Walking Eye interviews me
Joe Murphy (Broin):
The discussion in the first part about underground comix, the Moral Majority, and terrors like Dworkin and whatnot was pretty interesting. I didn't realise how much of that period affected me, way over here in Ireland.
As we more or less share the language, almost all our gaming comes from the US and UK. There are a handful of Irish RPGs, and they mimicked American games for the most part - a couple of X-Files inspired games in the 90s, mostly. The UK had a stronger voice during the 90s, but still mirrored a lot of the same US topics. Our geographically close but linguistically different neighbours in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Scandinavia weren't so much of an influence. And when you lost sex+death, we lost sex+death too.
During the podcast, I got to thinking about how much the US influenced my gaming in much the same way I've been fed American movies and novels all my life. The themes that came up again and again in games like Shadowrun or Vampire were very American themes of freedom and manifest destiny, and the US has become almost a mythical sandbox for gamers here. (Probably because you have guns). At least in cinema and comics, we had some influence from the continent, but I don't know that gaming received that energy.
I've read a little about jeepform and how Scandinavian it is, and a little Japanese gaming through Ewen Cluney's podcast, but I don't know much at all about other non-English speaking gaming cultures. And I wonder if we missed out on a gaming equivalent to Jean de Florette's cinematic influence.
Joe.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Joe,
That brings up a whole salad of responses for me. One of them is to follow up on my first post, when I mentioned that in the interview, I hadn't succeeded in bringing my (admittedly long and lecture-y) points about feminism's history back to the point of Trollbabe. Basically, I'm interested in power that might be called "female." If you have it, then what do you do with it? Beyond the struggle for it, what's it for? What does a woman do if she is unequivocally powerful, and not in the sense of being in any way identifiable as tapping into or relying upon maleness? (Here I'm discussing gender in the sense of social construction at least as much, and probably more, than in the sense of anatomy and very general behavior patterns.) I'm especially interested in when and how a relationship becomes valuable as an exploitable resource, and when you do or do not so exploit it.
Or to put it differently, I'm interested in the genuine questions of feminism in its first actual flush of political power, before it was (as I see it) co-opted by the right wing and diverted/muted into identity politics. Please don't misunderstand me to say that Trollbabe is a clinical or analytical dissection of these issues. It's probably the single most non-verbal, visceral creative work I've ever done. What I'm describing here is what I realized or reflected upon after having written it and enjoyed playing it so much.
That's what I'd hoped to get to in the interview but we didn't make it there.
Here's another response, which I'm not sure I can do much with ... strangely, given the stereotypes of Irish culture and Irish-American culture in the States, the ethnicity is often utilized as an opportunity in film or literature to investigate reflexive or semi-pathologized violence. The Irish are supposed to be scrappers and pugs, always ready for a fight. So if you guys are taking the opportunity to enact or fantasize above personal violence by using the U.S. setting, then I should at least reveal that for a century, U.S. literature and film has been doing precisely the same by using Irish characters and to some extent the Irish setting, Boondock Saints being only one of the literally thousands of examples.
And another: I completely agree with you regarding U.S. role-playing's cultural hegemony, with the U.K. being a strong and probably the only second, and I don't think it's a good thing. I have been amply exposed to the German experience of beginning their hobby with AD&D2, as quickly interpreted and essentially re-presented as Das Schwarze Auge: issues of Social Contract, expectations for presentation, and on and on.* In the U.S., AD&D2 was a prominent feature of the role-playing subculture, but certainly only one of a number of heavy hitters including GURPS, Champions, and RuneQuest at the least.
The Swedes and associated areas have more of their own footprint, I think, even before the current jeepform thing, to the extent that unique features of their 1980s games fed back into U.S. design and publishing pretty strongly. Obviously, Kult is a big player here, but also The Mutant Chronicles and others. I'm a little surprised that French design hasn't had more of an impact - maybe it would have if In Nomine Satanas/Magnas Veritas had simply been translated instead of genericized into In Nomine.
I do think we, in the sense of role-players everywhere, are badly missing out on what could be powerful and seminal influences and transformations of both play and design, because of this overly one-way English-speaking-to-everyone-else situation.
Best, Ron
* In German, "black eye" doesn't mean the injury as it does in English. Think of "black" in its fantasy-SF cool sense, like Black Tower or Black Nebula, and then apply that to "eye" - it's actually a seriously bad-ass title. The English transliterative equivalent, "Dark Eye," is very flabby in comparison, sadly. Anyway, I bring all this up only to contrast the awesome title with what was and is, and with apologies to the cultural love many Germans have for it, a pretty rotten game which managed to combine everything wrong with AD&D2 with everything wrong with Rolemaster.
Gregor Hutton:
Hi Ron
I want to hear how you'd liked to have responded to the Scientiology question.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Gregor,
Upon listening to the interview, it turns out that I did in fact accomplish my immediate goal in responding to that - which was to see whether Kevin had any substantive reason to use that organization as the direct analogy for the Forge booth. I wanted to give him room to provide that reason, which it turned out he didn't have, but also to introduce my complete disavowal from any such thing, as I saw it from my side of the table. I fully embrace the fact that the Forge booth is a recruiting culture, but it is not predatory, financially or otherwise. Nor does it focus on a belief system; the recruitment is to get people (a) trying games they might like and (b) considering publishing their own games themselves. The only thing I slightly regret not saying was being clear about how utterly vile Scientology is.
Best, Ron
The Dragon Master:
The bit in part 2, where you were talking about the game you'd run for them, when you talked about the excitement (THIS thing, with THESE people, in THIS way). I'd not thought of it before, but I really have been fighting that for years. At the absolute best I've been hitting two out of three. I'll find a group I like, but can't stand the game system (in the big sense), or I'll find a topic and a system I like, but can't stand more than half the people there. The way you worded it just helped it click for me in a way it hasn't before. It's also helped me to see that some instances in which I thought I was hitting two out of three, I was really only hitting one, because the very natures of the people I was playing with was opposed to a method which I found fun.
I was also wondering. I've only come to the hobby in the last three years, but I've thumbed through the books for Classic Traveller and your comment about the base assumptions of early RPGs (that sessions were assumed to be a snapshot within a larger wargame) doesn't seem to jive with what I'm reading in those books. I know that the Wargame variation on Traveller came out about a decade after the boxed set, and I'm having trouble seeing how this game fits into the assumptions you say were there. To be clear, you were there, I wasn't, but I was hoping you might shed more light on that assumption of play, and how Traveller fits into the mix there.
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