Would you care for a slightly more organized and precise way to discuss representation in media? Do you promise not to reduce discussions of representation in media to just this method of organization? Yes and yes? Cool. Here’s a tier list. Casual media enjoyers may find it fun to mess around with. Critics might get a little more use out of it, though many experienced critics already have favorite rubrics of their own. But if you’re in the business of creating fiction, or especially of helping others deepen diverse and marginalized themes and content in their work—cultural consulting, for instance—this tier list especially goes out to you.
Read moreThe most important point I can make about orcs
Seeing my friends and acquaintances struggle to explain why we feel so strongly about orcs to people who vehemently disagree, I thought I'd try rephrasing my orcticles’ most important point in language which both sides—since evidently now there are sides—could accept.
Read moreAsian Representation and the Martial Arts
This article discusses how Asian martial arts stereotypes fit into orientalist dynamics, in which the Western gaze rewrites and reduces Asian experience to a cool violent thing for white consumption. I also point out how imperialist, exploitative attitudes complicate real-world martial arts practice. Finally, we’ll go over practical guidelines for representing Asian martial culture in your creative work. You’ll leave this article prepared not only to avoid racism, but also to craft stronger martial arts stories in general.
Read moreBest Practices for Religious Representation, Part I: Check for Traps
Religion suffuses role-playing’s most basic structure: the adventuring party with a fighter, thief, wizard, and cleric. Fantasy mainstays like demons, dragons, heavens and hells, pantheons, diverse monsters, and magic originate in religious lore. The decisions people make without thinking about their cosmology carry ideological weight that validates some demographics and denies others—and not even just in terms of religious identity. This article is a toolkit to help creators and players of games and fiction build religious characters and organizations, portray them with fairness and respect, and draw on real-world lessons to craft fictional religions which sing.
Read moreOrcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part II: They're Not Human
This is the complement to my previous article, “Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror.” In the previous article, we learned how racist myths from the British academy and army fueled JRR Tolkien’s creation of orcs as an analogue for Asian people. Today I want to look at what happens to orcs as we follow Lord of the Rings’s influence into modern media. When Dungeons & Dragons and its descendants introduced orcs to the United States of America, orcs gained new ethnic dimensions and encountered new and visceral depths of criminalization and dehumanization. In the conclusion to this piece, I suggest several new directions in which gamers of all ethnicities might take the orcs they design or play, to rework this symbol of racist degeneracy into the vanguard of decolonization.
Read moreLess of a Question, More of a Comment
If you attend panels or presentations, ever, I need you to read this article because, best case scenario, I need you to help protect me from “less of a question, more of a comment” guy. Worst case scenario, you are “less of a question, more of a comment” guy. Let’s talk about panels in general, panels about diversity and identity topics in particular, and how you as an audience member can make choices and ask questions which improve that experience for both panelists and audience. I’ll also answer some questions we both did and didn’t get to at PAX East’s “Designing Asian Settings and Themes in Analog Games” panel.
Read moreThe Fortune Cookie Incident
This is a story about a racist role-playing game I encountered at Dreamation 2019. This game exemplifies how racist expressions draw on public-facing and commercially available cultural expressions: in this case food, cinema, and sport. It is also a story about the man who designed and facilitated the game, but I wish it didn’t have to be. I want to focus on what he did, not who he is, because he now realizes the thing he made harms Asians and he wants to improve.
I don’t know whether he’ll succeed, though, because he wrote a game about fortune cookies.
Read moreInterview: Yeonsoo Julian Kim and RPG Convention Racism
I’m back from Dreamation. It went well, really, but damn was there a lot of racism. My hero Yeonsoo Julian Kim graciously agreed to talk with me about their intense, exhausting experiences with racism at this convention and elsewhere. Content warnings: racism, elder abuse.
Read more“May I play a character from another race?”
I get this question more frequently than any other in my professional and gaming life. I get it almost exclusively from white folks, since gaming’s Eurocentrism requires people of color to play outside their race most of the time. My answer is emphatically yes, but please study how to do it. Here’s why and how.
Read moreOrcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror
This is the first installment of a two-article series about the racist origins, nature, and ramifications of orcs, a malevolent humanoid species from English author John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s Middle-earth fantasy setting. I started researching this article with the hypothesis that a collection of negative assumptions about people of color in general, common among the British of Tolkien’s time, gave rise to orcs. I was wrong. Drawing on the most hateful stereotypes he knew, JRR Tolkien explicitly and purposefully crafted orcs as a detrimental depiction of Asian people specifically. Part I, below, traces the long histories of the racist fears and ideologies which motivated Tolkien. Part II will explore how later fantasists have adapted the orcish concept to express different harmful cultural stereotypes; and draw parallels between the challenges of rehabilitating orcs’ portrayals and of decolonizing one’s own relationship to one’s cultural stereotypes.
Read moreInterview Roundup (and PAX Unplugged panels!)
If you’re a new arrival from the past couple days and you want to hear me say things to more people, here are some more interviews for you to enjoy.
Read moreThousand Arrows and Sensitivity, Part II: Dragon King's Gambit
I hope you enjoyed Part I of my series on Thousand Arrows, sensitivity, and respect. Here, Part II addresses issues specific to our 900-backer stretch goal, “Dragon King’s Gambit.” In this campaign, a sea monster attack in December 1592 forces the Imjin War’s Chinese, Korean, and Japanese combatants to work together against a common enemy. It draws on historical, literary, and religious sources: I wouldn’t call it fantasy, but it features folkloric and legendary entities important to East Asian religious practice.
While we’re unlikely to unlock DKG, its subject matter has generated some concern above and beyond the core game. My previous post on best practices for historical gaming governs my take on the Imjin War. But I want to go a little further and break down some of the reasons why folks might worry more about DKG than about core Thousand Arrows, as well as why I think DKG is important nonetheless.
Read moreBest Practices for Historical Gaming
I’d like to share some principles I follow when I work with historical and real-world settings, either in play or in design. For shorthand, I’m going to refer to them as “historical,” but many of these principles also apply to games set on contemporary Earth. This article refers to choices I made in Thousand Arrows, but it isn’t really about Thousand Arrows, so you still get a proper Imjin War-focused Part II later on.
Read moreThousand Arrows and Sensitivity, Part I: the Core Game
So, Thousand Arrows is on Kickstarter! Thousand Arrows is a tabletop role-playing game about samurai action and tragedy in the Japanese Warring States Period, powered by the Apocalypse. I’ve gotten some questions from the Internet about sensitivity, respect, and appropriation in the game. I’ve broken my answers into what I project to be two blog posts. This first one addresses issues which affect the core game of Thousand Arrows.
Read moreThe Giant Robot of Offense
The Giant Robot of Offense is a framework for creating content which won’t harm people. I use it for role-playing games, but it applies to any media which generate participatory elements (including cosplay and fanfiction). Think of your creation as a giant badass anime robot you’re building. Here’s how to make media, and/or build a robot, which won’t harm anyone except for bad guys in giant rubber suits.
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