[Would a mod mind shifting the discussion begun by Morgue into a different thread? I think this has derailed the rest of the thread somewhat, and I'm still interested in what people would be keen on at future Kapcons.]
morgue wrote:I hope I haven't killed the LARP discussion!
Hi Morgue,
With respect and all, I think that's exactly what you did. More than that, I think you dropped a conversational bomb, and then didn't have the grace to stick around and talk it out. Yeah, I get that you're a busy guy, but you put us in a position where we can't respond to your concerns because you haven't been here trying to be in the conversation.
Anyway, I have some thoughts on this issue.
First off, some general stuff:Roleplaying is a form of
bricolage. That's just what we do - we raid literary texts, historical time periods, novels, movies, cartoons, stories from people we know, all of that and turn it into something new. And partly that's because all art does that, really, but also because it's a lot easier to move people into the same shared imagined space when everybody has a similar set of cultural referents to work off (probably overlapping sets, I think, for instance a game that looks at a particular time period where some people have a vague knowledge and others have a detailed one, and the space of the game becomes over time a construct built up by those different knowledges.) The level of bricolage can vary, but I think that games that try to be entirely novel in both system and content have to work a heck of a lot harder to bring their players into the right space. For Kapcon headline larps, in particular, source material that is well known is a boon, because there are so many players involved and the game space is so diffuse that it's harder to teach people in a short space of time, and there aren't enough cycles (as you might get in a tabletop campaign) for people to build up their own construct through actual play.
Cultural appropriation is an issue. In any particular time period there are cultural/ethnic groups who are doing better than others, and there's been a whole slew of practices around a dominant group removing cultural treasures from a minority group. A current events example would be those mummified heads with full facial moko that were in overseas museums, that are only just now being returned. Another example is the Elgin marbles (the friezes from the Parthenon), which were removed from their original building and ended up in the British Museum. (Actually, there are tonnes and tonnes of Greek statuary that were abstracted from Greece, because there was a phase of rich Europeans being fascinated by Classical culture and buying all the pretty statues off the locals who were at the time dirt poor and couldn't afford to say no. As the disparity between Greece's temporal power and those of heavyweights like Britain, France and Germany lessened, this practice slowed down, because their government was in a better position to tell people where to go.)
Orientalismis an issue. I'll pull a quote for people who haven't encountered this idea before:
A central idea of Orientalism is that Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts or reality, but from preconceived archetypes that envision all "Eastern" societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and fundamentally dissimilar to "Western" societies. This discourse establishes "the East" as antithetical to "the West". Such Eastern knowledge is constructed with literary texts and historical records that often are of limited understanding of the facts of life in the Middle East.
This kind of 'othering', of selecting an exotic 'out group' and projecting your own fears and desires onto them isn't restricted to the Middle East, or even Asia in general. An example inside a Western text would be
Jane Eyre where the Jamaican creole Bertha Mason (the mad wife), is described as physically powerful, dark in complexion, with animalistic features, and strong passions which accelerated her decline into madness. The complete opposite, in fact, of small quiet English Jane. But also a feminine shadow of Jane's love interest Mr Rochester - Bertha is someone that Jane both fears and finds compelling.
There are some categories of source material that I hesitate to use, or wouldn't make a game about without strong ties to members of the group that I perceive 'own' the material. I have difficulty, for instance, in writing either games or fiction that involve Maori characters or Maori mythology, because the history of Pakeha/Maori relations in NZ are so fraught, so manifestly unjust, and so obviously with a long way to go before the people in this country feel right with each other. The disparity in social position, economics and access to education between Pakeha and Maori (as groups rather than individuals) is still too great. I'm afraid that if I write Maori characters with flaws that I'll be adhering to negative stereotypes, which is a bad thing, but it's our flaws that make us human, which means I have a hard time making the characters feel real in my head. And I think it's a worse thing to take the easy option of just excluding that culture, so I keep on trying to include Maori characters even if it's in a small way, but it turns something I do for fun into work. (Is this something like how you feel about Chinese culture? I remember in
this series of articlesthat you expressed concern about China being portrayed in one game as a brutal invader.)
No cultural group is a monolith. I think there are always going to be individuals who will never be happy about an 'outsider' using material based around their culture, and conversely, I think there are usually going to be individuals who are more relaxed about it. Just watching the news about things like a car company using the haka in advertising brought out a range of pro and anti views from various Maori commentators. A little more close to home, at Chimera the year after you wrote that Gametime series, I was discussing my anxiety about writing Maori characters with a player with Maori ancestry whose main comment, with respect to your article about the Maori themed Requiem game, was: "You Wellington people are pretty uptight." (I think he was in that game?) I don't expect every Maori person to have those views, but I know that at least some do.
Right, moving onto some more specific comments about Fragrant Harbour:I recognise that there are some problematic aspects to the game setting. I could say the same thing about Al Shir Ma, Reunion, the Mafia game, The Gordian Knot, A Town Called Refuge, Flight of the Hindenburg, The Great Exhibition... I think that's the nature of producing art. Accepting the problematic material and working out how you're going to deal with it is just another part of the process. I truly don't think that acknowledging that a work will have flaws is a sufficient reason to not produce it - I've never made something without flaw in my life. It's a more valuable question to ask if the flaws will outweigh the benefits.
In this case, I think that producing a game that celebrates Chinese culture, particularly texts that were generated for their domestic market like Journey to the West, and Wuxia novels, and Hong Kong fighting movies and then enthusiastically exported to the Western world is going to have a bigger effect of building bridges and giving people insight into different story and cultural modes. If nothing else, imagine how dire roleplaying would be if no one felt that they could use material that didn't come from a Westernised source: no Mountain Witch, no Legend of the Five Rings, no Ultimate Challenge Tea Garden. I recognise that Asian players are in the minority at events like Kapcon, but which do you think is more exclusionary? Presenting Eastern material that has flaws, or completely banning it, so that someone with an Asian heritage instantly perceives that there's nothing there 'for them'?
In terms of 'othering', that's not really my intent, and I think not Cat's and Ellen's. To me, Chinese people are the people I went to University with, and work with now. They're people that I
do see at Kapcon or in sports teams that I've played in. They're people like the friendly dairy owner that you chat with about your day, or the ESOL students that Cat tutors and calls 'a bunch of sweeties'. To broaden that to Asian people in general, they're also Cat's and my Auntie Kiyora, our half-Chinese cousins, Cat's ex-boyfriend with epicanthic fold eyes and six generations of NZ ancestors, our great-grandad who spoke Chinese at the dinner table, and our ex-de facto step dad's wife Cherry. I don't think Kiyora and Cherry would really understand how a larp works, but I don't think they'd mind us doing something like that, either. I don't think of Asian people as strangers, nor as a disadvantaged group. I know that there's a nasty streak of racism that's still in NZ culture, but I also see people with Asian heritage as filling the exact same economic and educational niche that I do.
If anything, any 'othering' that's going to go on in the game will apply to the European characters, who to a Hong Kong resident would be strange with odd behaviours and a weird way of looking at the world. I think that one of the strengths of roleplaying is that it gives you an opportunity to see the world in a different way, to go out of yourself for a time - an event that encourages people from a dominant culture to perceive their
own group as a misunderstood minority is no bad thing to me.
morgue wrote:* lack of representation behind-the-scenes - it would be very good to have at least one Asian New Zealander involved throughout development
In honesty, this comment really annoyed me. And I had to stop and think about it, because it's a reasonable suggestion on paper, and coming from Cat and Ellen I wouldn't have thought twice about it. But. To me a writing partnership is a really personal thing, and has a lot more to do with getting on with someone and having similar creative goals than any particular qualifications they might have. And - you're not involved with the project, and you're not one of the Kapcon organisers who would be hosting the event if it goes ahead. Based on your past history, I think you probably wouldn't come no matter how much the game aligned with your sensibilities, because you're a very busy person, and larp isn't your top priority. And you're trying to make demands about the composition of the writing team? I think that crosses the line from expressing concern/making suggestions to outright interference. I think I'm not wrong to mind. I think that we're all reasonable, intelligent writers who will respect the source material and not try to take the piss. I don't think anyone has the right to expect more (or less) from us, or any other writing team.
Anyway, this discussion so far has been a bunch of white people busily talking about how to be culturally sensitive with respect to a different generalised group of people, which feels like its own kind of paternalistic othering. I would very much like to hear the opinions of people who don't identify as Pakeha with respect to this game setting.
Take care all, and happy Waitangi Day.
by morgue » Sat Feb 04, 2012 12:09 am 
