Being in the Main the Mouth of Olde House Rules

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

On the Slow Death of Shock...

Okay, so James Raggi, shock maestro of the OSR, offered a clever play on the whole Kids on Bikes game with Kids on Pikes.  Yes, the cover of his GenCon catalog depicts dead children impaled on pikes, seemingly for our amusement.  I've seen worse in real life, and while I find it distasteful in the extreme, I'm not clamoring for censorship.  These things inevitably correct themselves, and James isn't helping himself.  I've never played his game, and the gross marketing tactics don't communicate anything informational.

Dead kids bleeding on wooden pikes!  Will the ideas never cease?  Seriously though, this latest non-controversy does at least invite a conversation about how we're supposed to view violence in games where the whole point is to stick pointy things into others and take their money.  How do we enjoy this and have any issue with Kids on Pikes?    

Birth, sex, and death are part of the human condition and impossible to ignore.  If you’re reading this paragraph, you were born.  And if you aren’t having sex now, the smart money says you’re the product of it (and very likely seeking your next encounter).  Our desire to survive and reproduce is indelibly hardwired, so much so that we omit these things from our narratives to our peril and to the detriment of the concepts we hope to explore...

I get it.  I'm not some prude who wants to play tea party.  Orcs pillage the countryside, slaughtering all in their path.  Lust reduces men to quivering jelly, makes them the lovers of demons (or maybe their own sisters in Caligula's case) and worse yet, predators of the topical sort who populate our news cycles all too often.  Indeed, these realities elevate our fiction and our games, and their omission would suck the humanity out of our efforts and leave a huge, unsatisfying hole in its wake.  Candyland doesn't interest me.


But that's the rub, isn't it?  When do our narratives go from being stories about humanity which just happen to involve death and sex, even if prominently, and when do they become death and sex for its own sake divorced from any context?  This distinction matters...    

So first, let's partition sex and violence.  Sex between consenting adults is nothing to oppose or censor so long as it's basically responsible and hurts no one.  But once it becomes non-consensual it devolves into violence.  And let's extricate death because this, in and of itself, is the natural end of our cycle, however painful it can be to the survivors.  We can disentangle these things and distill that which any considerate human should rightly reject...

Namely, the suffering of others as an end unto itself and offered up as entertainment or a clever marketing strategy.  And this is why I'm ultimately turned off by Kids on Pikes.   

Pain and suffering are things that happen in our narratives.  That doesn't mean we should find them cool or entertaining for their own sake.  Now I totally get that the grindhouse genre playfully exploits blood-spattering gore.  It's basically dark humor, and I was raised on the excellent Creepy and Eerie horror comics of the 1970s.  But these stories were surprisingly moralistic in their approach and never suggested that we should enjoy, much less find humor, in the suffering of helpless innocents, as horrific as they could sometimes be...

Feel free to disagree.  Free country.  For fans of Raggi's work, it's entirely consistent with an unbroken trend and maybe even good marketing.  But for adult gamers, human suffering shouldn't be amusing or diversionary fare.  Not when real children die in depressing numbers every day.  I don't care for (most) Quentin Tarantino movies because only a pampered and protected millionaire would find graphic suffering amusing*.  Again, that's just me.

There's no easy way to partition the fact of violence and the enjoyment of it, especially when the lines are so easily blurred.  We're rightly horrified at actual violence against children, including James Raggi (who obviously doesn't condone it), while simultaneously devouring splatter flicks.  It's the whole duality of man thing.  But live long enough and see enough actual suffering firsthand, and maybe the smile fades a little and we move on; and this is the slow and inevitable "death" of shock.  These tactics will eat themselves alive...

*From Dusk til Dawn and Pulp Fiction were decent, but the victims sort of had it coming!   

20 comments:

  1. Good to see you on the blog!

    I've always found Raggi puerile and dull. Juvenile body horror that broadcasts how little he actually knows of the subject. Like you, I've seen enough of the river of misery to roll my eyes at his silliness.

    Kids on Pikes. Cute.

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    1. We're slowly returning to the scene. Great to hear from you!

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    2. I don't even know what or where this scene is anymore. Your blog (and about three or four others) still land in my email.

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    3. I sense that we're all trying to push a revival after the collective shock of G+ ending. Let's hope it works...

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  2. There are numerous people - perhaps 25% - who have no sense of humor at all. They take everything literally.

    For instance they see this and think “James Raggi literally wants kids impaled!”

    I don’t find the image funny but it is clearly satire. It does not call for censorship. So few things actually do, and a stupid joke is not one of them.

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    1. Yeah, I think reasonable people can sort this stuff out...

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  3. It's pretty much on brand for LotFP, which is, after all firmly in the dark unspeakable horror school of fantasy gaming. In a lot of his modules the only way to win is not to play (because a bad death is far too common). As people have mentioned, it's normally the model/character drinking the cocktail that ends up horribly wounded and disfigured from her adventuring career in the illustrations. So it does actually inform people of the nature of the game.

    I think a lot of the furor is a dislike of Raggi himself (especially due to the company he kept/supported), rather than any proposed shock value of the cover. But then I've seen worse things in real life, so am not particularly worked up over a piece of art.

    [Although someone has also pointed out that it may actually have been intended as a commentary on Stranger Things, rather than the Kids on Bikes RPG. Which I do believe is a valid observation, and actually makes a lot more sense than picking on a relatively obscure RPG. Especially since I don't believe (but could be wrong since I try not to pay attention to personality squabbles) taht there is any point of contention between Raggi and the authors of Kids on Bikes. ]

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    1. Maybe so, although Kids on Bikes, Kids on Pikes is a pretty direct (and clever) play on words. The game is based on Stranger Things, though, so there's six degrees of separation as far as that goes...

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  4. I have always thought Raggi, and Tarantino, childish and foolish. For those who have seen true horror, their juvenile attempts to shock us are gross and disgusting, at best, foolish and ignorant at worst.

    I see this is nothing but an attempt to remain relevant in light of the missteps that he's made in the last year with regard to his arthaus fanbase.

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    1. We've both been there and come away feeling the same...

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  5. Maybe Raggi is right. If we are offended by this image then we should be offended by these games we play which at heart involves running around killing things and taking their stuff. If this is true then fuck tabletop rpgs. Kids on pikes is nothing more than the ugly soul of the OSR revealing itself. All of our critics are right, we're just a bunch of aging, anti-social misanthropes who should have never come out of the basement. You, me, and all of our friends are genuinely terrible people.

    Now with all that in mind, good luck getting a game together. Good luck getting artists and writers and game designers to risk their time and money creating stuff for a market which is already known for operating on a shoestring budget. Yeah. This is how a phenomenon dies. Raggi may be galvanizing his base but he does so at the expense of everyone else with these tricks of his.

    Personally, I don't believe it. I think there is a big difference between hunting down orcs that have been terrorizing the countryside and children impaled on poles. Censor him? No. Let the world see him for what he is, but also let the world know that the success of LotFP doesn't represent the rest of us.

    Or does it?

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    1. I think there's a definite difference. And I've been part of a thriving scene while pretty much ignoring LotFP...

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    2. Seems like a ridiculous overreaction, people actually harming children, yes they are horrendous and should be dealt with according to the full extent of the law. Someone using a--not particularly realistic--image of some impaled children on the front of a book, is it tasteless and designed to shock? Yes of course, it's LOTFP, that's pretty much their shtick, in the same way it is for numerous horror directors, fiction writers, etc.

      As for the mere existence of such a piece of work damning the OSR, tabletop RPGs and everyone who plays them - that's a vast overreaction. If you're not a fan of the picture, Raggi or LOTFP, fine, you can show that by not purchasing their produce - it's up to each individual to decide what they are offended by and choose to support, it's not their job to tell me or anyone else what they should be offended by.

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  6. Ugh. When did all these people turn into Tipper Gore? It’s just a dumb painting. It doesn’t say anything about any of us.

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    1. I think most are just ignoring it, which is a fate worse than death for the shock jock. On to the next drama...

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  7. I'd rather have kids scared straight at a convention booth than when they hit the front and realize war is not a game. In that regard, I don't even think Kids on Pikes qualified (it's good satire, imo, showing that the cozy stories that Stranger Things feeds the public can go wrong ...). So in a way, I think you are missing the point, this is not about what you have seen and the conclusions you had to draw from it, it's about those who haven't had that experience and offering an opportunity to talk about it. And the randomness of it? That's why Tarantino was so successful. It is authentic and something literature did looong before Tarantino managed to evoke it on the big screen. Don't get me wrong, I think both sides are needed: those pushing the limit of what's acceptable and those pushing back. So the discussion is necessary. However, to assume that this will ever stop producing drama is missing that it's a necessary part of public discourse and how it is resolved (or even possible) is a sign how healthy or not a society is. I, for one, am happy that people like Raggi exist and can do their thing ...

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  8. This was well stated. On one hand, I believe in James Raggi's right to put out shock material, and see this move as an actually clever bid at marketing his brand - a bunch of people were ready to write him off, and one image later, everyone is talking about it. He knows his business, and I believe he has a personal integrity of sorts.

    On a personal level, though, I find the aesthetic dull and played out. You can go there once, twice... maybe even three times. But like Tarantino's work after Pulp Fiction, the initial shock fades, and it turns out a lot of it was just bluster and hokum. Nobody cares about Tipper Gore anymore, and the new kids are into vore and fascism. Where everything is permitted, nothing is meaningful. The next big thing will be a sort of New Earnestness.

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  9. An acceptable aesthetic can be decided individually. However, my experience points to this "shocking" style being a sign of a fascination with intimidation. If you wanted to put a glossy spin on a besmeared deathtrap pretending to be an OSR adventure, you'd advertise with lurid and gory stuff to pull in dollars/hype.

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  10. I find it somewhat disingenuous of the publisher to publish a book with a shocking, horrific cover, and then complain when people react to it with a degree of shock and horror. There are some people who will always react negatively to the depiction of violence towards children. To claim surprise when it happens seems naive or deceptive.

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