What was on my mind when I wrote this question:
1) The willingness of indie designers to include obvious and forthright political content in their designs
and
2) The knots indie folks tie themselves into as players, designers, readers and social media nanocelebrities
and
3) The hilarious typical reactions from trad folks who have been consuming their own games’ political content for so long that it’s the air they breathe.
I think #1 is awesome and entirely fucking optional (nobody’s making you buy and play games from the #feminism anthology, you nitwits). I go through #2 all the time and sometimes I just have to laugh at myself. And having come from the world of #3, I’m all too sympathetic to just how casually accepted certain things are in mainstream RPGs.
As a long-time cishetwhite liberal sometimes-activist (no I don’t talk about this stuff much online; ask me sometime, I’ll be happy to share) I’ve got more than my share of liberal guilt. So my answer is: it happens to me all the time! But to badly paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, nobody can make you feel uncomfortably aware without your consent.
Not everyone wants discomfort in their games. Cool, no worries, you do you. Self-care is the most important thing. This is where that fun/rewarding line lies for me, though (talked about it a little bit yesterday). Games that can temporary manipulate your perspective and identity are a marvelous, safe way to explore your own discomfort.
So many examples of discomfort, all of which I consented to. Here are a few:
Carolina Death Crawl at a convention, ye gawds. I played it at home and we were even more careful than strangers had been. It’s a good game! Result: slightly more woke.
Dog Eat Dog, really an interesting experience but I’ve been studying colonialism and the indigenous experience a lot for my own work. Result: same woke as before, impressed at the procedural design though.
Night Witches is super interesting insofar as my own reaction to introducing my local friends to it. I’ve run it more for strangers than at home (which I know Jason Morningstar advises against, sort of) although it’s been mostly fine for me: I get to be a good performative liberal and really play up gross men being gross. But I tied myself up in knots for three months when I wanted to run it for people I actually know. Feel free to speculate as to why I’m so weird about it. Result: different-woke. Suspicious of my own motives.
Sagas of the Icelanders is an awesome political exercise insofar as it’s also a shitton of fun. I first ran this for a table of five: my wife and two couples. The women played women, the men played men, and afterward everyone had had an awesome time and felt deeply embarrassed. One of the players said “I really wanted to represent my gender well,” to which what can you say? The game is designed so nobody can represent their gender well. Result: more woke because it did prompt a great gender discussion with people who never, ever talk about that stuff.
So I guess what I’m saying is that I think it’s actually a really good thing that it’s such a cliche that indie folks tie themselves into knots when it comes to politics in their gaming. That means it’s out in the open, not casually accepted and left unexamined. Some of the knot-tying is pure performance; I get that. A lot of it I think is sincere. I’m not persuaded that gaming can change the world that much, but you know… maybe? A few nudges here and there?
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It’s going to start September 1, but to get your creative juices flowing, here’s the official Indie Game Reading Club’s list of questions to ponder.
Obviously this is needed because the #RPGaDAY list is so freighted with assumptions about RPGs that mostly it’s incomprehensible if you’re not in that scene any more.
1. When were you last deprotagonized? What happened and how did you reassert your agency?
2. What game created your most elaborate relationship map? How much of it did you actually use?
3. What’s your favorite behavioral incentive?
4. What’s your favorite perverse behavioral incentive?
5. Would you say rolling dice to have sex is hot, dirty, deprotagonizing, or all the above?
6. How many PbtA games do you own, and which one best captures its most clichéd genre tropes?
7. When did you last spend more time setting up a situation and talking about the situation after than actually playing in that situation?
8. What was your most awesome fight online about what does and does not constitute a story-game?
9. When was the last time an indie game made you feel guilty about your race, gender, or sexual identity? Were you more or less woke after you played it?
10. When did you most recently refuse to play a trad game because the central facilitation role was granted too much creative authority?
11. Best unwanted fictional input generated by procedural uncertainty?
12. Best story about waiting for players in a GMless game to finally get to the point in a scene they’ve called for but obviously had no idea why they wanted it in the first place?
13. What’s the most you’ve spent on a Kickstarter game relative to the amount of play it received?
14. What’s the most play-disruptive discovery you’ve made when you insist on playing by the actual printed rules?
15. When was the last time you unironically used the word “diegetic?”
16. GMs: abusers, control freaks or both? Best story explaining why this is so.
17. Do you buy your legal-sized paper by the ream or by the case? Do you ever try to reuse your playbooks or just start fresh every time?
18. What’s your best story about a precious snowflake character some trad player brought to the table because it was “clever?” How did you call them out?
19. What kind of shit-fit did you throw the last time someone tried to schedule your convention game in a ballroom like you’re playing fucking Pathfinder or something?
20. What’s your best story about falling all over yourself trying to rescue a bunch of awesome fiction that just got invalidated after making a fortune-at-the-end roll like some commoner?
21. What was the last OSR game you tried to play, but quit because you realized there’s literally no mechanical support for a storyline at all?
22. How many friendships have you terminated because they confessed they kind of like to play Fate games sometimes? It’s okay. Fate players have to hear the truth.
23. Tell your most scandalous story about getting X-carded.
24. What was the very saddest thing you wrote on an index card?
25. Do you like your scene framing hard, harder, or hardest? What’s the very hardest you’ve had your scene framed?
26. When you interrogate the nature of heroism in your game, do you prefer to directly or indirectly invoke Lacanianism?
27. What’s the very best playtest-stage game your friends probably haven’t heard of yet? How long ago did you play it and how much better was it than the current version?
28. What’s the most interesting period of obscure and unrelatable history you’d like to see a game set in? How would you do it?
29. What indie game tech do you most keenly miss when you play something more mainstream? And then do you denounce the game in person or do you save it for a social media rant?
30. What is your fondest memory of a game you thought was fun before you knew better?
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I don’t see the guilt ever coming from the games*. In most cases that I’ve seen, the game exists, doing what it does, not designed to make people feel guilty, but instead to investigate certain issues. Then people come into contact with it and think it’s saying things about them and then bam, guilt.
* Maybe not never, but I can’t think of any examples
Oh, slick point about Sagas.
I remember talking about that a lot, lot, lot when we started playing. But I’d forgotten about it since.
I tend to veer a bit away from these types of games. Games are my escapism so regular reminders of reality makes it blegh.
But I’m totally interested in what people have to say on this topic so sub’d
.sub for more introspective talk
I think this question has seen the most pushback, but I’m not keyed into who’s-who in indie games as much as some, so my circles are limited. But I’m listening because I don’t think I’ve seen anything bad yet come from this list.
But as I said, limited view and limited reach.
Interesting! I think maybe your definition of “woke” is slightly broader than mine That in itself isn’t worth discussion, but it definitely gave you a lot more room to talk about what’s being raised in games, and the sliding scale of “challengingness.”
“The unexamined game is not worth playing.”
— Socrates, the last time we played Champions together
.
First, I am glad my practice of fake quoting historical celebrities is being adopted by Mark Delsing. Second, guilt specifically is the product of a contrite heart falling short in the judgment of God or whatever repository of virtue the kids today squirm beneath the terror-inducing gaze of, Twitter, maybe. If the question had been about “awareness” of an injustice or “frustration” or “anger” at an unjust political reality, I certainly would have approached the question differently than I did with “guilt.”
Micah, can you be specific about what you don’t like?
Your one specific, AW‘s sex moves, argues that the only way to get to know someone is to have sex with them. But that’s not true. For one thing, you can get to know someone better at the end of every session. There are other ways, too.
I find gendered ability score modifiers to be the least-satisfying way of addressing gender difference I can think of.
.
Also, few sex moves are about getting to know someone better.
Guys, this is not the thread for this conversation.
Sorry, Paul, not trying to scrap. Just understand. But I’ll happily quit the conversation.
Guess I didn’t understand where you wanted to go with this. Withdrawn.