doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
There is, but I don’t know that it’s gonna be easy to have it here
What We Lose When We Eliminate Controversial Content
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No, and I wasn't really suggesting that we do. All I'll say is that safe is way over rated. Kids like scary, they like transgressive. Safe? Not so much. That's obviously different that safe in terms of groups, which is important.
A couple or three related points
Manichaeism: Good vs Evil, Light vs Dark. This can be one of the empowering and fun things about heroic fantasy fiction. In the fantasy world, there are clear boundaries between good and evil. The villain always does villain-y things, and the heroes are always heroic. Real life is not often so simple.
In the real world, we also tell ourselves stories about good vs evil. Often a “we” become the good and a “they” become evil. This sort of manichaen world view, while comforting in its simplicity, has led to some of the most destructive episodes in human history. Much of European empire around the world was driven by the idea that what they were doing was beneficial to the conquered.
So, let’s say in your game you have as a villain a group of muderous, capital-E evil Orcs. The adventurer PCs, meanwhile, are heroic and good, and will rid the evily mcevil orcs and save the world. Is that an empowering story about good conquering evil? Or is that just repeating a story that has justified tremendous violence in our real world?
Sensationalized violence: a further complication is that people are often fascinated by stories that are gruesome, violent, or illicit in some other ways. They want to be shocked about how people were tortured and brutalized (see, all the “museums of medieval torture”) or learn about the details of how a serial killer chose his victims. Here is where dnd shows itself to be a product of 20th c. American pulp fiction, because it revels in that kind of violence. And while I wouldn’t deny the entertainment value of slasher horror films, sensationalized violence tends to ironically diminish the real impact of these events even while making them into a spectacle.
So let’s say there are nazis in your Call of Cthulhu game. Are these Indiana-jones type nazis, there for a good punching? Or is your group interested in exploring the actual, real horror of the holocaust, more similar in tone to Schindler’s List or even Shoah? Are you really equipped do the latter any kind of justice, and what work do you have to do before and after to make sure everyone at the table is ok?
Loops: our real world is affected by all sorts of narratives, stories that we (or politicians, media, etc) tell us about how it works. It’s also represented in fiction, which can try to remain “true” to its source (whatever that means) or become wildly speculative and fantastical (but does it ever escape being made by real people in real places and times?).
Thus when it comes to “problematic” material in games or other fantasy fiction, we simultaneously get two contradictory justifications: 1. “relax, it’s just fantasy, it has nothing to do with the real world” and 2. “well the world is medieval, and has to represent that ways things really were back then, not toned down like in disney films.”
tldr: it’s complicated
Manichaeism: Good vs Evil, Light vs Dark. This can be one of the empowering and fun things about heroic fantasy fiction. In the fantasy world, there are clear boundaries between good and evil. The villain always does villain-y things, and the heroes are always heroic. Real life is not often so simple.
In the real world, we also tell ourselves stories about good vs evil. Often a “we” become the good and a “they” become evil. This sort of manichaen world view, while comforting in its simplicity, has led to some of the most destructive episodes in human history. Much of European empire around the world was driven by the idea that what they were doing was beneficial to the conquered.
So, let’s say in your game you have as a villain a group of muderous, capital-E evil Orcs. The adventurer PCs, meanwhile, are heroic and good, and will rid the evily mcevil orcs and save the world. Is that an empowering story about good conquering evil? Or is that just repeating a story that has justified tremendous violence in our real world?
Sensationalized violence: a further complication is that people are often fascinated by stories that are gruesome, violent, or illicit in some other ways. They want to be shocked about how people were tortured and brutalized (see, all the “museums of medieval torture”) or learn about the details of how a serial killer chose his victims. Here is where dnd shows itself to be a product of 20th c. American pulp fiction, because it revels in that kind of violence. And while I wouldn’t deny the entertainment value of slasher horror films, sensationalized violence tends to ironically diminish the real impact of these events even while making them into a spectacle.
So let’s say there are nazis in your Call of Cthulhu game. Are these Indiana-jones type nazis, there for a good punching? Or is your group interested in exploring the actual, real horror of the holocaust, more similar in tone to Schindler’s List or even Shoah? Are you really equipped do the latter any kind of justice, and what work do you have to do before and after to make sure everyone at the table is ok?
Loops: our real world is affected by all sorts of narratives, stories that we (or politicians, media, etc) tell us about how it works. It’s also represented in fiction, which can try to remain “true” to its source (whatever that means) or become wildly speculative and fantastical (but does it ever escape being made by real people in real places and times?).
Thus when it comes to “problematic” material in games or other fantasy fiction, we simultaneously get two contradictory justifications: 1. “relax, it’s just fantasy, it has nothing to do with the real world” and 2. “well the world is medieval, and has to represent that ways things really were back then, not toned down like in disney films.”
tldr: it’s complicated
I think it's very easy to find a problematic real-world analog to things that appear in fantasy games if you go looking. The problem is the 'go looking' part. Role play is a safe space in which people can explore some darker and uncomfortable aspects of themselves or humanity in a safe way. It really doesn't need gatekeepers deciding how that is allowed to work.
Teo Twawki
Coffee ruminator
RPGs are part of the long tradition of collective storytelling. At their best, they are part of literature, however one defines the form.
"Literature is the art of teaching us how to be." (Dr Jonathan Barz)
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? ... We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief."
Franz Kafka
("I want an axe to break the ice..." ~D. Bowie)
"The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked: the right way and the way that was not so right."
Harry Crews
"For it is the doom of men that they forget."
fictional Merlin, Excalibur
Fiction, especially participatory fiction, allows us to engage with dangerous, hazardous, and completely unsafe situations with the safety of knowing it is just fiction. And such unsafe situations encountered in such a safe and fictional venues, can teach us how to overcome similar situations when they occur in so-called real life.
Without literature and fiction to teach us things beyond our own time and place and comfort and culture, we can easy end up with only libraries containing nonfiction sections like the Sarajevo National Library in August 1992.
"Literature is the art of teaching us how to be." (Dr Jonathan Barz)
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? ... We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief."
Franz Kafka
("I want an axe to break the ice..." ~D. Bowie)
"The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked: the right way and the way that was not so right."
Harry Crews
"For it is the doom of men that they forget."
fictional Merlin, Excalibur
Fiction, especially participatory fiction, allows us to engage with dangerous, hazardous, and completely unsafe situations with the safety of knowing it is just fiction. And such unsafe situations encountered in such a safe and fictional venues, can teach us how to overcome similar situations when they occur in so-called real life.
Without literature and fiction to teach us things beyond our own time and place and comfort and culture, we can easy end up with only libraries containing nonfiction sections like the Sarajevo National Library in August 1992.
AnotherGuy
Hero
I agree with @MGibster, context is important. I dont need x element to run a heroic or dramatic game. If I run a historic game where the backdrop included slavery I won't shy away from that - and neither would my players want me to. They'd want an authentic backdrop. Same way if we'd ever play DS - we'd want to engage with the setting as was originally written.
We don't need to include x element in every storyline or campaign only if its relevant to the story or setting. Context matters.
What is important for our table is that we have the freedom to include it (whatever it is) should we want to.
We don't need to include x element in every storyline or campaign only if its relevant to the story or setting. Context matters.
What is important for our table is that we have the freedom to include it (whatever it is) should we want to.
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The wonderful flipside of this is that a game can be run in any genre or time period and we are free to include, not include, flip, or transgress against any of the cultural norms. Lots of games, for example, explicitly call out and elide elements of patriarchy and sexual politics from games set in the Victorian period. This is part of why TTRPGs are awesome.
AnotherGuy
Hero
Very true. The problem is I can't even get through the standard time period ideas I have nevermind the flipped or transgressive genres.
Well that does sound complicated! I was talking about more subtle transgressions, not whole genres. Lots of interesting stuff can happen, for example, when you start poking at social roles in the Victorian period an opening that up to some other interpretations.
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