Ephemera

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 - 11:46 AM

Squeezing my brain through academia's narrow halls can be a time-consuming occupation, and these past weeks have certainly been claustrophobic. I am certainly under no shortage of items that need to be taken care of, fixed, attended to and so on. I've noticed that in those times when I am busiest, my creative well starts overflowing and I feel like I've drank too much coffee.

Ideas don't like being confined. When they start to grow, they fill up one's nerves to the exclusion of other things. The mind desires their release. At the moment, I've got a few too many concepts that I'm spinning out into interesting threads, and they are all getting tangled up before I can properly weave them into text. Part of it is lack of time and focus to untangle the thoughts from one another. I've had to dedicate myself to study (particularly of Chinese language).

In brief, I'd like to thank those who chimed in on my rant last post about sexism in RPGs. All perspectives are good to consider, but I want to add that how we portray RPGs in terms of writing, presentation, theme and so on contributes to the creation of a culture. This is similar to the video game industry, though with a somewhat smaller audience. Naturally, I believe that everyone should take responsibility for their own thoughts and feelings and not simply ascribe their love of absurdly proportioned scantily clad women to 'social pressure'. I don't think you should ever excuse someone from being sexist just because they are exposed to sexist material. That said, why promote it?

The average gamer probably doesn't think much beyond gaming being escapism, which is no problem for me. Designers and writers, however, should be wary of viewing gaming as simply that. Gaming can be a powerful experience in which new perspectives and views can be gained. It can be a tool for increasing the vocabulary of the mind and soul. As creators of ideas, writers and designers have to acknowledge the subtle power they wield to shape perceptions in other people. This is particularly true in those sources of information which people use for escapism, because escapism becomes something with a lot of emotional investment.

The presentation of an idea is nearly as important as the idea itself, of course. Pasting a bunch of overly sexualized motifs on a product just to sell it is socially irresponsible, in my opinion. Pasting a bunch of overly sexualized motifs on a product meant to parody the extremes in our society is another matter.

Recently, I got in contact with an artist and musician who has been a source of great inspiration to me over the years (I'll forgo mentioning who, as I don't want to violate his privacy). The fellow lives in Europe, and we found some common ground chatting about RPGs. Something in particular I found interesting was the disparity between a European edition of a game and the American edition of the same game, notably the game Kult.

Kult has a by-turns awkward and brilliant game system that provides a skeleton for stories of personal horror. THe premise of the game is highly gnostic in outlook, in that the world you believe you are in is all a huge lie. I'm not going to go into details about the setting here, but in my experience a good many people run Kult as a kind of gritty gun-fest of a game where you occasionally do awful things to each other and generally get into a lot of combat. I had the blessing of being introduced to Kult by a GM who really liked the deep psychological angle of the game, but a perusal of the books released for the game definitely shows an emphasis for a kind of splatterhouse approach. There was very little horror and a great deal of shock. In discussion with the aforementioned artist, I found out that the original edition of Kult released in Europe had very little emphasis on the shock, gore and guns and leaned much more towards the personal part of the personal horror genre it claimed to be. Specifically, there was mention that the equivalent of demons in Kult were blatant, Clive Barker-esque walking atrocities in the American writing but in the original, they were much more subdued and subtle.

Kult is not a nice game. It is about loss and madness and the horrible things that humanity does to itself. The original edition presumes that those playing it are mature enough to look at these themes and explore them carefully in the context of the RPG. The American edition still has some seeds of the original intent, but it is often blanketed in the sensationalist guns-and-blood portrayal which (I can only assume) was intended to make it more marketable to an audience that probably shouldn't be playing the game anyway. It is like handing a copy of American Psycho by Ellis to your average 13 year old. They may be able to understand it, but they probably don't have the depth of experience or wisdom to dig under the atrocities of the text to find deeper meaning. By marketing RPGs with sexist motifs without regard for the audience, we are inadvertant teachers.

I suspect sometimes that these reasons are why I'm so horrible at selling my own work. More fiction on the way, for my highly limited audience.

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  3 Comments:

At March 25, 2011 at 6:30 PM, Blogger C Hanson said...

Looking forward to the fiction. ;-)

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At July 8, 2011 at 5:51 PM, Blogger C Hanson said...

*cough* fiction? */cough*

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At March 13, 2016 at 1:31 PM, Anonymous Piercing said...

No, ideas don't like being confined and good ideas should never be held back.

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