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[PATV] Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 6, Ep. 12: Dansky
I would like to see a games you might not have tired with not the usual qualifications but with what this video covers. Games that have subject matter, views, and situations that are different maybe even very different from the norm. Yes I know propaganda has been covered but there is a lot of ground between this idea and that. As always thanks guys for your great work.
@Sebby they may have not wanted to play it because even some of the designers view the game as unplayable. Wraith (and a few other RPG books) are great reads, but really wouldn't make good games. Wraith is all about an individual interaction and an internal conflict with your darker side which most people don't think works well with three other people at the table. It also doesn't help that the game does have a win condition that is obtainable and that win condition results in removing the character from the game.
@FTomato Wraith is a tabletop rpg (like dungeons and dragons) where players take the role of ghosts struggling to pass on to the next phase of the afterlife. It's an amazing read but it can be pretty difficult to play. If you're interested in tabletop rpgs I'd love to give you some suggestions of where to start. Just PM me.
Genocide + Play ? I don't know, I've have a hard time to take something seriously while at the same time having fun. This are the times when I think games and interacive experiences should be stated as different things, because when I think games I recall adventures, platformers, puzzles and carismathic characters. This sounds like the Road. I'm a bit in the middle in the sides of this opinion but I think in Games something like Life is Beautiful can translate better into games than something like Man's Search for Meaning.
Game have mechanics that when done right give the user tools to experiment and either makes rights, mistakes or awkward thing with the game environment (glitches, the powers in Skyrim, or breaking pots in a house to obtain loot). In my experience, mature gaming experiences for the most part are confined, limiting and linear, so that the player don't do the "funny" stuff with its mechanics.
Finally replay value is an important factor in games. Is hard to do that in heavy narrative games (maybe if is an RPG). I'm not against it but I'm an esceptic, even more when most developers think that by making better graphics and cinematic experiences they make more adult gaming experiences.
"The book is charnel houses of Europe, the shoah, it's a devastating book about the holocaust... it's a book that understands what taking on a role actually means... it is amazing that this book got made."
Given the mention of the word "book" throughout, I think there's a little confusion about the medium here.
"Video games" may have game based aspects to them, especially in terms of challenge and reward, but this is one aspect amongst many others. A book with a game in it and software with a game in it are as similar as equating a book with dialogue to a movie with dialogue. Calling these things "games" is just a holdover from the time that they were just games like tic-tac-toe, chess and ping-pong.
The interesting question is what part of this boundary pushing expression was intrinsic of the game aspect of this book and what part is in the book part, i.e. the narrative and explanatory text. My conjecture after watching this is none and all respectively.
Charnell houses of europe. I can't find this book for sale in my shithole country, India. I'm just looking for where to throw some money so I can feel I have paid for the authors time and then download it somewhere.
Anybody got a link to the guy's site or paypal or something?
This really didn't tell us anything. Just saying the word "Holocaust" isn't automatically deep and meaningful or whatever you seem to think it is. Yes, the Holocaust was a terrible thing. it was also seventy years ago. There have been genocides since then. Croatia and Iraq and whatnot. We don't seem to deal with those much either.
But what are the hard, deep questions here and how can a game tackle them in a meaningful way rather than a dumb way the way Train does. "AAAH! You were taking them to Auschwitz all along." Wow. Good twist, M. Knight Shyamalan. That's like saying Go is about the USSR annexing Poland. Or that Go Fish is about abortion. You can't just slap a hot button, even a seventy year old hot button, onto a game and call it deep or meaningful.
Charnel Houses and it's parent game Wraith: the Oblivion have been out of print for years. Fortunately a pdf version is still available at DriveThruRpg. Keep in mind that this is a tabletop RPG supplement. It can be appreciated on its own, but to play you would also need the Wraith core book (also on DriveThru).
The thing that I miss the most out of the New World of Darkness, its the edge their "metaplot" had. I got started into social psychology thanks to Mage and its consensual reality ideas...
@Vonter, check out @Gonten's comment. I think this book is probably a cool read, but this episode seems like it is missing the underlying reason of WHY Wraith was mostly forgotten about (cf 1m02s). It's NOT a good game. It's an interesting read, but I remember thinking, "No way is anyone in my group ever going to want to play one of these things."
One of my college friends had a joke, "You're playing Wraith. What do you do on your turn? 'I wait for Oblivion.' You're not gone yet. Now what do you do? 'I wait for Oblivion.' You're gone. Great game, guys!"
This was a big problem with a lot of White Wolf games. I remember flipping through so many of the sourcebooks at the store just hunting for any mechanics or NPC stat blocks that would help me identify the thing as a game.
Because otherwise it's a BOOK. Ain't nothin' wrong with that, but it does beg comparison to everything else ever written, particularly the reams that have been published about World War 2 and the Holacaust. And sometimes, if you look closely enough, that comparison isn't going to be too flattering. Check out the 3 star review's complaints at Amazon: http://amzn.to/18uUM52. So what you're left with is weird, a putatively well-written mirage of a game (since it's not really fun to play) that elides the, "לעולם לא אשכח," into weak game mechanics and just flat omits much of what's happening in the rest of Europe at the time (according to the extremely interesting 3 star review at Amazon).
... None of which is what compelled me to comment! I decided a long time ago not to play Wraith, just like everyone else.
The excerpted Holocaust novelist's comments from the introduction to Charnel Houses of Europe are asinine.
I hope someone reading this is also especially suspicious when they're fed politically correct poison and told it's medicine for their soul.
So if I am out with my white friends and tell them to keep an eye out for my friend J, and I use the helpful descriptor, "He's black," the author (and by including it here with such a precious introduction, I have to assume James or the whole EC crew as well) thinks I'm tiptoeing down the slippery slope toward the Holocaust? Really?
By the same token, if you're a group of Korean people, and you refer to "that white guy" it doesn't make you racist. It makes you a clear and sane speaker who tacitly recognizes that the most significant character trait that will separate a specific person from the people to whom you're speaking is that he is a different race. If you said "that fucking WHITE guy" you'd be racist. If there was a more visually dominant trait, you'd probably use that. "The dude literally NEVER goes anywhere without his pet boa constrictor. You can't miss him."
When I save money and one of my two Jewish roommates says, "You're gonna make a great Jew some day!" where does that fit in this author's road to Hell?
Here in New York City, we have about 72,000 ethnicities crammed into any one subway car. If I don't identify someone by their race, no one will know who the Hell I'm talking about.
Look, I'm not a complete rube. I know that dehumanizing the other is meaningful and dangerous, and I know that slavery is somewhere down the line after "black people are good dancers," but what I hate about BS like that introduction is that they seem to lose all nuance in the urge to achieve an universally desirable outcome, i.e. no more hate crimes, no more slavery, no more ethnic cleansing. Those are good, noble ends. I'm taking a stand, right here, right now: I'm not in favor of ethnic cleansing. That said, SURELY we can have a sense of humor about ourselves and those who aren't like us. How many times do I ask my roommates to apologize for killing my Lord and Savior (so far they have not apologized ONCE if you can believe it!) or ask my dog (a Japanese shiba inu) to apologize for Pearl Harbor before I have to wear a swastika armband around on all my clothing to show everyone I'm a crucial cog in the next Holocaust? The issue I take is that by saying absurd things like, "Don't say the man at the door is a 'black' man. Just say he's a man," it seems like a dangerous substitute for enhanced appreciation for details and nuance or for real empathy, which is the ultimate solution to our inhumanity toward one another. When we remove our ability to call thing as they are in the name of a propriety we've deemed holy, we haven't forestalled the next apocalypse. We've made ourselves dumber than the bigot who condemns all the Others for this or that fantastic atrocity. And if we, as a society, are dumber, it makes us that much more facile for the next monster to manipulate to some horrible end.
I'll stop typing now. There's a black man at the door.
I think sci-fi or fantasy metaphors can be used to do this sort of thing too. Mass Effect does it with 2 races.
I always thought of the Krogan as Afghans and Tuchanka as Afghanistan, in a constant state of war for years, fighting among themselves and foreigners and fighting proxy wars for others (think of the Rachni as USSR, the Salarians as the US and Turians as Pakistan in the Rachni Wars) .
and there are a lot of Israel/Palestine parallels in the Geth/Quarian conflict, elaborating on which will result in a flame war here.
It is _not_ "amazing that this book got made." At the time of its publishing, White Wolf was deep into using shock as a writing asset and every cultural taboo, quirk, and even settled issue was dredged up if it made for a bigger splash. "Edgy" was the new normal, and any game publisher wanting to go for something heavy wasn't about to be slapped down as a satanic cult by the cops -- that eighties craze was long dead. Say what you will about Charnel Houses of Europe, good or bad, it must be noted that it wasn't _brave_.
Indeed, WW's lust for shock (which continues even now with Exalted and one of its factions' treatment of rape) led it to produce what might be the single most racist rpg supplement ever printed: World of Darkness Gypsies. (Note that FATAL wasn't a supplement and its racism, though terrible, didn't actually repeat Nazi-favored propaganda as fact -- but Gypsies sure did!)
Black Dog, as an imprint, wasn't there to protect consumers from adult situations -- regular WW had plenty of that, up to and including moster vaginas. It was there for the same reason we had "Explicit Lyrics" on CDs back inna day: it drove sales. That and the monster vaginas, that is.
Wraith itself, btw, gives us an ethical problem in and of itself (much like Humanity's morphing into Roads did for VtM): the Shadow. The Shadow is the "bad" part of a ghost that wants it to commit ghost-suicide. Problem is, the Shadow isn't necessarily evil; sometimes the Shadow is actually much more ethical than its wraith! This issue was brilliantly examined in, iirc, one of the Wraith Player's Guides -- I bought the book just because I was impressed with the writing in that article -- I didn't even play wraith. In any event, it is ridiculous to wrestle with black-and-white morality in a world that happily endorses blue-and-orange morality, or just says screw it and throws the whole thing out. WW handled morality _badly_, and wraith was the worst of a bad lot.
Frankly, James is wrong about the context of this book and probably would have been better off going over "Imagination Is the Only Escape," a video game that, heretofore I had never heard of that is actually experiencing real pushback from powerful entities -- namely, Nintendo.
Oh, and yeah, @impureascetic is right -- that excerpt was TERRIBLE. Seriously. People of color in neighborhoods where they're the majority refer to people by their race all the time. So they're all racists now? Screw you nineties lady! Racism is part and parcel of an economic cast system supported by your tacit support of institutionalized race and class disparities, not your pedantry.
Y'know, this is the sort of high-handed arrogance, combined with white bourgeois pap, that made late-nineties WW freakn' intolerable. WW is the company that made damn certain that nigh-all of its black people illustrations had dreadlocks (when they bothered to appear -- they managed to create a Chicago setting with an ALL-WHITE CAST -- freakn' Chicago!), and, again, repeated every slur against the Roma as fact with Gypsy with such passionate bigotry that their mechanically-worthless and blandly racist Kindred of the Ebon Kingdom book actually looked socially acceptable by comparison. (Play in Africa without learning a single thing about a single, distinct African culture or nation, 'cause they're all the same! White Wolf!)
Iberia by Night was decent, though -- ah, I had forgotten, that was Dark Ages Vampire. That line, unlike most of WW, was shockingly well-written and culturally informed compared to the rest. Still not sure how that happened.
I'm really confused as to what the link to the game is here? Someone wrote a hard hitting book, written using a game universe as a framing tool? This seems to say more about books than games. Not a very clear episode at all, the fact the episode is named after the guy as well just makes this seem more like a 'love letter' rather than telling us something we can take away as viewers and apply to working in video games.
"So if I am out with my white friends and tell them to keep an eye out for my friend J, and I use the helpful descriptor, "He's black," the author (and by including it here with such a precious introduction, I have to assume James or the whole EC crew as well) thinks I'm tiptoeing down the slippery slope toward the Holocaust? Really"
No. Bringing up race, in and of itslef, is not the problem. Bringing up race where it is irrelevant is the problem. It doesn't matter that the man at the door is black. It does matter when you're describing your black friend so you can find him/her.
Bringing up race where it isn't importatnt reinforces the idea that it should be important. Further, no one is saying that bring up race innapropriately will lead to the holocaust; it was only said that it allowed the holocaust to happen. It was a neccessary component, not a cause.
I went to Auschwitz in mid-April of this year. Just seeing the sign gives *me*, someone who came seventy years after the unspeakable horrors inflicted upon those people occurred, a flashback to being there, of the utter despair that pollutes the entire place. A black cloud hangs over that site.
I think it's time for a game to properly explore the Holocaust. I don't know how it would be done - it has to be done in a way that's not exploitative, and it can't reduce the history of the event to a series of inputs and events. I don't even know what kind of game it would be - a survival horror of sorts would be a possibility, as would an "adventure" game (Auschwitz is no adventure, I can guarantee that). It also cannot allowed to be fun: it would have to be like Spec Ops: The Line, except far more dreary.
I fully agree with @crayzz. The idea that there is a guy at your door is implied message, you don't really need to give a descriptor unless you have multiple people at the door or multiple people at multiple doors. The fact that a person feels the need to add the descriptor usually implies some sort of negative connotation. "There's a black guy at the door," is probably thought by other people to sound as a warning, because of the negative stereotype of black people being criminals. At best, by saying this, a person is simply pointing out that the black person is different than them (aka setting each other apart, like the author says).
I'm pretty sure that the author never said that a person who uses qualifiers is going to a full blown racist. The message was that the minor bit of prejudice involved in calling something bad that happens gay, jewing (jewwing? idk...) something down, or adding unnecessary qualifiers allows those who WOULD pursue the path of bigotry to do so unchecked.
Describing someone by their characteristics is not bigotry, but pointing out someone's characteristics in a possibly negative (or sometimes even positive) way IS.
Art should not be allowed as an excuse for misrepresentation of some very important topics.
Hmmm...I'm going to have to agree and disagree with the link.
I agree that portraying the Final Solution as covert is a falsehood. This is found often in US politics as well. People tend to believe that fascism, the holocaust, and the Final Solution were hoisted on the German people without their knowledge. In reality, they knew what was going on and supported it.
I disagree with the author's argument that pushing the envelope is inherently selfish or bad. Sometimes, boundaries need to be pushed if the medium is to evolve. Ms. Brathwaite set out to prove that game mechanics can be used as a rhetorical device, and it seems she succeeded.
That whole "there's a black guy at the door" thing is why I use my phone to take a picture of every person I interact with in a given day. If I need to reference them in a later conversation I just show everyone the picture on my phone. It's a little cumbersome but at least I'm not a racist.
I remember reading this back in 98. It was good. What's so frustrating about White Wolf is that Vampire and Werewolf were the parts that did so well. I mean, can we possibly step on a more overdone trope? Well, I guess they could have done zombies. At any rate, Mage and Wraith were terrific because they focused a great deal of the gameplay (particularly Wraith) on not being the hero or villain. They focused not on extreme ability but on subtlety.
This becomes a fundamental problem with entertainment though. Honestly, if I just want to relax and be entertained, I'd rather have a power-fantasy than a fantasy about incapability any day. Particularly Wraith embraced being unable to act (as compared to unwilling to act with Mage).
So much of our daily lives make us feel powerless to begin with. Today, I spent all afternoon trying to get internet set up in the house I will be living in in a couple of weeks. I failed. Comcast beat me. Comcast beat me horribly. They set up a system that is so rigid, it had no place for me to find a solution that worked and they spent so much effort trying to sell me something I don't want, that I failed to buy what I wanted. That left me feeling powerless and upset - and this was just my attempt at setting up internet access where I will be living soon. After experiences like that, I don't want to experience something (much) worse. I'd rather just go with a power fantasy, whether as hero or villain.
It has become a fact of life that our everyday interactions almost always tell us just how unimportant we are, how little we matter to those we interact with. Certainly I treated the poor sales rep badly though they were just doing their job at a blind corporate megalith bent on evil. Imagine how that sales rep feels. That guy was likely in India, facing much bigger troubles than mine. I am connected after hours on their website to this fellow and I am angry and frustrated already. He knows the company he works for treats their customers like shit and it's his job to do whatever he can for them (within a narrowly and often scripted set of rules). Further, I knew none of this was his fault and even said so. That might be even worse to him. Not only am I upset and angry about how I've been treated, I make it clear as day that I know he has no power over the situation. Wouldn't it be better for his psyche if he could be the villain? At least then, he'd feel he had power. As is, I made it clear I knew he had no power as soon as I was communicating with him. As powerless as I felt dealing with Comcast, Comcast has made their employees feel even worse.
The thing is, I honestly got the impression this guy felt bad for me. I mean, he's likely not starving or anything, but his lot in life is likely not nearly as cared for as mine is. I'm bitching about a 1st world problem and he's dealing with 2nd world problems (not even getting to third world issues). Yet I got the impression he was sympathetic and could do nothing. Completely powerless. The world we've built tends to make us feel completely powerless. All this powerlessness is so some marketing execs can say their policies are "increasing product adoption rates among existing customers". That's a fairly assanine excuse to make everyone involved feel like worthless pieces of shit.
When faced with this, I'd rather not look at something deep or painful. I'd rather see something where I feel like I have control over the future, or at least someone I identify with has control over the future.
There was a recent article at the escapist about a writer leaving gaming because she wasn't able to write the stories she wants. I think, however, she'll find a rude awakening anywhere she goes. Most of us live better stories than we desire to read about. That is to say, we live complex and difficult lives. We'd often much rather have something light to remove us from that complexity.
So I felt that Wraith was the best of White Wolf's games, but I think I want to play Werewolf.
WOW! I never ever expected you guys to cover Table Top RPG's much less this book in specific. As a Wraith fan who has pretty much all of the books for the line, I am especially happy that you guys took a look at Charnel Houses, it is perhaps the worst/best book in the line. Worst because it talks about one of the most horrible things that happened in human history. Best because it does it in such a way that is incredibly engaging and respectful to the subject matter.
Wraith is possibly one of the darkest tabletop role playing games ever. And it was the perfect place to tell the story that Charnel Houses was trying to tell. It is such an amazing book that every once in a while I will pull it out and read it again because it is just that compelling.
Though of course now this reminds me of how much I love Wraith and how much I wish the line as a whole had more fans. It makes me all nostalgic wishing I could get a game together.
Using ethnicity as an identifier is no moral wrong. The only time I've seen people argue otherwise is when white people wish to dismiss race entirely -- which is in and of itself a component of white privilege. Privilege allows you to pretend race doesn't exist and invoke it at will -- meanwhile, people of color are subject to this use but cannot command it.
This is the source of Stephen Colbert's "I don't see race" gag. By pretending race doesn't matter, Colbert's character gets to abuse privilege and then blame everyone but whites for it. People here who think you can't say "there's a black man over there" are literally indulging in the same privilege. You're the living examples of what Colbert is parodying. Only racists get to pretend that race itself can't be seen, without consequence.
The concept of doing work with "adult content" to mean something other than sex and violence made me think of that Calvin and Hobbes comic strip where Hobbes figured it referred to stories about going to work and doing taxes.
I also thought about how even comic books could deal with heavy subject matter like the Holocaust and other genocides, and they've been doing it for decades. (Heck, Magneto is an extremely famous example of a character closely tied to such taboo subject matter.)
Then again, video games are still seen as a kid and teen thing, and I think that's the one thing holding it back. It is in its own counterpart to the Animation Age Ghetto, restrained by "Think of the children!"
James, I wanted to let you know that you talked me into buying the Humble Weekly Telltale Games bundle. I value your opinion on games, watch your show as its released, and think highly of everyone involved in it.
Thank you for contributing positively to the gaming industry.
No. Just no. WW2 is not a free goodie bag of endless impetise for game developers. The generation playing games now or even 20 years ago have no real connection to that era. There is barley anyone left alive from then. Why did you not talk about modern shooters that go into war crimes and how many of the people giving orders escape prosecution? Portal and Portal 2 covered this same topic with much more grace, tact, and even humor by removing the player from their familiar world and putting them in a place to be completely dehumanized. You could also achieve this message of leting someone experience total loss of control much better by putting them in charge of operations only to have them come to realize that power is a trap all on its own. Games do not have to be boring or uncomfortable to get their point across. The same way a good movie does not need to.
Interesting subject matter, I never really played wraith (or any of the other associated games such as vampire or mage or werewolf) however I am familiar with the gaming system, I will see if I can't find a copy somewhere to check out.
0/10 episodes guys. GNDN. Maybe you could have talked about how it is NOW important for game developers to stand up and push substance of game play over pretty graphics. That is the lost opportunity here. gg
I went and tracked down a copy of the Charnel Houses of Europe and If I may use a phase you used in the discussion of Spec Ops: The Line. The most engaging reading that I have in a while without being fun.
erated an interesting conversation between a friend and I. We both have been watching this video series for quite some time now ( Since I want to say Season 2 ... possibly 3? ). Often, an episode will get us discussing the topic a bit as we both like to believe in games as becoming a properly recognized artistic medium. By the end of it we both reached the same conclusion, though I was very surprised about how black and white both her first reactions and some other comments thought of it.
For instance: Whether or not people thought Wraith was a success or not as a game. To me, that does not exactly seem to matter when considering the subject besides whether or not the game mechanics work to allow the message to be spoken and make it powerful enough to speak to the player on a stronger level.
The second matter was of the Holocaust. Both my friend and comments mention how it seems like the Holocaust is either overdone or is not a big deal now that the subject matter is no longer quite so fresh. Honestly, I do feel like the Holocaust is still a powerful moment in history, but I concede that it is something that has been milked just about dry by both novels and films. However, I still feel like ExtraCreditz does have a valid point and the Holocaust works at least as a very good EXAMPLE.
It is a topic they have mentioned more than once in the videos: That games are often still not taken as seriously and thus the concept of a serious subject matter in a game continues to sound ridiculous to a lot of people. As such, topics like this feel more like pushing boundaries than it would in another medium. By now, we are so used to viewing other mediums as something where you can sit back and really chew on their artistic value whereas games face the hardship that they supposedly 'can' have deeper meaning but they still 'need' to keep us pleased, films still suffer the same way. For adult themes they are socially allowed to have the juvenile basics such as sex and violence, yet when these matters come up many people are either outraged, confused, or skeptical of the idea. If they try to be respectful to the subject matter and do things tastefully, public expectations usually dictate games like that will flop because it does not have the action or interactive engagement to keep people feeling like they are living a fantasy. However, if they try to make it engaging, they get misunderstanding protestors screaming about how offensive they are to make a game about it. Whether the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, or perhaps something more current such as the genocides in Darfur, it more has to do with the fact that games face a huge risk tackling it rather than other mediums.
Games like Bioshock and Nier can pass under the radar with their innovations and pressing boundaries of their themes simply because they can fly under the radar without too much backlash as 'just another' FPS Horror or Square Enix RPG. So really it is not so much 'Pfft! We need to be original and make games about the Holocaust!' so much as the idea we should not really be afraid to push the boundaries and be willing to take the risk. Honestly, some of the best lessons we learn from are from the past. Such as thinking over the anecdote critically rather than literally.
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@FTomato Wraith is a tabletop rpg (like dungeons and dragons) where players take the role of ghosts struggling to pass on to the next phase of the afterlife. It's an amazing read but it can be pretty difficult to play. If you're interested in tabletop rpgs I'd love to give you some suggestions of where to start. Just PM me.
Game have mechanics that when done right give the user tools to experiment and either makes rights, mistakes or awkward thing with the game environment (glitches, the powers in Skyrim, or breaking pots in a house to obtain loot). In my experience, mature gaming experiences for the most part are confined, limiting and linear, so that the player don't do the "funny" stuff with its mechanics.
Finally replay value is an important factor in games. Is hard to do that in heavy narrative games (maybe if is an RPG). I'm not against it but I'm an esceptic, even more when most developers think that by making better graphics and cinematic experiences they make more adult gaming experiences.
Given the mention of the word "book" throughout, I think there's a little confusion about the medium here.
"Video games" may have game based aspects to them, especially in terms of challenge and reward, but this is one aspect amongst many others. A book with a game in it and software with a game in it are as similar as equating a book with dialogue to a movie with dialogue. Calling these things "games" is just a holdover from the time that they were just games like tic-tac-toe, chess and ping-pong.
The interesting question is what part of this boundary pushing expression was intrinsic of the game aspect of this book and what part is in the book part, i.e. the narrative and explanatory text. My conjecture after watching this is none and all respectively.
Anybody got a link to the guy's site or paypal or something?
But what are the hard, deep questions here and how can a game tackle them in a meaningful way rather than a dumb way the way Train does. "AAAH! You were taking them to Auschwitz all along." Wow. Good twist, M. Knight Shyamalan. That's like saying Go is about the USSR annexing Poland. Or that Go Fish is about abortion. You can't just slap a hot button, even a seventy year old hot button, onto a game and call it deep or meaningful.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/58/Charnel-Houses-of-Europe:-The-Shoah?term=charnel+houses+&it=1
The closest thing I could find, sorry.
One of my college friends had a joke, "You're playing Wraith. What do you do on your turn? 'I wait for Oblivion.' You're not gone yet. Now what do you do? 'I wait for Oblivion.' You're gone. Great game, guys!"
This was a big problem with a lot of White Wolf games. I remember flipping through so many of the sourcebooks at the store just hunting for any mechanics or NPC stat blocks that would help me identify the thing as a game.
Because otherwise it's a BOOK. Ain't nothin' wrong with that, but it does beg comparison to everything else ever written, particularly the reams that have been published about World War 2 and the Holacaust. And sometimes, if you look closely enough, that comparison isn't going to be too flattering. Check out the 3 star review's complaints at Amazon: http://amzn.to/18uUM52. So what you're left with is weird, a putatively well-written mirage of a game (since it's not really fun to play) that elides the, "לעולם לא אשכח," into weak game mechanics and just flat omits much of what's happening in the rest of Europe at the time (according to the extremely interesting 3 star review at Amazon).
... None of which is what compelled me to comment! I decided a long time ago not to play Wraith, just like everyone else.
The excerpted Holocaust novelist's comments from the introduction to Charnel Houses of Europe are asinine.
I hope someone reading this is also especially suspicious when they're fed politically correct poison and told it's medicine for their soul.
So if I am out with my white friends and tell them to keep an eye out for my friend J, and I use the helpful descriptor, "He's black," the author (and by including it here with such a precious introduction, I have to assume James or the whole EC crew as well) thinks I'm tiptoeing down the slippery slope toward the Holocaust? Really?
By the same token, if you're a group of Korean people, and you refer to "that white guy" it doesn't make you racist. It makes you a clear and sane speaker who tacitly recognizes that the most significant character trait that will separate a specific person from the people to whom you're speaking is that he is a different race. If you said "that fucking WHITE guy" you'd be racist. If there was a more visually dominant trait, you'd probably use that. "The dude literally NEVER goes anywhere without his pet boa constrictor. You can't miss him."
When I save money and one of my two Jewish roommates says, "You're gonna make a great Jew some day!" where does that fit in this author's road to Hell?
Here in New York City, we have about 72,000 ethnicities crammed into any one subway car. If I don't identify someone by their race, no one will know who the Hell I'm talking about.
Look, I'm not a complete rube. I know that dehumanizing the other is meaningful and dangerous, and I know that slavery is somewhere down the line after "black people are good dancers," but what I hate about BS like that introduction is that they seem to lose all nuance in the urge to achieve an universally desirable outcome, i.e. no more hate crimes, no more slavery, no more ethnic cleansing. Those are good, noble ends. I'm taking a stand, right here, right now: I'm not in favor of ethnic cleansing. That said, SURELY we can have a sense of humor about ourselves and those who aren't like us. How many times do I ask my roommates to apologize for killing my Lord and Savior (so far they have not apologized ONCE if you can believe it!) or ask my dog (a Japanese shiba inu) to apologize for Pearl Harbor before I have to wear a swastika armband around on all my clothing to show everyone I'm a crucial cog in the next Holocaust? The issue I take is that by saying absurd things like, "Don't say the man at the door is a 'black' man. Just say he's a man," it seems like a dangerous substitute for enhanced appreciation for details and nuance or for real empathy, which is the ultimate solution to our inhumanity toward one another. When we remove our ability to call thing as they are in the name of a propriety we've deemed holy, we haven't forestalled the next apocalypse. We've made ourselves dumber than the bigot who condemns all the Others for this or that fantastic atrocity. And if we, as a society, are dumber, it makes us that much more facile for the next monster to manipulate to some horrible end.
I'll stop typing now. There's a black man at the door.
I always thought of the Krogan as Afghans and Tuchanka as Afghanistan, in a constant state of war for years, fighting among themselves and foreigners and fighting proxy wars for others (think of the Rachni as USSR, the Salarians as the US and Turians as Pakistan in the Rachni Wars) .
and there are a lot of Israel/Palestine parallels in the Geth/Quarian conflict, elaborating on which will result in a flame war here.
Indeed, WW's lust for shock (which continues even now with Exalted and one of its factions' treatment of rape) led it to produce what might be the single most racist rpg supplement ever printed: World of Darkness Gypsies. (Note that FATAL wasn't a supplement and its racism, though terrible, didn't actually repeat Nazi-favored propaganda as fact -- but Gypsies sure did!)
Black Dog, as an imprint, wasn't there to protect consumers from adult situations -- regular WW had plenty of that, up to and including moster vaginas. It was there for the same reason we had "Explicit Lyrics" on CDs back inna day: it drove sales. That and the monster vaginas, that is.
Wraith itself, btw, gives us an ethical problem in and of itself (much like Humanity's morphing into Roads did for VtM): the Shadow. The Shadow is the "bad" part of a ghost that wants it to commit ghost-suicide. Problem is, the Shadow isn't necessarily evil; sometimes the Shadow is actually much more ethical than its wraith! This issue was brilliantly examined in, iirc, one of the Wraith Player's Guides -- I bought the book just because I was impressed with the writing in that article -- I didn't even play wraith. In any event, it is ridiculous to wrestle with black-and-white morality in a world that happily endorses blue-and-orange morality, or just says screw it and throws the whole thing out. WW handled morality _badly_, and wraith was the worst of a bad lot.
Frankly, James is wrong about the context of this book and probably would have been better off going over "Imagination Is the Only Escape," a video game that, heretofore I had never heard of that is actually experiencing real pushback from powerful entities -- namely, Nintendo.
Oh, and yeah, @impureascetic is right -- that excerpt was TERRIBLE. Seriously. People of color in neighborhoods where they're the majority refer to people by their race all the time. So they're all racists now? Screw you nineties lady! Racism is part and parcel of an economic cast system supported by your tacit support of institutionalized race and class disparities, not your pedantry.
Y'know, this is the sort of high-handed arrogance, combined with white bourgeois pap, that made late-nineties WW freakn' intolerable. WW is the company that made damn certain that nigh-all of its black people illustrations had dreadlocks (when they bothered to appear -- they managed to create a Chicago setting with an ALL-WHITE CAST -- freakn' Chicago!), and, again, repeated every slur against the Roma as fact with Gypsy with such passionate bigotry that their mechanically-worthless and blandly racist Kindred of the Ebon Kingdom book actually looked socially acceptable by comparison. (Play in Africa without learning a single thing about a single, distinct African culture or nation, 'cause they're all the same! White Wolf!)
Iberia by Night was decent, though -- ah, I had forgotten, that was Dark Ages Vampire. That line, unlike most of WW, was shockingly well-written and culturally informed compared to the rest. Still not sure how that happened.
Art should not be allowed as an excuse for misrepresentation of some very important topics.
How is he pronouncing "charnel?"
"So if I am out with my white friends and tell them to keep an eye out for my friend J, and I use the helpful descriptor, "He's black," the author (and by including it here with such a precious introduction, I have to assume James or the whole EC crew as well) thinks I'm tiptoeing down the slippery slope toward the Holocaust? Really"
No. Bringing up race, in and of itslef, is not the problem. Bringing up race where it is irrelevant is the problem. It doesn't matter that the man at the door is black. It does matter when you're describing your black friend so you can find him/her.
Bringing up race where it isn't importatnt reinforces the idea that it should be important. Further, no one is saying that bring up race innapropriately will lead to the holocaust; it was only said that it allowed the holocaust to happen. It was a neccessary component, not a cause.
I think it's time for a game to properly explore the Holocaust. I don't know how it would be done - it has to be done in a way that's not exploitative, and it can't reduce the history of the event to a series of inputs and events. I don't even know what kind of game it would be - a survival horror of sorts would be a possibility, as would an "adventure" game (Auschwitz is no adventure, I can guarantee that). It also cannot allowed to be fun: it would have to be like Spec Ops: The Line, except far more dreary.
This is a powerful lesson in and of itself.
I'm pretty sure that the author never said that a person who uses qualifiers is going to a full blown racist. The message was that the minor bit of prejudice involved in calling something bad that happens gay, jewing (jewwing? idk...) something down, or adding unnecessary qualifiers allows those who WOULD pursue the path of bigotry to do so unchecked.
Describing someone by their characteristics is not bigotry, but pointing out someone's characteristics in a possibly negative (or sometimes even positive) way IS.
Hmmm...I'm going to have to agree and disagree with the link.
I agree that portraying the Final Solution as covert is a falsehood. This is found often in US politics as well. People tend to believe that fascism, the holocaust, and the Final Solution were hoisted on the German people without their knowledge. In reality, they knew what was going on and supported it.
I disagree with the author's argument that pushing the envelope is inherently selfish or bad. Sometimes, boundaries need to be pushed if the medium is to evolve. Ms. Brathwaite set out to prove that game mechanics can be used as a rhetorical device, and it seems she succeeded.
Steam: pazython
This becomes a fundamental problem with entertainment though. Honestly, if I just want to relax and be entertained, I'd rather have a power-fantasy than a fantasy about incapability any day. Particularly Wraith embraced being unable to act (as compared to unwilling to act with Mage).
So much of our daily lives make us feel powerless to begin with. Today, I spent all afternoon trying to get internet set up in the house I will be living in in a couple of weeks. I failed. Comcast beat me. Comcast beat me horribly. They set up a system that is so rigid, it had no place for me to find a solution that worked and they spent so much effort trying to sell me something I don't want, that I failed to buy what I wanted. That left me feeling powerless and upset - and this was just my attempt at setting up internet access where I will be living soon. After experiences like that, I don't want to experience something (much) worse. I'd rather just go with a power fantasy, whether as hero or villain.
It has become a fact of life that our everyday interactions almost always tell us just how unimportant we are, how little we matter to those we interact with. Certainly I treated the poor sales rep badly though they were just doing their job at a blind corporate megalith bent on evil. Imagine how that sales rep feels. That guy was likely in India, facing much bigger troubles than mine. I am connected after hours on their website to this fellow and I am angry and frustrated already. He knows the company he works for treats their customers like shit and it's his job to do whatever he can for them (within a narrowly and often scripted set of rules). Further, I knew none of this was his fault and even said so. That might be even worse to him. Not only am I upset and angry about how I've been treated, I make it clear as day that I know he has no power over the situation. Wouldn't it be better for his psyche if he could be the villain? At least then, he'd feel he had power. As is, I made it clear I knew he had no power as soon as I was communicating with him. As powerless as I felt dealing with Comcast, Comcast has made their employees feel even worse.
The thing is, I honestly got the impression this guy felt bad for me. I mean, he's likely not starving or anything, but his lot in life is likely not nearly as cared for as mine is. I'm bitching about a 1st world problem and he's dealing with 2nd world problems (not even getting to third world issues). Yet I got the impression he was sympathetic and could do nothing. Completely powerless. The world we've built tends to make us feel completely powerless. All this powerlessness is so some marketing execs can say their policies are "increasing product adoption rates among existing customers". That's a fairly assanine excuse to make everyone involved feel like worthless pieces of shit.
When faced with this, I'd rather not look at something deep or painful. I'd rather see something where I feel like I have control over the future, or at least someone I identify with has control over the future.
There was a recent article at the escapist about a writer leaving gaming because she wasn't able to write the stories she wants. I think, however, she'll find a rude awakening anywhere she goes. Most of us live better stories than we desire to read about. That is to say, we live complex and difficult lives. We'd often much rather have something light to remove us from that complexity.
So I felt that Wraith was the best of White Wolf's games, but I think I want to play Werewolf.
Wraith is possibly one of the darkest tabletop role playing games ever. And it was the perfect place to tell the story that Charnel Houses was trying to tell. It is such an amazing book that every once in a while I will pull it out and read it again because it is just that compelling.
Though of course now this reminds me of how much I love Wraith and how much I wish the line as a whole had more fans. It makes me all nostalgic wishing I could get a game together.
This is the source of Stephen Colbert's "I don't see race" gag. By pretending race doesn't matter, Colbert's character gets to abuse privilege and then blame everyone but whites for it. People here who think you can't say "there's a black man over there" are literally indulging in the same privilege. You're the living examples of what Colbert is parodying. Only racists get to pretend that race itself can't be seen, without consequence.
I also thought about how even comic books could deal with heavy subject matter like the Holocaust and other genocides, and they've been doing it for decades. (Heck, Magneto is an extremely famous example of a character closely tied to such taboo subject matter.)
Then again, video games are still seen as a kid and teen thing, and I think that's the one thing holding it back. It is in its own counterpart to the Animation Age Ghetto, restrained by "Think of the children!"
Thank you for contributing positively to the gaming industry.
For instance: Whether or not people thought Wraith was a success or not as a game. To me, that does not exactly seem to matter when considering the subject besides whether or not the game mechanics work to allow the message to be spoken and make it powerful enough to speak to the player on a stronger level.
The second matter was of the Holocaust. Both my friend and comments mention how it seems like the Holocaust is either overdone or is not a big deal now that the subject matter is no longer quite so fresh. Honestly, I do feel like the Holocaust is still a powerful moment in history, but I concede that it is something that has been milked just about dry by both novels and films. However, I still feel like ExtraCreditz does have a valid point and the Holocaust works at least as a very good EXAMPLE.
It is a topic they have mentioned more than once in the videos: That games are often still not taken as seriously and thus the concept of a serious subject matter in a game continues to sound ridiculous to a lot of people. As such, topics like this feel more like pushing boundaries than it would in another medium. By now, we are so used to viewing other mediums as something where you can sit back and really chew on their artistic value whereas games face the hardship that they supposedly 'can' have deeper meaning but they still 'need' to keep us pleased, films still suffer the same way. For adult themes they are socially allowed to have the juvenile basics such as sex and violence, yet when these matters come up many people are either outraged, confused, or skeptical of the idea. If they try to be respectful to the subject matter and do things tastefully, public expectations usually dictate games like that will flop because it does not have the action or interactive engagement to keep people feeling like they are living a fantasy. However, if they try to make it engaging, they get misunderstanding protestors screaming about how offensive they are to make a game about it. Whether the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, or perhaps something more current such as the genocides in Darfur, it more has to do with the fact that games face a huge risk tackling it rather than other mediums.
Games like Bioshock and Nier can pass under the radar with their innovations and pressing boundaries of their themes simply because they can fly under the radar without too much backlash as 'just another' FPS Horror or Square Enix RPG. So really it is not so much 'Pfft! We need to be original and make games about the Holocaust!' so much as the idea we should not really be afraid to push the boundaries and be willing to take the risk. Honestly, some of the best lessons we learn from are from the past. Such as thinking over the anecdote critically rather than literally.