Bridging the Representative Diversity Divide

You may have heard that there has been something of a kerfuffle lately, concerning attacks made by various of Wizards of the Coast's stable of designers and hangers-on against the older editions of D&D and their various insensitivities about language, lack of representation of non-white people, casual depictions of slavery, and so on and so forth. This is, apparently, happening in tandem with a gradual 'wokeification', if I can use that term, of the game in its most recent iterations, opinions about which - naturally enough nowadays - tend to cleave along culture war lines. 

This highlights the extent to which people in the culture war on both sides generally tend to interpret each other's conduct in the least charitable way possible, and thereby convince themselves that people with opposing views are evil and malevolent rather than just adopting a different perspective. 

I thought therefore it might be useful to give the most charitable interpretations I can think of to the two sides in the 'representativeness' debate in order to see if there can be an armistice of some kind. Because I think in particular people who are in favour of what I will call representative diversity tend to interpret the kneejerk reaction against 'wokeness' as being evidence of barely concealed or inchoate racism, when actually it's best to descibe it as a pretty understandable feeling of being unfairly demonised. 

Let's start, then, by putting the case for representative diversity at its strongest: for years and years it was mostly straight white men (or, let's face it, straight white adolescent boys) who played D&D, and they tended rather unthinkingly and generally unconsciously to behave in ways that were insensitive or exclusionary. A great example of this, not from D&D, actually comes from Palladium Fantasy, in which homosexuality appears in a list of variants of insanity (in my memory - I don't have the book in front of me - this is fairly early on in the text itself). Other more visually obvious examples would be the tendency to only ever depict women as looking either like supermodels or else witches or hags, or to only ever depict black or brown people in the context of being 'savages'. All of this was entirely understandable in historical terms simply because it is an ineluctable feature of the human experience that people tend to stereotype or typecast other people who don't physically resemble them. But it put off people who didn't fit into a particular paradigm and, hey, why put people off? Why not make the game more 'inclusive'?

What, then, could be the reason for the counter-reaction? Let's again put the case at its strongest and with its most charitable interepretation. It has I think three distinct limbs, though these interrelate for reasons which will be obvious. 

The first is that people can smell a rat with respect to the way in which companies like Wizards of the Coast operate. There is absolutely nothing genuine or principled about the way representative diversity is put into effect at the commercial level - it is happening simply because D&D for a long time had a core market of nerdy straight white adolescent boys and that market is in relative terms getting smaller and smaller. The diversity is there because of entirely cynical reasons - it isn't because Wizards of the Coast are a charitable foundation trying to improve race relations across the Western world, or making their own game more inclusive because they're just such nice guys. Fake sincerity is grating to everyone, and some people (I include myself in this) have a fine-tuned sensitivity against it.

The second is that nerds are nerds, and some nerds care about things 'making sense' in particular ways. Until very recently in human history most societies simply were not racially diverse in anything like the way they are now. And so something feels 'off' about presenting fantasy medieval societies as looking, in racial terms, like a cosmopolitan modern city. Similarly, there have never been human societies in which men and women's roles have been exactly the same and not in any way, to use modern parlance, 'gendered'. Here, the opposition mainly comes from a position of a desire for verissimilitude. The standard response to this - 'This is a game with magic and dragons in, so why do you care about realism?' - is well-known, but slightly unfair; when it comes to fantasy settings, tastes for the level of realism that different people prefer simply vary. 

The third is that the trouble with trying to increase representative diversity is that it is difficult to do it in such a way as to not appear to be acting sanctimoniously and/or snidely. Too often it comes alongside a (consciously or unconsciously) mean-spirited insinuation: 'You have a problem with this, do you? It's because you're a racist. You are, aren't you?' For people who are perfectly well aware that they have no racist bones in their own bodies, and who have just been innocently enjoying pretending to be an elf for years and have never 'excluded' anybody from anything, there is something galling about being implicitly cast as a villain in this way. And in this regard it bears emphasising that respresentative diversity is very frequently, indeed all too frequently, framed by an assertion that the hobby would just be 'better' in some sense if it was less 'pale, male and stale'. There are only so many occasions on which a person can accept being told that their very presence - or the presence of their type of person - is undesirable before they start to simply get pissed off. And the anger is justified; if everybody is entitled to equal concern and respect, then that means everybody is. 

Both sides in the representative diversity debate, such as it is, therefore have good faith arguments. And when two people are approaching a disagreement from a position of good faith, what tends to happen - if they don't listen to each other properly - is that they start to convince themselves that because their own position is good, the disagreement can only have arisen becaues the other side is bad. They begin to forget that it is possible for people to disagree for good reason. And this makes the disagreement more intractable, because the participants grow more convinced that compromise is undesirable (since compromise with somebody who is definitionally bad can only ever be an unjustified concession). This is, obviously, to be regretted, because it transforms such disagreements into winner-takes-all conflicts when the truth is that the stakes are probably considerably lower than either side realises. A more sensible public discourse is available - in every respect.