Racism and other troublesome elements in games

Boardgames
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I have conflicting thoughts about that. Piracy was (and is) a very big problem for a number of reasons.

Yet, I still want “Disney” Pirates to have a chance to festoon my table when me and my children (when they’re a tad older) want to play a fun game. The sugar-coated pirates of childhood fiction settings are surely unrepresentative of any actual pirates… and perhaps grown adults who think Johnny Depp portrays an accurate pirate should be taught a lesson… I certainly don’t want children to learn the even a fraction of the actual undertakings of Carribbean pirates during the very brief period that so much pirate fiction is crammed into.

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42

I suppose that depends on the game. Pirate 21 (which you almost certainly haven’t played) is basically blackjack with special card powers. The pirate theme is an excuse for good art, but it’s an abstract game at heart.

A more simulationist game where you’re actually saying “this crew does that” would gave to go to more effort.

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For an interesting middle ground to this, track down a book called The Invisible Hook. It applies the branch of economics called Public Choice Theory (the economic analysis of constitutions, governments, and laws) to the internal governance of pirate ships, based on, among other things, the actual articles they sailed under, so far as those have come down to us. (Curiously enough, the classic Errol Flynn movie Captain Blood shows Flynn’s character swearing his crew to such a set of articles.) Without denying the crimes of pirates, it will show them to you in a more human light, and present some things that could be roleplayed.

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That I shall certainly do. I’ve learned that pirates adhered very strictly to their own set of rules and customs through a number of sources (largely fiction seeking to be authentic) but never bothered to identify exactly what that meant in detail.

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45

That is a very interesting point. I am now thinking on the set up of video games like Total War. I remember when playing Empire (which actually is full of bang on colonialism and some capitalism for good measure on top) there was never a good way to settle down and negotiate with rebellions within your Empire. Obviously the TW games are focused on to armed conflict, but say you had the Austrian Empire and Hungary kept on having rebellions every now and then, the only way those rebellions had to triumph was through taking your region capital by force. And even taking all of your troops away, there was still a battle (the AI never seems to like to ask you for surrender or let the siege end till you surrender) between your armed citizens and the rebels on the capital fort. With a good measure of that rebel army looting and destroying all your different cities in the region first.

This long paragraph goes on to show that not always can you sidestep those conflicts without bloodshed (which might have been realistic, but does not allow the player to say: that region is not a winning objective, I cannot just simply let it go even though I now have half of Europe). So game designers there missed a treat, but still I did enjoy sinking French frigates left right and centre in the Med.

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By all means, you are right. I am not a racist, or a violent person at all. Rather meek.

But referring to your point above, if we have those games out of print… how could anybody play them? Wouldn’t we be missing a trick? Realise that this game involves piracy, or slavery, or colonialism, hence I won’t buy it?
I know it is tricky to find out without doing some research first, but I guess market sales will end up being the judge here. Which I think it’s fine by me.

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“Let sales be the judge” is absolutely not a good measure of whether something is okay or not, just throwing that out there.

Saying “I am not a racist person at all” also misses a point. You are racist, as am I. We all hold bigotry within us that has been instilled by society. “Let the market decide whether racism is okay in board games” is a racist position, whether you know that or not.

The point of any conversation like this is to learn. You have to enter these discussions with an open mind and full knowledge that you are a participant in bigotry and systemic oppression. You enter these conversations to learn where the ones are you didn’t know about, and to learn about other people’s experiences with those “troublesome elements”.

These discussions are how I came to understand that simply changing the names of things and not addressing the issues is in fact pro-colonialist (or whatever applies).

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48

Let me rephrase it, then. Racism, and any form of injustice due to origin, gender, sexual inclination, beliefs and most political postures (that do not enter into the Popper paradox of intolerance) disgust me. I have been the object of some (xenophobia, for example) and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.

Obviously, we all have some privileged conditions and social heritage that I try to actively discover, (and debates like this are a great source, btw) and minimise as much as I can. But I think board games are not precisely a “hot spot” on my list. And I am stating a fact that if everybody becomes more aware, eventually the drop of sales will be the judge. I particularly don’t feel qualified or entitled to be it, and I honestly don’t know who would be the right judge for “this game goes out of print, and this doesn’t”.

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I would say that a drop in sales might be the sentence, rather than the judge, for companies that charge forward, blind to the thematic content of their games.

I’m trying to teach my students to view racism through the lenses of ‘tendencies’ and ‘policies’ and ‘language’. For example, D&D 5e uses racist language in how it handles proficiencies in different character types. Or Nemo’s War uses the racist imperialist policies of the 19th century as a backdrop to the mechanics of the game. By framing things with a layer or two of specificity, rather than trying to decide whether or not something is in its entirety racist, makes it easier to have a productive conversation about specific problems, which could lead more directly to productive action, which, according to Ibram X. Kendi, is what anti-racism is.

For example, if WotC doesn’t continue to do the work of listening and adjusting the language in their literature, then I’ll start using my influence to force them to make changes or lose income.

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50

I recently watched a long piece by games critic Noah Cadwell-Gervais that put me in mind of this sort of thing through the lens of violence in video games as opposed to through racism and colonialism specifically.

I don’t think this is quite an answerable problem. Which isn’t to say games cannot be reasonably identified as overstepping boundaries, just that there isn’t a good way to draw those boundaries except through the inexact process of figuring out what is and isn’t ok the hard way. This is where cultural literacy and cultural diversity become crucial to commercial and artistic ventures–it’s important to engage with other communities and learn what you can to avoid potential harm and to contribute positively to the culture you send your work into.

Ultimately, no individual game has a particular right to a platform. I don’t think there is a shortage of energy and creativity in the world–for every work that succeeds, there are many more that do not and the success stories are disproportionately from privileged voices to begin with. I don’t think we have particularly much to fear from games going out of print due to “cancel culture” or what have you, any more than we have to fear from statues coming down.

There does need to be adequate space for mistakes and impurities in what comes after, though, or we end up stuck in a loop rather than in a more dialectic process. This is of course all made substantially easier by a media culture that wears its heart on its sleeves–from content warnings to thoughtful consideration of criticisms rather than knee-jerk defensiveness. Artists cannot really expect good faith if they refuse to provide it themselves after all.

Bonus Words

As an interesting wrinkle, I find a lot of works that take firm moral stances on their content end up alienating audiences precisely by doing so–by saying that a character (or worse, a player character) has done something wrong without that character being cartoonishly evil, the work can easily seem to be either celebrating the immoral behavior or punishing the audience for following along–this second is an especially common complaint in video games that enlist protagonists as a more complex part of the storytelling than The Good Hero. As a particularly common example, when a film or game that primarily features violent conflict tells a story that is critical of violent solutions, it tends to be hard for audiences to swallow even if it might seem like a fairly effective way to address the work’s themes in principle.

This is one reason it can be tempting to paste over complexities of violence, colonialism and racism with mindless hordes, genuinely unexplored landscapes, and innately evil beings. In presenting violent conflict one could attempt to present it as ethically flavorless, one could show violent conflict with clear moral justification, or one could show it as a cruel waste. This last alternative more directly threatens, frustrates, and challenges the audience and is often just as easy to get wrong. Its a commercially fraught approach for all that it is more artistically responsible in many specific stories.

I could bend into a critique of publishing here, but it isn’t just a problem of publishing and capitalism–shame and popularity are motivators without those pressures, too. Asking for more nuance and understanding in media, then, requires more forgiveness in assessing media. It requires more room for media to make mistakes. It requires an audience that is comfortable being uncomfortable and forgiving in how much respect they assume from the works in question. For example, a victory condition is not necessarily a celebration of a thematic outcome; many board games and video games paint their protagonists as undesirable people who either make cruel choices or at least have the option to do so, and this is often done with mutual understanding.

Many systems use the player’s celebration of abstracted competition to enroll the player as a cast member, engaging with a cruel system without needing to be themselves cruel or dedicated to play-acting cruelty. Simply being engaged with winning the game pulls the player through the motions necessary to play-act a cruel system and engage any thematic messaging that entails. Offering victory to players who behave unkindly is essential to using a competitive system to tell stories about unkind systems–a game in which you can equally choose to be kind or unkind and seek victory isn’t a game about how systems perpetuate cruelty or how certain goals create vicious cycles. Obviously not every game needs to be about such things, but just so, responsible approaches to complex subject matter will inevitably requires this sort of approach in many games.

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Violence in particular is easy to understand: even if you haven’t experienced it personally, with any exposure to existing pop culture you know roughly how it works.

I’m glad to see that this is just one element of the modern boardgames lexicon: sure, there are games about shooting and hacking, but there are also games about non-violent competition, and games about making things cooperatively or competitively.

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52

It seems to me that existing pop culture sometimes presents a radically false picture of violence. I remember seeing the second Bond film starring Daniel Craig, which had an opening scene where Bond and his immediate foe fell through scaffolding as they fought, both suffering repeated collisions with hard surfaces. After a few minutes of that Bond turned into an indestructible toon in my mind, and I wasn’t able to feel any involvement in what happened to him for the rest of the film.

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Indeed. I saw a trailer recently for a comedy in which a woman is shown bouncing down a high cliff and falling into the sea, and my first thought was not “har har” but “she is, if by some miracle not dead, suffering from multiple life-changing injuries”. (This is why I tell people I have no sense of humour; it’s simpler that way.)

Anyway, back to games. I know some people who get very scathing about X-cards and similar things in RPGs (see Consent In Gaming for a decent summary), but I don’t want to make my players unhappy. Sure, I can imagine a situation in which the secret villainous plot turns out to rely on something that is a huge problem for one of the players… but I don’t want to throw that player out of the game, which would be the only alternative to changing the plot, so it’s just a challenge to my improvisational GMing skills. I’ve not seen anyone propose something similar for boardgames – perhaps because most of the time it’s fairly clear what the subject matter is going to be, and if you don’t like confined spaces you probably aren’t going to sit down to play Sub Terra?

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When I started out in the Call of Cthulhu campaign I’m currently playing in, a long time ago now, the GM had us each take an index card and write down themes or topics that would make the horror, not fun, but uncomfortable. I put down “injury to the eyes,” which I seem to be mildly phobic about.

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Yeah, that’s a good start – I do something similar – but I run a lot of investigative games that are horror or horror-adjacent, with strangers at conventions, and while it hasn’t happened to me I have to accept the possibility that a part of the scenario is something that will make them uncomfortable.

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Ah. That’s not a situation I encounter. I haven’t run a game at a convention literally in decades. And I really don’t use pregenerated scenarios; I do a mix of bespoke scenarios carefully tailored to the specific player characters, and improv.

Though I have had surprises in campaigns run that way. There was the time I brought up “crossing the line” ceremonies in an alternate history campaign that involved a passage to India, and two of the players objected to that material strongly.

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I would point out that players/consumers aren’t the only people involved here whose awareness can be raised. There are all the people involved in the production and distribution of a game, as well as the designers themselves.

Games can always be changed, rethemed, etc, Or, if the objectionable elements of the game are fundamental to the games theme/narrative, then the context can be made clear.

Works get changed all the time for trivial and non-trivial reasons. There’s no reason things have to be static and consumers of those works only have a choice between “accept it or don’t”. And as a consumer, I’d look more favourably on something created by someone who had obviously put in such work.

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re: War games. I’ve been wanting to add a few notes on this particular thing for the past two days…

Many years ago, when I joined BGG, I first realized there was a large category of games that focus on WWII in many of which you can play/personify the German side. Admittedly, I don’t know much about these games. But their existence as “just another category” and my immediate assumption that they do not deal with the context of this period of history responsibly makes me feel deeply uncomfortable and also triggers a post like this where I have to insist that glorifying the German side in these games in any way is absolutely wrong. Or glorifying war at all. These should be uncomfortable games to play all around and I highly doubt they are. (Please correct me if my assumptions are wrong. I’d love to know the games are better than I think they are.)

My reaction stems from the way we get taught about our 20th century history in school. The method is intense and full of repetitions that make sure that students end up armed with knowledge and a feeling of responsibility (note: this is different from feeling personal guilt). As a student I got annoyed by having to repeat the subject in multiple classes over a number of years. There is no way you can leave school and feel indifferent about the Nazis. As a grownup, I believe that it is the only way to teach this and leave a lasting impression. This is not to say this approach always succeeds, modern Germany still has too many neo-nazis, too much racism and has not confronted other periods of history in the same way.

So. Regarding games dealing with WWII (or any other “troublesome” elements), I think that creators have a responsibility and need to have an awareness of what their game is saying and how it is framing history. Anything else is irresponsible. But it is also on the players, the consumers of those creations to be aware and think about what they are playing. Debates and discussions like this actively help with that I think because how can we move forward without knowledge and learning from different perspectives?

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59

Strategic level wargames usually have the ‘game’ element about the historic battlefield and the order of battle - what types of troops and equipment were available. Yes, there is typically some context as to why the battle occurred, but typically that is not tackled within the gameplay. Often the context is divorced from the politics. For example, a recreation of Waterloo will have a background that is more about Napoleon trying to strike fast before the allies can mobilise against him, attacking in Belgium to drive a wedge between the Prussians and Wellington, hoping to force them to fall back on different supply lines so they could be dealt with in turn. It is unlikely to cover the policies of Napoleonic France, and that of the other nations.

The challenge is usually about can you perform better than your historical counterparts to achieve set battle objectives. The outcomes post-battle are also a side note.

I don’t think that they necessarily glorify war. Indeed, when you look at the counters in your ‘dead’ pile and work out roughly what that means in terms of human life, it can be quite grounding. I also think that the existence of such games does encourage a wider reading around the events. As an example, I’ve seen a few people looking to find out more on the Great Game after playing Pax Pamir.

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I think the default wargaming approach is to say “this isn’t a game about politics, it’s a game about a commando raid in France in 1942”. Which I suppose is all right as far as it goes, if you can assume that everyone already knows about Nazis (which, given that a lot of hex-and-counter wargames got designed in the 1950s and 1960s, was a reasonable assumption).

Clearly that’s not the case now for many people. People my age in the UK (growing up in the 1970s-1980s) didn’t get told about Nazis, or WWII at all, because that was the boring thing the older generation cared about. There were still WWII-themed comics but I didn’t know anyone who read them (and those most certainly were glorifying war, as a place where men can do manly heroic things).

I think it’s now reasonable to say that a modern game should have at least a bit of background material about who’s fighting and why. One problem for me of the demonisation of Nazism that was the only way it was ever mentioned to us – the idea that it was a uniquely horrible thing which must be avoided forever – is that it becomes easier for someone to say “well, I’m not wearing that insignia or invading Poland or attempting genocide, so I must not be a Nazi”. But I have been saying for years, and in the last few years many people have noticed and joined me, that nobody sane sets out to Do Evil: they do the things that seem to make sense to them at the time, given their hopes and fears (as manipulated by others), and a step at a time they can become people who do great evil without ever having noticed the transition.

On the other hand some random platoon leader on the Russian front may have been a rapist (on either side, chances are) but that isn’t something that is, or can be, reflected in a tactical game of putting the soldiers in the right place with the right orders. As an ethical wargamer I consider it my responsibility to be aware of that kind of thing. [eta - that kind of context, because the game isn’t going to tell me about it. And if I were designing a game in that setting, I might put it into the rules too: “if you send one soldier to take up an ambush position in a bombed-out house, he may get his throat slit because of what he did last night”.]

So yeah, a typical historical wargame is not at all uncomfortable in the way you describe. And if someone came along who was predisposed to think of the Nazis as good guys, they usually wouldn’t find anything in the game to change that opinion.

A side note: one of the huge problems of traditional wargames for me is not that they glorify war but that they make it bloodless. I don’t mean that I want gore, but – well, take some SF games, which don’t have the Nazi problems at all. But in a typical scenario for OGRE or Battletech it’s absolutely fine for one side to lose nearly all of its units as long as it achieves the objective and wins the game. Show that to a real military leader and they’ll laugh: what about the next attack? One way of fixing that is to play several games in a row with one side fielding the survivors of the previous game…

It turned out that my personal sticking point was the old men and children of the Volkssturm in the last days of WWII: not only do I not want to play them on a wargame table, I don’t want to play the forces opposing them either.

A side note: for over ten years now I’ve been running an RPG campaign set during WWII, with the complication of hidden magic returning to the world and being used by both sides. One of the earliest decisions I made was to say that the vast majority of the evil is still human evil: to say “the Nazis were driven by demons” would have been to discount the genuine (and to my mind much more real) horror of people who would do those things when not driven by demons.

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