The following is an essay by John W. Sheldon, someone you may know as the art director for Turn, or as the creator of Roar of Alliance, playtested at Big Bad Con and elsewhere.
My name is John W. Sheldon, and I’ve been working on a tabletop game called Roar of Alliance for a few years (I used to call it Armored Reckoning). The game is about crewing an Allied tank in an alt-history World War Two and fighting through waves Nazis to set things right. What could be more anti-fascist than that? Lots of stuff, it turns out. The problem is that Nazis aren’t the only fascists, and my game does some things that potentially support fascist ways of thinking. In the political climate of the United States in 2019, it is especially important that we be aware of these things and work to mitigate them as much as possible. I’m writing about my process here in the hopes that others might find a useful example in the steps I’ve taken, and so that people with more experience can point out ways I can further improve.
What My Game Does Wrong
How does a game about destroying Nazi tanks and blowing up their infantry risk supporting fascist modes of thought? One cornerstone of fascist ideology is that they (the fascists) are oppressed by an enemy that is numerous, pervasive, powerful, and simultaneously inferior (stupid, incompetent, or morally weak). Another cornerstone is that the only appropriate way to deal with that enemy is by force.
The rules of my game do specifically these things:
The enemies you face in Roar of Alliance are numerous (outnumbering the players in just about every engagement), dangerous (their vehicles are often more advanced and better armed), and lack intelligence (their actions are automated by simple if/then statements that they never deviate from). The only way players ever interact with these foes is via deadly force. You will lose the game if you do not destroy their vehicles and disperse their infantry.
So, in these ways at least, my game actually promotes a core set of fascist ideologies. Some of this is hard to avoid, given that the game doesn’t have anyone in a central directorial role to moderate portrayals of the enemy or to restrict player behaviors in direct contact with the enemy outside combat, therefore no character in the game is ever confronted by a Nazi outside the specific circumstance of combat. This is a conscious choice to make sure nobody at the table is ever tasked with portraying a Nazi, and it keeps torture* and certain other types of violent fantasy outside the scope of the game as written. Players also have some leeway in narrating the effects of their actions on the enemy: when enemy infantry are removed from the field, players can choose to narrate the enemy’s retreat or death, and players do the same for surviving crew of disabled enemy vehicles.
Since violence and a portrayal of the enemy as numerous and unintelligent are essential to the way the game functions, and I don’t want to scrap the whole thing and start over, how do I make sure the rest of the game refutes fascism?
Focusing on Diversity
I start with something nationalists and fascists hate: I make sure that every other aspect of the game supports and emphasizes diversity and demonstrates how it creates strength. This paragraph kicks off the rulebook:
This game is set during the 2nd World War in Europe, a time when even the historical victors were rife with bigoted beliefs and policies. You should not let those real world bigotries limit the characters you choose to portray and accept. People of all races and genders from six continents and countless backgrounds fought against fascism and Nazism in Europe, and your characters should reflect some of that diversity.
Moreover, players are asked to identify their character’s country of origin, to help emphasize the diversity of geographic origin of the people who challenge fascism. Some of these choices are informed at a basic level by the themes of the character archetypes the game offers. In particular, the Partisan archetype was a resident of Nazi-occupied territory and a resistance fighter before joining up with the crew, the Collateral is a member of a population oppressed by the Allies and nevertheless pressed into service against the Nazis (e.g., Black Americans or colonial subjects of the British Empire), and the Duty was someone who volunteered for the fight because they new defeating fascism and Nazism was the right thing to do.
For actually producing the game, I’m doing what I’d never recommend: I’m doing the rules writing, layout, and illustrations all myself. What this does mean is that I can make sure that all of the art upholds my stated dedication to multiple axes of diversity. The art within the rules documents already portrays people of multiple genders, races, and body types as members of the player tank crew. Additional art I’m working on will include crew members with visible disabilities, crew wearing items of non-European traditional dress, and different cultural grooming standards.
Part of my plan for taking the game to crowdfunding is to offer backers the opportunity to have their portraits included as the card back art for some of the character archetypes, and as the face cards in the crew deck. Since I believe the audience for my game (one about Tanks in World War Two) skews significantly male, white, able-bodied, and cis, simply offering all of these art opportunities on a first-come, first-served basis would further skew the art for my game towards a monolithic default. To maintain my dedication to diversity, I need to give up potential sources of revenue and pre-stack the art with diverse portraits. I’ll won’t be offering backer levels for the Jacks in the Crew Deck, or for half of the character archetypes. Instead, I’ll be creating those portraits before the crowdfunding campaign begins. The portraits for the Jacks will be portraits of non-binary volunteers, and those for the first half of the character archetypes will be of volunteers who are one or more of non-white, queer, or visibly disabled.
Heroes that Need Help
Most fascism thrives on mythologizing heroes as paragons of strength, capable of facing great hardship alone and without aid. The heroes of fascism also contain within them a paradox: the enemy they face is terrifying, but they never actually feel fear. Roar of Alliance refutes these mythologized ideas of heroism idea on multiple fronts. The very nature of combat in my game requires players to rely on one another at all times (no person can operate a tank single-handedly). The player characters also begin the game by admitting fear: one of the first tasks of the first session is to identify a fear your character has about the fighting to come.
During the game, player characters will take Stress (the game’s unified resource representing both physical toughness and mental resilience). Characters who max out their Stress during an engagement play out a Last Stand for significant effect, then leave the Crew (the player decides whether they have died or simply become unable for whatever reason to continue on as a tank crew member). While the characters have a limited set of resources called Motivations that the players can expend to avoid stress, the only way to actually recover Stress relies on spending time with the other characters between battles. Only by working together, by comforting one another, and by acknowledging their own dependence on others can characters reduce their Stress and gain new Motivations to help them engage in future battles.
Every archetype has scene prompts that show them needing help, and the whole game requires players to rely extensively on one another. Even the player’s Crew is supported by a company of non-Crew characters that players will occasionally be called on to portray between battles. No lone strong hero, or even small group of heroes, can accomplish the monumental task the players are facing.
Humanizing the Enemy
Fascism dehumanizes its enemies, making it easier for its adherents to attack, belittle, and eventually exterminate those that oppose it. You can see this in language comparing enemies to animals, assigning them undesirable traits as a group, in racist and anti-Semitic propaganda images that exaggerate enemy features to cartoonish extremes, or even in recent online language where some members of right-leaning web forums call people who oppose them “NPCs” – implying that there is no real individual personhood in those that disagree with their fascist ideology.
In my quest to make the game as hostile as possible to fascist ideologies, I must design the game to humanize the enemies that players face. Everyone should be reminded that the Nazis and members of the Wehrmacht were not inhuman monsters – they were regular people who became willing to commit evil acts because of an abhorrent philosophy. Reminding players of this is important because dehumanizing even Nazis creates an easy defense for modern fascists and authoritarians to mount, in the form of a “but I do these good things over here, I’m not a complete monster” defense. Reminding people that Nazis were regular people, even while they did terrible things, reminds us that we must examine ourselves for the kinds of behavior they exhibited.
Next Steps
Is there more my game can do? Almost certainly. In fact, I’m extremely open to suggestions for additional ways to improve. You can get in touch with me on Twitter, Pluspora, or Mastodon if you want to give me some feedback.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in ways to make your own game hostile to fascist ideologies, check out these two essays that helped inform my own process.
*Despite everything pop culture tells us, torture does not work. It is immoral and wrong in every circumstance, and this would still be true even if it worked – which it categorically does not.
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