The Struggle to Create Gender-Neutral Characters

In early April 2014, I had the privilege of playing in College of Wizardry, which inspired my partner Maury and I to contemplate running a College of Wizardry game in the United States.  Among the design choices implemented in that game that we wanted to keep was the idea that every character in the game would be written as gender neutral.  Only after the character was cast would the player make the decision to add gender specific elements as they fleshed out the concept presented to them.

While progressive, letting the players carry the weight of gendering their character also alleviated a common logistical problem in creating characters and casting them according to the player’s gender preference.  Simply put, many larp organizers have found themselves in a scenario where their larp has enough player interest to be run, but that the players themselves do not necessarily conform to the gendered characters as written, requiring players to play outside their comfort zone and costuming, or hasty rewrites that themselves might also challenge players comfort zones when character relationships now change to a different dynamic.

The CoW design also did not presuppose relationships in the character sheet, explicitly assigning that responsibility to the player.  Connecting with other players before the game and forming those relationships themselves allowed the player to make their own choice regarding their character’s gender expression, and then also collaborate with other players regarding their character’s romantic attachments.

As we started our pipe dream of making a United States version of College of Wizardry for the summer of 2016 (stay tuned), we began to start creating our characters, and found that writing them as truly gender neutral proved to be particularly challenging.

The most obvious case was the first character written, who was a third-year student who had a younger sibling that was a first-year student, both player-characters in the game.  As I wrote about these two siblings, I found myself defaulting to male gendered nouns and pronouns, “your younger brother” instead of “your younger sibling”.  So, I would correct this, and continue writing.

I did it again.  Repeatedly, I’d have to reread and find instances of “his, him, brother” over and make those corrections.  This was quite humbling, since I had thought that I could count myself among the enlightened progressives and feminists.  I felt that I, like most people, had implicit biases that affected my point of view and my judgement at any given time, but as a dutiful progressive person, I was making good strides in being aware of them and counterbalancing.  How arrogant in retrospect!  To imagine that you can outsmart implicit bias is highly absurd, but it was only driven home when I had direct evidence of it in front of me; that I myself am affected by implicit bias, and this implicit bias was harming my ability to create genuinely gender neutral characters.

The bright side, is that I’m not alone.  It was a great comfort when my partner gendered a different pair of siblings as male, and I pounced on the opportunity to jokingly shame her, and to declare I was not alone in this mistake (even ironically shaming someone is questionable ethically, so I will state that it was a moment of weakness born from my frustration and disappointment in myself, and I’m sorry.) Further, when we had volunteered as part of the CoW editing team to review their characters in preparation for their three November 2015 events, we found a lot of cases where the writers of these supposedly gender neutral characters wound up also accidentally adding gendered pronouns, nouns or other characteristics and descriptions.

There is some satisfaction that, through practice of writing these characters, the implicit bias that genders all these gender neutral characters is surmountable.  Since writing a character is imagining what a person is like, being able to consciously make a decision not to imagine the character as a specific gender while creating the character attributes feels like I’ve taken a significant step in being a better writer-of-characters, and that the characters that I create going forward will be better characters for people to play regardless of their gender expression.

Empowered play — taking up agency given and fighting over-hesitation

So. Maury here, fresh on all the impressions of an amazing Intercon O, which included our presentation and four great games. Over the course of the con, Ben and I also had some experiences that brought us into visceral and contemplative contact with some of the principles we are working on with role-playing games and exploring here.

It’s not so much Post-Larp Depression or “con-drop,” but the return to the mundane world after the exhilaration of larping is rife with physical, emotional, cognitive, and psychological effects. I find myself today stuck in the realm of the “woulda, coulda shoulda” or as Ben put it, “ye olde ‘I ought to have'” with regard to various larp elements. I don’t intend to get stuck here. But it happens. It’s a result of caring about the game I have helped create and about wanting to have played my part well. By thinking metacognitively about my play I hope it will improve with each game that I’m in. Reflection is powerful, and replaying a game experience is enjoyable even. But I’ll admit, there is a bit of anxiety — and maybe even perfectionism — roiling about in this angst: “if only I had …” But, you didn’t. I didn’t. And now it’s gone.

There’s this concept of “learning not to hesitate” that I want to put in conversation with our notion of “mindful play.” As we have said, it is important to maintain a level of dual consciousness that allows you to think about the consequences of your actions (both in game and out of game) in a larp. And gameplay involves choices. Good gameplay involves lots of choices, ones with actual in-game consequences, and, as we discuss with regard to playing with empathy, out-of-game effects on players and relationships. In a larp, choices, consequences, and considerations are coming at you quickly, and that can be both exhilarating and exhausting. You have to make quick decisions or the game goes by. Sometimes, hesitation leads to regret and lost opportunity. Sometimes, as Hamlet can attest to, thinking too much creates inaction. And inaction in a larp can be a problem. In a larp, not-doing can profoundly affect the game experience since other players are bound to you in a networked interactive design. You doing things — taking action, making choices, accepting consequences — not only drives your game, but also the opportunities for others.

Hesitate too long in a larp, and the moment when a choice can matter is gone or, worse, the game has ended. Angst too much over a decision, seek too much consensus, defer too long, and you’ll be left with the GM calling time and the cards still in your hand. And that reluctance to take up the agency that you’ve been given as a character — either through the game design, mechanics, or the play of others — has affected not only you, but the entire game you are co-creating with others. Something you *could have* or *would have* or even *should have* done isn’t part of the game if it doesn’t come out for others to know and play with. It remains a latent potential that *could* have made an impact, an opportunity lost.

The opportunity cost of over-hesitation can be huge for the game-play of others, so I think this is a principle related to playing with empathy. Sometimes, a player needs to take a risk because it matters to the overall game and to others’ ability to play and get to enact their goals. I hesitate sometimes to make a decision because I am waiting for others to speak up, or because I do not want to dominate play, or because I am unsure if this will agree with what others have in mind. Because I do not want to overplay and leave play for others, because I am trying to be mindful of the designers’ intent and the goals and feelings of fellow characters and players, sometimes I over-hesitate. But I think that what might initially feel like “taking charge” when creating a scene in a larp may actually be an instance of transferring privilege and game-play to others.  By *doing* something, but taking action, I may be giving play and encouraging play. This seems to me a form of the kind of mindful risk-taking that we have promoted elsewhere. It’s an interesting paradox, nonetheless. Taking a decision and creating play doesn’t mean taking away from others necessarily. Done mindfully, such action may be inspiring and an instance of offering choices (and attendant consequences) to others. Indeed, in some cases, too much hesitation and inaction may become game-play that disempowers rather than empowers.

As players who are intentionally playing for empathy and transfer of privilege, we are busy thinking about others  and how our interactions create dynamic storytelling in game and powerful relationships out of game. However, we can’t forget that we, as individual players, have an integral role. We can’t be afraid to take up the agency when it is ours to do.

If we are left after a larp experience with a desire to do something different next time, then we are a mindful player. When we play — heck, when we live our everyday lives — we do the best we can given the many variables we are wrestling with at the time, variables that are both within and outside of our scope and control. So playing with empathy allows us to imagine ourselves complexly, not just others.

I’m interested in your thoughts.  Is intention the primary factor to distinguish between making the game about a single player and his/her goals vs. about the collective game experience? In other words, *can* you play powerfully without dominating play? Can taking charge and taking action be a way to give play? Can over-hesitation harm play? How do you play with both strength and empathy, reconciling power and privilege with mindfulness? Is it a matter of degree? Of give and take? Let’s talk.

Recap: Gaming with Empathy Panel Discussion Part 1

Our presentation of “Gaming With Empathy: Creating Play For and With Others” went fantastic. Thank you to everyone who attended.  As requested, we’re blogging some of the bullet points we’d discussed.  This is about one-fifth of the presentation and focuses on strategies players (as opposed to designers) can do to play with empathy and empower others.

This main purpose of the workshop was to help participants identify cases of transferable privilege, determine plausible opportunities to empower others, and enjoy the freedom to make choices unfettered by win conditions and other arbitrarily constructed restrictions that limit play and fun. Our solution to noticing and possibly subverting in-game privileges and reimagining a new social co-creative space is to play with empathy.

To recap, we identified three types of empathy

• Affective empathy, which tends to happen first, is the emotional reaction that happens neurocognitively through mirror neurons and amygdala reactions. You notice that someone else is feeling a certain way, sad for example, and you feel sad, too.
• Cognitive empathy, which tends to happen next, is the thinking reaction whereby a person identifies and understands other peoples’ emotions and needs (a point of roleplay itself); also known as “perspective taking.”
• “Compassionate empathy” or “active empathy,” whereby after feeling and thinking, you make the conscious choice to take a helpful, righteous action on behalf of others. This is the motivation to action we hope to incite in players who can make choices to make a gameplay experience that is collaborative and empowering for all players and can highlight and/or challenge institutional structures that may limit play for some.

We moved to highlighting some things you can do as a player no matter what type of game you’re in. We acknowledge, however, that some games make it easier to play with empathy than others. In a hierarchical larp with betrayal mechanics? Trust may be harder to come by. The bottom line is that you’ve got to play the game that you’re in.

One of the strategies is a shift in personal objectives of the game. We’re asking players to take risks and consider letting go of win-condition thinking. Games can fall along a ludus-paidia spectrum, and play includes both types, as Roger Caillois noted in 1961.

• ludic goals are explicitly set up to demonstrate superiority, either in skill, strength, or good fortune of the winner or winners. There are clear victors and clear losers; the game has explicit win-conditions that require separating into winners and losers. Your goal is to be a winner, even though you know that not everyone can be. Players are expressly competitive with one another and their personal ludic outcomes are primary.
• paidia is more open-ended, improvisational, play. Though sometimes characterized as not having goals, paidiac play does have rules, but it does not define winner and loser. There are goals and subgoals, but not win-conditions. The key objective is generally  to play together. We contend that although larps will have ludic goals and characters can and should play with a measure of competitiveness, that a larp itself operates primarily on the paidiac level of players choosing to play together for the experience of the event. The characters are competing and accomplishing ludic goals; the players are enacting paidia when you are gaming with empathy.

But how can I give up my competitiveness? Are you saying I should “play to lose?” Losing doesn’t feel good! We’d like to remind players that there are no non-diegetic (out-of-game) consequences to diegetic (in-game) failure, and that diegetic failure does not necessarily mean the game is over (barring permadeath, of course, but that’s another story).

Some of the tricks and techniques we offered to help encourage empathetic play include:

“What does failure feel like when it can’t hurt you?” – When you find yourself having difficulty letting go of ludic gameplay, I find it’s helpful to ask this.  It lets you assess that the risks you take in larp, do not often have very punishing failure conditions.  What would the gameplay be like if you didn’t have to try so hard to win at every turn?  Try exploring this!

• “Imagine Others Complexly” – As a simple mantra of thought, it helps us resist our first conclusion regarding someone’s motivations and circumstances, which are often both knee-jerk responses and judgemental.  Entertaining the possibility of complicated motivations or circumstances helps get our thinking into a less reactive and more mindful state, necessary for empathetic play.
• Dual Consciousness – In addition to trying to achieve immersion in your role, it’s helpful to try to also be conscious of the fact that you are a player in order to be mindful of others while you’re playing together.  When considering consequences for choices, it helps to think about how the choice will affect me as a player, other players, other players’ characters, and the overall gameplay experience.  Even if those questions are difficult to answer, merely raising them primes one’s thinking towards more mindfulness.
• Betray Up – many larps are designed with a significant intrigue component to drive the game’s plot.  Intrigue, and it’s climax of betrayal, is not exactly all that conducive to empathetic play.  I’d like to suggest that in games like that which are also cases where power is distributed hierarchically, that one tries to avoid betraying “down” the hierarchy, taking a betrayal action against a character who is powerless to retaliate (which I call “kicking the dog”), and instead try to find ways to betray “up” the hierarchy, taking action against a character with plenty of means to retaliate (which I call “punching the man”).  Betraying up is incredibly risky, but as an attempt to try to reverse the standard flow of above in hierarchical games, I think it’s worth trying to explore. See letting go of ludic goals, above.
• “Yeah!  What she said!” – Under normal circumstances, we don’t imagine a supportive voice to contribute much of value.  I would like to suggest that in larp, supportive voices are of incredible value.  A single supportive voice to someone’s idea or suggestion can help significantly to that person’s voice being heard, and their idea being given due consideration.  Our panel’s participants contributed the experience of making a suggestion which is ignored, and when the same suggestion is made by a player with some privilege, the suggestion is then deemed meritorious.  “Yeah!  That!” may feel a bit like the waving of pom poms, but in larp spaces, where so much of gameplay is derived from imagination and consensus, the act of being cheerleader for someone can produce great results.
• “Reinforce Non-Standard Roles” – Similar to the above remark, explicitly supporting someone who is in a leadership role that defies non-diegetic (out-of-game) power dynamics can help.  Making it clear that your character firmly believes that the person in the authoritative role owns and deserves that authority can help overcome other players’ often unexamined tendency to disbelieve a player enacting the role whose embodied appearance doesn’t conform to their expectations of what that role would look like (e.g. a small female battle leader).  
• “The Relationships You Form Are Better Than XP” – It helps to remember that when you leave a larp, all that you’ve achieved and accomplish don’t follow you back into non-diegetic space once the game is over.  The exception is that the relationships you form with the players do stay with you, and they are of incredible value.  Even in cases where gameplay is resumed from session to session, or there are opportunities for win-conditions during gameplay, it’s easy to imagine someone “winning” the game, but alienating other players to the point where they are not invited to form relationships.  Likewise, someone that “loses” but plays well with others and forms positive relationships with other players, can be said to leave the game with far more than they entered it with, and has, to a certain perspective, “won.”

Using a Trigger Warning — what of it???

We’re back! Abysmal, relentless winter, work commitments, personal challenges to overcome, and relationships to nurture: these things have occupied us these many weeks. While our fingers may not have been flying and we haven’t pushed the “publish” button, the thoughts have been swirling and there is much to say.

Recently, Trigger Warnings have been under discussion again, with all the predictable vitriol about what it means to use one, need one, or ask for one. It started with this post by a 20-year police officer who wanted to tell us what “real” trauma is like.  It extended into international Facebook discussions about the meaning of trigger, the need for trigger warnings, and why people are so upset by their use. I can tell you that our FB discussions were far more civil than the comments on Hernandez’s original post, which I don’t suggest you read unless you wish to fuel your anger and despair at humanity. Not here, though. As hard as it can be sometimes, we’re going to invite discussion and attempt not to fall into the binary logic trap of “I’m right, you’re wrong.” So here are some thoughts about trigger warnings, something Maury thinks about far too much.

Trigger warnings — short descriptive phrases that give advance notice about content and themes —  seek to recognize the lived experience of community members and offer these members the individual agency to determine when, how, and if they wish to read, view, or engage with content. Many people find their use to be insipid, and they have no qualms about telling others that TWs are evidence of everything that is wrong with contemporary society, challenged as it is by social justice and feminist activism that seeks to give voice to others. But it is patronizing and problematic to assume that someone is weak or inferior because they have been traumatized by their lived experience, and oppressive to assume that they should be able to handle a situation or content simply because you (an author, designer, or fellow audience member) think they should be able to, or should be “over” their situation/symptoms by now. These attitudes also assume that the reactions are completely controllable, which is a fiction. Biologically, trauma intrusions are enacted through the autonomic nervous system and are outside of a person’s control. A person who has been triggered can begin to enact a measure of control over how they handle the reaction after it occurs, but they cannot control whether they will get a reaction at all. Trigger Warnings are one way to give some measure of control back to the reader, viewer, player, audience.

Of course, one of the things someone can do is avoid a situation or content that may be triggering or that they simply don’t want to engage with; and of course, they can only do that with clear descriptions of content, transparency from designers/content creators, such as what might be found in a trigger warning. However, all-too-often trigger warnings become derided as being “unhealthy enablers or avoidance strategies” which almost immediately slides down the slippery slope to “and people are babies who need coddling and obviously can’t handle reality if they need to avoid something.” By giving someone a hard time for asking for a trigger warning or for choosing not to engage with something, these armchair psychiatrists have taken away the agency of an individual by demeaning him/her for making a choice; according to them, to make that choice was an admission of being “inferior” or “needy” or “weak.” Many people, it seems to me, have this one-sided view of trigger warnings as a marker that someone can’t handle life/themselves/their trauma and not as the more nuanced notion of allowing people to make their own informed choices about how they live their life and cope with their prior experiences.

Sometimes content creators use the phrase “trigger warning” or “TW” on purpose to demonstrate that they are thinking about others. To show that they care. To show that this author is considering the potential discomfort or intrusions of viewers or readers. They may get it “wrong” in that their TW is not specific enough or as a result of their concern they begin to overuse the term. This overuse of words such as “trauma” or “trigger” or “phobia” or “PTSD” can lead to trivialization, but those that voluntarily use trigger warnings are trying to show empathy. Tumblr actually has a few blogs that are dedicated to standardizing common trigger warnings so that people can use common language that facilitates content filtering and mutual understanding.

You don’t get to choose what traumatizes you. It is a neurological inscription that can be coped with over time using strategies, but neither trauma, nor subsequent triggering reactions, can be prevented or completely eliminated, despite your diligent efforts. That is not to say that there aren’t those who attempt to weaponize triggering as a way to silence others; however we have no way of knowing whether they are trying to legitimately protect their mental health and we should, with empathy, give them the benefit of the doubt and recognize that their discomfort is real.

Trigger warnings, like any content warning, are informational, rather neutral and boring. The outrage such an innocuous statement provokes speaks volumes about our culture and empathy. People have a right to know whether to engage with content or not. Providing a trigger warning does generally lead to refusal to engage with the material, but its presence affords viewers or players with the means to ready themselves for triggering content. That in this way, being at least mentally prepared for triggering content is far better than being blindsided by triggering content. The solution is not to deny everybody a trigger warning, nor is it to give everyone who wants a warning grief over wanting it. And most certainly we should not get into any attempts to try to divide “legitimate” triggering from “false” triggering from the comfort of one’s armchair. People’s experiences are their own. Respecting those experiences is ours to own. Trigger warnings are an invitational attempt at offering that respect.

The Serpico Effect

Frank Serpico got shot in the face. That is really what I was talking about when I jokingly coined “The Serpico Effect” when in conversation with Maury about our plans for this blog.  Speak up or raise a fuss, and you can get shot in the face.  The context, though, is where it connects to privilege, social justice and gaming.

Frank’s incredible story can be looked at as an example of what can go wrong for anybody when you make an effort to change things and a lot of people are invested in making sure nothing changes.  What I think is worth examining is the fact that Frank’s role when he took action to expose graft and corruption in the New York City Police Department is that of a privileged individual trying to enact a change in a system that privileges him.

It kind of blows my mind to just think that over, the level of retaliation thrown his way.

I referenced The Serpico Effect in that conversation to try and explain how difficult it is for a privileged individual to do anything about their privilege. For a lot of people with privilege, they are caught in a trap of circumstances.  If they care about justice, they know that they appear to the less privileged to be a collaborator with the oppressive institution.  But if they are cautious regarding consequences, they are very aware that the privilege that they have gives the system serious leverage.  If the system doesn’t benefit you, you don’t have much to lose by complaining about it, but if you do benefit from it, complaining can cost you all those benefits.  Worse, if you make a real mess of things, the retaliation you can expect for throwing a monkey wrench in the machine can escalate to something far worse for you than just having your privileges revoked.

Like getting shot in the face.

Or in the case of Veronica Santangelo, voiced by Felicia Day in Fallout: New Vegas, who, as a consequence of pushing for change in the Brotherhood of Steel, endured an attempted lynching (that would likely have been successful if not for the player’s intervention) by Brotherhood traditionalist extremists.

Or to maybe go back a little further, the case of Ramza Beoulve, in Final Fantasy Tactics, who literally threw down his birthright privilege, then was branded a heretic and became a fugitive.

Or maybe any of the many sympathetic characters in David Simon’s The Wire, powerless to effectively make changes in the institutions that control their lives, have to chose to between diving out of the way of the oncoming train (capitulate) or get run down (defiance until defeat).

As Bunk said to McNulty, “Shit is fucked.”

What can we do about this?

I don’t know.

I’d really like to have a lot of strategy and suggestions.  I’d love to talk to Frank Serpico and ask him about the advice he gives the many police who approach him on how they can effectively speak up about the things that they’ve seen and do not want to be silent about, how to be better lamplighters of the truth, and how to do so in ways that would expose them to a minimum of retaliation yet still accomplish the goal of making change for the better.

But for now, the best advice I can give is based on my puny and ineffectual attempts to speak up for others a few times in my life:

• Prepare for retaliation.  Not quite being blindsided by the people that you’d previously come to trust takes a bit of the sting out.

• Don’t expect recognition.  Failing to make a real difference and bringing shit upon yourself won’t get you an A for effort, a thank you for at least trying, or acknowledgement of the cost you’ve paid.  It’s also really possible to look like an utter jerk if you appear to think you’re entitled to this stuff.

• Don’t expect success.  Even if you successfully get your voice heard, and promises to take action are made, don’t believe it.  If the goal is to shut you up, letting you think you’ve achieved your goal is a remarkably effective tactic.

That’s bleak though.  But I think I need to accept that I’m not quite the heroic personality that Frank Serpico was, and that a lot of similarly privileged folks out there are not either.  And even you have the heroic temperament, the will to do what you think is right in spite of what may come, you can’t help but notice that those people who speak out face significantly high costs.

Like getting shot in the face.

More to come.  In the meantime, tread carefully.

Are we having fun yet?

So, if you’ve read the last few posts, you may be wondering what all this talk about privilege and empathy and rhetoric has to do with gaming. At first glance, nothing.  Then, if you think about it, everything. How? Let me give a few ways:

1. Nerd Entitlement: Aaronson speaks about being a nerdy white male and being less privileged than other white males. Because gamers and gaming is an often stigmatized group (at least in the United States), our subculture is a geekdom and participants are often “nerds” (whether called that in derision or embracing that as an identity). Gamer culture has a proportionally larger number of “lesser privileged males,” who by virtue of their interest in gaming (or their social awkwardness that drives them to seek it out) become part of this group. Thus, Aaronson’s point of view of not recognizing or understanding privilege as a result of his own marginalization and underclass treatment can be a relatively common one in gamer culture. In fact, I’d argue (and I’m pretty sure Ben agrees) that this is the root of certain feminism-resistant groups in gaming culture and their backlash against feminism in gaming. Lots to say here. More to come.
2. Games are culture: We can learn a lot about ourselves and our culture by looking at the games we play. Play is a simulation of real life, but with differing structures and rules that create new paradigms designed for fun. Roger Caillois notes that play is governed by rules that provide a level playing field for all participants and consists of finding a response to the opponent’s action – or to the play situation – that is free within the limits set by the rules. These rules are socially and culturally constructed by game designers, storytellers, and the players themselves. Even with these game rules and mechanics, out-of-game power structures and representations get replicated, and the empowerment that is possible from games can often be distributed in normative ways rather than allowing and encouraging the liberating possibilities of play. This phenomenon is an ongoing source of inquiry for us and many others.
3. Privilege exists in games: Games, as a cultural creation, are not immune to the social issues that exist outside of games, privilege included. Some in-game factors such as genre or historical time period call to mind certain representations of gender, race, and class. Yet certain players have power in games, regardless of their character. This power comes from outside of the game and is not fully mitigated through game mechanics. It is the result of out-of-game cultural norms as well as previous personal experience (in- or out-of-game) with specific players. Generally (but not always) at the top of this category are larger or stronger bodied, white, straight, loud-voiced men. By default their character is often deferred to (many times unconsciously) by other characters due to socialization outside the game. Exploring this privilege and how to use empathy to be aware of it and possibly transfer it is the crux of our work at the moment, and the focus of our upcoming presentation at Intercon O.
4. Games can be safer spaces: Because games are microcosms that have their own explicit rules, a game can facilitate a respectful and tolerant community, a safer space. The injustices, intolerance, and marginalization that occurs outside of a game can be mitigated or upended within it. Many Nordic Larps and American Freeform games explore these opportunities. In addition, a game has the ability to reset the parameters of reality, which also allows awesome opportunities to explore equality. Fantastic settings don’t need patriarchal systems and realism can be reimagined by players, designers and organizers. Gaming communities also have a specific play culture: guidelines, norms, or implicit rules that may not be codified or written into the game rules and mechanics, but are nonetheless expectations of participants and are enforced informally by community members and/or game organizers. It is here that dialog about empathy, equality, and social justice can be translated into felt reality. And what begins to happen in a game or gaming community can begin to happen outside of it. This is what excites us.

These are just a few ways that we believe the discussions about social justice, nerd privilege, feminism, equality, and other -isms come into play with regard to gaming. We plan to explore each of these in more depth here, and we hope you’ll let us know what you think.

Follow Up: Neither empathy nor trauma are zero sum

Following up on Maury’s post, (who I also owe a lot of thanks for helping me edit this cumbersome word vomit into something comprehensible) I’m going to look at some issues that are raised by Scott Aaronson’s blog comment, and try do it responsibly, with sensitivity, and finesse.  Let’s see how it goes.

The first thing that I want to address is that I believe that the guy is sincerely telling us this story from a place of vulnerability and shame, and that lends some credibility to his sincerity. If you really fight me on it, I’d probably have to admit that there’s a strategic time to offer up vulnerability and shame, precisely to leverage believability, but I’m going to work from the assumption, which I believe to be true, that it wasn’t strategic, and that the things he had to say about himself in comment #171 were genuine.

As others have already noted, I think there’s a case to be made for being sensitive to that vulnerability. That the thoughts he brought to his therapy were those of a young man who was suffering, and while there are some rather profoundly problematic elements to those thoughts, going too far on the attack on someone who is sharing “this is what I was thinking” really only teaches others “never share what you were thinking” rather than “let’s talk about how what you were thinking was problematic.”  Here is an admission from Aaronson’s youth that I found particularly troubling:

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.

(For disclosures sake, here’s where I out myself as a white queer cis male, which happened on this blog far sooner than I thought I would, but what can you do, really.)

In the course of narrating his own suffering, Aaronson compares himself to others, making assumptions about women and gay men that are both essentializing and inaccurate. He’s a straight white cis male imagining the life of the Other Other Other Other, and he is imagining that the grass is greener on the Other side. When Aaronson imagines the lives of Others while coping with his own suffering, he really believes that our lives are categorically better:

Alas, as much as I try to understand other people’s perspectives, the first reference to my “male privilege”—my privilege!—is approximately where I get off the train, because it’s so alien to my actual lived experience.

But I suspect the thought that being a nerdy male might not make me “privileged”—that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes—is completely alien to your way of seeing things.

Because he is so fully engaged with his own suffering, Aaronson cannot acknowledge his own privilege (which may indeed be less than some men) and he cannot acknowledge the suffering of others. In addition to his struggles in his life that I believe are very real suffering, I believe he would be categorically worse off if he were he any combination of Otherness on top of what he already had to deal with.

What I think might be more important though, is that it should not be that surprising that Scott came to that conclusion about his lack of privilege, and that he’s not alone in that kind of thinking in the least. When a person is nearly drowning in their own very real suffering, their ability to consider the suffering of other is compromised.  When white straight cis men who have been bullied, been abused, been harmed, and whose memories of their lives are full of such suffering, is it so hard to imagine that they’d take umbrage when confronted about their privilege?

I believe it’s precisely because of this that it’s so difficult to have a conversation about privilege; that it simply does not compute for those who have led difficult lives. Privilege is an advantage, and when someone is told they have an advantage while their memories of their lives show a distinct lack of advantage, that person is going to feel like they’ve just been falsely accused of a crime. Thus, they will often actively engage in narrating their own version, the one where they are the victim and not the Other.

Aaronson references his awareness of the lack of support and recognition he can expect regarding his difficulties due to being a member of the privileged group.

But let me draw your attention to one difference: the number of academics who study problems like the one I had is approximately zero. There are no task forces devoted to it, no campus rallies in support of the sufferers, no therapists or activists to tell you that you’re not alone or it isn’t your fault. There are only therapists and activists to deliver the opposite message: that you are alone and it is your privileged, entitled, male fault.

This received message of blame and shame for being a white male is again, not uncommon.  If a person thinks their life is worse than that of the Other, then when the Other gets recognition for their struggles, and that person does not, they see the Other as the privileged group, not themselves. When you’re part of a privileged group, you may be unable to realize that someone who is not part of a privileged group but otherwise a lot like you, could be looking at you and thinking “If only I could have that.”  All you can think about is that they don’t know about — and if they did know, they wouldn’t want — your suffering. You just wish for the clear undeniable advantages of being harassed just a little less, being scared just a little less, being Other’d just a little less than you are now. These wishes lead to Aaronson imagining that it is somehow easier to be a woman or to be gay, anything other than the privileged heterosexual white male he is. He doesn’t realize that they are feeling the same way he does.

Aaronson’s not a rape apologist. He appears to be rather starkly liberal, in his own words he’s on board with 97% of feminism. It’s just that he recoils every time he’s expected to acknowledge his white straight cis male privilege because he cannot see it in his life, and apparently cannot even imagine it. He simply continues to hear the message that “you are alone.”

But you’re not alone.

One of the reasons that I’m championing empathy is that empathy is one of the tools by which you find out that you’re not alone.  And I’m going to go out on a limb, one that’s admittedly pretty wobbly, to say that had Aaronson actually felt that he was not alone, his suffering would be significantly less horrible.

It’s through empathy that you can make the calculation, come to the conclusion that the suffering of others might be as bad or worse as that of your own.  That it’s also not your fault that things are this way.  That a lot of the time, even when you recognize that you have privilege, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.  That it’s non-transferable, non-negotiable, and sometimes even granted to you by an institution that cannot be reasoned with, cannot be mitigated, and should you try to do something about it, you get the Serpico Effect (which was what I thought I’d write about this round, but that will have to wait.)

You can find that there is a difference between your individual suffering in spite of being privileged, and the suffering of the people who are categorically worse off for being Other, and that it doesn’t actually cost you anything to acknowledge that categorical difference, your privilege, when someone speaks about their experience being Othered.  You can find yourself feeling less defensive when others ask you to acknowledge privilege, because what they want from you is not an apology, but just recognition for the way things genuinely are.

After some reflection Scott makes a follow up blog post that’s so close:

The second concession is that, all my life, I’ve benefited from male privilege, white privilege, and straight privilege. I would only add that, for some time, I was about as miserable as it’s possible for a person to be, so that in an instant, I would’ve traded all three privileges for the privilege of not being miserable. And if, as some suggested, there are many women, blacks, and gays who would’ve gladly accepted the other side of that trade—well then, so much the better for all of us, I guess. “Privilege” simply struck me as a pompous, cumbersome way to describe such situations: why not just say that person A’s life stinks in this way, and person B’s stinks in that way? If they’re not actively bothering each other, then why do we also need to spread person A’s stink over to person B and vice versa, by claiming they’re each “privileged” by not having the other one’s?

I think it’s here that we, and Aaronson really, discovered something.  That the idea of privilege isn’t quite so hard to swallow when it’s spelled out.  Yet, being confronted on privilege continues to cause people who are otherwise ideologically aligned with social justice to recoil.  I think that we’re in danger of using “Check your privilege,” to say STFU too often to effectively have any conversations about privilege. When we point out privilege we have to be mindful of what the result is.  Effectively weaponizing it to silence someone that we really ought to have a conversation with is going to bring us closer to the non-communication entrenched partisanship entails, and not the opportunity to listen.  (Maury’s going to address this soon when she examines invitational rhetoric and dominant rhetoric in an upcoming post.)

Engaging with others empathetically, being cautious regarding addressing the problematic thoughts and ideas that someone can have, even while they are being super wrong on the internet, can create better opportunities for getting folks on board with the goals of social justice.  Anger and outrage are necessary responses to a lot of the systemic oppression thrown our way, but I want to make the case that aggressive responses are not the right tool in certain circumstances, specifically ones where patience and understanding, the tools that empathy brings, could achieve a significantly better and more positive result.

It’s not hard to imagine that if Scott Aaronson was met only with contempt, shaming, and ridicule for his post, he would conclude that his assumptions were correct about feminism, activism, and social justice: that they have only one message for him, he’s a monster for being a white straight cis male. He would be lost to us.

The approach from Laurie Penny, and the many other folks who reached out in similar ways, I really believed saved the day here, and I thank them sincerely for approaching this very difficult scenario with empathy.

Neither empathy nor trauma are zero sum

As Ben noted yesterday, he and I are wrestling with our approach for our upcoming inaugural talk about empathy in gamer culture. And, as so often can happen once one starts considering a topic, the Internet delivers extra-large portions of food for thought like late-night sesame chicken.

On December 14, 2014, MIT professor Scott Aaronson posted a lengthy comment on his blog in which he candidly narrates his painful experience feeling disenfranchised and depressed as a nerdy heterosexual male in his teens and early twenties. In sharing his own experience of  “crippling, life-destroying anxiety,” Aaronson disavows any societal privilege he has been given as a heterosexual white male since his lived experience as a nerd did not support that. He puts forth an argument that his experience as one of society’s least privileged males absolves him of blame for any feminist shortcomings. While certainly not to the level of a certain type of men’s rights activist, Aaronson does assert that he has “the curse of having been born a heterosexual male,” and he understandably received some pushback on Twitter, his own blog, and others for his views.

However, focusing on pillorying Aaronson for some essentializing statements or for seeming to equate his experience with others (despite his direct disavowals of such) does not foster dialog and mutual respect for a variety of perspectives — one of the goals of this blog and the conundrum about tone and approach that Ben and I are facing as we begin to take our work more public. Not only does attacking Aaronson’s views disallow the courage and honesty he displayed by speaking up about his experience, but it also erases his own lived experience by attempting to replace it with the argument that someone else’s experience is somehow “greater,” “stronger,” or “more important.” Those who would give Aaronson a “good old fashioned blog fisking” and put words into his mouth, re-interpreting his statements through a lens of sarcasm and shame, enact the same kinds of silencing tactics that they decry when used against them.

In attacking Aaronson, and others who narrate their own experiences and perspectives in the only why they can — from their own experience and perspective — these writers and activists enact what Ben has called the Serpico Effect, whereby the one who speaks up gets harassed and threatened. We’ll have much more to say on that in later posts. For now, though, the point is that Aaronson represents a member of the audience we are trying to reach. Someone who both was born with unearned (and perhaps unwanted and unrecognized) privilege and a desire to think about it and talk about it. If we silence him or invalidate his opinions, then we can never bring him to the table to dialog about it.

Refreshingly, Laurie Penny in her New Statesman piece, “On Nerd Entitlement,” does not attack Aaronson or succumb to the  two prevalent ideas that keep dialog polarized: 1. that activists should be outraged and critical and therefore not nice; and 2. that argumentation should take the form of conquering and converting an opponent to your point of view by demonstrating its superiority. Penny recognizes that Aaronson’s experience was painful. She acknowledges what he said and validates both his own trauma and his conviction in sharing it. She takes the opportunity to empathize with him. This is key.

Because if we are going to bring others to the table to dialog about important topics like equality and social justice, we have to invite them to sit down with us. We have to listen to what they have to say and share the food for thought, passing the containers and sampling some new tastes that we may not have had the courage to try before, but out of respect for those gathered at the meal, we will at least allow them their choices and try to understand their preferences. If we want others to practice empathy, we have to display it ourselves.

In the course of empathizing with rather than deriding Aaronson, Penny also brings up her important point that Aaronson’s “very real suffering does not cancel out male privilege, or make it somehow alright. Privilege doesn’t mean you don’t suffer.” There’s a lot more to say about that idea, but a post about non-binary privilege is for another day. For now, Aaronson has responded on his blog with a clarification of his core beliefs, and he reaches out in respect to Penny, whose thoughtful and empathetic response he clearly read and took to heart. Funny how that works — when you don’t feel attacked or invalidated, you have a better opportunity to listen and reflect.

So while I can’t promise Ben and I will order Chinese, we do invite audience members to the table, both here in the blog and at our future sessions. We’ll start with empathic listening, and respect your freedom, autonomy and safety. What we ask for from others, we also give to you.

-Maury

Ready To Start

So.  Right now, amongst many other things, Maury and I are working on our presentation at Intercon O, Gaming With Empathy, and we’re in discussion regarding what information to present and how.  We’d tried out some roleplay where she’s slowly making a case for empathy to a strawman played by me, which we thought was fun and would be very entertaining, but I’m having second thoughts on using it because of the potential to lose some opportunities to communicate earnestly for the sake of entertainment.

Our basic goal with the presentation is to invite folks to consider an empathetic approach to their larp gameplay.  For those that practice that already, I’d hope the presentation would be validating and encouraging, not only for their gameplay, but also for conversations with others about empathetic play.  For those that don’t make empathy a focus of their gameplay, I’d hope it’d be at least food for thought, and maybe something that they might try experimenting with in the games that they’ll enjoy that weekend.

One of the items that I’m struggling to convey convincingly is the motivation to try it.  We can lay out some incentives to do it, and plan to do so in our presentation.  Though there’s one in particular that’s a big deal and a little thorny to express.  For me, empathetic play itself actually feels really good.  But why?  Is this merely a case that I’m fortunately empathetic on a neurological level, and so I experience pleasure during empathetic play?  And if so, can I effectively make a case to someone who is a little less empathetically inclined that this is worth trying?

I’m struggling with it.  So far the best analogy that I have so far is related to food.  As a dude who lives by himself with a cat, the joy of cooking is precisely “not”.  The only time I’m really motivated to put time in with my meager kitchen (M: No one needs to know exactly how meager my kitchen is.) is when I have an opportunity to also make some food for someone else.  The work to prepare food for just me feels like a waste of time, and the work to prepare food for me and one other person feels like a great investment of time and energy.

I don’t think that this is unique.  I believe that there’s some level of pleasure in sharing an experience with someone.  Favorite ice cream shop?  Dude, you have to try this.  This game is fun to play?  Dude, you’ve got to experience this.  I think this sense of desiring to share an experience might make the case for empathetic larp gameplay being a genuinely pleasurable experience.

More later.

Ben