Emily Care Boss, is a professional in forestry, and a trail blazer in indie game design. She has done something that nobody before her has really done well; that is to make not one but, three rpgs about love and relationships with the Romance Trilogy. To be clear, there have been attempts all the way back to the hoary days of 1980's D&D to gamify sex, with tables to randomly define brothels, types of prostitutes, tables for physical assets, and chances of as well as effects of pregnancy on characters. Other games have dealt with it in their own systems, and whole manuals have been made to bring every deviant and perverse activity to your simulationist gaming table. Boss, has (I like to think) burned all of them down by actually making love and relationships the thing the mechanics are about and making the gamified porn irrelevant.
Why does this matter? Aside from the fact that it is a really innovative piece of creative art in gaming by demonstrating clever ways to solve a problem (what to do when you don't want to murder-hobo), she demonstrates that another problem (why aren't there more women in gaming?) might be solved by appealing to other realms of human experience.
I really love the kind of output by the indie game community, because, while I was on a gaming hiatus during the years of the Forge, I nonetheless was on my lonesome trying to puzzle out other ways of telling stories through games, and asking questions; how could I get past the grind of die rolling in a fight to get to what the meaning of the fight was narratively? How could I get to the grit of risk without having to deal with pages (and many procedural minutes) of consulting tables? How could I make the psychological, social, and spiritual harm of a life of murder-hoboing have real meaning in the game? How could I make the flaws of a character something that the player did not compete against, but relish to season a story? My questions have multiplied since my fairly recent resurgence into gaming, and the questions and stories are more interesting than ever.
But the flip side of the indie community is the repellent and overwhelming commitment by so many of the designers that I really respect creatively, to the leftist political dogmas of "social justice". In fact, it is so common that, I have often felt (*gasp!*) marginalized, or triggered by the unquestioning rhetoric and invective that flies just because I don't agree with the intellectual premises upon which those views rest. That merely questioning them has made one of the most prominent indie designers go from calling me "my friend" to a fascist "nincompoop", and a civil question to another whose games I really love leading to a near hysterical screed about ignorance and hate on my part demonstrates, and yet a third from one of my favorite games continuously demonstrating the very definition of prejudice, racism, and sexism while virtue signalling and demanding that racism, sexism, and prejudice stop makes it clear to me that the indie community is far from being the tolerant safe space that it insists it is.
It really came as a wake up call when while regularly participating in a G+ community, I saw someone who clumsily but not hatefully questioned how realistic it was for a wheelchair bound individual to be the chief engineer on a submarine in a game setting that included lots of dangerous physical risk. It was a question that seemed to me to be mostly a matter of not injecting a little creative story crafting on the part of player and GM, and I really had nothing to say to it. It however quickly invited a dog-pile on the person who asked as a hateful, intolerant, and privileged jerk. Two... only two people bothered to actually address the question intelligently and thoughtfully. One to simply ask why people couldn't just let the fiction allow for that, and just let everybody have the fun they wanted. The other was a woman and an engineer who proceeded to discuss how it might be achieved from a technical perspective. She did not resort to name calling or accusations. The questioner (a very active and regular poster of many amiable discussions) ended up being banned from the community, and the record of the thread deleted entirely. This is exactly the sort of revisionism and heavy handed, echo chamber dogma that the game community does not need.
This dogma is rooted the fashionably left handed theory of intersectionality which some know about and many do not. One wonders... if you are "woke" but don't know it... are you just really dreaming? And if you are aware of the issues as described but question their analysis or demonstrate problems in their assumptions that the advocates deny, are you actually more woke than them? If they demand that you endorse an issue even when the facts are against them, is this actually just an effort to socially put you to sleep so that you can become part of their nightmare? And if questioning, no matter how civil, is prejudicially assumed to be an assault worthy of summary exile, can we even really call it tolerance anymore?
But I digress...
I think it is great that Emily Care Boss has created new ways to play stories. What I question is the assumption that she is a shining figure against the oppression of privilege under the dreadful history of (numerically majority) white males in the hobby of gaming. Was the very cool Mike Pondsmith of Cyberpunk 2020 fame oppressed because he was not a white guy back in 1988 (or before that with his earlier games)? I think not. I think that the truth might be found in a different narrative...
D&D came out of miniatures war gaming. This was a hobby with a long tradition in drawing rooms throughout western Europe (not to be too obvious, but racially mostly white) in the century following the Napoleonic era. War has been, until very recently in the age of increasingly remote warfare, largely conducted by males. As such, miniatures war gaming in the west is probably most likely to have been a practice of white males. I suspect that it was of significantly less interest to non-white non-males because it was not so immediately connected to the activity that those other people might be conceivably doing (fighting wars). As such, culturally I daresay that Gary Gygax (a white guy by no choice of his own) living in mid-west America (demographically mostly white) just happened to be interested in zooming in on the stories of individuals on those miniature war game battlefields. Did his race matter? I doubt it... but maybe his social awkwardness that made him prefer indoor war gaming to outdoor team sports did. Had he been from a very wealthy family, perhaps we would not have had D&D because he might have taken up yachting, or collecting Feraris instead. But as a middle class, middle American nerd, he and his friends invented D&D, and other nerds like Greg Stafford brought us other worlds. Numerically, there have always been more white people, so the odds are that there would be more chances of a white person inventing D&D. The fore mentioned Mike Pondsmith, obviously puts paid to the notion that gaming was for white people and took his interest in Japanese anime as well as science fiction, and made a game that has gone on to this day. I don't see him whining about being oppressed.
What I see is a hobby that has begun to refine into an art form, that is barely over four decades old in human history. Leftist thinking is long on empathy, but short on depth in time...
Why has it escaped the left handed thinkers of the indie game community that it is in fact girls who have been role playing as a hobby since time immemorial? The men who took their boyhood imagination with them as adults like Gygax and Stafford, did so perhaps because they were the vestigial ends of a tradition of human warfare, who had less social or athletic prowess than intellectual and imaginative. That many other kinds of people followed that creativity just is. So why have there been fewer girls joining the gaming community in the past or designing games? Maybe because they already were... in different ways. Maybe it took three decades to show us the ends of one way of story telling to raise the question of how to really start asking different questions about how to make games. I believe that Emily Care Boss was one of the original leaders in the Forge, and has a fair bit of status as a designer having been critical in the development of indie thinking. Is she more oppressed, or more privileged? Or is that a stupid question? If one happens not to care for playing an rpg about falling in love, does that make them an oppressive person? Or is it only oppressive to not want to play that game if you happen to be of a particular race or sex, and exercising free agency if you are the other race or sex?
Does Emily Care Boss make interesting, cool, and fun games? That is, I would argue, a better question. I don't care that Emily Care Boss is a female any more than I care that Mike Pondsmith is not white if what I want to do is play a game about love or one about street samurai.
Games should be judged on the merit of the design, not on the color of the designer's skin. Social justice (double-speak by any other name) does not help that.
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