The Seven-Sided Die

Last year I sent a slightly snarky email to Paizo in response to their virtual Christmas card mailing, which was a picture of the Pathfinder RPG iconic character Seoni[1. Not that I recognised her as Seoni at the time, not being familiar enough with PFRPG then. Granted, I still wouldn't know if not for that post, and I don't know any other PF iconic's name.] done up as a sexy Santa. As an afterthought I turned the email into a post because hey, why not get double duty out of that text I spent time writing?

Unsurprisingly in retrospect, but completely taking me by surprise at the time, that turned into a huge mess when the post was linked to on the Paizo forums.

I hesitated to write a follow-up post for a long time. When the next Christmas came around I considered writing something but ultimately skipped it just because it still left a foul taste just thinking about it. Even now I'm not really interested in analysing it, but a recent experience trying to explain male privilege to a friend and the resulting sensation of banging my head against a wall reminded me of that post and my undischarged duty to a commentor on it. That I've been reading the excellent Border House Blog that bankuei recently blogged about probably has a lot to do with it too.

Response

When I wrote that post, one of the first comments was from Ravyn of Exchange of Realities, asking that I post a follow-up should Paizo respond to the email. They never did so I never did, but I did (eventually, when my anger with the invaders had cooled) go and read through the entire long Paizo forum thread that discussed my post.

The male privilege and cluelessness about same was predictably rampant, but there was a surprising number of eloquent people arguing my point to the rest of the forumers,[2. roguerouge in this post and cappadocius in this post are particularly fine examples.] which was great to see. Most of them were more gentle and better-written than I was, but that sadly didn't seem to change any more minds than my angry arguing in the comments of my post did.

There were some very disappointing posts in that thread, and the most disappointing were the ones from the Paizo staff. So Ravyn, here's your answer:

LOL.

—Erik Mona, Publisher #

All I have to say since I ordered the Holiday Pin-Up Seoni is I LIKE IT and "pin-up" was in the art order description!

—Sarah Robinson, Art Director #

I don't think that Christmas Seoni is "bad" or sexist or anything of the sort. I think Paizo's done a great job at being open-minded and getting all sorts of genders, races, sexual orientations, beliefs, and all that good stuff out there in a non-discriminatory way. In other words, the only thing I discriminate against is bad writing, I guess.

—James Jacob, Pathfinder Editor-In-Chief #

The only thing to say about Erik Mona's response is that if the head publisher of a company is going to respond at all I would expect more of them. He could have said nothing at all, but he chose to respond and chose that to respond with? It seemed to be much more a response for the sake of the bulk of the forumers—"don't worry, I'm not taking this seriously either"—than for me or any of the forumers who brought up criticism of Paizo's representation of women.

The art director's answer is just tiring. That she asked for it doesn't mean it wasn't sexist. If she'd said, "I asked for a black slave naked except for Rudolph antlers and nose, with a white man's Santa-style boot on her back," that would have been plainly wrong.[4. This is not to compare sexism and racism, which are different yet related in complicated ways. It's an over-the-top example that I would hope the majority agree clearly demonstrates the irrelevance of an art director defending a piece with, "but it's what I asked for!" when the resulting art is inappropriate. Despite that intent, if using that example is offensive in a way that I—in my white privilege—have failed to see, I hope you feel welcome enough to say so and allow me to make amends.] It is the content of the art direction that matters, not whether or not it was asked for or even whether or not the art director happens to be female. Women can absorb and transmit oppressive cultural values just as easily as men can, because having the right bits in the pants doesn't provide magical brain-immunity to the culture that we're soaked in.

James Jacob's response I cared less about and I included it for the completeness of Paizo's response, paltry as it was. (Unlike the others though, he participated in the thread conversation beyond this response.) Still, it's annoyingly self-congratulatory. If the detractors are ignored and you make a point of stating your point of view over theirs, then you're selecting for self-congratulatory feedback. It's entirely possible to have done a great job on diversity and still have a lot of room to improve, and it's so much easier to overlook an area where there's a huge lack of improvement when you simply assert that there's no problem.

And of course, there were Sean K Reynold's self-serving responses in the comments of the original post, but the less said about those, the better.

So that's it.[9. Dammit. I just can't write a short post. I could have been working on my conversion of Shaintar to Burning Wheel.] The people at Paizo don't take concerns about sexism in their art seriously because they think their art is already not sexist.

Edit to add: Now that there have been a few comments in the moderation queue, I can see that this post is going to attract some of the same Champions of Men that the last did. I have only a little bit of interest in arguing with people who don't know—and more to the point, don't care—about the fundamental concepts that a conversation about inequality starts from. If your comment ladles a big helping of male-privilege condescension on top of the cluelessness I'm not going to approve it.

Yes, I'm going to police the comments.[5. Criers of "censorship!" are welcome to educate themselves about freedom of speech on their own time. The short version is: No, I don't have an obligation to give anyone a soapbox here; Yes, you are free to write in your own blog instead.] You might really want to add your opinion to the comments, but opinions saying that there's no problem are pennies a gallon and they get old fast. I'd rather keep the thread welcoming to all, no just the ones who ironically and loudly insist that there's nothing to talk about.[7. There's a quote of Lady Macbeth that applies here.] That said, you're welcome to add vitriolic comment to the original thread, where it would be in fellow company with all the other white men saying that they don't see what the problem is.

Otherwise, I'm happy to converse with people who are genuinely curious and make an effort to be respectful (not to me, but to women and PoC who are in the audience). I'm not setting the bar high—the least indication of having thought about it and being willing to keep thinking about it is all that's necessary.

Apparently Wizards of the Coast has finally released something that they're calling a fan site policy. There seems to be a bunch of kerfuffle among the bloggertubes about this event. There also seems to be a lot of confusion about what this means.

My other hobby for the past 10 years has been informing myself about copyright, trade mark, and other so-called "intellectual property" laws. I'm not a lawyer, but some of the things that people find confusing about this fan site kit are pretty clear to me.

Here's the most important one, and I'm going to put it in obnoxious formatting to make it really hard to miss:

WotC has not released a fan site policy.

This thing that WotC is calling a fan site policy is a license, not a policy.

The distinction is so stark that I'm frankly surprised that Wizards has done something so boneheaded. A fan site policy is a document that serves as a statement of company policy: what the company avows to do and not do in relation to fan sites. It is merely a communication of intent, a statement of policy. (Funny that.) A fan site policy is not a legal document, but rather is a means of communicating with the fan community in order to clear up fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what fans can and can't do while they're busy fanning about on the Internet. Such a policy draws some clear lines between what a company will magnanimously allow fans to do beyond the scope of fair use, and what the company will not tolerate and will reserve the right to challenge or issue take-down notices over.

A license is a legal document. It exists to be agreed to in order to exchange rights between two parties. It has terms of acceptance, termination clauses, and explicit descriptions of the rights that the licensee will been granted by the licensor. You are bound by a license only by formally agreeing to it by taking certain actions, such as signing a document or using a particular service. The existence of a license has no meaning or influence over people who do not agree to it, and it does not change what people can legally do already without the license.

If you read the text of the Fan Site Kit, it is a license. Critically, it does not clarify what Wizards will and won't sue over which is the sole reason for having a fan site policy. What it does do is offer you some rights (the use of the copyrighted material in the kit) in exchange for being bound by the terms of the license (not writing about or doing things they forbid, which are otherwise legal).

The so-called Fan Site Kit Policy is a contract, and it bones anyone who agrees to it. Even worse, by calling it a "policy", Wizards is contributing to the confusion about fans' legal rights by making it seem like fans need to agree to this license to operate a fan site. I won't cast aspersions upon the designers and managers at Wizards of the Coast, but their legal department are a bunch of tools who know exactly what kind of deceptive shenanigans they are trying to pull with this so-called "policy".

Other stuff

There are some other confusions around the "policy" that aren't such a big deal as that huge one above.

Who owns your site

Berin Kinsman notes that it requires agreeing to the Wizards.com Term of Use, and wonders if it could be interpreted as signing over all copyright and trademark of your own site to Wizards of the Coast. This is from a reading of Section 1 (User Content), which in part reads:

By posting or submitting any text, images, designs, video, sound, code, data, lists, or other materials or information (such User-submitted content, collectively, "User Content") to or through a Site, including without limitation on any User profile page, you hereby irrevocably grant to Wizards, its affiliates and sublicensees, a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and fully sub-licensable license, to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such User Content (in whole or in part) in any media and to incorporate the User Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

Yeah, that's pretty alarming to see attached to the terms of using Wizards' fan site kit on your own site, at first glance. However, earlier in the Terms of Use the word "Site" is specifically defined as "this website", which can only mean Wizards.com. Agreeing to the Fan Site Kit "Policy" requires agreeing to the Wizards.com Terms of Use... but I'm not sure to what end.

There's nothing in the Terms of Use that remotely applies to anything done elsewhere than Wizards.com. The only conceivable purpose to tie together the Fan Site Kit "Policy" and the Wizards.com Terms of Use is that anyone who can be construed as violating the Terms of Use while using Wizards.com (such as in the forums) could have the Fan Kit license for their own site revoked. However, they already include in the Kit "Policy" the words:

Also, we reserve the right to revoke this limited use license at any time, for any reason, and at the sole discretion of Wizards.

So they don't need any such excuse to revoke the license. Incidentally, this is the one place where they slip up and use the correct term "license" instead of the misleading and inaccurate term "policy".

Do I need to follow the policy now?

In a word, No. There is nothing in the Fan Site Kit "Policy" that is legally enforceable (or even legally meaningful) to anyone who does not agree to the license. But wait, what if you do want to agree to the license? Well, here's what that gets you:

• You can use the photos and text inside the Fan Site Kit.

No, seriously. That's all. The only reason to agree to and be bound by the Fan Site Kit "Policy" is if you want to use (as my wife put it) "their stupid banner" on your site. In fact, that's the only way to agree to the policy: by using their Fan Site Kit. If you don't use their Fan Site Kit, you can completely ignore the "policy".

What does Wizards ask in return for the incredible boon of using their graphics?

• You can't use the Kit contents anywhere near non-Wizards products. No using a Kit image to illustrate an article that does a compare and contrast of the 4e PHB with, say, the Pathfinder RPG.
• You can't alter the images except to resize them. Well, fair enough. That seems reasonable.
• You are not allowed to discuss "non-public information". That is, you're not allowed to talk about leaked materials that Wizards didn't personally leak. This makes more sense for their Magic: the Gathering Fan Kit since they really, really don't like spoilers for their cards, but it's lame that D&D must suffers by association. (This begs the question: if the information has been leaked to the public, how can they sanely call it "non-public"?)
• You can't do anything involving money. No links to your eBay listings of 3e books, no mixing a site that sells Encounter Critical novelty zappers with talking about Wizards' material, no daring to have your résumé and contact information for professional services on the same site where you talk about your Warforged Avenger's latest Daily Power. Oh, but it's OK if you have a "donate" or "tip jar" button. That's a tiny, but pleasant, surprise.
• You can't confuse your readers into thinking that you are Wizards of the Coast or are endorsed by them. Also, fair enough.
• You have to include a bunch of copyright notices on every page and stick ® and ™ after everything. This isn't even required by copyright and trademark law, but thanks to using their image of the PHB to illustrate your article, you too can make your blog look like a corporate press release.
• You may not deep link Wizards.com files (but pages are OK). That's a dick thing to do anyway, so fair enough.
• You may not make your site look like Wizards.com or like any WotC product. No making your web site look like the cover of the Monster Manual! I guess that's fair? I'm not clear on why they're afraid of this happening.
• You can't sell merch with Wizards images and stuff on them. Again, this is totally fair.
• You can't remix WotC videos and other non-textual media. Laaame. Don't they understand viral marketing, the grassroots, and how the Internet works in general? Oh, wait, right… (However, this is not unreasonable. It's to their own detriment in this day and age, but it is their foot to shoot.)
• You may not mirror or embed their non-video/audio web material. No making a mirror of Wizards.com or embedding the defunct Map-A-Day page in a widget in your blog's sidebar. Strangely (and probably unintentionally), this also means that you may not put any of Wizards' RSS feeds in a sidebar widget on your blog. This is a good example of how being uptight and too legalistic has unintentional yet stupid consequences. Lighten up, Wizards!
• You may not say bad things about Wizards and products, nor may you be obscene. Fuck that shit. (Also, you can't libel them or others, which is fair.) But really, fuck that. People swearing in their blogs are not going to do anything other than make themselves look like uncultured boors (hi!) and lose them readers (bye!). WotC is probably concerned that people talking about their products using "low-brow" words will reflect poorly on WotC and "their" community. However, the statement that you cannot "make disparaging [...] statements about Wizards and/or its products" is super-craptacular ass-destroying retardation. So, if you use their images, you cannot say a product sucks. "We know you'll keep it clean." Fuck you, Wizards! (Okay, I'm done swearing to illustrate my point. You can uncover your ears now, delicate and innocent flowers of the wonderland that is the Clean Internet.)

So, that's the sum of it.

You agree to not do some obviously bad things, and also agree to bend over backwards to say that WotC products are the bee's knees and that nothing else can be (legally) compared to them, to religiously avoid mixing your business with your fan activities, and to vow to never be a potty mouth while sprinkling fair dust (by which I mean ® and ™) liberally over your writing.

In exchange, you get to use their stupid banner.

The upshot

So… What does all this amount to? Well, Wizards of the Coast is still operating without a clarifying document of their intentions toward the fan community's activities online. They've got this… thing… that doesn't clarify what fans can expect to do without getting sued or having a copyright takedown sent to their ISP or web host.

Fans are still left in the dark as to whether their sites are OK as far as WotC is concerned, or whether the hammer is about to fall on them (and their wallets). The chilling effect of operating without a clear statement about fan sites is still going to give people pause and cause many to self-censor for fear that the wrath of Wizards may descend on them and destroy their little corner of the community in a digital apocalypse. People are still left guessing, and since eliminating that is the entire purpose of a fan site policy, that makes this move a huge fail for Wizards.

There are some good examples of fan site policies out there that we can compare this non-policy-actually-a-license thing to. Geek Related already did a good job of comparing this Thing That Should Not Be to actual, real, honest-to-goodness fansite policies, so I'm not going to duplicate that work. It's already far too late and this Public Service Announcement is already way too long, and I really should have been long since curled up in bed with my wife and my new copy of HackMaster Basic instead of trying to help to keep people informed about their rights online in the face of WotC misinformation. (Seriously, Wizards, fire your legal team. They are your albatross.[1. However, if they're actually Hasbro's legal team… I'm so, so sorry. Sucks to be you.])

Finally, don't take my word for any of this. I'm not a lawyer, right, just some guy who claims to have spent 10 years reading things on the webbernets about copyright and related stuff. Take the claims I make here and go find out about these things for yourself. I've given you a starting point, and maybe introduced some legal concepts and distinctions you weren't familiar with already, so you've got some terms you can start googling.

(Aside to trolls: There's some troll food in the beer fridge, and some nice gift bags in the foyer you can grab on the way out. That's all you're going to get though, so you can save yourself the trouble of posting. Thank you, and have a nice day.)

UPDATE: For comparison, here's how TSR's fan site policy failed back in the day. I forgot to link this yesterday.

Edit to add: Welcome, readers from the Paizo boards. Flame-free comments are welcome. Some important points to keep in mind to avoid saying clueless things: I understand that you're protective of your iconics, but they're fair game for social criticism. Please don't confuse "exploitive" with "offensive"—they're different words. Having a female friend/being a woman who doesn't see any problem doesn't necessarily mean there's no problem, just that that woman doesn't think there's one. There's a difference between criticising an example of a cultural phenomenon and "speaking for all women"—I'm doing the first, not the latter. A female CEO doesn't give a free pass on exploitation or sexism: see Jenna Jameson or Sarah Palin. For context you might want to read my first post on this blog, White privilege in fantasy fiction and gaming, and consider whether the comment you have in mind will get any traction here.

I made an account at Paizo's online store when I wanted to take a look at their Pathfinder RPG beta, so I'm on their mailing list. I got a promotional email from Paizo yesterday that I was compelled to answer.

Some of you might have gotten the email I'm talking about. It's a "Season's greetings, have a discount coupon" sort of promo email. It's one of those emails that's nearly all image. Since my mail reader doesn't load external images until I say it should (for security reasons), it initially just looked like:

Dear D7: [have a big-ass image]

Minus the editorialised replacement text, of course.

The image is of a big-breasted, skimpily-dressed, White woman fondling an enormous candy-cane with a come-hither look, sitting inside a wreath against a snowy background. (She must be cold. Or maybe she just has DR/fire.) The wreath is topped by "Season's Greetings", and the words "from your friends at Paizo" sit just beneath her coyly-crossed feet and elaborately-impractical costume. Curiously, her ears are hidden so she's of indeterminate species. Maybe they didn't want to be on the wrong side of that all-important elf fetish divide.

Yes, I'm being slightly caustic. Here's the non-caustic email I sent them in reply:

Thank you for the discount coupon and well-wishing. However, I have to take exception to the image. I imagine many of your customers appreciate being shown random cheesecake, but it's not terribly professional or respectful to your female customers. I do hope you had something less exploitive of women for your female customers. Even if so (and especially if not!) this is a good time to stop and consider how this kind of careless skin-selling from a major publisher sets back gamers' attempts to make roleplaying less of a horny-boys' club. FYI, the group I run games for is more than half women.

If none of that made any sense, you're welcome to ask what I'm on about. Part of the problem is that this kind of image is considered normal in the industry, so people don't have much of a handle on what might be problematic about it.

Sincerely, d7

I'm curious what their reply, if any, will be. Paizo is known for this kind of cheesecake and fanservice, and I can only imagine the company culture that must hold sway when that's their public face. I'm not expecting much. If only they'd realise (and care) how hostile to women gamers this kind of thing is.

Despite being finished school, I've been busier than ever. My family is taking a lot of my attention, and getting the house into better order than we were tolerating while I was consumed with school is being alotted the remainder. Then, of course, there is the holidays. Failing a thoughtful post, I can give you some links that are thought-provoking.

I was looking for GM advice earlier today. (More on that below.) By some tangents I came across the site of Greg Stolze, who is the most interesting RPG designer who I've ever been only vaguely aware of. (He's no longer in that category since I've absorbed his page and starting paying better attention to him.) If you enjoy reading industry-insider reminiscing and introspection about game design, you'll enjoy reading Stolze's pages devoted to talking about the games he's worked on. As he notes, they're marketing-pitch free unless you click the links to the products' own pages. He writes about good design, bad editing, a young Jonathan Tweet, the companies that come and go, and what it's like to write the RPG for a franchise he loved as a teenager. I usually balk at reading screens of non-blog home pages, but his are well worth it.

A later tangent found me reading Communicate: Understand the Lessons You Will Teach Each Other, an old guest article at Treasure Tables. Good advice there about considering what styles of play and group behaviour are rewarded by the choices and events the GM brings to the game. Along a similar theme I found Expectations, Conditioning and Your Game: Examples and its follow-up, Rules of Thumb, over at Errant Dreams. They address the broader but more practical techniques for setting the group's expectations for a new game (or resetting them in an established one) through deliberate crafting of an introductory session and making a themes reference sheet to keep the game on-track thereafter. It's one of those ideas that only seems obvious after it's stated.

Returning to industry reminiscing, I found an archive of John Wick's entire series of "Play Dirty" articles for Steve Jackson Games' Pyramid magazine. It's badly formatted, alas, because it's in the form of an email attachment that someone once sent to a fellow gamer, which itself has been archived on the web. It's well worth reading, although I admit I only got through the first few (long!) articles while Mr Baby napped on my chest earlier today. It has a massive word count. Those of you who aren't fans of Wick should probably take it in small doses, though, because he's his usual unsettling self. People seem to either love him or hate him. He's made some great games, though.

And that wraps— wait, what? Oh, right. That game on Wednesday I promised to report on. Um. Let's just say that parts of our group—myself included, much to my chagrin—are entering the storming stage. There's a reason I was looking for GM self-help and self-improvement articles... On the plus side, storming means that norming is on the way!

Being White, I have the dubious privilege to be able to ignore race in my roleplay gaming and my fantasy fiction. It's a dubious privilege because it's one that is impossible to ever fully decline. That's not to say "poor white me boo hoo"—rather, the only moral response is to decline the privilege at every opportunity. The pervasiveness of White privilege is such that I can never catch every instance, and when I do I won't always know what I can do to reject it. The key is staying aware of the taint that filters my culture, looking for the chance to resist, and learning more about the reality that is discarded by those filters.

On that last point, some edifying links.

Pam Noles' essay "shame" is the personal story of a young girl couldn't find herself in her beloved fantasy books, her elation at discovering that Ursula K. Le Guin's character Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea is brown, and the shameful Whitewashing of the book and its racial message in the Hollywood adaptation of the book.

bankuei over at Deeper in the Game writes about the perpetuation of the white assumption in fantasy gaming by publishers and players. He particularly notes the inanity of a genre that has room for elves, wizards, half-dragon vampires, and lighting–throwing god-child alchemists who can spontaneously grow wings, but doesn't have room for any colour of human except White.

Monte Cook takes on the twin themes of race and gender in D&D art. In a genre that is all about imagining a diverse palette of possibilities, it is particularly odd that every Strapping Young Swordslinger produced by publishers is as White as bleached cotton. (And male to boot.) Monte gives the example of Regdar (an iconic character in 3rd Edition D&D): he was shoe-horned into the books at the last minute by a marketing team who assumed their target audience was male and White and who feared alienating their "core" market of male White gamers if they didn't have a dominantly-raced and -gendered character for the game's launch. Of course, that's not how it was understood at the time, but that's how racism and sexism works: "it's not biased, that's just how the world is". That attitude keeps the world seeming that way. That the design team pushed strongly for diverse art that didn't include the ever present White Male Fighter is great, despite the sabotage.

And finally, keeping this bingo card handy when engaging with race issues is probably a good way to red-flag all the ways in which we've been conditioned to perpetuate and protect White privilege. There were more than a few squares to which my reaction was to say "but that's justified!", only to realise that it was a perfect example of how otherwise good-intentioned people like me participate in the maintenance of racial imbalance.

How do I apply this to my gaming? To be honest, I don't. I'm still trying to figure out how to disrupt the White assumption in my own gaming without it being a naïve effort that ends up backfiring. I've tried playing a brown-skinned man before, but I didn't know what to do with that character detail. Playing it up would have been as bad as Hollywood's magical negro. As it was, it just sat on the character sheet and there was never a moment in the game where it entered into the narrative as a "not a big deal" detail.

As a GM I'm responsible for portraying entire cultures and worlds, and it's hard to overturn the "everyone is white" default without either being ham-fisted about it or Orientalising a culture. One way of overturning the invisibility of Whiteness (part of how it establishes itself as the default) that I've considered is just to describe the skin colour of all my characters regardless of whether they are the invisible White or a marked Other. The problem there is how to describe White characters then: do I just say White? What about actual white skin that a moon elf has? The White race isn't even homogeneous, since it's a modern construction for political and power reasons: real White skin colours range from pale pink, to tan, to olive, to yellow, and more I'm sure I'm missing.

What do you think about portrayals of race in your shared fiction?