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Steal Away Jordan
Jun. 3rd, 2008 02:27 am(I'm still going to post about Sunday at Gamex, but this post got overtaken by one game that I bought that day but didn't play. I figured I might as well just give it its own entry, then write up the games I played in a later entry.)
I got up early and headed to the hotel again for my 10 a.m. game. In the time before it started, I headed to the dealer room. I wanted to pick up Steal Away Jordan. I'd meant to pick it up the day before, but I didn't have enough cash on me. I decided to buy the two books that I felt were the most likely to sell out by the next day. I figured that an RPG about slavery would be a slower mover than the indie-darling games about pulp adventures and television.
Steal Away Jordan by Julia Bond Ellingboe made a bit of a splash at last year's Gencon because, well, it's an RPG about slavery. It made people uncomfortable and defensive and excited and curious. I know that I was interested, but ultimately, I didn't feel attracted to the game. It was supposed to generate slave narratives and neo–slave narratives, and while I imagined it did that well, I wasn't interested in role-playing them.
But I kept following it. I'd occasionally check up on the Stone Baby Games blog ,and I'd listen to Ellingboe talk about the game on various RPG-related podcasts. I first started getting interested again when she posted about adopting American Black folklore into the game to create "more folktale than straight slave narrative." That certainly sounded more appealing to me. I mean, I roleplay the myths and folklore of other non-American cultures all the time, and I know I don't know as much about Black folklore as I'd like to.
The real point of understanding came during a podcast (I think it was the Independent Insurgency, but I could be wrong) where Ellingboe talked directly about the connection between slave narratives as African-American folklore, and the protagonists of them as heroes. Superheroes even. In a terrible time, they didn't merely survive (a notable feat of itself). They learned to read and write; they escaped or bought their lives back; they became influential activists. The game started to make sense.
I'd read slave narratives in high school and college, and they were always presented in the same way: as political tracts. They were symbolic; they were arguments directed exclusively to white Americans at the time. We didn't read them to understand the lives and culture of African-Americans, we read them to understand how they affected the political landscape of white abolitionists, white slaveholders, and the white people in the middle. That was the aspect of the "slave-narrative game" that turned me off. I didn't really want to role-play a story that was a political tract, or play in a game that was, by extension, a political-tract-building machine.
I'm not alone in my misreading of slave narratives. In addition to explaining her perspective that "we all own the stories of slaves who survived against all odds," Ellingboe described her refined pitch in an article in See Page XX:
Oh right, because it's an RPG; the characters are our job. All the game is supposed to do is give me a wide berth to let us create the characters that we will find compelling. And while the talk about the game often focused on the things that the player can't control (the GM assigns a name and a "worth" to each player's character), those things pale in comparison to what the player can control: a characters identity, hopes, dreams.
When I finally got past everything and started thinking about what slave narratives meant as, you know, narratives—a part of living history, a part of culture, a part of reality, a part of myth and folklore—well, damn, that's exciting.
Put another way, roleplaying Frederick Douglass as a symbol in a story carefully presented to the white power structure of the nineteenth century: not compelling to me. Roleplaying Frederick Douglass as the supergenius powerhouse who bests the man trying to whip him in a physical struggle lasting two hours: awesome.
And now that I read that passage for the first time since college, I'm thinking how precisely Steal Away Jordan models the conflict between Douglass and Covey. Not just the way Douglass rises as a hero, it also succinctly emphasizes the way characters draw from community (the other theme in the See Page XX article).
When![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ojouchan saw I brought it home, she was excited. She'd been excited about it from the moment I mentioned it last year, back when I still didn't get the game. Now, we're both excited, but for now she's right when she says we'll never be able to get our friends to play it. I mean, right now we can't even organize a group to be daring pirates, brave superheroes, or gorillas in biplanes. The slave narrative is still a tougher sell. But I know we'll get around to it eventually. And until then, I'll have that book around to remind me of how much I want to.
TueNYTX: 6:15.
I got up early and headed to the hotel again for my 10 a.m. game. In the time before it started, I headed to the dealer room. I wanted to pick up Steal Away Jordan. I'd meant to pick it up the day before, but I didn't have enough cash on me. I decided to buy the two books that I felt were the most likely to sell out by the next day. I figured that an RPG about slavery would be a slower mover than the indie-darling games about pulp adventures and television.
Steal Away Jordan by Julia Bond Ellingboe made a bit of a splash at last year's Gencon because, well, it's an RPG about slavery. It made people uncomfortable and defensive and excited and curious. I know that I was interested, but ultimately, I didn't feel attracted to the game. It was supposed to generate slave narratives and neo–slave narratives, and while I imagined it did that well, I wasn't interested in role-playing them.
But I kept following it. I'd occasionally check up on the Stone Baby Games blog ,and I'd listen to Ellingboe talk about the game on various RPG-related podcasts. I first started getting interested again when she posted about adopting American Black folklore into the game to create "more folktale than straight slave narrative." That certainly sounded more appealing to me. I mean, I roleplay the myths and folklore of other non-American cultures all the time, and I know I don't know as much about Black folklore as I'd like to.
The real point of understanding came during a podcast (I think it was the Independent Insurgency, but I could be wrong) where Ellingboe talked directly about the connection between slave narratives as African-American folklore, and the protagonists of them as heroes. Superheroes even. In a terrible time, they didn't merely survive (a notable feat of itself). They learned to read and write; they escaped or bought their lives back; they became influential activists. The game started to make sense.
I'd read slave narratives in high school and college, and they were always presented in the same way: as political tracts. They were symbolic; they were arguments directed exclusively to white Americans at the time. We didn't read them to understand the lives and culture of African-Americans, we read them to understand how they affected the political landscape of white abolitionists, white slaveholders, and the white people in the middle. That was the aspect of the "slave-narrative game" that turned me off. I didn't really want to role-play a story that was a political tract, or play in a game that was, by extension, a political-tract-building machine.
I'm not alone in my misreading of slave narratives. In addition to explaining her perspective that "we all own the stories of slaves who survived against all odds," Ellingboe described her refined pitch in an article in See Page XX:
I opened by asking, "When you think of slave narratives, what comes to mind." A young man, a Morehouse student, sheepishly raised his hand. "Suffering, punishment, pain?." He said. Another student offered similarly dismal words.Still, it was really foolish of me to get stuck in that thinking. Over a century later, why persist in seeing these stories directed exclusively at white America? And I'd read neo–slave narratives too, the ones that Ellingboe referenced more directly. Beloved certainly isn't presented as a political tract; neither is I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem. And I loved those stories. Why couldn't I reconcile them with traditional slave narratives? Maybe the pain, punishment, and politics I associated with the traditional stories was seeping into the newer ones. Or maybe it was keeping them apart. Besides, these contemporary stories were about characters, not events or symbols. Why didn't the game focus on that?
"No one thinks, 'hero'?" I asked. The students replied with blank stares. I'll show 'em! I thought.
Oh right, because it's an RPG; the characters are our job. All the game is supposed to do is give me a wide berth to let us create the characters that we will find compelling. And while the talk about the game often focused on the things that the player can't control (the GM assigns a name and a "worth" to each player's character), those things pale in comparison to what the player can control: a characters identity, hopes, dreams.
When I finally got past everything and started thinking about what slave narratives meant as, you know, narratives—a part of living history, a part of culture, a part of reality, a part of myth and folklore—well, damn, that's exciting.
Put another way, roleplaying Frederick Douglass as a symbol in a story carefully presented to the white power structure of the nineteenth century: not compelling to me. Roleplaying Frederick Douglass as the supergenius powerhouse who bests the man trying to whip him in a physical struggle lasting two hours: awesome.
And now that I read that passage for the first time since college, I'm thinking how precisely Steal Away Jordan models the conflict between Douglass and Covey. Not just the way Douglass rises as a hero, it also succinctly emphasizes the way characters draw from community (the other theme in the See Page XX article).
When
ojouchan saw I brought it home, she was excited. She'd been excited about it from the moment I mentioned it last year, back when I still didn't get the game. Now, we're both excited, but for now she's right when she says we'll never be able to get our friends to play it. I mean, right now we can't even organize a group to be daring pirates, brave superheroes, or gorillas in biplanes. The slave narrative is still a tougher sell. But I know we'll get around to it eventually. And until then, I'll have that book around to remind me of how much I want to.TueNYTX: 6:15.