benlehman | (no subject)

I think it depends rather strongly on whether it is more important that your gaming discussion be feminist or that your gaming discussion push the envelope.

Huh?? Here's the odd thing. I think that feminism can push the envelope. In fact, I think that commitment to feminism within gaming is likely to push the envelope, because the box that gaming currently is in is pretty non-feminist.

(deleted comment)

Agreed. So, for example, I think that Emma Wieslander's Mellan Himmel och Hav seriously pushed the envelope for role-playing, and it was very much a feminist event.

The question is -- can you do that better or worse with a strong commitment to feminist ideals in your discussion?

A lot of women are involved in gaming and have very strong viewpoints. Those viewpoints are, sometimes, wrong. Do you still listen to them?

This isn't rhetorical.

yrs--
--Ben

The best answer I have here is "sometimes."

Sometimes, viewpoints can seem wrong when you just don't understand what someone's getting at. Which is why it's dangerous to overlook people. But, there are some women that I disagree with as strongly as I disagree with anyone.

So, I think I tend to listen more carefully to the opinions of women and minorities, to make sure their concerns are acknowledged and addressed, but that doesn't mean they're always right.

Jon -- can I get personal for a second?

I feel wierd talking with you about feminism, because your recent post on Story Games about male sexuality makes me think of you as, basically, walking wounded in the gender wars.

Fuck, man! Read that shit! Read that shit you wrote! Imagine a black man talking about role-playing a black character "I don't feel comfortable exploring a black sexuality because it's dangerous. I prefer a white sexuality."

The demonization of male sexuality by both the patriarchy and feminism is an act of unspeakable evil perpetrated against our generation.

I write this not from an outsider position of judgement, but from someone engaged in the same problem.

YES.

The demonization of male sexuality by both the patriarchy and feminism is an act of unspeakable evil perpetrated against our generation.

A winner, sir, is you.

Seriously, guys? I've been on the, um, recieving end of male sexuality for a number of years now, and I've never found it particularly dangerous. The cock and its uses aren't that menacing, y'all. Sorry.

I guess I feel like Feminism gave (and continues to give) women a way of reconsidering society's rules and expectations of them. A lot of things have changed for women in the last 50-100 years and they are continuing to change, and women are talking about it and trying to figure out what new developments mean for the women's movement, etc.

But, what's missing is a movement where men start rethinking traditional conceptions of masculinity and try to figure out what it means to be a man in modern times. Instead, I think, men have just been defensively responding to Feminism, struggling to hold onto traditional male values that we think are actually positive, and trying to convince ourselves that male characteristics and sexuality are not bad. And that's not a very productive tactic and obviously I've not been able to convince myself that an active male sexuality can be non-creepy. But hopefully I'll get there eventually. So yeah.

I do realize this is an issue I have. I wasn't posting that thing to rant about the evils of male sexuality or whatever. I was just making an honest statement of how I still feel.

Yes.

And no.

Frankly, feminism has huge, huge, huge role to play in the demonization of male sexuality. When most rape inormation sites give "advice to men" as "make sure you don't slip up and accidentally rape someone" something is *wrong* and it ain't with the men.

yrs--
--Ben

I think blaming that on Feminism is unfair, like blaming all Japanese for WWII. Certainly there have been some branches of Feminism that have tried to dismantle male power structures to the point that they leave men with no real sense of identity, but saying that was the work of Feminism as a whole is misrepresenting things.

But, yeah, rape information sites should have a statement like "men get raped too, but not usually by women," and then talk seriously about male rape and then consent and that sort of thing.

Ah. So, the isolated incident defense?

Seriously, man. This is deep seated in traditional feminism. These are not isolated incidents.

I consider myself a feminist. I also think that there are huge glaring evils throughout the traditional movement, and a fuck-lot of them are around rape and sex.

yrs--
--Ben

(no subject)

funwithrage.livejournal.com - 2006-04-11 22:58 (UTC) - Expand

I guess I'm confused as to how male characteristics/sexuality *are* bad, because I'm not so much seeing that. I mean, standard gender roles, like sanity, are a prison, on that I think we can all agree...but I suppose I'm both unsure of what you mean by "male sexuality" and a bit perturbed that the batshit members of my gender have had such an influence on the culture.

The question is -- can you do that better or worse with a strong commitment to feminist ideals in your discussion?

Assume here for a moment that I want to push the envelope in a feminist manner. Then yes, I think that I can do it better with a strong commitment to feminist ideals in discussion.

As for listening to women -- sure I would. I listen to lots of people, and frankly, there simply aren't enough women involved in RPG discussions to make it a major drain for me to listen to them. There are other categories of people whom I don't listen to much. For example, I will from time to time sample what D&D and D20 players are saying. However, I don't regularly listen because there are just too many of them. But listening to women in RPG discussions... not a problem.

Hrm.

Let me put up an example.

Dogs in the Vineyard is one of the finest present examples of a game that can be used to address feminist issues. It also uses a set of technical agendas that, to put it lightly, a lot of people dislike rather strongly. In fact, a great number of the women who discuss RPGs online dislike Dogs' technical agendas.

This is cool. No harm, no foul. Different playstyles and all that.

I think that the ability of the game to address feminist issues would have been deeply impeded if these women had been involved in the development discussions. Not because they are women, but because they have conflict technical and creative agendas.

yrs--
--Ben

This begs a question for me: do you think the fact that these great number of women dislike Dogs' technical agendas is because it's just each of their personal opinion, and other women feel differently, or is there such a high correlation of 'women' to 'disliking Dogs' technical agendas' that it is possible there is actually some strong gender-associated thing going on at a more general level?

"Not because they are women, but because they have conflict technical and creative agendas" sounds like it just happens that these individual people have those conflicting agendas. But did you actually mean that women more generally have conflict technical and creative agendas where Dogs is concerned?

I'm thinking of two different cases, both of which I feel could be going on in your example above.

Case 1: individual women have a certain opinion that they don't like something, therefore they want to get rid of it. Generalizing the opinion of the specific women to 'all or most women' and letting that determine the result, with the notion that this is necessary to avoid treating 'women' badly, is stupid. The opinion of one member of a minority group does not necessarily speak for the whole group even when they claim it does; I'm personally offended by alleged feminists trying to outlaw porn 'for my own good.' If the women not liking thing X would result in a game which was less useful for both men and women to address feminist issues, letting their opinions have a disporportionate impact is a bad thing from a feminist point of view, I feel.

Case 2: individual women have a certain opinion that they don't like something, however, actually this is something that a very significant majority of women agrees on. There is a general response common to most women, whether because of shared experience, actual physiological/brain differences between women and men, who knows. De-generalizing this opinion to 'oh, that's just your personal feeling about this', and not letting it have an impact, may mean that you have produced a game that, across the board, will be less accessible, enjoyable, or useful to a certain segment of the population. In which case, maybe that game will be able to be used to address feminist issues -- but only effectively by men, and will be useless, or less useful, for that to women. That doesn't mean it's not doing something, but it's kind of ironic.

It is always going to be a judgment call how much you want to extrapolate from the opinion of one member of a particular group to make assumptions about how the entire group will tend to feel. Then it is a second judgment call how much you care. It's one thing to decide 'I don't think the problem this woman has with my game will be a problem most women have with my game.' It's another thing to decide 'I don't care if women have a problem with my game.' If you are someone who is uncomfortable producing work that has a more negative impact on women than on men, that might not be a decision you'd be likely to make or be happy with -- and to me the second decision sounds unfeminist, but the first one doesn't. I don't think you have to assume having no Y chromosome makes an individual capable of speaking for their entire gender to be feminist, no matter what their opinion, any more than I think disliking a particular individual of a certain ethnic group makes you a racist.

And the second, possibly unfeminist, part is also an issue of target audience. Excluding people from your target audience isn't necessarily good, of course, and I think it would be reasonable for women (and men as well) to be put off by a game that obviously excluded women as a group from the expected players. But as far as target audience goes, there may also be sacrifices the designer/producer/etc is not willing to make to increase the likely target audience. A blind guy comes up to you and says, 'Dude, your game sounds really awesome, can you put out a version where I can read the material?' Ok, his minority group complaint is pretty obviously general beyond his personal opinion; do you care? Do you care enough to address the issue his group has with your product? If you don't, are you insensitive?

Kendra -- Forgive me for a short answer, but I'm really getting worn out by these conversations. They're good conversations. But they're wearying.

I think that, in both cases, the best thing to do is to keep out input by people who aren't interested in your design goals or techniques.

So, in case one, where it's just a few women whose personal opinions are opposed to the game: clearly, you want to just design the game to do what it's going to do well. In the end, you've got a game that some men and some women can use to explore feminist issues. yay! If you'd let other people in to fiddle with it, you would have gotten unpleasant, artistically useless muck.

But what about the case where, say, %90 of all women have a problem with the games' process. Wow! That's pretty fucking severe. So, let's say you say "okay, %90 of women who don't like my game design -- tell me how to do it." And they do. And you get unpleasant muck, because your technical agenda is no longer matching your games goals. If you hadn't let them in, you'd have a game that (some) men and (a few) women could use to address feminist issues seriously.

So, basically, I'm in the school of never ever compromising your art.

yrs--
--Ben

So, basically, I'm in the school of never ever compromising your art.

That only works if you're sure about what you want to create. If you're open to a lot of different things, picking between them isn't "compromising."

That's true in a way.

However, I don't yet know a successful artist, at least in our tiny field of tabletop game design, whose creative process is based around "so what do *you* want?" Where you is someone not them.

yrs--
--Ben

True dat. If the buck doesn't stop with you, you're lost.

If you're not sure what you want to create, it ain't art.

Er, hold on. You jumped from "listening to people" to "tell me how to do it".

You can listen to people without compromising your art or having them tell you how to do it. Particularly in game design, I think it's useful to have feedback, rather than creating your "art" in isolation and not caring how actual people play it. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's good to have a variety of feedback. You're not going to be able to please everyone with your design, but I still think it's useful to listen to different groups of people. For example, I think feedback from a variety of religious backgrounds was useful for the Dogs design (i.e. Mormon, non-Mormon, and atheist).

Half of Vincent Baker's original group of playtesters were women. I'm going to presume for a moment that he actually did listen to them and took their feedback into account for the game. Are you saying this was a bad thing? Do you think that he shouldn't have listened to those women and instead "stuck to his art" -- which meant ignoring people who read and played his game?

John -- you're doing a thing here which is a bad thing. You are taking my words in one post and twisting them into a deformed monstrosity by ignoring the context of the posts before it.

Stop.

yrs--
--Ben

OK, I'll speak purely in my own words here.

I think that designing by mass commitee is bad. However, hearing a variety of voices in design is good. This means especially listening to people who aren't exactly like you. Game design is not like a painting or a novel. It has less personal expression of the author (though it is expression), and more a tool for others to use for their personal expression.

Demographically, the typical traditional role-player is a white male American who started playing RPGs in his teens but is now older. I think it's good to listen to people from other perspectives -- people who haven't been role-playing for years, people who aren't male, people who aren't American, and so forth. That doesn't mean asking them to tell you what your game should be. It means having them read and hopefully try out your ideas and listen to what they think.

It might make me uncomfortable at times to hear people's opinions, but I think that's a good thing.

Np, don't reply if you don't wish to. I will continue posting so long as I have things to say, unless you request otherwise.

What if 90% of the people you present your game to, regardless of gender, have a problem with the game's process? Do you say 'tell me how to do it' to them? Seems to me you'd get the same muck. My suspicion is that are ways to keep your agendas matching and still have improvements you could make to address problems people (again regardless of gender) have with your current result.

Absolutely -- don't use input by people who aren't interested in what you specifically are trying to do. But again, that's a gender-neutral thing. If you don't take input from anyone, obviously you're not being biased in what input you take. If you do make changes because of the reactions of people in one group, but regularly refuse to consider making changes because of the input of people in another group, it may be coincidence that all the input you're not taking is from people in the second group, or it may be bias.

Everyone has biases and assumptions, and those will naturally come out in their work. The more overt those are, the less likely the work is to do what you want it to do, or evoke the same kinds of things for other people that it does for you, for people who don't share your biases/assumptions. Therefore, if you want to broaden the range of people who can interact with your work in the intended fashion (which may not be what you want, since it may lessen the effect/usefulness for a narrower group), I think a certain amount of counter-bias effort is helpful, maybe even necessary. That means running your stuff by people you are aware are different from you, and possibly taking their input into consideration. Presumably these are the sort of people you still want to include in the target audience for your work, despite their differences from you.

While I'm still not convinced that men and women have truly significant mental/physiological differences as entire groups, I do believe there are differences based in culture and probable experience, and so a deliberate effort to counter-bias to some degree is probably useful. How useful or necessary any counter-bias effort is is probably related to how large a portion of the intended audience that group is. Also probably how directly the bias is related to the material -- if I'm writing something specifically relating to religions I don't follow, but I don't want people who follow that religion to reject my work because it's offensive or off base, it's more important to get input from people of that religion than people in another age bracket. But something about age issues, vice versa.

If you don't choose to change things in your work because of input, the reason you understand yourself to be rejecting the input reflects restrictions on your target audience. I'm designing this game for people who agree with theory premises X,Y,Z. I'm designing this game for women. I'm designing this game for people familiar with american culture and slang. Whatever.

I do think both accepting and rejecting input is quite different from saying 'you don't like it, ok, tell me how to do it.' That just sounds like giving up.