often get washed down to their most basic, uncomplicated components. Which often look a whole lot like this…
RAAAR! We’re sweaty and good looking! RAAAAAR!
Yet below the surface, gladiatorial combat in Rome was part of the systematic oppression of marginalized and conquered people from across the Empire. Slavery was in fact a major part of Roman life, and along with servitude, forced military service, and systematic sexual coercion, violence as a means of entertainment was a way for the Romans to require slaves to integrate violent behavior into their lives while turning their anger and aggression at their enslavement towards one another instead of at their captors. It was a brutal, horrifying practice, used to at once pacify both the slave population and the larger ‘free’ people of the Empire, keeping them distracted from the inequity and corruption of the higher classes on the backs of the lower. (Man, sounds familiar, huh…?)
It’s too easy to include gladiators in a game as a fun, sexy setting event by focusing only on their most well-known portrayals from the media. When including historical context in your games, you run the risk of relying on the Hollywood History Treatment, where the events of history are retold through the streamlined, white-washed narrative developed for ease of filmmaking and in the name of good television.
(A fun note: the above photo is from the Spartacus TV series from Starz. And while it is effectively a visual orgy of blood, violence and, well, orgies, the show also has a surprisingly nuanced take on the complexities of slave life. It takes great pains to show the horrors of sexual violence, lack of consent, slavery, and coerced violence that existed as part of Roman life. While it includes a stunning amount of sex and some of the most glamorized gore I’ve seen in a show, it has a surprising amount of heart. Just take its historical accuracy with a grain of salt. This is Hollywood History at its most over-the-top).
A great example of this is the Wild West, which as a time period has perhaps suffered the most in terms of being reshaped in public perception thanks to Hollywood’s influence.
Thanks to Hollywood, the Wild West has gone from looking like this…
Real cowboys, looking awkward in a photo.
…to this.
That’s right, pilgram. I’m the real cowboy round these parts. Thanks to my charm and a little Hollywood magic.
A recent episode of Adam Ruins Everything was dedicated to debunking many of the ‘facts’ people know about the Wild West. Apparently, most of what we actually think of as fact about this time period is just what we’ve been programmed to think by Hollywood’s representation. And man, a lot of that representation just glosses over a lot of things, like the financial strength many women had in western towns, the complexity of native life before, during, and after the invasion of white settlers, and the damage done by white encroachment to immigrants such as the Chinese, or locals like the native Mexican populations. The West has been rewritten as the domain of the rugged white man, the lone cowboy or law man who rides into town and rescues the poor settlers, besieged by lawlessness and terror. Sounds like a great game setting! Too bad much of it is wrong, paving over the real difficulties and complexities of a fraught time period.
So when integrating historical events into your game settings, it’s key to recognize and communicate whether you’ve provided your players (or consumers) with the Hollywood History or a well-researched version of history. What research have you done? Does your experience with the time period only involve films, not documentaries? (It’s important to recognize also that many documentaries have very specific slants they put on historical events too, so be careful for bias even in non-fictional accounts).
Bear in mind, the Hollywood History of a time period can be a fun way to set a game. It’s just important to remember that much of that Hollywood-izing (a new term!) is very two-dimensional and can be disrespectful in terms of portraying difficult issues of the time. If you intend to use it as the basis of your game, it might be helpful to be up front about the kind of history you’re going to use. Listing the sources for your game up front can help let players know just how accurate you’re going to be to the time period versus utilizing Hollywood History instead. A great example of this is Vikings. If you were to use the TV show Vikings as the influence for a game, you’ll get a very different experience than if you do actual research. And, as many of my larper friends from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland will tell you, nothing makes many of them grind their teeth more than the conflation of Hollywood Vikings with the real history of Vikings from their cultures.
But hey, some things can be sacrificed on the altar of fun… right?
Historical Figures In Games (or, No More Hitler Please)
Another place where games can run into difficult territory is the integration of historical figures as part of the game’s history or narrative. While many folks won’t have too much of a problem should you use a two-dimensional portrayal of the guy playing the violin while the Titanic sank (though that story is largely considered apocryphal by the way, sorry to burst THAT bubble), other historical people carry far more weight by their actions and legacies. Many games include mention or inclusion of some of histories greatest monsters as antagonists, contacts, or just cool little side bits. And while they can be great adversaries and evocative figures in your game, consider the real historical toll these folks had on real human lives when integrating them into your game.
Figures like Charles Manson, Jim Jones, tons of Roman historical rulers (sorry, can’t help picking on the Romans) all committed heinous acts that destroyed real people’s lives. Their inhumanity can provide a very tactile, grim narrative element to your games, given further weight by the fact that they actually committed these crimes. They are real nightmares for your players to face, not made-up villains with fictitious crimes. Yet it’s for that reason we ought to make sure to play out their involvement in fictional stories with the most respect as possible. Because in the end, they murdered and terrorized and tormented real people, whose memory we’re messing with in our fictional worlds.
A good example of characters with terrifying historical backgrounds is one of America’s very first serial killers, Albert Fish. Hamilton Howard “Albert” Fish lived from 1870 to 1936 and during his time he committed some of the worst murders this country has ever seen, specifically targeting little boys for assault, murder, and eventual cannibalism. Reports speculate Fish killed anywhere from five to one hundred children in his lifetime before he was caught. When asked why he committed the unspeakable crimes, he is allegedly reported to have said…
Probably one of the epitomes of holyshitwhatthehelldude in history.
It takes a special level of horrifying to imagine a man like Albert Fish for inclusion in your fictional stories, but history has provided you the blueprint for that horror in a real man, who committed real crimes against real children. Including a figure like Fish, or any number of other human criminals who perpetrated acts of depravity and slaughter, means recognizing these are people who harmed a real someone’s family member or child, not just a fictionalized person. And the historical weight of their crimes then becomes the backdrop for your game’s exploration.
To be respectful when including these historical figures, an important question to ask yourself is why. Why is it important to use this historical figure? What do they add to your story that a fictional character cannot? Are they integral to the plot or are they being utilized for the name recognition and shock value their crimes provide? If it’s the latter, then perhaps a long, hard look should be given towards why your game needs such a sensationalized pop provided by these figures. And if they are included, a strong eye should be put towards how these characters are being portrayed.
The universal example of this is Adolf Hitler. Hitler has appeared in so many media representations from Marvel Comics where he was punched out by Captain America (and recently by the maybe more awesome America Chavez) to his comedic performance in satirical shows like Look Who’s Back. While many use media representations of Hitler to jeer at and lampoon the genocidal dictator, the games world seems obsessed with including the Nazis and their leader as the ultimate bad guys, a two-dimensional representation of the ultimate evil. Yet most of those very games never address the real complex horrors of the atrocities committed, instead focusing their energy on the angry little man behind the awful mustache. Adolf Hitler’s very presence creates a titular evil to face without providing the human story of the suffering he created. He is the figurehead, an unexplained nightmare from our collective consciousness, a shorthand for Evil with a capital E.
For people like me, however, with a huge history of family members suffering in the Holocaust, the constant inclusion of Hitler and Nazis in games is a grating reminder of family tragedies not long passed. The same could be said for the inclusion of people like Osama Bin Laden, Joseph McCarthy, or Joseph Stalin in a game either as a figure. In a way, the historical figure question is almost a catch 22. When creating a game set in history, to exclude these figures would be to perpetrate the very white-washing I’m speaking against. But we shouldn’t be afraid to look at how much room and prominence these figures are being given, and how they are being represented.
But Shoshana, It’s Just A Game
While having these conversations, I inevitably run up against the same response from a section of people. “But Shoshana, it’s just a game. We’re just out to have a little fun. Don’t be such a party pooper. I like beating up Nazis without having a deep conversations about the Holocaust around the table. That sounds like the opposite of fun for my characters.” And yeah, I’d say it sure does. Players are coming to your table to enjoy themselves, not get into a deeply damaging exploration of the horrors of the Holocaust. They want to punch Nazis and feel satisfied by punching the worst evil humanity can imagine. Right? Sure.
But there are ways to acknowledge the evil done while still providing the experience you’re looking for in a fun game. A narrative can frame the context of events to take into account the difficulties, horrors, and complex social/cultural/religious issues by acknowledging their existence, and then place the game, its characters and its players on their path in contrast to and contextual relationship with these complicated events. One can still explore play the Inglorious Basterds going off to take Nazi scalps while acknowledging in the narrative the horrors that drove these Jewish soldiers to feel the need to fly all the way into Axis territory and commit some serious violence.
A Deeply Personal Favorite Example
It’s hard to consider the following example as a favorite of mine without acknowledging how difficult it is for me to even look at or read this book. When I heard White Wolf was putting out a book about the Holocaust as a sourcebook for their game Wraith: the Oblivion, I remember being outraged on a deep level in the first place. I thought there was no way anyone could have gotten a game book set during the Holocaust, not just World War II overall but the genocide of the Holocaust, correct in any meaningful way.
Then, I read Shoah: Charnel Houses of Europe.
If any book had a two-drink minimum, it’s this one.
Published under White Wolf’s Black Dog mature material label, Charnel Houses of Europe is a well-researched, thoughtful, respectful portrayal of the Holocaust in a game. I remember picking it up, ready to be angry, and instead read the book in shocked silence. I knew reading the book that the creators got it. They understood the enormity of the subject they were tackling and put back into their work their immense feelings in the shadow of such a horrifying tragedy. I remember coming across a single piece of art that cemented this feeling for me too.
Never Again.
In one picture, this book was sealed into my memory as the one of the best portrayal of the Holocaust in art that I’d ever seen. And as always, my hat’s off to the creative team.
This book highlights the importance of creating a good game as an element of being respectful. Many of the worst examples of disrespectful representation of difficult subject matter comes down to the fact that the material produce is just BAD. And by the inability of the artist or writer to do a good job tackling the enormity of a subject, their bad portrayal becomes disrespectful simply by clumsy handling. So when tackling rough issues in your work, it’s important to make sure you can jump the hurdle of being good too so your work has the chops to represent the material with the complexity needed.
Reflecting On Lost History
The last element of respectful representation lies in reflecting on the dominant narrative presented by both history and the Hollywood History provided by media, and delving deep into how that representation is either accurate or not. This is especially important when considering issues of marginalized populations or non-western cultures. For better or worse, western narratives have dominated the media landscape, and western bias has twisted the retelling of history in everything from academic research to our education systems. Yet we know from important research going on that history is far more complicated in terms of the lives of those outside the dominant narrative than previously provided to mainstream audiences.
Common statements that come up due to dominant narrative bias include:
“But women didn’t have jobs in _______ era!”
“But there were no people of color in _________!”
“But there were no queer people out of the closet in _______!”
These are all byproducts of dominant narrative bias, as told thru the lens of history controlled by hetero-cis-white-male patriarchal views. Fact is, history is always way more interesting than we think and full of surprises for those who think women didn’t have freedom before the suffragette movement, or who believe there were no Jews or prominent people of color in Europe before the twentieth century.
With just a little Google-fu you can come up with examples of prominent people of color all across Europe and the United States, moving through white society in defiance of expectation. We see queer relationships reflected in historical figures, such as Alexander the Great, who conquered what many saw as the ‘known world’ at the time (another super western-centric idea back during Greek times) with his spouse and multiple lovers of multiple genders at his side. And I won’t even get started on where Jews have lived and what they’ve done, because to paraphrase the song, we’ve been everywhere, man, from China to Africa, across Middle Eastern countries to the wild west. And thanks to amazing people doing fantastic research these days, we don’t have to just rely on the dominant narrative or biased educational institutions to teach us how things really were. We have the internet to give us more information.
(Of course one ought to check their sources to make sure they’re reliable. There are way too many ‘alternative facts’ out there to just accept things without verification. Always check to make sure your sources are reliable or risk spreading the virus of rewritten history).
In short, do not just swallow the dominant narrative and regurgitate it into your games. History is way more interesting than you might think. And by doing a little research, you can provide a more realistic portrayal of not only dominant groups, but marginalized groups as well, such as women, queer people, people of color, disabled people, and people of different genders, ethnicities, religious and cultural groups.
Why Is All This Important?
So after all this exploring of respectful history representation we come down to the last and maybe most important question: why is this important? Why is it important to represent history well in your games? There’s a few simple answers.
By providing a respectful historical context for your game, you acknowledge the enormity of historical tragedies and events gone by.
You acknowledge and respect the fact that those historical events might have a serious impact on people playing your game based on their own background or else just sensitivity to the subject matter.
You explore more complicated historical narratives and help bring forth those lost narratives into the media eye by representing them in your stories.
You provide richer narrative portrayals of characters for your players to inhabit, giving room for different stories especially for marginalized people in the game space.
But if you want to put aside all of this, here’s the one major reason to keep in mind:
You’ll just tell better stories.
If you spend all your time retreading the same historical ground done by the two-dimensional historic representations of the dominant narrative, your game will be limited to only those standard representations. By expanding the field of your representation of history, and by exploring the complexity of history in a more contextualized and nuanced light, you’ll be able to tell new and richer stories with your games and set yourself on a path to making better art in the long run.
So in closing, go make better art thanks to proper historical context. It might open up worlds of stories you never expected.
Image from: Supernatural, Season 8 Episode 11, “LARP and the Real Girl”
In just a few days, I’ll be shipping over to Europe to get on a boat and join the hundreds of other LARPers heading to this year’s Nordic LARP conference, Solmukohta. This is my fourth year in attendance, completing my first progression of attending the conferences in all four Nordic LARP countries – Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. It’s been my pleasure to get a chance to meet LARPers from all over and spend time learning about LARP practices not only from around the United States, but from across the world.
As I’m preparing for the conference, and a couple of talks I’ll be giving there, I ran across an article on LARPING.org that gave me pause. I’m preparing a talk on exclusionary practices in LARP, and this article highlighted one of my pet peeves when discussing LARP accessibility. I’m a big proponent of games being as accessible to people of all kinds, and finding design choices that can enable a game to be more open to everyone. Challenges to accessibility include tackling difficult social issues, economic inequalities and class differences, LARP culture barriers between communities, or even issues of physical accessibility. It’s that last one that I’d like to talk about briefly today.
The article in question that brought this issue up is called LARP Rules! A Mechanics Spotlight, which attempts to deconstruct the mechanization of actions within LARPs and how complex large-scale rules systems can become. The thesis of this article is that there is a tension between the narrative that is being developed in LARPs and the rules sets, since the narratives develop through the diegetic interactions between players while they are immersed in scene. The more complex the rules set, the article suggests, the more difficult it becomes to remain immersed in the narrative and the more disruptive the rules are to play. The article states this idea in what it’s calling the LARP Core Tenants, which looks startlingly like yet another definition of what is a LARP, ala the ad nauseum discussions of ‘what is a game’ that plague game studies conversations the world over.
Meaningful, consequential role-play and immersion is the means and the end. The story is secondary and is the organic, waste byproduct of interactions between players, be it through combat, in game skills, social mechanics, or otherwise. As such, any rules system, being that which defines and dictates actions in a game, should seek to put up as low a barrier as possible to this end, it being understood that a rule designed to represent an action is not the action. This represents a departure from play, and therefore to immersion. This departure is anathema to this end and as such should be as limited in scope as possible.
Aside from the fact that I find the reference to narrative developed by players as a “waste byproduct” a little distasteful, the last part is where I mean to put my focus. Namely, the idea that anything that breaks immersion is “anathema” to play and immersive narrative development between players because, as the quote states, “a rule designed to represent an action is not the action.”
This is further explained later in the article when an example is provided from the NERO rulebook. The article cites a skill called Parry, which is often included in many boffer/live combat rules systems that have skill calls. The text of Parry states that it allows a player to block an oncoming attack by vocalizing the word “Parry” and then goes on to lay out and explain the exact ways in which Parry is used (what kinds of attacks can be blocked by Parry, in what circumstances, etc). In critiquing the skill Parry, the article states that constant vocalization of unneeded skills which can simply be accomplished by physical action breaks immersion further. The article goes on to say:
Parry, on the other hand is one of those effects plaguing LARP rules systems that seek to reproduce an action people are able to safely execute themselves. Remember, the goal here is to impede immersion as little as possible, so in effect, you’re telling someone you dodged an attack that you didn’t actually dodge.
The idea then is that since people can simply dodge an attack with their physical weapon, a skill like Parry is then superfluous. And here is where I disagree, because this is not the first time I have heard this argument against skill calls within live combat/boffer games. The argument goes that if you’re playing a game where immersion is the intent, then using vocalizations to simply say you’re doing something instead of actually doing it breaks the believability of the world. If you’re following this line of logic, as stated above, and “a rule designed to represent an action is not the action” then simply calling out Parry impedes play and should be removed.
Except games with skill calls provide a vital resource to people who do not come out to games prepared to let their entire play experience depend on their actual physical capability. Skill calls allow, through representational game design, for players of different ability levels and physical capabilities to play characters that may be more physically capable then they are in the real world. To put it plainly: skill calls level the playing field and give those who are differently abled the chance to still play the kickass warrior, the powerful paladin, at a comparable capability as a player who comes in more physically able.
This representational aspect of the game, while it does require players to exert their imagination to count a vocalized word the same way they might a whack on the arm, allows the game that includes them to be more accessible to more players. This includes people who might not be as physically fit as the most active, agile, powerful warriors in the game. It compensates for nearly every ability and capability level (barring those who lack the ability or have difficulty speaking). And for those who are disabled, it allows for a game that uses the human body in what is considered its “normal, physically whole state” as the game vector by which you engage with the play space to enter play with simulated tools to put them on the same level as more physically able players.
I find the discussions of how skill can be disruptive a disturbing double standard in the discussion of what is or is not immersion breaking. In a game medium that requires me to look at a person wearing plastic costume elf ears and accept that they are, indeed, elven royalty, or expects me to acknowledge that a human dressed in a nice suit is a vampire prince, others are unwilling to acknowledge that a word spoken is the same as an action taken. Apparently a word is one step too far to stretch the imagination, even if it allows the game to include more people fairly.
Now, the entirety of the article’s discussion about rules being disruptive to narrative play, is not a new one. Game studies thinkers have been publishing articles about this in regards to video games for years (see: Patrick Crogan’s “Blade Runners: Speculation on Narrative and Interactivity”* or Jesper Juul’s “Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narratives“** for further reading). Yet the conversation takes on an entirely more insidious direction when we discuss that tension in regards to representational actions and skills in LARPs. While a narrative may suffer for the limitations and intrusions of mechanics within a video game, the game itself is presumably still playable and the player still capable of interacting with the play space if they are differently abled (the difficulty of controller use and video game medium usage for the disabled aside, as that is an entirely different topic). Yet in the race to provide more immersive, WYSIWYG narrative experiences for LARPs, it seems the proponents for skill-less systems are willing to sacrifice accessibility on the altar of some purist notion of seamless play rather than consider what representational rules do provide for players.
Full disclosure: I am a disabled LARPer who plays in the game mentioned in the article, Dystopia Rising. And thanks to skill calls within that game, I am capable as a disabled woman (who alternates between having difficulty walking and using a wheelchair) to attend game and still participate in combat situations. I utilize skill calls to augment my physical differences to allow me to be an effective combatant, capable of being a part of the play just like any able-bodied player. It’s for this reason that I speak from a perspective informed by experience, and concern for the future of my favorite game medium.
Can’t run from a bad guy because I’m physically disabled, a skill in Dystopia Rising allow me to call “Escape!” and take steps away from combat unimpeded to simulate what I cannot do. (Photo by Katherine Chartier, Dystopia Rising: New Jersey).
The above article (though in a rather arched and unforgiving tone) offers forth the notion that early LARP design suffered from a complexity born of simulationist roots that should have been outgrown in the race for new and better ways to embrace immersive live play. Yet in the process of advocating for stripped-down systems, this argument and those like it postulate play spaces that restrict interaction rather than make it more available to all, and that are prejudicial to those more physically capable than others. If that is the evolution of LARP, the vaulted future so often lauded, I’m afraid that LARP will not gain more players or become more open to a wider audience (an aim lauded by the article as a much-needed community goal). Instead it will become an even more rarified space, accessible to fewer based on the physical capability of the LARPers medium of play: their human body.
* Crogan, Patrick. “Blade Runners: Speculation on Narrative and Interactivity.” The South Atlantic Quarterly. 101.3 (2002): 639-57.
** Juul, Jesper “Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narratives.” Game Studies 1.1 (2001).
Actually, let me be clear. I don’t really want to write about Gamergate. I wish I’d never heard the term. I wish we could get in an epic Doctor Who TARDIS the size of the planet and go back to before two months ago (by god it’s been that long already) when all this madness started. If that’s when it started. Some folks say the Gamergate controversy was just brewing, waiting in the wings for an incendiary incident to drag all those feelings of misogyny and rage and resentment to the surface. I personally agree, that there’s been a lot of awful beneath the surface as the gaming community goes through its adolescent growing pains. As it grows from a haven for interactive technology, play, and those who sought to turn that into an identity, gaming has come to mean a lot of different things. And now, Gamergate has become that bone-rattling clash of cultures as what was once a subculture rockets towards the mainstream and the intrenched majority suffers from change-shock.
I’m not going to rehash the discussions about Gamergate here. There’s been a dozen analyses done by gamers, game scholars, thinkers, news mediums, and even cable news networks. The mainstream media has caught on and if you want to go through the entire history of this debacle, there’s plenty of timelines to catch you up. I would suggest this article talking about the knee-jerk rage of movements and even my own discussion about the decrying of the term gamer from a few weeks back. I’d also suggest this brilliant take-down by Brianna Wu, who went on HuffPo Live after she was threatened out of her home, where she takes on the so-called issues of Gamergate. But in talking about Gamergate, reading about it, seeing it go on for so long, I’ve become full up on it, saturated to the gills. I realized upon trying to write about Gamergate today that I don’t know what else needed to be said. It had been analyzed in relation to the Men’s Rights Movement, defended as a reactionary movement based on fear of change and deconstructed on the front page of the New York Times. The Verge has practically been camping out on the issue. Compared to all that, what else do I have to say?
Something. I need to say something. To get out of my system the feelings rising up whenever Gamergate is discussed. Whenever I see some ridiculous tweet or the comments section rebuttals to articles. Or worse, when I see a friend stand up and defend gamer-gaters as part of our gaming community. There is a feeling that goes full circle, back to the fundamnetal issue that most Gamergaters seem to ignore.
Guess what? I’m against the Gamergate movement and I’m a gamer too.
I’m a gamer. I’ve been one since I was old enough to have a gaming console, since I got my first computer, since I played Mortal Kombat in arcades and played online roleplaying games in chat rooms. I made gaming my business and loved every second of it. Still do. I call myself a gamer, proudly. I’ve been a gamer for twenty years and in half dozen different mediums. I don’t need to spit my cred and I don’t cred check others. I don’t decry the title or say that now is the end of gamers. I share my community proudly and speak loud and proud about my love for games.
But I am also a woman, and until recently, the tension between those two parts of my identity- that of being a woman and that of the community I love- were always at odds. For every ten great experiences in the community, there were awful moments. There were feelings of exclusion, of ridicule. There were moments of outright harassment and earnest moments of terror, of feeling unsafe, of feeling alone. This is not an unusual story. I’ve heard it from gamer women from the video game world to the LARP world, from tabletop RPG conventions to playing in D&D in the home of a friend. So I stand up to be counted with those who speak against inequality, who are demeaned and maligned and called Social Justice Warriors. I laugh like hell when people use that term as an insult because I wear that title proudly. Yeah, what?! I am a Social Justice Warrior. What’s wrong with being a warrior for a cause you care about? I don’t shout at people, I don’t harass. I stand for zero tolerance on bullying and harassment and for representation of all kinds in our community. That’s how I am a gamer, with social consciousness in my mind and happiness in my heart.
Then Gamergate happened. And all that awfulness just under the surface, all that mistreatment and harassment and misogyny that’s been there for years, it comes bubbling up. And because it’s couched in the language of some kind of ‘ethics’ discussion, because it’s hidden behind a supposed defense of the gamer hobby based on ‘assaults’ by those nasty, evil SJWs, then the real disgusting behavior gets marginalized. “Well that’s not us,” says the poor, maligned Gamergater. “We’re here to defend the gaming hobby and talk about journalistic ethics! We’re not about death threats!” And suddenly, they’re an equal part of the conversation. They get an entire segment on HuffPo Live to defend their ‘stance.’
And it makes me furious.
Their stance is built on supporting maligning women. In maligning any critic who stands up for unequal treatment in games. They stand to be counted with harassers – or they did, until the mainstream attention to those threats made them start looking like a lynch mob. Then suddenly, the language changed to “please, listen to us, we’re just misunderstood.”
And I’m just so tired of it. If I could, I’d wish it all gone.
I wish it was back before this pseudo-movement/ consumer revolt/ journalistic integrity thing / hate mob was born. I wish we were back in a time before I knew the name Eron Gjoni, before I knew that boyfriends could be so hateful as to record their relationships and pour them out on the internet to become the springboard for a malicious campaign against a woman designer. I wish we were in a time before I knew what the hell a false flag was, before I knew something called 8chan existed, before I knew they were the folks so bad they got knocked off 4chan. Before I had to learn about sock puppet twitter accounts made to feign actual discourse in an effort to troll. I want to go back to a time when misogyny in the gaming industry didn’t have a movement that got a B-list Hollywood actor like Adam Baldwin to use his social media reach to malign women and perpetuate attacks on social justice.
I wish I didn’t know that this post might attract all kinds of negative responses. I wish I didn’t know that I might get threats. I wish I didn’t know that somewhere, someone might read this and wish me harm.
I wish a lot of things about the gaming world. But right now, I wish this more than anything: I wish I knew what to say with more delicacy about a horror show of consumer superiority complexes and entitlement gone rampant. I wish that I didn’t go online every day and read about another person who has been harassed, about infographs full of half-truths and conspiracy theory language pointing to women in the industry and saying “Hah! I deny your experiences!”
I wish more than anything that I could put up my hands and say, “Jesus Christ, people, we are talking about a community of making games that has room for criticism, that has room for discussion, that has room for evolution of ideas! That has room for a better day where everyone can find themselves represented and respected, not just a target demographic! Where women can feel safe at play and at work within the gaming world! And where you, you over there, you with the angry look on your face and your hashtag full of hate, can accept social justice as a THING without flinging the internet equivalent of monkey shit.”
I wish I could just say: I’m a gamer too, and my opinions are just as valuable and valid as yours. And my opinion is that we need some change up in this community. And you don’t get to say no because this community isn’t yours. It’s ours.
So tonight, I wanted to write about Gamergate but I really wish it didn’t exist. I wish people could find some other way to express their concerns about journalistic integrity, if those are actual issues to be explored, without couching it in a language of hate. And I wish people could see that any actual conversation about issues was long ago tainted by the horror of rape and death threats, by the sad reality of women forced from their homes in fear.
By the real possibility of a goddamn school shooting because a woman criticized video games.
I want to write about Gamergate because there is some horror coming off this upheaval that gets lost in the news stories and the fighting on Twitter. It lies in the cracks between the MSNBC coverage and the New York Times article, the death threats and the IRC chats. It lies in the silence that fills up the minutes when you write a post about games, when you post that Tweet, when you say something on Facebook. It lies in that moment when you wonder, “Is this where someone on my feed comes and tells me I should die? That I should be raped to death? Am I going to be next?”
It comes in the conversations with your friends at IndieCade about who might be targeted next. Or who has been targeted. Who has gotten threats and who got things thrown at them. Who is going to be doxxed and who is afraid to walk alone.
It comes from waking up in a cold sweat in an LA hotel the night before IndieCade, wondering if you’re going to get into a dust-up with someone who read your Twitter account and thinks you should just die.
It comes from wondering if it’s all worth it, in the end. If this community is where I want to be.
Well here’s my answer: Screw that noise. I’m here to stay.
I’m a gamer. I’m a game designer. Brianna Wu stood up and said she is the Godzilla of bitches to those who would take her on. I might not be a kaiju, but I’m a gamer woman. I’ve taken slings and arrows all the damn time since I joined the community. I’m not afraid to be told that I don’t belong here because I’ve ALWAYS been told that. What else is new? So you’ve got Adam Baldwin on your side, Gamergate. I’ve got Chuck Wendig and Joss Whedon, Wil Wheaton and Patton Oswald. I’ve got women like Anita Sarkessian and Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu to look to as examples of women who have continued on after you’ve tried to warp their public image and destroy their lives. I’ve got people whose talent knows no bounds telling me that this is OUR community, ours and not just yours. And there’s a new day coming when maybe I can get on Twitter without hearing about someone I care about getting harassed into hiding.
I’m a gamer woman. I’m here to stay. And that’s all I gotta say about this damn Gamergate.
I’m excited to announce that the video of my short TED-talk like Nordic Larp Talk in Gothenburg 2014 has gone up. The topic is “Ethical Content Creation and The Freedom to Create” which was based on my research for my article on ethical content creation in the WyrdCon Companion Book for 2013. I’m really proud to have been included in this brilliant event, and encourage folks to check out the other Nordic Larp Talks for this and year’s past.
GenCon 2013 has come and gone, and there is so much I could say about the experience. I’ve already done a little bit of talking about some of the more unsavory parts of the convention that went down (UnderwearGate 2013 and the Nazi cosplayers), but I wouldn’t want anyone to think that the only things that went on that weekend are unfortunate. Quite the opposite actually! Most of the time the convention was a pleasure, and I want to give a shout-out to all the amazing things I got a chance to participate in this year.
Getting Started In the Industry Panel: I had the opportunity to speak on the Getting Started panel, talking to a full audience about what it’s like getting into freelance work in gaming as well as self-publishing. Brian Liberge, Tracy Barnett, Eloy LeSanta, and Matt Parker were wonderful to speak with and the audience was exceptionally receptive to our information dump. It was a wonder to sit back and be able to tell folks honestly that five years previously, I had been sitting in their seats with the exact same hopes to get into the industry. Now, I have this information I could share with them about how to get going!
Religion in Gaming and Mental Health Panels: I’m lumping these two together because frankly, both of these panels were amazing and went by entirely too fast. The Religion in Gaming panel covered appropriation with Jaym Gates and Lillian Cohen-Moore and we went right after the topics about appropriating icons, legends and practices without context. The Mental Health panel was also way too short, but John Adamus and I really dug into how to work on taking care of one’s self while still working and being part of the gaming world. I felt nervous going into both panels too for different reasons – one is that I always get nervous being a moderator (for religious appropriation) and the other because speaking about dealing with my illness is still hot button for me. Nevertheless, both panels put me in a place to share information I had and discuss topics important to me.
Mental Health And Game Design: This was the panel I was the most concerned about being a part of, and maybe rightly so. There’s still a lot of folks who don’t feel comfortable with hearing people talk earnestly about their mental health and the challenges it presents when you’re trying to be a professional. Still, John Adamus and I did a decent job for a short panel – there could have been a lot more to talk about.
The best parts of GenCon however came from the people I got to spend time with over the weekend. I was able to sit and talk about upcoming projects with a number of folks including Josh Jordan (author of Heroine), Tracy Barnett (author of School Daze), Brian Engard (author of Becoming), and many others. Needless to say its been a joy because I got the opportunity to plan some great work with amazing people AND just spend time with folks I don’t get to see very often.
Now I’m just recovering from this adventure and getting ready for the next few – PaxPrime, WyrdCon and the return to graduate school. Tune in next time for more!
Welcome back from GenCon, fellow gamers! To all those who attended as part of the nearly 50,000 gamers who hit the Indianapolis area… are you as tired as I am? Good lord, it was a heck of a convention. I will talk more about it in my next post. First, however, I’m going to riff on a different problem. Let’s talk together, shall we, about Nazis.
Nazis are the bad guys in so many games its hard to make a list. They serve as the ultimate expression of evil given form. Nazis represent the boogeyman of human devastation, of dehumanizing monsters in uniform who have no consideration for their fellow man. They are the perfect example of a person divorced from their empathy for the ‘other’ in the world, willing to destroy lives based on their rhetoric. It’s hard not to see a Nazi in a piece of work and not say ‘that is purely evil.’ That is, in fact, what most game designers count on when they add Nazis into their work. Need a villain that everyone can rally around kicking around? Make it Nazis! Want people to feel comfortable with walloping the crap out of a person in a game with, say, a rocket launcher? Make the villain a Nazi and suddenly people don’t feel anything anymore because, well, it’s the personification of evil. That’s what Nazis have become in games – the shorthand for a villainy so vile there is no explanation needed. It is #evil with a capitol hashtag. And for some people, that’s all Nazis are.
For other people, they are the nightmare of our grandparents’ childhood. They are the stories we heard growing up about relatives we’ll never meet. They’re the reason our relatives never felt safe all the remaining days of their lives, and named their daughters and sons after children that were no longer alive. They were real boogeymen that crawled out of history and into our lives. And to some, they’ve become a media punchline.
I won’t go into how difficult that can be for me. After seeing my third product in the dealer’s hall at GenCon, I may have exclaimed loudly that I could use a moratorium on Nazis for a little while. I could go one year without seeing Nazis used haphazardly in a game. Then I considered that thought and moved beyond it. Nazis being used in games might bother me, but they’re contextualized in those games as the villains they are and ought to be in media. I even saw games that treated the material well, such as Ken Hite’s book Nazi Occult and realized that not all Nazi representations were created equal. The content might be difficult for me but that is me. I can avoid those games, or choose to appreciate them from afar.
Then, I encountered the Nazi cosplayer.
I wish I had a picture of this person, walking down the street past the noodle shop in downtown Indianapolis. I was sitting with a friend, talking about how wonderful the convention had been so far, but not five minutes before I had been discussing how tired I was of seeing Nazi EVERYTHING lately. Then, no sooner had we moved on to another topic but BAM. Here comes a Nazi down the street. I got a good look at the whole outfit and even as I tried to place what he might be cosplaying from (was it a video game? an anime? a film?) my brain came up with the only answer that counted: NOT OKAY.
Context is a very important consideration when looking at difficult content in media. If there is, say, racist content in a piece of media, is it contextualized to represent that racism as acceptable or unacceptable? Is it historically placed? What does the piece of work say about racism through the events going on around it? All of these things provide context. However, cosplay is one of those mediums that offers very little context. Unless someone is crystal clear what that person is costuming as, there is no context between a cosplayer in a Nazi outfit and, say, just someone wearing Nazi regalia and walking through a convention. And left without the context, I couldn’t tell what the hell this cosplayer was intending. Was he intending to just represent the villain of some piece of fiction, or was he glamorizing Nazis through his pristine costuming? I had no idea. All I saw was a Nazi walking down the street past where I was eating and I couldn’t drive that image out of my mind.
Say what you want about freedom of expression. Say what you please about being able to wear what you want. But when you put on a swastika or the whole regalia, death’s head and all, you are taking on the symbology around that and the context that comes with wearing the uniform of one of the most reviled groups in the 20th century. And you carry that around with you into other people’s lives. Is that what you want to bring to a convention of 50,000 people who are there to have fun? Is that what you want people to see?
Now let’s talk about retail. There’s been a lot of talk about what I like to call UnderwearGate 2013. A booth called Belle and Blade (adorable name) put up some underwear that was some of the most ridiculously offensive merch I’ve ever seen at a con. One of the undies actually said “I could use some Sexual Harassment.” Gareth Skarka pointed it out and I got a photo of it out on Twitter, which got folks talking, and there were complaints about it. It’s all chronicled here on Skarka’s blog. But here’s the other part: did you know this booth, which makes its bones selling military movies and gear, also has tons of Nazi stuff?
Previous to seeing what kind of awfulness was available, I went to buy a ‘zombie killer’ patch from this booth for some LARP costuming. It was only after I paid that I turned around in my half-exhausted state and saw boxes with Nazi symbols on it, Nazi signs, and even Nazi pin-up posters on the inside of the booth. That is ALONG with the underwear. So in one shot, Belle and Blade became one of the most egregious examples of what not to represent at a convention by repping sexual harassment AND Nazis in one cash grab.
“But Shoshana,” you might ask, “isn’t it freedom of expression? Isn’t that his right?”
Actually, not entirely. See, the sexual harassment stuff is straight up against the terms of GenCon’s policies on convention harassment and reports were made. But the Nazi paraphernalia is more of a grey area, just like Nazi cosplay. The policies say something about not being able to costume anything that resembles a uniform from the 20th century, but that certainly didn’t stop Nazi cosplayers that I saw. That didn’t stop the stuff from being sold in a booth.
Freedom of expression is the backbone of so many conversations about offensive content. However just as it might be someone’s right to go out and walk the streets of a convention wearing Nazi gear (barring any rules at that event that says you can’t), it’s my right to feel that is unacceptable. It’s my right to question what that person is trying to represent or express. And it’s my right to say that maybe you ought to consider the time and energy you’re putting into so meticulously glamorizing such a symbol of human evil.
Note: In my consideration of the situation, I want to make clear that I don’t blame GenCon for the situation. GenCon is a wonderful convention that I enjoy very much and that puts on a hell of a show every year. Take that as a disclaimer.
Sexism in video games. The conversation has echoed through the internet and the halls of game development companies for months now, as it has seemingly become the topic whose time has come. With women like Anita Sarkeesian doing her best to get the message out there (despite heinous threats against her person), there finally seems to be some serious critical attention being paid to the choices designers make in creating their female characters. If you aren’t familiar with Sarkeesian’s work, I would point to Feminist Frequency and her video series Tropes Vs Women to get some background.
Part and parcel with the discussion of character design has been questions of how female characters are depicted in game advertising. However even in a time when companies are examining how to reach their audiences, there are still some stellar examples out there of blatantly sexual advertisement that is ignoring the conversation altogether. They just seem to be skipping the discourse completely in return for one thing: boobs.
This article is brought to you by some late night reading I was doing that was interrupted when this advertisement caught my eye:
“IN CASE YOU DIDN’T KNOW WHO THIS WAS FOR, WE KINDLY LABELED IT FOR YOU! YOU’RE WELCOME!”
Well, if that isn’t a way to interrupt what you were doing. Ironically I was actually looking up an article on sexism in games when this little jewel popped up. After I finished staring, I then went from laughing my butt off to horror back to laughing. Because – really guys? REALLY?! In the face of such ridiculousness its hard to not laugh because such ads just jump the shark from sexism into plain preposterous.
Once I’d recovered from my laughing fit, I got down to looking this gem up to find out what the heck it’s all about. Wartune labels itself as an “Epic Strategy MMORPG” that secretly seems to wish it was World of Warcraft. But since it isn’t, I suppose its advertisers wanted to find some way to lure in players. So they decided to just forget about, you know, TACT and went for the obvious advertisement choice. With a pop up ad so tacky that it might make some porn execs roll their eyes, Wartune is just another example of the silliness that goes on.
Now, you might think that this is an isolated case of the silliness of internet game advertisements. But it’s not.
“Come play, my Lord.” Yeesh, I’ve seen better dialogue in porn.
Remember these, folks? For a while, you couldn’t log into a website without tripping over the awful advertisements for Evony. It was a city builder that promised it would be “FREE FOREVER!” and decided to use heaving breasts as their primary way to draw people to their game. The amusing part was the game was clearly aimed at a fantasy audience, but as their advertisements went on they just plain through out the premise of sexy elves and went right to modern-looking women on display. The thing became such a huge internet joke that Plants Versus Zombies made a great parody of it for their own game, with a boob-showing zombie asking you to “Save Your Lover!” It was so ludicrous as to become a joke. The game still exists, though now the woman shown smiling at you from their front page is in a Renn Faire style gown and far more covered. As you can see, the precedent was always there for Wartune to build on.
But surely these are just internet games, right? Nothing so egregious could exist in mainstream-
Sorry, nope. Couldn’t even get through the sentence. It isn’t just the tiny online games that do it, folks. The nigh ludicrous objectification lives and breaths in AAA games and has for years. There are so many examples I could give, but let’s just put out a couple here to give some context to the conversation:
Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior – 1987 – Palace Software
Here’s just an example of the historical context. This is a Commodore 64 game called Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior. This is in fact the back cover of the game. The front shows a giant muscle-bound male Barbarian standing over the above woman as she reclines in his shadow. At least on the back they let her stand up and hold a sword. Remember, this is a Commodore 64 game. All the characters are on wee little pixels so basic they make your Super Nintendo look like Star Trek technology.
Want to get more mainstream? Let’s have a conversation about some ads for Soul Calibur. Now I’m a huge fan of this fighting game series but the advertisements for Soul Calibur 5 made me wonder if they forgot they were marketing a game and not skin care products or butt floss. Meet two characters from Soul Calibur 5. Who are they? I can’t tell because no distinguishing features of theirs are actually showing!
Y’know, I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine.
Hi there Sorceress. Nice to meet you. It must be really hard to concentrate on magic with the massive back pain you must have.
Now look, I get it. Sex sells. But there are lines sometimes that just seem so ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh. And then maybe get mad. Mostly at such blatantly over the top examples, however, I have to wonder how worried the designers must be about the weakness of their product that their answer is: “We just have to have boobs! More butt! Whatever you do, don’t put a face on it! Just maximize the sexy factor and they’ll come and play!”
And the sad part is that it kind of works.
Take Dragon’s Crown. This game created a whopping controversy by first creating characters with such gravity-defying proportions that they made people across the industry cringe.
Hi there Sorceress. Nice to meet you. It must be really hard to concentrate on magic over the massive back pain those must cause.
Then it made even more headlines when the designer tried to explain away the ridic proportions of his women by pointing out the guys are just as bad, and then turned the whole thing into a bad gay joke. It was kind of a nightmare all the way around PR-wise but the game came out. And all the gravity defying boobs did their job – they got the game the PR it needed to garner more attention. Am I saying that is why they designed it that way? Maybe not. But maybe it sure didn’t hurt either. The game’s out there. It’s part of the discussion now. And no amount explanation can justify the chiropractic nightmare that is that character design.
Not all examples of bad representations of women in game ads are so blatant of course. These just stand as the eye rolling, knee slapping, I have to laugh so I don’t get furious examples of the egregious sexist representations in games. They exist, I believe, so that when people come out to say that there isn’t a problem with sexism in the industry and that women should just calm down, I can pull these beauties out of the drawer. I keep them around so as to provide juxtaposition to other examples of sexist ads to ask ‘how very different are they?’
Case in point the comparisons being made between how the female characters are portrayed in two of 2013’s biggest AAA titles, Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us.
Now I’m a huge fan of Bioshock Infinite but when the cover to the game came out, there was an uproar over the design. Elizabeth, our female companion to the hero Booker DeWitt, is relegated to the back cover of the game box. Sure, she’s clothed as heck (thank heavens for small favors) but she’s on back. Heck, even the Barbarian bikini woman got to be on the front too! Kenneth Lavine, lead designer of Infiniteexplained his choice as meant to appeal to the “uninformed” consumer. He described actually visiting frat houses to find men who hadn’t heard of Bioshock and then designed the cover based on their suggestions. Dude on front? Check. Gun? Double check. Woman relegated to somewhere less important? Done!
By comparison, The Last of Us placed lead character Ellie front and center in the advertisements for the game despite pressure not to do so. In fact, designer Neil Druckman reported in the above linked article that their company Naughty Dogs was under lots of pressure to take Ellie out of the ads altogether. Still they stood their ground and right now, you can’t throw a stone in the game industry without hitting praise for The Last of Us and its brilliant Ellie. This was a conscious choice that Naughty Dogs made about how they were going to present their female lead and it paid off big time.
Comparing the over-the-top T&A show of the above ads to the more subtle question of representation in Infinite versus Last of Us does nothing if not to point out how insidious the problem really is. While critics can discuss the problems of the big name titles, though, and the more subtle choices designers are making, sometimes it bears pointing out the blatant ones too. Otherwise stuff like this might slip us by:
That time is almost here: when gaming geeks of all kinds extricate ourselves from the rest of the world and head to Indianapolis for that mecha of nerd fun, GenCon! GenCon stands as my favorite of the big conventions. It is huge, noisy and full of people, all of whom are coming together to bask in the glow of the gaming things we love. If you’ve never been, it’s a jam-packed experience full of panels, demos, games to play, merch to buy, and people to meet. There are parties, awards ceremonies, and after-hours fun to be had too, then you get up in the morning bright and early to do it again!
This will be my fifth year attending GenCon but it is my privilege to be going this year not as an attendee but as a speaker. On top of attending great events like the Diana Jones Awards and the Ennies (go Night’s Black Agent! Win!) I’ll be behind a microphone at the following:
Thursday August 15 @ 2PM – Getting Started In The Industry – Crowne Plaza Ballroom C – Have questions about how to get started in the industry? Want to know how freelancers got their beginnings? What about self-publishing, is that really for you? Come and ask questions and listen to people who have gone through the process answer you back. I’m pleased as hell to be on this panel with the likes of Brian A Liberge (Beer Star Games), Tracy Hurley (Sand and Steam Productions), Eloy Lastana (Third Eye Games), and Matt James (Vorpal Games) and can’t wait to speak to folks about my experiences thus far.
Thursday August 15 @ 4PM – Depression, Anxiety, Treatment and the Gamer – Crown Plaza Victoria Station C/D – John Adamus will be leading more of a conversation about how to be a game developer (or just a gamer) when facing issues of mental illness. It’s my privilege to be involved in this discussion, as this topic is near and dear to my heart and my experience as a designer struggling with bi-polar disorder. This talk is meant to be a supportive environment to discuss how to keep creating and working in the industry while still dealing with the monsters you have to face. Come to share if you feel comfortable, or just listen.
Friday August 16 @ 5PM – Religious Representation In Role-Playing Games – Crown Plaza Victoria Station A/B – Come join me as I sit down with Lillian Cohen-Moore and Jaym Gates to discuss how religions are represented in role-playing games. How are real-world religions such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism treated by mainstream gaming? What are the tropes, trends and territories explored by gaming when it comes to religious characters? And what about the issue of religious appropriation of icons, traditions and mythologies integrated into gaming works? Can it be and has it been done respectfully? We’ll pick apart this difficult question together.
So that’s my schedule! In between I’ll be attending lots of other panels, getting down with the awesome D20 Burlesque crew as they show off their best to the GenCon crowd, and celebrating the awards at the Ennies. I’m also super excited to hear Patrick Rothfuss speak – he is one of my favorite fantasy authors! It’s going to be a busy GenCon. To those who will be attending, I look forward to seeing you there!
Interested in getting together with me at the convention to talk shop? Hit me up @ShoshanaKessock on Twitter and we can see about setting up a time.
(Warning: This will not be language safe. Because frankly, this whole argument demands a little bit of four-letter wording).
In one moment, I’m going to show you a video that I saw in a recent Penny Arcade article about the recent Phil Fish / Fez II meltdown that occurred this past week. If you’re not familiar with the situation, let me give a breakdown so you understand what set off this post in the first place. Here’s a little context:
Phil Fish is an indie video game designer who created a game called Fez. He was in development of a sequel to Fez called Fez II when Marcus Beer of the GameTrailers podcast went on his show and verbally ripped Fish fellow indie creator Jonathan Blow a new face. For what reason? I can honestly not pretend to care. It was mostly about the fact that Fish and Blow (who Beer decided to nickname BlowFish) decided not to answer questions about the upcoming indie games offerings on X-Box Live. So Beer decided to target his self-confessed “bitch and moan session” at these creators for not answering questions.
That’s when things went mayhem. Because Fish shot back over Twitter and the two got into a heinous fight over the internet – which as everyone knows, always ends well. And in the end, Phil Fish quit making his game Fez II and who knows what will happen from there. Now, forgetting the fact that this turned into an internet slap fight of epic proportions, let’s step back for second. A guy who is out there making a thing completely lost his shit because, effectively, he was getting slammed by folks in the media. The response from a lot of people have been, “Big deal. The media hits folks all the time. The internet is an unforgiving place. Don’t read the comments, suck it up, walk it off, get back to work.”
Then I saw this video and read this article from Penny Arcade. The video is Dave Chapelle of course being the bastion of goddamn wisdom that he can be:
Then I sat back and I thought about all the things I’ve been seeing on my own Twitter feed recently. A woman helms a project in England to get Jane Austin, arguably one of England’s greatest female authors, on some currency and receives rape threats on Twitter. She stands up to try to get the people prosecuted for threatening her and sparks a controversy. All this over work she’s done, and it comes in over YouTube. Feminist Frequency’s own Anita Sarkeesian, on the same day, tweets about the fact that she had to report two particularly heinous rape threats and she was curious if Twitter would do anything about it. I watched a YouTube recording of Reza Aslan, a twenty-year religion scholar and author of a new controversial book on Jesus, school the HELL out of a Fox reporter because she couldn’t get over him being Muslim long enough to engage him as a human being over his work and made the mistake of looking at the heinous comments section below. It was enough to make me slightly ill to the stomach.
All of it together has got me wondering: what the hell is wrong with people?
Folks, I am a critic. I am. Part of my job is writing reviews of things. I have reviewed books, television, movies. I’m not as famous perhaps as this Marcus Beer (I have no idea, I had never heard of him until this BS exploded) but I have people who have read my stuff. I’ve even written reviews that were heated and sometimes I’ve gone back and questioned whether or not I was entirely too unfair towards a personality involved. Still. I do not remember where in my undergraduate classes on film and media criticism my professors told me it was okay to blast the shit out of someone in a bitch session. I don’t remember where in my raising since childhood someone told me it was okay to take someone to the woodshed for their creative choices by attacking them personally. I don’t remember that being part of the job.
Now I might not be a big deal reviewer but I know some things. Let’s start with this:
One: Calling people ‘toss-pots’ and ‘fucking hipsters’ for doing their jobs in the indie world is not professional. Its shock jock provocateur behavior at its worst. Its third rate Howard Stern armchair quarterbacking. Its two steps above being that guy on Reddit yelling ‘yur mom’. Because you’re not critiquing the actual work these guys are doing anymore, you’re just taking shots at who they are. You’re that guy chasing the Kardashians for a picture of their belly fat and making up new ways to talk about celebrity nip-slips, only you’re doing it about the gaming industry. I don’t care how hurt your feelings are about not getting the quote or not getting the story you want. Learn to live with disappointments.
Two, here’s my question: where’s your game? Where’s your work? What movie did you make? What have you put out there? And how would you like it if someone went all over the place and called you names? If that sounds a little too touchy-feely and kindergarden teacher to you, that’s because that’s the place where people learn those lessons about how to talk to their fellow human beings – in PRE-SCHOOL. If you’re going out and being a critic, you better do one of two things: be prepared to be a human being about how you critique other people’s work or else you better be able to say ‘I’m a creator too’ when people ask you where your work is, and then you better be ready to take the same slings and arrows. Because if you want to sling, you best put your own hard work out there to be slung at too. And if you don’t care, if you can take that kind of muck-raking and don’t see that it is hurtful, then I don’t understand you. I don’t get where your empathy lies.
Phil Fish put this up on Twitter and it resounded so deeply in me, along with what Dave Chapelle said in that video:
So here’s a guy. He made a thing. He put it out into the world and he gets comments all the time. He gets garbage. And finally, he gets one last straw dumped on him and says he’s done. He’s out. And people are saying that he’s crazy or lost it. Think about what Chapelle said there. Think about how it feels when you get criticized and then imagine what kind of magnification a thousand fold this guy is getting. I’m not looking at what kind of a guy he is or whatnot. I’m looking at the stimulus he has to deal with constantly in his face for the simple sin of trying to be a creator in an industry he likes. He’s the ant under the magnifying glass. Eventually he’s going to burn up. Who wouldn’t?
Now I’m not going to lie. I’ve had shitty interactions with people who are creators when I’m press. Hell, I had a shirty interaction with a comic book writer who is SUPER well known that made me so grouchy that I basically still think he’s a douchebag ages later. But I realized something recently that made me think that maybe, just maybe, I owe that guy an apology: he is not my bitch. Neil Gaiman said that of George RR Martin recently to some folks and it bears repeating. These guys ain’t our bitches, reviewers and interviewers and fans. And treating them that way makes us the bitches. Does it suck when someone is shirty with you? SURE. But get over yourself. They don’t owe you shit, even if you’re media. They don’t.
The internet can give you some serious toxic shock if you step out there and try to create, or say a thing, or do a thing. I’ve seen it myself. I’ve had people put up videos calling me names. I’ve had rape threats sent to my inbox because I spoke up against that BS Grope Crew stuff happening on Twitter. I’ve been called names. I’ve had friends called names I wouldn’t call my worst enemy. I’ve seen reporters chase Anne Hathaway through a protest she was attending like a regular person (not a celebrity) shouting at her that she owes him and she’s a bitch for not giving him a quote. I read Wil Wheaton’s recent experience at ComicCon and I start to really think that some folks have lost their ever-loving, self-entitled little minds.
Every time people speak up about this kind of behavior going on, the answers are the same: don’t pay any mind, just let it roll off your back, don’t read the comments. Don’t read the comments? It’s not just in the comments anymore! It’s in the self-entitled disrespectful way people are treating one another on the airwaves, across the internet and in person. The only way to get the hell away from it seems to be to just shut down and get out now or just stop doing anything that gets other people’s attention. At all.
I had to go thru recently to see if I could track down how things got this bad. I think I got it. This is the process:
The internet gives us anonymity to say whatever the hell we want. Then folks step out who aren’t hiding but put themselves out as creators, voices, whatever, and they become targets. They become that way for a billion reasons – either someone has an opinion that differs, or someone is just having a bad day, or someone has some angst they want to vent at another target. They hide it behind things like freedom of speech and ‘this is my opinion’ and ‘you put yourself out there so you want the attention so here it is!’ And then they spew. And the good voices, the people who just come to have decent conversations on the internet or speak their opinions and criticism with respect and humor and community in mind get drowned out by waves of absolutely rancid garbage. Or worse, they get drowned out by voices of critics who use their own self-created voices to spew the same trash, except under the guise of journalism.
The Newsroom this week had a quote come out of the main character Will’s mouth. “I’m against censorship but I’m a big fan of self-censorship.” That means that just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean it SHOULD be said. And when you say it, you have a responsibility to consider what kind of impact it has on another human being. Just because you CAN say something a certain way doesn’t mean you should. It’s a matter of respect and empathy and we as an internet society seem to be fighting an uphill battle against a landslide of poisonous garbage that cuts a path through good people who are just trying to do what they love.
I don’t know Phil Fish. I don’t know a thing about him personally, about his behavior, and I have no opinion one way or another about him as a person. I don’t know Anita Sarkeesian. I don’t know Reza Aslan. But I know folks who have gotten this treatment. I have burst into tears over things said to me in hurtful, hateful internet crap. I’ve had people discount all the writing I might do or anything I’ve said on a panel to slam into me for being ‘a loudmouth bitch’ or ‘fat disgusting slag’. I have looked at my computer with open-mouthed disgust and thought, “Who the hell told you it was okay to say such things?”
And I decided it wasn’t okay. And I decided to try to do better, to be more careful about how I addressed others in my criticisms and treatment. I decided to work on examining people’s actions and output in my criticism rather than who they are as people because glass houses world, glass frickin houses. But I also decided not to keep quiet about the phenomenon. If the trolls and the nasty critics and the hopped-up internet bullies get a voice, so do to the folks who say that this isn’t okay. So I’m going to use that voice and say it loud AGAIN. Because, you know, it seems to need a reminder every five minutes.
This shit is not okay. Not anywhere. I don’t care who the hell you are. Learn to talk respectfully to one another again or put down the microphone because your attitude is not welcome in a community of creators, whomever they may be. I’m not prepared to stand as a creator in a community I’m brand new to and say its okay when creators are bullied and heckled and hurt. Or if that is the way the gaming community works, it best come to realize that not all of us signed up for that – I certainly didn’t – and I won’t stand for it in my interactions. I’m holding others to a higher standard now.
So seriously, come to argue, come to be critical of work, come to discuss. But for the love of everything holy, learn to keep a respectful, civil tongue in your head or count yourself as part of the sea of toxic crap that floats along the media stream. Be quality or be part of the problem.
Today, the Winter Garden has been rebuilt and I’ve visited to run scenes there when I ran larps in New York City. But only once. The place stands in the shadow now of the Freedom Tower, but its proximity to the 9-11 memorial and the ground where so much pain happened in September 2001 leaves a scar I, as a New Yorker, can’t face on a regular basis. And that same scar haunts any game I know that includes 9-11 as a plot point. For me, there is not enough distance, not enough time. I don’t know if there ever will be.
