This is a very, very, very basic introduction to the question of race from a historical perspective. If you’ve studied any world history, human genetics, or even just had your eyes open in the past decade, there’s probably nothing here you don’t already know. Everything I have to say has been said before, so why say it again? I have two reasons.
First, there are some more obscure and complicated things I want to talk about concerning race and history and it would be useful to have some basic points covered for future reference.
Second, there are some people who don’t know the basics of race, even some very intelligent people (even some Supreme Court justices), so it can’t hurt to say these things again.
What happens when the World of Warcraft meets Game of Thrones? Wonderful, wonderful things. Check out Marc Ottensmann’s beautiful intro to Azeroth, GoT-style.
Game of Thrones Intro: World of Warcraft (World of Thrones) via Marc Ottensmann
Thunder Bluff is my favorite (but then Thunder Bluff has always been my favorite city in WoW).
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
The wisest thing I ever heard said about the Muppets (and just how often do you get to use that phrase, anyway?) came from a college classmate. This was back in the heyday of Muppet movies based on classic literature: you know, Muppet Treasure Island, Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppet Wizard of Oz, and the like. One evening over zucchini and pasta in the dining hall a bunch of us were complaining about how the contemporary Muppet oeuvre was so disappointing to those of us who had grown up watching the original Muppet Show on tv.
“I don’t want to see Muppets be actors,” someone said. “I want to see Muppets be Muppets.”
Well, there’s a new Muppet show on tv this fall. I haven’t seen any episodes, but here’s the trailer for the show.
I know a lot can happen between the proof-of-concept pitch for a show and when it actually goes on the air, but to me this looks like Muppets being actors. It’s Muppet The Office. Muppet 30 Rock. That’s not what I’m interested in watching.
Now, to be fair, the old Muppet Show was far from perfect. We’ve been rewatching some of it via Netflix lately; a lot of the material was already dated at the time and it hasn’t aged well. On the other hand there are things that transcend time and shine as brightly now as they did forty years ago. Mahna Mahna, for instance, is one perfectly formed comic gem.
Check out this Hugga Wugga sketch and watch how even a fuzzy purple alien can experience pride, anger, confusion, exasperation, smugness, surprise, fury, and shock.
The Muppets just aren’t what they used to be, but don’t despair. There are other places to find the three keys of Muppetociousness. Here are some of the true heirs to the Muppet mantle:
Community
Ostensibly a sit-com about community college students, Community flirts with chaos and pushes the boundaries of what a sit-com can do while staying grounded in the emotional reality of the characters. Here’s how a friendly game of paintball goes down at Greendale Community College.
The claymation studio that brought us Chicken Run and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit knows how to make wonderful comedy out of such ordinary things as a dog who’s at the end of his rope trying to deal with mischievous little bunnies.
I don’t think all of Pixar’s work quite measures up to the best of the Muppets, but sometimes they can really deliver the goods. Here’s one to take you all the way back.
Well, no I don’t actually want one. I don’t have room for one to begin with, and I don’t live in the right climate anyway. That doesn’t change the fact that iwans are cool. Literally.
An iwan is a large room with a vaulted ceiling that has walls on three sides and the fourth side open to the air. They were built in the heat of Mesopotamia to create large shady spaces that were still open to light and air. The earliest iwans are thought to have been constructed under the Parthian empire in the first or second centuries CE. One of the earliest examples to survive into modern times was at Ctesiphon on the Tigris River, built by the Sasanian empire in the sixth century CE. Unfortunately, the building fell into poor repair over time and was destroyed by wars in the twentieth century, but in these old photographs you can still see enormous vaulted space.
Sasanian iwan, from Wonders of the Past vol. 2 via Wikimedia (photograph 1864). Note the people standing on top of the roof vault for a sense of scale.Photograph of the same iwan from half a century later showing ongoing decay via Wikimedia (photograph currently San Diego Air and Space Museum)
The only living Judean date palm, at Kibbutz Ketura, Israel, photograph by Benjitheijneb via Wikimedia
The Judean date palm was a plant of great economic and cultural importance in the ancient Mediterranean. It grew extensively in Judea where it provided shade for people and livestock and its fruit was used for food and medicine. By the modern period, devastation in war and a changing climate had wiped out the trees. Then in the 1960s a two-thousand-year-old seed cache turned up in excavations at the palace of Herod the Great. The seeds sat in storage for another forty years until an attempt was made to cultivate some of them. Amazingly, one of the seeds germinated and grew. In a few more years, we get to find out what ancient Judean dates tasted like. If further efforts to breed the Judean palm with some of its nearest living relatives are successful, modern Judean date palms could return to the Mediterranean.
This story is a few years old, but I only stumbled across it recently. It’s wonderful that some things we once thought lost can come back.
Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!
One of my weaknesses as a writer is dialogue, particularly dialogue that needs to carry subtext. I’m not good at writing the kinds of things that people say when they’re not actually saying what they’re saying. When I need inspiration for how to write a scene in which people say one thing while really conveying something else, the place I look is the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon in book 1 of the Iliad (lines 101-244).
There are a lot of good translations of the Iliad available if you want to check it out. I’m especially fond of the Robert Fagels translation for the strength of its poetry. Richmond Lattimore’s version is good if you really want to get close to the rhythms and patterns of the original Greek. The translation on Perseus is older and less readable, but you can pick up the scene I’m talking about around the middle of this page (start after [100]). There are plenty of other choices.
To set the scene: As the Iliad opens, the Trojan war has been going on for ten years and has come to a stalemate. The Greeks are not able to breach the high walls of Troy while the Trojans cannot dislodge the Greeks from their camp on the shore. To break the impasse, the Greeks have begun trying to put pressure on the Trojans by raiding the smaller towns nearby that are allied with Troy. One of these raids carried off a young woman, Chryseis, who was awarded to Agamemnon as his prize. Chryseis’ father Chryses, a priest of Apollo, comes to the Greek camp to ask for his daughter’s return, but Agamemnon refuses and sends him away. Chryses prays to Apollo for aid and Apollo obliges by spreading plague through the Greek camp. After ten days of suffering, the Greek kings gather together to discuss the situation. The seer Chalcas reveals the cause of Apollo’s wrath.
So, you’re game-mastering a tabletop role-playing game and your player characters decide to spread out around town and see if they can pick up any useful information about their current quest. How do you handle it?
There are lots of things you can do. If there’s some info you need to dump on them, now’s the time to hand it over. Or if you want them to just head out into the wilderness and figure it out as they go, you tell them that no one knows anything. You can always just make stuff up off the top of your head. Like with most GMing tasks, as long as your players have a good time, there’s no wrong way to do it. Here’s a tool that might make your job a little easier, though: the rumor table.
When I’m planning an adventure and I know that my players are going to have a chance to snoop around and ask questions, I like to prepare a rumor table for what they might find out. The table is a mix of true and false information that is more or less helpful. I plan it for a roll of 2d6 (you can make it bigger or smaller depending on your needs, but I find a 2d6 table covers most cases). For the numbers 2-12, come up with the following tidbits of information:
2 – False, and potentially disastrous if the player characters believe it
3 & 4 – False
5 & 6 – False but with a grain of truth, such as true information that has been garbled or misinterpreted
7 – Equal parts true and false
8 & 9 – True
10 & 11 – True and probably helpful to the characters at the moment
12 – True and very important
Suppose your campaign is The Lord of the Rings and your characters are meeting for the first time at the Council of Elrond in Rivendell. (I mean, imagine a world in which The Lord of the Rings isn’t a famous novel and movie trilogy that your players already know but is your campaign that you wrote and they are playing through for the first time.)
Here’s what your table might look like:
2 – Saruman is secretly on the side of good
3 – Elves from Lothlorien have been attacking outlying villages on the borders of Rohan
4 – Moria is abandoned and free of orcs
5 – Smeagol has been sighted in Mirkwood heading east towards Dale
6 – Rohan pays a tribute of horses to Sauron for the ringwraiths to ride
7 – Denethor of Gondor has a palantir but he refuses to look into it
8 – The Dunedain rangers were searching for Smeagol not long ago
9 – Saruman has ordered the destruction of Fangorn forest
10 – Wargs have been spotted in great numbers in the wildlands south of Rivendell
11 – Theoden king of Rohan has become weak and listless and lets his advisers make most decisions
12 – A balrog lurks in the depths of Moria
There are some advantages to using a rumor table. For one thing, it takes some of the pressure off you to come up with the perfect responses in the moment. Like mapping a dungeon ahead of time, it lets you prepare in advance. It’s also a convenient way of rewarding your players for good role-playing or taking the characters’ advantages into account. If the PC has a charisma bonus and the player does a good job role-playing the asking around, you don’t have to puzzle out just how much better information they should get; it’s easy to just give them a +2 on the rumor roll.
Another good thing about using the rumor table, if your players know that you have one, is it short-circuits the “it must be important or the GM wouldn’t have told us” metagaming. Your players have to think carefully and evaluate the information they get, just like their characters would have to do.
Now, of course, it’s a tool, not a rule. Use it with discretion. If the character your PCs happen to be talking to wouldn’t know (or wouldn’t say) the answer you roll, don’t use it. Either go up or down the table or make up something different. If there are things that your characters really need to know at a given point in the adventure, then that’s what you give them. (You can always roll the dice anyway, so they don’t know when they’re getting plot-critical stuff.)
Happy rumor-mongering!
Image by Erik Jensen
Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.
Aerial view of Dún Aonghasa, photograph by Ronan Mac Giollopharaic via Wikimedia
While doing some research on northern European hillforts recently, I found myself looking at some pictures of Dún Aonghasa (also known as Dun Aengus). It’s an impressive site. The fort is a series of concentric half-rings backing up onto 100-meter cliffs on the island on Inishmore off the western coast of Ireland. The earliest construction on the site has been dated to around 1100 BCE. Later additions were made around 500 BCE. It is one of the largest well-preserved examples of a type of structure that was built throughout northern and western Europe, from Spain to Sweden, in the prehistoric era.
The “cheveaux de frise,” a barrier of jagged stones set up to slow down attackers, photograph by Herbert Ortner via Wikimedia
There has been disagreement in the scholarship about the function of Dún Aonghasa and similar forts. While often identified as fortified settlements, some have suggested that they were actually sites of religious ritual. It has to be said that if Dún Aonghasa and sites like it were religious sanctuaries, they were amazingly well-defended ones. I think it is more likely that sites that were originally built for defense were centuries later repurposed as ceremonial sites, much like how medieval castles built for defense have centuries later become museums and tourist attractions.
The walls of Dún Aonghasa and the cliffs of Inishmore, photograph by Jal74 via Wikimedia
It may be hard to believe that such an enormous fortification was built in so remote a place, but forts like Dún Aonghasa were once fairly common across western and northern Europe. Most, however, have been lost to decay, erosion, and the reuse of stones. It is only in remote places like Inishmore that they still survive.
Thoughts for writers
Just a simple thought today: the world is full of interesting possibilities. Fortresses don’t have to look like medieval castles. Religious sites don’t have to look like cathedrals or Greek temples. History is huge and there are amazing things out there to inspire your imagination.
History for Writers is a weekly feature which looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool. From worldbuilding to dialogue, history helps you write. Check out the introduction to History for Writershere.
Lots of women play video games, and lots of gamers are women. This is not news, yet for some reason we have to keep saying it.
The august Pew Research Center was the most recent group to say it. Here’s their Teens, Technology, and Friendships report from earlier this month about how teens use games, among other online services, to connect with one another. Among many other findings, 84% of teenage boys reported playing video games, as did 59% of teenage girls. All teens reported playing a wide variety of different types of games (which is to say: no, all those teenage girl gamers are not just poking at Barbie Sparkle Kardashian Krush on their phones; they’re doing everything from hacking up orcs in World of Warcraft to building imperial star destroyers in Minecraft).
So, if there are so many women playing games, why don’t male gamers see them? The results of another recent study, Insights into Sexism: Male Status and Performance Moderates Female-Directed Hostile and Amicable Behavior by Michael M. Kasumovic and Jeffery H. Kuznekoff showed that male gamers (specifically playing Halo 3) tended to be more aggressive and abusive in voice chat to players who sounded female than those who sounded male. Also not news. Anyone who’s spent time in any online chat environment is likely to have seen the kind of dreck that gets spewed at women who let their identities be known, so it’s understandable that many female gamers choose to conceal their gender when in mixed company.
The Kasumovic and Kuznekoff study offers another interesting detail, however. The abuse directed at the female-voiced player came primarily from male players who were performing poorly, while men who were doing well at the game tended to be positive or neutral in their comments.
I see three important takeaways from these two studies:
There are women in your games. In fact, if you play a multiplayer game, they are all around you. Just because you don’t know they are there doesn’t mean they aren’t. If you don’t hear women’s voices, it only means that the environment is toxic enough that many women choose to stay silent rather than have to deal with it.
The men who harass women in games are not doing it mindlessly or randomly. They are not equal-opportunity dirt-spewers but target women specifically because they are trying to reassert their position in a hierarchy. The people most invested in any hierarchy are not the ones at the top but the ones who are afraid of falling to the bottom.
If you are a male gamer and you want to look like you’re at the top of your game: don’t spew crap at the women around you. Good gamers are decent to their fellow players. The only ones who feel the need to put others down are the scrubs who can’t cut it.
Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.
The Roman empire had a problem. It was just too big. When a crisis developed on one frontier, it could take weeks for the emperor to hear about it, then months or even years to move troops and supplies into position to deal with it. The large frontier army consumed supplies which had to be delivered at great expense from the agricultural heartlands. The roads built by the Roman army helped make all this travel faster and easier, but if the Romans had built railroads they could have made it much easier still. A Roman empire with railroads might not have fallen apart in the fifth century CE. So why didn’t the Romans build them?
The obvious answer is that they didn’t have the technology of steam power, nor the resources of coal and iron needed to build a functioning railroad. It’s a good answer, but like many such obvious answers it’s missing something.
This is a very, very, very basic introduction to the question of race from a historical perspective. If you’ve studied any world history, human genetics, or even just had your eyes open in the past decade, there’s probably nothing here you don’t already know. Everything I have to say has been said before, so why say it again? I have two reasons.
Co-Geeking 
