Yudhishthira’s Dice

If you are using sexuality to sell your game, your game had better have sexuality in it otherwise you are a hypocrite. I am deeply tired of RPG companies who make “family products” and have freelancers guides that warn repeatedly against including material beyond “PG” who have covers of half-dressed bimbos pushing their tits at the audience. If you want to make Big Boobs and Blowjobs the RPG, I’ll say your cover fits your subject. But the hypocrisy has to go.

If you are using female object sexuality to sell your game and tell me that you are selling to women equally with men, you are either a fool or a liar. If you want to admit up front that you’re selling to men and that you don’t really care if women buy or play the game, because they aren’t significant to your audience, then I may dislike it, but at least I’ll know you’re being honest. Bullshit about including women while using constant images that either excludes them or at the very best possible reading doesn’t actively bar them from entry is, again, bullshit hypocrisy.

If you are telling me that the point of your game is to get people to think deeply about their own sexual preferences and reactions, to have some kind of really artistic or at least reactionary stance, then you’d better have art that can back it up and not just the same crap that we’ve been seeing for 100 years. Really, yet another slave girl is not the material with which you build something new and moving. If you want to get people thinking about sex then have something that you have to think about. So far I’ve not seen an RPG cover that actually does this, but I’d love to have someone show me one that does. You’re creative people, surprise me. But please do note that I’ve been around the block a time or two and the Howard Stern levels of creativity that normally get passed off as “provocative” in RPG circles aren’t going to impress me.

The other problem with a lot of arguments is that they assume a world other than the one we live in. If I could burn the whole RPG industry to the ground and start fresh tomorrow and we got some games with the sexy woman-like objects on the cover and some with sexy man-like objects on the cover and some with sex and some without, I’d probably have no problem with it. (Or less problem, at least.) But in the world in which we actually live there is a constant slanting, a skewing in one particular direction that so dominates the market that there is no equality of spread of visions or experiences. And in that context having yet another brick in the wall does not impress me or strike me as healthy. Really, don’t we have enough slave girls on the cover of our games that we can try ANYTHING else for once?

And that isn’t just about women in the hobby. It’s about race too, and to a degree class as well. Very few minority players I’ve ever met have only happy stories to tell about their experiences as consumers in the hobby — much less players. So when we get another game in which all the protagonists are white and many of the villains are the only ones with identifiable ethnicities then it isn’t just a game using some tropes, its a yet another step up to the monolith using all the same tropes that have always been used.

I’m also well sick and tired of the argument, “But I don’t feel that way, so it isn’t a problem.” Seriously, even if you are a member of the group that is at issue, the fact that you don’t personally have a problem with it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem. Not every woman hates Conan, lots of them love it. That does not mean that many women do not feel excluded by pictures such as the one I posted. It does not mean that a constant diet of those pictures doesn’t change the way people view RPGs or men in RPGs either. Saying “I don’t have a problem with it so no one in my group should” is indicating that your personal experience is the only one that matters, and that everyone else is wrong about what they think and feel. Its saying that all members of any group should block vote, but not just that, that they should block vote only the way you want them to. If you aren’t a member of the affected group and you say that, or say that you don’t think they should because you’re sure you wouldn’t if you were part of the group, then you have to ask yourself what that is even supposed to mean and how deeply entitled and biased it is.

I like sex. I like sexy women. I even like sexy women in my RPGs. That does not mean that there is not a problem in the way we portray women, or minorities, or ourselves — whoever ‘ourselves’ happens to be. I am not, and have never been, crying for an end to sex in gaming or sex on RPG covers. I am tired of the one sided, slanted, self-harming practices that have been, if not the norm at least a large section of the plurality, and the self-serving bullshit rhetoric that gets cast up to defend them. We need not to end it, but to do it better.

So, on that ranty note, I’ve decided to reveal my cover for my Green Latern RPG that I’ll be not writing sometime later this year. (Originally announced as Wonder Woman the RPG.)

I present:

Now we can all feel warm and included. That’s the kind of cover that can let us all feel something. If you want more covers like the above, check out this page