Grumpy RPG Reviews

Dannyalcatraz · Feb 24, 2012

I think that's a significant part of the equation, but not a bar. When you don't see an echo of yourself in something, it is that much harder to comsider that as a path for yourself. That is why I think it is important for all the sports color barriers to be broken. Records aside, one of the most important things tiger Woods ever did was simply play pro golf well as a person of mixed race. Black participation in golf has exploded since he started winning.

Little black girls played with little blonde barbies before there were little black barbies, after all. And like the discussion in the other thread hinted, a high percentage of my fantasy art drawings were and still are about white people.

Likewise, my youngest cousin, like me, is nuts about Greek & Norse mythology. Unlike me, though, he's never expressed an interest in TT gaming- he loves his console games.

So percentages have risen over the years, but we're still "Rare, % in lair 25%".

billd91 · Feb 24, 2012

Thunderfoot said:
As for the art, it sort of makes sense. White guys make white pictures. It's unintended racism. When I think about NPCs or read a book without a very specific description, I think white person. It's not intended, but it's what my mind comes up with.

I really wouldn't call that racism. That strikes me as more of a variation on identification in literature. When we read (or in the case of painting, create) we develop a psychological relationship with the character and see ourselves in that character. So I think it's perfectly natural to see characters being similar to ourselves, not just in their behavior or personality qualities, but also physically... barring a specific description that contradicts our mental picture.
Honestly, I'd say it has more to do with our own narcissism than racism.

GSHamster · Feb 24, 2012

It probably also has a lot to do with how people get into D&D in the first place. You usually get into it from friends and family and those tend to map to racial/ethnic lines.

I'm East Indian, and I see the same issue as I know of no other East Indian tabletop gamers. I think a great part of that is that I did not grow up in the Indian community. Instead, my circle of peers and friends was almost entirely white, and I learned to play D&D with them. But the flip side of that is that I cannot act as a vector into the Indian community, because I'm not really part of it.

Umbran · Feb 24, 2012

Dannyalcatraz said:
I think that's a significant part of the equation, but not a bar. When you don't see an echo of yourself in something, it is that much harder to comsider that as a path for yourself.

It's a hard question as to whether the barrier is more about the fiction and presentation, or about socio-economics. I have no hard data, but my rough understanding is that the traditional home of RPGs is among middle-class suburbanites. The education, income, and free time and safe place barriers may be taller than the representative art barrier, so to speak.

Thunderfoot · Feb 24, 2012

PC, I would say that the percentage is higher in more integrated states, but only slightly so.

I played with 3 black people at my table of 13. You figure that into percentages and that's roughly 23%, definitely higher than the national average I'm sure (I think your guess of 25% is really high there Danny). Taking it away from my table I've known personally 6 other blacks that gamed in the area, 4 from the FLGS - that was in the Baltimore/DC/Annapolis area. A very high African decent population (both African American and native born immigrants), but even though I knew many I would still venture to guess that the total population in that area that were black and gamers was only about 6% tops.

Most black friends I had thought it was just weird, even more so than my white friends. I think part of it was a cultural thing, pass-times were a way to get you out of "the hood" and nobody was going to get a Nike endorsement rolling dice and eating pizza. By contrast those gamers I did run into were all college graduates with stable mid to high level incomes, so the economic thing may have had quite a bit to do with it too.

By contrast, when moving back to Southern Illinois I have run into exactly 1 black gamer (in the whole area), and frankly, he acts whiter than I do, so I'm not sure what that means.

Of course none of this is very scientific and without a national/international census, we are never going to get any real data/facts. Even poling on ENWorld will only give a representative sample of our membership, assuming they actually answer. I am sure if this had come up a few years ago I would have used this as a sociology paper and got an even higher grade than my 102%

(And to think, I hated sociology, although the hot professor tried to give me her phone number after I took the final so we could discuss my final project (over coffee or cocktails?), so maybe it isn't so bad after all.

My wife thought it was funny anyway.)

Grumpy RPG Reviews · Feb 25, 2012

how do you make things better?

Also, on Wednesday this thread becomes about D. Vincent baker's "Apoco World," i.e. the subject of my next review.

Piratecat · Feb 25, 2012

RobertSullivan said:
how do you make things better?

As the closed threads mention, you make sure you're using blacks in illustrations and examples of play. You find role models who play and you convince them to talk about it. You actively recruit new players of color, then you make sure they can DM better than you can.

Dannyalcatraz · Feb 25, 2012

The biggest thing is, I think, to not assume that anyone who is a minority isn't interested in gaming. I don't mean at a conscious level, I mean working against the force of our subconscious attitudes. I have lots of cousins, for instance. I've only exposed a few of them to gaming at all. None really picked up the hobby, but 2 enjoyed themselves somewhat.

But be careful of any of us playing Kanye the Giant...next thing you know, your dungeon crawl will be derailed by a quest for hoes and then someone uses the Eye of Odin and *pop*

Lwaxy · Feb 25, 2012

Anyone know how the situation in the military is? I learned play from the US forces living off base in our village. 4 Native Americans (dad and his 3 kids), 4-5 whites (me and friend included), 3 African Americans and an Asian woman.

I never had the impression that any race is underrepresented before the topic came up here, as we don't have so much racial diversity in Germany and I almost always had at least 1 non-white in the group.

Thunderfoot · Feb 26, 2012

Lwaxy said:
Anyone know how the situation in the military is? <SNIP>

Depends upon the branches within the services represented. I was Military Intelligence when I was on Active Duty. A lot of us MI geeks (low flying MIGs according to the combat arms guys) played RPGs, wargames, etc regardless of our race. The Artillery guys rarely played RPGs regardless of their race. And as MI I was multi-service (ie all services trained and served together regardless of where we were stationed) so I can tell you that from what I saw it was the same in the other services too (you've never played until you've had a Marine playing a paladin.)

Without trying to sound elitist, often it was the more cerebral jobs that held the gamers. Of course this generalization (like all generalizations) isn't an absolute, but it did usually play out that way. I.e. your intel, tech (repair), commo (communications), med and finance were usually your RPGers, but we had a guy in our group who was clerk.

So the military is skewed (like it is in all demographics.). But if you did a full census you would most likely find that military members are more inclined to play RPGs than the population at large, but the racial split is probably still fairly close.