Yudhishthira’s Dice

So the post for this week is just another link, to a redraft of How to Draw Superheroes. I find it awesome and funny.

There’s a new gaming forum up, not just for RPGs but gaming in general. It’s focus is a feminist-oriented community for women who love gaming and men who want to network with and learn from said women.

It is The IRIS Network and I wish it well. If all my talk about sexism and inclusion turns your crank, you should check this one out.

The good Mr_orgue has started doing an analysis of the role of women on Dragon magazine covers. (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and the conclusion Part 7. Also, new now, The Editor of Dragon Magazine Responds.) I’m hoping for some good commentary over there, especially about methodology and things guys might miss that women might see.

This, btw, is a follow up to his similar look at women in interior artwork in Dragon magazine, which showed some interesting trends — especially around 2002, which was a good year for interior art.

So anyway, for everyone whose been into this discussion about cover art, feminism, and all the rest, have a look. Even better, leave some comments over there.

Also linked in the discussion on that page, real women do wear armor. Funny.

Bruce Baugh talks about his take on New Horizons.

So far several folks have expressed some concerns about the New Horizons project that got announced yesterday. I thought I’d take a moment to address some of them from my point of view, and with a couple of quotes from Bruce Baugh, the author of the work.

1. I don’t think I’ll like this book. I want my pulp to be gonzo all the time.

Cool beans! Luckily Spirit of the Century is already set up to do that. If you don’t have interest in the other heroes angle, or are already doing it yourself, then you don’t need this book. You’re probably already rocking with Spirit, and can continue to do so.

2. So, Brand, why would you want to put this kind of stuff in your pulp game?

I love the fact that its going to be full of nifty game coolness, with new villains and new heroes and a renewed sense that the world is full of zany, wonderful, terrible stuff without having to always go gonzo. I mean, I think its fun that we often go back to the Gorilla Kahn aspect of pulps, but I sometimes think we miss out on the fact that lots of the old pulps were really into issues of history and the world in ways we often overlook now. I mean sure, they had lost Atlantis (though that wasn’t the pop culture term it is now until someone went out, researched, and started writing stories about it) — but they also had the Orient Express, and the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War and a lot of other things that when we cast our eyes out we totally overlook.

I mean, I know its odd to think of now, but there was a time when the Nazis were the ruling government of a country that the US was not at war with in which the pulps were using them as bad-guys anyway. Captain America (comics, not pulp I know, but close enough for hand grenades) punched Hitler in the mouth in March of 1941 — months before the States was at war with Germany. That took guts, because even if anti-German feelings were running high, it was using the image of the head of a foreign state and doing physical violence to him. Legal action could very realistically have ensued, and there was some backlash to it. Pulps didn’t always do just the safe thing, and very often the evil guys that the heroes fought were evil guys or allegories of evil guys, from the real world. Nowdays we think “nazi bash” as good clean fun with no political side, something that we can just all do without a second thought, but that wasn’t always the case. Pulps were not all apolitical, and many of them increased their sense of optimism and the potential of the future by having the guts to stand up and say things directly. And even when it wasn’t direct, pulps and comics were taking stands to make big two-fisted statements about justice. So why not put a little justice and reality back in our pulp?

Nor, in the case above, can I ignore that the writer and artist were Jewish, and so were many pulp writers. The old pulps were full of heroes and heroines of different types, from lesbian detectives to Jewish detectives to black detectives to… well, lots of detectives I guess. I think that having a supplement where we can get back at some of the politics of the pulps, some of the real stuff that they dealt with — even when they only dealt with it in a fun and fast way — can help round out the “Martians stole my death ray” experience into something fuller and richer and more like the vast variety of pulps in their prime.

3. What’s this about a woman not being able to hold patents, or Asian immigrants not being allowed to teach each other English? I know women have held patents in their own name since at least the mid-1800s, and several Asian-Americans set up schools for English language instruction.

While I have a bit to say about this on my own, I’m going to let Bruce answer this one:

The patent issue is actually a good one to illustrate a point: there were legal rights not everyone could exercise in practice. A lot of female inventors got turned down without recourse, and in-house notes make it clear that they were turned down for being women, because individual inspectors didn’t approve. I’ve got examples on my shelves over yonder *points helpfully*. The same is true for other examples in my post - what was legal would often clash with what was actually done, and what could in practice be enforced. In both cases, (problems arose from) matters of official caprice even where the clear text of the law said something otherwise. I’ll be providing examples for this stuff, and likely quoting William Burroughs on the three types of cops.

I should also add that some people in discriminated-against categories of various sorts - and not just celebrities - could and did get treated better than the law actually allowed for, thanks to just plain decent people in positions of authority. The tangle between law and practice should be a major theme in New Horizons, particularly since social aspects let one apply interesting leverage to various parts of the thicket.

4. So are you taking steps to make sure that the past doesn’t look worse than it actually was? I mean, it could get bad at times, but there was also a lot of good out there. Is that going to get addressed?

There have always been stand out cases — on every side. There have been more enlightened friendly, open people in history than we often recognize. The truth is that if the majority of people weren’t willing to accept change, didn’t embrace at least some aspects of it, things wouldn’t have changed as they did. There have been more men and women who triumphed over prejudice than can easily be cataloged. And we in no way want to deny either of these groups their just due and praise.

But even in stories of triumph there are obstacles. And for every good story a bad one. Booker T Washington often went out to dinner with the Steel Barons of the Universe, but Langston Hughes was once asked to go in the back door at a dinner in his honor. Women inventors did make amazing things, and Wollenstonecraft did publish, heck, I have an ancestor who was a female doctor before the American Civil War. But I also have ancestors who were beaten to death, hung, or chased out of a state in campaigns of organized terror, and there are many stories of women who were turned away at the door because they wore a skirt.

The past was full of the best and the worst, and no doubt about it. But the fact that there have always been renegades just means that there was always something to rebel against. So we want to make a book in which there is a chance to get into the real difficulties of the issue, and not just strawmen.

5. So, what else does this book have to say about issues of discrimination and historical perspective? Is it all going to be “they were wrong then and we are right now?” How do you handle such a hard topic and not get didactic.

For this one, again, I’m going to let Bruce answer:

I think that a lot of gamers never learned how to use history (and other scholarship) to best effect, and in part New Horizons should be a “show by example” book. I’ve never had so much opportunity to talk directly to players and GMs about the methodology along with the stats and all, and intend to make the most of it. Different people do different things and have wildly different experiences all against the same background, and deciding how you want to select the specific circumstances to use in play - the overall tone of the campaign, what works for this scene, and in between - can be (should be, I’d say) both challenging and fun.

I was just remarking to Fred, in fact, that I’d like to do something like this: take a particular moment where someone in one of the groups I’m covering has an interesting encountering with the powers that be, and show how very differently it can be described by observers and scholars all of whom are honest and have good will, but who are all bringing different perspectives to bear. “Anything goes” and “it can only be this one way” are both common errors in using history in entertainment, but fortunately, the middle ground is both available and very often more enjoyable once you see how to get there.

6. So Why Does Any of This Matter to Actual Gamers?

Well, for that I’m going to let a couple of actual gamers responses stand as the answer:
sabbatregent writes:

It’s been a long time since I posted on RPG.net. I hope that my comment doesn’t get lost in the deluge this supplement has created.

I’m Mexican. That means I can’t claim any race but a mixture of many. Also, I live in Mexico City. That is, I live in a city where some people still have to use the back entrances to a restaurant, and some people can’t walk on certain neighborhoods without getting arrested. Religious persecution, sexism, chauvinism, homophobia: you name it, we have it plenty. Sure, the Law don’t support any of this conducts, and a lot of them are considered criminal. Still, they’re very much a part of my society.

We’re even racists to ourselves. In many restaurants and bars, they would even unseat you to give your place to a foreigner. There’s a common fear of Asians, of African Americans, of indigenous people, of Argentinians. People of one State sometimes loath anyone from any other State.

Anyway, this is not a sympathy plea. It’s actually a pretty good place to live. I just wanted to give context to my point. I’ve been role playing for almost fifteen years. I’ve had many gaming groups over that period.

A lot of World of Darkness way back when. Despite that the fact that every single one of us were Mexican, most of our characters were either American or European.

A lot of D&D way back when. Despite the fact that most of the time there has been at least one woman on my groups, everyone’s character was male. Very sexist male characters, even when played by women.

I remember some White Wolf books that heavily referenced Mexico: Mexico City by Night, the Giovanni clanbook, Chaos Factor and Tales of Trails. It was really funny the way we get to be depicted in those books. The thing is, most of the players I knew never really pointed out that. We took the caricature of ourselves for granted. We never questioned the way Mexicans got represented in those books.

Actually, some GMs down here, when a Mexican character appears, make funny voices, the same way Spanish gets misrepresented/mispronounced in American TV.

In our last SotC game, even when everyone was free to choose any nationality (the Century Club being international and all) there were two English characters, two Americans, one Rumanian (my own), and one French.

What I’m trying to say here: there seems to be more to this book than only depicting ‘minorities’. This could be the source of stories that really have never been told before, simply because the medium (pulp) never really existed outside of some Occidental contexts. Also, it actually seems really important that the choices are offered: to play a gay character, for example, might be a lot of fun, but if the option isn’t readily available, you may not actually think of using it.

Hence, D&D parties comprised entirely of male characters. Hence, a bunch of Mexican roleplayers who can’t, for the lives of themselves, think of making a Mexican vampire. We do not conceive pulp in our cultural terms, hence we need to come up with concepts based on other cultures.

alexandria2000 writes:

Many people I look up to in history fought to change a world like that; I wouldn’t be here without them. And people today *still* follow in their footsteps.

It certainly won’t {bring my table down}. And I’m saying that as an African-American woman.

Pulp isn’t just about kicking evil in the junk - it’s about bravehearted men and women of every stripe finding adventure and making the world a better place, regardless if it’s stopping a gold-laden Klan train, or finding the hidden last library of Alexandria.

Most pulp doesn’t give a place for women, or people of color, or political dissidents, or LGBTs. They’re background, the people carrying the bags while the brave white men forge ahead, or the evil enemy. Worst case, they’re not mentioned at all.

Or if they ARE mentioned, it’s in a stereotypical way that makes my teeth ache.

So hell yeah, gimme a chance to inject a little reality in the pulp. Stop ignoring the people I want to play because ‘reality and history were boring and sad.’

The entire theme of pulp proves *it doesn’t have to be*.

7. Okay, so I’m down with all of that, but are you having anyone outside the circle do readings on this stuff? Like, having people in affected groups have a chance to look over the material?

Plans so far seem to include that. I know I’ve got my communism in my pocket, and that Bruce has said he’s looking for people from the discussions about gender and race to help him with various aspects. Fred’s talked about doing stuff like that too, and in general we’re looking to give people a chance to make their voices heard. But, considering the book isn’t even written yet, we’re not done with the plan on that.

Any extra worries or comments or whatever, can be left in the comments. There is a lot still to be decided about the book, and Bruce still has to write the thing, so there is also no hurry.

So, one of the projects I talked about coming out of the gender, race, and class discussions in the blog-o-sphere has gone public. It’s for Spirit of the Century by Evil Hat, will be written by Bruce Baugh, edited by my, myself, and I, and is called “New Horizons.”

Here is the promo blurb:

She is the strongest human being alive, her muscles super-charged by her own scientific processes. She’s fought dinosaurs barehanded and lived to tell the tale. But she can’t join any professional society for engineers, or even hold the patents for her inventions in her own name.

He is a supernaturally good poet. He can smell truth and lies from across the street. He’s saved the life of one president, two prime ministers, and a future pope. But if he goes out for a gourmet meal with friends, managers will insist he go in through the servants’ entrance.

Two men share a mystical union, pooling their health, knowledge, and magical essence. They bind demons and champion the falsely accused in courts on three continents. But if they ever once acknowledge the love they share along with their power, they’ll be disbarred and shunned by decent people everywhere.

The band of five fought in two wars for liberty, first against invading armies and then against tyrants at home. They free serfs, fight the architects of murder, and have twice stopped mad schemes of genocide. But they’re communists, and can’t even get visas to visit other heroes and scholars in the US.

Brother and sister are heirs to a millennia-old family tradition of serving justice and knowledge. Their ancestors commanded armies, delved into ancient tombs to lay ghosts—and worse things—to rest, taught the founders of new schools of philosophy and military strategy. But in the New World, he’s barely tolerated as a ditch digger—and she’ll be deported if she teaches English to other immigrants.

These are the other heroes, the ones who must fight for their dignity and liberty just as fiercely as they take on the challenges all pulp heroes face.

New Horizons is a new supplement for Spirit of the Century. Each chapter addresses a marginalized group from the pulps, kept outside by their sex, their race, their lifestyle, or their beliefs. In New Horizons you’ll find information about real-life heroic individuals and teams, the challenges they face and some of the solutions they find to the problems of dealing with 1920s society. You’ll also find heroes and villains ready for use, plot hooks, and ties to the mysteries around the Century Club. The life of heroes outside the mainstream may seem as strange as the secret language of Atlantis, but can be as exciting and powerful in play as a zeppelin armada.

New Horizons comes to you from veteran author and developer Bruce Baugh in collaboration with the minds behind Evil Hat Productions. We aim to show some of the real failings of the pulp era when it comes to fairness and justice in order to provide rich and vibrant new possibilities for adventure roleplaying in a bygone era. The real world is full of surprises—dense, weird, and just plain cool—and the bright light of Spirit’s optimistic pulp heroism can shine on some difficult realities just where they need it most.

New Horizons is about adding truth without sacrificing adventure — about bringing the real world together with the fantastic. Change your game. Change the world.

I wrote this for Church and State, and then used parts of it for commentary in PUSH: New Thinking About Roleplaying. Since then I’ve had several querries and comments about it, so I thought I’d put the whole thing up. Maybe the “Gaming Dummy” will become a regularly monthly column — I could easily see various articles on history, rhetoric, religion, and such being useful to folks and I do know plenty of otherwise useless trivia.

Anyway, Marxism for Gaming Dummies:

A lot of us Swine are a trash talking college boys whove gotten more education than was good for us, and promptly started spouting things about how the “dominant hegemony imposes consumer fetishes through the pseudo-individualism of post-modernist para-texts.” Now that’s all well and good for people who spent too much time in culture theory classes sucking up to the teacher, but for those who want to make their NPCs speak intelligently without having to take a class on Neo-Marxism, this section presents a few names and terms that you can drop into their dialogue to give it that authentic pseudo-intellectual stink. By dropping the following names and terms into his ranting, you can make your players think you too are one of the Marxist l33t.

Cultural Determination: The basis of many Marxist arguments is that there is no inherent human nature. Rather man creates the world he lives in, and that world in turn shapes the nature of man. So if we create a society based on greed, then people will be greedy. But if we can break the vicious circle and make a culture based on cooperation, then people will become cooperative.

Marx: The grandfather of Marxist theory (bet you couldn’t guess), Marx argued that our culture is driven by greed and the desire for material wealth and that the dominant society makes an ideology to legitimate their domination. In other words, everyone wants lots of stuff, just for themselves, and the rich make up rules that let them have the most stuff.

Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: The iron fist is the obvious methods of physical control — the police, military, and the courts. The velvet glove is the more subtle methods of mind control — such as media, education, and the church. Althusser is the name most associated with the use of this term.

Culture Industry: This theory says that mass-media (movies, radio, television) are all part of the velvet glove, which make the masses (that’s us) stay happy, sappy, and pliable while bilking us of all our money. So every time you go to the movies The Man programs you, makes sure you stay happy and in control, and takes your money at the same time. This to leads pseudo-individualism, which is what happens when people start defining themselves by the mass market. So if you think you’ve got a real personality because you like Eminem and not The Backstreet Boys, then you’re really just a pseudo-individual. Adorno is the name to toss when talking this talk.

Hegemony: The process of control and education that makes people see the current power structure as not only right, but as a matter of common sense. So people not only think that Bill Gates really deserves to have 32 billion dollars, but that there is no other possible way the world could work if people couldn’t get that rich. Gramsci is the name that you must drop to give this word some theoretical respectability.

Structuration: Theory that the repeated acts of individuals are what create social structure, and that social structure then reinforces the acts of individuals. This stance also says individuals can make a change simply by not repeating the actions that shape society. So if you want to change the world, you start by changing yourself and your relation to the culture around you and it will inevitably lead to social change. Giddens, who isn’t really a Marxist, is the big name behind this little theory.

Yes, as a matter of fact I do. I also like cheesecake. It’s fun. I also like Roleplaying Games, they’re fun. But two great tastes, like onions and chocolate, do not always taste great together.

Below is a rant. It isn’t nice, it may not be fair to some people. Read at your risk.

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If you want more to chew on, I suggest checking this out — the part about the bikini math quiz (page 22) is brutal: Sexualization Report.

So yesterday I talked a lot of trash about, depending who you ask, looking women in the eyes, Conan, roleplaying, or Michael Jordan. So today I want to return to the topic of women in RPG art, but with a different focus and much less from me, Mr. Mouthy.

Ladies, what RPG covers (or interiors) have you seen that involve a woman in the art that make you say, “I want to play that” or, just as good “I want to play her.” Or that make you feel like it is a game you could like, or be included in by a group of guys you’d never met and whose maturity you didn’t neccisarily know?

In other words, can you name for me (with links when possible) RPG art of women that has not just been passable but has actually attracted you to the game?

(Yes, guys, I know we have opinions too. For this one post keep em to yourselves. This post is inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft who many years ago suggested to the mouthy men that if they wanted to know what women thought they should 1) ask the woman and 2) shut up and listen.)

So ladies?

Much has been said and done about the objectification of women in RPG art, and the ways in which it is and is not changing in the modern hobby. At this point “objectification of women” is almost a jingle, spoken so often that it loses meaning and is often tossed off at the drop of a hat in order to shut down any discussion of sexual and gender roles and power relations. Of course, its used even more often for the opposite effect, sneered at in a preemptive attack to shut down the discussion of problems before they can start.

So I’m not going to talk about objectification of women in terms of why its bad for women. I’m going to say a brief bit about why its bad for men. Not everything I’m going to say below applies to every case. The stories of sex and sexuality in our culture are infinitely diverse, and each of us comes from our own history of petty neurosis and sexual formations, and so any given story can be as different as night at day. But there is, none the less, some aggregate truth in what I’m getting at, an issue that I’ve seen shading enough sexual stories that I can’t help but speculate that it has some relevance to at least some of us.

Let us take one picture and have a quick look at it.

Now, I don’t know if any given person is going to find the girly front and center on that cover sexy, but I do. She’s of a physical type that I like and she’s got that “I Dream of Jeannie” outfit that speaks of all sorts of orientalist fantasies of decadent other places where the sexual mores and laws of our restrictive society don’t apply. She’s round and womanly and sexy and available.

Yes, available. She’s on her hands and knees, she’s submissive, she’s probably a slave or so controlled by the evil sorcerer standing above her she may as well be. She’s available to me because of her status, because of her innate submission, because of the orientalist permission of her outfit, and a thousand years of cultural substratum telling me that a woman like that is a prize.

I don’t have to wonder, when I look at her and fantasize, what she thinks about me. I don’t have to consider why a woman like that would be interested in me. I don’t have to face the fact that she’s out of my league, physically like the type of woman I’d have trouble speaking to face to face in real life without saying something stupid. The way the picture presents her makes her mine already, and so I don’t have to think about her or her desires, I don’t have to think of a reason why she would like fat, nerdy, non-heroic me. I just get to leer and own, because she’s that low.

Of course, that makes me just as low, doesn’t it? I don’t think of a reason why she would like me, I don’t think of reasons why an attractive woman might want to have sex with me. In making her my accessible, object fantasy I do not have to face my own sexuality, my own limitations, or the fact that some women may find me attractive on my own merits and the linked proposition that other women will not. I don’t have to fear rejection, because rejection is something that only human beings give to me. Objects don’t. In my fantasy I’m able to be as little as I think of myself as and still posses her, because she has no attribute that makes her above my reach.

And no, simply giving her a sword doesn’t help. She may not be a slave then, but if the way the body is held and presented tells you she’s in heat and wants it, it’s all the same thing isn’t it? She doesn’t want you, she just wants anyone and since you’re there you’re just that lucky. You still don’t have to think about why her, why you, or that there is another human being there. Its still a body, and its just now a dominant one rather than a submissive one. There is still no equality, and the observer still owns the interaction. (Consider the “fuck me now” pose of the noble woman in the background.)

When I look at a sexy woman that isn’t objectified, I have to wonder why she would want me. I have to question my own sexuality and sexual attractiveness. I have to deal with my negative qualities and try to find enough belief in myself to think that I could be worthy of her sexual attention, much less her emotional commitment. I have to think of her as a human being, and in so doing I have to think of myself as one as well — and not just that, but a worthy human being.

Being fed a constant diet of slave girls who can’t meet my eyes, loins and breasts being offered up to my penetrating gaze, and round things with no power of their own doesn’t help women’s image in the hobby — but it also doesn’t help the boys’ image either. Is this the most that we think of ourselves, that not just an occasional fantasy is about a girl who can’t say no, but that a vast swath of them are? Can’t we think of ourselves with a little more respect than that? Can’t we think enough of ourselves to be attracted to women who might need, you know, people with positive qualities to be attracted back to?