Tag: feminism

Five or So Questions with Kira Magrann on RESISTOR

I interviewed Kira Magrann about her upcoming zine, RESISTOR, which is being co-created with Elissa Leach. It sounds like a fantastic project, and you can check it out on Kickstarter now!

Tell me a little about RESISTOR. What excites you about it?
Elissa and I have been wanting to collaborate on a project for awhile, and we just weren’t sure what themes we wanted it to have. The second she said “let’s do something cyberwitchy” I jumped out of the chair I was sitting in and nearly spilled the bourbon I was drinking. YES. CYBERWITCHES.

The cool thing about this project is that it’s remixing a bunch of ideas, communities, and people in one place. That’s a very cyberpunk thing in and of itself. It’s featuring games, art, and fiction, in a zine format, which is very popular in current queer and social justice circles. We wanted a diverse set of creators so we’ve got trans, non-binary, women, and POC working on it. And we wanted it to have that gritty feel, like something you could find next to some fliers at a punk bar. I’m excited about the aesthetic, and the stories we’re telling!

Zines have a long history with social justice, queer culture, and a lot of divergent subcultures. What are you bringing that’s new to the format, and what inspirations did you have for the types of materials you brought together?
Elissa and I kinda wanted to remix a bunch of ideas, communities, and people in one place. It’s a super cyberpunk idea, taking the old “zine tech” of rough edges, collaboration, personal politics, and making it new. It’s featuring games, art, and fiction, in a zine format. We wanted a diverse set of creators so we’ve got trans, non-binary, women, and POC working on it. And we wanted it to have that gritty feel, like something you could find next to some fliers at a punk bar. So like, easy to pick up, engage with, and get sucked into our world with no prior knowledge of the themes or how to play these games.

What are a few of the challenges you’ve encountered creating a niche project like RESISTOR, and what good things surprised you?
I think the biggest challenges so far have just been logistics, really! This is my first Kickstarter, and Elissa’s second, so figuring out how all that works and how to coordinate with a partner on a project like this has just been a little trial and error. Mostly we just hung around with Elissa’s cats, listened to some records, and like, made headers and bios for the kickstarter page.

We’re both visual artists, so creating images and finding collaborators on that end wasn’t too hard. I’ve been really inspired while this kickstarter is running, it’s hitting the reward centers of my brain and motivating me to create new stuff! I think that sometimes its easy to see creating things and making Kickstarters as difficult, stressful obstacles, but I’ve really enjoyed organizing everything, and coming up with ideas that are cyber-witchy to write about. Working with these amazing people has been really maybe the best part. Banana Chan’s game is gorgeous, Elissa’s art is phenomenal, my game ritual has been super inspiring, it’s really easy to get into the setting and thinking of this zine and create a whole lot of things for it, because its basically everything that I love. Funny how that works out, making things I love is easy!

Cyberpunk and social justice are two things I absolutely love. Coming in from that angle, what are the two things that you would say to someone with my interests to get me to invest in the project?
I like to think of RESISTOR as a kind of tool to inspire people to think more about these ideas. Not really a manifesto, but something that someone can pick up and read and say, yea, I wanna go talk about this class issue, or this neat ritual way of thinking, or apply this to my every day life. We want it to be accessible to a bunch of different communities, so not just the queer, punk, music, comic communities where zines are popular now, but also gaming communities and fiction communities. My black heart would grow three sizes if women and trans and non-binary and POC people in comics started playing roleplaying games by picking up this zine. It’s also hella styish and woke af. Cyberpunk often is about awesome chrome cyborgs and fighting the corporations in this real rebellious uplifting way, and we kinda want it to be like that but, less guns and simple binaries, more witchy rituals and complex cultural nuances.


Finally, if I were a cyberpunk dystopia, and you were a witch, if you took out our hearts, what would they be in RESISTOR?

I mean, we’re already living in that dystopia. So basically, they’d be right where they are, but like, connected by deep black ghost tunes of all the other hearts around us trying to make this world a little better with our glitched-rituals, metallic hymnals resonating in tiny screens that sit next to us every day. Our hearts are all connected even outside of our bodies in machines where we make them vulnerable.

I don’t know about you, but those black ghost tunes are throbbing in my heart right now. RESISTOR sounds like an awesome product and I’d love to see it out and available. Check it out on Kickstarter and consider becoming a backer!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Content Warnings and Trigger Warnings: They Are Not What You Think

Content Warning: I’m going to talk about trigger warnings here, so if you don’t like hearing about that, click away now.

Hey humans! 

I want to talk about what content and trigger warnings are, and why they are important. Let’s first establish what these things are:

Trigger Warnings:

Trigger warnings are related to psychological triggers, like those from abuse and trauma. Triggers are things like sights, scents, sounds, and sensations that can produce flashbacks, painful memories, or anxiety/panic reactions in people who have experienced abuse and/or trauma.

For example: I have been sexually assaulted. When I watch movies, play games, or read books that have sexual assault in them, I can become panicked, stressed, and uncomfortable. This feeling can last anywhere from a minute or so to days or weeks. Some people I know are triggered by scents like smoke, sounds like yelling, or sights like specific violence in media or even something like being on snowy roads in winter.

Triggers are not something of cowardice. They are a psychological reaction to traumatic experiences of someone’s past. No one can define the severity of someone else’s trauma. Even when it comes to professionals, they can’t read someone’s mind. When someone is triggered, they can have complex and extreme reactions, or just some stress and a desire to remove themselves from the situation.

Content Warnings:

Content warnings have some things in common with trigger warnings, but they are not the same. We see content warnings all the time – at the movies (Rated R for language, violence, and sex!), on TV (This presentation may contain material that could upset viewers – just like Law and Order), and on video games (Rated M for content). They are not new, and anyone who is surprised by them may have been living under a rock.

Content warnings are not in regards to people’s mental health or put together to avoid panic attacks or flashbacks. Content warnings are there so people can prepare, or decide what they should let their kids see. They are not censorship, and they are not any restriction on media. They are there to guide consumers to media they want, or away from media they don’t want.

Common Objections:

“Trigger warnings and content warnings are for cowards/babies/wusses/immature people!”
Nope! Trigger warnings are there to prevent people with past trauma from experiencing further trauma. Believe it or not, a lot of people suffer from trauma, and it is not something that you can just “tough it out” most of the time. Soldiers who return from war with PTSD (diagnosed or not) can have trouble because of triggers. People who were abused as children can have triggers. Not just soldiers have PTSD, and people of all ages have experienced trauma in their life. This is why trigger warnings are valuable. When you expose someone to a trigger, it has a psychological impact. In some ways, it is like an allergy. If someone were allergic to peanuts, would you tell them to eat peanuts anyway, because their allergy is just “all in their head”?

“Trigger warnings and content warnings are censorship!”
Nope! Slapping a rating or a simplified list of the content of media on the package doesn’t censor anything. The media is still produced, and available for consumption. It might be limited by age, but parents can buy for their kids, so that isn’t a significant issue. People who are triggered by the content might be upset that the product exists – and that’s okay! They can talk to other people about it and say, “hey, if you don’t like this stuff, don’t buy this thing!” and maybe other people won’t buy it. Maybe they still will. People can make choices!

“If people see trigger or content warnings that have stuff they don’t like in them, they won’t buy it or consume it!”
Not necessarily true! While everyone, regardless of their issues with triggers, might decide not to consume a product, there are plenty of people who still will. People can, and often will, still consume media that has objectionable material in it, and that has triggers for them. Seeing a trigger warning isn’t always “That’s not for me!” It might be “I can watch this when I am having a good day” or “Maybe I will save this until when I am not in a depression” or “If I get a friend to watch this with me, I’ll be great” or even “Maybe if someone tells me what part to skip, I can enjoy the rest of the thing!” Also, we are not in the business of forcing people to buy things. No one has to buy what you are selling. It’s not like creators walk beside people in the store just putting things in their cart and telling them that it’s something they should watch, even if they don’t like it. That’s like forcing people who like action movies to watch Oscar bait.

“People will abuse them to get out of work/school/responsibilities!”
Totally! And you know what? That’s okay. It’s okay because those people will be few. It’s okay because people use excuses to get out of work/school/responsibilities already. It’s okay because the people who use trigger warnings and content warnings for their own wellbeing and awareness will, a lot of the time, still take the classes or go to work or fulfill their responsibilities. People abusing systems is nothing new, and we shouldn’t put other people through difficult and often dangerous situations just because some people are jerks.

ETA: “You can’t possibly list all of the triggers, how am I supposed to know what they are?”
Well, for one, you can’t list all of them. That’s okay. You don’t have to list them all, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t list any. Part of the point of trigger warnings is demonstrating that you are aware of your audience and willing to listen to them. You can try to focus on the common ones: graphic violence, sexual assault and abuse, domestic/child abuse, and rape. From that, most people can get an idea of whether it’s their kind of media. Trigger and content warnings are not an all or nothing tool. You can talk to your audiences or potential audiences, you can check around in forums and on social media to see what your potential audiences might have issues with. Even if you don’t do that, you can still be considerate even with limited information.


Why are these things important?

A lot of reasons, actually! I have covered a lot of them already, but I’ll summarize.

  • Many people have been affected by trauma in their lives, and it is important to provide support for them to feel safe and still able to enjoy their lives in any way we can.
  • A lot of people prefer to consume different types of media for many different reasons. Some have kids, some like to compartmentalize their media, and some people just don’t enjoy all types of content.
  • We should respect psychological issues just like we do physical issues. They are valid, and denying people the ability to avoid things that hurt them is, honestly, just rude.
  • Everyone should have choices in their media! Everyone is different, and we shouldn’t force everyone to enjoy one thing just because the majority enjoys it, or because not liking it makes them seem judgmental. 

How can this be applied?

In school, it’s simple. Put a note on your syllabus about what kind of content will be discussed in class, what materials you’ll be using, and how to contact instructors to either change classes, consider alternate materials or assignments, or help to figure out a good way to go through the classes without putting students in a position where they don’t feel safe in class.

In media, it’s pretty easy. Create what you want, but put a note on it. It can be simple: “This film includes rape, sexual assault, and sexualized violence.” It can also be more complex: “This game has mechanics that allow for PC mind control, which are not optional and central to the game’s premise.” Either of these options are great, and importantly, they are way better than nothing. If you are planning a convention game, you can put notes in your description, or let the players know when they arrive at the table, and offer them the opportunity to step out.
What about in games where we aren’t using a script? What if something happens in game that wasn’t planned?
This is more difficult! The cool thing is that it’s not impossible! One of the first things you can do is establish boundaries with your players so that if there is something completely off the table, you know in advance and can avoid that material. Another thing is that you can provide tools like Script Change and the X Card. These tools give you either the option to skip content altogether, or to back up and go through a scene again with new content, fade to black, or pause for a moment to evaluate players’ comfort with moving forward. It gives players more control of the content, as well as helping them to feel comfortable. It is awesome because sometimes it makes players even more likely to try adventurous content they may not have otherwise tried.
I want to emphasize: You can still create whatever you want to create. The key is to allow those who aren’t interested in your content to safely avoid it, and give those who want to enjoy your content an easy way to navigate. People have more fun doing the things that they enjoy, and when they are stuck doing things they don’t want to, it drags everyone down. Trigger warnings and content warnings help people find content that they can enjoy, and can encourage them to try new things.
—-
In the end, trigger warnings and content warnings are a great way to support other people in trying new things, expanding their boundaries, and exploring, without leaving them with no safety net, and without ignoring the importance of their mental and emotional health. Some people might not care about this at all, and that’s okay. However, I think that kind of attitude definitely shines a light on who is likely to consume their media, and whether they are the kind of person those who have experienced trauma are willing to trust. For me, there’s no question: I want everyone to have fun – not just the people who don’t care.


This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Women with Initiative – Wendy Gorman




Hi all!

Welcome to my new feature, Women with Initiative! I am hoping to make this a monthly feature, but we’ll see as time passes whether the interest is there. Today I’ve interviewed Wendy Gorman, creator of Still Life, which won in last year’s Golden Cobra design contest. 

Wendy shares a little about her here:

My games are mostly WIP right now, but I co-wrote one of last year’s Golden Cobra winners, Still Life, and I’m currently working on two games, one called The Things She Carried, which I wrote for the Warbirds anthology contest, which won, and is a game about Japanese American women in the US during WWII, and Shemesh, which is a solarpunk utopia game that I’m working on with Different Play, and that is probably my game that I’m most excited about. I’ve also written a DramaSystem setting called “Game On” about the women’s baseball league in the US during WWII, and I have a million tiny baby game ideas that I’m working on with my favorite codesigner, Heather Silsbee.


Here are some questions I asked Wendy!

You have written some really amazing things. One of the previous cons I attended, many people played Still Life and said it was amazing. How did you find inspiration for such a unique game, and what kind of experiences do you think uninitiated players would have?

It’s funny you should ask about Still Life, because it has really been a huge surprise to me. Still Life is a mystery! My friends and I were play testing Jon Cole’s larp design work shop, Larp Jam, and our prompt was “pebblestone lifestyle.” I desperately did not want to write a Flintstones larp, and we were on the shore of a lake, with rocks surrounding us, so I guess it was easy to run with the rocks/nature theme. As for the uninitiated playing it, I’m sure experiences will differ! It’s a very low-key larp, with lots of sitting and quiet time, so if someone went in expecting to run around hitting people with foam swords, it would probably be a disappointment. That said, I’m told it’s a great game to play when you’re tired, because you really don’t have to move around very much at all!

In your work for The Things She Carried, how have you been gathering information and historical reference for it? What made you choose that particular subject?

For The Things She Carried, I was inspired by an amazing memoir, Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, about Jeanne’s experience with being relocated to internment camps in her youth. In particular, there’s a scene in the book where her grandmother is trying to sell some family heirloom plates that the family has had for years, and the buyer is refusing to give her what she considers a fair price, because the market is flooded with similar items from other Japanese American families who are also leaving. The grandmother gets so mad that she smashes the plates, one by one, rather than sell them. It’s a powerful book, and a powerful scene that stuck with me, especially since so many of these families lived in Washington, which is where I grew up. It’s a side of World War II that doesn’t get talked about enough, but it’s all I could think about when I saw there was a contest for WWII games about women. I’ve been reading articles, I reread the first inspirational memoir, and have been looking at photos on historical archives to try and get a better feel for Japanese women in the 40s.

I am so excited about your solarpunk game! I have been delving into it – tell me more about solarpunk, and about Shemesh!

Shemesh is probably the game I’m most excited about! Solarpunk is an emerging genre that focuses on ecofriendly, sustainable living with an art noveau flair. I love the aesthetic, I love the message, and I love the chance to explore positivity and hope. My game focuses on a city, Shemesh, that envisions a new way of living. I was interested in games about utopia, and couldn’t find any that I felt really fit, so I decided to design my own! The game is about exploring a solarpunk utopia in a diverse city, with a focus on aesthetics, which I love, and working through differences without resorting to conflict and anger. The question I’m inviting players to answer with this game is “What does it look like to approach misunderstandings in a utopia?” To top it all off, I have a backdrop of a bunch of funky fantasy peoples, including giant rats with a hive mind, human-sized sentient butterflies, fae, humans, and sentient robots, who all live alongside each other. I’m really, really in love with the setting and the game, and I can’t wait to release it. It’s sort of an amalgamation of a bunch of my favorite things, such as Microscope, the works of China Mieville, and beautiful, brightly colored stained glass. I’ve had a ton of fun writing it, play testing it, and I sincerely hope that others will enjoy it as much as I have!

What do you do outside of gaming, hobbies &etc.?

Outside of gaming, I’m a cat enthusiast, aspiring writer, and earring fanatic. I’m currently living in Spain for a year, teaching English, which I love. I am a big fan of feminist discussion, and trying to figure out how to make myself a more socially conscious human being. I also love to cook, and to bake, although I lack an oven here in Spain, so it’s put a huge damper on my culinary escapades.


Thank you so much to Wendy for sharing with us! You can find Wendy online on Google+!


This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs.

Five or So Questions with Shoshana Kessock and Abigail Corfman on Smoke and Glass

I interviewed Shoshana Kessock and Abigail Corfman on their new project, Smoke and Glass, launching soon on Kickstarter!

Tell me a little bit about Smoke and Glass. What’s the game about?
(SHOSHANA) The book, Smoke and Glass, is a Dickensian-steampunk Fate Core world set in the magical world of Meridia, a world modernizing after hundreds of years of magical war. It’s a game about the haves and have nots in a world trying to come out of their own dark age, caught between those that have power and folks who have to choose to step outside of the law just to survive. The book is written by new author and designer Abigail Corfman, edited by John Adamus, and laid out by Tiara Lynn Agresta, with beautiful art by the talented Nicole Cardiff and Jonathan Wyke.

What about the setting really intrigues you? 

(SHOSHANA) I’ve always been intrigued by worlds that take a left turn at genre conventions. You have certain expectations of fantasy worlds, of steampunk, and worlds that have magic. Any time you can push outside of those expectations, you have the potential to create a new take on what’s already been done. So when Abigail spoke to me about a world where the haves and have-nots fight for hold on a city that is at a crossroads between magic and steampunk-style technology? You have my attention. Then you add in the social questions this game brings up about gender politics, economic inequality, and what one is willing to do for (magic) power, and you have my attention. That’s why I’m really excited Phoenix Outlaw is getting the chance to develop this game.

What motivated your team to design in Fate Core?

(ABIGAIL) I love the elegance of the system. I like that it’s simple, and that it’s easy to make things happen. I’ve always seen roleplaying as an extension of children playing pretend in a garden, and the closer the system can bring me to the flexibility of “Okay, now I’m a dragon!” the happier I am with it. In other settings I’ve played I’d have to stat out the dragon. In Fate, I can just write the words “Giant Fire Breathing Dragon” on a note card, and I’m good to go.

Also, the philosophy of Fate Core resonates with me. It treats roleplaying as a collaborative storytelling enterprise, and that approach is baked into the mechanics, instead of just stated. The character creation process and aspect-creation options give the players a crazy amount of power to shape the world, and the fate point system means players are encouraged to make trouble for their characters in exchange for more awesome later. It’s an economy dedicated to creating exciting stories, and that encourages players to own their own fascinating misfortune, instead of having it thrust on them by the storyteller. Its very nature discourages the playing to win, dungeon master-versus-players mentality. So I like it.

Also it was really easy to adapt Fare Core to my world. Because it’s really easy to adapt Fate Core to most things. I’m not getting paid to say any of this.

What do you think magic adds to steampunk? 

(ABIGAIL) Steampunk is hugely about technology. Awesome, smoke-belching, gear-spinning, clinkity-clanking technology. Technology is a way of interacting with the world by way of mastery and perfect understanding. You need to study and experiment and know how every facet of how your steam-powered invention works for it to work. And once it’s working, you’ll know why it works, and that if it breaks, it’s for a reason you’ll be able to comprehend and touch.

Magic is a way of interacting with the world that involves acknowledging the limits of our understanding. The word magic itself implies a force that we have no real explanation for, a system of light and energy that can be examined and mapped, but only to a certain extent. Magic is always fundamentally a black box. The incantations we pour into one side of the black box come out the other side as rabbits, silk scarves, and lightening bolts. And they only real justification as to why that’s the case boils down to: “It’s magic.”

I think putting magic in a steampunk, or any technology heavy setting adds a delightful tension between the world of concrete technology, and the incomprehensible realm of magic. In Smoke & Glass, the people of Kroy are simultaneously covetous, and terrified of magic, and try to use technology to control it. Since magic is literally in the blood of certain people, they become the focus of this balance of fear and desire. On the other side of things, inventors have developed a substance called saltglass that’s very effective in repelling and controlling magic and magic users, but producing it takes a heavy toll in labor and human lives.

What do you hope people get out of the game when they play?

(ABIGAIL) I hope they get to run a heist game with magic in it. Because that’s pretty much my favorite thing in the universe to do.

In addition, one of the things that was important to me while building this world was to play with societal norms. There are ingrained beliefs in American society that influence everything we do that are so basic it’s hard to even remember they’re there. Like the idea that being masculine means you’re tough and should never cry, and being feminine means you’re pretty and delicate. Assumptions that are often accurate, very limiting, and self-perpetuating. It’s hard to make a fantasy setting that changes these basic ideas because they inform so much of how we think and what we’re used to, and have been pervasive throughout English history–the era and location we most like borrowing from for our fantasy.

In Smoke and Glass, I tried to play with gender roles. What is life like in a society where masculine means magical and feminine means deadly? What are the problems that arise from THOSE stereotypes? Smoke and Glass isn’t a utopia. It isn’t better than our society: they just have a different set of societal norms that people make assumptions based on and are pressured to conform to. Slaughtering animals is women’s work, and the other girls make fun of little Daisy because she doesn’t like blood. No one cares if Roger cries about it, but they expect him to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a priest, because otherwise he’s getting drafted by the army and milked for his magical blood until he’s fifty.

So I hope people can use Smoke and Glass to explore a world with some different social conventions. They can also, if they like, use it to explore some very familiar economic ones, like exploitation of workers and class warfare, which is fought on the front lines by by an order of masked Robin Hoods and a legions of angry urchins in Kroy. The distance of a fantasy world can let us look at issues we’re too close to think about clearly in real life. The divide between rich and poor is a contentious issue right now, and I hope that examining it through a fictional lens of magical Dickensian England might be interesting and helpful. Or at least cathartic.

What else can we look forward to from Phoenix Outlaw Productions?

(SHOSHANA) We’ve got a number of other projects on the horizon, both in tabletop RPGs and in live action roleplaying games. Josh Harrison, co-founder of the company with me, is writing a brilliant game called Dreamdiver, which is cyberpunk-meets-Inception. That’s also going to be a Fate Core game that people can look for more announcements about around August. After that, I am developing a tabletop RPG as well called Wanderlust, which is about humans and faeries traveling through space looking for a new planet to call home. That book is slated to come out after Dreamdiver and there should be announcements about it come Metatopia in November this year. In the LARP world, we’re working on developing a collection of freeform games for release next year.

On Feminism

This isn’t going to be a super eloquent post.

I’ve never been good at eloquence.

I don’t aim to write many political posts on this blog, but here’s one just for joshies.
 
I’ve been thinking a lot about feminism and what it means to me and all that jazz. It’s complicated, right? Like, there are all of these different schools of feminism, including ones filled with racism and trans-hate and bullshit like that. I’m no expert on feminism, hell, I only really discovered it a few years ago.

Well, that’s not true. I’d heard of it and rejected it soundly as some crazy liberal thing. This is back when I was a conservative. When you’re raised in rural Pennsylvania on a farm by a bunch of blue collar people, you are likely to be taught the same values I was, and those were mostly conservative values. I’ve changed.

And feminism has changed, yeah, over the years that it’s been recognized as a thing, and now it’s not just for middle- and upper-class-white-ladies. Feminism in a lot of circles means equalism (gosh that’s unwieldy) – rights and equality for everyone. That’s what I believe in, these days – the feminism that means everyone gets treated decent and where laws treat people equally and the kind of feminism that tells people they need to be better to everybody and not just the people they were taught to be better to.

I get stuck in my old ways some days. Bothered by little things. I take a while to change. It’s hard changing two decades of habits. Not hard enough to stop doing, but hard.

One thing I learned this year is I have to fight my battles carefully, and choose them even more carefully. I also learned sometimes it’s worth putting in for something that has a small benefit even if it also has negatives. It’s tough because it’s a compromise but it’s still sometimes worth it. The biggest thing I learned, though?

I can’t let myself be swayed by the day to day changing winds of the internet. I have to research before I get angry. I have to think before I spout off my anger.

I just need to be more careful.