Problematic Art

This is in response to cucumberseed's recent post on the topic of problematic material, edgy stuff, and art. Which I thought about trying to summarize but I think I'll just link you. To my friends: Please respond here, not there.

I responded and said "Yes and no. Little yes. Big no."

So I think he deserves an unpacking of that, and I thought it might be interesting for other people as well.

So. Yes and no. Little yes. Big no.

The little yes is, well, yes. As in: if you produce a work of art that's crappy and racist and sexist or whatever it is, yes. You have produced a crappy work of art. Going: "but it was the MUUUUSE" is a stupid excuse and you should own up to it and deal. Furthermore, including explicitly problematic material in your work just because you think it makes you edgy and modern is shitty. Don't do it. It just waters down your work and alienates people.

The big no is, well, no. You are not going to produce a piece of wholly non-problematic art, no matter how squishy and liberal and consciousness-raised you are. News flash: you live in a racist and sexist society. More importantly, you produce art in the context of a racist and sexist society. Your art is going to have elements of racism and sexism, as well as a host of other socially problematic bullshit. Attempting to purge these elements from your work will make your work unpleasantly tepid and no less offensive (indeed, it will often make it more problematic, not less.)

So what's to do? Seems kinda like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Here's my suggestion: Make art that's honest to your own vision, honest to the world you live in, and honest to your audience. And, yes, people are going to be offended. How could they not, if your art is an honest reflection of the offensive society that you both live in? But the important thing is that honest, well-researched, wrestled-with art creates an opportunity to confront and process the problematic material, rather than just dismissing it (as with those who simply brush past issues of, say, racism in their work with 'that's what the muse told me') or sweeping it under the rug (as those who edit all potentially problematic material out of their art do)

To take a game I played recently as an example: Poison'd, which is a game about pirates, includes rape on the list of sins your character may have committed (or might commit in play to particular mechanical effect) and includes rape also in brutalities your character might have suffered. This is really offensive to a fair number of people, it's potentially horribly problematic in play. But it's also honest to the subject matter, to the society and the world that the author and audience live in, and to the themes of the game, which include a lot of cycle-of-abuse and dysfunctional abuse relationships and such.

Check this: To do otherwise (not include rape) would be far worse: it would mean that the game didn't consider rape a sin or a suffering, that a character who blasphemed damaged their Soul in a way that a character who raped did not, that a character who was beaten suffered in a way that a character who was raped did not. That would be way, way worse.

Anyway, that's a few thoughts.

Thinking about ...

I've been thinking about, of all things, game design for boffer LARPs. I think I'm trying to tell myself that I need to work on the more technical aspects of game design. Maybe I should write an Aralis-style class and post it for savaging by the masses.

Interesting Sales note

Polaris tends to sell to people who have bought indie games before (many Polaris eBook customers already have Forge Bookshelf accounts).

Most Bliss Stage customers, by contrast, do not have Forge Bookshelf accounts: I assume they're less exposed to the community.

As for Journeying West, most customers are Stephen O'Sullivan.