Diversity Representation in MU*ing

[Jeshin]

I play dark eyed characters, as a rule. Why? I was born with very very dark eyes and they have been getting lighter as I get older. I liked that I had near black colored eyes so you'll see characters with black, dark brown, earthy, slate, dull black are all surefire ways to spot me on a game.

Black eyes are extremely rare, rarer than blue for true "dark" almost can't make out the iris eyes. It was unique, I liked that. If someone else had some childhood thing about blue eyes, like someone saying oh I wish you'd been born with blue eyes like your grandma. Boom nostalgia/childhood thing insert into RP, bet they might have a preference towards that given complete freedom and a choice.

[Groth]

@Kanye-Qwest said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@egg blue eyes are coveted because they are rare. Just like being 'the tallest' is coveted because it is rare (and generally accepted to be attractive, most people don't covet rare things that are NOT.)

While you're checking demographically funky stats. Check out the number of men taller then 6 feet and women who are close to 5 feet tall as well as the number of people with green eyes.

[Auspice]

@surreality said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

...awkward thought: my most recent PoC PB has blue/grey/green eyes (depends on the photo; she's Jamaican/Irish). But, uh. That doesn't make her a generic white girl last I checked?

See this is where I'm like: <throws hands in the air> . o O ( ...is this something I should be ashamed about that offended someone? )

I used Nicole Lyn on 8th Sea who is Jamaican/Chinese, but prob looks white at first glance. I find her absolutely gorgeous partly because of her eyes (they're like, this amazing hazel and paired with her dark, curly hair is just- nngh). But I think she's a good example of 'probably got assumed white'

[saosmash]

My eyes are blue. I have never found them at all exciting. This thread is telling me that I am weird in a way I did not know.

[Tinuviel]

I'm all for encouraging diversity in terms of players and characters. Diversity of all kinds.

But people will always want to play what they want to play, and we shouldn't suggest that they shouldn't. Unless there's some inherent evil or immorality to what they're playing that goes against the setting.

[Jeshin]

@saosmash

Grass is greener. You probably want green eyes!

[Sunny]

I mean, @egg has a point. These games are full of blonde haired blue eyed tall / short characters. They really are. I play one, and there's like eleventy billion others on the same game. BOTH of my PCs have blue eyes. I think. Pretty sure, it's my default go-to when I have to create my own PC.

I agree it would be nice to see a more diverse collection of characters. I think it's representative primarily of the fact that it's a predominately white hobby, which seems to ME that it would be more helpful to make it a safer space for POC players than it currently is. Does more people playing POC make it a safer/better space for the players? ETA: My 'badly' should have been more strongly implied.

[surreality]

@Auspice Yeah, I remember her. I was talking about Taii Gordon from HorrorMU... she definitely didn't look white girl, but.

@saosmash If it makes you feel any better, my eyes are blue and I have central heterochromia. I am also just under 5ft tall. This thread makes me feel super called out for existing RL at this point, and I proooooomise you all no one would ever in a million years want me for their PB/on TV/etc.

[Tinuviel]

@Sunny said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

I agree it would be nice to see a more diverse collection of characters.

It absolutely would.

But I'd hate to suggest the idea that we should all play a POC, or queer, or differently-abled (or whatever the term is now) character simply because we want diversity for the sake of having it.

[Sparks]

Now that I have caffeine (if not actually any sleep) in my system and my brain is somewhat more orderly and somewhat less "blearily stream of consciousness", I shall try to be more clear (though knowing me, just as overly verbose) as I type up things between working on actual-work-stuff...

@Tinuviel said in MU* Gripes and Peeves:

@Sparks said in MU* Gripes and Peeves:

That said... even if it helps with some understanding and forces you to break out of unconscious biases? It's even more important to take those experiences and really internalize that they've got nothing on what POC folks have to go through RL.

While I agree that yes, breaking biases and doing one's best to reach a better understanding of those different to one's self... I honestly don't understand how playing a POC on a MU is going to do it. A character on a MU is not at all the same as an avatar in a game world, especially if the game world is fictional. The choices you can make in a video game are exceptionally limited when compared -to that of a MU*, so playing "someone with dark skin" isn't the same as playing an actual black person from Harlem.

I mean, sure, if you're not RP'ing then you don't have to force yourself to think about things that way because you're constrained by the choices the game allows you. Now, that said, RP is definitely a thing that happens in MMOs—or outside MMOs, but with those characters and settings—so sometimes you get the weird duality of having that avatar viewed as "you" and trying to also tell a story with them a'la a MU*, but I grant that the majority of MMO players don't RP the characters they make.

Even without the RP, you may still be forced to confront unconscious biases and assumptions in other ways, but maybe not those. That doesn't change the fact that putting yourself into the head of a character with wildly differing experiences than your own can help to widen your viewpoints. Maybe not in ways that aren't as much of a shock to the system as having someone let loose on you with a string of really vile racial epithets in the middle of online gaming, I grant.

The point I was very clumsily and blearily trying to get at is that you can find ways to break your biases and shift your viewpoint in unexpected places; witness that deciding to play a dark-skinned avatar in online games leads to many people assuming that you must be a POC iRL and feeling free to let loose with racist invective at you, which can be a viewpoint-shifting experience you would not otherwise have. And that only magnifies my feeling that an attitude that you should play or write only what you've personally experienced is horribly restrictive in a number of ways.

I've never been an insane nocturnal elf obsessed with death and spiders. Or a mage trying very hard to hold the world together after the passing of their teacher, who had basically become a lynchpin of the world they lived in. Or an explorer trying to map the forgotten parts of the world. Or a parkour enthusiast in a semi-dystopic cyberpunk future. Or a deeply emotionally damaged biotic with serious commitment and trust issues. Or a newborn AI. Or the young and somewhat reluctant ruler of a nation. Or the inconvenient bastard child of the ruler of an entirely different nation. Or a rancher in the 1880's Australian Outback. Or any number of other things I've played on MU*s.

And if we want to stick to modern-day real-world things, then I've never been a medical professional even though I've played a doctor. I've never been a pilot, though I've played people who flew planes. I've never been from New York, though I've played folks from there. I've never been from Texas, though I've played folks from there. I've never been someone from a wealthy background, though I've played those. I've never been a foster kid, though I've played those. I've never been blind—save during my worst migraines, where the loss of vision is blessedly temporary and usually only one eye—but I've played a blind character before.

Hell, I've never really been a straight person, and I've played those. (To be fair, I've never really been gay/lesbian either—woo, asexuality?—and I've played characters who were.)

Which is all a way of trying to say...

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

If you have the knowledge to accurately play a POC, with all their culture and history intact, then chances are high you already are aware of your biases enough to deal with them. If you don't, then you're likely just playing a white dude with chocolate frosting.

...that I disagree (and fairly vehemently) with the implication here. Maybe I'm misreading what you're trying to say, since general lack of sleep? If so, apologies for springboarding off of the comment erroneously.

But if I did read a correct implication there, then I think trying to limit yourself to only roles you have direct personal knowledge of is limiting, both narratively as a player—frankly there are honestly only so many times I'm willing to play a tomboyish ginger software/hardware engineer with ADHD, since I can just log off and be that in the real world—and in terms of letting you sit comfortably in your own OOC viewpoint.

We may not always get it right. Some things will just make people grit their teeth; we might try to do some research but still get it wrong. I'm certain there are a lot of little details I got wrong while playing a doctor that would drive real medical professionals nuts. I certainly know there are things where people are like "And then with my Mad Electronics Skillz, I'm going to do this" and I'm thinking "AUGH no how are you handling this aspect of that? You need this or else your device is going to catch fire. Which generally is bad and makes you fail the design review!" But it's fiction, and we can wave our hands around somewhat.

And yeah, when you get into questions of race, gender identity, sexual preference, etc., having things you do be perceived as 'wrong' can lead to more hard feelings. But I've seen someone get accusatory that "you're playing X wrong, because I'm X and that's not my experience of things" only to discover the other player was in fact also X, and that their personal experiences just happened to differ. Because experiences aren't universal.

There's no one way to play a character who happens to be POC, because there's no one universal "POC culture". There's no one way to play a character who happens to be ADHD, because ADHD presents differently in different people (and is co-morbid with a whole mess of other neurodivergent things). There's no one way to play a gay man, because there's no single universal template for "this is all gay men in the world". People are messy and made up of complex intersections of many different things; even people who are intersections of a lot of the same things ("Feminine, lesbian, POC from the Ivory Coast, scared of heights, allergic to penicillin, etc.") can be extremely different individuals.

Sure, if you think all black men have to be "thugz from the hood" and that's literally the entire depth of your character, then yeah, that's likely to be offensive. Just like if you do the same thing with homosexuality, or neurodivergence, or Asian ancestry, or anything else. Speaking as someone of partial Roma ancestry, the cliche and borderline-fetishized—pardon the slur for illustrative purposes—'gypsy' stuff that people romanticize makes me want to gnaw on my keyboard in quiet but deeply offended frustration. But I've seen complex, well-rounded, fully-realized characters who happen to be of Roma descent, too. Anything can be boiled down to a shallow and potentially-offensive cliche.

I'd argue that the possibility of getting it "wrong" doesn't mean you shouldn't try to construct characters who differ from your own life experiences in fundamental ways, even when those characters inhabit a fictional world that is far closer to our reality than many of the more out-there worlds we tell stories in. It makes for more interesting narrative and richer stories (and in the best case, more complex and full characters) if you have more diversity in your story world... and learning to try to really think about how all those different elements of a character's identity will drive their decisions and story and reactions can also be very good even outside of RP to learn to broaden your viewpoints. So it seems like a win-win; a richer world for the storytelling, and a chance to confront our own unconscious biases. Just be willing to genuinely hear concerns if people whose real-world experience touches on that of your character express them.

I mean, obviously, varying your RP in pretendy fun-times internet story games isn't going to make massive shifts in the state of the world; even if every single person in the MU*ing world learned to see things from viewpoints far different from our own, it wouldn't measurably move the needle on a global scale. But people have asked me before why I'll go buy lunch for the homeless folks near my office (pre-pandemic, I mean) because "it's not like buying lunch for those four people today is going to really make a dent in the problem". And aside from the fact that it demonstrably makes a difference to those four people? I like to think that if everyone did tiny acts of kindness, the world would in aggregate be a far better place... and even if no one else is doing little acts of kindness at that moment, that doesn't mean I should just stop doing it myself.

Because the world desperately needs us all, collectively, to learn to broaden our viewpoints and confront our unconscious biases. And even if other people aren't doing it, that doesn't mean we should just shrug and give up on doing so ourselves.

I guess it's more... I don't know that it's about making the hobby a safe space for POC in my way of looking at it, though I feel like if it isn't a safe space for POC already (beyond the usual ways in which the world can be shit towards POC, because woo systemic oppression) then we've got an entirely different additional discussion to have. But I think it's an exercise in learning to break our own unconscious biases, to learn to think more diverse, and most importantly to carry those changes in our thinking out into the rest of our lives.

I can say from personal experience that my writing without making conscious effort to write more diverse casts is still more diverse now than it was when a much-younger me was consciously reminding myself to add diversity. (It's also had the same effect on the mental images my brain spits out when I'm reading and encounter a character who isn't described in detail visually.) It doesn't happen overnight—if I look at my own writing, this is an unconscious shift, but that's taken a little more than ten years, and lord knows there's certainly still always a lot of room for further improvement—but it still seems worth striving for.

Humanity is a tapestry of infinite complexity, and people are plotted on a multidimensional chart with an uncountable number of axes; even if two people share the exact same coordinates in one axis ("cultural background") they could be separated widely on that chart by almost everything else. Possibilities are endless, and we're roleplayers; our entire hobby is about using our imagination. And if we storytellers—either as GMs or players—are incapable of imagining what the world looks like from any viewpoint but the one we've personally lived, or if attempting to do so means we'll end up with a shallow (and potentially offensive) cliche... then I'd argue those imaginations are frighteningly limited.

[silverfox]

These are musings not directed at anyone as evidenced by the lack of @atting. I don't actually care who said what, all the words together made me use.

1. How many people don't play PoC because they don't WANT to contribute to a stereotype?
   Me Musing: I grew up in Rural Colorado and DID go to BYU (so whomever compared something to BYU campus you are DEAD ON with that comparison.) I didn't have a single PoC teacher //ever//. It wasn't until I went to Houston, Texas, and had a beautiful and amazing mentor teacher for my student teaching, that I had PoC mentor. Those four months shaped my ENTIRE attitude around race and relations because I finally saw what I'd only "read" about in books. Legit - even my TESOL class that dealt with race in the classroom was taught by a white woman. Come on BYU, you can do better.

2. When thinking about "blue eyes" or other popular topes, how much of our ideal over them being "rare" and "pretty" is tied into systematic ideas of what is/isn't attractive?
   Me Musing: To be clear, I'm not accusing anyone of intentional racism or exclusion, or whatever. We're all built by what we are raised as. Both my elder sister and I married guys with blond hair and EXCEPTIONALLY beautiful blue eyes. How much of that was shaped by the fact that we were raised to see blue eyes as beautiful but weren't exposed till later in life to the beauty in other colors?

Okay, I will make an exception:

@Tinuviel and @Kanye-Qwest just kiss already and get it over with. #teamTK.

[reversed]

This post is deleted!

[saosmash]

@reversed I can't remember if that was me or if it was the person whose character I rewrote, but I do think it's funny.

[Sparks]

@Warma-Sheen said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Just keep in mind there are many flavors of POC who also have many flavors of culture. A lot of people forget the distinction between skin color and culture. I know a few white dudes with chocolate frosting. I know a few chocolate dudes with white frosting. They are people too.

Don't let fear of 'getting it wrong' stop you from playing a POC character.

You are way more concise than I am apparently capable of managing today; apparently I shouldn't have left the reply window in fullscreen mode and watched updates to the thread periodically while I worked instead of blindly writing a small novella while three more pages of thread materialized.

But, yes, this. Upvoted, and then an additional 99 more upvotes in spirit.

[Tinuviel]

@Sparks said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

But if I did read a correct implication there, then I think trying to limit yourself to only roles you have direct personal knowledge of is limiting, both narratively as a player

You didn't read it correctly, no.

And yes, your overall point is valid. But my only response is... so?

I don't want to use my fleeting RP time to break biases or shift my viewpoint. I want to play characters that entertain me and others. I spend my entire life learning about cultures and experiences both extant and extinct. I don't want to do that when I get to play make believe with my friends.

So again, people are going to play what they want to play.

[silverfox]

@Tinuviel

I think that's a valid point, re: This is our escapism. (Have I said the word valid to you two or three times today? I don't know. But I do appreciate where you are coming from and respect what you're saying about it as reasonable points.)

I think I'm going to be with @Sparks though. I think it's important for us to think about representation and factors of race in all areas of our lives, even our pretendy fun-times. These are places were we CAN confront those issues - provided people aren't choosing to be dumpster fires at the moment (tb clear, I'm referring to people in general and how we turn into dumpster fires so super easily... not specifically anyone that's spoken so far) - where the stakes are exceptionally low. If we get it wrong we CAN retcon/erase what has happened and then move forward and DO it better.

EDIT: Oh god my grammar. I know there should be something other than a regular dash in there, and that my ()s are wrong but I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO FIX IT and still keep all those ideas together.

[Dreampipe]

@saosmash said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

My eyes are blue. I have never found them at all exciting. This thread is telling me that I am weird in a way I did not know.

My family is majority brown eyes, so when I’d had blue eyes I was like “aw rad, I got something neat.” Any characters I created for like ten years straight all had blue eyes cause it was like a personal touch.

Not nearly as much these days but I still occasionally get “hey neat, blue eyes” from time to time just based on identifying with it.

[Tinuviel]

@silverfox It's not simply about being our escapism. It's about being our place to do our thing, within the confines of whatever setting we're in.

If I choose not to deal with a certain kind of story, so long as it's reasonable within the confines of the overall game story, then I have the expectation to have that choice simply accepted and everyone move on. The same goes for those that want to explore the intricacies of race, or culture, or whatever else.

I really hope that I'm not coming across as bigoted or bullying here, as that's not my intent. Gaming is an excellent tool to explore all kinds of things, I just don't care to be told that I must think about X, Y, or Z all of the time always or else I'm a bad person.

[Kanye Qwest]

I admit i hesitate in modern settings to play black people, because I worry about doing it in a way that is disrespectful. It's the worry that stops me, not in that I feel like I might actually hurt or offend someone or get 'in trouble' for it, but because I know that added layer of analysis and anxiety will make it harder for me to get into the character.

But in fantasy settings? Yay! My first Arx pb was Zendaya. My only current PC anywhere is Chinese, but born/raised in California, because I can play that. I'm familiar enough with that to not find it stressful, and even then I get it wrong sometimes. I only recently learned that Cantonese and Mandarin apparently use the same written language? Oops.

[silverfox]

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

I really hope that I'm not coming across as bigoted or bullying here, as that's not my intent. Gaming is an excellent tool to explore all kinds of things, I just don't care to be told that I must think about X, Y, or Z all of the time always or else I'm a bad person.

Oh god, no. And I am so sorry if what I typed implied that you are a bad person for thinking differently.