What Not to Do

Man, this fucking week. Month. Year.

OK, I'm not going to get into all of the ways that 2016 has sucked, because I have shit to do today. What I do want to talk about, a little, is this little shitshow.

That image is taken from the press release wherein Modiphius announced the writers for their new Star Trek game. I know a bunch of the guys up there, and that's a pretty impressive group of talent. You know what's not there? Any women. At all.

(Now, I'm pointing out that specific fact because I don't know all of the guys in that list, and I'm sure that some of them are LGBTQA+ and some of them might be POC; I literally don't know. So I'm sticking the what I do know, for now.)

That is, frankly, unacceptable. But I understand how it happened.

Why White Dudes Hire White Dudes

It happened because whoever was in charge of making that decision was a guy, and he went with the people he knew. He went with names he recognized, and while I'm sure he talked to some women, he didn't talk to enough. He didn't make hiring diversely a priority, and I'm here to tell ya, if it's not a priority you won't do it.

I've been in the position of hiring writers for RPG products, a bunch - dozens of projects going back to 2001 (when I had my first development gig after getting hired at White Wolf). It's hard when you have only X slots to fill, and you know X people who would be good for the gig, and all of them happen to be white dudes. That means that you know you're hiring qualified, talented people - people with whom you have a history - and that'll make the product solid, right? So hiring someone different means bumping someone you know will be good, on, what, some kind of quota?

There's a very big tendency in this hobby to knee-jerk rebel against authority, to say "You're Not the Boss of Me" to anyone trying to moderate the conversation (evidence: spend any amount of time on a heavily moderated message board or forum, especially if bannings and suspensions are public. Yes, like RPG.Net. No, I'm not interested in fighting about this). Any suggestion that hiring practices are in any way suspect gets met a lot of resistance, often using words like "quota," "merit," and "SJW." And all of that is bullshit.

No, you don't hire on a quota. You hire with an eye toward diversity. No, you don't hire someone whose writing is weak just because they're not a cishetwhitedude, but you might hire someone less experienced because of their diverse background. Ultimately it's a good choice.

Why I Hire Diversely 

Here are my reasons for hiring people not like me:

1) They're not like me. I'm a middle-class cis white man from Ohio. I was raised not rich, but certainly comfortable. I've made a lot of attempts to broaden my horizons as I've gotten older, but I'm limited by time, money, and health (social media helps!). I need diverse voices on my books because they say things I can't say because I don't know to say them.

2) The books benefit. Games written entirely by dudes like me wind up derivative and safe. Games with a diverse group of writers wind up interesting and unexpected. I can avoid being derivative and safe, but it's a conscious effort - much less work, really, to hire people who can bring change and variety easily.

3) It's fair. You can talk about "hiring on merit" all you want, but that's not how our brains work. We look for people like us and trust them more, and moreover, we avoid people we perceive as a threat (this is just an article I found on a quick Google search, but there's a lot more). Hiring diversely is a way to break down our own internal biases, and that's good for us as people, and it's good for the hobby.

How Did Modiphius Handle This

Badly. For one thing, they've kinda hung their freelancers out to dry. The guys on that list didn't make hiring decisions, and they're not accountable for the decisions Modiphius made. Instead of issuing a statement saying "we're aware of the problem, please direct questions and comments here" (where "here" is an email address or comment form so as to give people a place to direct feedback, rather than slather it over Facebook), one of their head dudes is hopping around on people's FB feeds, posting the same bunch of excuses. Basically, it cooks down to "we did talk to women, but they didn't get back to us, so we had to hire all dudes." 

Politely put, I don't believe that for a hot second. 

The press release includes this little coda at the end:

That's nice, guys, that you're looking for "diverse writers" but that's not enough. You need to approach people. You need to track down the people you want to work with. You need to make your team diverse, not whisper into the Internet "we want diverse people!" and then expect them to come to you. You're talking about populations that sci-fi, fantasy, RPGs, and gaming in general have marginalized, abused, and run out of the hobby for years. You want 'em, you need to find them. 

And hey, I get it. I've seen developers track down diverse voices and hire them, just to have them flake out on projects, and it would very easy to say "Hey, I hired a WOC on this project, she bailed or disappeared, if they don't want the jobs why should I bust my back hiring them?" 

My response to that is, I've had so many white dudes flake on projects. Just so many. And I've had women do it. It happens on every book. It's not a problem with any particular demo; if it's common in RPGs, it's because writers aren't paid enough to make the writing a priority and therefore when health, real life, or other things conflict, the little writing gig that you're being paid 4 cents a word for but asked to do playtesting, game design, writing, and world-building on is the thing that has to go. Sorry, little bonus rant for you. 

Anyway, the point is that yes, you need to make the effort. You need to build your team. You need to think about the voices you want to amplify.

There's more to this, but it's already getting long, so I think I'll post this and see what happens. 

Game as Art: Participation

I ran Monsterhearts yesterday, and as I was drifting off to sleep, I was thinking about why I love the game so much. I mean, sure, "messy lives of teenage monsters" is a cool hook, and the writing is tight, and it's probably the best implementation I've seen so far of the *World system (though Bluebeard's Bride gives it a run for its money). But on top of all of that, it feels like art.

We talk about whether RPGs (or video games, but that's a discussion I'm not really qualified to have because my interest in and exposure to video games is a pretty narrow slice) are art, but it tends to be hard to come up with a good definition of "art" as it relates to RPGs. When I think of RPGs as art, then, I realized, as I thought about Monsterhearts, that to me a game that's art is challenging.

I would argue that most RPGs actually attempt not to be challenging. What's one of the common sales pitches I hear when I'm walking the dealer's room at GenCon or Origins and talking to folks about their games? "The system gets out of the way." Well, that's cool and all, but that's not really what I want if I'm looking for art. I'm looking for something that makes me engage with the game. Games that prioritize breadth - your GURPS, your d20, even (I hate to say it, because I love the system) Fate, don't challenge so much as shoot for inclusivity.

Now, that's funny, of course, because a lot of those games have labyrinthine rules rabbit holes, such that only someone who is willing to engage and put in the time to learn the rules actually gets the full experience of the game. I talk about this with regards to NWoD a lot; it's a good system (2nd edition especially), but it gets better if you learn it and use it. Hell, that's true of Chill, too - there are a lot of fun things the game does, but you have to know how they work.

That's not the kind of challenge I'm talking about, though. That's mechanical challenge; it'll be harder if you're pressed for time or if reading comprehension (or math, in some cases) isn't your thing, but it's not art. It's not an aesthetic challenge, it's not challenging attitudes or viewpoints. It's more like a puzzle.

No, when I'm thinking about challenge, I'm thinking Monsterhearts. I'm thinking Bluebeard's Bride, or Misspent Youth. Hell, without meaning to toot my own horn, Promethean works precisely because it's assumptions and challenges are so different than the rest of the World of Darkness - you're on a journey with a specific ending, and that ending is that you leave the WoD behind and become "normal." That's 180 degrees from every other WoD game, and consequently a lot of folks label it "unplayable." It's not, though (as two long-running chronicles will attest), it just requires different engagement than other games in the same world.

A challenging game should do more than make you try and remember what kind of dice to roll and what numbers that generates. It should make clear the relationship between system and narrative. Bringing that back to Monsterhearts, I have a player in my group who is highly system-impaired. Like, actively hates "systems". But even he is aware of what it means when I tell him to bubble in "cold" at the beginning of a session; he's gonna mark experience when he rolls on cold, but he's more likely to fail. That means if he plays to his character's strengths, he'll succeed more often, but he won't get as much out of it in the long run. Character development is therefore tied directly in to what that character does within the fiction of the game, which is a hell of a lot more artistic and elegant than "you killed 80 goblins? OK, at 4 XP each, that's...".

As I was talking about this with Michelle, she pointed out that A Tragedy in Five Acts might not be art so much as it encourages players to make art. Players don't tend to remember the system (which is a pretty simple bidding mechanic, really), but they remember the play they created. That's actually something I was trying to do with my contribution to Game Chef this year, Unstuck, and those it's very much in the preliminary stage, I'd like to flesh it out at some point. That does leave me wondering where curse the darkness falls, but since it's mine, I don't think I'm qualified to judge.

One more thought: I've played with a lot of first-time RPG players over the years, and the notion that "you create, control, and speak for a character within this world" is a pretty radical one for some of them. I think it's therefore important to remember that art, even as I'm considering it here, is a pretty subjective measure; what's challenging and new for one person might be familiar or even banal to me. In that kind of case, I think it's important for those of us with more experience to a) remember that there's always someone out there doing edgier shit than we are and b) remember that no one likes snooty, scoffy people who crap on other folks' fun.

Anyway: Tell me more challenging/artistic games! Offhand, my (incomplete) list:

• Monsterhearts (duh)
• Misspent Youth
• Bluebeard's Bride
• Ganakagok
• Geasa 
• Spark (although this might fall into the same category as Tragedy; a game that helps you make art as opposed to being art)
• Dread
• With Great Power...
• Dog Eat Dog
• Magicians (maybe, I haven't played it)
• Poison'd (yeah, I know it's problematic as shit in places, but it's definitely challenging)
• Dogs in the Vineyard

Love is Action, and Action is Effort

I say "love is action" a lot. It's a useful mindset, in my humble opinion, because it neatly dodges some of the issues in abusive relationships (for any value of abuse). "Oh, but she loves me." Sure, but how do you know that? What does she do that's loving? (Swap the gender, it still works, I just default to "she" because I write for Onyx Pat.)

You can extrapolate that principle out to work in relationships beyond intimate ones, though. Not to get all Carlo Summers on you, but I really do believe in thinking and acting in friendly, loving ways. I fuck it up sometimes, I admit, I get angry or frustrated and I get grouchy. But I really do try to at least empathize with other people, even - especially - people I don't and will never know, even people who would probably hate me. It's hard to do sometimes (often), but I find it helps for a few reasons:

1) I don't want to be angry all the time. There are people in the world who, whether under the banner of race, gender, "ethics in game journalism," "real talk," or whatever else, actively make the world worse. Sometimes they do that by shooting people, sometimes they do that by making anonymous death threats, sometimes they do that by just propping up other people who do the really horrible stuff by saying "not all whatevers." Those people, by their actions, are clearly not loving, and maybe they don't feel any need to be. Maybe they feel the world hasn't given them their due so they don't need to give anything back. Whatever. I can't be angry with them all the time, and my solution to that is to avoid making judgments about what they are and stick to making judgments about what they do. Hair-splitting? Maybe, but it's helpful to me.

2) I like people. I like talking to people, I like hearing people's stories. I like learning about people's viewpoints and I like it when people are interested and enthusiastic and happy. And that is one of my biggest reasons for being as gung-ho about inclusion and diversity and feminism and so on: I want all voices at the table. But if your voice is mostly defined by what you don't like, what you don't accept, what you don't want to hear, well, I'm not as interested. (Yes, there are folks who are highly feminist who mostly define themselves by what they hate. I don't like that negativity, but I'm much more inclined to listen to it, because the truth of the matter is that some voices are routinely silenced and some aren't, and as one of the "not silenced" ones, it behooves me to STFU and listen.)

3) I find the following phrases to be lazy and unpleasant: "People are stupid." "I hate people." "Nuke it from orbit." I totally get where they come from, but I have no time for misanthropy. I say "lazy" because it's so damned easy to spout platitudes and to be negative. It closes you off, so that means you don't have to make the effort to understand people. Also, if you're coming from a place of hate, then you assume everyone else is either. No need to try and understand why people act the way they do if the answer is either "because they suck" or "fuck 'em."

I have a theory that a lot of modern-day stress comes from the fact that our social circles are so much bigger than our Monkeysphere can handle, because of the advent of social media. I have 717 friends on Facebook as of this writing. I have no idea who most of them are; they're folks that friend me because of my gaming work. But even if we strip out those folks, there are probably several hundred people that I do know or did know at one point, but that are not really part of my life. Can I, from a emotional/mental bandwidth perspective, care about those people?

No, not unless they become part of my life. I had a really interesting moment yesterday; I realized, actively, that there was someone on my feed that I wanted to know better. I thought about our exchanges on Facebook, and though, "I would like this person in my Monkeysphere. I would like to know this person in real life."

I don't have that realization often, but the truth of the matter is, I'm open to it from most people. It's not the active emotional investment with individuals that I cultivate, because that way lies madness. It's the potential for that investment, for not closing myself off until I have enough data to do it.

Positive outlook? Sure. But mostly it's about remaining emotional neutral, with a slight skew toward favorable, about any given person until I have a reason not to (or to feel more strongly).

That works for me. It might not work for you, but I'm happy to hear what does.

Why I Try Not To Laugh at People

Short form? I want everyone to be warm, safe, well-fed, and happy.

That's why, despite any snark that I throw around online (and I do, I admit; it's hard not to some days), really, I want people to be OK.

Now, me wanting you to be OK doesn't absolve anyone from not being abusive or hurtful. It doesn't mean I won't tell you to check your privilege (and if that phrase makes you immediately roll your eyes and start grousing about "SJWs," well, you probably need to check your privilege). It doesn't mean I won't make fun of you or be sarcastic at you.

But you know what? I will never doxx you. I will never encourage other people to hunt you down and say hurtful things. I will never stalk you, and I will never, ever, knowingly lie about you. I might be wrong about something, and if I am (and if it's brought to my attention in a factual and respectful way, obviously), I'll retract it and make steps to correct it.

'Cause you know what? I was an angry young man for a long, long time. I was pissed off at women and...well, pretty much everyone. I didn't like people, and I didn't care who knew it. I was confused and scared and not a little depressed, and that makes for a really shitty cocktail. Add into the mix that I was privileged as all fuck (I grew up male, white, and well-off; I'm a bisexual atheist, so the points at which I lose my privilege are only as visible as I make them) and you've got the recipe that, had things gone a different way, I might have been out there today championing some very unsavory hashtags. And I'd probably be just as vociferous as anyone, and I'd have plenty of reassurance that I was right. And like a lot of folks, I feed on that kind of feedback.

So, despite accusations to the contrary, I don't live in an echo chamber. I pay attention to what I hear and where I hear it. I consider sources. So if you see me saying something and you think I've been taken in by "the other side," may spare 30 seconds and think that maybe, just maybe, I might know what the hell I'm talking about.

Or not, who the hell knows. Maybe I've been thoroughly corrupted by the "SJW" movement. Tell you what: Here's my ethical framework. I'll let you be the judge:

1) People have the right to say what they want...but no one owes you a platform on which to say it.

2) People have the right to sell what they want...but no one owes them customers or a storefront.

3) People have the right to believe what they want...but no one owes those beliefs anything other than acknowledgement.

4) People have the right to exist without being attacked or threatened or silenced...but pointing out problems with someone's statements isn't silencing. Disagreeing isn't, by itself, attacking.

We could get into finer points, of course. I think it's reasonable to ask for greater representation in games, for example. I'm not interested in supporting games, video or otherwise, that make no attempt to include and accept women, POC, trans, queer, etc. people. Do those folks have a "right" to be represented? Let's say it this way: They have as much right to be represented as anyone else. Do game devs have a responsibility to strive for that kind of equal representation? I don't know about responsibility, but I certainly have a right to make their decisions affect my buying habits. And that's not silencing or censorship. I owe any given game company exactly nothing.

I also believe that people can grow up. They can change. They can learn empathy. I did it. My methods might not work for everyone; for me it took having kids, getting a job that required some humility and some service, and losing people in my life that I truly loved. It require perspective, and you can't exactly bottle that. So maybe the folks who are up in arms now about "ethics in games journalism" - the ones who really believe that that's actually a thing, that the harassment and the threats, like, didn't happen or something, that believe that their favorite video games are actually under some kind of threat, maybe what they need is a little time and a little exposure to the biomass and a little perspective.

I'll say this: I wade into threads and Twitter fests and hastags and I read, not because I'm expecting to agree with what I find, but because I want to understand. What I find makes me sad, sometimes, but that's life, and I have plenty of reasons to be happy. I type and delete a lot more comments than I post, but I fuck it up sometimes and say things that are mean or sarcastic. But I do try and learn. And I hope that folks on the other "side" do the same thing - go looking for other perspectives not with the intent of making themselves angry or finding a place to lash out, but just to learn.

The world is an interesting place. It has awesome people in it. But you lose so much if you go looking for people to hate, and you gain so much if you remember that even the people who hurt you have some humanity.

Now, that's easy for me to say. I'm not being hounded out of my home or threatened with murder or rape, and don't think for a minute that I don't recognize that. I am privileged that I can be so calm about things. That's really all I mean when I say to check one's privilege - acknowledge it. See how it might inform your position. And move on.

It's late, and I'm done rambling. Next post will probably be a character or a movie or something more typical of this blog. But maybe not...maybe I'm gonna start using it for this kind of thing.

People Are OK, Mostly

People occasionally ask me what, since I'm an atheist, I believe. It's a valid question, since "atheist" as a position doesn't tell you what I do believe, just what I don't believe. It's not necessary to have beliefs, I don't think, but I've come to realize I have some: Some things that I hold as personal truths, regardless of whether they would stand up to objective scrutiny.

(That said, I am, as always, willing to put my beliefs up for debate or objective scrutiny, if such a thing can be arranged.)

So here are my beliefs: I believe that people are generally understandable. I believe that most people, given an actual, immediate chance to do the right thing, would do it. I believe that people are self-interested, but that they understand, on some instinctive level, that what benefits the people around them benefits them.

Now, understand, when I say "around them", I mean literally the people physically nearby. I mean the people in the monkeysphere. It should be obvious to anyone paying the least bit of attention that when people can be abstracted, when they become nothing more than a screen name and 140 characters, that it's easy to think of them as not-human (to say nothing of how easy that is when they're thousands of miles away, entirely different culturally, and functionally invisible).

I don't believe that "good" and "evil" are fixed positions. I believe that evil is as evil does. I believe that even someone who is an avowed anti-person (choose your poison; homophobe, racist, sexist, misogynist) can change that position because they got to that position somehow. In short, I believe - well, this one isn't "belief" so much as "duh" - that everyone is on their own journey and comes to wisdom (or not) from different directions.

I think that I've managed to accumulate some wisdom over the years - but everyone thinks that. I think that I'm a generally good person - but everyone thinks that (if you want to say "but!", put a pin in it). I think that my moral positions are generally righteous - but everyone things.

I am not, at the end of the day, special, except in the nuances. But I like to think that paying attention to that nuance is important.

So here's that pin I mentioned: I know there are people who cheerfully say, "well, people are shit, but I'm shit, too, so whatever." Or some misanthropic variation; "people are stupid," "I hate people," "I don't want to live on this planet anymore."

I don't go in for that position. Not because it's wrong - people certainly are capable of being horrible to each other. Some moral positions are indefensible. But I don't go in for the misanthropy because it's lazy. It's avoiding any chance at education or interaction by just throwing up one's hands and saying, "well, it's all fucked."

I don't think it is. I think that people, individually, can figure it out, can grow some empathy, and can stop lashing out. I don't pretend to be a saint on the subject - I'm watching my Twitter feed go nuts daily over Gamergate, and watching some of the people responsible for perpetuating the worst of it sit smugly by and claim (falsely) that the "movement" was ever about anything other than one lonely, petty man's attempt at lashing out at his ex.

But I'm not quite ready to say, "yeah, it's all fucked." Because if I do that, if I agree that people are shit, then I have to include all people in that statement. And there are too many people that I know, personally, who are capable of such acts of love and compassion that they bring me to tears, for me to lump them in with the people who are capable of such acts of selfishness and bitterness.

So, I'm not going to say that people are good, because that's lazy, too. But I will say that, on balance, people are OK, and that it's important to remember that everyone is the hero of their own story. That's not to say that their story is good or a story you want to play a role in, or even a story you want to try and understand. Just that it's useful, to me, at least, to know the story exists. Maybe it'll help me make edits to my own.

My Father Loved Women

When we had my father's memorial service back in 2009, one of the things that I heard more than one person say was that he loved women. The unspoken subtext, which everyone understood, was "not like that." Dad wasn't a womanizer and he never made advances on women. He just enjoyed their company, apparently more than that of other men.

Dad was a deep pool. I learned something new about him every time we talked about his life, even right up to the end, and he was much less transparent about himself and his feelings and thoughts than my mother (or me). I suppose it's also possible that he was simply what he appeared to be: good, quiet, calm, and kind. Maybe both.

But back to women. I'm a product of my own generation, and I have my own hangups about sex and women and the intersection thereof that I have been trying, over the last few years, to recognize and, where necessary, correct. I'm starting from a better place than some men. I never believed women owed me sex. I always knew that sex was important for me in a relationship, and if a romantic relationship didn't include sex, that was a problem for me, but that doesn't make it anyone's problem but mine. It certainly doesn't make it anyone's responsibility to provide it. My needs are my needs, but it's not all about me.

It's not all about me. Could that be a mantra that we instill into our young men? Could that be something we teach boys as they get old enough to realize that sex is a thing that they want (regardless of who they want it with)? I mean, it's a useful message for anyone, regardless of gender, but I don't see a lot of women gunning down men because they felt they were owed sex.

The link above, by the way, is a quick and incisive examination of what Elliot Rodger, the man who murdered six people the other night, is and isn't. I fully agree with the writer; calling him crazy or mentally ill assumes facts not in evidence, and is horribly dismissive and othering to people who do have mental illnesses (most people with mental illnesses are not predisposed to violence).

I don't pretend to have a firm enough grip on the human psyche to explain what drove Rodger to this, and I don't believe in "evil" as an outside concept. That is, I think evil is what we do, not what we are (if that's too fine a hair to split, I apologize). So what he did was evil.

What a lot of men are doing now, on social media, congratulating him, is also evil.

I don't have any solutions, except great big grandiose statements about changing the culture, and I don't know the best way to approach that. At this point, I'm just wishing for a little more of my father's insight, love, and patience in the world, coupled with a great big dose of it's not all about you.

Apple-ogies

So, my girlfriend posted this on her FB feed earlier:

(Note: I only mention that she posted it for context; it's not especially relevant for the rest of this.)

I take some issue with the sentiment here. I don't entirely disagree, but my initial reaction is "hmph," and I thought it might be worth unpacking that a little bit. So here we go.

I have a weird, long, and somewhat complicated relationship with apologies. Some of it may be cultural; my wife is from Oklahoma, and doesn't see quite the same need to say "I'm sorry" to act as a sort of gateway to successful communication. But I don't really know how to brain the cultural aspects, so for me personally:

1) I grew up in a household in which "Matt is selfish and egocentric" was a fucking meme. I mean, I'm not saying it was never true (hands up if you've never done anything selfish). I'm not even saying that it wasn't a problem at points. But I am saying the meme long outlasted its applicability and became something that I actually take direct offense to, and I'll get shouty and unpleasant when family members try and apply it these days. The point is, I think, that there was often the assumption that I should apologize, but wouldn't, if that makes any sense. And the truth of the matter is that I've always wanted the people around me to be happy, but I never really knew how to get there. Is it possible that I occasionally played to the perception of egocentrism because I knew that laughing about it seemed to make my family happy? Maybe, seems possible.

2) I actually have done some really unpleasant and mean things to people I loved, and I've given some pretty heartfelt, painful apologies for it. Compared to that, saying "I'm sorry" because I said something offhandedly that was interpreted wrong seems kind of trite. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that as a way to minimize anyone else's experience, just to unpack my own.

3) I give people benefit of the doubt all the damn time. I actively try to live a philosophy that places my perspective not as unimportant, but not as especially important, either. My perspective is just mine, other people have reasons for doing what they do and in the spirit of honest communication, I owe it to them to try and understand it, etc. As such, if someone says or does something that I find offensive, either personally or on a larger level, I don't necessarily require an apology. That seems weirdly egotistical and personal to me. The point of the exercise isn't to assuage my feelings, it's to enable communication and, hopefully, educate so as to avoid future problems.

By getting hung up on the formality of the apology, it seems to me that, one way or another, someone's ego is getting massaged. Refusing to give an apology serves the ego of the would-be apologizer, refusing to proceed without one serves the ego of the apologizee.

For my own part, I don't want an apology unless it's genuine. I don't want someone to say the words unless they really understand what's happening, which is why I think the apology serves better coming at the end of a discussion. And frankly, "I'm sorry" doesn't help me anyway, because I want people to be happy and for them to understand me. I don't want you to be sorry. I want you to get it. "I understand why you were hurt" is sometimes used as a cop-out to avoid a "real" apology, but I think it's what I'd rather hear.

Superheroes

So: I really love superheroes. I have since I was little. I used to make up my own superheroes, as early as age 5 or so (there's even a picture floating around Facebook of me dressed up for Halloween as Debious, one such creation). I had a DC Comics dictionary as a kid, I had a bunch of records that told the adventures of various superheroes, and I liked watching Superfriends and suchlike.

But what I wasn't really into was reading comic books.

Now, that changed a little as I got older. I got into limited series like Secret Wars and Squadron Supreme, and titles like Who's Who (DC) and What If... (Marvel). I'd read comics as I found them, but I rarely bought them, and if I did it was generally a new book, from the first issue (sometimes that worked out, sometimes you get the first six issues of NFL Superpro).

I started playing RPGs at age 11, and my first game was TSR's Marvel Superheroes. I ran the hell out of that game, and since then I've played and run a bunch of others - Batman, Mutants and Masterminds, Marvel Heroic, ICONS, and most recently Better Angels. And I'm finding that my tastes are changing. I like four-color, but it's hard to get into the conventions and tropes of that four-color setting now. That is, it's hard for me to play or run a supers game without at least some attention to the larger context in which these supers exist. In my recent Marvel game, Greenspace, we had all the usual Marvel tropes: mutants, high-tech, a sorcerer supreme, and so forth. But there was still the SHIELD-like government agency looking out for everything. It's not just "put on a cape and punch dudes," I need to pay some attention to what kind of world allows that kind of derring-do. But it wasn't always thus, and I blame (or credit) movies.

Various comic-book character movies came and went; Punisher (Dolph Lundgren), Burton's Batman, and so on, and then X-Men came out. And X-Men, flawed though it was, really drove home for me that you could make a movie about superpowered people and have it make sense within its own world, and have a larger connection to the world that the source material set up. Movies since then refined that, of course; Avengers did it best, and that movie really nailed it - that's what the four-color superhero genre has always looked like in my head.

But it was long about X-Men when it clicked for me. I like superheroes. I don't like comic books.

Comic books go on forever. Characters don't age. Or they do. They die, but they come back. You can't ever really change anything. You're always at the mercy of the folks making the decisions, and often those folks are idiots who figure the best way to make comics is sexify all the girls and give pouches to all the boys. And it's not like this isn't a problem in movies, but in a movie, it's over in two hours. In comics, it all becomes canon, and even after how many crises, the very concept of "canon" is meaningless. It makes about as much sense as the backstory to Mortal Kombat.

And that's why I always liked the limited series and the graphic novels that took a few characters, told their stories, and then let them the hell go. I want the stories to make sense and then end. That's probably why I'm fine with the end of The Dark Knight Rises, because it the trilogy tells a complete story.

Anyway, I have no idea what all this means, but it's late and I can't sleep, and it was in my head, so I typed it out. Really I think I just wanted to use this space to blog a little bit. :)

Would You Like a Sammich?

Not long ago, I had a discussion with a teacher at my school about religion vs. ethics. He knows I'm an atheist (he's not, though I don't know the particulars of his beliefs beyond "Christian"), and we did the usual round-n-round about how being an atheist does not, in itself, confer any particular ethical framework or lack thereof. He asked me, then, what my ethical philosophy was.

I said, "Summed up in one sentence? 'Would you like a sandwich?'"

He laughed, but I clarified. I love to cook for people. I like it when people are warm, safe, happy, and fed. It doesn't matter to me if they don't have my ethical outlook or, indeed, if their outlook is fundamentally different to mine. If they're in my space, I want their needs met, and then maybe we can come to some kind of consensus. But I have a really hard time turning people away, ideologically, because they're different (or even just flat-out wrong).

That doesn't mean I like them, of course. There are people who espouse really horrible things. Would I invite them to share my table and my food? Provided that there's no actual threat to me or my family, sure. I have sandwiches to spare.

We joke about the "eat, eat, eat" stereotype from folks' cultures; I've seen it most often connected to Greek and Italian families. But my family is of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, and my mother is much the same way. There's always food.

There's an intrinsic amount of trust involved in this attitude, of course, and that burns me once in a while. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. I tend to believe them. I'm highly susceptible to a good story. I recognize this, and I try to be smart and skeptical.

But you still get your sammich.

Last week two guys came to my door selling magazines. (Go ahead, start rolling your eyes now.) I gave them a check without Googling their company; it was a mistake, the whole pitch was a scam. Fortunately, I put a stop payment on the check, so it's not actually going to cost me anything. (For the record: Midwest Circulation is a scam, and they will say anything to you that they think will get you to part with your money.)

Now, what happens if those guys show up at my house again, saying, "hey, the check bounced?"

Provided they're not threatening, I offer them a sammich (or a cup of coffee, or something. The sammich is a metaphor, much like the minotaur).

My wording choice - and my misspelling of "sandwich" - is deliberate. "Go make me a sammich" is the rallying cry of guys trying to drive women out of video games (well, it's one of them).

I appropriate that. I take it for my own. Yes, I will make you a sammich. Yes, you are welcome to ask. Yes, you might be a terrible person saying terrible things, but the strength that I have is to offer hospitality anyway. That I can do is privilege on a pretty large scale. I recognize that, too, and I attempt to use that privilege in a beneficial way.

But that's the message: You don't get to use this phrase as a way to control or to reinforce gender roles in a way that makes you feel powerful. I take that role - provider of food - and although I can only rarely provide it to people I don't know, I do it when I can. Because that feels moral to me, for reasons I cannot explain and I can only assume are rooted in my own experiences and the ongoing tapestry (meal?) of my life.

People gotta eat, even the people who behave badly. I would rather cook and teach than starve and berate. That's just me.

(And again, I realize that this preference is one afforded to me in large part because I don't wind up on the receiving end of the abuse. I get that, and I don't judge anyone else for how they choose to respond. I would just personally prefer to make sammiches.)

Much of this, by the way, was spurred by reading this site, which has a lot of thought-provoking articles.