[This post is adapted from a Patreon topic from earlier this year. If you want to see how some of my ideas are developed before becoming public, please consider joining the Patreon.]
I doubt anyone reading this would respond positively to an outright vile racist slur in a role-playing text, or tolerate it to the extent of buying or playing the title. My review of titles lately leads me to think, too, that examples of this are few, possibly fewer than in other media.
But that doesn’t mean racism isn’t present and all too effective in its worst sense, i.e., persistent and influential. Aside from the many examples of thoughtless or unintentionally self-revealing portrayals or metaphors, aside from discussable examples of tokenism, and aside from examples of positive confrontational content, here I want to focus solely on what I see as the most common and pernicious form in the published activity.
Here are two excellent examples, because the authors are apparently convinced they are located fully safely or well. It would astonish them to be told that their work is racist, and if my experience with these issues is worth anything, I predict that saying so would receive the reply, “How can you say I’m racist, I love these people, they are so bad-ass and so cool.” These titles are frighteningly perfect in celebrating an objectified, commodified version of ethnicity as legitimized by other media and de-politicized into Barbie form.
Wyrd is Bond was published in 2003, right in the thick of the Forge self-publishing boom, the associated booth at GenCon, and the initial cresting of Google, Paypal, and online promotion. (I am not proud of having indirectly contributed to its existence, I knew nothing about it until it was published, and it was never featured at the Forge booth.)
We play gangsta rapper wizards who belong to one-hat gangs, like the Satanist one, the Voodoo one, the blacker than thou one, the smart Golden Dawn-ish occult one, the Tong one, the Latin one …, and do, uh, stuff. Cool stuff, like criminal, kind of, and up against the law, kind of, all of it vague. The procedures focus on the factions, rivals, and true friends, and the GM is explicitly instructed to run a show using deceptive control techniques that will entertain the players so we can all act out our inner black rapper selves.
It is, I think, not available for purchase and remains forgotten. I would say “thankfully,” but on the other hand, this forgetting also relieves the culture from facing the phenomenon, and I think it should have been faced.
Katana-Ra was published 20 years later, 2023, adhering to the now well-oiled Kickstarter promotion machine of an RPG accessory to a successful franchise. It is fancy and colorful, and rather well-written in a kind of spooky, utterly neutral way which suggests a Markov chain application, including “where you put the jokes.” If I say cyberpunk Neo-Japan with clans, factions, demons, and various versions of ninja and samurai, there’s not much to add. What do you do? Cool stuff. Because the GM throws opponents at you and you fight them with your cool things.
I’ll say this for both games: they have fast, punchy resolution procedures which seem likely to change-up a confrontation without grinding, and simple resource mechanics which look like they might serve as relevant limiting factors in action. So that’s good. All of which, unfortunately, is undercut by the remarkably distinct halves of the familiar reverse mullet instructions: colorful bang-bang for players, story steering for GMs. The GM instructions in Katana-Ra are a carbon copy of those in Wyrd is Bond, regardless of phrasing.
In case I’m not being clear yet
This is not merely appropriation, which I think is too fraught or ill-defined for me to generalize about, and for which I am willing to say “everyone’s conscience is their own guide.” No. This is not up for debate or personal spins. It is objectification and orientalism. The effect is not to prompt critique or recognition of a problem, but instead to normalize and internalize the topic as Other, and the extent that it is sexy or cool or wannabe-worthy is exactly the extent to which it is being othered.
Regarding role-playing, games like these are the poisonous effect of locating our activity in the constellation of other media and their commodity network, i.e., of considering it to be a branch of fandom. Fandom is not, as its adherents claim, about loving and doing anything. It is – hands down – uncritical, which is to say, willfully stupid; and through commercial capture, hegemonic, which is to say, bourgeois and racist.
And for us, too, it is avoidable, simply by disconnecting your role-playing from that complex tangle of media, faux-socializing, and commerce. We aren’t digital gaming or show-creators, who must navigate and compromise in that profits-haunted and racist swamp. We don’t have to be in that swamp. And if we’re not, then our play and expression will be as bad or as good in terms of racism as we really are. Indeed, if we play on purpose and design through playful-play, then this truth about each of us will appear fully and clearly, with the virtues of honest expression and the potential for ongoing learning.
Therefore publishing content of this kind is wrong in the most literal sense of the word, meaning both counter-factual and insidiously destructive in effect. “Role-playing is part of the gaming industry” is a lie. Participating in its context ruins the capacity for the value of the activity to appear.
Not to see it is the astonishing thing. Could not Jason read his own limping, weirdly diverted “awareness” paragraph and see its admission that he and the potential players he describes are aping bought-and-sold coolness? Could not Jay Parker, whom I don’t know, see that he’s colluding in a sanitized fetish … including the Japanese franchise creators … Well, you see, that’s the point as indicated by this post’s title. Of course they should be able to see it, but they are not looking for it, so they don’t. They don’t look for it because they have no actual desire not to be racist, only the fear of being called racist, so as long as they avoid slurs and internalize their otherizing “love,” then they avoid that criticism. How can it be racist when everyone loves it so and is willing to pay so much money for it?
Jason of course probably made no money worth mentioning from his effort and its decentralized personal sales, but Parker and his team certainly did via Kickstarter; that’s what two decades of developed commodification will do for you.
I’m almost tempted to play both as an exercise for me and others in learning to see it clearly.
This post may be considered some steam venting off my preparation for “Racist Where & How,” one of the workshops I’m preparing for The Happening. If I don’t relieve some of that pressure or the reactions I’m having along the way, the workshop will lose focus.
If this post suggests that this project might be pretty good and rather different from the plethora of such discussions (if I don’t screw it up), then please consider helping the Happening to happen, if you haven’t already, at this link.
8 responses to “If you’re not looking for it, you don’t see it”
Good post, thank you. Wyrd Is Bond looks truly unforgivable, even at first glance, but on Asian settings, I have become too lax so your commentary is pointed for me. I suppose the inevitable question is, “Must we burn Bushido?” A tentative answer: exploring the difference between a good-faith attempt at historical fidelity and an extrapolated caricature in a sci-fi setting. And so a discussion of Bushido’s political validity involves a discussion of its historical accuracy. Precisely the discussion reflexively suppressed in most commentaries as “irrelevant, it’s a game.”
I would caution against over-caution. It might be easy to miss my opening phrase,
… which is a lot of “asides,” and allows for someone to play a hell of a lot of problematic titles or content in good faith, well or badly, successfully or unsuccessfully, which I think is fine.
I mean, Bushido is orientalized or adjacent, sure, but it sits in a rather rich stew of literature and cinema, much of it Japanese, and much of it poking at or grappling with the very things which someone find objectionable. In other words, as I see it, we might play Bushido with a knowledgeable eye on these matters, and who knows, we might come up with something good in these terms, or at least find out where we do something bad because of who we really are. (Also, I don’t think historical accuracy is really the important variable.)
Whereas I think the category I’m talking about in the post is my “no go” zone. Despite my “almost” phrase in the post, I really can’t imagine leading the drive to play either of these games or a lot of titles like them, and I don’t think I’d participate in someone else’s drive to do so without some indication of seriousness on their part.
As for where these boundaries fall, well, I don’t really see how that can be dictated across persons. For example, I opened the possibility of playing Undiscovered with a specific emphasis on the Dusters with exactly the point that I considered the content to be discussable, not repellent (see the video embedded in Desert duster fantasy). On the far end, It might even be the case that I’d play something more obviously repellent, as in derogatory racist, than Katan-Ra or Wyrd is Bond, because that degree of racism is easily subverted or explored for power, whereas their bland-ass normalization is not. My call is that such decisions really are a matter of personal reflection and expression, rather than an official checklist of Approved vs. Too Terrible to Exist. Someone else’s boundaries could well be different from mine for all sorts of good reasons.
My point here is to call attention to this normalized category because I think it’s the most insidious and most harmful. I hope I might have done a little good in being so specific about it.
I’m currently grappling with how to adapt a twenty-year old adventure of mine, full of racial stereotypes, made more difficult because it was and is intended for a one-shot. I’m scheduled to run it twice soon.
The players receive a selection of pre-made fairy tale archetypes – a child-stealing goblin, a man-eating ogre, a dime-sized fairy, a shining knight, an altruistic gnome – with appropriate strengths, weaknesses, and gear.
A villain has stolen summer (i.e. the season) and fled to another world. The PCs are tasked with returning it.
And then there’s my surprise: the PCs end up in modern day Los Angeles — and their characters, while retaining strengths, weaknesses and magical gear, are cast into new forms…
In my old version, the goblin becomes an Afro-American street kid, the ogre a fat (and white) biker, the fairy a female Hispanic singer, the knight a native American park ranger, and the gnome an old Chinese watchmaker.
These are walking clichés and that was deliberate — I thought I was being clever and, I reasoned, the fairy tale archetypes are clichés, too, so that must be okay. However, I’m not comfortable with this anymore.
My current plan is to let the players decide which form (sex, ethnicity, trappings etc.) their character takes in modern day L.A., with a few requirements: the goblin must be a child, the knight must have a ‘noble’ profession (e.g. firefighter), the gnome must have a job entailing manual dexterity (e.g. physiotherapist) and so on.
I’m a tad worried that deciding on one’s character’s new form might take too much time (being limited to a four-hour slot at cons) but maybe this is really just some residual fondness for these clichés in myself which I intend to crush.
As is often the case, once I post something, I get all sorts of ideas — even if the post has sat on my hard disk for days.
Anyway, I think I’ll let the players handle their characters’ manifestation in L.A. without any requirements. The fairy tale archetypes are strong, my brief descriptions are evocative, and the players even get to play them for a bit at the beginning.
Hence, the players have enough to work with. I can use one or two of my ideas for modern day manifestations as examples (e.g. physiotherapist) and bloody leave it at that.
If someone casts their knight as, say, a nurse or midwife – whether as a serious statement or intended for laughs – that’s great! This is part of the scenario’s fun and I should not be hogging it.
And if the chosen manifestations are pedestrian or inscrutable (e.g. the ogre as an accountant), that’s fine, too.
Potentially problematic stuff – e.g. casting the knight as a policeman, particularly in a U.S. context (given all the police violence) – is something we can either let pass or maybe discuss.
I’ve been thinking about this since you first mentioned it to me on Discord. From my native cultural perspective, the assignment of those distinct ethnic and other tropes to the “landing states” of the characters is jarring, including the response, “But why would you do that,” as in, at all.
But then I thought about it as an immigrant to a country nearby to your own, and my efforts to shift perspectives or at least to understand the interface between my new “two cultures.” For example, let’s say you had chosen Hamburg as the city, and assigned the child-stealing goblin to “land” as an undocumented Romani person, perhaps with criminal connections. You might be interested to know that to a person in the States, this would generate almost no sense of shock or inappropriateness. The term “gypsy” is considered an ordinary word in reference both to actual people and to a suite of stereotyped behaviors, including the also-ordinary verb “to gyp.” The default reaction would be to respond as if to a Disney character, i.e., simplistic but familiar, doing little if any harm, and probably cute. To call it out as non-trivially racist there would be mildly baffling to the people involved, who might respond “OK?” but think of it as a quirk on the part of the person saying so.
But as I now understand it, In Sweden, Germany, and anywhere else in which actual Romani culture is present, and for which the far and near history is now well-known, such a reference and especially such an application is appalling. It would be an indicator of a deeply racist and stupid person; I’m sure anyone from North America can fill in the equivalent terms regarding black people, Mexican people, Native American people, specific underclasses, and so on. My point here is not to claim personal transformation or virtue, but rather the opposite: that I have to remember that “gypsy” is a slur as bad as any that I can imagine, and that the associated tropes are not easy-access basic characterization short-cuts, but linked to a recent history of not only discrimination but outright genocide.
Anyway, that’s why I think I understand that your initial plans utilizing American tropes, twenty years ago, may not be admirable, but they aren’t exactly as they would seem to me on their face. I also think I can admire your shift in perspective since then, including trusting other people to arrive at their own concepts.
This response is very valuable to me!
First, shifting one’s point of view like you did (to the extent that is even possible – I am not an immigrant after all -; but even a thought experiment is useful) is illuminating. Your example regarding Romani is spot on and makes me cringe much harder than my reported sins. The analysis is relevant, too.
But there is more.
When I posted this, I was aware that my chosen manifestations were offensive — and (1) that includes such ostensibly positive stereotyping of, say, native Americans as nature-loving ‘noble savages’ and (b) that they were already offensive twenty years ago (though I did not perceive it then). Disney’s Pocahontas had been lambasted almost ten years earlier, for instance.
However, I was oblivious of both the severity and the weirdness from an American perspective, so this is a very useful splash of cold water in my face, prompting me to look more carefully for biases and blind spots, past and present, in myself.
(I am also actively seeking new perspectives on these matters via roleplaying, specifically with a planned game of Cthulhu Dark in 1920s Germany — but that should be another post.)
(“Cringe” is not the right word here, as this goes beyond embarrassment.)
I ran the adventure yesterday and people chose their manifestations without resorting to racial stereotypes as I had done twenty years ago: the goblin became a short, homeless person (“Danny DeVito as a hobo”), the knight a quarterback, the fairy a college girl, the ogre a lumberjack, the dwarf a handyman. Race was never mentioned (so presumably everyone was white like the players).
The archetypes were explicitly not gendered (thus “Kobold*in” etc.), not even the knight, but the only female player ended up with the fairy anyway, despite hoping for the ogre, as apparently none of the men wanted to play a fairy (male or female). In any case, I’m glad I left things to the players.