Quote from: jhkim;450055Third, there are no censorship boards in tabletop RPG publishing.  From what I've seen, overwhelmingly if there is negative response to an explicit RPG, it is from segments of the fans.  i.e. We don't have much sexual material because fans seem to not want sexual material, not because it is being censored out of the books and kept away from demanding customers.

I think that's partially because a lot of those people are programmed to think "this is not ok," especially since you don't see that sort of reaction in other media industries.  It's also a shrinking industry with relatively narrow tastes in content (when it comes to games that actually sell).

Like I mentioned before, I'm not a fan of Ren & Stimpy.  I'm also not a fan of gory films (or games, or whatever).  I can directly attribute that to two factors:

1) Going to Catholic school through elementary

2) Being raised in a household where gory, R rated horror movies were verboten until I was in my mid-teens, even when some of my friends were watching them at much younger ages.

Even after years of being exposed to them, those sorts of raunchy, violence for the sake of violence, gross-out films and games just don't do it for me, even if other people find them entertaining.  I won't even touch tabletop games like Dread because I just find that type of focus on violence and creep-out-factor repulsive.  Movies like SAW I find sickening, but I know plenty of well-adjusted people who like them.

I especially like the pirate radio analogy that's come up. A little more swashbuckling panache is called for.

Quote from: D-503;449882Edit: The Right isn't a monolith. Some cared only about economics. Some cared a very great deal about social issues (some more than they did about economics). Like all movements it's a broad church. That said I'd say more care about social issues than don't.

IME the Thatcherite Right shared with the classical Marxists the assumption that economics determines everything.  They read Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" but ignore his "Political Constitution of a Free People".  The vast bulk of the British Right have Capitalism as their sole ideology, they may get an initial 'yuck' reaction to the latest cultural Marxist stuff, but they adapt soon enough.  Social values stuff, or really any concern with societal wellbeing beyond economics, seems very much a minority pursuit - Ian Duncan Smith is as much an outsider in the Tories as Frank Field is/was in New Labour.

Quote from: D-503;449882I don't recall bare breasts being remotely common in the 1970s and '80s on British tv.

Post-watershed comedy - Spike Milligan, Hale & Pace, I recall one Fast Show episode.  Maybe "common" would be exaggerating.  I recall Channel 4 broadcast the unexpurgated version of the boobs-in-every-episode US comedy "Dream On" - happy days for a teenage S'mon!  

Quote from: Esgaldil;449586When he dismisses White Wolf as "so compromised by branding and target marketing as to nullify any actual underground content or importance", though, I have no idea what he's talking about.  Anyone?

Sure, allow me translate from Swine doublespeak to Actual Intentions.  Just like the article as a whole is written to highlight for everyone how "transgressively" hip is Ron himself (and Storygaming/theory swine as a whole are), the shitting on white wolf is to point out that the Storygaming/Theory Swine are actually much more "Legit".  The White Wolf Swine are their direct competition in the Pretentiousness/hipster-edgy arena, Ron made his career out of claiming that White Wolf were not in fact the legitimate intelligentsia of roleplaying, so he needed to demonize them as "posers", whereas he and  his cronies are the real "Beat Poets of gaming" on the real  cutting edge.

Its why White Wolf could get away with making games about gothy types in black leather and obscure bondage references, while Forge games have to go full-bore into the territory of being about playing pedarastic necrophiliac fantasies.  Its because to them, whoever is "edgier" wins.

This article, in other words, is both a pathetic attempt to claim that the open degeneracy and bottom-feeding of the Forge is somehow the "original intent" in RPGs, and at the same time a desperate plea to try to claim some kind of lingering relevance in the face of the Forge's failure and collapse.

RPGpundit

Quote from: Seanchai;449894Spartacus, when it was all about titillation (get the pun?) was dumb. It didn't become good until it started focusing less on T&A and more on story.

Spartacus is fucking terrible. Like, worse than Stargate, or Legend of The Seeker, or that Beastmaster series that came out a few years ago. Every minute I've spent watching Spartacus is a minute I wished I spent watching Rome, and worse (given the focus of the show) I'd pick every single character on Rome in a fight over every single candy-ass backflipping gym-muscled character on Spartacus, up to and including Octavia and young Augustus Caesar, tridents, nets, the whole nine yards, though of course everybody in Spartacus TWFs and shit.

That new Camelot series, on the other hand, that is actually pretty badass so far.

Quote from: Simlasa;450064The boobies are just symbolic...
Going from what I've heard/seen/read... creative folks in general, given the choice, would rather work in an environment with fewer constraints of any kind. Give a writer his choice and, given the same budget and pay, my guess he'd rather develop a program for HBO than ABC.
That doesn't mean they all want to write porn.

My point is that boobies are a bad symbol, because racier/edgier content doesn't mean less creative constraints.  It just means a different target audience.  For every producer/editor who blocks racy/edgy material, there is a producer/editor who demands that the story be "spiced up" with more racy/edgy material to help it sell.  I have no idea about whether artists have more control in an HBO program or an ABC program.  

Regarding RPG fans rejection of sexually explicit material...

Quote from: Peregrin;450074I think that's partially because a lot of those people are programmed to think "this is not ok," especially since you don't see that sort of reaction in other media industries.  It's also a shrinking industry with relatively narrow tastes in content (when it comes to games that actually sell).

Sure, we are all partly products of our environment and culture, but I think this applies just as much to our taste in erotic and/or gross material as anything else.  I don't think that following Ron Edwards' call to have more nudity and racy material would make us any less programmed.

Quote from: jhkim;450157Regarding RPG fans rejection of sexually explicit material...

  I don't think that following Ron Edwards' call to have more nudity and racy material would make us any less programmed.

I wouldn't go quite so far as that. Yes, there's a built in biological factor that very definitely affects our judgements, and no one is entirely immune to it's influence, however to say we collectively are programmed is simply fiction.

It's a surrender of  free will, choice, and reason, to passion, preference, and circumstance.

Sexual obsession is a recurrent failure (pattern) to resist impulses to engage in acts of sex. It's defined and treated medically as an addiction that has many ties to repeatedly and compulsively escaping emotional or physical discomfort.

RPG's are often played for enjoyment, amusement, and pleasure as well, but the difference is that RPGs are recreation, leisure, a healthy refreshing of the mind and body, it allows for individuals to consider and reflect on the values and realities that are missed in the activities of daily life, thus being an essential element of personal development, and of civilization.

All that is broken when RPGs themselves become the obsession, or sole focus, or single reason, and especially broken when it is also mixed with the failure to resist impulses to engage in acts of sex.

Quote from: jhkim;450055From what I've seen, overwhelmingly if there is negative response to an explicit RPG, it is from segments of the fans.  i.e. We don't have much sexual material because fans seem to not want sexual material, not because it is being censored out of the books and kept away from demanding customers.

Exactly.

I love movies a great many movies and TV shows with explicit sex, but I don't want it in my RPGs for a couple of reason.

Reason 1: We know the kind of fringe groups that would enjoy this sort of thing a little too much.  I want nothing to do with those people nor do I want to be publicly identified as being in the same subculture as them.  We've already seen what happens when you head down that path (furries).

Reason 2: It's just icky.  I do not want to be discussing anything remotely sexual with the people I game with.  It'd be one thing if I was running game night down at a sorority house or whatever, but with the group I have I can't think of anything more vomit-inducing that having to discuss anything sexual.  The turn-off factor there approaches "talking about sex with your grandma" level.

Quote from: jgants;450168Exactly.

I love movies a great many movies and TV shows with explicit sex, but I don't want it in my RPGs for a couple of reason.

Reason 1: We know the kind of fringe groups that would enjoy this sort of thing a little too much.  I want nothing to do with those people nor do I want to be publicly identified as being in the same subculture as them.  We've already seen what happens when you head down that path (furries).

Reason 2: It's just icky.  I do not want to be discussing anything remotely sexual with the people I game with.  It'd be one thing if I was running game night down at a sorority house or whatever, but with the group I have I can't think of anything more vomit-inducing that having to discuss anything sexual.  The turn-off factor there approaches "talking about sex with your grandma" level.

Even in games I've run or been in with mature themes, the sex stuff is always off camera, because the players don't want to describe sex acts to each other, or role play an encounter. I recently ran a modern mafia campaign where the PCs were soldiers that made a lot of money in prostitution. All the sexually graphic stuff was behind the scenes. My sense is that this kind of content is fine, but few people want to go into details at the gaming table.

"my" D&D has nudity and graphic violence in the art; the actual mechanics regarding either are largely left to the imagination of the DM and player.

I wouldn't care a fig about their obvious removal in later D&Ds if it wasn't so pathetically obvious (particularly with the TSR standards and practices letter that got out) or the "side-boob-hey-we're-still-racy" artwork of 3rd edition.

But insisting that the solution is to go the other way as hard as possible just makes you into FATAL or the Book of Erotic Fantasy - IOW, goddamn fucking stupid and ridiculous.

Which is what Ron Edwards uses to pass as noteworthiness and forward thinking so...touche to him.

Quote from: jhkim;450157I don't think that following Ron Edwards' call to have more nudity and racy material would make us any less programmed.

Or cause us to produce more creative material. Or magically return us to the late 70s and early 80s.

Seanchai

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;450179Even in games I've run or been in with mature themes, the sex stuff is always off camera, because the players don't want to describe sex acts to each other, or role play an encounter. I recently ran a modern mafia campaign where the PCs were soldiers that made a lot of money in prostitution. All the sexually graphic stuff was behind the scenes. My sense is that this kind of content is fine, but few people want to go into details at the gaming table.

I completely agree.  It's not that the subject never comes up in my games, it's just that it's hinted at rather than explicit.  For example, the first session of my Rifts game involved saving one of the PCs from a biker gang intent on kidnapping her and making her into their slave.  But we didn't go into anything with it, it was just implied.

Hinting at is one thing.  Graphic exploitation is another.

Quote from: Seanchai;450194Or cause us to produce more creative material. Or magically return us to the late 70s and early 80s.

I always thought the general consensus was that graphic exploitation was the result of a lack of creativity.  The whole theory of grind house, blaxploitation, slasher horror, etc was that the people weren't all that creative at what they did and added a bunch of graphic violence and sex to make up for it.

Quote from: Simlasa;450069That's true, but I don't know any artists that purposefully go looking for projects with lots of constraints on content.

Help me out here: how does their looking for constraints or not matter if, as we agree, constrained or not, whether an artist will produce in a particular environment is dependent on the particular artist?

Moreover, the writers are HBO are constrained. First and foremost, like network TV, they face budgetary constraints. They can't script anything they want - they have to be reasonable about what they put in the script because someone has to pay for it. Second, there's a line even at HBO. Nudity, coarse language, and violence may be on the acceptable side of the line, but the line still exists.

Certainly, as HBO writers can use nudity, coarse language, and violence, they face fewer constraints. There are three, in fact: they can use nudity, coarse language, and more graphic violence.

But in the end all that is meaningless.

We noted that creatives aren't necessarily less creative with constraints. As we know, there are plenty of creative projects - TV shows, movies, books, comics, et al. - that don't use nudity, coarse language, and graphic violence.

And I suspect HBO's acclaim in the quality department comes from factors other than the nudity, coarse language, and violence of their shows. For example, they have a stable of far fewer shows and thus are able to spend more time, money, and effort on each. As a premium channel, I imagine their budgets are bigger. And, as people have to pay for their channel, they really have no choice but to make sure everything they offer is excellent.

(In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the constraints on HBO writers is that they have to use nudity, coarse language, or graphic violence as that's what people pay for.)

But really we're talking about what's more creative, material with or without adult content, not HBO.

Here's a quick litmus test: Are R rated movies always or usually better than PG-13, PG, and G movies? If Edward's theory holds true, the R rated movies, which are less constrained, should be consistently more creative, etc., than other movies.

Of course, that isn't the case. There are plenty of R rated stinkers. And there are plenty of great G, PG, and PG-13 movies.

Seanchai

So the little boys who couldn't get laid in high school have become the adults who fear sexual images?

How not surprising.