Diversity Representation in MU*ing
-
@Auspice said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
wagon of dildos with the squeaky wheel
New MSB tagline.
-
This monitor is going to be so, so clean at this rate.
-
@surreality said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Wretched said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@insomniac7809 But then how will people know my pc got these tiddies?
<calmly wipes down the monitor>
In all seriousness part of my escapist fantasy is playing women with smaller boobs than mine. Because a strapless dress is part of my fantasy dream world, goddammit.
I honestly care about this more than hair/skin/eye color or combination thereof by miles and miles and miles.
I mean, maybe if we incorporate one of those winches they use for crossbows with, like, a corporate power corset or something?
I mean, you're a geek and a clothier. Surely this can be done.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
-
@Derp said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@surreality said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Wretched said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@insomniac7809 But then how will people know my pc got these tiddies?
<calmly wipes down the monitor>
In all seriousness part of my escapist fantasy is playing women with smaller boobs than mine. Because a strapless dress is part of my fantasy dream world, goddammit.
I honestly care about this more than hair/skin/eye color or combination thereof by miles and miles and miles.
I mean, maybe if we incorporate one of those winches they use for crossbows with, like, a corporate power corset or something?
I mean, you're a geek and a clothier. Surely this can be done.
They're totally a thing.
ETA: Or were. Only sources I can find are Victorian-ish.
-
Also, ohgods I had a point that prevented a nap and by the time I got to the screen I forgot what it was until now.
A good point of reference for anyone who doesn't understand the 'well-intentioned but is afraid to get things wrong in an offensive way'?
White Wolf -- back in the oWoD days of OMFGWTF were they thinking?! -- was trying to incorporate everyone and everything in part to 'invite everyone into the game'.
It, uhm. Yeah. It did not go so well, regardless of the intention.
Those of us who lived through that era of gaming, well. There is a hell of a cautionary tale right there.
@Derp If I was hot and thin enough to pull off that look without going all Ursula Under The Sea, I would. I so would. When I asked a professional corsetier once upon a slimmer time, I think the words he used were 'I would want to consult an engineer'.
Oh fucking well.
-
Look, if the Romans could build aqueducts, surely our civil engineers could fashion you a bustier that won’t make people think of a soft octopus flowing out of a bathtub.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
-
Great. Now my subconscious is working on structural designs for corsets for the well-endowed, as well as on cheapo insulation monitors, sound as a form of fault detection, and a new form of wind turbine.
I love you and I hate you all.
-
I've largely found MUSHes to be far more progressive when it comes to gender/sexuality politics than when it comes to race. I think largely because MUSH population is predominantly white, and that gender and sexuality issues are issues many have faced. Not so much race. Not really at all race. I know, being as European white-bred as I can be, I sure haven't. It's very alien to me, even though I've done all I can to try to learn and educate myself to the experiences of others.
Even then, whitey ass me still gets surprised!
A lot of players I've found -- generally those in the ok boomer-to-gen X age range -- haven't really updated themselves out of old mentalities, and will surprise me with old, non-PC terms (mulatto or Oriental I've seen many times, and was surprised by it) or ignorant prejudices that if they're not saying or doing anything hostile or negative toward a race, then they're not racist. Not all players in that age range, no. But it correlates.
There are also a lot of players I find that like to cling to the older tropes of game types, and elevate "normalized geekery" over what may be considered offensive. I've witnessed superhero games that keep FCs from the 1940s that my be built on or simply ARE racist cariactures ('The Mandarin', anyone? Or 'Gypsy Moth'). I've witnessed fantasy games that like to keep that Tolkien-esque golden age of racism where the evil overseas empires and races are usually going to be dark-skinned in some way.
For a recent example, I know just in Arx, I've felt many times uncomfortable just with the occasional jokey player culture of 'unleashing a crusade' on the made-up Arabic-themed empire. Even though I'm certain it's not theme trying to promote such a thing, at times I can witness a bit of slippery slope happening with how some of the playerbase receives it, and can be a little bit Too Real to be able to keep it safely in the realm of the fictional.
I think it takes a lot of care that people may not always employ, because they're too busy having fun geeking out to what feels normal and fun to your average middle-class white nerd, and sometimes having to see that Normal Geeky Fun in a different light -- potentially, an offensive light -- isn't everyone's cup of tea.
-
@Ganymede It's more the rest of me. In a power corset dress, I am round enough -- think larrrrrrge hourglass, I guess? I stole the term 'dayglass' from a beloved friend years ago and have stuck with it ever since -- that the proportions of 'incredibly short fat hourglass woman in a corset powerdress' would be very Ursula. Especially balanced on wee small feets.
I mean. She had style, so that's not totally a complaint, either, I suppose, but I would look completely hilarious and can admit this to myself quite comfortably.
-
@Roz said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Sunny said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
The more... verbose people in this thread seem to want a place to actually explore the reality of being a POC.
I haven't gotten that impression, but if it's true, that strikes me as exactly opposite of something that would make RL POC comfortable/feel included.
I haven't gotten that impression, either. I've seen @Sparks be verbose on this, but my takeaway from her stuff was "It was really valuable to my perspective to branch out in making my characters on MMO dark-skinned," not "I want to play stories in game about the effects of racism, not stories where race isn't an issue." (For one thing, I know that she enjoys Arx's setting. Enough to staff there!)
Yeah, to demonstrate more clearly, what happened with that challenge was basically this. Albeit paraphrasing because fourteen years ago or whatever, so hell if I remember exact quotes, and the paraphrase is funny. (And putting it in spoilers because psuedo-script-formatting gets long.)
***=So much text***
click to show(I am also suddenly fiercely missing online gaming with this friend since he moved across the country and we gradually lost touch several years ago. I'm a little tempted to reach out and see if he's currently playing anything actively.)
-
My current (only!) PC is non-white.
That said, he's from a culture I've lived and worked in so I have confidence to play him, if not wholly accurately, at least with a degree of verisimilitude that is acceptable to my own standards. I don't really know how I could play anything else decently. People sometimes say 'do research.' I think if current world events show anything, it's that the gap of experiences is something far larger than simple 'research' could cover.
There's also another problem. Based both on channel chatter and this very thread, I often find myself self-restricting what kind of RP I engage in. Not to avoid stereotyping (obviously I am conscious of these), but to avoid engaging almost any topic of cultural relevance at all, because I don't trust the very people suggesting this to be anything but unbearable in their effort to police RP. I picked my current character to engage with some uncomfortable history, but I really can't do it, because I know it will cause a shitstorm of people getting offended. So instead I do pretty generic RP. I'm not sure this has accomplished much, in the long term.
-
@surreality said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
White Wolf -- back in the oWoD days of OMFGWTF were they thinking?! -- was trying to incorporate everyone and everything in part to 'invite everyone into the game'.
It, uhm. Yeah. It did not go so well, regardless of the intention.Which was a good one. I have no real doubt about that.
And there have been strides made since, boosted by the fact that it is so much easier to hire authors from different countries, rather than have everything done by a handfull of white boys in Georgia with a library card.
But yeah, I can defend their intentions, but there's no defending what happened.
ETA: Actually... at the risk of shoving my foot entirely down my throat...
I will offer some defense of early WW, just because they tried to break the RPG presumption of "straight white man" that was very much set in 1992. Even something as simple as defaulting to "she" in most of the example text and using women as sample characters and NPCs, something like two years after TSR had published their corebooks with sidebars defending the use of "he" as a universal neutral default. They tried to get a more diverse crowd into their games, and while we don't have census numbers for RPGs, it seems like they were hugely successful in getting women into the hobby.
...and at the same time, yes, their attempts at racial inclusivity were frequently ham-fisted, misguided, and offensive to the races they were depicting.
-
So, just to clear things up...
- I didn't start this thread to make you stop playing your alabaster-skinned, cerulean-orbed, lithe-but-toned PC.
- I didn't start this thread to get White supremacists to play POC.
- I didn't start this thread to police your behavior.
...in fact, I didn't actually start this thread at all! I originally posted this on MU* Gripes and Peeves, because that's what this is to me: a gripe and a peeve. It was then taken out of there and given its own thread.
I just wanted to talk about this because I was upset about something and wanted to vent. That's all.
-
@onigiri said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
I've largely found MUSHes to be far more progressive when it comes to gender/sexuality politics than when it comes to race.
If you say so. I've found that people's progressive attitudes toward my gender and sexuality directly correlate to how much they can fap to them, which I guess is better than a lot of reactions but is still pretty creepy.
-
Let's all take a moment and appreciate the orb in @egg's avatar.
Anyway, I'm not sure what else I have to add on the topic, but I feel bad shitting up the thread with jokes. I guess I'll just say that for me, at the end of the day, thinking critically about the character you're playing is a good thing, and being able to recognize when something is weird and not-so-okay is likewise a good thing, whether it's White Wolf 1990s edgelord un-PC-ism, the white-folk-favoring bent of barbarian fantasy stuff, the "faith an' begorrah!" stereotype dialogue of your favorite X-Men comics, or Lovecraft stories all being (in the words of a podcast) "a white man goes insane after learning jazz exists." You don't have to stop liking WoD, or barbarian stories, or the X-Men, or Lovecraft, but you should be able to at least not pay the weird not-okay shit forward when you use that stuff as inspiration.
-
@GreenFlashlight said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@onigiri said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
I've largely found MUSHes to be far more progressive when it comes to gender/sexuality politics than when it comes to race.
If you say so. I've found that people's progressive attitudes toward my gender and sexuality directly correlate to how much they can fap to them, which I guess is better than a lot of reactions but is still pretty creepy.
This is the perk of being pansexual. People mistake me for woke because I'll fap to anything.
-
@Kestrel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@GreenFlashlight said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@onigiri said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
I've largely found MUSHes to be far more progressive when it comes to gender/sexuality politics than when it comes to race.
If you say so. I've found that people's progressive attitudes toward my gender and sexuality directly correlate to how much they can fap to them, which I guess is better than a lot of reactions but is still pretty creepy.
This is the perk of being pansexual. People mistake me for woke because I'll fap to anything.
This is the perk of being bisexual. People don't know we fuckin' exist.
ETA: Why do I call myself gay then, you ask? Because fuck you, that's why.
He/Him
-
@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Kestrel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@GreenFlashlight said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@onigiri said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
I've largely found MUSHes to be far more progressive when it comes to gender/sexuality politics than when it comes to race.
If you say so. I've found that people's progressive attitudes toward my gender and sexuality directly correlate to how much they can fap to them, which I guess is better than a lot of reactions but is still pretty creepy.
This is the perk of being pansexual. People mistake me for woke because I'll fap to anything.
This is the perk of being bisexual. People don't know we fuckin' exist.
ETA: Why do I call myself gay then, you ask? Because fuck you, that's why.
When we do exist it's 'cause we're stealin' everyone's wives and husbands cause if you like more than one gender obviously you can't be with one person at a time.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
-
-
@GreenFlashlight Haha, I definitely didn't say the other was perfect either. I experience it too, and my gender has made me a target of harassment, abuse, and even sexual coercion attempts over my MUSH career. So lovely! I think I've also posted at length here before ranting about the rampant fetishization of queer characters -- though this is not the specific topic to talk about that. I just see a lot more community "wokeness" steered toward that than I do racial issues, especially in the last few years.
Conversely, I had to hear someone use the n-word in a lounge because 'it factored into an academic debate about Lovecraft.' Some nerds do not get it.
