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That's simply not true. There are very few entertainment and leisure products whose target audience is 'everyone.' Even the biggest entertainment properties, such as the Marvel films, skew to certain demographics (young and nerdy, in this case). How much resources should Disney put into getting...

We don't actually know if that's true, do we? It's an article of faith that representation in artwork significantly affects sales, and that there's a huge untapped RPG market that more inclusive artwork and characters will tap into. But there's no data to support that belief.

Corporate culture can mean a lot of different things, including: Flexible work hours or fixed Expectations around overtime and availability after regular hours The frequency of meetings How work is tracked and logged Whether social events are boozy or sober How candidly people can speak to...

There are fields that attract large numbers of aspiring creators with the promise of engaging work doing something they love. These fields almost all pay poorly, for the simple reason there are a great many people willing to do them, and only a finite amount of money people are willing to spend...

Some of us are simply skeptics by nature. I don't take anyone's assertions at face value when it comes to how they were treated by their former employer, who was at fault in a marriage breaking down, or any other contentious personal issue. Not even my close friends and family, let alone a...

I don't consider a few hundred people on social media platforms engaging in rumor-mongering and outrage to constitute 'hot water' for a company on the scale of WotC. Every sizeable company, especially ones involved in entertainment and culture, routinely has online 'scandals' of the sort cited...

They're the big fish in a small pond, and social media gives people a platform to express frustration about their industry or employer. And most of the 'hot water' is only evident to the small faction of gamers who spend a lot of time on forums like this. I doubt any of the people I play D&D...

But we don’t know how many racialized minority gamers find things like orcs and drow offensive. I’ve never seen a poll or a study on the subject. What if 2 in 10 gamers of colour say they find depictions of orcs reinforce stereotypes and 8 in 10 say they don’t see it. How then should we...

Read my posts. I clearly said it's not. Is there something unclear about: Everything bad about us has been with us since the dawn of humankind. We're violent, status-seeking primates. The good news is we're making progress. We live in a far better world today than 50 years ago, which in turn...

Where did I say it made it okay? I'm simply pointing out that cultural bigotry is a universal human weakness, not some defect peculiar to European culture. We must - and we are - gradually evolving past it. North American attitudes around race and culture are dramatically different today than...

That's a contestable claim. Up until very recently, every culture saw itself as the centre of the earth. Chinese, Indian, etc. stories and myths were about China and India, with strange or funny or threatening foreign elements sometimes making an appearance. Multiculturalism on a scale beyond a...

It seems to me that the principles for removing the tag 'evil monster' from orcs and drow can - using the same justifications - be used to remove the tag from ogres, trolls, ettins, and giants. And why stop there? Mind Flayers are intelligent and live in communities. Why should they be evil by...

The Mongols were an aggressive invasion force bend on destruction from the POV of Chinese, Persians, and Arabs as well. India has been invaded over and over again from Central Asia. The settled peoples of Eurasia have long histories of being invaded by the nomads of the steppes, and those...

And yet the Pax Romana was the best time to be alive - healthiest, most prosperous, least violent - that Europe and the Meditarrean would see for over a thousand years. If you could be random Gaul in 200 BC, or a random Gaul in 200 AD, you'd have to be a fool to choose the former. Of course...

No. But I don't see any other cultures being stereotyped that way lately either. Can you point to some examples in popular culture from the last 10 or 15 years?

Are depictions of evil monsters that evoke any real-world cultures problematic, or only ones that evoke non-Europen cultures? Is it problematic that always-evil Frost Giants evoke Norse culture?

Bah, unemployed and drug-addicted rural whites who were raised by alcoholics in communities with no decent jobs should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and move to Seattle to become software developers or open craft breweries. ;)

There are dozens of monstrous groups in D&D, some modeled off of European cultures (Berserkers, Ogres, Hill Giants, Frost Giants, Fire Giants) and some modeled off non-European cultures (Hobgoblins, Yuan-Ti). I don't see a preponderance of non-European baddies. Good-aligned Samurai PCs were...

Looking broadly at the two approaches to D&D, heroic vs dungeon-looting, the former typically provides the righteous justification I mentioned, while the latter doesn't really require any justification. If it has loot, and it's not evidently Good with a capital G, then kill it and take its...

Social media amplifies the most extreme and contentious voices. That's the foundation of its commercial model - generate engagement through anxiety, outrage, and the desire for validation. If an opinion strongly held by 10 per cent of users generates more engagement than an opinion moderately...