@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Roz said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Tinuviel I think you're conflating a few things. One, having a fantasy setting decide to basically forego racism as part of the theme doesn't mean that all the players and the OOC experience will suddenly be free of bias, because OOCly we're all still brought up in this system.
Second, I think you're conflating "this experience was valuable for my personal learning and I think others could find it valuable, too" with "all games must provide this specific experience in the same way."
No, actually. Not even remotely, on either of these points.
I am speaking, specifically, about the idea that was raised that playing a POC character to tell and experience stories from the viewpoint of a POC, specifically to try to understand their point of view in reality.
@Sparks said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
Granted, that pressure is more common in anything set in the modern-day world, as opposed to fantasy worlds, but I'd argue that the modern-day world is where being willing to expand your viewpoint is actually potentially important to things outside of pretendy fun-times internet story games. Since we aren't experiencing widespread and systemic real-world racial oppression of elves, or werewolves, or Togruta, or anything else mythical or purely fictional.
Sorry, I'm evidently not being clear here, for which I apologize. Learning to expand a viewpoint does not mean taking another experience as your own. It means learning to see things from another person's point of view, which is something we have a general lack of in today's world.
I should clarify that I know some folks think of characters on a MU* as alter-egos, and use them to explore aspects of themselves. (Which can be really valuable for folks who are exploring their sexuality or gender identity and cannot do so safely in their offline home life.) I do not. As someone who writes a lot, I think of characters on a MU* as being like characters in a story I'm writing; their experiences are not mine, but if I'm writing a character in a story it behooves me to try to get out of my own head a little bit. After all, if I don't, a character will just be... well, me.
Trying to force yourself out of your own headspace to try to see something from some other point-of-view is something you can do in a lot of places—writing, certainly, but also friendly debate where you genuinely try to see the other person's viewpoint, reading nonfiction from people whose experiences differ from your own and really trying to understand where they're coming from, etc.
And when the viewpoints you're trying to stretch your head to are for something that's a real-world thing, it's worth doing in an informed manner; talk to people whose viewpoint you're at least trying to understand. And not just one, but as many as you can, since no one social group or cultural group or any group is likely to have uniform opinions on everything.
It's something people will never be perfect at—or even close—because we're all inherently flawed because you can never entirely get out of your own head. But I tend to think any time you can work to see a situation or scenario from a viewpoint that isn't your own inherent one, it's like exercising an empathy muscle. A man trying to genuinely try to comprehend what a woman goes through in a world full of sexist background radiation, someone from a more privileged social standing working to understand what folks who don't have money go through, someone trying to understand where people on the opposite side of a political divide are coming from (I... I have tried, but I cannot do this one, not even to try to win them over with rational arguments), etc.
You'll never 100% understand someone else's experience—hell, you might never understand 40% of it, if even that—but at least trying to step outside your own head long enough to see the general shape of where they're coming from is worth it. And their time and energy is worth you trying to at least meet them halfway rather than making them walk everything over to your point-of-view to explain whatever on your terms rather than you trying to understand what they're saying on theirs.
It ain't perfect, sometimes we'll get it wrong—heck, maybe a lot of times—but I honestly believe that empathy muscle is at least worth trying to exercise. And if you fail, you apologize, make amends as best you can, try to learn what you can do better next time, and then do better next time.
But there's a fear that in trying to stretch that muscle and get outside your own head that way, those failures might be Really Bad, and that so it's not worth trying to step outside your own head at all. And I just... I can't agree. None of us want to fail at things, but failures are also the first steps towards eventual success. And if you don't risk failure by trying, you never get anywhere at all.
Anyway, being forced into personal experiences outside your normal world view can certainly be one way to stretch that muscle. It's not ideal—and often not pleasant—but boy can it be effective. My friend quite demonstrably wanted me to change out my avatar to understand his online experience firsthand, because I was being unfairly dismissive about the severity of his experience when I kept equating it to the online sexist toxicity I was dealing with in the same game at the same time.
(I mean, the sexist toxicity was pretty awful too, but it did not involve freaking death threats. Most of the time. This having been pre-GamerGate.)
Honestly, my friend's challenge to me was like the more recent two folks who handled support for a company—one man and one woman—where they flipped email signatures for a week on the shared support account email and changed nothing else about how they handled the incoming client mails, and he had an eye-opening week when it came to the sort of sexist nonsense she put up with that he'd been blind to. It wasn't that he wasn't unsympathetic or unaware that sexism happened, he just had not truly comprehended how overwhelming and constant it was and how his productivity bottomed out when people thought they were talking to 'her'. And conversely, when people thought they were talking to 'him', she had her most productive week ever by leaps and bounds. Because, as her co-worker put it after the fact, it turned out he wasn't actually a lot faster like he'd thought (and written off as having had years more experience), but that in the time he could finish a ticket and move on to the next, she was stuck still trying to convince the client for her first ticket that she actually knew what she was talking about so they'd follow her instructions.
She could've told him all that. (In fact, she did tell him all that; the two of them wrote up Medium stories about the experience which are both worth reading.) And it wasn't like he didn't believe her that sexism was a factor, but he didn't actually understand it until she forced him into the situation she was normally in. It forced him to flex that empathy muscle, and get a little better at stepping outside his head to understand where she was coming from for other things too.
In the case of the challenge my friend made, he demanded I do it because he figured—rightly, as it turned out—the experience would be eye-opening. It was also a passive experience, just like the email, inasmuch as all I had to do was make a new character for the game who was dark-skinned instead of fair-skinned—akin to flipping the email signatures—and without saying or doing anything new or differently than I had been before, holy flipping cheese did the hidden assholes reveal themselves.
Anyway. I guess I'm not trying to say people must exercise that empathy muscle, or must do any one thing to try to get better at shifting their viewpoint to understand what someone else is trying to communicate; I think that'd counterproductive in the extreme. I guess I'm just saying... there's value in doing it when there are good opportunities, and I think discouraging it is detrimental.
And even if it's not the intention, a lot of the caution folks end up feeling they have to exercise—never write an NPC on a modern game that doesn't share their own background in case they get it wrong, never write a character in a story that isn't one entirely drawn from personal experience, never try to make the effort to stretch and see someone else's viewpoint because your interpretation might be wrong, keep arms and legs in preexisting unconscious cultural bias zone at all times while life is in motion due to risk of offense—is worse than the possibility of a failure you can learn from and do better as a result of.
That said, I'm realizing that I'm definitely not communicating any of this stuff very well (...and also, just now, that my ADHD meds wore off two hours ago and HELLO HYPERFOCUS ON WRITING A POST), and I've got no desire to muddy the waters of the thread more than I already have. So with this as my final attempt, I think I'll bow out as a contributor. (I'll definitely keep watching/listening, though, because there's a huge variety of viewpoints on all of this and it's worth listening to them.)
Otherwise, I've done some fiddling and it at least looks a bit more familiar.