RPGs by and for white nationalists

Question

So, I see RPG Stack Exchange has a MYFAROG tag, and MYFAROG questions in that tag.

MYFAROG is a game by Varg Vikernes, an infamous Norwegian murderer/arsonist who espouses white-nationalist and "Heathen Front" (racist pagan) beliefs.

The game's blurb (currently quoted uncritically in our tag wiki) talks around the whole white-nationalist part, but it's pretty transparent about the goal of using the game as a vehicle for Varg's concept of "European values:"

MYFAROG is a role-playing game based on European values, geography, (pre-) history, mythology, traditions and morals.

I believe part of the original shtick was to teach his kids white nationalism.

You can read plenty about Vikernes by googling him. You can find information about the game and its content as well, but these days it's obscured somewhat by the sheer volume of stuff Vikernes himself posts about it. (Check web archives from last year?) The point is, you don't have to take my word for it, but I don't have a time to do some kind of preemptive deep-dive about this.

The game is undoubtedly more staid than "RaHoWa" (the fecklessly awful neo-Nazi RPG, for neo-Nazis), but it's still very much a product of — and vehicle for — this dude's racial-hate-movement ideology.

So, my question to you all is:

• Should RPG SE recognize roleplaying games created by a hate-movement figure and inspired by hate-movement ideology as a valid part of the RPG ecosystem, or treat them as something beyond the pale?

• If RPG SE is going to host discussion about such games, what's an appropriate way to at communicate to users that an RPG is by and for white nationalists?

Answer 1

I'm going to write with a basic premise:

• MYFAROG's content is unquestionably horrible and neither this question nor its answer are concerned with whether that's the case — we can consider that settled. So far the only defenses we've seen here of the game's content itself have been based on defending it sight-unseen, and we all know that arriving at a conclusion by starting with assuming it's true is just noise.

You don't have to accept that premise. That's just square one based on what I know about the game and it's not possible for me to write as if that's not fundamental to the game.

Free speech is a bugbear — it is not relevant

There's another premise, actually. This one takes more words, because so many people misunderstand how this stuff works and how it relates to a site like RPG.se. This is here because we've already seen some reflexive defenses of MYFAROG based on no knowledge of the game; it's also here because inevitably someone brings up free speech as if it's the only thing that matters in discussions about whether a kind of content should be permitted.

Free speech 101: if you're not the government and control people's lives — in a literal 24/7 life-and-death way — you are not responsible for granting the ability for people to exercise free speech rights. Free speech is between a citizen and their government, not some website among billions and the troll (or whatever) who wants to write there.

There is no free speech principle to stand up for here. It doesn't apply and doesn't compel us to permit things, when faced with a weight of reasons not to. It doesn't apply because RPG.se is not an exclusive platform, and we cannot compel people to silence — we don't control all communication methods or speaker's bodies in a way that could take away their ability to speak their views. Having no absolute power over people, we cannot violate their free speech rights.

And no, we're not going to locally champion free speech anyway and import it into the site's working principles, for some undefined “but free speech is good” reason. We're not a public utility — posting here is a privilege that people earn by contributing constructively and not behaving badly. Nobody is owed our cooperation with using this site to say or do whatever they want. We regularly prevent people from doing whatever they want, because the site would be crushed under the weight of that burden otherwise. The site is too small and too not-the-whole-darn-world to support or be required to support anything and everything someone might want to post on it.

In other words, just because what you want to say is not literally illegal doesn't mean you get to say it here.

So that's not really touching on MYFAROG's current impact on our site at the moment, but it's a fundamental piece that needs to be laid down, otherwise “but my free speech!” is going to keep (irrelevantly) being brought up as if it's the end of any possible discussion of what we should do about games like it. It's not the final word here, and isn't even a minimally relevant word here.

The problem of association

You know the quality of a person by the friends they keep. That's true too of a community. What a community accepts into itself speaks very loudly about what the community is.

There are good people who will have nothing to do with RPG.se if RPG.se has questions about a game that actively calls for the death of themselves, their family, or their friends. There are other good people who are not personally targeted by MYFAROG who will have nothing to do with a site that visibly welcomes questions about a game that calls for real-world genocide.

Do we want to look and be welcoming to

1. revolting bigots who like everything in MYFAROG

2. the vanishingly rare person who plays MYFAROG but subverts it (there are only like 200 copies in existence, so we're talking on the order of ones or low tens of “good” MYFAROG “fans”)

… in exchange for encouraging

3. a large number of people who have problems being anywhere near group (1)

to stay away from or leave RPG.se?

In straight exchange, that seems like a really bad trade. Considering we're custodians of a privately-offered service and not only not obliged to host all speech, but actually required to reject all kinds of innocuous speech (too-chatty comments, off topic questions, etc.), let alone bigoted speech, that seems like a really bad trade. Standing up for inapplicable principles of free speech just to make our site worse is not what SE handed all of us, the community, self-rule for.

The problem of the actual questions

The actual questions here have a side problem: they're not actually about MYFAROG. MYFAROG is just background context, provided so that people know what kind of game the actual problems are operating within. One is a question about recovering from messing up a campaign development and the other is about a player wanting to know things that might not be their business. Neither is a problem with any part of MYFAROG — which is what tags are supposed to be for.

Ironically, it looks like part of the community's indecision about this game's presence on our site (I know it has been part of mine) is that the questions are themselves not even about MYFAROG — no part of MYFAROG is actually in them, and the game is just mentioned in passing. They're relatively innocuous, generally-applicable questions.

Not being about the game, we don't actually have any obvious case of the game's awfulness coming to RPG.se. We're concerned about its presence, but its presence is mostly an artifact of not cleaning up the questions in the first place.

What I'm doing right now

I'm not banning the game (that would be rather unilateral, anyway). I'm not closing the questions.

• I am going to remove the tag from both questions, though — by normal principles of how to use tags, they don't belong there.

• I'm going to blank its wiki too, so that it decays and is removed from the site. We have no questions about MYFAROG here yet, and therefore we have no tag for it either.

• I am also going to unlink the MYFAROG site from the questions, because even the questions' author says you should ignore the official web presence of the game and its author if you want to subvert it and extract anything decent from the text itself. We have no need to gratuitously link to hate speech, so let's not, eh? The link didn't even help educate answerers, who just assumed what they wanted about the game anyway when forming their advice. We'll be better without it.

• The name of the game is also not super relevant to the questions, so I'm removing it too. Normally we like system-agnostic questions to mention the game being played at least in passing, so that we have that context, but in this case not being associated with White Nationalist Calls To Real Violence is probably enough of an upside to balance removing that bit of convenience. (Not that it was actually a meaningful convenience! Nobody answering has apparently used that information to inform their question anyway, based on the numerous comments I had to leave explaining that their answer's assumption about how the book is organised were mistaken.) In the first question the game is super not relevant, because it's entirely about a homebrew setting. In the second question the game is only slightly relevant because of the way the book is organised, but see the recent parenthetical.

Effectively, I am kicking the can down the road: MYFAROG has't really yet come to RPG.se in a way that RPG.se inherently doesn't tolerate, so we're working (badly) with a hypothetical. If MYFAROG itself got some questions, we'd have more to work with and we'd probably have an easier time coming to a consensus about how to handle it, based on real MYFAROG game and content questions. We might not even need a conversation — if the awful MYFAROG content came here, normal procedures of “nope, this post violates our code of conduct and has been fired into the sun” would take care of it without any need for discussion.

Let's discuss the situation when it's less hypothetical, and pray that it never is.

I'm still not super happy with the game even being asked about without the name or link or tag, because of the Problem of Association, but getting rid of gratuitous connections between us and it is still a big improvement in the Not Associating With a White Nationalist Teaching Game metric.

(I'm also not super happy with having just… expunged… a game from the site. The different responsibilities and perspectives of the moderation role are often in tension with each other. I think that I'm only OK with it — on balance — because they're not irreversible or nuclear actions, and they're reasonable on their own to do. Still, wary discomfort is my companion from both ends of this thing.)

Yes, this is a half measure. This answer is less “this is what we should do” as, “this is why it's a problem”, and a note that I'm making some overdue corrections to the posts in a way that almost incidentally significantly remove MYFAROG's real presence here. Most of this should have been done as a routine question-cleanup when I saw the first one, but I didn't because I was too busy being alarmed by the appearance of MYFAROG — so, my bad.

Answer 2

First, we do have a Be Nice policy, and no racist or otherwise offensive content will be allowed here.

Furthermore, we don't want links to places where offensive content is prominent, like 4chan/8chan. So links to any MYFAROG sites with racist or white nationalist content is inappropriate.

However, we don't blacklist discussion of specific games or authors outside that boundary.

The Author

In the RPG space, a lot of people object to a lot of game authors. I've read similar passionate screeds about how Vincent Baker, or Zak Sabbath, or H.P. Lovecraft, or whoever is bad and they and their games should be shunned. "But that author is a bad person" - including "they were convicted of a crime" - is not a reason for anything on this site.

To be clear, I am not interested in any of the Gamergate-style arguments that infect other sites. If a game's author is a convicted criminal, or you think they are a homophobe, or a pervert, or a rip-off artist, or a Muslim, or a Christian, or a Republican, or a racist, or whatever other thing you and maybe most of us object to - it's not relevant, and as long as I'm a mod I will give any argument along those lines extremely short shrift.

The Game

If a game's content is offensive, then we should not discuss that content here. Of course, different content is objectionable to those of different backgrounds, but I think it's fair to say SO generally abides by "generally accepted enlightened civilized rules", which everyone knows even if they sometimes pretend they don't. We do want to be able to frankly discuss sex, sexism, racism, murder-hoboism, etc. in games and we have questions here already on those topics. Games like Call of Cthulhu are based on writings that can fairly be described to have previous-century racism embedded in them, but we discuss those just fine without having offensive content on site.

If someone asks "How do I calculate AC in MYFAROG" - I don't have a problem with that. IMO worrying about the "problem of association" on the public Internet is a pointless pursuit. People use D&D to act out rape fantasies, or in this case use MYFAROG to play an apparently non-racist game. We don't need to get into deep dialectical analysis of "which games we decree bad," we just need to not allow offensive content on this site, period.

Conclusion

@SevenSidedDie brought up the issue of the pedigree of this game in mod chat when the question was first posted, but we discussed and agreed that the question itself was inoffensive and so there was no grounds for doing anything about it.

I would certainly support putting a warning in the tag wiki to the effect "Warning: This is a 'white power' game and Web sites about it are likely to contain racist content" or similar, so that people have fair warning about it if they go to learn more.

Actions beyond that open our site up to the same factionalism that infests most every other social media site, with the flavor of the month inciting its members to decide which authors and works are currently allowed vs disallowed based on their real or perceived beliefs. Take it to Reddit, we don't want it here.

Answer 3

Should RPG SE recognize roleplaying games created by a hate-movement figure and inspired by hate-movement ideology as a valid part of the RPG ecosystem, or treat them as something beyond the pale?

Yes, we should recognise hate-inspired RPGs as RPGs (and as hate-inspired). They may be completely awful RPGs embodying abhorrent ideologies, some of which enjoy presence in RPGnet Wiki's Worst RPGs Ever list, but they're still RPGs. Our hobby does have bad stuff in it the world would be better off without.

I think what you're really going for here is whether we should allow them topically. Whether we recognise them as valid RPGs and parts of our hobby or whatever can be totally separate to whether we allow talking about them.

Personally I'm interested in being able to talk about these games academically, since they represent the worst parts of the genre and things not to do that I can learn from — it's for similar reasons historians will discuss the worst parts of history to learn from them.

If RPG SE is going to host discussion about such games, what's an appropriate way to at communicate to users that an RPG is by and for white nationalists?

I'll rather go and consider: what should we do about these?

I agree with warning people the game appears to be full of racist analogies and push a Norse white supremacy agenda. I agree with BESW's notion to warn people in the tag wiki summary itself, wording TBD.

I'm also keenly aware of something else: allowing the game as a general topic of play is tacitly endorsing it as a reasonable companion to the various more decent games play, despite it and its ideologies being distinctly concerning. Part of me wants to say "let's ban it" for not letting a racist game really gain much traction, but I'm not sure how to reconcile that with "we should probably still be able to learn from this junk", or other games we'd ban for offending our sensitivities. Even D&D has concerning features such as its primary nomadic races being bloodthirsty savages who everyone else would be better off without.

Answer 4

Thoughts. Here, have some thoughts.

I support SSD's decision to burn down the tag and kick the can down the road

Why twist yourself into a pretzel coming up with ways to discuss a committedly racist game non-racistly when you could just… not do it?

Any link-back, however negative, is still a bit of unnecessary free advertising.

Any discussion that actually fits the parameters of this site — which tends to be rules questions and play advice (not game reviews, critical reading, or abject mockery) — would be de-facto normalizing.

Tag wiki stuff: be honest, be clear

The author's ideas about "European values" are the game's raison d'être, as well as by far the most notable thing that sets it apart from other RPGs.

There's no reason not to label MYFAROG as white-nationalist. It would be deceptive not to.

"Be nice" and hate groups

Big communities always involve a bit of a compromise, wherein folks agree to overlook and talk around some of their fundamental differences to avoid butting heads. Call it "civility" or whatever.

Now consider hate groups, such as neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. These are folks who've built an entire identity around wishing harm, or death, or industrialized genocide on you, or your family, or your friends.

Why would you want to be around those people, ever, at all, if you can avoid it? I certainly don't want to, even if a site has rules that partially force them into "stealth mode."

Folks make the mistake of assuming that a space that doesn't explicitly exclude anyone is the most neutral and accepting and inclusive, but in reality plenty of people self-select out when they notice who else is floating around. That's not "factionalism," it's "Why the hell should I bother being here?"

Answer 5

It is clear that this kind of game goes directly against the Be Nice policy.

Now, whilst you can argue that all RPG's have maligned/evil races in them, I doubt any of them make it very clear that they are based on real world races.

Would we feel comfortable hosting questions about a RPG for ISIS fan-boys that has them as the 'good guys'?

We shouldn't give any space for racist and bigoted views on this site, even if they are just part of a 'game' - allowing people like this to build a small community on our site goes against everything that stackoverflow stands for

Disclaimer: I am not 'white' and my cultural background is often the target of white supremacists and other neo-nazi hate groups

Answer 6

A game, film, book or any other creative product which endorses or promotes racism should be banned (and often is).

Of course, since it is a collective imaginative past-time, a roleplaying game session will inherently consist of the biases, preferences and ideologies of the players, be they in America, Saudi Arabia, Northern Korea or the Amazon Basin.

It's also true that nearly any RPG can be accused of some racist tones (such as the caricature of nomadic races as barbaric).

However, the vast majority of RPGs do not actively promote or endorse racism in their text. Rather, they provide an imaginative sandbox in which to create stories about the tensions such difference causes.

While a forum should be open to as many people and ideas as possible, it is easy to get confused and assume that it needs to have no agenda of its own.

That's not true. A forum can be forthright and upfront about the fact that it is for people who are not racist, or sexist or anti-social etc.

Racists and sexists have the right to start their own forums.

There is nothing wrong with standing up and saying what the forum is against. There is something wrong with allowing liberal ideology to lead you to paralysis and inaction (which is as bad as tacit agreement), and potentially dangerous.

Moderators of this forum are not obliged to tolerate all content, or to give air to all products.

Moderators can choose to be activists against dangerous ideologies (for reference, they're the ones which promote division, fear, hate, abuse, violence, murder and war, and are identifiable by historical precedent).

Answer 7

Questions about RPGs are on-topic. MYFAROG is an RPG. Therefore questions about MYFAROG and answers to those questions should be allowed so long as the content of the question or answer is not in and of itself offensive. This will render some questions un-askable, and other questions un-answerable, but that's not the RPG.SE community's problem.

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_{Devil's Advocate Post: I am posting this specifically so that people have it available as an option to vote on. It does not necessarily reflect my own feelings on the matter.}

Answer 8

Questions asking about myfarog gameplay imply racist gameplay, as the game itself is built to teach racism. This isn't a game that contains racism, it is a teaching tool.

Questions about what ways myfarog is racist isn't intrinsicly racist, or how its mechanics and setting do/do not encourage/teach racism.

I would propose this for the tag wiki:

This tag is for questions about the white power survivalist game MYFAROG. MYFAROG embodies real-world racism, religious prejudices, and other forms of bigotry, and was designed to teach these concepts to the well-known racist author's children. Questions about actual gameplay of MYFAROG imply racism, bigotry, and other offensive conduct, as such content is embedded in the game itself, and are not tolerated on Stack Exchange websites. Questions not about playing the game are permitted. Don't take that as an invitation to say "hypothetically", then ask a gameplay question.

and for it to be enforced as written.

This game is different than most RPGs about violent or other objectionable content, because the game is designed and intended to say "this is what you should do", not "you should only do this in the game". An RPG that was actually designed to teach you how to rape or murder would be no different than this case.

Answer 9

Regardless of whether there's racism involved, even superficial examination of most games shows some pretty unpleasant themes, so this is either a double standard or one which ends with essentially all RPGs tarred. Unless MYFAROG has Dark Dungeons-style play (unlikely), it's still just fictional depictions of objectionable behavior.

Some people believe games with Devils and magic are vile, corrupting influences; some people believe games with explicit racism are vile, corrupting influences. In all cases, trying to enforce a community standard on which RPGs are and are not okay will get ugly fast.

Answer 10

Racism is bad. Racists are bad. Racist games are bad. We should ban the MYFAROG tag and any questions about the MYFAROG game. We don't want people who are experts on the game as part of our community.

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_{Devil's Advocate Post: I am posting this specifically so that people have it available as an option to vote on. It does not necessarily reflect my own feelings on the matter.}