Part I of this interview can be found here.
Traditional RPGs are the perfect vehicle for Lovecraftian horror. What better way to portray an uncaring universe than a game where the person running the game is (supposed to be) a neutral arbiter and dice decide everything? It's when you start getting into narrative mechanics (hero points, karma, whatever) that this starts to break down.
Thing about an indifferent universe is not just that it doesn't care if you fail and die ... it also doesn't care if you live and thrive.
5. You’ve been an outspoken defender of freedom of expression in RPGs, even when that means publishing work that some find offensive. How do you see that ethos connecting with Lovecraft’s own disregard for popular tastes?
I think this is a bad comparison. Lovecraft had his idiosyncrasies but I don't think much of what he was doing was pushing the boundaries of good taste. The violence, or its aftermath, in his stories weren't really detailed or dwelled upon, and he didn't go anywhere near sexuality or use profanity.
6. LotFP often revels in going beyond the boundaries of "good taste." Is that purely a stylistic choice or is there a deeper creative or philosophical motivation behind it?
Both. I grew up with horror movies and those 70s/early 80s Savage Sword of Conan comics, not to mention Howard Stern. I also grew up with the Satanic Panic and a little later on the PMRC and all the nonsense from the FCC and MPAA throughout my life.
I recently got the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers on Blu-ray, and I watched it, then listened to the commentary ... and they went on about they had censorship problems because, gasp, the two lead characters were both divorced.
We look at what couldn't be done in mass media in the past and we scoff at it. “How silly they were!” And the people that fought to overcome those restrictions, we see them as important people in the history of their art. Heroes, I'd call them.
But then people act like what is restricted today is serious business and totally justified, and anyone who fights against these modern restrictions are bad people who want bad things.
No. It's the same thing. It is absolutely the same thing.
Oh, you used a bad unacceptable word!
Dancing on a Sunday.
That picture is unnecessarily graphic!
Dancing on a Sunday.
You've expressed irresponsible social views!
Dancing on a Sunday.
You made a joke about a sensitive topic!
Dancing on a Sunday.
You're displaying a political point of view I find unacceptable!
Dancing on a Sunday.
Remember the whole Janet Jackson Superbowl controversy? Literally dancing on a Sunday!
I don't even like ratings. Ratings change how people create, both in concept and altering a “finished” product after the fact to attain certain ratings, because ratings shape the potential audience. That's not serving an informational function, that's censorship. Fuck em all.
I know I'm on the far end radical about this sort of thing. Everyone's got that one thing they're fanatical about and this is my thing. People should just be able to do shit creatively without being able to worry that they're going to be actually restricted because of it.
A couple of my favorite stories about censorship:
For many years the first three Cannibal Corpse albums were banned in Germany, and no songs were from those albums were allowed to be performed live. There were police monitors at their shows. They'd play the songs anyway, just under different names. That ban was lifted in 2006, but just a couple years ago Germany banned the Cannibal Corpse coloring book. A coloring book!
I've got no sympathy for anyone who argues for restricting the availability of creative work. The fact that all of this is still an ongoing concern makes me more confrontational about it. The books, movies, and music that I like pretty much guarantees that some of this stuff was always going to be a part of LotFP, but the fact that there are people who want to penalize people for making up stuff they don't like makes me do it more.
And we do get penalized for it. The first Free RPG Day book we put out was trashed by a number of the participating stores. We were later kicked out of Free RPG Day entirely because some other publisher threatened to pull out if we were allowed to continue to participate. One of our titles got trashed by a British distributor, and we only caught wind of that because one of the distributor's employees publicly complained that the bosses didn't let her look at it first, they thought it was so bad. Our stuff regularly gets denied from DriveThru, sometimes for reasons I can't fathom.
And of course there's the reputational factor, “Oh, they do that sort of thing.” Well yes, but not only that sort of thing. You work outside of someone's comfort zone once and they're going to try to punish everything you do because of it.
I just don't understand the impulse to look at something and decide that the public shouldn't get to decide for themselves whether they accept it or not. And it's the worst when it comes from someone who makes things themselves; it's the basest form of cowardice, trying to argue for caps on imagination and be in favor of more restricted thinking in creative work.
Aarrrghhh I get so angry, even when it happens to something I don't care about, even when it happens to something/someone I don't like. I don't understand why anyone does that, and I don't understand why anyone goes along with it.
To me, the first step in doing anything creative is to take down the creative walls so there's nothing but clear horizons on all sides, and then you decide what you want to create. If there's someone keeping creative walls up, how do people not feel like they're being physically crushed? How are they not expending at least some of their creative energy attacking those walls?
Yawn. He was more entertaining in Part 1.
ReplyDeleteRaggi said he grew up on Howard Stern and it all makes sense now. But Raggi doesn't have an FCC to nobly rail against. LotFP's catalog is available on DriveThru RPG right now. So what's the problem? (And by the way, there's a "Cosmic Horror Sale" going on right now too! They must be following your blog this month, James.)
Merchants and distributors trashing Raggi's work counts as free speech, not censorship. Censorship is something the government commits. Individuals are free to boycott or write negative reviews about anything they like, if we have the kind of freedoms that Raggi supposedly champions.
The only thing Raggi would censor is plagiarism. Which brings us back to The Lichway and Death Frost Doom.
Hoping he rallies in part 3.
I get the feeling when he says "trashed" he mean "destroyed physical product before it could be sold," not merely "criticized."
DeleteAgree with Etrimyn. He seemed to get distracted from the core subject - H.P. Lovecraft, not James Raggi.
ReplyDelete…without delving into semantics, i generally see four depths of censorship manifest increasingly-insidious repression the deeper one plumbs…
ReplyDelete…at the surface, one may take personal exception to information and choose not to engage it any further, fair-enough; mesopelagically, one might take exception to *association*, an inherently political choice to disregard secondary information in its own light; abyssopelagic censorship manifests as vicarious exception to information, not one’s own reaction but a presumptive reaction on behalf of a third party; and finally, down in the hadal zone, one withholds expression of ideas which might incite public exception…
For what it's worth, every single LotFP release is individually vetted by DTRPG before they will allow it to be sold. No other publisher has to jump through those hoops.
ReplyDeleteThat isn't censorship. DTRPG isn't the government. It's a private business, which still has the freedom to sell or not sell whatever the hell they want.
DeleteNo one owes him a platform to sell his products.
Etriym, thank you for the reminder on permitted vs. illegal censorship! However, even permitted censorship is censorship. They are free to censor and have the right to do so, but that doesn't make it a moral or ethical choice, and it's still censorship, if that is indeed what they are doing.
DeleteLikely has to do with their credit card processors. A hot topic in the realm of video game sales and having to remove more far side of adult content games from digital storefront recently because of processors prudish ways. Find a porn purveyor and you will find a long history of credit card processors in their business records.
DeletePeople are confusing censorship with the constitutional right to free speech in these comments. Anyone can censor something. (The wise often censor themselves!) At some point, people seem to have got it into their heads that because the government can't censor anyone, that it's only censorship when the government does it.
ReplyDeleteAs for the interviewee's points, I'm starting to think that people have a natural need for taboos. I come from the generation that ultimately got us things like South Park and fought hard for the ability to say whatever they wanted, so long as we weren't hurting anyone, so I'm a bit taken aback by the younger generations being so easily offended by everything. I guess we really did go too far at times, and it's just the pendulum swinging back the other way, but it makes for really rancid art.
All that said, James Edward Raggi seems a little gross, to me.
I don’t know. I respect the fact he works hard to put out beautiful books. And he had some neat comments buried in this interview. But I just don’t buy “I made D&D dangerous again”. Which he has talked about the whole time. I grew up on grindhouse and horror films from the 70’s and 80’s. And back then things seemed dangerous just cause the world was smaller. In the Information Age it just seems comical and mostly around a group welling to play adventures that are truly against you. I get the style he is capturing and there are a few creators who go this way. But it seems like more pretend. Some of the adventures have great ideas but I wouldn’t play them just cause them have meta game no-wins. Even those “shocking” things from my youth are also comical when revisited. Sure there is some haunting and messed up stuff. Witch finder General becomes an endurance test by the time you get the home stretch. But it really all feels like it is someone trying to hard. If I ever played the system as intended I think I would go more down the Italian or Hammer film route and their nebulous endings.
ReplyDelete