Don’t forget we moved!
https://brandmu.day/
But Why
-
I can definitely understand the critique, especially from a Marxist perspective. I mentioned in the Concordia thread that this is the first L&L game I’ve played because of many reasons that were illustrated as being common in those genres. (To some extent, I wonder how this might inform why I picked a roster character who is an economist and historian, so fantasy dialectical materialism?)
As Faraday mentions, there is no shortage of problematic options in games. We may have gotten out of the really egregious options with most places not allowing you to play characters like the Black Spiral Dancers (for WoD) or what sounds like a major focus being on rebels/independents in some Star Wars games. I’m not too familiar with the other themes that are common these days. But anyway, what I think Jenn is saying is that a lot of times we use these ideas or games to explore concepts or constructs and that our individual ludonarrative might have a kind of instructional capacity. It’s probably seriously not that deep now that I realize I’ve used the word “ludonarrative,” but it could be possible.
-
@De-Villefort said in But Why:
I’ve been thinking about it and maybe I’m just mad because the Lords and Ladies type games are glorifying some of the worst kinds of people to have ever existed on the face of the earth.
You really need to read more history.
-
@De-Villefort said in But Why:
I’ve been thinking about it and maybe I’m just mad because the Lords and Ladies type games are glorifying some of the worst kinds of people to have ever existed on the face of the earth.
You really need to read more history.
Or less.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
I’ve been thinking a whole lot about how I’d deal with a historical setting, since I’m coding a MUSH setup I intend to use for a game in a historical setting.
My thoughts go like this being some sort of mission statement on the site:
This game is set in 1880. The past is a foreign country. People thought differently. People had different standards of conduct. The structure of society was different.
For example, chattel slavery of the most brutal kind was still common in many parts of the world, and was recently banned but still in living memory in the English-speaking world.
In the US, the country was four years past the end of Reconstruction, 5-10 years past the destruction of the original Ku Klux Klan. Jim Crow laws were being enacted, and many people that previously elected black representatives to state and federal government were being barred from voting in those elections.
Women and men were seen as having distinct vocations in society. The tremendous leveling of the sexes that saw Rosie the Riveter become a national hero, was still 60 years away.
After the 15th Amendment was passed, many women who had fought for abolition of slavery and equality in society, were now asking for a chance to vote themselves. 8 years ago, Susan B. Anthony was put on trial for attempting to vote in the Presidential election, found guilty, and fined $100.
She told the judge she would never pay. He took no action against her. California would not grant voting rights for women for another 30 years, and the US would not do so nationally for another 10 years after that.
That’s all pretty bleak by modern standards, isn’t it? Well, here’s the thing. We’re not telling stories about this. We’re not telling stories about personal oppression by a sleeper society that doesn’t understand how to unlock the potential people have. We’re not telling stories about people casually hurling slurs at people on the street.
We’re telling stories about Mage society. These are stories about secret societies of elites with tremendous powers. These societies have social hierarchies based on ability. They are fundamentally meritocracies in a way sleeper society cannot yet comprehend.
I’m not saying we’re going to whitewash history in this setting. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m saying I’m not going to be approving PCs who have a problem with women who aren’t birthing babies, or who miss whipping slaves on pappy’s plantation.
PCs here are Awakened or Enlightened, or work for people who are. These are elites who earn respect from what they do, more like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Marie Curie, C. J. Walker, George Washington Carver, or Frederick Douglass.
This is a game that seeks to have a more heroic tone than some might have. I will not tolerate edgelording on this. I don’t want to hear “This is the World of Darkness, not the World of Rainbows.”
This is not a game to tell stories about being racist or sexist, any more than this is a game to tell stories about rape or incest. This is Mage. It’s about people who defy reality, and pay the price for that hubris.
-
@Polk i understand what you are trying to do here and have very enthusiastically played in a similar setting that also did not allow racist or sexist play.
But if i saw this as written on a game the tone of it would instantly turn me off. I’ll have to think about how to explain why.
-
@mietze I’d love to know why, because I’d love to address concerns. So please do share if it occurs to you why you’d have a negative reaction. I’m sure I’m missing concerns here. I’m only just starting this process.
thank you,
-
@mietze I’d love to know why, because I’d love to address concerns. So please do share if it occurs to you why you’d have a negative reaction. I’m sure I’m missing concerns here. I’m only just starting this process.
thank you,
I think part of it is that you’re attributing it to the “elite nature” of mages, as if being Awakened is why they aren’t sexist or whatever as a society. At least, for me, that’s pretty eh.
-
For me… The tone is off because it’s like it’s LOOKING for all of the ways people can be awful, and making sure to elaborate on all of them.
It’s one thing to write a policy about as a game, and as a theme, we will not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc.
It’s something else entirely to actually make mention of whipping your chattel slaves on the plantation and incest as being SPECIFICALLY excluded.
Which, I mean. I absolutely get that if you don’t make it excluded down to nitty gritty that there are some people who will try to do it and then cry foul with: No one said I couldn’t!
But. There are ways to say people can’t be total asshats about things without elaborating down to the details the kinds of asshats you aren’t going to entertain. If I read a disclaimer that had THIS MUCH detail, I’d probably skip the place, too. Because either there is this much detail because staff is thinking WAY TOO DEEPLY about how awful people can be to one another… Or else they’re assuming they’re going to gather a player-base that wants to think way too deeply about it.
I think having a consent policy is important. I think having anti-isms policies is essential. I don’t think any of those policies needs to be quite so vividly explained. Because people who want to do horrible things will ALWAYS find the line of what they shouldn’t do that something in depth will have forgotten to add. You will never be able to elaborate all of the awful things you don’t have any desire or will to have on your games.
It’s not about keeping every single example documented. It’s about blanketly saying there will be NONE of it tolerated, and then enforce that as needed, and the broadest sense and scope of zero tolerance on being a shitty person is enough elaboration of the ‘why’.
We're all mad here.
-
I guess I wrote that defensively. I worry about bothering people who care deeply about history and don’t want bad things swept under the rug. I don’t want to be accused of trying to rewrite women and minorities out of history.
I’m going to think more about how to convey this. Thank you again.
-
Which, I mean. I absolutely get that if you don’t make it excluded down to nitty gritty that there are some people who will try to do it and then cry foul with: No one said I couldn’t!
You know, I actually don’t find this to be true. The truth is, you can have a 46 page document with every known instance…and the people who wish to play that type of thing are still going to do it. So it’s not that that is troublesome to me.
-
@Polk Of course! Like. To be fully clear, I don’t think at all that it was the tone you intended to have. I think you’re trying your best to make sure you run a respectful and intentional world. And that’s a GOOD thing. You’ll get there with the wording.
-
@Polk the people who need to have absolute historical accuracy (sometimes just in general, sometimes as a justification for wanting to play a bigot or have that be an absolute focus of their RP that they cannot stray from even if their character is not bigoted) will not want to play on your game anyway. Or any game, probably. In my experience it’s really often much less of a headache to kick people off who can’t leave it alone (absolute historical accuracy) because their constant pontificating on the public channels or arguing “playfully” oocly in every scene will drive a lot of people away.
-
@mietze See I’m thinking about the opposite. I don’t want to annoy the people are keenly aware of injustices in the past.
The people you’re talking about, yeah. I can spot THEM a mile away. I’ve moderated political forums in the past. I know ALL their tricks, ALL their games, and I see right through their bad faith ‘just asking questions.’
But yeah. This was very useful.
-
I think the first thing maybe is to take this out of a format of a lecture. I don’t mean a lecture in a the pejorative sense, but like…a lecture, given by the authority/professor/headwiz to the audience. I don’t feel that gets off on the right foot. Yes, there will be some players that are very ignorant of history, but there are going to be plenty of your peers or even more educated (or they’ll certainly THINK themselves to be) and may take this as a special, irresistible invitation to argue. But also, unless you are a scholar of American history and the subsets of the groups you’re trying to represent, don’t underestimate your ability to get it wrong as you’re trying to educate the less educated audience. A lot of the figures you name kind of have a more…complicated history. Especially Susan B. Anthony. I do think that’s one of the things that bugs me actually, because a white suffragette who did good things for a great many people but still left a unified movement with black suffragettes because she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not believe that black men should receive the vote before white women did.
Is that important to a game? No, not really. But that’s one of the pitfalls of a lecture type statement that’s opening yourself up to things like that. To me, I see a guy centering a white woman with the people of color crammed together as a list of people that’s almost like an afterthought. Oh yeah, them too. I know that’s not your intent and I believe you when you say you don’t want to whitewash things, but you do kind of unintentionally in a way in your statement.
That’s why I think it’s better to keep a statement short and to the point.
“We acknowledge that American history during this time is rife with genocide, racism, antisemitism, sexism, homophobia, and classism and that often times the contributions and experiences of people other than rich white men and people in power has been whitewashed, mythologized, or there has been the attempt to erase it. We acknowledge that in setting this in an alternative reality in many ways, there will be some that feel we are doing the same. We respect those feelings. But as a setting choice that we will enforce, we are setting up a scope and framework for play where discriminatory play will not be part of the on screen RP. (or at all, if you’re not permitting that to be in in the backgrounds or not), and because of that we acknowledge that not everyone will wish to RP here.” Or whatever.
It feels like you’re trying to prevent people’s discomfort, but look. There ARE going to be moments of it on any historical game especially right now when we are seeing yet another resurgence of bigotry based violence and laws being passed.
-
I played on an alt-history game set in the 1800s fairly recently. And even though it was a safe place, run by people I trusted, and also a closed game which meant a more selective group of people, I’ll just be straight up honest, there were many times where I wrestled internally with my own PC because of the inclusion of historical events in her life that honestly I was not super well versed about and knew my understanding largely came from writings by white English speaking scholars with a sprinkling of women but mostly men. I enjoy wrestling with hard, difficult stuff in my RP. And most of my thoughts and wrestling were internal as i tried to inform how I RPed her BUT I did not want to introduce much of that at all to anyone else because it wasn’t necessary, and again–you /never/ know someone’s background and the last thing I wanted to do with put a stumbling block in front of a RP partner that jarred them. I don’t know that i was always successful at that. I’m not sure I would play an 1800s game in the US with a rando/open game, tbh. There’s a lot of hopeful stuff going on but also a lot of really dark stuff and we’re moving through a very dark period of history right now too.
-
I’m not sure I would play an 1800s game in the US with a rando/open game, tbh.
Same. I love historical fiction. I once ran a Western game. But I don’t think I would do so again having both that experience and the awareness I now have.
The main thing for me is - it’s fine to say that the PCs are enlightened for whatever reason (a progressive town, mage society, etc.) but they still have to exist within the wider world. I think that opens you up to either feeling that you’re whitewashing the setting, or risking that you might invoke problematic topics (even unintentionally or tangentially).
-
I discarded the entire idea for a long time since I wasn’t sure it would get ANY interest. But I’ve recently come to believe it will get SOME interest, so I’m doing it.
Worst case, I end up with Evennia WoD MUSH in a Box, and can use it to make something else.
-
Agreed. It’s one of the big reasons for the popularity of fantasy games with an “it kind of looks like a historical period if you squint a bit and tilt your head” attitude.
A game in the 1800s USA will have racism around it somewhere. The Civil War is right there, framing the entire country’s narrative. I don’t mean to sound like a historical purist or anything, but racial issues essentially defined the 1800s in the United States. Without them, it’s not the 1800s, or it’s not the United States.
ETA: It’d be like, to my mind, setting a game in 1940s London and straight up not mentioning the war.
Set it in an alt-history USA, so you get to define what happened and how the Mage society brought about something more progressive. Or something.
-
-
Fortunately I’m likely going to have months to have this rattle around in my head, since I have a lot of coding to do.
