Gamebooks and racism
Gamebooks ought to inherently be the most inclusive medium on the planet. The hero of each story is YOU, the reader, regardless of skin colour, gender, social class, or anything else.
And yet gamebooks are a microcosm of the problems that the west in particular faces.
The fantasy tropes that have formed so much of the bedrock of this craft are ultimately inspired by British myths as a general rule, in which almost all characters are Caucasian men. But the world has changed since those myths emerged.
I’ve always been quite aware of gender when I’m writing, and in The Altimer and New Gaia I also intentionally gave particularly influential characters African names. I’d love to rest on my laurels at this point, and yet I’m aware that in Escape From Portsrood Forest I (again intentionally) dived heavily into the classic high fantasy archetypes.
I’m aware that as a white, British man it’s easy for me to wash my hands of the whole thing as if it’s not my problem, but with privilege comes responsibility and the fact that the heroes (and powerful villains) I read about as a child looked somewhat like me I’m sure built an unconscious worldview that makes me look down on other people.
So this is me saying publicly:
- I believe that all of humanity is created in the image of God, therefore worthy of honour and celebration in its rich and complex diversity, like the intricate arrangement of different colour pixels that go together to make up a beautiful and fantastical landscape on a screen.
- I’m aware that I hold unconscious biases, and commit to doing what I can to promote diversity through my work in every way that occurs to me (I invite suggestions at this point, by the way!)
- I humbly challenge the rest of us – particularly white men, however difficult the label of “privileged” may be to relate to – to speak up.
Amen, Sam. The image of God should be a doctrine that squashes conscious racism, and a life of worship should change us to make unconscious sins conscious.
I don’t personally feel that the cultural background of western popular fantasy is itself an issue: all stories come from somewhere, and that is a good thing, just as all people have a heritage. But the repetitiveness of gamebooks set within the same set of tropes is the issue: that can unconsciously reinforce the idea that these are the best/right/only way to write gamebooks.
Steam Highwayman is a love letter to my country, England, and an ideal version of that culture (ie pubs and steam engines – lol), but it is fundamentally a story, and while stories are, I believe, about the most powerful thing that humans have for changing our own world, they’re only ever mirrors and windows to a tiny part of the real world. So within my gamebooks I will sometimes address racism or other evils head-on, I have to admit that that’s not the main point of these books. And I can, literally, forgive a writer a great deal, taking into account his or her cultural background, if I believe their story is good enough and reflects something true about the world.and humanity. And I will expect the same from my readers, while of course not indulging this.
But there are times when writers of fiction need to write unpleasant worlds, characters etc without explicitly condemning them within the work themselves. That’s one of the things that stories are actually better at than anything else – getting people to think again about what they are seeing in the world around them.
It’s an interesting subject.