bruceb

In no particular order, really, here are things it's occurred to me to say about New Horizons. This installment focuses mostly on motives and basics of approach.

How can I keep up with developments with least fuss?

I have a tag for New Horizons posts -http://bruceb.livejournal.com/tag/new+horizons - and you can get Atom and RSS syndication feeds just for those I remember to tag this way.

Nitty-gritty time. Won't this just be a book of politically correct BS?

I'm going to separate out a terminology concern from the substantial one.

Okay. What's the terminology concern?

I passionately loathe the slipshod usage of "politically correct", "PC", and the like. The time is long, long past that the concept referred reliably to anything at all. As Orwell says of "fascism" in Politics and the English Language, "politically correct" has "now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’." As a general thing, if you want to talk to me about PCness, I don't want to hear it; I will breeze past virtually everything in which I find it playing a part as something I'm supposed to take any bit more seriously than simply a dressed-up "I don't like that".

All right, then, Mr. Usage. Isn't this just going to be a load of ideological indoctrination, the usual left-wing cant warmed over and gussied up with pictures?

I sure hope not. So do the folks at Evil Hat, who have better things to put their production time and effort into. Gaming is at the best of times not a path to riches, but publishing a lot of ranting doctrinaire work wouldn't be anywhere near the best of times.

But isn't the whole point of this to "raise consciousness" or something like that?

Yes, in a way, it is.

So you admit it! All that stuff about usage is just a smokescreen for not facing up to your agenda, right?

Ah, no, it isn't. Here's my actual agenda: to inform gamers about parts of life in the pulp era that haven't been covered well in gaming before, and to help them put that information to use in a bunch of ways.

What's the real difference between this and any politically driven history of the era, though?

Open-ended nature.

Eh?

Here's some philosophy of game design for you. To the extent that an RPG is a good RPG, it's a bad tool for guiding people to specific conclusions. Gaming is only good for raising questions.

In a classroom, the lecturer can take you all the way from raising the issue through reviewing selected evidence and prior interpretations to a summation. But gaming isn't supposed to do that: the whole point is that the contributions of the participants matter, and if they do, there goes your guaranteed outcome. Gaming does situations rather than expositions. That is to say, it can inspire you to think, "Hey, that's a great idea," and help you incorporate aspects of it you might overlook or just hadn't thought of. But that's not steering you to an outcome; it's about helping you walk and talk a particular way, while leaving your destination and the content of your speech for you to determine.

My agenda, this is to say, is to help bring some interesting parts of the past to life in your play, in ways compatible with the spirit of heroic adventure. I don't want you think any specific thoughts, beyond what I'd consider the rudimentary dignities of civilized existence like "racism really does suck" and "women are just as interesting and capable as men, and good for more than being eye candy and sex toys". A bunch of the genres gaming tap into already have the everyman hero concept, the good guy who comes out of anywhere when there's a need. New Horizons is fundamentally about nodding in vigorous agreement, pointing at more places, and saying "here, too".

Well and good, if you can keep it up, but what about villains. Isn't this all going to be about hating whitey, in the end?

Yes, and no.

You're doing it again.

I know. I'm like this in person, too. Anyway, here's what I mean.

When you take up unjust law and custom in the early 20th century US, which is the primary focus in terms of time and place for New Horizons, you're mostly looking at things set up by bad white people and maintained by them and followers with varying degrees of ignorance and prejudice. It wasn't an impersonal force of gravity that imposed racial segregation on the federal government's agencies and facilities in the 1910s, it was Woodrow Wilson and like-minded employees at all levels. The victims of lynching described so well by Billie Holliday in "Strange Fruit" didn't go hang themselves; white people brutalized and killed them. And so on through the tragedies and horrors of the time.

But it's important both for the history and for the genre that most white people weren't actively villainous (degree of culpability matters, a lot) and not all bad people were white. Just as there are unknown heroes and would-be heroes everywhere, so with bad guys. There are schemers, lunatics, and other real people who'll make fine antagonists who aren't anything like upper-class white men.

{Enter another questioner.} Isn't this just going to trivialize the whole thing, then?

That's what most concerns me, actually. After some point, accommodation of varying perspectives and the search for equivalent starting points and challenges becomes first a kind of whitewash and then just plain dull. I've seen plenty of game books with intriguing hooks that left me thinking "But what do I do with this? What's cool, what's challenging, what's fun?" I'm hoping very much not to fall into that. I think it's possible to acknowledge complexity without imposing a false equivalence on all the interesting people, groups, and situations I want to cover.

Ever think that maybe you're not the right person for this job? Do we really need another volume of white guys explaining other people, when there's real talent in people of other backgrounds out there?

Of course I worry about that. If I didn't, I'd have gone ahead and pitched this book to some publisher at least a decade ago. But I've been gaming 29 years now and nobody's written the book for me (and the rest of us) yet, and Fred and Rob and everyone's excellent work on Spirit of the Century offers some distinctive hooks, and I'd rather take my shot at it than not. If what I do is lacking in some key regard...someone else can fix it, just as others have improved on my concepts and details for other games. I'd be perfectly happy to see other perspectives on this kind of subject, for this and other eras. I am quite sure that even if my words turn out as well as I hope, there'll still be lots of room for others, let alone the openings left by my inevitable flaws.

That's my answer to the literal meaning of the question, at least. I've seen it just a few times so far with what strikes me as a subtext of "You ought not to do this." There I'll have to disagree. I don't see everything someone in other circumstances would, but then they don't see everything I do, and in any event, the goal of research and discourse should be to get beyond our individual limits. In some ways nobody is qualified to really do justice to anything, and I'm not being merely rhetorical about that: reality is bigger than our words can encompass, and we will never do more than approximate it. But then I'm not trying to have the last word, only to open up some turf and say some good words. Others will be as free to take their run at it a year from now as they are right now - I am not, I genuinely believe, oppressing their power of choice, thanks to the realities of small-press publishing. If anyone has a concern about the market realities, I'll be glad to discuss it separately. In more general terms, no matter how good a job I do, there'll be room for more.

(The short form is that because there's no fundamental invention here, it's very different from writing a supplement about some real-world subject for use with a strongly defined single fictional world. The Century Club and its context are built on top of the real-world stuff in New Horizon rather than vice versa. Furthermore, the Evil Hat guys could always say "That's all options" and build their own alternatives, or have someone else do so, if they decide later that they don't like the results. I have much less narrative power in this situation than writing for an environment like the World of Darkness, and for this purpose I'm quite glad of it. I can expound at length if someone cares, but it'd go beyond general-purpose gamer interest.)

If someone feels actual offense or slight at the fact of my doing this, then I encourage you: please, get writing. There's a ton of help available about self-publishing - you can manage PDF and print on demand just like, say, Evil Hat, and lots of folks would be glad to help you do it. For my part, I'm quite willing to be shown up, and I have a history of admitting it when I am. It's just that I think I have some good stuff to deliver here, and I'm not going to wait more indefinite years hoping for someone better set to come along. Whether it works or not, it just feels - to Fred and me, at least - like it's better now to take the shot.

Issue 2 of this will probably be about doing research.