For a commie, I sure am a bourgeois pig. And really, the whole VSCA authorial pool is packed with this. There’s no question that it influences us and that we make mistakes because of it.

Here’s a mistake we made. In the uncorrected (which means wrong) version of Diaspora, in the platoon combat section, we have an example unit with a mind-blowingly racist Aspect — the unit is “Primitives” and the Aspect was something like “Crush the white devil”. The racist bit here is the automatic association between primitive and not-white. Now, there’s a mitigating explanation here for how it got past us that has to do with the origins and revisions of the platoon combat system (hint — it wasn’t always for Diaspora or even sf or even a role-playing game) but that’s not an adequate response. The adequate response was to acknowledge it and fix it.

So we did that. I’m proud that we did that. Because that means that we have certain kinds of blindness induced by our culture (and I’ll talk about what I mean by that in a second because it’s very specific and not vague at all in this context) but that we are capable of seeing. When the error was pointed out to us we saw and it was embarrassing and we fixed it. I’m proud of fixing that mistake. Not proud of making it, though.

Who’s we? Well the Diaspora team is four middle-aged white guys with comfortable economic situations. Okay, Byron can get downright Mediterranean when the sun hits him, but he’s still white. The other three are fish-belly white. Two are somewhere between balding and bald. This is the culture I was talking about — the four of us. And the people we deal with regularly, professionally and casually, also mostly belong to the same demographic (though with a lot more women in it, for sure). But age range and colouration and even salary are all pretty close. We belong to the privileged class of our continent, without question, and so we are bound to make decisions that reflect this unless we think really hard about every little thing.

No one has the patience for that kind of detail in a hobby (well, certainly some crazy people do, but let’s omit that large but scary category) and so we make mistakes, and sometimes they are serious boners like the one I just described. Not just “oops that’s not how you spell it” but more like “holy shit do we really think in a way that makes that not obvious?” Well, it’s at least certain that we don’t now, at least not that specific way that made that specific error not obvious, but I am certain we will make new errors in a similar vein.

We’ve added another author and playtester to the team, and he’s a middle-aged white male and balding professional. Oops.

We’ve got another guy coming to join our game in July (the guy I first played D&D with in the Old Days, with his mom as dungeon master) and he’s a middle-aged white male and balding professional.

Now, being part of this privileged class obviously has a lot of advantages as well as a set of blinders that we can’t predict very well. I mean, it wouldn’t be a privileged class if it didn’t have advantages, right? And so while there is a distinct leftist leaning through the team (some leaning much harder than others) we sure like nice things. For example, we enjoy some pretty wonderful scotches during our sessions and we’re not very shy about it. We all can afford the time to play and to experiment. We can find the tools and the expertise to help figure out how to do things that we couldn’t otherwise do. We are near the pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, meaning that significant portions of our energy are spent on (or at least available for) self-actualization rather than finding food or avoiding wild dogs. I expect that an awful lot of indie game designers are here.

This is the 99th percentile of humanity. In fact it’s rarer than that. The kind of person that can afford the energy to, as a hobby, design and develop and publish and market a role-playing game with a potential audience measured in hundreds, is a rare and super-privileged beast. We are a bizarre anomaly in the set of all humanity. And so I have to wonder, having made the particular error we did, what sorts of blinders the whole community of designers (and probably players for that matter) have. I mean, we’re not all balding white male professionals, obviously, but we all do certainly have a startling amount of leisure time and the desire (and training) to devote it intellectually and creatively. We are certainly a subset (rich enough to have leisure) of a subset (interest in games) of a subset (interested in role-playing games) of a subset (interest in game design) of a subset (motivated to actually design games). I think there are more subsets in there actually.

So we count on those outside our tiny filtered niche to let us know when we blow it. As we design games to be played, we at least have players up above our little leaf on the tree. And we even have would-be gamers closer to the trunk still. But even all the way back to “people who have even heard of role-playing games” we have a really miniscule fraction of humanity in our potential pool of observers. As the whole idea of role-playing games is to essentially pretend that you’re someone you’re not, this seems like an especially glaring problem. Are all our characters also middle-aged balding white professional males? I mean, certainly we paint them different colours (black, female, poor, angry, and so on) but are they more deeply different?

This question bugs me in part because I’m not sure I want to play a character that is genuinely all that divergent from myself in these sorts of deep ways, and that’s obviously a cultural bias. Now there are some divergences that I know I can get a handle on because they are part of the fantasy space of middle-aged balding white males — Hollowpoint, for example, lets me play a character who is all I am but also amoral and a little stupid. Someone for whom violence is a functional early resort to practically anything. One could argue that D&D also goes to this same place, but the contrast I wanted in Hollowpoint is that these guys are not justified in it in anyway. Their opposition can be the good guys in all respects, whereas in D&D you can at least point to the goblin alignment and justify any action as purging evil. Evil! When we strip the idea of absolute and (therefore?) supernatural evil out, we get into some more interesting space. Anyway, this divergence is easy and familiar — I like watching movies like Heat or Reservoir Dogs or The Bad Lieutenant. This is not new territory for me, it’s just not exactly who I am.

I dread our next staggering error. But I also welcome it. I really have no idea exactly what I can’t see. I know roughly where it is, but looking there is such a deliberate act that it can only happen in little places. There have to be huge swaths of space that I can only see if someone points it out to me. And thanks to bankuei (though I wish the author made his or her real identity easier to discover — it would lend the criticism more weight, I think, to others) for shouting about this particular error.

You should shout too, so I know where to look to see things I haven’t before.

–BMurray