Cultural Appropriation in role-playing games (draft)

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

Oops, double post - I am doing this with a smartphone.

 

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

When the Greeks complained, the Romans crucified them. We are trying to do better.

 

[delericho]

-- deleted --

 

[Umbran]

A few other thoughts on accuracy...

· The Dreamspeaker mages from White Wolf games for all the indigenous aboriginal magical forms ever as a single cohesive and coherent tradition

This is not an accurate description of the Dreamspeakers - they are not "cohesive and coherent" as presented in the game. They are presented as (at best) a loose agglomeration of diverse people banded together for mutual representation among more organized, cohesive and coherent power blocks.

· The Euthanitos mages from White Wolf as a group of mages from southern Asian who more or less worship death and frequently act as serial killers,

"Euthanatos" is misspelled. The tradition tends to explain its approach to magic using concepts from Indian religion, rather more specific than "southern Asia".

According to Nayyirah Waheed, in his essay “Cultural Consent is Not a Strange Concept,” modern Western society and its history over the last few centuries “has convinced us that no peoples have agency over their individual expressions of life. That this is a free market, that peoples’ cultures are created for sale, and everyone is free to take what they want, when, how, with no thought to the violence this causes.”

Waheed is correct.

Waheed is misleading. The focus on western culture carries the implication that this is really a characteristic of Western Culture. In this, he is incorrect, and likely (and ironically) engaging in a variation of the "noble savage" archetype - the Westerners, they're all bad, and the others, they're all good.

Instead, throughout history, when cultures have met, they have borrowed from one another. Sometimes the power was balanced, but often not. Imperial China gives us excellent examples of cultural appropriations - we, who are somewhat ignorant, sometimes think of "China" as one place, one people, one culture. Nothing could be farther from the truth - that seeming is due to the imposition and flagrant cultural appropriation of the various Imperial dynasties as they conquered areas of what is now a unified nation. There are indeed few examples of cultures who have *not* engaged in such practices. To suggest otherwise is a whitewash. It is a *human* behavior, not a Western one.

Players and game masters running games set in a minority culture, be it a pastiche or a direct translation, are not actually granting that culture or its people agency.

You haven't established that we generally think we are granting agency, so that disabusing us of that notion is useful. Nor have you established that failing to grant agency in our play in our own homes is problematic. The implication is that there's some badwrongfun in here, but it is applied via vague emotional appeal, rather than direct analysis of what behaviors in our play cause what harm, and to whom.

A white guy in Wisconsin sitting at a table of other Wisconsinites playing a samurai character is not granting agency to anyone, no. But, he's not granting agency when he tries his hand at making a curry, either. So what? Is he not supposed to cook new foods that he didn't grow up eating? Why not?

They are fulfilling a power fantasy...

Sorry for the sarcastic tone, but, *duh*! We are pretending to be elves running around throwing fireballs, and barely-armored swordsmen that take down 50' long, fire-breathing dragons with nothing but a sword and mighty thews. If there's a problem with power fantasy, we need to toss the entire hobby in the trash, including EN World and your video blogs about the hobby.

Why should white people be granted an infinite series of mulligans to screw-ups allowing then try again? Why should the minorities accept this as a non-negotiable fact of life, like gravity?

Before you can reasonably ask that question, you need to accept that cultural borrowing is *human*. Then, you can discuss the cases where following your normal human behaviors is okay, and when it isn't. Any suggestion that takes the form, "You may *never* engage in this normal human behavior," is pretty much a non-starter, from a practical standpoint.

 

[Bagpuss]

Cultural appropriation is hate speech.

Have to disagree with you there. Hate is an intense dislike. People that appropriate aspects of another culture don't do it because they hate them, to call it hate speech is unnecessarily inflammatory.

 

[Alzrius]

For example, a character from Piazo may wield a saber and wear a particular set of robes, so the audience understands she possesses a pseudo- Arabian Nights aesthetic. This is to say, she looks like Arabian… in a vaguely pop-culture manner, meaning she does not have to know the pillars of Islam.

By comparison, any attempt at a direct representation of the Middle East and people of the Muslim faith should get that type of thing correct.

You seem to be completely unaware that there are Arabian people that aren't of the Islamic faith, such as the Yazidis. I think it's your article that's "vaguely pop-culture."

 

[Celebrim]

Before you can reasonably ask that question, you need to accept that cultural borrowing is *human*. Then, you can discuss the cases where following your normal human behaviors is okay, and when it isn't. Any suggestion that takes the form, "You may *never* engage in this normal human behavior," is pretty much a non-starter, from a practical standpoint.

I think you can state this more strongly. There are some human behaviors that appear pretty typical, an hence 'normal', that humans generally feel they ought not do however normal the behavior is - honesty is upheld as a virtue despite a general lack of evidence that honesty is more normal than lying. So this criticism, while valid, isn't as powerful as it could be.

But under the own terms of the criticism, diverse influences and non-Western cultures are called out as good things (indeed, better things than the depraved Western culture). So the problem is not merely that the essay, and the term it is discussing, states that you may never engage in the normal behavior of borrowing ideas that intrigue and excite you - ultimately suggesting that only non-westerners should be allowed to create from a palate of non-western ideas - but that at the same time the criticism suggests that westerners are to be damned for not drawing from these more diverse sources and that a setting can be condemned a being too Eurocentric.

While the original essay doesn't focus on it, the same critics are also highly critical of Western cultural assimilation of non-Western cultures and claim that this is a violent hegemony that oppresses them. So for example, if a Japanese person where to appropriate the iconography of Western knights, devils, angels and so forth, and use it to create art, then this would be seen as being an evil perpetrated by 'the West'. The Japanese person is in this theory denied agency, and is in fact manipulated by Western forces. Where as, if an American person where to appropriate the iconography of Japanese samurai, oni, and kenku and use them in their art, in this theory the Japanese person still doesn't have agency and the westerner is still the active agent acting on the passive Japanese culture. According to the theory, the only way the Japanese person can have agency is if the American explicitly goes to the person and grants them agency by asking their permission, because under this theory of 'cultural appropriation' it is ALWAYS the Westerner that is the active agent and ALWAYS the non-Westerner that is the passive agent that is acted upon.

Now, not to put a too fine a point on it, but that's racism.

I mean, the thing that really strikes me about this theory is how bloody self-centered it is. I grew up outside of the United States, and the above theory doesn't remotely describe how cultural exchange works in the real world or how much benefit accrues to a people when their cultural trappings and heritage come to the attention of larger and more prosperous cultures. The theory is just a dandied up version of 'White Man's Burden' and 'Noble Savage' theory masquerading as decency (as those theories have before), and it's insulting to real friends of mine and real people, and believe me, this is me being really restrained in holding back from saying what I want to say.

But in the face of that sort of hate speech as is in the OP, don't expect me to be silent. Much as it claims that you can do hate speech without meaning it, so I also grant that the original poster wasn't meaning to be so condescending and hateful (to just about everyone), and unlike the essay I do think that the intention matters, but yeah, I'm not going to be meekly going, "Yeah, stop making Ska, Calypso, Jamaican Folk or Reggai influenced music unless you are a real Jamaican because it's really bad for my Jamaican musician friends for you to be like influenced by them." (Plagiarism would be a different story, but we already have a term for plagiarism. It's not like 'cultural appropriation' adds any clarity to that.)

 

[Bagpuss]

If you want to see hateful speech, look at some of the responses to Monte Cook's well reasoned decision on Thunder Plains, because he didn't just bow out to the harassment and remove references altogether.

https://plus.google.com/+Montecookgames/posts/DhyFE67jFoZ

 

[Umbran]

You seem to be completely unaware that there are Arabian people that aren't of the Islamic faith, such as the Yazidis. I think it's your article that's "vaguely pop-culture."

And that there was a time before the Islamic faith's dominance in the area. Most of our thoughts on Arabian style for RPG adventuring are based on "One Thousand and One Nights", much of which has pre-Islamic origins.

 

[Umbran]

I think you can state this more strongly.

Yes, I could. I chose not to. I am more critiquing the presentation of the piece - places where depictions are inaccurate, logic is flawed, phrasing is apt to have unfortunate results, and the like. I'm aiming for constructive criticism, mostly to help Grumpy improve the piece, rather than to tear it up and reject it.