roseembolism | (UTGM): How to avoid racefail in a game world

I've been considering some of the lessons that can be learned from the Wolsung debacle, wherein the designers of a steampunk game apparently were unaware of just how racially insensitive the mixing of fantasy races with real world cultural stereotypes could be.

D&D and other fantasy games often do a lot of problematic conflating between physical and psychological and cultural attributes. Though at least D&D doesn't directly conflate real-world cultural stereotypes with its races. The question then is, can ewe avoid unfortunate racial stereotyping?

The Wolsung controversy has been valuable to me, since it gives me examples of how not to approach race and culture in the Under the Green Moon setting I'm working on. A few ideas on how to avoid the failure of Wolsung:

1. Separate physical elements of different breeds of humanity from psychological or cultural traits. It's acceptable to say "Feralin tend to be stronger and tougher than the human standard, and have excellent night vision"; it's not good to say "Feralin are less intelligent and have bad tempers."

2. Define cultural traits as tendencies or common values rather than universal absolutes. Say, "Stories written in the Ashurvalen Empire, celebrate modesty, honor, and House loyalty".

3. Write breed and cultural traits as stereotypes and reputations rather than facts: "The Feralin have a reputation in the Empire for ferocity and being close to nature."

4. Avoid making any breed inherently less intelligent our otherwise mentally handicapped. Duh.

5. Give examples of characters that break the stereotypes: "Despite the reputation Feralins have, Lord Dochatta is a cold and calculating warrior."

Does anyone have any other ideas?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hey, this is back. Though you used the wrong tag: you haven't used 'utgm' before, it was "under the green moon" in full.

My first reaction is that you have a world 30,000 years in the future, after waves of Singularity and bio-engineering, vs. Wolsung's "19th century, or not!", so as long as you're not stupidly similar to existing races you can do what you want.

Then I remembered you are using Earth, so anything you say about e.g. dark-skinned hominids in Africa will be charged, and if you don't have dark-skinned hominids in Africa that will *also* be charged. So I dunno.

Are these breeds as in varieties (in Darwin's sense) of Homo sapiens, or engineered to be reproductively isolated species? Or uplifts, ditto? You can get away with more in the latter cases, or should be able to.

And then there's the tension between what's possible and what avoids offending anyone. It's not like there's anything impossible about varieties, let alone species, with different levels of intelligence and purer distributions of personality types, especially if Lifemakers adapted human stock to the degree that we've bred dogs and altered voles.

Thanks for pointing out the tag problem- fixed now.

What you said is something I have been considering- on the one hand, after 30,000 years it's more than possible none of the current racial types will exist. On the other hand, the enclaves for Old Humanity act as a kind of "seed reservoir". It's possible for their to be dark skinned humans in enclaves in Africa and Eurasia. I can see a variety of ethnic types dissociated from current "standard" locations, as well as a lot of what we consider mixed-race. Bearing in mind of course that race is something of a social construct, and there can be a huge amount of variation in an ethnic type.

The breeds are both engineered Homo sapiens variants, as well as uplifted animals. I'm honestly not sure if the HS derived breeds are different enough for reproductive isolation- I'm inclined at this point toward a sort of "donkey + Horse" situation. Naturally, breeds such as uplifted raccoons or seals are going to be more reproductively isolated.

I also agree with that tension between possible and practical. Which is one reason I'm strongly shying away from breeds with differences in intelligence. I would doubt that even in the case of servants, that low-intelligence would be a selling point in a high-tech society. Now as to engineered psychological traits, that would be a different story- but also something that might make it hard to survive when the Lifemakers disappeared.

In game terms, the fact that I'm using FATE makes this decision easier, since there isn't a dedicated "Intelligence" stat.

Personally I'd expect Old Humanity enclaves to look like Brazil with even more mixing and 'anime' colors added in. Though the skin cancer thing might continue to select for darker skin in the sun-rich regions... assuming Old H doesn't have other anti-cancer mechanisms engineered in. Conversely, they might make their own vitamin D, with white skin having largely vanished. You can justify anything really, though I think adding exciting new colors or other aesthetic traits is probably almost certain; adding harmless pigments seems the easiest thing to do with human genetic engineering.

We know human evolution can happen in a few millennia or less, when it comes to disease resistance traits or lactose tolerance, and of course evolution is faster when adjust gene frequencies rather than building new complex organs or adaptations. I don't know when the Lifemakers vanished, but there's probably room to say "they were designed for personality X but post-collapse selection has changed things somewhat".

Of course, as I note in another comment, differences in life cycle or senses can cause robust differences. Stronger for the uplifted animals.

(Polarized vision. Electric or magnetic field senses. Magnetite deposits in fingertips. Four-color vision. Echolocation. Different art, at least... of course what's fun for SF worldbuilding may not be good gaming.)

Brazil is one of the influences on my thinking, as well as the newer multiracial depictions of Cleopatra.

I definitely think there was a lot of biological experimentation on the human form, not only with the Lifemakers, but with previous civilizations. And there is room for a lot of cosmetic tailoring. On the other hand, one reason that the Old Race Humans survived the various die backs, ascensions, disappearances or what not is that the Enclaves tend to be biologically conservative, and traditionalist in their approach to life, and humans that want more tend to depart. A comparison to the Amish might be in order; they are more likely to stick around should a Singularity or other phase change event happen.

For all that, Old Race Humans will still be healthier and longer lived than modern humans, and free of some minor evolutionary legacies and genetic problems. Nothing major like redundant spines, but minor conservative edits that could easily be passed down, like say, no impacted wisdom teeth. In some respects Old Race Humans could be considered designed for continuation.

This seems to exclude the possibility that there are, in fact, beings who are more or less intelligent, strong, etc., than others. Or that there would be true Good and Evil and thus Good and Evil species (which is a standard draw of fantasy -- the objective existence of right and wrong) and a bunch of other things.

Well in the case of Under the Green Moon, there aren't any capital-letter Good and Evil breeds, nor are there any Good or Evil cultures. There's plenty of room though for individuals and polities to do good or evil, and justify it as they will.

As for variable intelligence, I confess I'm ducking the idea, in part because the idea is so ephemeral. I just consider it such a hot-button issue that I decided even if there had been any breeds with different intelligence, that they weren't successful and are no longer around. After all, even a servant race in a high-tech culture needs to be intelligent.

Shadowrun did a pretty good job of presenting stereotypes as just that: stereotypes. They did a whole lot of items 2, 3, and particularly 5. The initial/main rulebook had the the Elven decker, making fun of the "hippie-dippie magick-user" stereotype of Elves. Then came the Street Sam sourcebook, definitely one of the first 3 released (and possibly the first) with the Orc street sam — he spoke in polite, cultured tones with sophisticated vocabulary, then lampshaded it at the end by saying, "Fine howzabout if I talk like dis? Dere, does dat sound more 'Orkish' to ya now?". Glorious.

But they even got away with not doing number 4 — I'm almost positive Orks had a minus to intelligence, and I know they had a minus to charisma. But the rulebooks explicitly called this out as bias on the part of society: People are taught to consider Orks ugly, if not fearsome or disgusting; you don't see Ork models on the covers of magazines; is it any wonder, then, that people don't react as well? If there was an intelligence penalty, it was because of poor educational opportunities.

In other words, they just went ahead and said, "Yes, racism does exist in our game universe. The people inside it are racist." But then the examples of anti-stereotypical characters added the point that "Just because the people are racist doesn't mean the reality of things is."

I tend to think that Shadowrun kind of got away with Number 4: They did do minuses to mental stats, though they explained it away as a social element. The upshot though is that Orcs and trolls had lower intelligence and charisma.

(UTGM): How to avoid racefail in a game world

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