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

[roseembolism]

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?

Comments

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

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.

[seawasp]

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.

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

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."