Such realizations should not dissuade people from continuing to attempt the elevation of how we interact, and incite reassessments of what the hell we are doing on a daily basis to those around us.

Thanks for writing~

I have realised since writing this that the satire couldn’t reach anyone whose mind actually needed changing, for the reason you demonstrate. But, if all it did was serve as a visible display of support to the commenters who already understood the problem, then that’s good enough.

Anyway, they’re changing the icon.

What I’m more surprised by is that anyone would bother to come here to defend the slur at this point.

Why don’t you take ‘inclusive activities’ that could actually happen and don’t specifically target a minority, and then see what kind of fun over the top images you can find.

Short Story, Is that the old ball and chain applies to spouses, and spouses are not a minority group that is in danger of being prosecuted, discriminated against, or otherwised dismissed from sight.

I honestly think that you making the blackface and other signs is more offensive than the actual wrong here, if any, because not only are you calling on other people’s suffering, your doing it to prove a pretty thin point.

Other sites you might like in that case, blog and otherwise:

The Border House, mostly about videogames, but the issues are parallel and non-video games get occasional treatment. I’ve found it very thought-provoking. I discovered that blog via the next one.

Deeper in the Game. Bankuei doesn’t write as much on representation issues since he rebooted the blog, but you can see it throughout his material if you know to look. He writes some excellent and inspiring snippets of worldbuilding, among other things.

Feminist Gamers is another focused on videogames, and is currently hibernating while Mighty Ponygirl puts energy elsewhere, but it’s still good to mine for bits of interest.

Race in D&D is another inactive blog. There are only a few posts, but worth reading.

The RPGirl Project isn’t a blog, but a yearly zine written by women gamers for women gamers (and allies). Its editor is the respected indie designer Emily Boss.

As a progressive gamer it’s nice to find someone both into games and willing to discuss, in depth, issues of gender, race, and privilege. Something that is sorely lacking in the world at large, but it seems (or at least it feels that way sometimes), even more so in the gaming community.

Harmful cultural norms are harmful because the majority of people keep them alive to the detriment of the oppressed group. Having a vote on it is misguided at best.

And, as a bit of advice, calling educated beliefs about the harm done by various sociocultural systems in which we are embedded “voodoo” is both racist, and ignorant of fifty years of progress. Have a nice day!

Happy?

This post was mentioned on Twitter by direflail: @sevensideddie sees my ball-and-chain article and raises me three icons. http://bit.ly/97iz6u...

(On a sillier note, I wish I could have this post in hardcover form. It’s a masterpiece.)

I do agree with you that 4e is relentlessly self-referential. 2e and earlier were definitely well-rooted in fantasy literature that established the genre of D&D, while 4e (and 3e to a certain degree) seem to take their genre foundations from only D&D itself. I don’t think that the designers are incompetent, just that they didn’t really understand (or care to understand) the foundation that they were building on.

Sometimes it seems like 4e was less of a game design project in its own right and more of a knee-jerk reaction to the (perceived) flaws in 3e.

Shame WOTC, shame.

I am a male, but I’ve discussed this with many of my mixed groups. From my experience, there are a significant number of women gamers that like to make pinup-worthy characters. Of course they make characters that have other advantages beyond the physical, but appearance is important to them. This is fantasy and many people play games in order to imagine themselves having attributes they don’t have.

But I’ve been looking through a lot of art and trying to judge which I saw as more offensive – trying to separate myself from preconceptions. In the ones I’ve seen, a lot of the most offensive ones are “pinups” – images where it looks like the women are deliberately posing for the camera. I’ve found that action pictures are often less offensive. Pictures showing female characters not as sex objects, but as daring adventures. In many cases, these are sexy women. But these pictures don’t start and end at sexuality.

The core design problems here are twofold. First, there’s what I think of as the “Diablo issue”. Basically, the moment-to-moment gameplay in RPGs can suffer because the game design prioritizes building a powerful character over everything else. Strategic concerns like min-maxing and careful loot management are the only real priority; once those have been taken care of, combat itself winds up requiring no active thought. (This is not an inherent problem, simply a pattern of poor design)

Second, there’s the matter you’re getting at. In the end, the game determines what players must do to achieve their goals. 4e suffers because all they have to do is make a few quick decisions. My most well-received rpg, Trigger Discipline, is designed with this principle in mind; improvising over-the-top descriptions of your character’s badass accomplishments is an essential part of the mechanics, and the key to a player’s success.

I hate to compare apples to oranges but those guys saying “it is not an issue” sound an awful lot like the sports fans who say that Native American themed “mascots” are not offensive — while Native Americans are saying, these are offensive!

Interesting blogroll over there, by the way, and I really enjoyed your “pull a level” post. Thanks!

Because often people think something is ‘okay’ simply because they have drawn no line in the sand for themselves on what isn’t okay.

Once they draw a line in the sand they might look at what they’ve done and start to see similarities to crossing that line.

But you have to prompt them for an example of what would be wrong, first.