Do orcs in gaming display parallels to colonialist propaganda?

[Bedrockgames]

So it can sometimes be rather glaring when an entire species is a play on a single racial or cultural trope. Especially when by comparison, the typical primary player race (humans) has been shown at length to have cultural, racial and physical (at least superficial) diversity both in the game material and in the settings themselves (exampled by having multiple different human civilizations with different cultures and sometimes physical appearances).
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I think the tendency toward monocultures is just to make them easier to use in the setting (and possibly easier to handle in the design phase too). But I don't think monoculture races are as ubiquitous as they once were.

In terms of the orcs being a stand in for one racial group. I think it isn't just one racial trope being put into orcs here. Obviously most of the cultural features of anything in a fantasy setting will have some basis in reality. Orcs support a lot of different kinds of cultures. Some orcs I've encountered in games seem vaguely Mongolian in culture, but I've just as frequently seen orcs that are more like vikings or celts. And the visual depiction varies a lot too. I just don't think it is that crazy for most people to see an orc and not see the racial or historical issues people are invoking.

I think it is also important for us to keep in mind, drawing on a real world culture to paint something vividly in a gaming context, doesn't automatically mean it is a commentary. And again, I think this is where we are starting to get a led a bit astray by completely throwing out authorial intent, and saying only our reactions to the stuff matters. If someone is drawing on a cultural feature because it is aesthetically interesting for the group being described in the setting, should they limit themselves to only elements that can be perceived as a positive or neutral? Is it okay to have 'warlike' anything in a setting or is that too problematic. Or can only certain things be warlike? And it feels like a lot of what is being called for would almost naturally lead to a colonialist setting (because everything is being framed in terms of colonialism, so it becomes a matter of just making sure our settings are morally appropriate commentaries on colonialism----it will still be playing out the colonialist tropes, just with our sympathies weighted toward the colonized. But i think few gamers actually have colonialism in mind at all when they sit down to play a fantasy gaming setting.

 

[Doug McCrae]

A lot of the stuff people are posting are limited quotes from Wikipedia...

Part of what troubles me about this debate though, is the level of intense scrutiny required to make these arguments. It is been a while since I read Lird of the Rings but just by memory, it seems like that connection isn’t clear from the book alone. That you need to build a case drawingbon letters, ideas about racial coding, etc.

The quotes in my previous post were all from The Lord of the Rings, one of the most popular books ever written. Repeated below.

"His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red."​

"There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thick legs and large hands."​

"A grim dark band, four score at least of large, swart, slant-eyed Orcs."​

While "swart", meaning dark-skinned, is obscure, I'm pretty sure everyone understands the meaning of "slant-eyed".

 

[Bedrockgames]

The quotes in my previous post were all from The Lord of the Rings, one of the most popular books ever written. Repeated below.

"His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red."​

"There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thick legs and large hands."​

"A grim dark band, four score at least of large, swart, slant-eyed Orcs."​

While "swart", meaning dark-skinned, is obscure, I'm pretty sure everyone understands the meaning of "slant-eyed".

I see that. But I can also see how people would reach different conclusions about it. And to be honest I didn’t notice it myself until very recently when it was pointed out to me (and I read the trilogy about three times). I am not saying your conclusion is incorrect. I haven’t read lord of the Rings in years, and I am not a someone who has read much about it beyond the trilogy and the hobbit. But this doesn’t all rest on Tolkien. We are also talking about current day depictions of orcs.

 

[pemerton]

So going over The Licheway this morning I have quite the desire to run modified versions of it, and maybe Halls of Tizun Thane too, again, this time in Thule. I think I'll run it in the Thule group NOT including my son though.

All I remmember about Halls at the moment is the mirrors and the Guan-Deeko (sp?). I'll have to check it for luridness (are you also working from BoWD scenarios v1?).

I find the apparent lack of luridness in some of this early stuff . . . weird? oddly fetishistic? Even random harlots would stand out less, or less strikingly, if there was some suggestion somewhere that sex and sexuality (and women!) might figure in the lives of PCs in other ways.

 

[Immortal Sun]

...But i think few gamers actually have colonialism in mind at all when they sit down to play a fantasy gaming setting.

Skipping ahead since I don't have much else to say other than "i agree", I just want to reply to this part: I REALLY want to play Dragons Conquer America.

 

[Doug McCrae]

But I can also see how people would reach different conclusions about it.

Afaict the only other reference to similar eye shape in LotR is "Bill Ferny's squint-eyed companion", the southerner spy.

"Frodo saw a dark ill-kept house behind a thick hedge: the last house in the village. In one of the windows he caught a glimpse of a sallow face with sly, slanting eyes; but it vanished at once.
‘So that’s where that southerner is hiding!’ he thought. ‘He looks more than half like a goblin.’"​

I don't know what conclusion can be drawn other than that the text is associating a particular eye shape, corresponding to that of East Asians, with evil.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Afaict the only other reference to similar eye shape in the text is "Bill Ferny's squint-eyed companion", the southerner spy.

"Frodo saw a dark ill-kept house behind a thick hedge: the last house in the village. In one of the windows he caught a glimpse of a sallow face with sly, slanting eyes; but it vanished at once.
‘So that’s where that southerner is hiding!’ he thought. ‘He looks more than half like a goblin.’"​

I don't know what conclusion can be drawn other than that a particular eye shape, corresponding to that of East Asians, is being associated with evil.

And southern hobbits apparently as well. It is a shape of an eye. Asian people are not the only ones in the planet who could be described that way (there are europeans with this kind of eye feature as well, as well as many other groups). I am not saying its this enormous reach for you to get to that conclusion. I am just saying, can see where someone might think he is invoking something else, or simply drawing on the shape for convenience/aesthetics, without any thought that it is meant to the group of people it might be associated with. I gave a bunch of religious zealots in my campaign blonde hair. It was an entirely arbitrary decision. I knew it was a feature associated with northern europeans but I didn't intend it to invoke them in any particular. I just borrowed that feature. This is why I do think intent is important. If we looked into Tolkien's life and found all kinds of troubling thoughts about race, then sure, I can see it being a more closed case. But the accounts I've seen of him have painted a man with a great deal of empathy for other people who seemed to hold racism in disdain. So I think that does shape how I am going to read what the purpose is there.

And again, I am not saying you have to agree. I just think this isn't as clear as people are making it out to be.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I gave a bunch of religious zealots in my campaign blonde hair. It was an entirely arbitrary decision. I knew it was a feature associated with northern europeans but I didn't intend it to invoke them in any particular. I just borrowed that feature. This is why I do think intent is important.

In a superhero scenario I wrote the only black NPC, out of about thirty, was a catgirl. That's a racist association - black people and animals - even though it didn't occur to me at the time, only years later. That's one reason, among many, why I think intent isn't important.

 

[Bedrockgames]

In a superhero scenario I wrote the only black NPC, out of about thirty, was a catgirl. That's a racist association - black people and animals - even though it didn't occur to me at the time, only years later. That's one reason, among many, why I think intent isn't important.

But your intent was important. You were not intentionally making that association (cat woman has been portrayed by both black and white actresses, I would have assumed you were inspired by that).

 

[Doug McCrae]

But your intent was important.

No because what matters is what I've put out into the world. The text is accessible to others. My mind is not. The text is racist, purely because of the associations of ideas it contains. When I say ideas I'm not talking about ideas in the head of the author. The ideas are in the words, because words have meaning. What gives them meaning is not the author, or the reader, but the wider community of language users.

Intent sometimes matters. We may want to try to understand what is in the author's head for a number of reasons. But it doesn't matter when deciding whether or not a text is racist.