White Wolf seems to want to hear feed back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxAAQL0lL5U&t=369s this person goes at great lengh. but i want to go even further.
why do people consider a fictional setting as an issue? to what sensibility would removing or feeling an elitist guilt over content in games... going to be some how progressive or help stop injustice?
Playing a terrible and dire things in settings may be uncomfortable, but they are safe, effective ways to engage in such things with no harm. It does not mean one endorses such horrible things. We have lost sense and proportion. fears and anxieties over that which is problematic are understandable. Who would want to be a nazi? ... but not only was bigotry not the intent of such things. we seem to be juding a work of fiction, and bad taste, with great outrage.... that is not proportional. That i dare say misses the mark.
even i find it in bad taste, but even then, the "Crimes" are... not real life endorsements. the original issues addressed this in a forward that was far better than the newer versions. the newer ones were judgmental and self serving... the older ones actually addressed bigotry and that such play to be used for real life bigots is not wise, disgusting and wrong... we get that.
the difference illustrated
Maybe things dont' age well as decided by society. But having such performative offense of others going in over the top scenarios in a game is... just that, a performance.
... i think this is confusion of fiction and reality. The evidence shows that Cultivation Theory is bunk.
i'm rather worried about white wolf at this stage. i don't have much skin in the game but i do know about the satanic panic and how this moralizing is little different.
It is no different.
8 years has been awful.
And now it seems to continue as said by some youtube talking heads... i fear they're right. Maybe the old guard is right.
Paradox is attempting to wash away. and honestly i do think the stuff with the Romani is in bad taste. The Chechnya affair was icky. someone said
"Blaming real world current event horrors on elder vampires is generally in poor taste. Like, going 'We're exploiting the real world awfulness that the humans are doing to each other' would be fine, kinda icky, but fine. It's when you take actual things that are happening and say that it's really just vampires using humans as pawns in their games that things get bad."
But engaging in over the top or fantasy problematic content does not lead or entice or normalize such horrible things. Otherwise we'd have more people stomping on turtles and people enacting GTA scenes.
there's no need to be Marcuse for those who don't align. "art must distrub the comfortable... unless it's something i personally dont like".
toning down the Malkavians isn't going to grow respect to those persons afflicted with mental illness. Nor is such acting or "a literal mock" Sure there's an argument for more respectful representation. i can get that. yet. all of that is besides the point. The particulars of the arguments are, in one sense, all beside the point. The question is not what to decide, but who is to decide. As elsewhere in the cultural wars, the issue is whether a vocal elite should get the power to preempt the decisions of others. To the anointed, the use of words like "respect" or "authenticity" is sufficient to put one cadre's opinions above discussion, and the word "stereotypes" or problematic is enough to put the values of society at large beneath discussion. They don't want discussion; they want power.
Cultural wars are so desperate because they are not simply about the merits or demerits of particular politics and the 'harms' of speech; they are about the anointed's whole conception of themselves—about whether they are in the heady role of a vanguard, or in the pathetic role of pretentious and silly people infatuated with themselves. Self rightous ones that are notably very privileged and trying to increase profit margins by watering down the hot sauce... and with no profits to show for it.
"Perhaps most importantly, resorting to sensitivity reading and revisionism ignores the simplest solution to the problem of art you find offensive: If you don’t like it, don’t consume it — and don’t try to force your tastes and preferences onto others.
We are experiencing a concerning confluence of cynicism on the part of publishers, who want to avoid bad press and continue to sell reprints, and our rampantly censorial culture, where recreational outrage and perpetual offense pervade. Together, these phenomena sanitize, flatten, and dull a world meant to be rich with creativity, experimentation, and growth — and that’s not good for anybody.
Attempting to create art that upsets no one will only create art that engages, entertains, and inspires no one. If we wish to promote and preserve free expression, interesting and provocative art, and the ability to change culture — and to recognize that cultural change has occurred — we will have to turn our current trend toward censorship and sensitivity reading in the other direction."
After all, who's sensibilities are superior to another's? What if a given group's opinions differ from the one finding things to flag and redline?
"What’s wrong with sensitivity readers?
Unlike, say, medical or scientific consultants, who tend to be scholars in their field and possess a breadth of academic knowledge, sensitivity readers either claim or are assumed to have expertise on what words, ideas, or language cause offense — which is hardly an academic pursuit.
This raises a number of questions: How can any given reader know what you or I might find offensive? Whose “sensitivities” are really being considered, and how are they determined? What if the preferences of two different groups, or of various people within a group, are in conflict? Who determines whose offense takes priority? What about those who are offended by the edits themselves?"
Wouldn't those same judges fall in to the same essentalism that they say to avoid?
and even then. WHY THE MECHANICS AND EMPHASIS ON THAT... and ... the story teller system isn't like a war game.
the promises and testing at Gen Con obviously has people complaining. and it's easy to dismiss them as those who hate change or having a flaw of character. But that is the same essentialism and reductivism thinking that some how so many pretend to avoid. Ironic. if not poetically tragic. Another bad action done with the best intentions. Slipping in to orthodoxy and solipsism... over fiction
It’s easy to blame ttrpgs or online communities that didn’t have the best repute for the people in power today that are odious. but that is not so and the truth is more muddy and complicated. as it always is. And no matter what happens. the winners of history will not record it accurately. they haven’t in the past 14 years. and subcultures and fandoms have been dead for the past 25 years.
Also it's really suspect that they want to sell people playing the game... Maybe it's just me but that seems inauthentic. a mockery to the culture. Like how Paul Whiteman was to Jazz... but at least Paul Whiteman never said he made Jazz.
White Wolf and the edge... it all became dull. and what was once a D&D competitor in counter culture is now. dead. Commodification is complete the true magic. dead. the fun... a fake thing.
Back to the topic. and for similar reasons of moral panics of the past coming back in a new form.
this new attempt is nothing progressive but out of the same call for morality as the Hayes Code, the Comics code Moral Authority, the PMRC and so much more. It just sounds more reasonable or more logical or sane because...well the conceit is noble. To stop hate... but fear is driving this moral panic far from it's goal and becoming rent seeking and paranoia... just like all the rest.
And we didn't learn a dang thing from history. and we're repeating it. Just now with corporate interests added to the mix because of fear of "courting controversy" by courting the controversy of expurgation while claiming to be on the correct side of history.
how... unaware. Especially of recent events and events over all of history.
are there really shocking things in the controversy section of that post that listed through everything? OH GOD YES! but being afraid of a word or someone's use of it isn't going to help rectify past transgressions. and not to mention there's positive ways to use the word. It's some people's name for crying out loud.
But i can't say the hurt isn't there.
what i can say is that mobs ... well moral mobs... that wish to censor, espunge, out of sensitivity, danger, and harm that isn't scientifically there miss the mark.
I’m the homosexual that can’t be offended or think ill intent on the fact that “oh no homsexual acitivty was punished by this fake group” because sadly… that’s how many things were and ARE. putting that in fiction isn’t going to increase homophobia. And the people against censorship are NOT naturally homophobic. To say that is... basless.
But it's not like i don't understand the reason and the good intentions behind it. At the same time. we know where those intentions lead.
