Diversity, fantasy literature, and game design

This post is partly about the design of tabletop RPGs – but it is mostly about sexism, racism, and homophobia. You don’t need to know the first thing about polyhedral dice here.

For the past few weeks I’ve been dipping in and out of the Wizards of the Coast online forums about a project they called “D&D Next”. This amounts to the development of the fifth (actually seventh) edition of Dungeons and Dragons. D&D has been going for about 40 years now, and each new edition is a complete overhaul of the system from the ground up. So there’s been a lot of talking to do.

While a lot of the discussion is about game mechanics – people’s unaccountable nostalgia for blatantly broken, user-unfriendly features just because they were in the version of the game that each individual commenter first played, for example – a lot of it isn’t.

A lot of it is about the way the game is presented, and the way the game presents the fantasy worlds in which the narrative takes place. For the latter, I especially like to use J R R Tolkien’s terminology of a ‘Secondary World‘, of which the author or game master is the ‘sub-creator’. These two elements of the game are inextricably linked, because everything about the game except the technical nuts and bolts depicts, to a greater or less extent, the sort of secondary worlds the designers have in mind. Every choice of equipment description, every example scenario, every piece of supporting art, illuminates our expectations about the game we will play.

There are wildly divergent views on what sort of world the game should depict. But I’ve noticed a stark difference between what people think they want from the game, and what they actually demand. When it comes to matters of diversity and inclusion, this is especially striking.

One tendency is for players to claim that they want a more authentically medieval European world. But if you tell them that you agree, and that you’d love to see a properly worked up setting that resembles al-Andalus, they ignore you. If you say you want to see a setting that encompasses and encourages female roles like Joan of Arc, Joanna of Flanders, Yolande of Aragon, Margaret of Anjou, Hilda of Whitby, Freydís Eiríksdóttir or Maria Pita, they aren’t interested. And if you suggest that the secondary world should reflect the same-sex romantic and sexual associations of Richard the Lionheart, Marbodius of Rennes, or even perhaps Leonardo da Vinci, you’re liable to receive a stream of homophobic ranting that leaves one wondering if this an RPG forum, or Answers in Genesis. (The forum’s ‘no politics’ policy means in practice that challenging this with the force it deserves gets the thread shut down, and both bigots and their opponents threatened with banning.)

The medieval world was undoubtedly a terrible place. Philippa Gregory, in the afterword to The White Queen, says “I would be absolutely mad to want to be a woman of any of those times… If one could go back in time and be a wealthy man these would be times of adventure and opportunity but still tremendously dangerous… No woman of any sense can be nostalgic for the past.”

But there is a perplexing tendency among (almost exclusively male) fantasy fans to wish to sanitise such times as they relate to the adventure and opportunity for wealthy (straight, white) men, while exaggerating the already poor condition of women, and entirely erasing non-straight and non-white people. Rape was not as widespread as advocates of the ‘realism’ of A Song of Fire and Ice seem to contend; Richard the Lionheart was specifically condemned by his contemporaries for his appetite for rape, which suggests that he stood out from those around him enough to be noticed. Margaret of Anjou’s army of Scottish mercenaries, which wreaked such havoc in the approach to the Second Battle of St Albans, were notorious because they were seen as so much more dangerous (in this way as in others) to ordinary people. When Edward IV and his commanders breached the sanctuary of Tewkesbury Abbey and summarily executed their defeated foes there in 1471, the event became notorious.

Despite the enduring popularity of the (progressively better-researched, less crashingly-stereotyped) Oriental Adventures game-books, there seems to be a baffling adherence to a view of history which regards classical Greece and Rome, viking-era Scandinavia, and medieval France, Germany, Britain, as pretty much the whole world. The diversity of Constantinople, the religious pluralism of early al-Andalus, or the cultural complexity of medieval Persia are as alien to many fantasy writers and their fans as dragons and wizards are to our own reality. (Notwithstanding many excellent fantasy treatments of, for example, al-Andalus in various guises by authors such as Guy Gavriel Kay and Lois McMaster Bujold.)

The second tendency is to retreat to the 1970s. And I don’t just mean in a peculiar fondness for strange, arbitrary rules constructs, or the desire for the morally-neutral slaughter of faceless humanoid enemies. I specifically mean in the choice of art, and the depiction of women in particular. Two recent threads, “What kind of female character art do you want to see in the D&D Next books?”, and “Sexism in Fantasy”, have dwelt at length on this issue. And frankly, those who are against the constant use of gratuitous glamour shots of female characters are no more help than those who are in favour.

In the ‘Sexism’ thread, one early poster asked “Would you let your daughter go out looking like that?”. This, to me, immediately recalled Mervyn Griffith-Jones’ argument for the prosecution at the ‘Lady Chatterly’ trial: “Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?” No thought is given as to whether the players themselves might be young, female, or both. The same poster, in a single sentence, refers to “females…and…men” – women treated as biological specimens, men as human individuals. Another poster, a long-time banger of the drum for ‘authentic medieval European’ settings, condemns the glamour-girl art for its lack of ‘modesty’, making me wonder if this isn’t game design at all, but the policy committee of some small Salafi political faction.

As for the pro-scanty faction, they’re just as dismissive and objectifying. Some put great store by the ‘realism’ of their experiences in ogling female Live Action Role Players, as a source for what believable adventurers might wear. One poster just the other day said “What does this half-naked blond have to do with the story? Who cares?” Leaving aside the gendered-noun failure there, let’s just stop and realise that this is essentially an argument for entirely unrelated porn to be stuffed into the rulebooks because “sex sells”. As an episode of Mad Men recently had it:

Peggy Olson: Sex sells.

Another masculine fantasy figure.

Don Draper: Says who? Just so you know, the people who talk that way think that monkeys can do this. They take all this monkey crap and just stick it in a briefcase completely unaware that their success depends on something more than their shoeshine. You are the product. You – feeling something. That’s what sells. Not them. Not sex. They can’t do what we do, and they hate us for it.

The discussion of sexism inevitably became just another discussion of the dismally repetitive glamour art, rather than any kind of examination of gender roles, real or imaginary, current or medieval. Never mind that one of the best-loved and most widely-read fantasy webcomics features not just a female lead character, but a gender-ambiguous one as well. Never mind all the progress of politics and culture over the lifetime of the game. Some players’ contributions are still limited to “It’s a fantasy game; it’s perfectly OK to show a woman in a chainmail bikini, because she might have a ring of protection that we can’t see.” (No, really. Actual argument repeatedly deployed on both threads.)

Finding this image through Google was made difficult by just how much fan art there is out there for “drow swimsuit”.

Race gives more problems for some gamers than just the narrowness of the idea of medieval Europe. One of the game’s iconic villain groups, the drow, encompass several issues at once. A race of elves (and thus long-lived, beautiful, and magically adept), they were cursed long ago to have jet-black skin (such a curse!) and live underground. They are mostly dominated by a tyrannical matriarchy of spider-fetishists. Despite living in damp caves, these evil termagants are almost invariably depicted wearing little more than web-themed swimsuits. And the most famous exception to this community’s distressingly predictable ways of wickedness is a man-elf, fiercely independent and vigorous in throwing off the shackles of womankind: Drizzt Do’Urden. Now every pasty-faced mid-western libertarian basement dweller can empathise with this heroic individualist who resists the feminine tyranny. And the original drow (because despite a notorious court case, D&D did not invent them), who were legendary pixie/troll creatures of Shetland Island folklore, are more or less entirely forgotten in favour of these dark-skinned malefactors.

What all this boils down to is that a significant number of players of the game have found their ignorant, racist, sexist, homophobic worldview completely unchallenged by the game and the community that supports it. They regard any challenge to this absurd privilege and security as a personal affront, and they really don’t care if the game looks, plays, and feels like a relic of a bygone age. They don’t care if no women, no non-white people, no non-Americans, ever buys a roleplaying product again. As long as they can continue to expand their comfort zone like the imperialist fantasy of the old Expert boxed set, sod progress. Sod inclusion. Sod diversity.

I’ve said my piece on the forums. I’ve done my best to win over these bigots by convincing argument, by example, by drawing on any tiny grains of sense any of them might drop. But when I get down to it, the divide in gaming (and fantasy fandom more generally) isn’t between storytellers and simulationists. It’s not between wargamers and roleplayers, or between console gamers and card players. It’s between people who, beyond the gaming table, respect their fellow-people, and those who don’t. And I’m damned if I want to see the game, or the genre, shaped by sexists, racists and trolls for one moment more.