Nothing is ever, ever enough for the Ctrl-Left. And I wish gaming companies would really get that. Absolutely no actions will ever satisfy them.
Case in point, the latest D&D book, Tomb of Annihilation features an area of the Forgotten Realms which was once just barbarian jungle vaguely in the style of the heart of Africa.
But for Tomb, Wizards re-imagined it as featuring a significant and developed city-state obviously inspired by African history and cultures in the same vanilla-generic way that the "white" countries in the Realms are vaguely generically inspired by 'medieval Europe'.
For Kotaku, this was a vile act of racism.
The most ridiculous part is how this very white alleged 'game journalist' says WoTC should have made the Realms' black civilization a "black Atlantis" of (I assume perfect and flawless) "bleeding edge technologists that engineer magical machinery", when we all know that if Wizards had done that Kotaku's white propagandists of leftist Identity-culture would have just accused Wizards of something like "erasing any element of African culture from their world" or how "white kingdoms get to be based off Europe but black kingdoms don't get to celebrate Africa".
That's just how it is for them. The point is never to be satisfied. It's to keep damning the hobby. My own Arrows of Indra game was accused of being racists by the Ctrl-Left, largely for being too accurate a depiction of certain aspects of Indian culture, like the caste system. If I had ignored the caste system, I would have been accused of ignoring it. There's never any way to win their stupid game, and the only way to avoid losing is to just tell them to go fuck themselves.
Quit lying, Kotaku. We know your whole agenda is to never, ever be satisfied with anything anyone does, because you keep making money off of false outrage and increasingly ludicrous demands that somehow will never be enough when they are met.
RPGPundit
Currently Smoking: Brigham Anniversary + Image Latakia
Well said.
ReplyDeleteWow, you're quick off the mark there.
ReplyDeleteI went to play my first session of this campaign with a group of strangers at the Meetup on Saturday. 2/6 of the players were black African, 3/6 were female, white men were a minority (2/6). We all enjoyed the game and the campaign setting. Obviously no one took offence at anything. Basically WoTC's progressive dream scenario.
So of course the SJWs have to shit on it.
That proves little. I worked on a team in the deep south, where oblique racist jokes putting down black people were the way to fit into the group. Black team members were going along to get along and everyone had a swell time, except of course, they didn't. People who were butts of the jokes were taking offense and keeping it to themselves. Woe to someone like yourself, who thought that good times were had by all and they were among friends. Does not necessarily apply to your experience, of course, but racism is real and it can and has been used as a tool of oppression/repression.
DeleteAnd your comment has zero to do with what is being discussed. Also, your stort is inconsistent: if the people who were offended kept it to themselves, by definition you cannot know they were offended.
Delete@Brooser so you want to shit on it too?
Delete@ Celis - They kept it to themselves until they were off duty and off base, and I was drinking with them.
Delete@S'mon, not at all, I was on commenting on your experience. One happened in the real world, the other is a critique of something that is totally made up and is mainstream commercial, where the main goal is not to offend anyone. I wouldn't even comment on it. One thing I might add is that SJW folk I read come from a different social strata of gamers and have their own views and biases, and it's not as simple as merely being left wing. The ones I know in person in NYC aren't that much different from the people here, except they all have an overwhelming ambition to quit their inadequate day jobs and publish in the mainstream. I don't have that need, and so I was pegged as a "merck" and a "boring fuck", at which point I was promptly expelled, and started my own game.
"I was on commenting on your experience."
DeleteWell, I can assure you my experience last Saturday (at a D&D club in central London, UK) of people playing Tomb of Annihilation together has nothing to do with your experience of white employees in the US Deep South cracking oblique racist jokes at the expense of black fellow employees.
I thought you were claiming there was oblique racist content in ToA. If you're suggesting that because there were white and black players playing D&D together, the whites must have been being racist and the blacks secretly taking offence but hiding it, that's worse again.
I suggested nothing of the sort and only cautioned you against the assumption about everyone in your group being cool with everything.
DeleteIt wasn't an *assumption*, I was looking out for everyone and if they were having a good time. One big advantage of being a player not GM in a game, much more time to do that. Like I said, everyone had a good time (or was an incredibly good actor). Certainly no one took offence at anything in the setting - and from what I've seen of it so far you'd have to be a truly rabid SJW to find anything to take offence to.
DeleteYou must have a good game running in your club, which is rare. I play public games by necessity, and too often, there is more going on at the table, than D&D, meaning court politics. I think that it's extremely hard to be offended by anything in the Forgotten Realms setting. I find it lackluster, too many parallels to the real world that I can see, but I enjoyed Baldur's Gate nonetheless. I think that SJW is a political posture, and if no player is attacking your GM while jockeying for position or trying to usurp the GM, you will find no SJW activism in your group.
Delete"You must have a good game running in your club, which is rare."
DeleteIME it's not rare where I play.
It's not journalism if you don't have anything relevant to say and are just begging for attention.
ReplyDeleteYeah, fuck those guys.
ReplyDeleteAgain, well said.
ReplyDeleteWait, they're upset that "D&D Africa" is as unimaginative as "D&D Europe"? The best part is when Might Whitey Liberals get offended on behalf of black people. Is there anyone more racist than white liberals who think the rest of the world needs their help to stand up for ourselves and determine when to be offended?
ReplyDeleteMuch as you sometimes annoy me, Pundit, you're on the money here. It sounds like a great improvement on previous Africanesque settings, and that writer is going to some lengths to find things to be outraged over.
ReplyDeleteThis article was a hatchet job. To avoid seconding everyone's prevailing sentiment here, I found it more interesting to examine who the author of the article is and the person whom she quoted extensively. The author seems insecure about her journalist cred, and compensates by using the social justice polemic. There are real journalists, who travel to places like Syria, South Sudan and other bad locales to report developing stories. Then there are others posing as journalists, enjoying the cosmopolitan glamor, often working for the art and fashion magazines. Instead of looking for stories worth reporting, these other journalists, review and write profiles of their friends and pitch it as a real thing. Part of corruption in journalism is that more serious journalists that glamor types will write up public releases or promote clients of PR firms. Having said that, Mark Tawin, Hunter Thompson, or Scott Anderson will produce award winning pieces, even if assigned to Kotaku or Dungeon magazine. Unfortunately the author of this article is in the other category. She is ambitious. When she was interning at Kotaku, she came to work provocatively dressed with painted face, though her demeanor showed that she was uncomfortable in the outfit. Her act is paying off, and she is now a senior staff writer. As journalism, her article lacks objectivity, and she didn't bother interviewing the writers or artists, who worked on the Tomb of Annihilation, nor did she bother examining the opposing point of view. On the other hand, the source whom she quotes most extensively is a miserable blogger, whom nobody reads, and whom I will not dignify with a mention. This person is a Canadian of the Scottish-Kenyan origin who runs a blog dedicated to the racism that he perceives in D&D and in Sci-Fi. He seems a life-long gamer and a crusader against Eurocentrism in D&D. His blog deals with nothing else, and he delves into no specifics, ranting in generalities. He seems to have an ego of an octopus and also, resources to burn, pursuing expensive hobbies, like deep sea diving. He may have ambitions, both as a writer and a video game developer, and his social justice crusading may be part of his political strategy to success. He has an on-line handle as a "PzKing", Pz standing for "Panzer". Interesting, how a person of color battling racism in gaming identifies with terminology and weapons that enabled Nazism in the world. In a revealing bit he writes that a particular game has a drawback, because you can not see the black characters in their power armor. My take on this is that he grew up educated and privileged in UK and or Canada, he grew up gaming and internalized its tropes. How and why he got a chip on his shoulder as a person of color is an interesting question. Based on what I seen, political correctness in gaming, has to do more with ambition, than with any kind of progressivism. I got curious about the female videogame designers who complained of sexual harassment by others in the gaming scene, and what I discovered was that their ambition drove them to make use of their looks and to try to become one of the boys, while at some level, they looked down on nerds, and by extension, on gamers, as uncool, and any masculine attention from them, provoked or otherwise, they perceived as an insult. This is not to excuse anybody else's bad behavior, but these female designers were posing as gamers as a result of their ambition. The interesting thing is that nobody has gone and written an Afrocentric setting to better the WOTC. The reason being, is that their drive for cultural diversity is political posturing, and not any kind of passion or vision for another culture, because if they had it, they would have been writing it.
ReplyDeleteInteresting perspective. I agree that "outrage" often seems linked to ambition and using it to try to get ahead instead of getting ahead because you actually merited it.
DeleteAnd why hasn't Panzer King written up his cool African setting?
DeleteGod in Heaven that is one mighty fine text-wall you have there. Do you have something against paragraph structure?
DeleteIf you ever played Fallout 2, where the masked shaman woman gives Player his quest and in the early tutorial section of the game, that part of the soundtrack that sounds like Man With No Name spaghetti western theme, is actually African musical tradition, echoing voices representing ancestors (I think), and that video rpg had other atmospheric elements to make it subtly an African setting for the post nuke primitives that very few gamers would recognize. The Mona Lisa smile of the artists who brought us Fallout 1, 2 and Planescape Torment. Somehow the Fallout captured the essence of the Southern California, Fallout 2 the Bay Area of California, and Torment had the avant guard elements of the fringe street scene cutting edge in the U.S. at the time that videogame was created.
ReplyDeletePerhaps someone at Kotaku could have researched the fact that Chult has existed for decades and been defined before?
ReplyDelete