Historical Games Round 75
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I admit, I am a person who wants historically accurate -isms and resistances in historical games. Does that mean I want to see a bunch of racist, sexist, bigoted PCs? No, of course not.
But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.
I just finished reading Last Night at the Telegraph Club (excellent book), and it’s a lesbian coming of age story that could not exist if you took out not just the anti-LGBTQ prejudice of the 40s, but also the harassment and abuse of Chinese immigrants by immigration officials on anti-Communist witchhunts.
Does every game have to include this stuff? No, of course not. It’s your game, make what you have fun with. But there are valid reasons for including major societal pressures that have nothing to do with wanting to abuse other players or PCs by playing a bigoted character.
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@Tez I dont think it is either, I enjoy those tensions, but personally I’d only want to give it a shot with gamerunners I trusted, both in how that would be managed and their quickness in excluding people with problematic behavior that crop up. (You are on the list of trusted gamerunners BTW but I think you already know that! <3)
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@Roadspike that is largely what I mean. If I dont think staff is able and willing to spot and remove people that don’t get it, that is where I dont bother investing/playing on that place because I know its going to go off the rails, no matter what language is used in policies/what the genuine intent is. I know many nice/creative folks who are great storytellers but suck at boundaries.
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@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:
But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.
This whole passage is generally why I’m against the removal of -ist/-ism speech in art. If we don’t see how ubiquitous it is that characters are frequently denigrated or have slurs thrown at them, it’s hard to appreciate the movements that worked so hard towards changing that perspective. There are also thematic constraints that come with including bigoted characters that are often subtextually difficult to explore without them. I could point at media that explicitly looks at the semiotics of racism or sexism like Get Out or more recently Silent Hill f, but also at things where the racism is front and center and its endemic nature shows us how a myopic worldview can lead to the development of a specific genre: Lovecraft and the other pulp-era writers on racism and sexism, Robert Heinlein on sexism, etc. Edit: I forgot to finish this point out. We can see that there are many other elements in these genres now that have moved away entirely from these perspectives, and have played with the old school -isms in different ways to elevate the genre. Lovecraft Country is the obvious example, but also modern sword and sorcery revival literature tends to turn sexism on its head.
On a personal level, I will rarely play characters that are front and foremost with my RL identities. I’ve only played one Muslim character and I rarely have my characters engage with their sexuality, so there have only been a handful of times when someone used the f-slur towards a character of mine and one particularly memorable time when someone used some (admittedly mild) Islamophobia against my character which was very much rooted in the cultural perspectives of the United States. It does get my hackles raised a bit if I don’t know the person, though, and I can imagine that if I were Black I would probably get deeply emotionally exhausted attempting to play through a perfect recreation of 1920s Appalachia, warts and all.
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I would agree that wholesale removal of hate speech is bad because it removes the ability to recognize it, understand it, and safely deal with it when it does arise.
That said, individual games choosing to eliminate that from the scope of RP is totally cool with me, and will probably be the route I take for my games in the future. I’m trying to have pretendy fun times and tell neat fantasy / sci-fi / horror stories. I’m not trying to give minority players the potential to flashback to the small-minded nonsense they deal with in their RL on the regular.
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I’m largely in agreement with Pyrephox, surprising nobody, but I also have to acknowledge that I just don’t have the time nor the capacity for the level of moderation a historically authentic game would probably require. And if I don’t have the time, I can hardly make demands of others to have such time or spend such effort.
So I’ll most likely content myself with playing pseudo-historical dress-up on a MU instead of anything even remotely verisimilitudinous.
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@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:
I admit, I am a person who wants historically accurate -isms and resistances in historical games. Does that mean I want to see a bunch of racist, sexist, bigoted PCs? No, of course not.
But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.
This is a huge part of why I opted not to open that game–not because I don’t agree with you, but because I do.
My original intention wasn’t to muck with The -Isms or the timeline at all, trusting that the vast majority of the player base wouldn’t engage in anything so egregious and that the few who’d come in with the worst intentions would be obvious and easy to boot from the game.
It was the very first question I got being “But what about the racism?!” that led to me to a bit of a knee jerk reaction of “Well, I’ll just lift it out. Blah blah blah, players imagine all sorts of crazy stuff, they can imagine this, too.” Especially since, given the OGoA setting, there would be plenty of other horrors for characters to come up against.
It was my attempts at presenting historical examples and this person who is intelligent and insightful and whose opinions I generally trust going nowhere that ultimately changed my mind. Despite evidence to the contrary, it seemed like they just couldn’t be convinced that while this was the predominant attitude of the time, it wasn’t universal and it would be perfectly reasonable and also historically accurate for people to play characters who didn’t hold those views.
That left me sitting there thinking that my options for running something in the time period would effectively be:
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Erase the history of this very real oppression that people experienced and those that fought against it.
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Neglect the history of the people that fought against that oppression and potentially expose players to really awful prejudice and abuse.
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Write a guide that would effectively boil down to “Okay, But How Much Racism is Cool versus How Much Racism is Too Much Racism?” with all of the ick I feel even typing that, nevermind the potential for any of it to be taken out of context or implied to endorse at least some terrible things as acceptable.
When I realized that none of these seemed like very good options, or at least not options I was comfortable with, I couldn’t move forward with the game. Not because I don’t think those stories are worth telling, but because I think they need to be approached with a level of awareness that I’m not sure I trust a mass of strangers to consistently demonstrate on a public game.
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I have bad experiences with “the -isms” on games. Some of those experiences still make me very sad and very angry OOC, years later. What happened to me in the name of “theme” was wrong, and it sucked.
But on a broader view than that: Books and movies can and do tell stories about these social injustices and those who overcome them, as they should. But a MU is not a book/movie. A MU does not have a single author/filmmaker viewpoint, a MU’s content cannot be completely verified or monitored. A MU is about many narratives and many interpretations, for better and worse.
Player A might be great at writing a powerful and nuanced struggle, but Player B might be mid and Player C is reductive and fetishy about it. Public games are not made of just Player As. Everyone has at least once run into some well-meaning person out there who is RPing the world’s worst representation of an oppressed minority.
These stories need to be told. Is a Public MU* the best medium in which to tell them and give them the care and nuance that they deserve? I don’t know that it is. Private, maybe.
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And all of those very good comments are the flip-side of the issue:
Players/staff aren’t necessarily GOOD at dealing with these kinds of issues. No one wants to play a game with That Guy who is drooling at the thought of playing a Klansman. Not a lot of people want to play on the game where staff are like “women can’t be anything but mothers and wives because That’s Historically Accurate” (when it never has been). It’s exhausting to try and build something authentic that is actually fun to play, so I don’t honestly blame anyone for saying “I want something that’s got the fun parts and not the unfun parts”.
I just mourn the kind of stories that could be played if more people could be trusted with these kinds of subjects.
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Since I was namedropped earlier in the thread (thanks @Tez) I felt compelled to post something here.
I think representation is important, and I wouldn’t be inclined to run a historical game that glossed over the historical facts of what it was like to be a member of a group subject to “isms” at that time. I also wouldn’t be inclined to run one that didn’t.
When you put an “ism” into the social contract as allowed content, you immediately open up the expectation that it will be a gameplay factor and you open up the conversation to what is “accurate and allowed” and what is “accurate but not allowed”, and by opening up those things you now have taken on the responsibility for providing it and policing it. This leads to a lot of questions.
Why is this dynamic being included? Do you expect it to enhance the story in some way? Do you have plans to engage with it directly, or will it just be existing in the background? If you have no plans to engage with it directly, what is the benefit of including it? Do you expect people to RP about it? What will that depiction look like? Does that depiction serve to illuminate something about the human experience in a respectful representation or does it serve to create spectacle and story drama purely for entertainment? What will you do about players who are leaning too far into the latter? Can you clearly define where that line is? What will you do if YOU are the one who crossed the line and it’s been brought to your attention?
Regardless, the expectation should be that a game clearly state on the tin exactly what unconscionable things might occur to your character in the course of play. Do not leave players to discover this through play. If my guy could be killed, say they could be killed. If they could be sexually assaulted, say they could be sexually assaulted. If they could be discriminated against, say they could be discriminated against and how it could look. Gritty Games are allowed. Please put the Narrative Facts on the side. I can choose if this is right for my diet.
he/him
this machine kills fascists -
@Trashcan Thank you for articulating this so nicely. It’s a very blurry line that I have issues with myself. Do you disallow IC discrimination at all (as has been neatly pointed out by others, this has its own problems with telling stories of resistance)? Do you only allow it based on non-real-world reasons (“hedge mages suck, werewolves rule!”)? Do you only allow players to apply it to their own characters (that doesn’t stop someone from fetishizing the struggle that another player may have to deal with in RL)?
I don’t know that there are good, “right” answers to any of those questions.
I do agree with others above that if I don’t trust the game runners to enforce the boundaries of their playerbase, the answer to most questions is “no.”
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@Trashcan said in Historical Games Round 75:
Since I was namedropped earlier in the thread (thanks @Tez) I felt compelled to post something here.
@Trashcan @Trashcan @Trashcan @Trashcan @Trashcan @Trashcan @Trashcan
Thanks for being willing* to be dragged in to the conversation.
For me it comes down to two things:
a) Players need to know what to expect. The social contract that @Roadspike cited is a great place to set expectations.
b) Staff needs to do the work to maintain their vision.* not willing
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@Trashcan said in Historical Games Round 75:
Regardless, the expectation should be that a game clearly state on the tin exactly what unconscionable things might occur to your character in the course of play. Do not leave players to discover this through play. If my guy could be killed, say they could be killed. If they could be sexually assaulted, say they could be sexually assaulted. If they could be discriminated against, say they could be discriminated against and how it could look. Gritty Games are allowed. Please put the Narrative Facts on the side. I can choose if this is right for my diet.
I had a really good experience with a Social Contract on the last game I had any staff involvement in, mostly for expectation-setting. I never viewed it as a thing that flattened RP so much as one that set some baselines for what the world was and wasn’t. Players are, in my experience, often spotty on internalizing thematic realities that are even slightly different from their RL experience. Like, I spent a lot of time doing BSG RP back in the day. The amount of people who couldn’t wrap their brains OOC around the treatment of gender in the show and lack of sexism was…not incidental.
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I think when doing something like this you also need to be very aware that “historical prejudices” are still very real today and that mushes are still overwhelmingly white. So while it might be fun for one person to play being racially discriminated against in the old south, there are a whole lot of people who deal with that every day and might be going online to escape from that and not want to see that in their fun-pretendy-time game. Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.
Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.
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@DrQuinn said in Historical Games Round 75:
I think when doing something like this you also need to be very aware that “historical prejudices” are still very real today and that mushes are still overwhelmingly white. So while it might be fun for one person to play being racially discriminated against in the old south, there are a whole lot of people who deal with that every day and might be going online to escape from that and not want to see that in their fun-pretendy-time game. Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.
Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.
I agree and disagree with you:
Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.
Throw them out. Throw them the fuck out. I don’t think they are as subtle as they think they are. If you see it, if you sniff it, throw the poop out. You’re right that you will get people pushing boundaries, but you get people pushing boundaries regardless. Flush 'em.
Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.
Maybe.
I think we also have a tendency (duh, obviously) to take a very modern (duh, obviously) western idea on what isms are and what we would expect to see in play. I’m more interested in themes of cultural xenophobia than colonial racism: the isms of different times and in different places. I’m interested in stories that don’t draw quite so direct a line to the here and now, but there are of course still echoes of any marginalized stories.
she/they
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@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:
I admit, I am a person who wants historically accurate -isms and resistances in historical games. Does that mean I want to see a bunch of racist, sexist, bigoted PCs? No, of course not.
This.
The tabletop game I’m running has all these historical -isms, but resistance is practically the point, and the PCs are trying to be the good guys. So no, they are not racists. The players don’t want to do that and I don’t want them to.
And the truth is, there have always been some people who resist. It is far from inaccurate to depict them.
I also told the players that their characters had to pass for males over the age of 12, but only in the dark. So about a third of them are girls, dressed as boys by the standards of the 18th century, and the NPCs are either very bad at noticing or they don’t care. My take is that this is actually believable enough, but even if it’s not, well, we’re gonna play that it is because some people want to play women characters and that’s not a freedom I want to take from them.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
@Tez said in Historical Games Round 75:
@DrQuinn said in Historical Games Round 75:
Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.
Throw them out. Throw them the fuck out. I don’t think they are as subtle as they think they are. If you see it, if you sniff it, throw the poop out. You’re right that you will get people pushing boundaries, but you get people pushing boundaries regardless. Flush 'em.
Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.
Maybe.
I think we also have a tendency (duh, obviously) to take a very modern (duh, obviously) western idea on what isms are and what we would expect to see in play.
I have, on two different games about ten years apart, run into entire groups of people playing actual, literal neo-Nazis. Both instances were disturbing, but the second instance was particularly strange. Somehow, my character – who was Jewish – got painted as the asshole for not wanting to deal with some dude walking around with a shaved head and a swastika tattoo.
But even weirder than that? I found out after the fact that one of the women in the group was someone I’d known for a years. In fact, it was a friend I’d lost contact with. A friend who I’d had long conversations with most of a decade earlier about how she was never going to play a black character again after dealing with a guy on the White Wolf mods who had sent out a really gross email including a lot of stereotypes about black people and then got very much called out on it by, like, half the Mage sphere. Long conversations about how upsetting that was for her because she was no longer comfortable playing characters who looked like her because of that incident.
To this day, I don’t really know how I should feel about that or if I even get to have an opinion on that, because her feelings on the subject are entirely her own and not something I get to dictate. But needless to say, I was shocked to discover that one of the most racist characters I’ve ever encountered on a game, with a player that took umbrage to people not wanting to interact with a group of neo-Nazis, was played by a person of color who had previously felt personally victimized by racist stereotypes proposed in RP.
(Also, sorry if the quotes got busted. Phone typing sucks.)
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@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:
The tabletop game I’m running has all these historical -isms
A TTRPG works for historical games for the same reasons a private MUSH would, it’s a known quantity of like-minded people. A public MUSH is a different animal.
@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:
Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run.
There are a few historical -isms to navigate in those
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See this is what makes pre modern games attractive in terms of ism handling. The world was so different that many of the categories of bigotry today just didn’t exist yet. The beef between ancient Assyrians and Greeks might as well be a beef between vampires and werewolves for how relevant it is today.
It’s unavoidable in all human history that people have used bigotry to justify harming perceived political and social enemies. It’s not the only way to go after your enemies, either, and those other ways are a lot less retraumatizing for people who have experienced it. Few people have been traumatized by weaponized lightning bolts, disintegration rays, or medieval weaponry applied to them. Nor have they been hurt by people orchestrating a palace coup against them and running them off their throne. But the modern ism stuff? Why drive off players like that? If the beef is between like, Hittites and Myceneans, who cares? Go ham.
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@Ashkuri said in Historical Games Round 75:
@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:
Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run.
There are a few historical -isms to navigate in those
Indeed there are.
it’s a known quantity of like-minded people. A public MUSH is a different animal.
Honestly, though, a MU does not have to be so different from aTTRPG. You can show people the door if they are not like-minded enough. This is not really all that hard.
