Friday, May 12, 2023

problematic critique


James removed the identifying information when he posted this tweet thread to facebook. A tweet is a public statement, so I don't see any reason to do that.

Even when I am not a fan of the work itself, I have nothing but admiration for people who try to make a go in the RPG industry. You really have to bust ass pushing the boulder uphill to pay the bills. That's why I find it problematic as fuck that a small game company (it's just two people, as far as I can tell) would decide after the fact to rob a freelancer of the credit they are due. It seems like the message that sends to future freelancers is that Leyline are willing to do the same if, at some point, the publisher decides that they don't like you.  I dunno, maybe I'm being a crazy lefty worried about the rights of a worker in the face of corporate ownership.

"Corporate ownership" is a harsh term for a two-person garage band of a game company, but I stand by it. After all, they could have dropped the editor without pushing them into the Leyline Press memory hole. They could have stood by them and said "Hey, freelancing is hard and you got to take work where you can get it sometimes." Or they could have said, "We know our editor has some fucked up stuff in their credits. We know they have a gig with that bastard James Raggi right now. Some cowards and cheapskates are urging us to drop our editor like a hot potato. But we can do better. We've decided to help them shake off these bad gigs by hiring them full time/throwing more work their way/paying a better rate. That's how you improve the RPG scene, by investing in better outcomes." Instead, they chose the Hasbro Wizards option.

The first tweet of the thread is a fascinating artifact, by the way. If I was teaching a composition class right now I would build a lesson around it. Why the choice of the preposition "on," for starters? What does it mean to work on LotFP as opposed to for or with? Is this word choice the result of a clumsy attempt to come in under the character limit, or is something else going on here? Does Leyline Press even know what a Lamentations of the Flame Princess is? Hard to tell with that "on" in play. Maybe they are just replicating the rumor mill at several removes from anyone who has actually read any of LotFP's output.

Furthermore, it's a sly rhetorical trick to not explain what is wrong with LotFP but to immediately juxtapose it with "other problematic works that have received widespread critique for bigoted and other harmful issues." This creates an association between the two in the audience's mind, whether true or not. This is one of the tricks that venues like Fox News use to convince folks that mainstream democrats like Joe Biden are pinko commies. So, well played. I guess.

While I've got my teaching hat on, I would deducts points from this piece for its reliance on the term problematic. Better yet, I'd send it back for revision. Here's my comment from James's facebook post:

I regret the day problematic escaped out of academic discourse and into the wild. In grad school problematic meant "hey, this looks kinda fucked up, so we should slow down and pay attention to it and figure out what it means." Nobody slows down on the internet. Nobody tries to understand.

The way problematic is used in public now seems to be "this is fucked up and I am running away from it." Which is fine, I guess. Language changes over time. But it seems to me that what liberals have achieved with problematic is the same sort of politically self-serving bastardization that the right has applied to the term "woke."

And this is going out on a limb, since I don't really know what the "other problematic works" are, but I will hazard a guess that they have sustained criticism but not much in the way of actual critique. Criticism is about the critic's agenda. "The magic deer in Blue Rose promotes the fantasy that authoritarianism can work and is therefore bad" is a criticism based upon my personal politics. Critique is based upon the creator's agenda. "Broodmother Skyfortress lacks an extended example of how to apply the various re-skinnings offered as options, and thus fails its avowed project as an introductory module" would be a critique.

Finally, can I just say that I find it problematic (in the academic sense) that the Leyline Press blog contains a fic with openly stated themes of "grotesque body horror, torture, dehumanization, bestiality, pregnancy, sexual situations, and non-consent?" Can we talk about that? It feeds into my (admittedly paranoid) theory that liberals believe that you can create any kind of fucked up art that you want, so long as you are willing to make your own personal identity as a victim part of your artistic persona. If James wrote and published the exact same text, would he be put on blast? I suspect so.

Anyway, the LotFP sale is still a thing. There's never been a cheaper time to form your own opinion about what Raggi chooses to publish.

20 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:12 AM

    Isn't it illegal to remove a guy's name from a product he worked on like that? I thought you had a right under copyright law to be recognized as the creator of any and all of your work? I swear Hollywood got in trouble for this a man's age ago and this is why every key grip and boom operator is in the credits of a film now.

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    1. If it's a work for hire they can pretty much do whatever they want with it and do not have to credit you at all unless it's someplace in your contract.

      Delete
    2. Anonymous7:59 PM

      Every name at the end of a film was included after negotiations with different unions over the years, often in place of a larger paycheck.

      Delete
    3. Anonymous12:01 AM

      There is an extension of Copyright known as Moral Rights, in which an author has attribution rights (among other things).

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

      Delete
  2. Leyline is based in the UK. I know nothing about the copyright laws there.

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  3. Anonymous9:17 AM

    Well, I don't know much about their laws either, but I did think that copyright law was harmonized all over the western world and that was the excuse Disney used to extend their grip on Steamboat Willie.

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  4. Well said, Jeff.

    From that initial statement, I suspect that these people probably haven't even read any LotFP stuff and fall into that annoying "I don't know the company but I've heard it's bad" camp that keeps popping up, which makes it even worse, probably.

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    1. That was me goofing in your blog, by the way. You don't owe 25 cents of anything, given how cheaply I just purchased your latest stuff!

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    2. I can guarantee that they are familiar with Lamentations given I played in a one shot game run by Panny from Leyline that was a Greek mythology inspired island hexcrawl using a hacked version of the LotFP rules.

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  5. Some of stuff the Raggi publishes is puerile, brutal, and adolescent, some of it isn't; most of the offical LoTFP publications I've seen have been pretty good quality overall. I've never seen a political voice that judged other people or put them down and there's a lot less ever-present sexism relative to other works.

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  6. If you want to claim a work is problematic, you have to prove it created or exacerbated a real problem that didn't exist before. Otherwise you're just lying.

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    1. Ironically, a lot of what certain people would call "problematic" is not a problem at all. In fact, it's the reverse!

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    2. Graham3:35 PM

      The world is backwards right now. Like Leonard Cohen said, "we've overturned the order of our souls." Luckily there are people waking up to that fact. It's a point of pride to "be problematic" in a problematic world.

      Delete
  7. Croaker3:55 PM

    I barely even acknowledge statements that contain the word "problematic" anymore. Far too often, its meaning has changed to become, "A lot of people don't like that opinion or position, and now I'm uncomfortable and don't have the balls to just agree to disagree and move on."

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  8. Never choose the WotC Hasbro option!

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  9. Anonymous5:00 PM

    Are you going to post about Zack’s current devastating loss?

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    Replies
    1. He and I haven't discussed his legal battles in a bit. I'll check with him. If you got news, share it, anony-wuss.

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    2. What devastating loss?

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  10. Anonymous8:44 PM

    Problematic is just a weasel word for people who want to say they don't like something but don't want to give specifics that they might have to defend.

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  11. Well said!

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