Culture, Diversity and the my experience of Chimera

Hey all

I’ve started a series of posts over at Gametime, an NZ gaming group blog, thinking about some of the experiences I had at Chimera and how they relate to some other issues. I was surprised to find that colonization was a really strong theme running through Chimera this year - almost all my games had some kind of colonization narrative present.

The first couple of posts are about the Requiem game. Warning: it’s all very wordy. I’m in academia, what can I say…

Comments and replies are, of course, extremely welcome.

It begins here.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the reviews. It’s interesting to read in-depth larp reviews with a specific angle to them.

Your first review re-raises previously discussed suggestions of a large one-off game set in colonial NZ, directly addressing the issues of colonialism and attempting some historical fidelity. I think it’s the elephant in the room of NZ larp, and Steph’s comments that pakeha are afraid to tackle Maori issues are exactly right.

In the Nordic countries they’ve had larps about their historical submission to Nazi Germany, that I’ve heard were very affecting. Our colonial history is an equivalently charged subject.

[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]I’m looking forward to the rest of the reviews. It’s interesting to read in-depth larp reviews with a specific angle to them.

Your first review re-raises previously discussed suggestions of a large one-off game set in colonial NZ, directly addressing the issues of colonialism and attempting some historical fidelity. I think it’s the elephant in the room of NZ larp, and Steph’s comments that pakeha are afraid to tackle Maori issues are exactly right.

In the Nordic countries they’ve had larps about their historical submission to Nazi Germany, that I’ve heard were very affecting. Our colonial history is an equivalently charged subject.[/quote]

I would love to see such a game done well. I would hate to see such a game done badly.

I’d like to see those discussions, if they took place in a public forum. I totally agree that there’s huge potential in such a game. The fear we have of getting into such subjects is not a sign that we shouldn’t explore them, but rather that we should take care when we do so; in fact, the fear is probably a sign that there’s something really powerful there to be explored.

Thanks for the interest anyway.

Also - I’d love to hear the writers and other players in Requiem give their take on the game - there was a lot of meat in there, and the writers had clearly gone to a lot of trouble with their research and I’d like to hear more about and acknowledge that.

Just read up on the Parihaka incident referred to in the review, as according to Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parihaka

Really shocking, I thought this sort of thing had only happened in Australia and USA colonial history, not New Zealand. At least it wasn’t as bad as the massacres in the USA colonial history, and 100 years ago, but still…

Steve

They don’t often come by here but I’ve sent them an email to let them know about this :slight_smile:

I think the original discussion was on the Mordavia forum. We have that forum backed up offline, but it’s not currently online. That discussion was quite varied, with suggestions ranging from a purely Maori setting to purely colonial to a mix, and varying in ideas for style from adventure to intrigue. Concerns about cultural sensitivity ranged from it being a “nightmare” to “manageable”.

Personally, my vision for such a game is one held at a venue like the grounds of someplace like Highwic House in Newmarket, with immersive props and costume.

Set in the 1850s (as that’s when Highwic house dates from), at something like the reception for a wedding in a well-off colonial family that has connections with one or more Maori groups who are invited, along with numerous colonial groups from religious to business to political. Haven’t looked into how believable such a situation would be though.

I originally imagined it being for 100-200 players, and potentially suitable for a general non-gaming audience and children as well as larpers. However I’m not sure how practical that idea is. If cultural conflict were to be a major theme, it might not sit easily with a general audience, and of course getting the public to roleplay might have varied success (although I’ve found it quite easy with friends and family). On the other hand, challenging and educating public preconceptions could be seen as part of the appeal. I’m guessing we could also get input and players from various historical groups who have an interest in that time, like the groups that maintain Howick Historical Village and Highwic House. I imagined the Maori characters being played by Maori players, or at least by people who speak te reo and are acceptable to that player group.

Overall, I pictured it being framed as a fun day out that allows larpers and some keen members of the public to immerse themselves in an era in NZ history, but also as a well-researched setup that neither celebrates or denigrates the colonial history, but rather tries to conveys the facts and feelings of a different era.

New Zealand colonial-era history has been, until very recently, pretty much ignored in our education system, hence the lack of dialogue around these issues. Maori have typically continued their oral tradition, so the (usually locale-specific) histories have been transmitted through the generations. A lot of our Maori-Pakeha issues are framed by Maori having a very good understanding of what actually happen vs Pakeha who literally don’t know what the problem is.

Could be quite believable if the local hapu were industrious and were therefore a business entity (say, producing food or flax) - perhaps they are interested in forging business alliances. There could be other hapu who foment isolationist succession (a la Tuhoe). Others could be seeking information about these fellows who call themselves “developers” and want to “borrow” some of their land for “a little while”. Theres quite a bit of scope.

Or people of Pakeha ancestry who have been whangaied (adopted) by a local hapu. Last year, during the election campaign, I was one Eye To Eye along with a certain larping MP and Mike Smith. We talked about the concept of being Maori and he was of the opinion that anyone could be Maori if they felt they were Maori. Whether you could whakapapa back to a specific tribe depends on your genealogy, so it would be possible to be Maori without being born Maori. And you could also be adopted by a hapu, too, although this could raise (handily in the case of larp) the issue of what exactly one’s entitlements are.

This could be quite an interesting larp setting, and I agree that we would need to be careful to be cognisant of the issues associated with this era of our history.

Ryan/Mike - those ideas sound really amazing. Will have more to say on them when i’ve battled open some time to finish writing of chimera…

Yeah, I think it would be a worthwhile effort. But I think it would need a lot of parties involved. People with a good grounding in the historical era who are willing to research people and events in the specific time period. People who can bring a good perspective on Maori cultural issues, and approve of the approach taken. People who can provide good advice to players on period costuming and propping, with patterns being made available if possible. Liasons with historical reenactment groups that may have an interest - for example there’s the folks who put on the live days at Howick Historical Village.

Then there’s the usual character writers, organisers, marketing, props… only more so, if it were to be a game with 200 players. I imagined the roles being divided somewhat into those with heavy and light involvement, with larpers and reenactors being more likely to opt for heavy involvement (i.e. lots of roleplay required of them), versus general public probably more likely to opt for light involvement (if they just stand around watching it won’t spoil the “plots”).

It’s on a long list of things I’d love to be involved with doing someday.

Joel, on behalf of Requiem, has left a comment on the second half of Morgue’s post: community.livejournal.com/gametime/72822.html

Wow - Google Chrome is awesome - it remembered my password and I didn’t even remember that I had made an account here!! I just looked at the bottom of the page and it said Joel Williams was browsing this forum!!!

I’m immensely proud that the Requiem LARP has sparked such conversation - it is what (I hope) we all aim to achieve when we write these games.
I remember my first brush with Racism at the tender age of 12 when I played a Dwarf…
And then the victim of the Caste system when playing a thief…
And let’s not even talk about the women’s lib issues I’ve fought for…

But that’s what makes RPing SOOOOO awesome - it allows us to live outside of our little boxed lives where the majority of our experiences come from a little flashing box, in a little box room in our little box houses.

I really hope that Colonial-era Wedding/Business deal game that Ryan is talking about goes ahead - indeed I’ll put my hand up as a script writer (I’m sure they’ll be several needed). I think roleplaying, as a form of educational theatre, has huge undiscovered potential for the next generation…

  • that is until Microsoft find a way of putting on their box…

i enjoyed the requiem game and felt comfortable playing a Maori character. i probably wouldn’t have a year or so ago but after hanging out with Maori rights activists in Taranaki and taking Te Reo and Unitec i don’t feel like such a n00b.

Ditto with Kalika @ the great exhibition, i have been hanging out with Hindus since like march and so i felt a lot more comfortable adding personality traits to the character rather than just being strictly racial/religious in the portrayal.

i did notice though something that’s hard to role play without feeling like a nasty person is racism. if you’re mature enough you can play another race, its quiet hard though to feel comfortable playing racism. that happened a while back in TNC with Juliet’s African American character. but maybe that’s another kettle of fish

I agree. Back in the Mordavia days, I crewed and played the part of a Wizard working for the ‘dark side’ who captured and tortured one of the players. The scenario was that he was basically good but had been convinced that this was the best way to save the country, distasteful as it was working with tentacled monsters.

I based the character off of reports from Nazis in WWII, some of whom tortured and killed Jews while honestly believing that it was ‘horrible, but all for the best in the long run’ and made up convoluted justifications to paint themselves as the good guys.

I tried the same with the character but reached a point where I no longer wnated to get any further into that sort of mind and pulled back. I tend to try more complex Role-Play using The Method and it is not good for this sort of character. It would be even worse when you’re trying to be a real historical character you strongly dislike; I have much respect for people who can properly and convincingly role-play (eg) Nazis and not be upset at the end of it.

The upshot of this is, if you’re going to run a LARP in a politically sensitive historical era, you need people to play the Bad Guys, and in a ‘real world’ situation these people honestly dont think of themselves as evil or even wrong. Its not easy to find someone who is willing to convincingly play a racist, a Nazi, or so on as who wants to be assosciated with that?

Strangely, theres no problem finding evil priests of C’thulhu who eat babies. Probably because these are clearly fictional, whereas Nazis are sadly not.

I usually find something in a character to play that is radically opposed to my own beliefs. In St Wolfgang’s, I’m playing someone who believes in God and has very strong faith. This is radically different from my own religious point of view. At the Great Exhibition, I was playing a gentleman of privilege, with very traditional views about women (I voted NO for women getting the vote). If you’re not portraying a character that is different to yourself, you’re not really role playing…

When playing fantasy games, nobody seems to lose a good night’s sleep after killing a band of orcs, which is racism at it’s simplest.

The reason why some genres feel more sensitive than others is because the events actually happened, happened more recently, and / or happened closer to home. I don’t think this makes the characters harder to play, so much as people don’t want to portray a Nazi, because their grandfather was killed in WWII ( or he’s still alive and really wouldn’t forgive them ).

Pretending to be an elf, and killing orcs on the weekend is harmless fun, because nobody has to worry about a player turning up who is half orc. Playing a Nazi on the weekend and killing Jews, isn’t harmless fun because it really has potential to offend people very easily.

I don’t thing recent historical games are hard to do, but I do think you risk people misunderstanding what you’re doing.

I don’t think you have to get as extreme as “Nazi” to get that sort of “for the greater good” mindset going. Plenty of history’s “good guys” have done terrible things to people. This isn’t, of course, in any way to say that what the Nazis did was okay (I will never say that because it wasn’t) I’m just saying that a mentality of “it’s for the best, it has to be done” is a far more universal human response than we would feel comfortable in admitting.

A real world example of this is the Milgram experiment where the psychologist Stanley Milgram essentially replicated the mindset that Steve is talking about in ordinary blue collar American men in the fifties. His study has since be replicated a whole bunch of times, all over the world, with men and women of all ages, and the results have remained the same in all cases. You can read in more detail at the wiki link, but essentially what he did was he that he advertised for volunteers to help with an experiment on learning. The volunteers were paired off as “learner” and “teacher” and the experiment was that every time the student remembered something wrong, the teacher would apply stronger and stronger electric shocks. What the volunteers didn’t know was that the “learner” was a plant, and that there were no electric shocks being delivered, and that the actual experiment was about how far people would go with hurting another human being if they believed it was “necessary” - 66% of his volunteers ended up administering what they believed was a 400 volt electric shock to the “learner” who had stopped responding five minutes ago. Kind of a shocking result, that decent, ordinary people can be convinced to do horrible things by the power of “you must, it’s necessary.” I highly recommend reading the wiki link, it’s eye opening reading.

A larp example, I played a character in a horror game who did some pretty horrific things. When I was in character and playing her, I didn’t see these things as horrible, because to the character, they were absolutely necessary to be done. It had to happen. Those people had to die. Those people had to be betrayed. Those people had to be tortured. Coming out of character was a surreal experience, to look back on the weekend from an OOC perspective and realise all the terrible things the character had done, and the fact they didn’t seem so horrific to the character. Out of character, her actions were selfish and heading fast towards psychopathic, and the thing I found fascinating was how natural and necessary they had seemed in character. It was a slightly scary, but really interesting experience.

I think trying out different moral and personal codes is one of the most fascinating things about larping. Boffer combat I can take or leave, it’s the trying other people’s headspace out that really appeals. Really strong IC/OOC boundaries are absolutely necessary though, and I think a high level of maturity on the part of the other roleplayers to understand that while Bob is playing a racist, Bob himself is not actually a racist. Personally, it makes me feel good that this community is in a place where we feel uncomfortable playing things like racism. It’s a good sign about our values, right? :slight_smile:

In terms of briefing people for a colonial NZ game, I was thinking that one way to put across the ethos of the time would be to use real letters to the editor of the Herald, or similar, in the briefings. Covering things like attitudes to women, Maori, England, etc that may be different to some people’s attitudes today. That way we couldn’t be accused of being didactic, because those letters are historical facts.

I found the Requiem game both interesting and challenging and it sparked a lot of thinking that I didn’t expect to come away with - and I consider that a huge gift and one of the huge wins I get out of RP.

As an American with very little “working” knowledge of Maori or NZ history I was certainly out of my comfort zone and felt ill prepared to play the role I was given, but up for the challenge - but I definitely think I only played the very fringes of the character for fear of doing something “wrong” or offensive. Sadly, I couldn’t immerse myself in the RP because of that discomfort, despite having a few really good IC exchanges with some other player. Some of this may have been lessened if I’d had the character sheet well enough in advance to research history and customs prior to the game, but the real meat of the issue here is the one of, for lack of a better term: “socially responsible gaming.”

I’ve never been challenged to do anything other than draw loosely from other cultures as inspiration. Everything his “history lite” or “in the spirit of”. Clearly, that makes things more accessible (gender equality, players not needing to be experts on the subject, a gracious amount of ‘wiggle room’ for creative license). This has allowed me to dive in to games without worrying too much about if I’m trampling over serious social taboos. But I’ve had very outspoken friends of a variety of races who take offense at this ‘dumbing down’ and stereotyping of their cultures and want to their myths and histories used differently and with more responsibility by game designers.

But back to the Requiem game. Despite this being, clearly, a fictional game in a fictional setting with vampires and werewolves (and Busbys, oh my) I couldn’t shake the discomfort of being a white American blundering clumsily into another culture. Maybe that’s just because there were enough historical references to cross the “taking inspiration from” line for me. I mean when I play my L5R character (Unicorn Clan - Moto represent!) I don’t feel any hesitation to borrow on any and all knowledge I have of Mongolian custom and culture.

I’ve no conclusion to these thoughts at the moment, but I appreciate Morgue’s initial post that has got them percolating in my brain. And I do appreciate that there were real efforts to provide a rich experience and clearly a lot of research had gone into the game. I do feel the game creators were coming from a place of both genuine interest and genuine respect, which is the necessary foundation for bringing various cultures into a game.

That is a fantastic idea.

I’m playing the game Spore at the moment. Basically, you start out as pond scum, competing for resource against the rest of the pond scum. You eat smaller things, run from bigger things, and try to stab anything that’s equal to you in the back. Eventually, I hope to evolve to a higher life form and crawl out of the water… Nothing has really changed. We’re all just grown up pond scum, competing for resource, eating weaker things and stabbing each other in the back.

<-- that’s me, no limbs yet, but I can see what’s in front of me :smiley:

People do terrible things, but it’s an evolutionary trait that I don’t think we’ll ever leave behind us, because, unfortunately, being a complete wanker, committing genocide, raping the resources of other countries and bombing other civilizations back into the dark ages, is still sound from an evolutionary point of view.

I’m certainly not trying to belittle the crimes that people do, and have had committed on them, but I believe it is human nature that we do these things.