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There has been a debate raging on G+ and some gaming sites about racism in gaming. The debate was provoked by the observation that Pathfinder's world setting substitutes humanoid monsters of various kinds (gorillas, gnolls, etc.) for at least some of the humans in its faux African continent. The discussion also pointed out that the faux Africa in the Pathfinder setting is not based very much at all on real cultures of medieval Africa.
Unlike, let's say, the Spears of the Dawn RPG, in which the cultures developed for the game can be said to be based on and traceable to real world historical groups in Africa. Needless to say - but I will - the cultures in SOTD are not evil groups. Like real cultures, they contain a mix of the good and the bad.
So why can't we see more of that?
We have a hobby full of racist cliches, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when that erupts - as I have seen happen many times at conventions and in public game spaces - into out-of-character, racist speech. So why can't we talk about the products that contain, support, and sustain those cliches?
One poster described Pathfinder's approach as "ethically problematic." Kind of clunky language. Others have taken the position that criticism of such cliched and racist content is in fact censorship, or worse still "intolerance", both of which should be opposed.
It's interesting that both sides of this debate are using the language of ethics.
The term has undergone something of a renaissance in contemporary philosophy, particularly since the end of the Soviet Union. Ethics as it is used today is an ideology of the liberal democratic state. It is concerned with matters of law and aesthetics. It is not really concerned with constructing alternative social arrangements. It is about containing grievances and debate about what is actually possible to a very narrow space and a very narrow range of options.
When we are talking about racism, we are really talking about a lot more than shitty art. Racism has been one of the foundations ensuring the stability of the capitalist world economy for more than 500 years. While abstract economic theories have argued for a couple centuries that "pure capitalism" (whatever that might mean) doesn't entail racism, every place on earth where capitalism has taken root (which is pretty much the entire planet) has produced racist social structures, ideologies, representations (including art), and political practices - all resulting in negative outcomes for people not of European descent.
Just ask the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas. Or, a bit closer to home for me, the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples.
The only times these racist practices and representations have been rolled back is when there have been vigorous, broad social movements demanding that these practices change. Sorry if not everyone is ready for that kind of free speech. But you'd better get ready for more of it. The old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born.
Amazing. What ever happened to 'human'?
ReplyDeleteyours, Chirine
I am constantly surprised by how little time and consideration people will give to the views, thoughts, and feelings of other people - especially in online environments. And this isn't everyone in the OSR, but is truly odd to see some of its luminaries a) defending Pathfinder, and b) taking positions that show little understanding of basic features of contemporary life such as discrimination, and the fact that different cultural groups perceive the same communications differently - rather frequently. I can't imaging Gygax, Arneson, or Barker being so thoughtless and discriminatory with their public speech, but I guess that really was a different age.
ReplyDeleteI would offer a completely off the cuff opinion on this. In many FRPs the goal is to give the players an opponent, more than to explore a culture. I suspect Pathfinder was not being intentionally racist when it created a faux africa and populated it with non human creatures that could serve the purpose. I did something similar to Scotland in a campaign once, and I have no racist view against the Scots. But I needed a home for the Orcs and I decided norh of Hadrians wall was a good place. Africa, on first glance, offers a nice exotic place to adventure, but it won't do to have players go gallivanting in and kill africans. So we keep the savanah and the jungles and displace the humans so we can kill something. Is that fair to african culture? No. But I don't know that it is racism either. Course, it certainly doesn't help the issue either.
ReplyDeleteHey Kokigami: You may be onto something there. I mean, the Pathfinder case strikes me as more of a failure of the imagination than anything else. It's not like the places and cultures they developed in their faux Africa really have much depth or feel that interesting.
DeleteWhat we see in games like Fortune's Fool (Fantastic Renaissance Europe and the Mediterranean), and in Victoriana and Wolsung (both Steampunk flavored) is more offensive: goblinized non-Europeans and goblinized non-Christians (Jews, Muslims). It seems to me that designers need to spend a little more time doing market research with different cultural groups - and how they will perceive their products - especially when they use real world analogs.
The Hadrians Wall point makes me think we aren't reflective enough at times.
ReplyDeleteWe are up against it though. With the powers our own cultures have over us, it's easy to conflate what could be brightly-shining independent ideas with well-worn existing instances. If those instances come to us indirectly and subtly, through regionality or language, the conflation might be all the easier.
It could bring with it the lack of reflection of a former time too, compounding the problem and possibly setting us back, undermining hard-earned experience.
It helps to wonder who we ourselves are before considering who any given other might be.
A fine post by the way, and the blog seems fuller and sharper than ever.
Thanks as always, Porky, and a very good point about the Wall.
DeleteMy wife shared this with me as I am building an annotated bibliography for a future research paper dealing with nearly this same issue.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, there are a few issues with race in SotD.
Where do you see them?
DeleteMost of the textual descriptions of the culture groups are white-washed: lighter skin tones and straighter hair. The one group with the darkest skin and curliest hair, the Lokossan, is also the one with the most unpleasant governmental system, slavery and human sacrifices, and live in the jungles.
ReplyDeleteThanks for clarifying! I live in a community with many different African populations. I was pretty happy to see some recognizable groups who resembled North Africans and peoples from the Horn of Africa. They are often left out of popular representations of Africa.
DeleteAre you saying that the textual descriptions of the different peoples are not white-washed and are in fact true to the large variety of physical appearances across Africa? Because if that is the case I would feel really really stupid.
DeleteWell, I think the product is better than whitewashed. I think the author's intent was to create a range of cultural groups and succeeded in that goal. His intent was not to emulate 1:1 real-world Africa, but to create a gameable pastiche, like so many pseudo-Euro settings. There are recognizable cultural analogues among the kingdoms. I actually thought the baddies were the pseudo-Egyptians. The Lokossan's didn't trip me up too much. I thought they were kind of interesting. If I ran a game it would probably be in the Nyalan kingdom though - I like the city-states/Central-West Africa model best as the base for a campaign.
DeleteSee I love SotD, but for some reason the pastiche approach bugs me, even though I understand his reasoning for doing so.
DeleteThe more I think about this, the more I want to do a supplement focused on a specific historical time period and region of Africa.
And the baddies are totally the zombie notEgyptians, it's just the description of Lokossa is really dark.
Delete