Broadly speaking there are two approaches to literature and drama. One view is that it’s entertainment, it should be fun, and it shouldn’t challenge you or make you feel uncomfortable. That’s a strain that’s developed in Britain and America particularly and used to be known as the Young Lady Standard. The term is particularly unfair seeing as Emily Bronte wrote one of the most uncompromising novels of all time. Nowadays we’re hopefully less sexist and young ladies get the same educational benefits as young gentlemen, so let’s instead call it the Cosy Standard. In TV broadcasting it’s the equivalent of pre-watershed content.
On the other hand, fiction can take you right into the depths of the human soul to confront both the marvellous and the terrible. It can shake you up. Read Chekhov’s short story “In the Ravine” or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Nabokov’s – oh, well almost anything by Nabokov, in fact. You’ll face some profound truths. Like all great art, these works can change you. But you’d never say of them, “Oh, it’s entertainment, it’s just a bit of fun.”
That’s even more true of games, where the very name of the medium leads people into assuming it has to be frivolous and jolly. When Profile Books published my interactive version of Frankenstein, one reviewer complained that she didn’t want to be complicit in the creature’s murder of 6-year-old William Frankenstein. Too bad. Every reader of the novel who finds themselves sympathizing with the creature is going to have to face that moment. The game version just really rubs your nose in it. There are games like Papers, Please and This War of Mine that are trying to be L'Armée des Ombres rather than a boys'-own romp like Kelly's Heroes.
This is the point Jim Desborough was making with his widely (and often deliberately) misrepresented article “In Defence of Rape”. If you’re a grown-up, you look to fiction (including games) to tell the truth, not wrap the world up in a comforting nursery blanket.
This exact point came up recently in the case of a motion capture performer who refused to act out a rape scene for a game. That is their right, no question about that. And I have no idea what the game was, so I don’t know if the performer was correctly judging it when they said, "It was just purely gratuitous in my opinion." But it wouldn’t have to be gratuitous. Suppose this is a WW2 game. You’re sneaking into a Nazi-occupied village to plant some explosives or steal the attack plans or whatever. Stealth is the watchword. But you pass a window where you see an enemy soldier raping a villager. (Or torturing a villager. Or even in the act of murdering them, since this isn’t Victorian times and we don’t buy into “the fate worse than death”.)
Now here’s the question. Do I shoot the Nazi soldier? In doing so I’ll save the villager but I’ll give away my presence in the village, jeopardising the mission. Or do I pass by, hardening my heart to the villager’s screams because many lives hinge on the success of the mission and so it’s more important than one innocent person? It’s the Trolley Problem but not presented in the dispassionate context of a philosophy lecture. The decision is brutal and I’m going to have to live with it. The choices that confront you with challenges to your most fundamental moral principles are the ones that fuel the most powerful stories, because they make us think hard about who we really are.
As I said, I don’t know if that’s what the game’s designers were trying to do. But you would expect good literature or cinema to confront you with raw and disturbing situations like that. Games are an art form no less capable than literature or drama of addressing difficult moral questions. Games can be simple uncomplicated fun, of course, and many are. But that’s not all they can be.
The challenge for TTRPGs is that they are necessarily a collaborative medium in a way that gamebooks and conventional literature are not. I get that we might argue about it being a collaboration between writer and reader, but not in the same way.
ReplyDeleteIf I decide that American Psycho is too graphic, I can stop reading and that doesn't prevent anyone else reading it. I can walk out of a film, or turn it off after 20 minutes on Netflix, and that doesn't affect anyone else. The same doesn't always apply to a TTRPG, though - if I decide I don't like the direction it is taking because it is too violent, too graphic (or even too boring) - then there's a whole group dynamic that gets potentially messed up if I walk away.
I guess that's more analogous to the motion capture actress' situation described above. Even if the scene was artistically merited and not at all gratuitous, you can't force someone to perform situations they aren't comfortable with, especially if you refuse to give them forewarning.
Of course, in TTRPGs forewarning isn't always available, which makes things even more complex. I often think there's a distinction between groups who know each other well and therefore have a lot of established trust, and groups who have only just met or may only play together once (convention one-shots, for example!). In the latter case, challenging topics should probably be steered clear of, unless people have expressly signed up for them.
We've had some interesting moral challenges in our games over the years, including characters murdering and robbing each other (granted that was in an Alien one-shot where you expect people to die; and at the very end of a Kult one-shot, where it was dramatically appropriate).
The closest I've had in a CRPG was in Shadowrun Returns - I was really short of cash, and couldn't survive without better equipment, so I took a mission to retrieve a scientist so he could go and work for another corp. It turned out the Scientist didn't want to go. I didn't want to force him, but it was kind of the end of the world if I didn't survive what was coming, and I had no other way to get money, so I went ahead and did it. I definitely didn't feel proud of myself. I *could* have just reloaded an earlier game and managed my money better, but I feel like I'd have lost something important in the process.
There's also the change in attitudes over time. Those of us who started roleplaying in the mid-1970s grew up without trigger warnings and were accustomed to TV that didn't shy away from potentially upsetting scenes. I'm conscious that even the cohort of roleplayers from around fifteen years later are very alert for things they consider inappropriate. Oliver Johnson had a WW1 character called Joseph Gass who he suggested would have the nickname "Mustard", but one of the younger players objected so strongly that I canned the campaign rather than try and run the inoffensive Saturday morning cartoon version of the Great War.
DeleteYou're right about the perils of playing with people you don't know, especially now that society has become so tribal that there's no way of knowing what will set another person off. That's also why I don't bother with social media these days, and why I'd only play a convention game for laughs -- to really get into the roleplaying would be futile.