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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8508108" data-attributes="member: 85555">I think part of the problem here is we are importing Said and Zinn wholesale into RPG design as guiding principles. I was a history major. I don't have an advanced degree, but I do have a BA in history, and I studied mostly the Mediterranean and my language was Arabic. So I had to read Said's Orientalism as part of my education. But I also had to read criticisms of Orientalism as well. Same with Zinn. Both have their critics. I think this is an overly academic topic for us to really be addressing here, and I am by no means the most well suited to addressing it. But I know enough about it, to understand that we shouldn't just be uncritically bringing these as measures of whether a game is morally okay. I remember Nikki Keddie for example had some very compelling criticisms of Said. I think especially when you get into ideas like decolonizing the arts, you start hitting an extreme that feels more akin to a cultural revolution than something that is genuinely going to help people who feel marginalized. And Zinn, who I am more familiar with, is I think an even bigger problem because he tended to simply accept the narrative of whoever had the least power in the dynamic in question. And you can see that mindset at work in many of these discussions. I understand his rational was that to that point, he felt those in power always had control of the narrative. But there is a sound argument to be made that his approach just reversed the problems and that he exaggerated how much primacy was given to the narrative of those in power (and to be clear I am not saying those in power didn't also have power over historical narrative, just that history changed a lot in that respect and it isn't so black and white by the time you get to A Peoples History). Again, I think this is very complicated stuff to expect people to get into in order to design games or make art. And I think when that stuff leaves academia and finds its way onto gaming forums or twitter, it gets incredibly simplified and used as a bludgeon.</blockquote>

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