Historical MUSHes

[surreality]

@Arkandel said in Historical MUSHes:

And while The Pianist is a static work of art that narrates events within a specific context and tells a specific tale. MU* simply don't work like that due to their interactive nature.

...and yet, you can't tell the static work: "Hey, too far, scale it back." You can when it's other players interacting, which is a benefit of the interactive nature of MU.

[faraday]

@Lotherio said in Historical MUSHes:

@Cupcake said in Historical MUSHes:

female Indian medical doctor

Susan "Bright Eyes" La Flesche Picotte

That's actually a perfect example of the possible/plausible debate. Mary Walker (Army doctor), Kate Warne (Pinkerton detective and Union spy) and Bass Reeves (former slave turned lawman) are other examples of ground-breaking people that did things that were generally prohibited to people like them in their day.

Should everyone on the game be allowed to be that unique though? Or waltz through their story without facing any of the challenges that those real people faced? What about something that just flat-out didn't exist, such as a female soldier serving openly (i.e. without disguising herself as a man) in a front-line regular unit of the Union Army? And what happens when you now have a whole town full of these exceptional people? At what point are we no longer playing any semblance of history and just playing costume dress-up with modern sensibilities?

Ultimately it's up to an individual game-runner to make those decisions, but we're being disingenuous if we think drawing those lines is easy.

[Ghost]

@Arkandel But this is where it gets weird and makes me go...

There are all these rules and bylaws, societal norms, socio-political fads per country that vary from person to person...

Like:

If it's socially acceptable for people of a certain skin color to use certain words, and my character fits that wheelhouse, is it okay for me to use those words ICly? Does it more or less matter if I'm not that ethnicity OOCly? Does my OOC ethnicity even matter and why should I even disclose that? Does that make it okay for men to RP as women...?

...but what if I'm a man RPing as a woman and avoiding themes central to women's issues? Is it okay for someone who has suffered discrimination as their OOC nonwhite ethnicity to RP as a racist white person? Is it stupid to declare your ethnicity/gender on an OOC scale? Would doing so cause more issues than good?

INTERNAL SCREAMING INTENSIFIES

Minefield. MIIIIIINEFIELD

(And no, please, let's not turn the conversation to this, or if you want to create another thread. I was just trying to outline the number of mines in the field should anyone allow racism/bigotry into a Historical MU. Or, at least, was trying to outline how fragile the yellow tape is when it comes to maintaining peace OOCly when it comes to these topics)

[peasoupling]

@faraday said in Historical MUSHes:

What about something that just flat-out didn't exist, such as a female soldier serving openly (i.e. without disguising herself as a man) in a front-line regular unit of the Union Army?

This cuts both ways. If you have female soldiers serving openly in front-line regular units of the Union Army, I can't play a female soldier disguised as a man. Not really.

[Lotherio]

@faraday said in Historical MUSHes:

At what point are we no longer playing any semblance of history and just playing costume dress-up with modern sensibilities?

This may be the heart of it, at what point does verisimilitude vanish for the individual (various points certainly).

Another example cause it works for me; I keep thinking a 50s cafe racer joint would be fun to play in. But maybe I'm only seeing the costume dress up side? Greased hair, kids biker gangs versus outlaw 1%'ers vs police chases and all; rum runners on the side even, souping up their pre-NASCAR cars by mixing and matching the best parts to get the most out of the pedal.

But I also know, everyone holds up the 50s as a golden era and looks at crime stats without considering that domestic and hate crimes were not reported as much. There was more hate than acknowledged by simple crime stats that were collected due to how the data was collected even, it was a big era of civil rights movement.

The suggestion @Ghost hinted at, period-piece vs historical, might help a little, but I think more folks would simply eye roll at playing on a period-piece game, wondering how much history was thrown out the window even (is that 50s cafe racer place going to involve the main motorcycle person jumping the shark on skiis at some point?).

[Ghost]

@Lotherio said in Historical MUSHes:

The suggestion @Ghost hinted at, period-piece vs historical, might help a little, but I think more folks would simply eye roll at playing on a period-piece game, wondering how much history was thrown out the window even (is that 50s cafe racer place going to involve the main motorcycle person jumping the shark on skiis at some point?).

You know, I think this hobby could use more artistic fuckery in terms of injecting style into period/historic themes.

Like DiCaprio/Danes Romeo + Juliet Montague vs Capulet set to the theme of a quasi Coachella post-apocalyptic Long Beach setting.

Probably a lot of fun room in there to do stuff like THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR in a medieval theme between two rival nations of knights/wizards/LotR style rangers, where the slaves are some kind of underground race of mole people used for mining...but then there is a slant historically where things like graffiti/tagging/underground clubs exist in the "No Man's Land" like some kind of shelled out Bosnia (a la This War of Mine)

Creating themes like these could kill 2 birds with one stone: You can explore historic themes with alternate NOUNS and stylized imagery to retell a story in the era of your choice without the RL social pitfalls.

(I.e. They call the mole people Snouts which is a pseudo-reference to the N-word, and the King in the West has outlawed their slavery and integrated the mole people into their society. Popular mole-person activist uses music radioed across the battle lines to give hidden messages (SLAVERY underground railroad songs) to give them hints on how to escape...)

^^ This is also the method Neil Blomkamp and Sharlto Copley used science fiction to tell stories about the horrors of South African Apartheid through Alive in Joburg, which later became District 9.

[surreality]

@Ghost See, this is what people insist others do. As in, 'this is the only allowable way'. And I am just not remotely down with that, because it again makes 'playing something with elements of actual history' NOT ALLOWED.

If people want to do that? Go do that. Have a blast, sincerely, please do. But leave people who decide to do something else the fuck alone.

To the generic crowd that behaves this way: Just stop with this bullshit insistance that anyone who DOES NOT DO THAT is an RL *ist troll. It's divisive garbage behavior. The hobby is not solely composed of extremist SJWs and trolls, full stop. Stop acting like it is.

[Ghost]

This post is deleted!

[Ghost]

@surreality said in Historical MUSHes:

To the generic crowd that behaves this way: Just stop with this bullshit insistance that anyone who DOES NOT DO THAT is an RL *ist troll. It's divisive garbage behavior. The hobby is not solely composed of extremist SJWs and trolls, full stop. Stop acting like it is.

(Moved deleted post as an edit to my previous one)

I don't disagree with you at all. I personally think people assuming that character selection, or language of said character, is a reflection of the author's secret allegiance to something horrible is a WTF-LEVEL 1984 sanitization that will end up doing more harm than good.

I should be able to write an antagonistic character who does horrible, bigoted things as a counterpoint to a hero (up-to and including writing things like the full n-word) without people accusing me of being a neo-Nazi. I think this steps society in the wrong direction and that kind of fascist over-liberal extremism normalizes fascist thought sanitization and punishment of people who refuse to conform to whichever social dominance claims divine right to do so.

As far as I'm concerned, all of you should go IC with your +2 shinai sticks and call each other n-words and PK each other to your heart's content, then laugh about it and pat each other on the back for writing antagonist characters who made it really satisfying for the PCs to defeat said evil. Go for it. Write things that inspire and horrify you.

Authors and actors can do this so long as their forwards or promotional interviews contain convincing explanations of how horrible they think said antagonists are, give or take a few mentions of stuff like "I had to go to therapy after playing this racist character", "It broadened my understanding of...", or "I couldn't sleep some nights after filming." This is stuff our society expects.

But, in all fairness, some mushers can't survive differences on whether or not characters are monogamous, whether or not initiating combat is a form of harassment, or role-playing without the OOC element being constantly pervasive without near constant accusations and explosions on MSB's hog pit. Too many people use their characters as extensions of themselves to the point of barely separating IC from OOC. Too much is taken too personally.

Choices gotta be made. Are people going to play a game that removes the safety nets and let the chips fall where they may, or are you going to choose which elements need to be avoided to keep the OOC-side issues to a minimum? By all means, choose whatever you want for a game...

...but I can tell you which one would make a MU more successful and draw more of an audience (or end up on the Hog Pit less).

[surreality]

@Ghost I think part of the confusion here is that antagonists focusing on these themes are just not a requirement in any way.

Horror handled 1902 Wild West. The focus of the story had nothing to do with these themes. They were background elements. 'Somebody who spouts *isms willy nilly' was not a character concept, not even for antagonists.

While people took these things on, they were not the focus of the story. As described a ways back, yep, people did. There were gay couples, there were non-whites. They all had shit to put up with -- but it was from background NPCs they controlled themselves, or their characters' understanding of the attitudes of the faceless mob that makes up society.

It wasn't other players throwing things at them, and it wasn't the story focus. Both of these things are relevant.

Someone making these things a focus of how they interacted with other players in the 'I wanna be a bigot!' way would have been glaringly obvious to everyone, given that environment.

I suppose anyone could have! ...but it's also relevant that no one did. It's pretty strong evidence that the 'anyone who wants to play in a setting where these things exist just wants to get their *ism on' hypothesis is absurd on its face.

[faraday]

@surreality said in Historical MUSHes:

I suppose anyone could have! ...but it's also relevant that no one did. It's pretty strong evidence that the 'anyone who wants to play in a setting where these things exist just wants to get their *ism on' hypothesis is absurd on its face.

At the same time, though, if someone had decided to give those characters IC grief, I don't think that should reflect poorly on them any more than the decision to play a monstrous slave-owning a-hole should reflect on Leonardo DiCaprio.

If (generic) you don't want that in your games - by all means make it a policy. But in absence of such a policy, people reacting in historically-appropriate ways to historically-oppressed characters should not be taken as a reflection on their OOC feelings nor the compassion or quality of the game community.

[surreality]

@faraday Oh, I don't disagree. It's just that this notion that 'anyone who wants a game that doesn't scrub these things out of existence is only doing so because they want to engage in bigotry'.

That even without policy, no one went there? Says a lot about how ridiculous that argument is.

[Pandora]

@peasoupling said in Historical MUSHes:

@faraday said in Historical MUSHes:

What about something that just flat-out didn't exist, such as a female soldier serving openly (i.e. without disguising herself as a man) in a front-line regular unit of the Union Army?

This cuts both ways. If you have female soldiers serving openly in front-line regular units of the Union Army, I can't play a female soldier disguised as a man. Not really.

I upvoted this because I see where you're coming from, but there's a loophole. If there are female soldiers serving openly and being treated with disdain, and my female soldier is disguised as a man and reaping the benefits (respect, dignity, worthwhile assignments, remaining unmolested, etc) of her assumed masculinity, there's a story worth telling there. Will I stand up for these other women? Will I join in on the misogyny to be part of the boys' club? Will I sacrifice my pride as a woman to protect my cover as a man? And so on.

[Ghost]

@Pandora I like the style of your brain. It has good brain style. There is definitely a story to be told, there.

[peasoupling]

@Pandora said in Historical MUSHes:

@peasoupling said in Historical MUSHes:

@faraday said in Historical MUSHes:

What about something that just flat-out didn't exist, such as a female soldier serving openly (i.e. without disguising herself as a man) in a front-line regular unit of the Union Army?

This cuts both ways. If you have female soldiers serving openly in front-line regular units of the Union Army, I can't play a female soldier disguised as a man. Not really.

I upvoted this because I see where you're coming from, but there's a loophole. If there are female soldiers serving openly and being treated with disdain, and my female soldier is disguised as a man and reaping the benefits (respect, dignity, worthwhile assignments, remaining unmolested, etc) of her assumed masculinity, there's a story worth telling there. Will I stand up for these other women? Will I join in on the misogyny to be part of the boys' club? Will I sacrifice my pride as a woman to protect my cover as a man? And so on.

That is kind of what I was trying to get at with "Not really." You could absolutely play that, and there's a lot of potential for interesting stuff there, absolutely, but I'm not sure it's still the same concept in some meaningful ways (at least as far as MY personal reasons for liking the concept go).

But yes, I was more making a general point about rebel concepts having nothing to rebel against. And you can't do rags to riches in a post-scarcity sci-fi socialist utopia.

[Ganymede]

@surreality said in Historical MUSHes:

Someone making these things a focus of how they interacted with other players in the 'I wanna be a bigot!' way would have been glaringly obvious to everyone, given that environment.

On The Descent, I played a fairly bigoted character. Yes, he used the N-word. Yes, he used the F-word (for homosexual men). Why did he do so in a post-apocalyptic setting? Because he was a white, heterosexual man born in the 30's who became a vampire at an old age (60s), and it fit in with his character.

Did this produce interesting RP? I think so. Was he antagonistic? I think he was, in many ways. Was I ever called a bigot OOC? Of course not. Why? I think it's because I never really threw it in anyone's face.

For me, that's not the insidious thing about bigotry. Marches with torches are scary and frightening, but the daily seemingly-innocuous aggression is just as bad. Also, for me, I enjoy playing concepts that I abhor at times.

[Goldfish]

Speaking as female of color, who played a white male in Horror's take on 1902: I think the progressive culture of our players and game made it a safe place to explore ideas that would get you run outta town or worse in real life. Now, this is for the same of my fun and (general) their fun.

My Dude sided-eyed a gay couple dancing. I had something vaguely bigoted in the next pose and I was like, naw, this ain't right. For one, I had already established that he was a woman beater, having slapped the shit out of one in front of another woman and I'd made allusions to him having hit his late wife, a close female friend, and his young sister in law. (I think. It wasn't a thing I made a huge deal about but it was firmly in my head canon) I didn't think that him calling a couple of perfectly happy men dancing something ugly was going to suddenly improve our historical accuracy. I'd have just been the asshole.

ICly, he had various reason to at least to keep his bigoted opinions to himself. A short list. Well known family head fucked anything with a heartbeat, making people he grew up with all colors of the rainbow. He'd lived 'Back East' as a Pinkerton for 8ish years before the story. He'd seen things and probably made peace with some more controversial things at the time. He was a disabled laudanum addict and had no place to throw stones, as far as he was concerned. Lastly, he was a closeted bisexual. Very, very closeted. All of that before you take into account Horror's archetype system and my character's archetype. The Confidant. He wants friends. He wants to help people. He wants to be supportive.

[Pandora]

Once upon a time, I was told that my black female character couldn't be fae-blooded because 'there were no fairies in Africa'.

Crushed.

[Tinuviel]

@Pandora said in Historical MUSHes:

there were no fairies in Africa

There totally were! I mean we call them Portuguese or Dutch these days...

[surreality]

@Pandora Well, I can't tell if you're joking about being upset about it or not entirely, but I sure as hell wouldn't fault anyone for wanting to slap the stupid off of whoever pulled that one out of their ass.

I am the wiseass that would get instantly banned thereafter for saying something like, "Spoiler alert: there are no fairies anywhere else, either, Peter Pan." (And commit canonical wholesale fairy genocide by choosing to disbelieve.) <cough>