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Inclusive, to a Point

David Gaider’s response to a fan irked at the implementation of romantic relationships in Dragon Age II is one reason why Bioware deserves your money. It’s worth reading in full, but for those in a hurry, here’s the synopsis:

Player Bastal thinks that, since maybe 80% of DA2 players (a number he pulled from the air) are heterosexual males, Bioware ought to be catering to them—it’s not clear whether he means exclusively, or merely giving het males lots of sex content to enjoy and only singular “token” choices for everyone else. Gays are being openly and unfairly catered to. There’s an implicit suggestion that het males such as himself shouldn’t even be put at risk of witnessing males so much as flirting, but again, it’s not clear whether this is part of his intent. Gaider pauses first to tell the hecklers to shut up if they can’t contribute constructively, then clinically demolishes Bastal’s position. The crux of his response lies in the statement:

“…privilege always lies with the majority. They’re so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don’t see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what’s everyone’s fuss all about? That’s the way it should be [in the minds of the privileged majority], any everyone else should be used to not getting what they want.”

While I agree with the general thrust of that characterization of privilege, we should pause to remember that it does not always lie with the majority. Sometimes it lies with a distinct minority, such as nobility, ecclesiasts, or (here in America) the very rich, all of whom are in a position to write the laws to suit their narrow demographic. The exchange over romance in DA2 came to my attention at about the same time I was wondering what to do with a story on tearing down a mural to celebrating labor. I was about to let it go as yet another leftie rant when Gaider’s characterization of privilege struck a chord.

It’s not majority status that causes a lack of catering to privilege to be perceived as an imbalance among the privileged; it’s simply the enjoyment of privilege at all, long enough to become habitual. Just as Bastal, above, considers the presence of homosexual content itself both personally offensive and unfairly catering to his group, and wishes to make sure no one can be exposed to it even in passing, corporate greed has grown so used to holding all attention that it finds the very idea of celebrating labor threatening, offensive, and suitable for removal from the public eye. This isn’t a mural encouraging the Soviet-style overthrow of the capitalist oppressor, mind you; it merely recognizes labor’s contribution to society. And Governor LePage, alongside whatever super-wealthy agitators raised the issue, can’t fathom why anyone else should even want to see pro-labor art, much less be allowed to see it outside the privacy of their own rooms, hidden away like something shameful.

Postscript: As a heterosexual male myself, I for one am happy to see all four potential romantic companions available to both sexes. I figure on playing three times, once for each class. I’ve already bedded Isabela and romanced Anders as a female mage; maybe I’ll woo Merrill as a male rogue and Fenris as a male warrior. Why not? I’m secure enough to know I’m not going to catch “The Gay” from a video game.Besides, as one het-male friend observed of another third-person hack-n-slash game: “If I’m going to have to stare at somebody’s ass all day, it may as well be a hot one.” Homophobic het-males ought to be glad of the opportunity for hetero relationships when they prefer to play a chick for that reason. Or are we still stuck in “fags are creepy but lesbos are hot” territory?

For all the sexual inclusiveness, though, I can’t help but notice that Bioware won’t stand for polygamy or incest. You only get one fuck buddy, no matter how hard or successfully you woo anyone else (or how loose Isabela’s morals may be), and fanboys eager to get their hands on sister Bethany have been slapped down in no uncertain terms. Another case of “my kink deserves recognition; your kink is sick.”

2011 03 29 mdlake Games
Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Neither Are We, Anymore

Over the weekend, Scott Simon had Jim Brady and his wife on the air. Brady was the press secretary who took a bullet intended for Reagan, and was wounded badly enough to remain in a state of permanent recovery/therapy ever since; I gather his wife was on to help overcome the speech barrier.

Simon pursued the human interest angle with his usual sycophancy, and in the process brought up the Brady’s son, about whom Mrs. Brady laughingly admitted, “We brought up a good, liberal son.” It was a good line; I recall earlier interviews in which Mr. Brady remained genuinely, enthusiastically Republican, even as he admitted the party wasn’t always living up to its principles. I was impressed; I remember thinking Brady might be wrong, but was honestly, patriotically so, eager to make the Reagan vision a reality despite strong evidence that Reagan’s methods lead directly away from that vision. He was not of the same cloth as Republicans eager to wrap corporate greed in patriotic colors. (It’s hard to argue that someone who deliberately takes a bullet is in it only for himself…) And even though the report of a liberal son had something of the air of a confession, it still sounded more like a “Kids. What can ya do?” shrug, and, because it was said with a smile, suggested an open-minded acceptance of differing political views that’s gone missing from too many respected Republicans.

But Simon, strangely, didn’t leave it at that. He sought a point-blank response: “Your son isn’t a Republican,” which struck me as pointlessly redundant, until I heard the reply.

“No.” It came after a pause that lasted slightly too long, and really did sound like a confession this time. So did the next sentence: “Neither are we, anymore.” And finally, after a very uncomfortable pause, “Times change.”

The shame behind that exchange was evident even to insensitive me. Was the shame felt for abandoning the party, or for doing so much for so long to support a political party that ultimately, to paraphrase Reagan, abandoned them? Either way, I found it deeply moving, a frank recognition among (former) Republicans deep in the party establishment that what passes for conservative policy these days is Not Right, combined with a palpable sense of loss over the fact.

They know. We all do. Liberals, too. Just as the Republican party has morphed into something openly, positively evil, we liberals know that too many Democratic politicians have transmogrified into shills for empire, despotism, and big money—it’s just that they have to be more subtle about it, given their base. The principled politicians are too thin on the ground to stop it. We’ve all been complicit, either in voting for Republican bastards, in voting for Democratic conciliators or in not voting at all. We all know. The truth hurts.

2011 03 28 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Corpse, Live

We watched a stage performance of Frankenstein last night, and it was time well-spent. (Technically, we watched a live broadcast of a stage performance, but since we had to go to a theater to see it, I figure that’s close enough.) The rendition was fairly faithful to the book, and thus had little in common with the celebrated Karloff version. This came as a surprise to my father-in-law, who knew Frankenstein only by way of Mel Brooks. Faithfulness means an intelligent, self-possessed creature and plenty of philosophical diversions. Generally, I’m not much for theater, and my attention drifted at points of philosophical pontification, but perked up again whenever the plot began to move: in ethics, too, showing is a better way to teach than merely telling.

Perhaps this superiority of showing over telling is the reason the first five minutes of the play were the best. The creature (that night played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who switches lead roles nightly with Miller) clambers out of an enormous, artificial womb and spends several minutes flailing about before achieving the complex art of walking upright. The creature behaved very much like a severe stroke victim learning to walk, combining an infant’s absolute ignorance with an adult will and adult strength.

The process was part acting, part dance, punctuated by wordless grunts and howls, because the creature hadn’t yet learned to speak, either. It was entirely engrossing. I could have watched it for half an hour or more, but only so long as “watching an adult body learn to walk” was the entire show. Sadly, the creature continues to move convulsively and speak as though with an impediment for the entire show—long after it has moved on to heavy social and ethical questions and left the “learning to walk” stage far behind. The creature speaks smoothly enough when the philosophy gets heavy, and moves smoothly enough when it needs to overpower someone, so why must it continue to look like the victim of nerve degeneration otherwise?

Strictly speaking, the novel is ambiguous on the point. One could imagine all that “Adam” says and does in a clumsy but powerful manner. But one gets the impression of a sophisticated, self-possessed “Adam” by the novel’s end, the creature having mastered speech and its own physique over the intervening years.

2011 03 25 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Bodice Ripper

Dragon Age II uses retrospective as a narrative frame: your story is told by Varric: dwarf, bard, spymaster, adventuring companion, and accomplished bullshitter. He tells the story of Kirkwall’s implosion—magophobic templar against wizard, Qunari against Kirkwall, noble against perpetual elvish underclass against refugee human newcomers, slaver against rebel—from a distance of several years, and paints your character in the middle of it: your in-game decisions are the flashbacks in his version of your story.

Just how accurately he tells your story is an open question. I heard a wonderful report of how deftly the designers employ the device of an unreliable narrator, which, if true, rocks my world.

Your first appearance features you and a sibling escaping your destroyed home town, darkspawn nipping at your heels. If you play a mage, as I did, you’re stuck with your pissant wannabe brother, a warrior; if you play a rogue or warrior, you’re paired with your little sister, a mage. The scene is something of a tutorial, teaching you to mash the attack button and move around a battlefield, and maybe hint at the various class roles. You dispatch a bunch of darkspawn, but they just keep coming, and things begin to look bleak, until a dragon shows up and…

“Bullshit!” interjects the templar interrogating Varric. She demands the Real Story, so Varric shrugs and returns to his tale. At this point, I’m told, if you’ve been paired with your little sister, her breasts are animated much smaller than they were just a minute ago, a subtle and brilliant dig at the video game industry’s fascination with boobs as well as a subtle and brilliant demonstration of Varric’s personality. I haven’t had the chance to verify the rumor myself, but you can bet I’ll be watching for it when I explore the powers of a different class on a second playthrough.

2011 03 24 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Movin’ On Up

Despite a large percentage of twerps in the pool of potential opponents, I enjoy the online spades game offered as part of the standard Windows package. Spades is deep enough to be worth the effort, yet can be played in a manageable bite.

Well, worth he effort if you don’t get a twerp in your anonymous foursome. You know the guys I mean: the ones who quit when they begin to lose, or the ones who deliberately make unachievable bids, or the ones who just stop playing without quitting and letting the computer take over, or who automatically risk a double-nil bid (worth 200 or -200 points on a 500-point game) on their first bid, hoping sheer luck will carry them to victory and spoiling any sense of achievement and competition. And, of course, there’s always the risk of getting stuck with a partner who is just plain incompetent.

In theory, the ability to select your difficulty level—beginner, intermediate, or expert—allows you to be matched with players of roughly the same caliber. Gross incompetence can be forgiven among beginners, but I’ve been playing at intermediate for a while now, and there’s plenty of duffers there, too: oafs who actively try to take extra bags after both partnerships have made their contract, trump your honors, bid nil with four trumps in hand… no mistake is so obvious that self-styled intermediate players won’t make it. Repeatedly.

As a result, I win more than I lose. Barring an incompetent partner, I win a lot more than I lose. So I’m considering shifting gears up to expert. But there’s a problem.

I’m getting by just fine at intermediate level following a list of rules of thumb: second hand low, third hand high; count on winning tricks with aces and kings and spades beyond your third; don’t place a second nil bid on a hand if that would leave partner leading blind; signal the hilo and the false hilo with queen in hand; avoid leading to partner’s possible unprotected king. Such rules are usually enough to bring the contract home. But to my mind, expert play goes beyond rules of thumb to a deeper understanding of the game. It should include genuine card counting, which I can’t quite manage. (I can count spades, or honors, but rarely both, and never the whole deck.) Expert players should be able not only to bring the contract home, but bid all the tricks they can take, for therein (setting aside gross luck) lies the margin of victory. They know when to draw trump, and understand the importance of placing the lead in the proper player’s hands and how to make it happen when it is important. And I’m not confident I can do that. Certainly not right away, maybe not ever—trial and error against tougher opponents may teach an intuitive grasp of what not to do, but without table talk, there’s no real opportunity to learn the game’s subtleties in the post-game analysis.

Moving up in to the big leagues, then, would make me the bad partner: the guy who calls himself an expert but needlessly takes or loses the wrong tricks, misses cues, and generally throws away the game. Every so often, when there aren’t enough players online, the system will match me with a table of experts, or slip an expert into an otherwise intermediate game. Almost invariably, the expert(s) will quit immediately, unwilling to subject himself to twenty minutes of mediocre play. Who could blame them? Sadly, I’m stuck with a bad choice: live with the twerps, or become someone else’s twerp.

2011 03 23 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Nearly Grown

I witnessed a student nearly run over today. Fortunately, the driver ahead of me was alert, and traffic surrounding the school at the last bell is slow in any case, but it was still a narrow thing: some kids were horsing around, and one got pushed out into the street. Once the driver had a second to collect his wits, he honked, and the kid who nearly got hit, grinning, pointed at his pushing friend, calling “He did it!” Which was entirely beside the point, as well as disingenuous.

The event serves as another reminder that, with a few exceptions, high school students are not adults. They’re almost adults, and they can behave like adults for short periods, and we expect them to behave like adults all the time, and they yearn to be treated with the dignity of adults, but they really aren’t adults yet. A blithe disregard for danger and, when caught at it, a reflexive effort to deflect punishment to someone else rather than address the problem as a problem both speak of maturity yet to develop.

And yes, I realize that some people never develop a healthy sense of responsibility. Adulthood isn’t merely a matter of age. Teenagers, at least, have an excuse. The basic fact remains: however much we might like to treat them like adults, and however much they might want to be treated like adults—or think that they do—they aren’t adults yet. And we, their handlers and teachers and hopefully role models, need to keep that perpetually in mind.

2011 03 22 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Snow, Snow, Go Away

With characteristic inaccuracy, the radio informed me as I left this morning that we would experience “light showers throughout the day.” Bullpuckie. It was already snowing when I heard the words: heavy, sloppy snow that wouldn’t have been a “light shower” even if it had arrived in liquid form. And the drivers I met on my commute were driving very badly indeed.

Now, New Jersey drivers deserve their reputation, but it’s for aggressiveness and lack of consideration, not out of any inability to handle weather. Snow and rain and potholes they handle just fine. So why are the roads littered with spinouts and crumpled fenders this morning? Why is everyone driving like a bunch of Georgians paralyzed by a little sleet?

My armchair psychological theory is that they’re driving to defy winter. It’s officially the first day of spring, and we’ve already had a few spring-like days, so it’s easy to resent a late March snow. So my guess is that drivers believe, somewhere deep down, that if they pretend the snow isn’t there, it won’t be.

Sorry, guys. Mother nature doesn’t care, and you ignore her at your peril. If only you could do it without endangering more circumspect drivers—or pedestrians!–like myself in the process.

2011 03 21 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Aha! Gotcha!

I’ve been at work on Dragon Age II lately, getting well into the “first act,” wherein you perform odd assignments, often shady and almost always bloody, trying to make a name for yourself and collect enough gold to finance an expedition to the deep roads. So far, so…well, not good. Okay.

Technically, the game is fine. It looks better and flows smoother than its predecessor, doesn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken, sometimes fixes what was broken, and streamlines some of the busywork between events. (Not always. The idea of streamlining inventory fuss by equipping yourself and not all your companions was a good one, but the designers didn’t commit to it, so now 85% of the items you pick up are of no use to your companions, but the remaining 15% requires the same amount of fuss as the full inventory.) Structurally, the game is fine, too; anything you might hear about changes in the tone and narrative structure should be taken with a firm conviction that the game is far more similar to than different from the original.

That means a lot of moral dilemmas, a lot of choosing sides, a lot of scenarios where you act as final arbitrator in someone else’s dispute, and a heavy dose of “there are no right or wrong decisions, only the decisions you make.” And that philosophy is cool in a game, a mature and promising outlook for Bioware’s ongoing efforts to make actual role-playing, as distinct from mere hack-and-slash, possible in electronic RPGs.

I am disappointed, therefore, by the preponderance of “pig in a poke” missions I’ve seen so far. You never know what job you’ve actually signed on to do until after you’ve agreed to do it, and are nearly finished. That makes sense when you agree, say, to help a smuggler who refuses to tell you what’s in the crates. It makes less sense when some guy is begging you to find his missing wife. And refusing shady deals to concentrate on straightforward ones isn’t an option. For one thing, there aren’t enough respectable jobs to get you through the game, but, more to the point, even the seemingly decent jobs are filled with bizarre and implausible twists just to ensure that you’re stuck in questionable ethical territory.

To illustrate—and this paragraph is a spoiler!—one mission has a magistrate hiring you to bring in a felon, who has escaped from prison and holed up in a cave outside of town. It’s a hostage situation, and the already high tension is heightened by complaints from the hostage’s father that he won’t get justice because she’s an elf and her captor is human. So you fight your way in past living corpses and giant spiders, only to learn that nothing you’ve been given represents the situation fairly. The hostage actually sympathizes with her captor: she tells you he is controlled by demons against his will, and begs you to spare him. The criminal, when you reach him, wants to die; he came here to be destroyed by monsters. (So why a hostage? And how did he get to the last chamber without meeting the same monsters you had to kill?) But he isn’t actually possessed by a demon, though he insists he is; he admits that official mages have determined that, amid hundreds of genuinely possessed people, you’ve come across the one guy in the whole world who is a genuine schizophrenic. Oh, and the magistrate who hired you? He’s the killer’s father. So he’s kind of hired you to keep the matter under wraps and bring his boy home safe, and will become your enemy if you don’t, but he didn’t bother to tell you that part of it, or even sound out your feelings on equal representation before the law before hiring you. And the hostage is actually Adolph Hitler in an elf girl disguise, so if you save her, you’re responsible for the Holocaust.

Okay, so I made up that last part. But the rest is entirely accurate, and the last bit is substantially representative of what you deal with. The immersion-destroying gyrations necessary to produce these situations would do a soap opera proud: orphanage nuns are actually child slave traffickers, bloody-handed murderers are framed, and criminals trying to go straight go about it by selling poisons and drugs.

Half the time.

And, since there’s no way of knowing what you’ve done until you’ve done it, you’re just enduring an enormous game of Gotcha! Occasional red herrings and unexpected turns are appropriate. Big decisions have unintended consequences, and sometimes protagonists are deceived. Especially in a corrupt town like Kirkwall, and most especially if they insist on making deals with strangers in back alleys. A continual diet of misdirection, however, is out of place in a game about crafting a heroic (or anti-heroic, if that’s your thing) persona and creating the tale of Kirkwall’s fate. If you aren’t given enough facts to steer the story or, worse, deliberately misled in your efforts to do so, you’re just as much at the mercy of the game designers’ whims as you would be on a strict railroad storyline, and that’s not good for efforts to bring true role-playing to electronic format.

2011 03 18 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Exciting Trends

I’ve largely, though not entirely, dropped out of touch with the world of RPG design in the past several years. As the hobby continues to shrink, we’ve seen a lot of consolidation into familiar titles—D&D and White Wolf’s formula—even on specialized game shops, which grow fewer every year, and less shelf space for even the flagship lines outside conventions. Having found a regular group, my incentive to attend the local gamer cons vanished; bad management and shrinking offerings outside the RPGA circuit (Yecch!) meant I went to those cons only because I had no better outlet. So I lost touch with developing trends. It was easy to think, in that isolation, that there was little if anything new under the sun; though I wasn’t prepared to state categorically that there couldn’t be, the possibility passed through my mind more than once.

Happily, that suspicion was incorrect. Small press indie games can never vanish entirely; there will always be innovators driven by love of their art. With a little encouragement from my fellow system geek Dave, I’ve been looking into new titles lately. The hunt for novelty takes one farther afield than it used to, but there is still game to be found if you’re willing to look. Pun regretted.

The new trend is surprisingly uniform, given that it’s coming from so many sources. (Yes, they cross-pollinate. A lot. But they’re also coming from the contrarians and egotists who comprise the indie game press, so uniformity of anything is a surprise.) I thought the new ideas I found in FATE started with FATE, which generated all the press, but no: FATE is merely the most celebrated case employing devices increasingly common in new titles. They can be condensed into three principles:

1.Power over the plot represented by a small pool of points (fate chips, hero chips, plot points). A player can take narrative control by paying a point to the GM. Typically, a player can earn points by suffering the GM’s whim, and players may even pass points to one another if they’re the kind of group that delights in screwing one another over—they pay the point to the screwed PC’s player, who then has extra points to respond in kind.
2.Increasing abstraction of the narrative into a negotiation over what could or should happen: negotiation over what’s at stake with a given skill check, negotiation of outcome when the loser of an extended competition decides to cut his losses, negotiation of what the campaign is to be like and what kinds of characters are to be allowed. A lot of this comes from Burning Wheel, which takes it as the driving principle, but lots of indie games have been quick to pick up the perspective. One of the most interesting features of this trend is the appearance of intrusive questions into PC design: one player asks another a question like “Why did your character dump mine six years ago?” and the other player has to run with the idea, rather than treating each PC as a sacrosanct preserve for its respective player.
3.A return of random elements and a lot more reliance on creating stories on the fly. But where old-school randomness involved endless tables of minutiae and character powers, the new interest in randomness emphasized the injection of a few big plot items. Perhaps story elements are produced from three or four draws from a specialized deck, and the GM has to weave these together—and quickly, while the players fill out their stats. Maybe, as in Dirty Secrets, the murder plot is generated at random, the goal not being to figure it out so much as to encounter and expose it, in noir gumshoe tradition. Perhaps, as in Spirit of the Century, players are encouraged to begin play without knowing all their skills and aspects, choosing them (up to a limit) as the need arises.

All these amount to a strong dispersal of narrative power, mostly from GM to players, but also between players and even from players back to random devices, a direction contrary to the past twenty years in RPGs. The nature of the story isn’t being challenged, but the method of delivering it is, in a big way. Old gamers might be uncomfortable with the novelty; the notion that the GM is in charge and it’s his job to deliver a setting for the players works well, and many of the implications of the new ideas can be taken too far, even laughably far. The guys who put out the Actual People, Actual Play podcast agreed in one post-game analysis, for example, that too much abstraction and negotiation hurt a sense of immersion, that there was too much talk about the game and not enough playing of the game. On the other hand, these movements also reflect the needs and capabilities of old gamers: there’s a growing sense that we’ve been there and done that, and seek to spice the mixture by forcing everyone back on their toes, using each player’s built-up experience to aid the telling of a story rather than packing it away, unused, until he gets back behind the GM screen. At a minimum, the new devices are intriguing and should be tried, even at the risk of a few implosions of excessive self-awareness and lost immersion.

2011 03 17 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Coincidental Aristo

Continuing my search for RPG inspiration, I checked out the Douglas Fairbanks version of The Thief of Bagdad. Boy, is it ever campy! The sets and costumes, though lavish, bear no resemblance to either Arabian folktales or the historical garb of Arabs, Mongols, et al. “Florid” is an understatement for the body language, and the plot is something on the order of Snidely Whiplash demanding the rent—which, at least, isn’t too far from the Arabian Nights from which the movie draws inspiration.

Nevertheless, it’s a good movie. Not just campy fun, but actually good, once allowances are made for the technological limitations of 1924. The flamboyant gestures are useful in the absence of a soundtrack, and the butt-spliced special effects, while unconvincing, are at least done with care. Fairbanks’ fluid athleticism is amazing, and carries action sequences with a playful grace that might otherwise look crude. It’s easy to see why he preferred to act shirtless, and why the ladies preferred him to.

Watching it has borne immediate practical fruit, as well as supplying a narrative vocabulary for a potential game. Already I’d been grappling with the issues of sexism, racism, and other ugly -isms of the era. Should my game reflect such intolerance, and stay true to the source material, or should the great serial and pulp adventures be sanitized to meet modern sensibilities? For example, should a female PC be treated as a second-class citizen? And I got my answer: a firm and unwavering “Sort of.”

As I noticed of John Ford films, the movie seeks to respect and embrace its foreign material—to an extent. Allah is recognized implicitly as the same god most Americans worship, and Islamic virtue, so far as it receives any attention, is respected. Many of the Arabs are depicted as buffoons, to be sure, but no more ludicrous than the (white) buffoons of other early films, and the heroes are just as Arabic. Are the excesses of oriental royalty ethnic slurs, or merely a celebration of the equally excessive wonders of the original tales? Two women—the princess and one of her handmaidens employed by the villain—take active roles, if never so active as the men. Fairbanks smeared himself with something to darken his skin, and I don’t think it was done with any but honest intent of verisimilitude.

On the other hand… he did have to darken his skin. All the good guys are played by white actors, and the caliph’s daughter has a decidedly WASP-y beauty. Simply a reflection of available actors? I think not. Black and Asian actors get the bit parts and villainous roles. The Mongol prince plays to the sneering and duplicitous Fu Manchu stereotype, fond of poisons and spies. The obsequious peasants and decadent monarchs of the east might be said to perpetuate stereotypes that have been with us since Herodotus.

The contrast is found throughout popular fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries: Allan Quartermain may admire the African prince who joins his band, the Lone Ranger may consider Tonto his equal, and Indiana Jones (imitating earlier serials) may praise Sallah as the best excavator in the business, but these heroes also operate and benefit from an implicit position of privilege and superiority over their darker brethren. Adventure tales from 1800 to 1950 uniformly treat non-Europeans not only as subservient, but cheerfully subservient, and can safely be embraced by the heroes, while the few who challenge white Christian male hegemony are wholly and irredeemably evil; there is no middle ground. Women can be strong, as long as they are willing to be tamed by a stronger hero in the end.

In short, the characters and events of the films bear little or no prejudice, but the people making the movies do, if only unintentionally. (Thus the amount of prejudice you see in such fiction is largely a product of how much you want to see.) Which solves my dilemma. I can duplicate that phenomenon in a pulp-serial adventure or an Arabian Nights romp: the social environment in which the characters operate may be racist, sexist, class-conscious, and prone to religious prejudice, but the major characters therein (including PCs) are not. The potentially distasteful tropes of the genre are thus preserved without my players needing to help preserve them. Sympathetic foreigners will be pro-western by choice. The villains will be horrible, murderous, lecherous psychopaths who must be stopped; if that happens to preserve a colonial legacy, then so be it. Women may be second-class citizens, but in the rarefied atmosphere of the natural aristocracy the heroes occupy, they will be accepted as feisty equals. Aristocrats who openly stand for conservative values are to be pooh-poohed or even pitied as fossils of a bygone era, even as their values rule the world surrounding the PCs’ adventures.

2011 03 16 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink