Regarding the violence and ‘real-war’ simulations of wargame, with everything that entails of people dying, family becoming orphaned, etc…; I really love this text in the conclusion of HG Wells Little Wars’ rulesbook.
You have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to realise just what a
blundering thing Great War must be. Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the
most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the
masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason,
but — the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific
realisation conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.
Full conclusion for those interested :
I COULD go on now and tell of battles, copiously. In the memory of the one skirmish I have
given I do but taste blood. I would like to go on, to a large, thick book. It would be an
agreeable task. Since I am the chief inventor and practiser (so far) of Little Wars, there has
fallen to me a disproportionate share of victories. But let me not boast. For the present, I have
done all that I meant to do in this matter. It is for you, dear reader, now to get a floor, a friend,
some soldiers and some guns, and show by a grovelling devotion your appreciation of this
noble and beautiful gift of a limitless game that I have given you.
And if I might for a moment trumpet ! How much better is this amiable miniature than the
Real Thing! Here is a homeopathic remedy for the imaginative strategist. Here is the
premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or ,disaster — and no smashed nor
sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country sides, no petty cruelties,
none of that awful universal boredom and embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage or
embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet, and charming thing, that we who are old
enough to remember a real modern war know to be the reality of belligerence. This world is
for ample living; we want security and freedom ; all of us in every country, except a few dull-
witted, energetic bores, want to see the manhood of the world at something better than apeing
the little lead toys our children buy in boxes. We want fine things made for mankind —
splendid cities, open ways, more knowledge and power, and more and more and more, — and
so I offer my game, for a particular as well as a general end ; and let us put this prancing
monarch and that silly scare-monger, and these excitable " patriots," and those adventurers,
and all the practitioners of Welt Politik , into one vast Temple of War, with cork carpets
everywhere, and plenty of little trees and little houses to knock down, and cities and fortresses,
and unlimited soldiers — tons, cellars-full, — and let them lead their own lives there away
from us.
My game is just as good as their game, and saner by reason of its size. Here is War, done
down to rational proportions, and yet out of the way of mankind, even as our fathers turned
human sacrifices into the eating of little images and symbolic mouthfuls. For my own part, I
am prepared . I have nearly five hundred men, more than a score of guns, and I twirl my
moustache and hurl defiance eastward from my home in Essex across the narrow seas. Not
only eastward. I would conclude this little discourse with one other disconcerting and
exasperating sentence for the admirers and practitioners of Big War. I have never yet met in
little battle any military gentleman, any major, colonel, general, or eminent commander, who
did not presently get into difficulties and confusions among even the elementary rules of the
Battle. You have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to realise just what a
blundering thing Great War must be. Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the
most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the
masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason,
but — the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific
realisation conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.
A tangent - it’s through wargaming that I learn about historical conflicts that I am otherwise completely ignorant. Take the Paraguayan War (also known as the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864-1871), a horrendous war in terms of the human cost. Exact numbers are debated, but it is estimated Paraguay lost 60-70% of her total population, and 3 in every 4 adult males died during the conflict. I like to think historical wargamers tend to look beyond the mere game presented to them by the simulation, or the games at least offer an opportunity to do so, grounding a simulation into a real world context (certainly more so than a fictional setting for a wargame, like Twilight Imperium).
I find myself with mixed feelings about translating a simulation of a historic conflict to a sci-fi or fantasy setting. On one hand, there’s some amount of comfort to sugarcoat the horrible nature of war by making it appear to be far-away in both time and space.
On the other hand, I think conflict simulation offers a wealth of education for those who are interested in that sort of thing (and certainly those who aren’t, but they will likely not benefit as it’s very much an ‘opt-in’ ordeal). Historical-conflict-simulation-as-History-Lesson (HCSaHL, if you will) is perhaps the first and foremost reason to not teleport away from uncomfortable historical truths when presenting a wargame.
Myself, I’m not a wargamer (and will likely never be accused of such), and the “wargames” that are in my collection are, for the most part, centuries-old conflicts and that is intentional. I do have a few World War II games, but only because the setting is so prevalent - I would certainly prefer older conflicts. The games I do have are largely de-politicized. Likely the closest I have to a “political wargame” is Falling Sky: The Gallic Revolt Against Caesar – where Caesar’s win condition and ability to muster forces relied directly on ‘the Senate’s Approval’.
On the other hand, by recreating a real-world conflict but transporting it to a sci-fi/fantasy setting as a way to sidestep the politics or harsh realities of the actual conflict, I think you’d do a disservice to the actual historical event.
TL;DR - I’ve just typed a bunch and I still don’t have a clear thought on the subject.
I encountered that approach some years ago, when I first looked at the Honor Harrington novels. About when I encountered the name “Rob S. Pierre,” I realized that this was a replay of the French Revolution IN SPACE. And that meant, to me, that the course of events and in particular the outcomes of battles and the tactics of war would be determined, not by rational extrapolation from the technology and the combat environment, but by emulating historical events from a radically different technology and combat environment; that at best Weber would do an elaborately clever job of contriving his technological assumptions to make things come out as he had already decided they should (in effect stacking the deck), and at worst he would be handwaving the hard parts. That really killed my interest; I stopped reading partway in, and I’ve only read one novel in the series since, when it was nominated for the Prometheus Award and I had to take a look.
So, in the short version, I feel that the transposition you describe not only falsifies the actual historical conflict, but also falsifies the science fictional situation. If, as Asimov puts it, you “take an empire that was Roman and you’ll find it is at home in all the starry Milky Way,” you’re giving your readers counterfeit coin as science fiction.
Where it could, I think, potentially work is if your thesis is “these conditions will lead to something that looks like a Roman Empire in space, even if the people involved are trying to avoid it”. But while that could work in fiction, it’s not something you could easily put into a wargame.
Perhaps, but there is the issue of scale that J.B.S. Haldane addressed in his essay “On Being the Right Size.” It seems doubtful that institutions that worked for an empire of a few tens of millions of people, with a capital city of a million, could even begin to function in an empire of tens of millions of planets with a capital planet of many billions of inhabitants. That’s where the handwaving comes in.
Yup. As such, the first few volumes were quite entertaining as pastiche historical fiction, with carefully contrived technology to make battles work somewhat like those of the age of sail. However, that entertainment value requires a fair degree of knowledge of Nelson-era navies, and I’m pretty sure that a lot of Webber fans were reading for the explosions.
This might be analogous to the way that a chap I knew at university regarded Haldeman’s The Forever War. He’d expressed vast and uncritical admiration of everything in Starship Troopers, so I lent him The Forever War as an experiment. He failed to notice the difference: his main comment was “I liked the nova bombs.”
In any case, after a while, Webber developed a bad case of Mary-Sueitis with respect to Honor Harrington, the books started trying to be serious, on a very shaky foundation, and the entertainment value evaporated.
I’m not sure that leaning into the problematic elements justifies them. In order to make something worthwhile educationally it needs to have a voice from those affected by the exploitation. A bunch of Europeans who have benefited from colonialism shouldn’t make a game about the horrors of colonialism without at least hiring someone from the place being made about.
And if it’s just thematic “who can be the best colonialiser” then forget it. It’s a racist game.
I’d like some feedback, and this thread seems like as good a place as any to start.
Some context:. I’m a high school English and Creative Writing teacher near Boise, Idaho. My school has a large non-white community (compared with the rest of the state).
I utilize boardgames and RPGs extensively in my curriculum, and have been spending my quarantine time doing a lot of painting to give my students more engaging miniatures to work with as they write campaigns and craft narratives.
Most of the minis that I have are tied to existing works (D&D, Arkham Horror,Star Wars, Godtear.).
I’m considering doing some pretty large scale race bending (for lack of a better term) with many of the character depictions, for the purpose of having broader cultural representation. I’d like the 40% of my students who are not white to have some more faces that look like theirs.
My painting skills aside, does this seem like a good idea to y’all? It seems like a good idea to me, but I’m operating largely in a vacuum, and would appreciate the feedback.
I’ve set some guidelines for myself, such as if a character’s cultural background is thematically relevant I leave them alone, (ie, it DOES matter that Grand Admiral Thrawn has different colored skin than every other Imperial officer, but Han Solo’s ethnicity is largely irrelevant to his character).
I’d be a little hesitant to do that with a known character, because some students will expect that character to look as they did in the movie. I wouldn’t paint Han Solo to look black, or Lando Calrissian to look white, even though there’s no obvious reason that the actors chosen to play them couldn’t have been so in a different timeline. I’m not very visual myself, but I see people write about “this character looks like Harrison Ford/Daniel Radcliffe/Michelle Yeoh” all the time, so I think appearance matters to a lot of players.
On the other hand, if you have two Han Solo figures, making one black and one white would give players a choice.
On the other other hand, if you paint a Han Solo figure with darker skin, is it going to look “black,” or is it going to look like Harrison Ford doing blackface? There are people who’d be unhappy with THAT, I’m sure.
If you’re doing more generic figures, Rebel pilot #2 or elf archer #5, I don’t see any problems of that sort, though maybe there are some I’m not anticipating.
I’d also note that more recent films in various franchises often give you more ethnically diverse casts to work with. Are figures for those cast members available?
I can’t speak with any authority on the matter, but people much, much smarter than I continually drive home the same message: any representation is better than no representation, but good representation is better.
I’d say go for it. I paint 1/3rd of all my armies in darker skin tones just as a matter of fact (I read somewhere once that 1 out of every 3 cowboys was Black, and that shocked me enough that I figured it should get some representation), regardless of all other considerations (my Yu Jing army, for example, is a Future China… and it still has one out of every three characters with darker skin).
It sounds like a good idea to me, for what it’s worth.
Absolutely, agree. Not only will all kids find more characters to identify with, it will hopefully also help normalize a more diverse society for everyone.
If you can do this, I guess, it’s probably the least controversial choice. If you don’t have two of a named character, and change for example Han Solo’s skin color, one thing I can see happening is that you’ll have a debate with some white kid’s parents.
… especially Han Solo. If someone cares at all, they probably care about the one character they know far more than about you changing all the other characters. So possibly Han Solo is a very good example to discuss this but may be a bad choice for actually testing this in the wild.
As for all the other franchises mentioned: I doubt any of the kids or parents would notice any changes you make and then we’re back to what @Marx said: respresentation.
I don’t think you should necessarily assume that it’s the parents who will object; the kid themself might care a lot about what the character looks like in the movie. Nor would such an objection necessarily come from a white person. To suppose this is already to assume that the objection must be an expression of racial bias. I’ve suggested some reasons that a person of color (parent or child) might not like to be offered a black Han Solo (or a white Lando Calrissian!) as their only choice; you seem not even to be thinking about this possibility far enough to offer reasons to dismiss it. So I don’t think you are fully considering the question.
I’d say it would depend on how much the sculpt looks immediately at first glance like an easily identifiable specific character. If it really looks like a highly known character, probably better to paint it closer to that character’s familiar likeness. If without a paint job on it, it isn’t obviously a known character - not in an iconic pose, not a very good facial likeness, etc. - then you can and should paint it however you want and the more diversity the better.
This is my biggest practical concern, and the one I’m spending the most time mulling over. If you like, you can swing over to the painting thread and see my first attempt, where I take a swing at a Catti-Brie model with dark skin.
I don’t anticipate much pushback from parents. I work in a low-income school, and one of the bittersweet bonuses of that is that the only things that are presented as problems tend to be pretty low on the hierarchy of needs (my kid has no place to stay/nothing to eat today) and I don’t have to deal with whining too much.
I find myself agreeing that with iconic characters, having more than one option is better than only one, and if there’s only one, the classic representation is probably the way to go. My mother secretly named me after Obi-Wan Kenobi, and anytime I feel that character getting maligned, I feel it deeply. I should assume my students may feel the same way.
For unnamed characters, I’ve never had an issue with deciding on different skin tones, but in looking over my collection of painted models, there’s definitely been some bias at play, and I need to correct it.
I think it all depends on how recognizable the miniature is if it is associated with a character. Obviously characters from movies are going to be more recognizable than those from books, simply because movies are visual by nature.
Look at your Drizzt minis, for instance. Wulfgar could be any barbarian type character, Regis any halfling, Catti-brie any human. Only the beer mug on the shield makes Bruenor stand out as unique from any other dwarf. Even Drizzt, arguably the most iconic of these characters, could be painted as a non-Drow and most people would not know the difference. I mean, nothing on the sculpt even screams “Elf” to me, much less “Drow”.
Compare that to Han Solo or Luke Skywalker, characters who have an established visual appearance, and now you are walking shakier ground. If the mini is not immediately recognizable as the characters, then have at it, go to town and paint however you want. Otherwise, I am less certain it’s a good idea.
Roughly how big are these minis; how much detail do they have? Because I don’t think “male human in waistcoat with blaster” is necessarily coded “Han Solo”. But… does “Han Solo” appear in the narratives being created? I think I may be missing something.
Even unpainted, to me that is clearly Han Solo. Now I, myself, would not be offended should someone paint them black, brown, or purple rather than white, even as a devoted Star Wars fan, but others might see it as Han in blackface, or somewhat pandering were he painted in such a way.
