Twilight of the White Boy Club

Jackwraith wrote: This thread explains: boardgamegeek.com/thread/1843452/abject-misogyny-bgg

You have to reveal the first post to get the actual context. Sandy quit BGG after the backlash over this thread.

That's some pretty messed up shit right there. And evidently he was sharing this with his son as well. I guess nobody in the house asked him, "WTF is wrong with you?"

Msample wrote: This reminds me somewhat of the current discussions around the NFL and their lack of diversity at the head coaching level and especially team upper level management ranks. The common wisdom suggests that since all 32 teams are owned by white ( and usually old white ) males that their hiring practices reflect on the ownership demographics. Until that demographic changes, diversity will be unfortunately limited. And that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.

(Yeah, I'm off topic a little bit) I think you're off by a little bit. The owner of the Lions is female, and the owner of the Jaguars is a minority. You're right about the coaching/GM situation in the NFL, though. Eric Bienemy not getting a head coaching offer is a crime.

Thank you for the post and the ongoing discussion. I have started to include some of these factors in my decision-making process, and certainly I'm not looking to support designers or publishers that continue to somehow be surprised when being called out for poor diversity or dodgy themes. But what to do with those troublesome games in the collection. In my case, these would include games like Five Tribes, Pax Porfiriana, and Navegador. I haven't pulled out Five Tribes in years, despite owning the alternative pack, and I often thought about trading it. I enjoy Pax Porfiriana but yeah... Eklund (i stopped buying his games a while ago). Navegador is a much loved game, but simply seeing the world as resources has its issues -and it was something that dawned on me when I was playing with friends in West Africa and setting it up.

But dealing with troublesome games this also creates a dilemma in my head. On one hand I may not want the game on my shelf, but trading or selling it doesn't seem right as you are simply passing the issue on. But the other alternative, destroying the game, also seems pretty wrong as well - as there is hints of book burning in this as well as hiding away the problem.

On a positive note, I would like to give a shout-out about one of the first board games in my collection to display diversity: The Vesuvius Incident (1993). There was minimal art in the game and all the characters are obscured because they are wearing spacesuits, but their names point to a decent amount of diversity. And there is no presumption of gender for any of the characters. In alphabetical order:

Bresinski
Colovisto
DuBois
Eastwood
Hernandez
Kyoshi
Lichter
Mendez
Orlov
Robertson
Sarma
Yee

As Sergeant, Hernandez outranks everybody else, a bunch of enlisted personnel ranging from Private to Corporal.

ubarose wrote:

jason10mm wrote: Barnes went off on a tirade about this games art choices, kinda incorrectly as I've listed (if i can ever get images to load).

Our policy is that review copies "accurately represent the final retail version" of the game. Two of our reviewers received review copies of the game. This is what was in the box that each received.

Our reviewers can only speak to what they receive and must assume that the publisher has sent them a copy that accurately represents the retail version of the game. What is included in the Kickstarter version, or a Deluxe version, or an Expansion, has no bearing.

That photo alone is pretty doggone damning in that ALL of the characters are exact copies of each other EXCEPT for the art. As vanilla as it gets, any art would work equally well. You could put a badger on one of the cards and it wouldn't matter to gameplay. Why put art on the cards at all (why have the cards at all) if they just are a couple of sentences of rules that could just be in the rulebook instead?

Good game to pass up.

Oof, do I dare ask what Phil Eklund has done or said? I would hate to get rid of some of my all-time favorites like the Pax series but, as was said earlier, I'd feel much better knowing I am sticking to my principles of no tolerance for this kind of shit rather than creating exceptions.

He had a big covid denier, it's no big deal jag on his social media recently. Ion decided to continue to honor their contract with him but they would no longer publish his ugh essays in the rulebooks of new games.

Just to provide an alternative perspective:

I fully support the idea of not continuing to support people who simply refuse to understand that the world has changed and we want the gaming world to change with it. I'm frankly done with a number of designers for that reason. However, as Davidjc points out, there's a certain aura of book burning that's beginning to accompany this. People are free to make their own choices about what art they enjoy and what they do with said possessions that embody that art, but the classic example is Richard Wagner.

Wagner was a pretty prominent anti-Semite and racist who wrote openly about excluding Jews from music and his distaste for "miscegenation", among other things. His music was also adopted by the Nazis as emblematic of their vision for Germany. That said, he's also one of the most prominent composers of the Romantic era and there's a solid argument to be made that his music is the foundation of modern film scores. No one is compelled to buy his music, but at the same time, I'm extremely uncomfortable about the prospect of shaming people for enjoying it, given that even his operatic themes had little to do with his personal perspectives on race (i.e. it's not like his music was adopted because it's an early version of Aryan rock.) Also, just for a little counterpoint, there are many possible socialist themes in Wagner's work...

If your personal distaste for people like Eklund or Petersen has grown to the point where you don't want their games any longer, that's fine. That's your choice. I would personally recommend to everyone that they no longer purchase the output of people like that. But when it comes to looking down on people for continuing to enjoy Cthulhu Wars or Pax Porfiriana, I'm not interested in doing that anymore than I am disdaining someone because they enjoy Wagner's music. It's just not constructive, IMO, and it certainly doesn't help what should be the real focus, which is normalizing the ideas of diversity and inclusion within the gaming world and promoting the work of people who haven't been included for a long time.

Good points, Jackwraith. If the goal is to make things better, then we should focus on promoting diversity more than punishing past lack of diversity.

In regards to Phil Eklund, I don't have a particular issue with his COVID denialism - he is not a decisionmaker and as long as he doesn't espouse violence to deny others vaccination etc, then this wouldn't be a cause to avoid his games in a more general sense. I was drawn to his game Pax Porfiriana as it had an original theme for its time. But my issues started when reading the designers notes fill me with a bit more disquiet, especially his views about colonialism and denial of its horrors, denial of rights of indigenous peoples etc.

Games shouldn't make you angry. Plenty of other things out there to stay angry with.

Throwing a game out is not the same as book burning. As Michael put it, these games are white boy fantasies. They belonged in the trash all along.

Gary Sax wrote: He had a big covid denier, it's no big deal jag on his social media recently. Ion decided to continue to honor their contract with him but they would no longer publish his ugh essays in the rulebooks of new games.

I didn't realise but it doesn't surprise me that he is a Covid denier.

Eklunds Games are generally vehicles for a thesis he has about a given topic. This could potentially be interesting as he tends to make indepth games that take an 'interesting' angle on a topic and explore it. The issue is his interesting ideas have been accused to being propaganda. I own Pax Renaissances which posits that the bankers really ran the show and drove the reformation and dynastic struggles on the era. In Greenland he explores a clash between Vikings Inuit, Sami, and Thule. Both of these are interesting ideas but they are presented as researched ideas when in reality there is little evidence to support them in academic circles. With these two games this is not such a problem, I have heard with Pax Emancipation and Transhumanity (Matt Eklund) this becomes significantly more problematic.

An important question i think, is; what is the message of this game?

Entertainment is not neutral and purely frivolous but it can affect the way people view the world and what they perceive as normal or factual etc. This applies both to representation of characters but also what kind of activity the game is rewarding or punishing and what world views it is promoting. I appreciate that the answers to this question will vary by cultural background and evolve with society. I had long assumed that people could divorce the fictions they enjoy from reality, I am no longer sure this is true.

This is a question i think designers, publishers, critics and consumers need to be asking far more often.