Well, today kicked off a hell of a firestorm on Twitter (you know who you are and what you said that you shouldn’t have thought), and it kicked up an internal question/debate around the office. The first part of this discussion is one that crops up again and again in the tabletop community and it can be reduced down to “Our game is perfect and represents wide and varied cultures vs. No, it really doesn’t.”
Now first up, let me point out that my ethnic heritage is predominantly european with a bit of native american. My skin is white, and i have never had a problem finding people to represent me in tabletop gaming because i was the target audience in most cases. I remember the first time i saw the new PHB for 5th edition and i was having fun with the new art, and moved on. It wasn’t until i was cruising through Twitter and saw a post from a POC remarking that they had finally found a character that looked like them in the book. It would never have occurred to me to even go looking for a character that looked like me because everyone looked like me for so long that i accepted that as part of the norm.
That’s a position of privilege that i have as a white male gamer in our community and this gets tricky for me. I love seeing varied and different people in the art and the fiction that goes with our tabletop games because it gives other players and consumers of our market the opportunity to see people that look like them (and possibly had similar experiences) in a world that i have been living in for over two decades. I don’t feel threatened by that, i don’t feel an encroachment or a sense that people are coming to take my community away from me. It’s never been MY community, it’s been our community and everyone should feel welcome and be able to find examples of representation in their community.
The underlying question that this kicked up for me is another one that i have more complicated feelings for. Most designers (and i have been guilty of this in the past) pull examples and in some cases, full cultural ideas from existing real world cultures for their games. This creates a ton of problems, (and if you want to check out a blog that will start to explain why, feel free to check out pocgamer.com ).
I like the idea and practice that if you are going to lift elements of a real world culture for a gaming product that you bring people from that culture into the design room at the base level so that they can give you an idea of what that culture looks like from an internal perspective. There’s no amount of study or external experience that can give a person the level of understanding of how a culture works the way a person who lives in that culture. It’s possible to get close, but it’s still not the same as experiencing a culture from an internal perspective.
Now the question this raises to me is what level of entitlement do i have where i expect people to build and showcase their cultures to me in a way i can incorporate it into a gaming experience? That’s a pretty screwed up world view, and it caught me off guard the first time i thought about it. No one should ever think that they’re entitled to pick and choose the aspects of another culture (especially one based off a real world culture) for their gaming amusement. It’s a form of cultural appropriation and it hits me in an ugly mental space.
This is not a criticism of projects by authors, designers, and creators of varied cultures and ethnicities that want to share their own culture. Those projects are amazing and give the outsider an idea of what that cultural experience is. This is a criticism of a lot of designers who try and take a snapshot of a culture and that turn that into their personal awesome gaming experience land.
We can draw inspiration from real world cultures and ideas, but if we do so without people from those cultures we lose a lot. It’s also not the responsibility of Persons of Color to share their cultures with us. That’s their culture and something we should treat with a great deal more respect than we usually do.
That’s my quick hit for the day, and this is just my perspective and the questions that keep coming up to me.
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