Big Changes At White Wolf Following Controversy

LuisCarlos17f said:

Where is the limit of the bad taste and why? Where is the right to offend and when the duty of show respect?

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You will find the human species incapable of drawing a clear, sharp line, acceptable to all, dividing what is acceptable and what is not.

In all of this, context matters, the audience matters. Exactly how you present it matters. There are too many variables to make a clear determination.

LuisCarlos17f said:

Where is the limit of the bad taste and why? Where is the right to offend and when the duty of show respect?

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Social interaction isn’t *that* hard. I’m afraid there isn’t a rulebook.

Sadras said:

Well that statement comes as a surprise to me. Is this vampire comment something that existed in the 90's and are they referring to all Kindred or just a clan or sect or those in Chechnya?

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It's refering to the vampires in Chechnya, reflecting the general attitude to homosexuality there.

In the wider Vampire community, LBGT would be well represented - as seen in other vampire books. I'd say there is a good chance that some of the writers of White Wolf may be part of the LGBT community.

Maxperson said:

No it didn't. The company caved before the effects could be seen. It was more politics than the boycott.

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You do realize the pdf version went on sale, right? Even if it were a leak they're seeing the full effects of their blurb right now.

Maxperson said:

I don't see it that way at all. I read the wording in the links provided, and the writers make sure to say that the horrors the LGBT community are going through in Chechnya are happening. It provides a vampire twist to it, but it doesn't attempt to minimize the horrors at all.

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Did you miss the part where it says it's all a distraction? In the Chechnya of the v5 universe LGBT people are being persecuted not because of religious hate or general homophobia (y'know like in real life), but just to keep up the guise of "Sharia law".

Sadras said:

Well that statement comes as a surprise to me. Is this vampire comment something that existed in the 90's and are they referring to all Kindred or just a clan or sect or those in Chechnya?

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Maxperson said:

Because they are saying that even the LGBT vampires don't get a pass. All LGBT members in Chechnya are being targeted. It's an attempt NOT to minimize things or imply that it's only being done as a smokescreen. If it were only being done to humans and not vampires, it would become a smokescreen and not true hate for the LGBT community.

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No, no, if the Vampire community were really that LGBT friendly they wouldn't even have this plot at all. The text even actively discourages doing anything about the problem. If it were really just a regional issue then there wouldn't really need to be an excuse of being a "distraction", it would simply just be vampires running the Chechen government are also just really homophobic. Also the text describes it as "media manipulation" when in reality the Chechen government vehemently denies any sort of genocidal activity against the LGBT community. What media is being manipulated and how? Only the media outside of Russia could really get away with reporting it, so that would imply some level of collaboration with vampires outside of Chechen territory.

Rygar said:

Could you please put a large warning when linking to RPG.net? Given the very political nature of that site and its participants, and the actions they've taken over the past few weeks, some of us would prefer to avoid giving them any traffic or revenue.

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Uh... right there in the links it says "rpg.net"??? It wasn't even hidden behind text. The URLs were right there in the open.

Why do WE have to post large warnings when YOU don't read a link before you clicked it? (I'll try not to be cynical and think you were just "virtue signalling" your disapproval of rpg.net.)

Maxperson said:

No it didn't. The company caved before the effects could be seen. It was more politics than the boycott.

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While everything I've heard about Paradox's leadership indicates that they do have sincere "political" convictions to the effect of "don't be horrible to LGBT people or anyone else", I also have no illusions about their nature as a for-profit business: it was without a doubt the threat to sales posed by acquiring a homophobe reputation that spurred such a quick and heavy-handed correction. I will grant you that the actual boycott didn't have time to hurt the company, but you're not thinking as long term as they have to. A formal boycott is only the tip of the iceberg. Negative sentiment drives away customers far beyond that.

Umbran said:

We aren't really talking about what should be allowed in art, though. We are talking about whether a particular publisher makes a particular work available as a part of their business.

Remember that classically, a painter or sculptor got to make *one single copy* of a work. Thus, distribution through a business arrangement is a separate consideration from the creation of the art itself.

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This is a tricky issue to answer, because White Wolf was founded on the principle of creating roleplaying games as art. The initial appeal of the games were that they were provocative, and throughout their rise as a company they wrote copious essays and defences on the notion of art vs commercialism and freedom of expression. It's why they actually wanted to print uncensored things in the Black Dog license (go and read HōL), and they even attempted to establish the Null Foundation as a non-profit company for games (it failed) to be published under. You can pick up on a lot of the sense of movement in these early days by watch the World of Darkness documentary, I think.

The problem in the interim of nearly 30 years, however, is that White Wolf has been successful, become a corporation and indeed, been sold off a couple of times. It's maybe naive to hold onto notions of artistic expressions.

The long term fanbase was built on these principles though - and so when people talk about the game having a '1st edition feel', I think a lot of it is down to the drive to make something artistic again - by which I mean provocative and reflective of the real world. A lot of the reaction to it has been from other fans, possibly from later generations, who just don't care about that aspect any more, and instead want a less provocative game with more character options and powers and a more escapist fantasy to play in. Notwithstanding the specific issues in this particular incident, it's actually been the main source of conflict for the fanbase reacting to this new edition.

I've always found it distasteful when supernatural explanations are given to horrors created solely by humanity itself. Because it is minimizing things by blaming it on something not real, and not humanity, where the blame belongs.

If you want to do that, maybe apply it to natural disasters (and even then, things like floods are often man made. But things like volcanoes exploding or meteor strikes aren't)

trancejeremy said:

I've always found it distasteful when supernatural explanations are given to horrors created solely by humanity itself. Because it is minimizing things by blaming it on something not real, and not humanity, where the blame belongs.

If you want to do that, maybe apply it to natural disasters (and even then, things like floods are often man made. But things like volcanoes exploding or meteor strikes aren't)

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That's understandable. For me, it depends on context. For crazy out-there settings like the Marvel Universe and the World of Darkness, the resemblance to reality is so slight to begin with that it doesn't really register to me if there's something supernatural behind the evil. But if, say, Downfall had a twist ending where Hitler was possessed by Satan, that would be pretty bad.

Panda-s1 said:

No, no, if the Vampire community were really that LGBT friendly they wouldn't even have this plot at all. The text even actively discourages doing anything about the problem. If it were really just a regional issue then there wouldn't really need to be an excuse of being a "distraction", it would simply just be vampires running the Chechen government are also just really homophobic. Also the text describes it as "media manipulation" when in reality the Chechen government vehemently denies any sort of genocidal activity against the LGBT community. What media is being manipulated and how? Only the media outside of Russia could really get away with reporting it, so that would imply some level of collaboration with vampires outside of Chechen territory.

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I think you're thinking about the implications more than the writers did.

Which is part of the problem, of course.