Ganakagok and Cultural Appropriation

Reiterating a point that Jonathan made recently, Chris Chinn posted this severely critical comment about Ganakagok on his blog, Deeper in the Game:

Ganakagok is, “a quasi-Inuit Silmarillion as seen from the inside looking out”. A bunch of folks had recommended it as a great game. It uses a sort of tarot-system to set up the situation, the characters, and play out the game. I picked up a copy yesterday, as I’ve been meaning to check it out for sometime.

Skimming through, my first big twitch was the images of the example cards, using Pacific Northwest NDN artwork… UM. And then stuff like character names: “The name should be primitive and icy, vaguely Inuit in sound and form.” WTF is “icy”? Then there’s “Shaman”, “Good Medicine” and “Bad Medicine” …

For a game that claims to be a look from the inside-out, it’s chock full of exotification.

This brings us back to the larger media issue- we’re forced to either only indulge in things where we’re invisible (“Look, we don’t show up, so no problematic imagery… uh, yay, I guess?”) or things where we show up distorted and stereotypes (“At least I get to have media with people who look vaguely like me… I’ll just imagine there’s scenes and spaces where we get to see them as normal”). Which pretty much sums up my love/hate relationship of L5R.

And beyond that, the bigger social issue of why us telling stories, about ourselves, is absolutely required in the face of cultural genocide.

I suppose that’s also why roleplaying as a hobby, is where it is.

Who gets to tell your story? Right?

So I sent Chris this message:

Thanks for the chance to talk about the issue of cultural appropriation and representation in gaming. As Ganakagok’s designer, I’m chagrined to meet with disapproval, even mortified. But I’m prepared to take my lumps so long as they’re fair.

I’m saddened to have to admit that using Northwest Indian art as imagery on some of the cards was ultimately a bad idea from the standpoint of communicating the game, even if they are some of the most powerful images in the deck. My reasoning in approving those images was that they were broadly evocative of Native American culture, and thus appropriate for a fantasy game whose entire point was to dispense with the usual tropes of quasi-medieval European Tolkienesque fantasy. As it turns out, those images lose their free-floating symbolic power to the extent that the interpreter already has referents for them (already knows them), and thus familiarity (with the images) in this case breeds contempt (for the game): exactly the opposite effect than I’d intended. So that’s clearly a failure, and if I’d listened to Jason Morningstar I would have avoided it.

Umbrage at the language “primitive and icy” is probably justified, but a more generous reading of the rules text at that place I hope confirms my contention that what I’m trying to do there is tell the GM to take the naming of names seriously in the game: no “Nanook of the North,” no “Bob the Eskimo,” nor any of those other tricks of ironic distance in which players will sometimes engage. A better way of saying what I was trying to say there is “Enforce the setting in play. Make it sound right.” The least successful Ganakagok games I’ve played are the ones in which a player wants to be an outsider of one sort or another–usually a Viking, occasionally a colonist.

There are terms with which you take issue where perhaps there are connotations of which I’m unaware. For example, I’m not sure that I get why “shaman” as a potential part of a character’s identity is problematic. I can sort of see that using the term “Medicine” might call to mind bad Saturday afternoon cowboy movies, but as a way of signaling to players that the game revolves around a currency of karma, mojo, cosmic afflatus, or what-have-you, it’s perfect.

As I think about it, I suppose that the use of the terms contributes to the “exotification” you see in the text, which I take as referring to a Said-like Orientalism–a “Borealism,” if you’ll permit me–that is a kind of fetishization of the Other, which results in (as you say later) “us showing up as distorted and stereotypes” as the only alternative to invisibility in games.

But that’s a false dichotomy, isn’t it? When you say of games like mine, “I’ll just imagine there are scenes and spaces where we get to see them as normal,” you’re begging the question. Maybe several questions, actually, but the important one for my purposes is the extent to which Ganakagok play produces a human experience–whether or not it produces “scenes and spaces where we get to see [characters] as normal.” I want to assert that it does, often powerfully so. In a recent game, the drama revolved around a curmudgeonly traditionalist learning to love and care for his child, and an arrogant young man coming to grips with the necessary compromises of maturity. In other games, I’ve seen players grapple with issues of loyalty and betrayal, love and loss, fear and hope. The game is more conducive to a dramatic exploration of human experience than it is the fetishistic exoticization of alien otherness. In fact, my friend Don Corcoran told me that when he tried to run it that way, an over-the-top wire-fu Crouching Polar Bear, Hidden Orca-style game, the images and motifs on the cards (!) brought the game back down to earth.

Having said that, I want to clarify that I’m not arguing that Ganakagok is an authentic representation of Inuit culture. It’s not, and it’s not supposed to be. Rather, it produces stories that feel like the genuine fables of an imaginary people; the term “quasi-Inuit” is there advisedly.

Now, it may be that I can’t have it both ways: I do rely on the associations that people — players! — have in their heads for “Eskimo” to drive a fantasy of life on an island of ice in a star-lit night-time world. To call it a cognitive short-cut is merely to avoid using the word “stereotype.” I get that. But game-play often produces moments that are so satisfying and beautiful that I am moved anew when I recall them.

I also am not trying to argue that the phenomenon you’re talking about isn’t real. I was browsing the RPG Site a few minutes ago, trying to make myself feel better by looking at some real hate (it’s hard to explain), when I came upon this quote in somebody’s signature:

“I had no concept of historical anything. I think I even put in magic in there, like one of the indians summoned a ghost buffalo that was marauding the town, because he was helping some desperadoes steal the gold out of the mine…and we had to gun him down. It was a plot I lifted from Scooby Doo.”

In a word: Oy.

To sum up, I’d say I’m guilty of cultural appropriation but not of cultural misrepresentation. In the rules, I tell prospective GMs that the game “plays like a quasi-Inuit Silmarillion as seen from the inside looking out.” Thatplays like is important; it’s meant to describe the experience of playing the game, not of reading the rules, which I concede is dreadful. But game play is more often than not dramatic, illuminating, and powerful.

Thanks again for this opportunity to talk about the game. I hope we can continue the conversation and see where it gets us.

Chris was generous enough to reply:

Hi Bill,

I'm sure Ganakagok produces great stories and lots of fun for some group of people. It's also hurtful for a large number of people as a part of a larger historical action of cultural appropriation by outsiders for fun and profit... whether it was intended to be hurtful or not.

If you are interested in knowing more about how your game fits in with that, perhaps for improving future editions or avoiding such things in later games, you might consider reading some of the links on the sidebar of my blog under the "NDN" category, or perhaps googling some of the many blogs and websites by various indigenous people on the damage and effects of "well meaning" media.

Chris Chinn

Which led me here. The essay argues that existing copyright law inadequately protects indigenous folklore from cultural appropriation, and offers some alternative legal concepts that would ameliorate the problem while at the same time permitting appropriate artistic uses. After reading it, I told Chris:

My short-term obligations seem clear: (1) make a donation, and encourage others to donate, to an organization like the Nunavut Arts & Crafts Association as a kind of recognition of domain publique payant, and (2) provide an account on the game's Web site of the provenance of the indigenous art used in the deck in acknowledgement of the moral rights of its creators.

So if you have enjoyed playing Ganakagok, please consider making a donation to:

Nunavut Arts and Crafts Association
P.O. Box 1539
Iqaluit NU X0A 0H0

Thanks!

Two Games, One Name

My friend Nathan Paoletta is running a design contest called "Two Games, One Name," where pairs of designers are given the same title for a game and a set of contrasting constraints (e.g., "design a game for solo play" vs. "design a game to be played via text message") and asked to create games.

My assignment was The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which fit nicely into something I'd been thinking about since Gencon. My constraint was "music must be central to resolution," which I interpreted fairly broadly, using a musical analogy for the sort of exchange-level game-mechanical focus I first used in The Perilous Realm. I'm not sure whether to consider this a cheat or a bit of cleverness.

A draft of the game is here. Let me know what you think.

Designing Ganakagok Essay at Flames Rising

When I was at GenCon this summer, the impresario behind the Flames Rising webzine invited me to write an essay about designing Ganakagok. So I did. Let me know what you think of it, if you get a chance.

The New World

At Gencon, I played Ganakagok with Simon Rogers, the impresario behind Pelgrane Press. Later, I had a conversation with him, and he told me that there was a game he wanted to play that, based on his experience with Ganakagok, he thought I could write. The game in his head is a colonization game, essentially Guns, Germs, & Steel, the RPG. What follows is what I pitched to him; we'll see whether the game in my head matches the one in his.

THE NEW WORLD

A Roleplaying Game

by Bill White

You must leave everything behind.

You must forge a new life for yourself in an alien land where everything is strange.

You must journey to THE NEW WORLD.

The New World is about the encounter between the Old World and the New. It can be played as a straight historical game, or in a more speculative mode. Thus, a given instance of play could be a quasi-historical game about Vikings in Greenland, an “allohistorical” or alternate history game about Chinese admiral Zheng He’s colonization of the West Coast of North America, an homage to Eisner’s stories about Jewish immigrants on Dropsy Avenue, a fantasy of conquistadors seeking the Seven Cities of Cibola and the Fountain of Youth, or a science fiction epic about the terraforming of Mars.

Basic Concept of the Game

The New World is a tabletop version of games like Civilization and Colonization. But rather than attempting to be a quantitative strategic simulation—something that computer games facilitate far better than tabletop play—the game is a qualitative, impressionistic simulation of the experience of leaving your home and voyaging to a distant land that may change you, break you, or kill you.

The game is thus played at the macro level and the micro level, where the macro level models the movement of peoples, resources, and ideas in time and space, and the micro level involves playing out the little dramas of individual choice, action, and experience. The two levels feed into each other, with the macro establishing the situation at the micro level and the micro informing the parameters that the macro level comprises. In other words, player decisions at the macro level have consequences at the micro level, and vice versa.

One player is the Game Master; the others are Player-Characters. In general, the GM represents the resistance of the New World to efforts at colonization, while the PCs are the agents of the Old World, will he or nil he. Each player-turn consists of a scene that intimates the material and cultural flows taking place at the macro level but is played out at the micro level of character action.

Macro Level

The macro level is constituted in how the Frontier mediates the Old World and the New World. Players brainstorm, or the GM concocts, contrasting descriptors for both domains in terms of Geography, Ecology, Economy, and Culture; e.g., well-mapped/trackless; cultivated/wild; agrarian/nomadic; civilized/savage.

The Frontier is defined in terms of cultural ecology concepts (after Diamond): Development, Sustainability, Hostility, Trade/Support, and Cultural Change. Comparisons among those elements determine what’s happening in the colony; e.g., if Development is greater than Sustainability, then some sort of environmental damage takes place.

Micro Level

Characters are leaders or exemplars of what’s happening in the world. They are defined minimally by assigning a different die type (d4, d6, d8, d12) to each of four domains: Physical, Social, Mental, and Moral. They may have other, scenario-dependent special abilities as well. Players probably create new characters for each scene.

The Game

The game is played out in scenes.

Each scene is about an encounter between the Old World and the New, on the Frontier (in a colony, that is to say). This encounter may be literal, as in meeting the natives upon stepping off the boat, or figurative, as in a single individual choosing between the values of her immigrant parents and those of the community beyond the ghetto.

Each “side” (GM=New World, PCs=Old World) starts the game with a pool of tokens representing their available resources, with different colored tokens signifying different resources. The size of the pool is probably tied to the qualitative description system in some way.

Color	Old World Action	New World Attribute
RED	Exploration	Vastness, Extensiveness
GREEN	Conquest	Deadliness, Danger
BLUE	Exploitation	Richness, Diversity
WHITE	Colonization	Strangeness, Unfamiliarity

On his or her turn, each player plays a token from the Old World’s pool to signify the larger macro-level activity in which his or her character is engaged, involved, or enrolled. The GM responds by playing a token from the New World’s stock. Playing a token commits a player to a particular mode of action in the scene, and shapes the macro-level stakes of the scene (i.e., the effects on the Frontier).

Development: Green/Red, Blue/Blue

Sustainability: Blue/Blue, Blue/Green

Hostility: Blue/Red, Green/Green

Trade: Blue/White, White/White

Cultural Change: Green/White, Red/White.

So, for example, if I’m a PC (a Player-Colonist, naturally) then I’m playing out a scene against the GM (Geographical Mediator). I define my character by putting my d12 in Physical, my d8 in Mental, my d6 in Social, and my d4 in Moral. I’m a tough and ruthless navigator with a sturdy crew and a mercenary eye on the main chance.

I take a Red token from the Old World in order to engage in some Exploration. This has some sort of in-game meaning as well, e.g., “I travel up the river, hoping that it leads to the Northwest Passage.” The GM chooses a Blue token, and has to describe the richness of the environment, “You are struck by the many streams that drain into the river, and the great number of beaver dams that block the streams.”

But the stakes of the scene now have something to do with the presence of hostile neighbors or natives. The GM gets to introduce a character. She describes a tribe of innocent natives, noble savages living in a neolithic utopia, and assigns her dice by putting the d12 in Moral, the d8 in Physical, the d6 in Social, and the d4 in Mental.

We declare our actions; I go first, saying “I give them gifts of steel axeheads and pretty beads.” I roll my Social die, a d6, and get a 4. The GM says, “They examine the gifts you bring with great interest. One elder of the tribe says, ‘These gifts are good, but I am afraid that they will cause jealousy among the younger men. Let us throw them in the river, so that there will be peace among the youths, and no strife.’” She rolls her d12 (because her reaction was moral), and gets an 11, which beats my die (and is also prime).

The GM has the high die, so she gets to describe what happens next—something involving my umbrage at the refusal of my trade goods. She also gets to increase the Frontier’s hostility by 1, because she won. If I’d won, I’d have been able to reduce it by one.

Her result of 11 was also prime, so she gets to inflict some sort of consequence on my character, moving him closer to his eventual deserts: death, madness, destitution, ignomy, and so forth. If I’d had a prime number (or 1) on my die, I’d have been able to move closer to my character’s stated goal: fame, fortune, discovery, and so forth.

Play continues in this vein until one side or the other runs out of tokens. During play, comparisons among Development, Sustainability, Hostility, Trade/Support, and Cultural Change will allow in-game events to be introduced, both in favor of the colony and in its despite.

The Book

The game book will consist of a a relatively short section on game mechanics and then a number of sample scenarios along the lines of those discussed above, plus guidelines for creating one’s own, either on the fly or as a prepared “adventure.”

This Just In from Gencon 2009

I met Ryan Macklin at Camp Nerdly in May 2009 and he's a good guy, a great player, and a clever game designer. This e-mail from him came off the rpgpodcasters mailing list:

A Last Minute Request for This Just In From GenCon

Posted by: "Ryan Macklin"

Wed Aug 5, 2009 1:47 pm (PDT)

Gang,

So, GenCon is a week away! I'm pretty excited, and as many of you
know, I'm doing the almost-live podcast news show called This Just In
From GenCon.

As a favor, I was hoping you guys might post on your blogs or forums
about it. I know some of you have run the promo, for which I'm wicked
grateful, and I'm hoping another bump in the textosphere might help
get the word out about the show -- since its success is measured by
people who are listening during GenCon as much as it is afterwards.

http://thisjustinfr omgencon. com/

Thank you,

- Ryan

--
Ryan Macklin
Master Plan: The People's Podcast About Game Design
http://masterplanpo dcast.net/

Fixing Trail of Cthulhu

On my brother Mel's podcast Virtual Play, I ask "Is Trail of Cthulhu broken, or is it just me?" To my chagrin, that prompted a somewhat defensive reaction from TOC's advocates on Story-Games. I actually really like the game, and the title was merely intended (a) as an allusion to critiques of Trail of Cthulhu I've seen elsewhere, and (b) to wink at the fact that I made some mistakes in running the game. I was pleased that the conversation was generally positive and constructive in tone, and I even sent my game notes to one of the participants in the thread, who wanted to run the adventure himself. And there was an admission that the game's author is writing a supplement that contains alternative magic rules "along the lines" of something I suggested in the podcast episode.

I ran the game at Camp Nerdly 3 at the end of May 2009, and had a great time; it was a very satisfying run. But I was sensitized to pay attention to problematic aspects of running the game. And a conversation I had with independent insurgent and indie game designer Rob Bohl helped me identify one.

In Trail of Cthulhu, when you have a "contest" between two characters -- one is chasing the other, or some such -- you roll until someone fails, spending your precious skill pool points on each roll. This has a number of unhappy effects, chief among which is that it makes contests largely an exercise in die-rolling and point-spending, with the edge going to the character who can outspend the other.

Fixing the Contest

It might be more fun if there were some "tactical" decision-making going on. The idea I had on the drive home from Nerdly was this: you spend for an automatic success, but the amount you have to spend goes up each round until you "reset" by rolling instead of spending.

So, for example, if you're chasing me, you spend from your Athletics and I spend from my Athletics and/or Fleeing.  On the first round, you spend 1 for an automatic success and so do I. On the next round, you roll and I spend 2 for an automatic success. On the third round, we both spend for automatic successes, but I have to spend 3 and you spend only 1, because you "reset" in the last round.

This strikes me as setting up an interesting choice for players each round. Now, I think that there should be a system for setting the difficulty of the roll based on the differential between the two pools. I think for every 3 points you are lower or higher than the opponent, your target number of 4 goes up or down by one, rounded down. So if your Athletics is 8 and my Fleeing is 12, my skill roll is 3 or higher and yours is 5 or better. 

This means that if the differential is 10 or more, the lower value automatically fails on the roll and the higher value automatically wins -- no rolling necessary. Or should there be a 6 always succeeds, 1 always fails rule? Probably yes.

You could use a similar system in combat, where a hit always takes an opponent out unless the victim succeeds on a roll of Health versus the damage.

I will try this at Dexcon and see if it works.

Whither Rune Saga? Post-Nerdly Prospects

I didn't run any Rune Saga at Camp Nerdly 3 this weekend (the run-down on what I did run ishere), but the game wasn't far from my mind, as I considered Bruce's comments in a previous thread: should I use the game to experiment with "jeepforged" structured freeform-type techniques, or develop it as a tabletop story-game. I had thought the former, but Bruce's comments gave me pause.

Bruce says:

Freeform/jeepforge is somewhat outside my comfort zone but I'm very interested in your efforts to develop "techniques to facilitate player engagement with their characters without sacrificing the narrative coherence that oracular mechanics provide." 

. . . To my mind, the tarot-based oracular game mechanics make Rune Saga unique so I wouldn't worry that In A Wicked Age occupies the same "space." I think the two games are very different despite the fact that they are both "sword-and-sorcery story games."

Whichever direction I take the game, I'd like to avoid the pitfalls of "parlor narration" -- a term of opprobrium that suggests that the game is a purely mechanical exercise with some fictional elements "tacked on" in an inessential sort of way. In other words, I want there to be a space for role-playing within the game, for engaging with the fiction to be essential to the game's forward movement: You get to the end, you've told a story, and you've felt it.

So in my last few designs, I've toyed with the idea of using emotion or attitude game-mechanically: in order to achieve this task or participate in this encounter, you have to act a particular way. Take a look at The Great City and The Perilous Realm and you'll see what I mean. My notion is that these things may give the player the freedom to act in character, rather than in purely "rational" utility-maximizing ways.

Bruce goes on:

For me a major appeal of your designs is the support they provide to situation generation during play. Generally RPGs rely on the DM and players to decide what situations the PCs are presented with. Mechanics are provided to determine success or failure and to arbitrate conflicts; guidelines may even be provided such as "threaten PC beliefs" etc; however it's largely down to the DM (or other participants) to come up with interesting situations which advance the fiction.

In your designs the participants aren't asked to determine "what happens next?" they're asked to interpret the cards. This is easier somehow and works surprisingly well considering there's no 'architect' guiding the story. There's a degree of 'magic' being employed here I think.

Yes! Magic, indeed. It's the same sort of magic that lets charlatans and mountebanks fool the unwary, but we use it for good. People's minds naturally want to impute meaning to patterns: random noise plus human perception equals deep significance, as someone once told me.

And that's why I think that when we're playing Ganakagok a card will come up as the situation or the consequence and people will laugh, because the appropriateness of the card in the context of what has gone before seems uncanny. It isn't, of course; it's just our minds filling in the blanks for us. This is to some extent a learned skill. These days, when I run the game for new players, I often find myself saying, "Now, there's an obvious interpretation of this card. . ." But it's not obvious at all; it's something I've learned how to do.

Anyway, I'm curious, did you consciously aim to target this in your designs or has the added 'support to situation generation' arisen out of other things?

I had been playing around with oracular systems prior to writing Ganakagok, but they were a solution without a problem for me until then. Then after the first run of the game in January 2005, sans cards, part of the feedback I got was that it was hard to figure out what to do. I had been relying on a kind of resource management thing to drive the action: you have such-and-such amounts of bone, oil, meat, and hide, so maybe you'd best go hunting. But it wasn't easy to tell what the numbers were saying you should do, and hard to keep track of in any case, so it was easiest to jettison those rules and replace them with a Rune Saga-like deck of cards that would serve as a qualitative  and descriptive system for coming up with statements about the world like "The people are starving." Best go hunting, then.

Since then, I've never looked back. Jason Morningstar has accused me of being a "slave" to my "house style," but I prefer to think of myself as inimitable.

Your Fourth Age D&D rules would appear to address this specifically for D&D. In your words turning it into more of a "pick-up game."

Exactly so. I'll be running a D&D mini-campaign this summer if all goes well; I'm regarding it as an experiment in "ganakagok-ified" gaming.

Thirdly, I wonder if you might divulge any elements of the process you went through to establish the card meanings in Rune Saga and Ganakagok? Do I detect some of Vladimir Propp's narrative functions? I'm intrigued and fascinated. The symbolism which you've assigned is not only very effective but resonates quite strongly with me personally.

The Rune Saga cards came first, and were created by re-skinning the I Ching's trigrams with some of the key major arcana from the Tarot (Child is really the Fool, Man is really the Magician, and so forth). The suits are thinly veiled Tarot suits assigned elemental meanings and used to create specific identities for each card. The events associated with each card are pure Propp. The interactions of card values (the "glyphs") are simplified versions of the I Ching hexagrams. 

It was a lot of work! Pleasant, puzzle-solving work, but work nonetheless.

Having done it once, though, it was easy to do it again for the Ganakagok deck. This time I simply re-skinned the meanings of the minor arcana of the Tarot with quasi-Inuit flavor, melding the Knight and the Page into the Child of any given suit when necessary. I think I extracted a Nitu numerology from the card meanings, but that came after the basic meanings were already fixed.

A few things helped me in the process: Robert Graves's The White Goddess, with its notion that poetry is the preservation of (druidic) knowledge of the world expressed in riddle and metaphor, and Algirdas Greimas's Structural Semantics, which is all about unpacking the latent semiotics of any given system of meanings.

So the thing to do, I think, is go back through these old designs and see which ideas are most compelling, interesting, or novel, and pull them in to a revised Rune Saga. In the meantime, I'll play around with Ganakagok Jeepforged to see what can be pulled from that game. Ultimately, I think I'd like the game to feel like The White Goddess: a powerful mythic connection to a time long-past-if-ever.