Bill White's roleplaying game design blog, with emphasis on narrativist or story-heavy games.

Thursday, April 09, 2009

Little Game Chef 2009: Midnight at Burning Horse

Here is my game for Little Game Chef 2009, called Midnight at Burning Horse.  The PCs are first- and second-generation Japanese immigrants in the Yakima Valley in Washington State during WW II.

Midnight at Burning Horse

Being Japanese in the Yakima Valley, 1942

Summary. This is a role-playing game for 3 to 5 players, one of whom is the Game Master (GM). The other players are first- and second-generation Japanese immigrants (i.e., issei and nisei) in the Yakima Valley of the Pacific Northwest during the early days of World War II. To play the game, you’ll need pencil and paper as well as six-sided (d6) and eight-sided dice (d8) in addition to a copy of the I Ching, the Chinese book of divination called Ekikyo by the Japanese. You may also want lists of Japanese and American names appropriate to the period; see, for instance, The Story-Games Names Project.

To the Japanese who settled there beginning in the early days of the twentieth century, the native American place name “Yakima” sounded like the Japanese words for “burning horse.” This seemed strikingly fitting for a wide sagebrush-filled valley, spread out between barren brown hills to the north and south, with its 100 degree summers and stark winters. Still, they made their homes there, leasing Indian land as tenant farmers and starting small businesses in the “Japan Town” quarter of Wapato. They lived through a wave of xenophobia in the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan was active, and began to establish themselves as members of the community, even bringing home an area baseball championship in the middle of the 1930s. But in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese of the Yakima Valley found themselves once more at the receiving end of racist and nationalistic hostility. To an endemic practice of discrimination was added bursts of jingoistic violence—though admittedly this was in some quarters thoroughly deplored. Nonetheless, by the middle of 1942, rising xenophobia prompted FDR to sign his infamous internment order, and the Japanese were removed from their homes, forced to sell their lease holds, and sent to internment camps for the duration of the war.

Character Creation. Roll 1d8 twice to create the character’s hakke, or divination signs. Consult the table each time. The first roll is the character’s yin, or active principle. It determines whether the character is issei (an immigrant from Japan) or nisei (a Japanese-American, born on U.S. soil). The second roll is the character’s yang, or receptive principle. It determines the character’s gender.

 

Roll

Sign

Symbol

Meaning (Strength)

Value

Generation

Gender

1

kon

Earth

receptiveness, passivity; mother (0)

000

issei

female

2

keni

Thunder

movement, peril; oldest child (1)

001

nisei

male

3

kan

Water

a pit, danger; middle child (1)

010

nisei

male

4

sui

Lake

pleased satisfaction; youngest child (2)

011

nisei

female

5

ken

Mountain

progress halted; youngest child (1)

100

nisei

male

6

ri

Fire

brightness, beauty; middle child (2)

101

nisei

female

7

son

Wind

gentleness, discernment; oldest child (2)

110

nisei

female

8

shin

Heaven

creativity, activeness; father (3)

111

issei

male

 Examine the meanings associated with the hakke to develop a description of the character. Give each character a name. Also establish three attributes for your character; these are memories, beliefs, relationships, possessions, or other aspects that represent the character. If the character is issei, two of these should be related to Japan or Japanese culture while the third should be related to America or American culture; if the character is nisei, two are American and one is Japanese. Buddhist upbringing, Wapato Nippons baseball uniform, savings account at the First National Bank, memories of Mount Fuji are typical attributes; notice how they serve as resources as well as identity markers.

Together with the GM and other players, create a relationship map for the characters that identifies their relationships with each other. Connect characters only by ties of kinship and sex/romance. Add additional non-player characters to represent significant others in the Yakima Valley, including other Japanese, Americans, and possibly native Americans, but do not connect them save by kin or sex ties.

Game Play. Beginning with the youngest character, use the I Ching to read the hexagram created by the character’s hakke to identify the character’s starting situation.

 As the GM, engage the player in role-playing character reactions or choices in response to that situation. Other players may participate in the reaction if warranted by situation. Once the situation reaches a crucial point—when you all want to know what happens next—roll dice. If the character’s action was active, aggressive, or initiatory, the player gets dice equal to the strength of his or her yin hakke plus one. If the character’s action was passive, defensive, or reactive, the player gets dice equal to the strength of his or her yang hakke. The player gets one additional die for each attribute he or she has used in role-playing his or her character’s reaction to the situation. Other players may roll dice as well: one if their character is present in the situation, plus one for each attribute they use to describe their influence on the scene, plus one if they have a relationship-map tie to the active character.

Cancel out matching pairs of dice (other players with each other first, then with the active player, then within the active player’s roll) so that no more than six unique results are on the table. Use those results to change the value of the character’s hakke by “flipping” a 1 to 0 or vice versa in the position in the six-digit sequence created by concatenating the yin and yang hakke (in that order). So a die roll of “4” changes the first digit of the yan hakke (i.e., the fourth digit in the sequence) to its opposite state.

The GM then interprets the resulting hakke by reading the new hexagram. You may choose to regard canceled-out pairs as suggesting the presence of “moving lines” in the hexagram. Any player may gain “narration rights” by sacrificing an attribute. At this point, the active player’s turn is over and the next oldest character takes a turn.

As the game progresses, the GM must ratchet up the level of xenophobic nationalism and racist hostility faced by the PCs while at the same time taking care to ensure that the environment is not uniformly hostile: there are sympathetic and even friendly neighbors among the non-Japanese of Yakima, as well as those who simply believe that the principles espoused by the Founders apply to everyone. At the same time, however, the political climate grows increasingly chilly and pressure should be brought to bear upon the nisei to make extravagant but ultimately unrequited gestures of patriotic loyalty: helping with the war effort at the expense of their own affairs, helping to register other Japanese and prepare them for internment, and so forth. The PCs may encounter jingoistic reporters, miscegenation-fearing ministers, prejudiced ignoramuses and other busybodies who will try to stir up trouble. The GM may wish to emphasize the impersonal evil of bureaucratized racism and xenophobia, with arbitrary denials of rights and stratagems by unsavory and predatory carpet-bagger types to take advantage of the injustice. Frozen bank accounts, forced sales of property, and similar threats to livelihood will take place. Alternately, a somewhat anachronistic (given the collapse of the local Klan in the 1920s) but not far-fetched Ku Klux Klan presence can be introduced to raise tensions and anxiety, perhaps with a burning cross rally or a raid at midnight by night riders on cowled horses.

The game ends when the characters leave the Yakima Valley, either by being evacuated to an internment camp in Wyoming or by some other means. Usually one or two rounds of play are sufficient to bring things to this pass.

References

Griffey, T. (2007). The Ku Klux Klan and vigilante culture in Yakima Valley [on-line]. Available: Path: http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk_yakima.htm.

Heuterman, T. (1995). The burning horse: Japanese-American experience in the Yakima Valley, 1920-1942. Cheney, WA: Eastern Washington University Press.

Kiyama, Y. (1999). The four immigrants manga: A Japanese experience in San Francisco, 1904-1924 (F.L. Schodt, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press.

Ng, W.-M. (1998). The I Ching in the Shinto thought of Tokugawa Japan. Philosophy East and West, 48(4),  568-591.

Van Over, R. (1971). I Ching. New York: New American Library.

The comments from the judges were mostly neutral; they saw it as interesting enough but not really super grabby. There was a desultory critique forum created for the contest temporarily; I've cut-and-pasted the game's thread here. The criticism verged upon the political, which was I thought an interesting outcome.

  1.  quote
    If you are the author of this game and would like to get it reviewed by your peers, please whisper your agreement to 'admin' in this thread as soon as possible. We'll then assign you two other games to read and critique and whisper back to you.

    If you have any specific guidelines for your critics - any particular area you'd like them to focus on - please post it in this thread.

    The link to the game text is: http://www.grahamwalmsley.net/littlegamechef/games/Midnight%20at%20Burning%20Horse%204.pdf
  2.  edit quote
    I'm in.
  3. Notes While Reading
    * Just me, but I never like random generation of things as fundamental to character portrayal as gender.
    * What size die is rolled at "a crucial point"? (I'd guess a d6, but it's not said.)
    * I'm confused as to how one could RP with the GM for an indefinite period of time, and then stumble into a point (crucial) where they must resort to a Fortune mechanic. You might want to unpack the meaning of crucial, in particular vis a vis how to determine when randomness becomes a factor over narration and acting.
    * The dice-reduction bit is a tad unclear--you'd have room to explain it more (maybe as a procedure, not jammed into a parenthetical) if you reduced the massive margins (most printers can print out to within 1/4" of the page edge, or 1/2" at page bottom).
    * I dig the hexagram shifting; but I'm not 100% sure of how many of the remaining dice count. All of them, I'd guess--i.e. from 0 to 6 remaining dice could change none, one, several, or all of the lines of the hexagram? A result of 2, 3, and 5 would change the second, third, and fifth lines (from top to bottom)?
    * "Round of play" means what? Each player has had at least one spotlight scene? Or each player has been in a scene, whether "their" situation or not?
    * All-in-all the writing flows well--never jarring, never unclear in terms of diction (though procedurally unclear, at times, per the above).

    Overall Impressions
    I think there's enough game here to play as written. With some clarifications, it would fly just fine. The GM is left with just enough info to run something--develop some situations, with the Oracle-like use of the I Ching--but isn't likely to just run the situations listed. But I wonder if a group without exposure to dirty-hippie narrative games could really get going. At the least, a good "Guide GM" is required, to help coach folks into the use of nebulous attributes to drive both acting and mechanical advantage (extra dice). Or that could be a part of a "How To Play A PC" section, in an expansion of the game beyond the two-page (too-short for a full treatment of this setting and its situations and peoples) layout.

    I do not, however, think the ingredients were very well used. They felt tacked on--quite literally an afterthought, in the third-to-last sentence of the game content. Does that make the game bad or unplayable? No. Am I a Game Chef judge? No. But I think the spirit of the competition took a back seat to whatever motivated the use of this subject matter. Though the Yakima ~> Burning Horse implementation is certainly unique.

    The layout fits two pages, but it is very workman-like. No muss, no fuss... but no zing, either. Specific issue include:
    * San serif body font implies that it's only meant to be read on-screen (serifed fonts are easier to read in print).
    * Run-in headings save space, but I prefer them to be at least a BIT larger than the body text; otherwise, they look like definitions. And meanwhile, the References section introduces a new font in the heading, makes it nearly as large as the title text, and (for some reason) gives it its own line. All this just makes for a bit of an un-unified design.
    * The body text font has no life, it doesn't evoke the setting or the tension of the situations or anything. Century Gothic, if I'm not mistaken (or similar). Great for bank forms; not so great for evoking the mid-20th Century, the style of the Japanese (or even Japanese-Americans), or the WWII West.

    I'd be happier seeing this game really expanded to, oh, four full pages, front and back, with more examples of play, more ideas for "harassment hooks," and maybe even some period photography (got to be some in the public domain). A book design that makes me feel the dust and stress and hatred and fear. It would make a very respectable portfolio piece; but to actually go to market, it would need a LOT of expansion, explication, and examples to justify even a "micro-book" of 30-40 digest pages. And might as well drop the forced "burning horse" stuff and give it a name that really catches the eye and makes someone wonder what it's about (e.g. American Internment or You Ain't From Around Here! or some-such).

    Let me know if you have further questions or need me to explain something above. Nice work! Now go finish it and make it better! ;)
    • Scott
    •  
    • 4 days ago edited
     quote
    I’m going to give honest feedback here as holding back my reactions to this game wouldn’t be helpful to its author. If I hadn’t been assigned this game, I would have passed on making any comment on it. So please realize that I’m not intending to incite anything here, just give my reaction from my point of view. If anyone (besides the author) wants to disagree with me on politics or take offense, you should really censor yourself from doing so as I wouldn’t have expressed any of this under different circumstances. 

    That being said, there is a lot of this game I like. It will be easy as you read further to assume I hate this game. That would be a false assumption.

    [I tried not to read any other commentary before I posted, so please forgive me if I repeat anything.]

    1) Please provide a summary of the game's goals, as you perceive them, with notes about why you think those are the game's goals.

    I think the goal of this game is to teach the players about the struggles of Japanese Americans during WWII. This is theme at the beginning and the end of the text and the advice given to the GM is mostly about increasing the societal pressures of the time. 

    The assumption that nationalism is necessarily xenophobic and accompanied by racist hostility certainly reads like a text with an agenda. There’s likewise no counterpoint, no balance to some of the base assumptions. There were Japanese Imperialist saboteurs in the United States during WWII who used the Japanese American population as cover. Internment was effective in stopping those saboteurs, but was it in any way worth the price? This question wasn’t asked, which I why I perceive an agenda with a singular point of view.

    2) What works within the game's text and system to help accomplish those goals? Why? How could it be improved?

    3) What doesn't work to fulfill the game's goals? Why not? Could it be removed? Should something else be added? Should things be changed?

    I don’t think there is much within the text that serves this goal. That’s fine with me, as I don’t really like the goal as I perceive it. The elements of relationship maps and use of the I Ching would seem to create stories that have little to do with the goal of the game. 

    Furthermore, it’s unclear how the GM is supposed to accomplish any of the things assigned to her. It’s unclear that the GM controls the plot, the scenes, and the NPCs, but it would appears that that is necessarily the case if they are expected to bring the desired adversity. My assumption from reading it is that they do control all those thing.

    I have no idea what the task or conflict or story direction resolution for this game is. It seems that the work with the I Ching takes place at the beginning of play and frames a scene for a character. But beyond narrating and role-playing that scene, I don’t know where the game goes from there. So it would seem that it wouldn’t go anywhere, just wait for the player’s next turn to do the same.

    While I don’t particularly care for the goal as I currently perceive it, I do so one way that the mechanics could be improved to better achieve it. The “gestures of patriotic loyalty” should be mechanically rewarded somehow – probably with greater rewards than staying true or fighting the system or whatever. Create a mechanical tension to accompany the thematic tension.

    4) What do you think of the game's goals? Are they worth achieving? Are there other things, also present in the game, that you think the author should focus on? What direction do you think the author should take the game?

    While I think the setting and the inherent tension in it are good fodder for a role-playing game, I don’t think the goal is a good one. I think it’s a bad idea to attempt to teach anyone anything through a role-playing game; unless this game was designed specifically for a Japanese American Studies class, in which case it’s not generally applicable to the rest of us. It definitely feels like you want to use this game to spread a message or awareness rather than create a fun game.

    I like the use of the I Ching. I can’t say I understood the I Ching part entirely. I went online and tried to work it out and I think I know how to find the hexagrams created by the mechanics, but if I think that if I had a copy of the I Ching it would have made more sense. That section definitely needs step-by-step procedures and possibly website references (again, with clear procedures) if a physical copy of the I Ching isn’t absolutely necessary (it’s okay if it is, that’s a cool element, but I suspect some of the websites out there would do). 

    As an aside, it’s very fun that with the popularity of the Oracles in “In A Wicked Age” you’ve gone back to one of the original oracles and incorporated it into the game. I didn’t know that the Japanese also used the I Ching, so you did learn me somethin’!

    While relationship maps are becoming more common, I like the limitation that all ties be familial or romantic. I think in the setting that is very good rule that will drive greater conflict. I’d like to see the rest of the rules likewise address the tension mechanically. There should be more about NPC creation at that point, it’s touched on but there’s not enough there. I think, perhaps, that you may want to require one relationship to a non-Japanese NPC for each character.

    I think this game needs a clear resolution system. Maybe that’s the intent of the I Ching, but I read that entirely as “oracle” for each scene rather than resolution.

    I don’t think the two-page limitation served this game well. I would recommend that you blow it out – big time – and write a lot more about the setting, the characters’ roles in it, how to use the I Ching, how to reward the increasing of tension, etc. Basically I’m saying that there are a lot of strong ideas here that need a full text.

    Also, I think you could use this as a more generic system for Asian cultural role-playing. If the I Ching and resolution mechanics were beefed up I could see using the basic system to play historical Japan, China, Korea, etc – maybe even L5R! You’d probably want a different chart for each setting to replace the “Generation” column.

    Speaking of that chart. I think it needs to be rearranged so that Generation and Gender are the first two columns after the numbers. Also, it’s unclear if the Sign, Symbol, and Meaning apply under both roles or which one.

    5) Do you want to play the game? Why? Why not? What would have to change so you would want to play the game? Are you going to?

    With the current (perceived) goal, no I wouldn’t. If that were changed or at least made more of a question I would definitely want to play. If the author does plan to change that and continue to work on the text, I’d be interested in play-testing (I’d even buy an I Ching!).
    • Scott
    •  
    • 4 days ago edited
     quote
    Just read the judges' critiques of this game. It may very well be that this game won't make sense to non-Americans and that might be okay. The setting is very storng and I wouldn't throw it out just yet. Of course, if this becomes a more generic Asian-culture game than Yakima Valley could be just one setting. But I just wanted to say that as an American the setting spoke to me and that might be worth keeping even though it will be more alien to others (and beefing up the text could go a long way to heling with that).
  4. Thanks for the reviews, fellas. Let me state up front that my choice of subject matter was entirely occasioned by the contest ingredients: a Google search turned up "The Burning Horse" as the title of a historical account of the Japanese immigrant experience in the Yakima Valley during WWII, Jason Morningstar was one of the judges -- it's a no-brainer. Scott, I think when you say:

    The assumption that nationalism is necessarily xenophobic and accompanied by racist hostility certainly reads like a text with an agenda.

    you misread me. What I say in the game is this:

    As the game progresses, the GM must ratchet up the level of xenophobic nationalism and racist hostility faced by the PCs while at the same time taking care to ensure that the environment is not uniformly hostile: there are sympathetic and even friendly neighbors among the non-Japanese of Yakima, as well as those who simply believe that the principles espoused by the Founders apply to everyone.

    So I think I'm striving for the kind of balance you're saying is necessary.

    I'm not sure how seriously to take the danger of Japanese saboteurs hidden among the immigrant population; I'm reminded of the ineffectual German saboteurs who were dropped off by U-boat on Long Island or the Jersey Shore or somewhere and managed to strike exactly nowhere before being apprehended and if memory serves tried by military tribunal and executed. This required the internment of no Germans, unless I'm mistaken.

    But that's neither here nor there. For me, the notion of "immersion" implies a novelistic approach to the game, in the sense of focusing on the lived experience of a thematically linked set of characters. So I imagine the game as starting off with quotidian concerns: will Papa Tanaka get enough help to plant the field, will little Ken Kimura make the cut for the team, and so forth. But then as the game progresses, the mundane gives way to the monumental, and you have to deal with it, even if you would rather stick to the day-to-day matters that you are capable of handling. 

    So I can totally see an incident in the game involving a Japanese saboteur showing up on the run and wanting aid and concealment--he's your dad's cousin from back home, after all--and the crux of the character's turn is how the character deals with it. "I turn him in to the authorities" is one response; "I dress him in my brother's old farm clothes and say he's visiting from San Francisco" is another. But it's the player's choice. And once that choice is made, that's the crucial point: roll the dice! Shift the hexagram! Read what it says as the consequences of the choice, and then move on to the next player. Boom. The next player may find his or her character dealing with the consequences of the previous player's turn, or go off in his or her own direction. Turns can actually go fairly quickly; quick scenes that advance the action a little bit. So I may have mis-spoken when I said that one or two "rounds" would probably get you to the end of the game.

    Scott, your idea of enforcing the ratcheting up of tension game-mechanically is a good one. But I agree that some sort of "loyalty" measure is off-putting; I think the tension comes from external pressures impinging upon the efforts of the characters to just live their lives without interference. At the beginning, those pressures are more or less normal; by the end, they're insurmountable.

    Dave, your comments about the layout are well-taken; thanks for running your eye over the game.

    You both suggest that firmer guidance to the GM about how to run the game would be helpful, and I agree. I think that it would become clear in play, but the GM needs a head's up to let him or her know what to expect. Good call.

    Thanks again for your reviews, guys. I really appreciated them.
    • Scott
    •  
    • 3 days ago edited
     quote
    Posted By: whitewj11@yahoo.comyou misread me. What I say in the game is this:

    As the game progresses, the GM must ratchet up the level of xenophobic nationalism and racist hostility faced by the PCs while at the same time taking care to ensure that the environment is not uniformly hostile: there are sympathetic and even friendly neighbors among the non-Japanese of Yakima, as well as those who simply believe that the principles espoused by the Founders apply to everyone.

    So I think I'm striving for the kind of balance you're saying is necessary.


    Well that says to me, "Not all Americans at the time were racist." But it doesn't say that some of the people behind internment had good motives and weren't racist. Or that the ends were good but didn't justify the means. But I really appreciate that you're willing to talk about it and I definitely see now that you don't have an agenda.

    Posted By: whitewj11@yahoo.comI'm not sure how seriously to take the danger of Japanese saboteurs hidden among the immigrant population; I'm reminded of the ineffectual German saboteurs who were dropped off by U-boat on Long Island or the Jersey Shore or somewhere and managed to strike exactly nowhere before being apprehended and if memory serves tried by military tribunal and executed. This required the internment of no Germans, unless I'm mistaken.

    No, but it did involve a US citizen who had joined the Nazis. That tension of our freedoms potentially endangering us is very relevant to this game and today's world.

    Posted By: whitewj11@yahoo.comBut that's neither here nor there. For me, the notion of "immersion" implies anovelisticapproach to the game, in the sense of focusing on the lived experience of a thematically linked set of characters...

    If you continue to develop this game, I hope you keep this explanation. This was very good stuff that made me want to play it. I saw that aspect of immersion in the original text, but it's much better in your post above.

    Posted By: whitewj11@yahoo.comAnd once that choice is made, that's the crucial point: roll the dice! Shift the hexagram! Read what it says as the consequences of the choice, and then move on to the next player.

    That's what I was missing. I think you need to make it clear that the I Ching is resolution and how to use it. Examples of play would be good here.

    Posted By: whitewj11@yahoo.comI think the tension comes fromexternalpressures impinging upon the efforts of the characters to just live their lives without interference. At the beginning, those pressures are more or less normal; by the end, they're insurmountable.

    That's great too. You've definitely sparked my interest in the future of the game now.
  5. Posted By: ScottIt may very well be that this game won't make sense to non-Americans and that might be okay.


    We actually had a very similar situation here in Australia, with a heavy concentration of Japanese rounded up at a camp near a town called Cowra (over 300km from the nearest big city). Australian attitudes to the Japanese at the time seem to have been very similar, so I can really get a feel for translating the setting to that camp and still having it work well.

    In this translation of the game, a second session would develop based on a historical escape attempt of the Japanese into the Australian bush. This escape was largely tragic, most being shot down, and some committing seppuku when recaptured, but if I remember correctly a few Japanese disappeared from the camp without a trace. I don't know if this sort of thing happened at Burning Horse, but it could make for an interesting (and even darker) follow up session. 

    Otherwise this is one of the few other games that really caught my attention.
  6. Vulp -- Really neat! That would be an intense and intensely dark setting. -- Bill

    Well that says to me, "Not all Americans at the time were racist." But it doesn't say that some of the people behind internment had good motives and weren't racist.


    You have to bear with me, because there's a fundamental way that I think the statement "some of the people behind internment had good motives and weren't racist"cannot be true--at the level of definition--as well as a way in which it could be true. So I want to read it the way that makes us in agreement, but I want to specify the definitional issue so that if we have to agree to disagree we can do that too.

    First the definitional issue. If you detain, imprison, or segregate a group of people who've done nothing wrong simply because they share a racial or ethnic origin with a group that's your enemy, that is by definition racist, because it involves judging people based on their racial or ethnic identity rather than their individual behavior--and judging them in a way that's really consequential for them. Now, "racist" is what some rhetoricians would say is a "devil term" because to be called a racist is to be charged with something so heinously and irredeemably bad that you might as well wear sackcloth and ashes and cry out "unclean! unclean!" But if we strip away that heavy moral baggage and just focus on the definition, then to say that racism is involved here becomes a merely descriptive rather than a moral judgment. Now, I think you'd have a tough time arguing that racism is sometimes justified, because it goes against what we as Americans believe about how we should treat people, but there are people who make exactly that argument--"The Bell Curve" comes to mind--although they are not terribly convincing to me.

    So I think to call the internment of the Japanese in WW II "institutionalized racism" is nothing more than to tell the truth, without euphemism. Now, the sense in which "some of the people behind internment had good motives and weren't racist" could be true is the sense in which people conform to societal, cultural, and organizational norms and "just do their jobs" without questioning the institutional norms behind them. But the only way that it could make sense to lock up the Japanese en masse, without doing the same thing to the Germans and Italians, is if you thought that the Japanese were somehow so irreconcilably different from the rest of us that we just couldn't trust them. And that is by definition racist.

    That tension of our freedoms potentially endangering us is very relevant to this game and today's world.


    That's absolutely true, and really nice. I see this game as being about being on the receiving end of those sorts of fears, and that's a good hook for driving the GM's play of NPCs.
    • Scott
    •  
    • 2 days ago edited
     quote
    I see your point. You should assume that everyone reading your text will read the latter definition of racism into it. You may want to address that explicitly.

    There were also those that believed that the Japanese needed to be interned for their own protection from the rest of the populace. That's certainly different from "just following orders". Maybe it's more of an excuse or justification than what their true feelings and motives were, but that's the kind of thing a game like this can explore.

    "During WWII, the U.S. Government interned at least 11,000 persons of German ancestry. By law, only “enemy aliens” could be interned; however, with governmental approval, their family members frequently joined them in the camps. Many such “voluntarily” interned spouses and children were American citizens. Internment was frequently based upon uncorroborated, hearsay evidence gathered by the FBI and other intelligence agencies."
    http://www.traces.org/germaninternees.html

    As an aside, FDR chose not to intern Italian Americans because he saw no threat from a "bunch of opera singers". That's arguably more racist! But there were Italians and Germans from South America and some who were visiting the US at the time of Pearl Harbor that were also interned, but that's more of a historical footnote.
  7. Scott -- Nice; I didn't know about the German internees. That's interesting. Of course, the 10-to-1 difference in the number of internees from the different groups probably speaks to qualitative differences in attitude towards Germans vs. Japanese; what counts as "prudence" with respect to each group differs. The "for their own protection" angle is interesting, too, but even if sincere it strikes me as wrong-headed, a willingness to countenance injustice for expedience's sake.
    • Scott
    •  
    • 2 days ago edited
     quote
    Of course, the Germans didn't attack Pearl Harbor, so there was certainly some of that as well. But I think the 10-to-1 difference had more to do with the fact that German have always been one of the largest immigrant populations in the US (Ben Franklin feared we'd all speak German some day!). It just wouldn't have been possible to intern all German Americans. So they were selective. They weren't at all selective about the Japanese. 

    Posted By: whitewj11@yahoo.comThe "for their own protection" angle is interesting, too, but even if sincere it strikes me as wrong-headed, a willingness to countenance injustice for expedience's sake.

    I wouldn't argue that at all. But it was part of the rationale and I hope you treat these as questions of "was it worth the price?" I think things like this work better when phrased as questions in RPGs even if we know the answer. You can't examine it in game if it's an assumption and not a question.
  8. Posted By: ScottI wouldn't argue that at all. But it was part of the rationale and I hope you treat these as questions of "was it worth the price?" I think things like this work better when phrased as questions in RPGs even if we know the answer. You can't examine it in game if it's an assumption and not a question.


    I'm right there with you. Although this game as framed isn't about the choices of white Americans; it's about being Japanese in the Yakima Valley in 1942. So the question it poses is more along the lines of "you're a stranger in a strange land that you thought was your home--what do you do?" 

    Jason Morningstar suggested to me privately that baseball play a more central role in the game. There's an Ansel Adams photo of Japanese-Americans playing baseball in an internment camp, and it would be a nice bit of design to make it possible to resolve a game of baseball by consulting the I Ching:

    Pî indicates that (under the conditions which it supposes) there is good fortune. But let (the principal party intended in it) re-examine himself, (as if)
    by divination, whether his virtue be great, unintermitting, and firm. If it be so, there will be no error. Those who have not rest will then come to him; and with those who are (too) late in coming it will be ill.


    I think we almost win but I make an error that costs us the game and I beat myself up about it because I didn't practice enough.
  9.  quote
    Nice! Good call mixing the internment came with something that is pure Amercicana like baseball.
  10. What the judges said, for completeness's sake:


    MIDNIGHT AT BURNING HORSE

    JASON

    + History gaming, social issue gaming, subdued reality gaming, more please! Right up my alley in terms of scope, theme, and subject. The potential for immersion is there.
    - Not fully baked, by a long shot. The hexagram thing is a little gimmicky and you'd really have to sell it - it feels wrong for the Nisei particularly. I'm seeing a standard R-Map sort of game with some color overlaid. It needs a lot of expansion and player support for what to most will be a deeply alien time and place. This is the game's strength and I'd love to see it developed further.

    GRAHAM

    This seems like a nice, low-key game, which is rather a pleasure to read. It's extremely well-written: any text that can explain a system where you roll dice to flip binary digits must be good.

    There's some nice mechanical touches. I like the I Ching. I like the relationship map, which only allows ties based on kin and romance. The resolution mechanic is interesting, although I'm not sure whether the resulting hakke is the character's new hakke, to be narrated in the scene, or merely informs the outcome of the scene. Either would be good. 

    The setting is very American and, as such, isn't drawing me in. There are many American references of which I don't understand the implications: Pearl Harbour, FDR, Ku Klux Klan. I'm also not sure where the Pacific Northwest is. For a game about diversity, this game sure does assume the reader is American.

    There's much guidance for the GM (e.g. ratcheting up xenophobia), which might be good to reinforce mechanically. There's a whole paragraph about how the game should progress, which, to me, suggests an opportunity for enforcing it mechanically.

    It's an interesting game, which I broadly like. I'm not fired up to play, but if someone I knew was playing, I'd play.

    EERO

    The way I Ching is used is interesting. The fictional situation doesn't go anywhere, really. The game lacks American elements to balance the Asian ones insofar as the meeting of the cultures goes. The fictional scope should be widened to view the whole Asian immigration issue in west coast USA. Perhaps use the current I Ching system in directing the "flow" of a characters life while introducing some American-symbolic crunch to fill other parts of the game. I'm fully behind the topic, Asian immigrants in the USA is interesting, although the specific time-frame chosen is very one-sided and prone to wallowing as opposed to understanding.

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A communication Ph.D., I teach public speaking and media-related courses in the middle of PA. I do research on scholarly/scientific communication, and I write & play roleplaying games.

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