Quote from: jhkim;480256I think "It's just a game" is no more or less an out than "It's just a movie" or "It's just a comic".  Obviously fiction isn't the same thing as reality, but it still has meaning.  I personally would have a problem if there was a scene in the Lord of the Rings movies where the heroes went through butchering up orc women and children and told themselves with authority that it was the good thing to do.  Can you honestly say that you would be fine with it?

I'd honestly be as fine with the heroes in a movie doing that so long as they were defined as irredeemable creatures of Evil and the heroes treated it like a grim necessity rather than a good time.  I see it as little different than killing zombies (which have not only been depicted as babies and children but also as having sentience -- e.g., the zombies in The Return of the Living Dead, that included one that requests more paramedics from the radio dispatcher so he could eat their brains).

On the other hand, I was troubled by James Bond, in Goldeneye, shooting Russian police officers who were just doing their job in order to escape a police station.

Quote from: jhkim;480264Can you answer the same question honestly?  i.e. In the Lord of the Rings movies, would you have no problem with a scene of the good heroes butchering up a bunch of helpless orc women and young?  

Yes, because there are no orc women and young, and Jackson took enough smegging liberties as it was.

Would I object to that same scene in Game of Thrones (not having read the books first)? No, not at all.

QuoteIf you want more specifics, perhaps picture it when the Ents along with Merry and Pippin were attacking Isengard.  No gore is shown, just some ugly little orc young trying to get away - and we see the Ents crushing them while Merry and Pippin try to help out, pointing out ones that are being missed.  

Sure, it's just fantasy, but I still would have a problem with it.

Why?

QuoteWe still identify with characters and situations in fantasy in exactly the same way that we do in other fiction.  Framing things as fantasy makes things more distant, but it doesn't become abstract notions divorced from any meaning.

Well, I usually identify with protagonists, not so much undead anglo-saxon bogeymen. I identified with Ripley, not really with the Aliens for example.

QuoteAs an alternative:  Do you think that any meaning behind James Cameron's Avatar can be excused because it is just fantasy?

What about Ferngully 2's plot needs "excusing"?

Quote from: jhkim;480264Can you answer the same question honestly?  i.e. In the Lord of the Rings movies, would you have no problem with a scene of the good heroes butchering up a bunch of helpless orc women and young?  If you want more specifics, perhaps picture it when the Ents along with Merry and Pippin were attacking Isengard.  No gore is shown, just some ugly little orc young trying to get away - and we see the Ents crushing them while Merry and Pippin try to help out, pointing out ones that are being missed.  

Sure, it's just fantasy, but I still would have a problem with it.  

We still identify with characters and situations in fantasy in exactly the same way that we do in other fiction.  Framing things as fantasy makes things more distant, but it doesn't become abstract notions divorced from any meaning.  

As an alternative:  Do you think that any meaning behind James Cameron's Avatar can be excused because it is just fantasy?

See above. It may be in poor taste, but it's not an indication of inherent racism in the product.

You toss around hypothetical movie scenes for the next year, it won't make the premise of the OP any more sound. No, I would have no moral problem with any LotR movie that displayed "orc children" being stomped by ents. It would be irritating because it would be too big a deviation from the books, but morally wrong? Not really.

I fail to see what Avatar has to do with whether D&D contains racist ideas simply because it makes orcs an evil race. The OP is trying to convince us that orcs = black people. Let me ask you, do you believe D&D orcs = black people? Do you believe that if a DM describes, in his or her campaign, orcs that are evil and that are attacked on sight by the "good" races, they are promoting a real world racist agenda and glorifying colonialism?

Quote from: jhkim;480264Can you answer the same question honestly?  i.e. In the Lord of the Rings movies, would you have no problem with a scene of the good heroes butchering up a bunch of helpless orc women and young?  If you want more specifics, perhaps picture it when the Ents along with Merry and Pippin were attacking Isengard.  No gore is shown, just some ugly little orc young trying to get away - and we see the Ents crushing them while Merry and Pippin try to help out, pointing out ones that are being missed.

And if they were zombie children, sentient enough like the zombies in The Return of the Living Dead that they could carry out a conversation with you, who had an irresistible urge to eat your brains (which they could tell you, clearly and distinctly), would you be troubled by the Ents stomping them and Merry and Pippin pointing them out?

Quote from: S'mon;480238The SPLC isn't very reliable though - they class all kinds of people as Hate, from actual Haters (Aryan Nation, Nation of Islam) to, well, people who clearly aren't.

You do not know what you are talking about. The SPLC is an excellent organisation that has perhaps the most comprehensive knowledge of hate groups, their organisation, methods and operation in America short of the FBI.

Quote from: jibbajibba;480243But jhkim's point is more subtle. The fact is that racists can make those points from D&D. They can't make those points from many games.

I was thinking along those lines myself.  I am sure someone can imagine the darkies building their houses and hotels in Monopoly, but I hardly think that would be the same level of investment.

Quote from: David R;480246Since I'm saving my effort for Stormbringer's thread, I'll just say this. All this is rather silly. A role playing game is perhaps the best way to transmit or reinforce dodgy vile ideas within a social context. Add to this the cathartic elements of the game and a manipulative GM/Group, the potential to warp impressionable minds is great. Better than any other artistic medium. Most agenda driven games are basically didactic exercises.

Regards,
David R

Excellent points.

Quote from: StormBringer;480278I was thinking along those lines myself.  I am sure someone can imagine the darkies building their houses and hotels in Monopoly, but I hardly think that would be the same level of investment.

I don't see how someone could read racism out of monopoly? - though there is a racist version.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghettopoly

I could totally see Chess being misconstrued as racist, though. If "white" and "black" are ideological rather than racial tags, you should be able to convert captured pawns to your colour, rather than killing them. And White gets an unfair advantage.

Why does White start? Because White is better. That's it. Chess = subliminal racism.

Quote from: S'mon;480105Yeah, but... in that New Left diaelectic "The Personal is Political" and everything is a political act.

Same for the rightists. I mean, you don't get more personal than what you do with your genitals for fun, but "conservatives" are usually very, very worried about that. For them, the personal is extremely political.

Fuck 'em.

Quote from: S'monWe don't have to agree, but it's worth understanding that they've been indoctrinated in this stuff - they were the guys actually paying attention in the compulsory Citizenship/Civics class, in the Diversity Training seminars and all the other places where the Left-Leitkultur is disseminated.

I think it was Aos or Jeff who said, "the internet: where freshman year at university never has to end."

It's over now, for most of us. Get over it. Not every act is imbued with greater meaning.

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;480131Media should always be taken seriously.

Should it? Why?

Quote from: Kaiu KeiichiAnd if I want a mindless diversion, I'll raid in WoW.

Fallacy of false dichotomy. Between "mindless diversion" and "my game world is a metaphor for these real-world political issues dear to my heart" is a wide and sane middle ground where we can have rpg campaigns with interesting themes which aren't all preachy.

Quote from: Kaiu KeiichiAnd, colonialism is bullshit

If colonialism is bullshit, then we definitely have to hate and kill orcs, since as I already described, they have a god who tells them to conquer and enslave the whole world. Gruumsh is like the Cecil Rhodes of the D&D world.

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;480135Stop dodging the responsibility bullet.  Every piece of media, everything is political and a statement of values.  Gaming can't help but represent what *we* are, it comes from us.

Sure. But like everything else, it's an expression of part of me, not the totality of me. That I have sex with my wife from time to time does not mean I am nothing but a sex maniac. That I train PT clients each day does not mean I am nothing but a trainer. That I like sunsets does not mean I want to sit and watch one every single day.

Likewise, that I enjoy having a fighter butcher orcs horribly does not mean that I wish I could do it in real life.

Quote from: Kaiu KeiichiNext time I run fantasy gaming, I might have the PCs be all from an Orc tribe.  That would be fun to explore.

So you're going to explore colonialism from the point of view of the colonists? Interesting.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;480172And yet: Stormfront RPG groups exist (no link to spare Pundit hair pulling). So it is part of what RPGs do, whether intentionally or not.

Intentions matter. It's like saying that a tomato sauce bottle is inherently sexual because someone stuck one up his jacksie once. It's not a sexual object by intention. And most rpgs aren't racist by intention. It's not the tomato sauce bottle maker's fault. "But they made it sort of cylinder shaped, and a penis is basically a cylinder - I should sue them for my internal injuries." No, if you stick a sauce bottle up your jacksie, it's your fault you're a pervert.

Likewise if you use rpgs to express your racist/classist/etc views. So for example GamerDude has told us he has no homosexual characters in his game worlds. Obviously he doesn't like them, and wishes they didn't exist. Since he is too lazy to go out in small gangs of shaven-headed unemployed bums beating gays up, he just waves his hand and they don't exist in his game setting. His fantasy world is one where gays don't exist. So he's using his rpg sessions to express his bigoted views. This makes him a cocksmock. But it's not the fault of whoever wrote GamerDaddy's favourite rpg that GamerDude is a homophobic cocksmock.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;480274You do not know what you are talking about. The SPLC is an excellent organisation that has perhaps the most comprehensive knowledge of hate groups, their organisation, methods and operation in America short of the FBI.

King of the Hate Business by Alexander Cockburn (Also published in The Nation behind a paywall):

QuoteWhat is the arch-salesman of hate mongering, Mr. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, going to do now? Ever since 1971, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with his fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC. Nine years ago, Ken Silverstein wrote a devastating commentary on Dees and the SPLC in Harper's, dissecting a typical swatch of Dees' solicitations. At that time, as Silverstein pointed out, the SPLC was "the wealthiest civil rights group in America," with $120 million in assets.

[...]

But where are the haters? That hardy old standby, the KKK, despite the SPLC's predictable howls about an uptick in its chapters, is a moth-eaten and depleted troupe, at least 10 percent of them on the government payroll as informants for the FBI. As Noel Ignatiev once remarked in his book "Race Traitor," there isn't a public school in any county in the U.S.A. that doesn't represent a menace to blacks a thousand times more potent than that offered by the KKK, just as there aren't many such schools that probably haven't been propositioned by Dees to buy one of the SPLC's "tolerance" programs.

What school is going to go on record rejecting Dees-sponsored tolerance?

Dees and his hate-seekers scour the landscape for hate like the arms manufacturers inventing new threats and for the same reason: It's their staple.

The SPLC's latest "Year in Hate" report claims that in 2008 the number of hate groups rose to 926, up 4 percent from 2007, and 54 percent since 2000. The SPLC doesn't measure the number of members in the groups, meaning they probably missed me. Change that total to 927. I'm a hate group, meaning in Dees-speak, "one with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people," starting with Dick Cheney. I love to dream of him being waterboarded, subjected to loops of Schonberg played at top volume, locked up naked in a meat locker. But the nation's haters are mostly like me, enjoying their (increasingly circumscribed) constitutionally guaranteed right to hate, solitary, disorganized, prone to sickening relapses into love, or at least the sort of amiable tolerance for All Mankind experienced when looking at photos of Carla Bruni and Princess Letizia of Spain kissing.

Quote from: jibbajibba;480243But jhkim's point is more subtle. The fact is that racists can make those points from D&D. They can't make those points from many games.

They can make that point from any game that includes a racial or species modifier to anything.  I guess WEG Star Wars is racist then because Wookies get a bonus to strength.

Chess is a good metaphor for white supremacy too, see there are these pawns, which are really niggers...  it's idiotic.

The strength of a role-playing game is its imaginative power.  It's a tool, nothing more.  I care what RPG Stormfront uses to spread their filth about as much as I care about what paper they use when they print their newsletters.

Quote from: jhkim;480256It's fine to enjoy genocide

Oh god, we're back to this useless strawman again.  Oh yeah that's right, backdoor defense of Poison'd, of course the strawmen have to fly.

Completely killing all the orcs in the Caves of Chaos that have been raiding the areas around the Keep on the Borderlands is not genocide.  

Show me one module, adventure, what have you where the de facto assumption is to have players actively seek out and destroy orcs wherever they are found in the world, or even country....

That's not what happens.  Even the fucking Dwarves don't do that.  Orcs are everywhere, you'll never kill them all, they probably outnumber every demi-human race combined.  What happens in the vast majority of D&D situations is, a particular group of orcs is encroaching on civilization and must be killed because if not, then they will destroy the humans there.  If you don't completely root them out and kill them where they have taken hold close to civilization, they will return.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;480220And I clarified what I meant by that post. I wasn't saying there are no racist gamers, I was saying that racism isn't a natural outcome of gaming.  

And that point is still wrong. There is nothing unnatural about the Stormfronters using D&D as a recruiting tool, because they don't have to change a single thing about the game itself when they pervert it into a recruiting tool. All of the elements that they stress are elements that exist in the game as written.

They make much over the fact that some races are better than others and some races are good and others evil. That is basically their whole argument, so what makes D&D an "unnatural" thing for them to use?

Or to put it another way: when they made a racist version of Doom where you shot ethnic minorities, they had to change a considerable amount of code. When they make games of Dungeons and Dragons to promote racial separation and the murder of other races, what exactly do they have to change?

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;480291Or to put it another way: when they made a racist version of Doom where you shot ethnic minorities, they had to change a considerable amount of code. When they make games of Dungeons and Dragons to promote racial separation and the murder of other races, what exactly do they have to change?

-Frank

So changing some sprites to make demons into jews or blacks and changing pentagrams on the walls to swastikas is "considerable amount of code", huh?  It's nothing more then a new paint job, pretty much exactly what they would do to D&D, or Space Hulk, or Magic: The Gathering.