Quote from: fonkaygarryCue the griffon-riders making a mockery of the US Border Patrol.

"Hey, let's go beat us up some Elfxicans."

"No way, man.  You mess with one leaf, you get the whole tree."

Okay, I think I see what's going on. :rolleyes:

Peaseblossom writes:

QuoteOkay, so, a while back I was all like "I wish there were a bunch of feminist gaming blogs that did feminist critique of new gaming products and stuff like all those awesome feminist comic book blogs," and everyone was like, "Why don't you just do it?" and I was all, "Because I don't actually buy/read that many new games. Duh."

And then Jere picked up Spirit of the Century, and I was grousing about it, and he entreated me to write something about it, so here goes:

She's talking about Karen Healey's excellent blog Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed.  Karen writes about over-the-top sexism and misogyny in current comics.  Supergirl's mini-skirt, Frank Millers cast of 1000 hookers, and so on.  She reads lots of comics, and has very good insights into why they're bad for women AND men.

Now, Peaseblossom wants to do the Karen Healey thing... but she doesn't read new RPGs, so she decides to ape Karen's style by doing a hatchet job on the first new game she gets her hands on.

Most of the negative commentary is indeed about the illustrations and sample characters.

Fred Donoghue's response is pretty spot on:

Quote from: Fred DonoghueSo I'll say again, I think you're pretty off-base, and I'm frustrated that you're choosing to focus on a subset of the images when the whole body of art is, I think, pretty balanced. And again, it comes off like you're eager to be offended by the stuff. It saddens me, and I think it cheapens the valid bits of the critique.

She is eager to be offended.  She wants to read RPGs and be pissed. Like Karen.

Quote from: Dr Rotwang!"Hey, let's go beat us up some Elfxicans."

"No way, man.  You mess with one leaf, you get the whole tree."

"So? Just put a bigger Weed-Wacker on our shopping list."

Quote from: Dr Rotwang!Personally, I like the idea of just ignoring it and going the Shanghai Noon way.  Yeah, it's a woman, a black guy, two gay dudes and a couple of Thai folks.  They fight crime!  Oh, no -- Polish robots attack New York!

EXACTLY!

Quote from: blakkie"So just put a bigger weed wacker on the shopping list."

"Nah, forget it.  It's time for schul anyway."

"Wait -- who the fuck are we, again?"

"Uh... think we're white trash jews.  Only you're Vietnamese and I'm gay."

"I'm confused.  This campaign is fucked-up."

"Yes.  Let's go play Frogger at the Circle-K."

"Word."

Quote from: JimBobOzMockery is almost always productive.

Well, there we will just have to agree to disagree.  I find mockery simply induces the mocked party to get angry and irrational and dismiss the opinions of the mocker.  

QuoteIf a white middle-classed straight male is going to write about "The Other", then he won't be able to do it well without a bit of self-doubt, and questioning of himself.

Again, I'm happy to wait until I see the finished product before I judge how well Bruce can do it.  But then again, I'm a white, hetrosexual, middle-class male, so I wont be in any position to judge :rolleyes:

QuoteMockery creates self-doubt, and can lead to a person questioning themselves. "Is a teapot really good for a hat?" Either the mocker's comment is somewhat true, in which case it should be listened to; or the mocker's comment is untrue and wrong, in which case it should be easy to deal with in a short response.

An interesting perspective.  Personally, I tend to favour positive reinforcement rather than mocking people, but maybe that's just all the wanky management training courses I've done

Further excellent responses from Rob:

QuoteI'd also like some more helpful suggestions for either incorporating or ignoring those 'ugly truths' in my game.

An awful idea, from my perspective. Just awful. From my perspective, we put more than enough stuff about the ugly bits into the game. We didn't want the game to be *about* the ugly bits of the past -- that's a message that runs counter to the light, breezy fun vibe we wanted. So we hung a lantern on it, said it was there so you don't get ugly surprises if you go researching the materials. But to make it a big point of the game? No thanks, honestly.

The biggest hurdle for me is the list of character ideas

A fair critique, there. Honestly, if anything, the reason these weren't presented as Gadget Guy/Gal, Gentleman/Lady Criminal, yadda yadda was that the slashes looked really distracting and ugly. We should have varied it more, certainly, but decided to let that be something that played out in character examples. Sally Slick is a Gadget Gal. Claire Holloway is a Woman of Mystery. Etc.

Also note that the character types grew out of our actual play, with a mixed gender group of players, some of whom preferred to play male characters.

Six are men, two are women

Again, this grew as much out of actual play as anything, but with us paring the list down to iconic characters for the game.

Femme Fatale

I cheerfully assert it would have been a shitty, shitty game without a femme fatale in it. Again: iconic characters for the genre.

Rocket Red, the Femme Fatale, isn't wearing any pants

Y'know, I can see why you see that, and it completely slipped by me (and I'm the guy who coordinated and directed the art). I guess I chose to see her as wearing tight pants/a sleek flight-suit rather than baring skin, what with it being black & white. Apologies for the gaffe.

It's not the worst art ever, but it certainly could be better, in terms of showing women actively doing pulpy things.

You're also being selectively ignorant with your examples. You left out several very key illustrations of Sally in action.

One shows her rescuing Jet Black, who's been chained to the face of Big Ben, in danger of getting pulled apart/crushed by the movement of the hands.

Another shows her outnumbered three to one by shadow men, as she swings her big wrench through the gut of one, cutting it in half.

A third shows her building gadgetry.

Which makes me say, uh, yeah... we sure made her look like a chump. I mean, she rescues men from danger, fights as well as or better than any of them, and builds crazy machinery. How dare we also show her needing a little rescuing (by the guy she has a crush on, no less), diving for safety, or being more alert than the bumbling guys she's surrounded with!

Just to be clear, I'm totally on board with some of your complaints. You're right; we didn't put a heavy focus on making sure we did the gender balance act throughout the book, and that's going to be offputting for some women. Then again, we had a female editor go over the book, and had the book proofread by my wife, and made one of our central, iconic characters a Rosie the Riveter-esque persona who was based on the player's actual grandmother (whose real name was, in fact, Sally Slick). So if you want to suggest we didn't make an honest effort to be pro-female, I'm gonna laugh at you. Good-naturedly, but I'll laugh.

I feel like you needed us to be perfect, and I'm sorry that we weren't. I can guarantee you we'll fall short of that mark every time; we're men, so perfection's out of our reach.

Quote from: Tyberious FunkAn interesting perspective.  Personally, I tend to favour positive reinforcement rather than mocking people, but maybe that's just all the wanky management training courses I've done

I think everyone needs a bit of both. A lot of carrot, a little bit of stick.

Everyone else was drooling over the idea and begging Baugh to have their babies. Carrots. It was time for a bit of stick. Which, you know, managers do, too. If someone comes in on time a lot, positive reinforcement time. If he's regularly late, they don't use positive reinforcement, then.

Mockery is good. But it ain't the only good thing in the world.

It's worth noting that Brand Robbins has some further thoughts on the project. Check it out.

The comments are also interesting. Ten bucks says "Matt Wilson" is a WASP: "I have this little daydream about people playing a game based on Bruce’s supplement and then thinking, hey, we should go out and actively fight discrimination in the real world, too."



Of course that is not, thank God, the stated aim of Baugh & Robbins. Just one of their drooling fanboys. But still... it's a scary thought.

Quote from: Dr Rotwang!Personally, I like the idea of just ignoring it and going the Shanghai Noon way.  Yeah, it's a woman, a black guy, two gay dudes and a couple of Thai folks.  They fight crime!  Oh, no -- Polish robots attack New York!

Allow me to simply say that your suave 80's stylings combined with masterful bon-mots such as this make me devoutly wish you were a girl.

Or I was. Or we we gay. Or something.

Um... hey, yeah, its the Jager talkin'.

(POLISH robots? It must be pulp!)

Quote from: JimBobOzIt's worth noting that Brand Robbins has some further thoughts on the project. Check it out.

Brand quotes Bruce as saying, "I'll be providing examples for this stuff, and likely quoting William Burroughs on the three types of cops."

Wonderful.  Let's quote a guy who shot a woman in the head and killed her while drunk.  How about a William Burroughs quote about how to kill a woman and get away with it, how to bribe Mexican authorities for favorable treatment, or how to skip out on a homicide conviction?  The capacity for people to ignore the corpses produced by their heroes never ceases to amaze me.

Quote from: John MorrowThe capacity for people to ignore the corpses produced by their heroes never ceases to amaze me.

Like I said on my LJ, "Ah, the obliviousness of geeks, I love it!"



(I should note in passing that I keep spelling Brand's surname wrongly - it's Robins, not Robbins. I don't know where I got the second one from.)

I'm sorry, but I still don't get it.  What's your beef with this project?  So far, both Bruce and Brand have seemed pretty reasonable to me.

I simply dont see the need for it. There comes a point when these things stop being games and become...something else. This may be an ideal example.

When you agree to play an RPG you are suspending reality. RPG's are a dressed up version of "let's pretend". Why would you even want to go where this is going? How is this fun?

I've ran quite a few Pulp games and my players and npc's have run the gamut from Filipino boxers, Australian P.I.'s, Mexican Priests, and an Oxford educated Punjabi physician (who happened to be a weretiger). Never did racism or bigotry show up in the game. It didn't need to. My players and I are all too aware of the historical racism of the period and the ethnocentrism inherent in the pulps, but we chose to ignore it to have fun playing the game.  Remember fun?

It's almost condescending in the way Black history month is.  here Black people you can have this month, Mexican's you get Cinco de Mayo (whatever that is), Italians you used to get Columbus day but the Native americans got mad so were gonna have to find you something else...

By creating a supplement of this nature, it seems that the publishers are saying:
Attention ladies and people of color. you  now have your own supplement. so if your character is a Wong or a Gomez please convert your PC to comply with this new "special" supplement we have made for all of you.

The publishers may think they are doing something neat or noble but all they are doing is making race an issue where it never was. Justice Inc. Mercenaries, spies and private eyes, GURPS Cliffhangers, Top secret: Agent 13, none of them went to this extreme in making race an issue.

Visit the various Pulp boards. we all know that racism and bigotry is a fact in the pulps. It's discussed and grudgingly accepted as a reflection of the times. We are well aware of it's existance, you dont have to shove it in our face during a game.

My blog entry about this subject.

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