Some gamers incorporate their views about the current political and cultural milieu into their tabletop roleplaying game hobby.
I am not one of those people.
While fun isn’t the only thing I want out of games, it is something that I don’t want to do without.
Current politics and culture war injected into gaming ruins the fun.
Even worse, it ruins the possibility of fun.
What is “fun?”
“Fun” is a nebulous word. The dictionary definition doesn’t quite capture it. It tends to be a “I know it when I see it,” kind of thing.
Some psychology researchers who study “fun” came up with a theory.
They call it the liberating hedonic engagement theory of fun. The researchers identified two fundamental elements that make up fun. They also found several factors that make something “more fun” but I’m only going to need the two main elements for this discussion.
1. Hedonic engagement: Feelings of happiness or pleasure
2. Liberation: A psychological release from mental restriction.
Their definition “fun” requires both things. You may be happy and enjoying yourself but that may not meet their criteria.
You can have hedonic engagement without liberation and you can have liberation without hedonic engagement. Without both things you don’t have “fun” as they define it.
If you’ve had a good mindfulness meditation session, you’ve been liberated from your thoughts about work, the fight you had with your wife, the dog’s cancer. You’re not thinking about those things you’re focused on your breath and the sensations in your body. You might feel serene and calm when you’re done but most people would call meditation a pleasant experience but probably not “fun.”
You find out you are getting a bigger bonus than you expected this year. Great news. It makes you happy (hedonically engaged) but you are also thinking about how you will finally be able to get the leaking gutters on your house replaced. Since you are not liberated from your feelings about the cost of maintaining your home this happy feeling also is not “fun.”
You take some of that bonus money to the pinball parlor with your best friend, have a few drinks, and play games. You don’t think about your job or your overflowing gutters for a few hours while you laugh and have a good time. That’s fun.
Freedom from concern + pleasurable feelings = fun
I like fun but it’s not everything.
Depth of meaning in my games is important to me and that depth requires “not fun” emotions. Sadness, annoyance, and even anger.
Despite my desire for depth and meaning, I mainly want the game I’m playing to be fun.
The liberating hedonic engagement theory of fun says that “fun” requires not thinking about your current worries and responsibilities.
Putting politics and culture wars as a central element of the game means you are highlighting current worries and responsibilities.
You are not liberating yourself from them, you are bringing them to the forefront.
Many people find current politics to cause a whole variety of negative emotions.
Making politics and culture wars a major part of a game is not liberating hedonic engagement (fun) and makes so you probably will have fewer moments of liberating hedonic engagement (fun) playing that game.
That’s a kind of game some gamers want.
In my experience, most gamers are not interested. Most gamers are looking for fun and escape from those topics and issues.
I don’t want current politics and culture wars in my game play.
I’m not saying you can’t, you shouldn’t, or that political opinions are not a valid topic for a game.
All human interests, feelings, and experiences are valid topics for games.
I am saying that political debate and activism is not fun and not what I want from my game play.
If you want that sort of thing in a game, that’s fine.
I hope that you get what you are looking for from that game.
There are certain games where those themes can be fun, but not always.
Games like that can produce moments of fun but they might not. Even when they do produce fun, there is less of it. Those games tend to be enjoyable in a different way. I might even say in a more “mature” way.
Dark Sun is a great example of that. The depredations of the Defilers on the environment of Athas was a thoughtful insertion of philosophical, political, and social issues into a game world.
Denning and Brown were quite careful. They made Dark Sun entertaining and engaging even though message about environmental destruction, the horrors of slavery, and tyranny was quite clear.
The theme of the setting is the dark heart of human nature and the question of “What are you willing to do to survive?” That is far deeper and more interesting than the ham handed way most designs have incorporated political themes.
I suspect some gamers don’t find it to be as much fun because of the themes.
It had far fewer sales than the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk settings.
Adding politics to an existing “fun” game is a dumb move.
If a game product is about a political or cultural statement, and that is clearly stated in the marketing and sales copy, then the customer can decide if that is for them.
If the customer expects “fun” and the publisher also gives them, “We believe this is the way you should think about this issue,” the customer is not going to be happy. They didn’t buy a product to get a political tract. They bought it because they are trying to have fun.
Knowing what your customer expects and delivering it is the most fundamental element of any business. Delivering something they absolutely do not want along with what they do want is not going to work out in most cases.
I’m trying to create fun.
I want most of my play time to be liberating hedonic engagement. I want to forget about my responsibilities, my concerns, my worries for a few hours while enjoying a game with my friends.
I don’t want to think about my next colonoscopy, war, who’s running for president, the school tax levy, mass extinction, or financial crisis when I’m gaming. I don’t even want to think about what I’m going to make for dinner.
I want to think about how I can lure this troll into that pit trap in the passage because none of us remembered to buy Greek fire or acid.
I’m not going to apologize for wanting four hours of fun with friends.
Ever go to a party planning on a good time only to have some tedious boor start talking to you about their politics?
Was that fun?
Did you feel bad for excusing yourself to go to the bathroom and not coming back to that conversation?
4 hours out of 168 is too much time not to be thinking about <insert your least favorite politician here>?
I want my games to be as much fun as I can muster.
Politics is the opposite of fun.
In the parlance of our times…
You do you.
If you decide to insert your views on politics, social issues, and whatever the current cultural battlezone happens to be into your gaming hobby, that’s fine.
Please communicate that is what you are doing so I can make an informed choice.
I’ll be over here playing a foppish elf who enjoys killing orcs and spending the gold he acquires on expensive wine.
Grumpy Wizard 
This is nonsense. If I’m meeting regularly to play a game of roleplaying and stories, I want it to be with friends. My criteria for friends involves a baseline of shared human values.
Politics permeates the fabric of our lives — because it impacts so many aspects of our lives, or the lives of people we know. For example, am I supposed to avoid transgender representations in my game because someone might find it offensive? Am I supposed to avoid representations of interracial couples in my game, because someone might find it too political?
News flash — your “non-political” games, I guarantee, have some aspect, or a multitude of aspects, however small, that reflect a certain interpretation of reality. And because politics is so ubiquitous, you’re already injecting your views into your game. They may not be the big hot-button issues, but you’re already doing it.
LikeLike
Hi Phil Thanks for taking the time to read my post and express your opinion. I appreciate the effort.
Not everyone gets to play with friends. There are many instances where I’ve moved to a new place, didn’t know anyone who was interested in gaming, or was at a game shop or convention playing with strangers. It happens. Should people not play with people unless they knew the political positions of their play group? That seems rather extreme to me.
My friends and I don’t always have similar politics. We still game and play together because we respect each others humanity and opinions even though we disagree about political ideology. We are there to have fun. Through that fun game play, we learn that the other guy is a human too, even if he’s full of nonsense about the capital gains tax.
I never wrote that you should do anything your game at all. Re-read the post. I said I don’t want certain current day political issues in _MY_ game. _YOU_ can include transhuman cyborgs ass raping billionaires for XP if that’s what you want. That’s not for me.
Likewise publishers can do what they want. I may not decided to spend my money or time on their product, as is my right. If I find the game is too “on the nose” regarding present day political issues so that it brings my mind out of the play and back to whatever I saw on the news, then yes, I might not want to play that game.
The “everything is politics” idea a poorly considered concept. Reducing everything to politics is about as anti-humanist a position as I can imagine. It reduces all things to a them vs us, mentality with no possibility of compromise. That often has terrible consequences. It’s no better than the practitioners of Abrahamic religions who separate everyone into categories of “Believer” and “Infidel” because “everything is theology.”
Politics is a tiny tiny fragment of how view the nature of reality. A rather base and simplistic fragment at that. I do inject my views into my game, it would be impossible to do otherwise.
My views include the physics of arrow ballistics.
Did Leo Strauss have something to say about the range of a composite bow verses a longbow?
Perhaps you can suggest a Marxist theorist who has something to say about the design of traps or is Grimtooth satisfactory?
I also have strong views about the stirrup, the physical impossibility of the roc as a real animal, and the theological implications of gods with statblocks and hit points.
LikeLike
OP: “Should people not play with people unless they knew the political positions of their play group? That seems rather extreme to me.”
Extreme? I find it practical. I have various metrics for whom I choose to spend time with — especially when it’s something as elective as a hobby. Political views is among those metrics, as a non-conclusive indicator. For example, anti-vaxxers and people refusing masks when advised can g.t.f.o. It helps those awkward moments when someone figuratively takes a shit in an otherwise pleasant gathering.
OP: “We are there to have fun. Through that fun game play, we learn that the other guy is a human too, even if he’s full of nonsense about the capital gains tax.”
Capital gains tax is conveniently the least hyperbolic of issues you could’ve chosen as an example. And I’m very familiar with the humanization of people you disagree with. My late father couldn’t be more politically divergent, but we loved each other.
OP: “Likewise publishers can do what they want. I may not decided to spend my money or time on their product, as is my right. If I find the game is too “on the nose” regarding present day political issues so that it brings my mind out of the play and back to whatever I saw on the news, then yes, I might not want to play that game.”
You can’t open any edition of D&D without seeing evidence of sociopolitical decisions that were made — sometimes unconsciously, sometimes not. This is likely true of many other RPGs — particularly older ones. The fact that some of these things have changed (like sexism and representations of diversity) WAS an intentional, politically-relevant decision.
OP: “Reducing everything to politics is about as anti-humanist a position as I can imagine. It reduces all things to a them vs us, mentality with no possibility of compromise.”
It’s about a) raising the bar of the people you decide to spend your time with, and b) not being afraid to set boundaries for yourself. Lots of people lower their standards in order to not be alone. As I get older, I find I’d rather surround myself with better quality people.
OP: “That often has terrible consequences. It’s no better than the practitioners of Abrahamic religions who separate everyone into categories of “Believer” and “Infidel” because “everything is theology.””
Yes, I’m clearly on a slippery slope into declaring a religious war.
OP: “Politics is a tiny tiny fragment of how view the nature of reality. A rather base and simplistic fragment at that. I do inject my views into my game, it would be impossible to do otherwise.”
If you don’t see the relationship between reality and politics, it’s no wonder you wrote this article.
OP: “My views include the physics of arrow ballistics. Did Leo Strauss have something to say about the range of a composite bow verses a longbow?
Perhaps you can suggest a Marxist theorist who has something to say about the design of traps or is Grimtooth satisfactory?”
RPGs are about characters, presumably resembling real people to some extent — enough so that players can identify with them. And they’re about telling stories. So unless you’re strictly playing a war game (a perfectly fine choice), with little story, drama, and character arcs, then yes — you will inevitably run into something that reflects a particular sociopolitical influence. Whether it’s a choice of the publisher, the player, or the GM.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t agree with anything you said here Phil. You’re welcome to see yourself out. I don’t think there will be much common ground on the topic and you’ve clearly not read anything else on my blog to establish some context.
Best wishes to you.
LikeLike
I’m in full agreement here. However, I think that it’s a misnomer to call what we’re seeing in gaming, movies, and other mass media as the inclusion of “politics.”
Rod Serling, a leftist of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, made political commentary in his writing on “The Twilight Zone.” But Serling only allegorically commented on what was happening then and presented the logical conclusions that would have occurred should things have continued as they had been going.
But Serling never insisted on specific plans of action. And, more importantly, Serling didn’t insist on the kind of social-media-reinforced group-think we’re seeing today. In fact, he would have vehemently opposed it. “Being like everyone else is the same as being nobody,” he once said.
“Dark Sun” was similar. It made comment. But it too didn’t insist on group-think or group action. And, since it was a game, it necessarily subsumed its commentary inside the mantle of “fun.”
What we’re actually seeing today is not politics but social engineering. The kind that seems eerily familiar. ( https://youtu.be/yysKhJ1U-vM ). We’re just fortunate that, at the moment, the government and force of law isn’t involved. (Although corporate power —seeking to protect its bottom line— IS involved.)
Today, not only are people insisting that people be nice to each other —a good idea to be sure— they’re also insisting that there’s only one way to do that. And that assumes that everyone is the same, which, in the end, is discriminatory. Not everyone is a white purple-haired Gen Z theater kid with a passion for infantilist Japanese cartoons. And not everyone wants to be.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks Marty for a thoughtful comment.
To be clear, I’m not interested in any political rhetoric in my gaming no matter what position it holds. There is room for universal human morality, philosophy, and anthropology which gets close to politics and informs current political ideologies so there will be some overlap.
LikeLike
I think I’m mostly in agreement with you. I’m not aware of ANYONE who plays RPGs to AVOID a fun time. However fun is completely objective and in the eye of the beholder. These kinds of screeds against “politics” ultimately don’t advance the hobby, and in my opinion just bring politics into it even more (see comment above with insert of Bill Maher). Bill Maher has an opinion, you can agree or not, but does he play RPGs? It’s simply inserted to advance the posters opinion by having someone else echo it back to them.
There are enough RPG systems and players out there that anyone, and I mean ANYONE, can find what their looking for.
I like your blog, but I have to ask you, what is the point of this post? It’s just opinion and has no more meaning than anyone else’s, unless you just wanted us to know that you like to have fun.
The only real point that might come out of this is that GMs should be clear to players, and players clear to each other, of what they expect from each other out of a game. For me I don’t want real world religion or politics entering my game. It’s really easy to make this clear to other players without offending anyone. If someone crosses the agreed upon “red line” then the game should stop and action be taken from a simple dialogue to expulsion from the game depending on the circumstances.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Hi Michael. Thanks for taking the time to read my post and comment.
While they are an admitted tiny fraction of role playing game hobbyists, there are gamers for whom fun is not the point of their gaming activity. If fun happens, that’s nice but for them, it’s not the point. It’s not that they are trying to actively avoid fun. It’s that the style of play they want doesn’t place fun as a priority goal.
Example: https://petterkarlsson.se/2012/10/26/just-a-little-lovin-2012-a-larp-about-aids-in-the-80s/
A game about gay characters in NY of the 1980s. I’ve read reports of this event and the people who played in it found it very deep, meaningful, and cathartic. They did not describe it as being “fun” though I am sure there were fun moments. The stated intent of the game was to produce the emotion of desire, friendship, and fear of death. That’s deep and I applaud them for accomplishing their intent. This is very hard to do. That indicates excellent design choices. It’s just not a game I would seek out as a regular activity because it’s not fun.
The purpose of this post, indeed this blog, is not “advancing the hobby” whatever that might mean. My ego is large and hard to suppress at times but even I have no delusions that I’m “advancing the hobby” or even nudging it half a degree onto a different course.
I don’t remember stating that I believe my opinion was the infallible word from the gods. Do I come across to you as a person who thinks he’s imporant? If I do, it is not my intent. “I want” “I don’t want” “Not for me.” I make a point of limiting the prescriptive in favor of the descriptive.
I do try very hard to think through what I’m writing before I hit “publish.” I have strong opinions, but they are weakly held in most cases. If someone offers a counterpoint, I’m happy to consider it.
The point of this post, and the blog as a whole is:
1. To express my opinion and what I like for the purposes of finding My people.
2. To express an opinion from an angle that I haven’t seen anyone else state.
3. To provide encouragement to people who may have similar ideas and alienated from/by the mainstream opinions of the hobby.
4. To work out my thoughts and ideas through the process of writing. Often in the process of writing, I find other ways of looking at an idea.
LikeLike
My point was this: “What we’re seeing today isn’t politics but social engineering.” In other words, there are people in gaming seeking a homogeneous ideological view within the community as a whole and seeking to exclude anyone who doesn’t agree. Five minutes spent in any RPG forum on any social media platform will reveal at least one of these people. I’ve had one person actually say to me “This is •our• hobby now. And old white guys like you aren’t welcome anymore.” There it was: Ageism, sexism, and racism in one fell swoop! And this person honestly believed she was a bastion of inclusion and open-mindedness.
This may (or may not) be a minority within the community. But it •is• a growing view and group aided and abetted by game companies seeking to protect their bottom lines by inserting the same homogeneous ideological group think these people are spouting into their game materials — WOTC’s doing it! Chaosium’s doing it!
In the past, game rulebooks didn’t include any suggestions that you had to be nice to people. Game writers just assumed that you had parents who raised you properly, that you were playing your games to relax and socialize with like-minded people, and that you weren’t playing games to further a social agenda.
Game rulebooks today don’t just include suggestions that players should be nice to one another. They actually have institutionalized instructions on how to do it: Session Zero must include X, Y, & Z! Safety tools are required even if no one needs them! And a certain set of people are lapping this up like it’s Chairman Mao’s Red Book.
Again: “What we’re seeing today isn’t politics but social engineering.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Interesting thought. I can see where you are coming from. There does seem to be a movement of totalitarians on the extreme edges who want to stamp out all dissenting thought.
LikeLike
I feel like I’m the opposite.
What’s the entertainment in escapism? What feels good about having adventures when the evil you’re destroying is banal?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Different people like different games for different reasons because they are different from you.
LikeLike
That really is the entire point, is it not? People seek out game groups for a variety of reasons. For some people, fun as defined by science may not be a top priority. They may find that feeling comfortable around like-minded people is of greater value. This is, after all, a prosocial hobby, and it’s possible to derive more than just personal liberation from game sessions. Yes, I get annoyed when people find being offended a criminal thing, but I also find that many people of whom you speak are also quite young. Developmentally, young people often view the world in black and white and apply some moral purity testing. I’d say all this is amplified vastly through digital communication. Those folk who feel they now own the hobby will also become old and feel culturally disconnected. And so the world turns. And the profit makers will always latch onto the zeitgeist to make more coin.
LikeLiked by 2 people
“Politics” is a tricky one because it can be so hard for different people to agree on what it is.
For one person, seeing a company push for inclusivity & representation of different backgrounds, sexuality, and/or ethnic groups can be interpreted as politics. For another person it has nothing to do with politics and is about morality.
For one person, a game removing content such as slavery, genocide, and sexual assault can be seen as pushing a political or cultural agenda. For another person, including that content can be seen as the same.
Not to mention that for a large number of people, thinking about the above content is as much fun for them as thinking about your next colonoscopy is for you.
As to politics in games, that is a tricky one too. Brennan Lee Mulligan is a huge lefty and his political world view often informs his games, same with Matt Mercer to a degree. That politics doesn’t bother me at all and I love those games but…. it’s probably because I agree with it. If I didn’t, I imagine it would make me feel excluded or even attacked. Definitely not fun.
I guess what it comes down to is don’t play with people you don’t get along with? And if you are playing with people with different views or beliefs to yourself, then be respectful?
LikeLiked by 3 people
Hi Danrimo. Thank you for reading and taking a moment to comment.
I think it is one thing for a game company (or any company for that matter) to run their business based on political and ideological grounds and another to produce a product that is primarily about advancing those politics. I’m not saying they shouldn’t do that if that is what they want to do. If a company wants to make it’s internal business decisions about who to hire, who to promote, how they pay, sourcing of products and materials, structure of the business and so forth on political or ideological positions, without that also translating into a game about their politics, they’ll probably have an easier time finding and retaining an audience.
If they want to create a game that promotes a particular political ideology, that’s different. I’m not saying they shouldn’t do that. I am saying that if they do that they will narrow the potential pool of customers who want to buy their product or service. I will be one of those people turned off by the product.
I used to work for a coffee company whose primary purpose is development in coffee growing regions. Profits from the coffee were a fuel for development. If we could have achieved more of our goals selling something else, we would have done that instead. The coffee was better than your typical grocery store product but it was not up to the standard of a hardcore coffee enthusiast. We didn’t appeal to that crowd at all and that was fine. We didn’t expect them to like the product. The company could have increased profit and reduced costs in a number of ways but that would not have fit the political and ideological purpose of the company. There were people who drank our coffee at an event or was given it as a gift but when they found out the founder’s very left leaning politics made a point of telling us they would never buy the coffee for themselves. The founder was aware, understood that some people were not going to be happy about that and was fine with it.
I suggest that game companies have the same degree of awareness.
My political positions are all over the place and can generally be classified as “none of the above.”
I think respect, courtesy and decency is a pretty good place to start.
LikeLike
If a publisher has NPCs that are trans characters — this will be viewed as political. Diverse representations in games are interpreted as political. If someone is going to have a problem with diverse representations in my game — g.t.f.o.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It “could” be viewed as political. Not always. Context matters. If you are playing a game set in historical India, transgendered characters would be contextually correct and not political at all. A trans character walking around medieval England being treated like a normal person without any sort of hassle might be viewed a political statement as “this is how things should have been.”
LikeLike
I think this is actually a good example of how your escapism model of non-politics makes politics dependent on the participant (because different things will enable escapism for different people.)
Imagine three gamers sitting down for a Session 0 of a campaign set in pseudo-historical medieval England – recognizably medieval England, but with magic and elves and statues of saints that weep real blood, and what-have-you. All three of them are trans themselves and medieval history buffs.
Alice says: “I just want to be able to swing my sword and fight bandits, not think about transphobia or other regressive norms. We should revise this setting so that that’s absent.” Her goal here is thus to avoid politics so she can focus on escapism.
Bob says: “no, that’s erasing the past. It means we can’t engage with the realities of the past, or have an opportunity to critically engage with and reflect on it. Let’s have things as they are in the real medieval England, minus the magic and such.” Bob wants politics in the game, and realism enhances politics.
Carla wants to immerse herself in a thoroughly medieval millieu without filtering things through a present-day lens. She’s not opposed to Bob’s idea of critically examining the past, she just doesn’t want to do it at the same time as immersing herself. For her, escapism is enabled by playing the history straight.
It would be easy to multiply examples. For instance, is making the bad guys of a campaign Nazis escapist or political? One the one hand, Nazis are just straightforwardly political, and may bring in all sorts of political concerns. On the other hand, making your enemies Nazis forecloses all sorts of political questions many people have about solving problems with violence – they’re Nazis, go kick their ass, end of question. As in the above different people at the same table might have legitimate different answers to the question.
I think both you, me, and Dan are saying that context and individual perspective are determinant so there may not be as much daylight between everyone as it seems, of course.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Well considered and thoughtful comment. Thank you for taking the time to write it out.
I think most gamers just want to escape a bit and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Some gamers want a blend and it depends on who they are gaming with, what kind of experience they want and so on.
LikeLike
I found your blog through Reddit, and stumbled onto this post. I appreciated your perspective, and largely agree with this post. I particularly found the bit about what is fun useful for a discussion I had with an aspiring GM who is a close friend who states that they want their campaign to be fun.
It feels a bit weird for me to agree with this blog and also really really enjoy Werewolf the Apocalypse, which is very political in a fairly direct way. One of the things I enjoy about that game is that the writers, to my feeling, have taken an open approach to the level of investment a player could have with some of the core political premises – it could be window dressing to splatter the bad men, who are bad because they are cartoonishly evil, or it could be a serious examination on blah blah blah. That’s how I justify it, anyways. The best solution is to have an open and earnest conversation between a table and come to an agreement about what level of politics (Potentially none, and probably the less the better, mostly!) you want to see at your table. My current group has chosen not to play in a modern setting, but rather for a medieval one, which I’m looking forward to. There probably won’t be too many modern politics in that!
LikeLiked by 3 people
Thanks for taking the time to read and comment.
Though I may seem quite absolute in my statements in the post, I’m more nuanced and subtle in practice.
Werewolf, a game I played and enjoyed quite a bit in the 90’s but haven’t played recently, does have a definite political position. And that’s not entirely unreasonable given the timeline of the setting. It’s set in modern day (more or less) so there are going to be modern political issues brought up in the game. That’s fine and within its context makes perfect sense. Also notice that it’s not a top seller on DTRPG and even when White Wolf was a big deal, Werewolf was’t their most popular seller. Interestingly, Vampire, another game I also played a lot of in the 90s is overtly political. The politics _within the setting_ is interesting. It was frequently not “fun” in the liberating hedonic engagement sense of the term but it was enjoyable in a different way. Which is also fine if that is what the group wants out of their gaming experience.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Another thought I just had was that there are methods of putting those topics into a game that produces enough emotional detachment from the player/GM’s own responsibilities, worries, and concerns about the current political landscape that it works. The designer has to foreground the “fun” parts of play and what the players are actually doing in the game more than the “oh and by the way, maybe not polluting the planet with our filth would be a good idea,”
One of the things a lot of people don’t see about Lord of the Rings was that it was in part a statement about the use of power in 20th century. They think it’s just a parable about “good and evil.” Tolkien was tricksy enough to bury it in the story people didn’t recognize the orcs as a metaphor for the industrialized murder of humans and nature.
Perhaps a very skillful game designer or game master can manage to make a game that expresses a moral or philosophical position without being so damn on the nose about it. With enough caution and skill a writer/designer could dissociate the current TEAM RED vs TEAM BLUE fight from what is better thought of as a moral or philosophical (perhaps even theological) perspective that transcends politics.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Political relevance of a topic or presentation of that topic is not a binary. I don’t think anyone can reasonably disagree with that. (See the above example: inclusion of a trans person, or to be extremely hair-splittingly-accurate, a person whom we would consider in the social category of ‘trans’ but whom the people in question would have entirely different social categories for, in a game based loosely on a portion of mytho-historical India, can be perceived as political or not.)
I also think inclusion of politics can be fun for some people and not for others, depending not just on the people involved, but also the specific nature and presentation of the politics, the relation of the game to the political issue in question, and so many other factors we could spend the next two weeks proposing additional qualifiers and blow up this blog thread to be the most commented thing in the OSR this month.
In other words, I don’t think “I don’t want politics in my games” is going to bear much fruit if taken as an invitation to create and refine definitions to crystallize the exact meaning of the statement, nor to use it to justify it as a sorting mechanism for why I enjoyed this game but not that game as a strong predictive filter.
(I recognize and respect that’s not what you’re doing in the above post. It is, however, a perennial temptation in the Internet Peanut Gallery.)
Ultimately, this is to be solved among a group of mature adults deciding without rancor whether they like spending time playing elfgames together or not. In that context, “I don’t like politics in my games,” or, “I do like politics in my games,” or, “I do like some specific politics in my games, but not others,” is a useful filter. For example, if we ever game together I’ll know not to show up with a character named Drumpf or Baiden.
It also says something about the person staking the position. It betrays some of what you consider to be baseline social and political assumptions vs. what you don’t. For instance, I’d wager you’re associated with neither revolutionary communism nor fascism – an easy guess based purely on numbers, but you seem to be missing a root assumption about the existence of radical political dialectic in every human action. (Please don’t answer; I’m not interested in your personal political persuasion, just like you aren’t interested in mine.)
LikeLiked by 3 people
Thank you for taking the time to make a thoughtful and nuanced comment.
LikeLiked by 1 person