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Episode 24: Cultural Risks of Rabiah
100 Plays6 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our twenty-fourth episode, Alex and Joe talk about the Magic: the Gathering world of Rabiah, the setting of the expansion set Arabian Nights and based on the real-life folktales of The 1,001 Arabian Nights. They discuss how Magic has handled sets drawing upon real-world cultures throughout its history, and both the risks and rewards of drawing inspiration from cultures of real people.
Magic content creator Shivam Bhatt's blog post on his response to the creative design of the Kaladesh expansion also forms a strong lived experiential counterpoint to Alex and Joe's perspectives, and you can find it here.
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Joe Redemann at @Fyndhorn, Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @AlexanderNewm. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Goblin Lore is proud to be a member of the Geek Therapy Network (on Twitter at @GeekTherapy).
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art courtesy of Greg Staples, design by Joe Redemann.
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Transcript
Cultural Challenges of Rabiah
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore. In this episode, Alex and I discuss the cultural reasons about why the plane of Rabiah will never come back into Magic the Gathering.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is an issue that I feel personally very strongly about. And this is an issue and a subject that can be a little bit sensitive for people, especially those who have had their cultural identities marginalized.
00:00:41
Speaker
We want to see Magic the Gathering be a place where cultures can all be valued equally, where people can see themselves in the game. Representation is always one of the most important things about a game being engaging to people of all walks of life, from all cultural backgrounds, and from all different places in the world.
00:01:05
Speaker
It's for this reason that we recorded this episode, even though we know that as two white guys from the Upper Midwest of the US, we are going to get some things wrong. We are going to perceive things different than a lot of people will.
00:01:21
Speaker
But we hope to use our platform here to start or continue or add to conversations going on about race and culture in Magic the Gathering. And hopefully we can help perpetuate this conversation and make sure that we don't make the same mistakes in the future that we have in the past in terms of representation in the game that we love.
00:01:48
Speaker
You'll also notice my passion coming out in the fact that the last five minutes of this episode are me just being on a soapbox. So, if you're excited for that, like I am, and was, get ready. Without any further ado, let's get to the show.
Introduction to Goblin Lore Podcast
00:02:15
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore. This episode we are a little bit short handed. We are coming to you with only two of our usual three hands and I know that that's a little bit tough to fathom having three hands but you know we are we're talking about mythical creatures yeah so why can't we be mythical too?
00:02:40
Speaker
Think think the triple headed the triple striking goblin from Unstable that's that's usually this podcast. But for now, we're just a normal two-headed goblin and this week we are gonna be talking about Rabaya and actually I don't know if it's pronounced Rabaya or Rabia But we'll get into why that's a question and an issue because we're talking about why Rabaya Rabia is
00:03:06
Speaker
kind of a problem for Magic's storyline in the past and why we're never going to go back there again. But before we get into all that, I am going to have my co-host introduce himself, and we are going to have our intro question of, if you could choose any plane in the multiverse to make your home, what plane would that be? Well, I'm Alex Newman at Alexander Newham on Twitter. And my first instinct, and the thing is I don't
00:03:37
Speaker
Thinking about it, I don't know that I have a fully rational reason to answer, but my first instinct was theros. So I'm just going to go with theros. I know I really enjoyed the flavor of the set. A, I just really enjoyed ancient Greece. I mean, I was a philosophy major for a little while and read a lot of ancient Greek from people from ancient Greece.
00:04:03
Speaker
But just the setting, I think the world feels very vibrant. There's a lot going on in that world. So I think that's probably where I would pick from my home. Yeah, it's very beautiful, very pastoral. And there's kind of this cool faith-based element of you can see what you believe in happening in the world. That's kind of cool. Yeah, and it's a nice varied place. It's not one of those science fiction ice worlds or volcano worlds.
00:04:33
Speaker
There's a little bit of everything going on. Seems like a good place to just globetrot.
00:04:40
Speaker
I love it. Well, and I am Joe Rettemann. You can find me on Twitter at Fyndhorn, that's F-Y-N-D horn. And part of me really wants to be hipster and pick somewhere like Ol' Grotha, which if you don't know Ol' Grotha, it is the setting of the Homelands expansion set, possibly the worst magic expansion ever. We can get into Ol' Grotha later, some other time. I imagine.
00:05:10
Speaker
It may come up in this very conversation later in the podcast. Oh, it's possible. It's certainly possible. But old growth is kind of like a, it's a horrible dying world and there's a small section of it that is like livable. It's like if you were to build- It's less dying. Yeah, that's slightly less dying. But even there, you still have terrible people all over the place. It's just bad. So anyway, forget old growth. I'm over it.
00:05:36
Speaker
I think that I would actually pick Zendikar because even though Zendikar is kind of like the world is you know the terrains and upheaval and it's still I mean at this point it's still rebuilding itself from the Eldrazi attacks.
00:05:55
Speaker
It's a really beautiful world full of plenty of places to explore and adventure and kind of the same way that you were saying, Alex, there's a ton of varied climates in Theros. That's the same thing in Zendikar. You kind of have this realistic seeming world, but it does have sort of that unifying theme of adventure and exploration. Sounds good.
00:06:20
Speaker
What doesn't seem good, though, is is a certain particular plane that we're going to talk about
Rabiah's Cultural Sensitivity Issues
00:06:25
Speaker
here. And for the sake of conversation, let's just nail down one pronunciation and let's call it Rabiah. That might be completely wrong because it's based on the real life culture of Arabia. And so maybe it's Arabia, but we're going with Rabiah. If we don't know the right way to pronounce it, I like the idea of just picking one.
00:06:50
Speaker
and probably being wrong regardless, but just committing to be incorrect and just carrying through. So, Rabaya, or Rabaya the infinite as it's known is, like I said, it's this plane that's based on the real world setting and culture of Arabia. Saudi Arabia, the Arabian desert, all of the sort of Middle Eastern cultures kind of smushed into one.
00:07:20
Speaker
We're going to be talking about the flavor of this plane and I think some other planes, I don't want to go too deep on some things, but this was introduced into Magic as the setting for the Arabian Nights expansion, which was the first expansion for the game and in fact was created by Richard Garfield in a very, very short amount of time because for not story reasons,
00:07:45
Speaker
For real world reasons, Wizards needed a new product to sell. They needed something else to put on shelves because the game in the first couple years was just continuously selling out. And so he made this set. He picked a setting that he knew he could whip out a bunch of cards. And so it was based on the 1,001 Nights collection of stories from the Arabian sort of Middle Eastern culture.
00:08:14
Speaker
Yeah. And so this was kind of the, I mean, it was the first expansion, but it was also the first top down expansion in that way, because it was based on, you know, an IP. It was based on an intellectual property. It was based on the story of the thousand one Arabian nights. And so every card
00:08:30
Speaker
basically relates to one of those stories in some way or another. That's where you have the old man in the sea. You have King Suleiman. You have Scheherazade. You have all sorts of nonsense. Yeah, including of the names of real places. Library of Alexandria, the bazaar of Baghdad were both cards in that set. That also is a part of, as we're going to kind of get to, why this is a setting that Wizards is never going to go back
00:09:02
Speaker
The first and one of the most problematic issues with it is that it includes locations from the real world that are very, very heavily based on a culture. As opposed to, you know, we've seen recently with Caladesh where there is definite inspiration from a real world culture. They took, I think, from my perspective, a lot of care. I mean, not belonging to that culture. I don't want to speak for other people, but it seemed like they took a lot of care to take some inspiration from that culture.
00:09:31
Speaker
but make it its own thing. So this is Kaladesh. It has some Indian inspiration, but it is Kaladesh. Rabaya does not really have that distinction.
00:09:45
Speaker
And so that's kind of what we're going to get into in the second half of our podcast, more talking about that real world connection. Let's sort of run down what we know about Rabiah. Since it is early on, since it showed up early on in magic history, we don't have a ton of backstory for it. Like you said, Alex, Richard Garfield turned out this setting really, really quickly. And so it's not like there was a lot of Vorthos consideration to this.
00:10:14
Speaker
Well, a lot of it was sort of back explained to be this plane. If I remember right, this was theoretically supposed to be sort of set on Dominaria in a different continent or something. And then they sort of said it didn't really work to do that. So actually, this is Rabaya. It's a different plane that I'm not sure. I don't know some of those story pieces from back then. I do know.
00:10:43
Speaker
One of the things that didn't help the lack of orthos in this is because they made it so quickly.
00:10:49
Speaker
the flavor text is entirely from real world sources. Right. From the 1001 Nights from. There was a fair amount from the Bible as well, right? Yeah. So there's quotes from the Quran too, I believe. So Rabaya is a solely desert plain. So kind of the opposite of what we were talking about with the varied climates of Theros and Zendikar, Rabaya is a completely desert plain.
00:11:15
Speaker
the weird even more I guess the the weird quality the unique quality of Rabaya than just it being a desert world with dunes and oases and all this stuff is the fact that Long ago in its history. There was something called the thousand-fold Reflection refraction the thousand-fold of refraction where? Rabaya's magic
00:11:40
Speaker
was sort of shattered or reflected or splintered. We're not exactly sure of any of this, of how it happened, of who did it, of why they did it, any of that. Again, this is all very vague. Long time ago, this was, God, over 20 years ago now in Magic History.
00:12:00
Speaker
Um, but somebody did something to Rabiah that made it multiply 1000 times. And so literally there were 1001 different variations of Rabiah. And so again, you tie flavorfully sort of into that story of a thousand and one Arabian nights.
00:12:23
Speaker
But each of the rabbis was slightly different than the other. And it was sort of that idea that has been talked about for a number of years now in our world that, you know, there are infinite universes out there with infinite possibilities and infinite different variations of us.
00:12:43
Speaker
you know, each little choice point is a digression and whatever. And so that's kind of how Rabiah was shaped is, you know, there might be a Joe and Alex somewhere in Rabiah One podcasting on a show called Goblin Lore. And then there might be a Joe and Alex somewhere on Rabiah 397 podcasting on a show called Gin Lore. And, you know, like just
00:13:12
Speaker
I thought you were going to iterate and say, goblin boar. Ah, there you go. That's 472. Yep. Or is that somewhere in between because it's still goblins? It's alternate dimensions get really confusing. Spectrums are tough too. But yeah, so you have this world where over centuries the planes are evolving independently of each other.
00:13:39
Speaker
but they all have very similar cultures and from out of this comes one of the first planeswalkers we ever find out about and the most powerful pre-revisionist planeswalker
00:13:54
Speaker
Tasere is one of the cooler ideas actually I think of pre-revisionist planeswalkers. It would never happen in Magic Story today, but it's pretty darn cool. Essentially, Tasere was born on five different
00:14:12
Speaker
worlds of Rabaya. Five different taseers were born on five different Rabaya worlds and so during that refraction he was copied those five times once for each color so each of these copies manifested a gift for, you know, using this particular color of magic. There was a green taseer, a red, a white, a blue, a black.
00:14:37
Speaker
and he was sort of like you know kind of Harry Potter style prophesied to be like the one made of five the greatest sorcerer that the world had ever known that the world would ever know I guess at that time and
00:14:53
Speaker
So each of those refractions had led a different life. Red taseer was a nomad. Green taseer was a herder. Blue taseer remained a baby, which is super weird. White taseer became a whirling dervish, a warrior, and then black taseer
00:15:15
Speaker
became sort of an assassin and Black Taseer started hunting down the other taseers like found a way to go world to world and when he tried to kill the other taseers he absorbed them into him and sort of became this amalgamation of all of them and once the last taseer was absorbed into the the
00:15:38
Speaker
the whole, his spark ignited. The five pieces of his spark were reunited, his planeswalker spark, and he, you know, became a planeswalker. And so not only was he a planeswalker, he was a pre-revision planeswalker, a pre-mending planeswalker, and he was one of the few planeswalkers who has ever mastered all five colors of magic.
00:16:04
Speaker
And so that's pretty darn dope. And I mean, this is to me, this is one of the cooler origin stories of a planeswalker and kind of is facilitated by the weirdness of Rabiah's world. Yeah. Which is interesting. Like it's it's a story you can't really tell in a normal plane. It's it's the whole the refraction gives some interesting storytelling things. But the plane itself has
00:16:34
Speaker
It's just a myriad of things that make it difficult to do to bring back. But I think that's a really interesting story.
00:16:42
Speaker
And it's so, yeah, you're right. It is, like, it's difficult to do. It's so confusing to follow that story, even as I'm telling it, and I know this lore. I know this lore. I've got the Gamepedia page sitting in front of me to help me refresh. You know, it is tough to follow, and that's one thing we'll get into here, too. I'm just gonna wrap up, I guess, the bit of lore about Rabiah here, which is...
00:17:09
Speaker
One Stacia became a planeswalker, the sorceress who had encouraged him to hunt down his other selves in order so that she could control his power and control planeswalker.
00:17:24
Speaker
She was furious that she couldn't harness his powers, and so once Tasere walked away from Rabaya, she created a barrier around the Rabayas, preventing him from ever returning. So what a lovely little in-lore way for wizards to ensure that we can never planeswalk back to Rabaya. Yep. That's a nice clean way to just be like, and that was that.
00:17:48
Speaker
Well, and that sort of gets us to a part of this that especially I know you wanted to talk about Alex, which is Mark Rosewater's Rabaya scale. Yes. I personally think these things are really interesting.
Rabiah's Future in MTG?
00:18:03
Speaker
He has a couple of scales, the storm scales for mechanics, but this one that we're going to talk about today is the Rabaya scale. Basically what Mark Rosewater does is he builds a scale one to 10.
00:18:16
Speaker
And it's the likelihood of a set coming back in a standard legal set of us of a thing. So one being very likely you will definitely for in this case the scales. You know one is it will definitely see again most likely very soon. 10 is Rabbi. I mean never. The actual description is I would never say never, but this would require a major miracle. So.
00:18:46
Speaker
The point of, you know, and he gave kind of a list and he numbered things out and people will talk to him about different things is, you know, does this change this? Like Dominaria recently moved from a four to a one because of the popularity of the set, the Dominaria set this summer. And so it's just, I think it's a really interesting way for Mark Rosewater, who's the head designer, and especially in this case too, he's not tied to creative.
00:19:14
Speaker
So he doesn't have quite as much weight in this, but it's a great way for him to communicate with the community and to share information in a very quantifiable way. Because he can't say, well, I know we're going back to this set until they're ready to announce it. But he can say, well, that's about a four on the scale if someone's asking about a world that they really like, talking about Vrin.
00:19:41
Speaker
That's a four on the scale. So that gives people, that gives Mark the ability to kind of answer questions and talk to the community about this stuff. And it gives the community the ability to kind of quantify where Wizards is at, or at least where Mark thinks Wizards is at, regarding some of these different worlds.
00:20:00
Speaker
Right. And so that's why Rabaya is at the top of this scale. Rabaya is the only 10. There are a bunch of nines. There's planes that have been destroyed. There are planes that have been, you know, encased and locked away. There are planes that were just kind of meh. Yeah. You know, the Elgaratha or, you know, my favorite, like you were saying, the planes that were destroyed or encased, planes that technically exist, but would be difficult to travel to.
00:20:28
Speaker
Sarah's realm wrath phyrexia old school phyrexia, right Yeah, although sit at nine, but rabbi is the only one at 10 and that is kind of what we want to talk about today culture in games and how you represent cultures in games and For the sake of this discussion. We're going to kind of be defining culture as um
00:20:56
Speaker
Sort of heritage or you know the culture that you live in you know sort of your cultural setting You know that we talked a little bit off-air Alex about how
00:21:11
Speaker
There are things like gamer culture or magic culture or um, you know nerd culture in general or whatever and I think some of those some of those things are important and those are those are important communities with important sort of defining factors in and of themselves But it's it's a little less it I think intrinsically tied into people's Identities and and frank quite frankly into people's bodies, you know
00:21:41
Speaker
Yeah.
Defining Cultural Representation in Games
00:21:42
Speaker
And, and of course, we're talking, you know, relating to two magics and magic sets being based on cultures, and those are going to be world cultures based on locations and demographics and things as opposed to like the office culture at your workplace, which is totally a thing, like anytime you get two people together who spend any amount of time, there's culture there. But that isn't super applicable to what we're talking about.
00:22:11
Speaker
So at some point, we kind of have to draw a line and say, OK, we're not going to talk about that then.
00:22:16
Speaker
Right. Yeah. So for the sake of this discussion, we're talking cultural demographic type things. And so that's kind of the big problem with Rabaya is not even just that it's tough to do from a legal standpoint or design standpoint or creative standpoint. It's tough to do this from a representation standpoint. And I think that's good that Wizards has actually started to recognize that because
00:22:45
Speaker
Rabaya presented a world of of Middle Easterners that really was just a Sort of a hodgepodge mess of of you know geographic Non-selection and and there's you know because you know, this is something I alluded to earlier on in the episode you don't have just a
00:23:09
Speaker
Arabia in the Middle East. It's not just all Arabia. There's Saudi Arabia. There is Oman. There is Yemen. There is Jordan. There's Lebanon, Syria. You even have... Right. Qatar. You have even Middle Eastern cultures that are not Islamic or Arabic. You have Israel. You have Turkey. You know, those are completely different cultures.
00:23:37
Speaker
And then you have things like Egypt that has a lot of its own history and culture, but because of where it is, it's right in between a lot of what we would consider Middle Eastern culture and a lot of the Greeks, like Egypt. And African. And African. Yeah, it really was in the middle of all this and influenced by all of it.
00:24:02
Speaker
Right. Absolutely. And so, I mean, again, and that spreads out because obviously all of these places are connected to one another, but, you know, you even get further out into Iran, which has a lot of Central Asian influence. You have, you know, tons of that's where Persia was and sort of broke up. And like, you know, you go a little bit further, you have ancient Babylon into, you know, modern day
00:24:31
Speaker
a rock. I think you're right. So like there's all manner of stuff in there of what we would just you know, paint with the broad brush of Middle Eastern. It's like there's a lot there. There's a lot there now and a lot going back down all sorts of different lines.
00:24:48
Speaker
Right. And so that's sort of the issue that you run into when you're creating a game or, you know, some sort of fictional world that is based on a real world culture or even even more. So I guess sort of an amalgamation or a stereotype of these cultures is you get this muddy picture that is sort of just a like it kind of almost becomes a caricature. Yeah. And and I think
00:25:17
Speaker
unfortunately helping that character, making it more of a caricature, the set includes Aladdin. Like literally, there's a card called Aladdin in Arabian Nights. And you know, it calls out named characters, it calls out named places. And that just doesn't really fit with how magic design has been going forward. They've been trying to have their own places, both because it's better to have the creative control of it. And because then they don't have to worry
00:25:46
Speaker
as much about doing something in sense of doing something just wrong with the culture.
00:26:00
Speaker
I guess let's start with some of the problems with Rabiah. The main facets of problems are things that are sort of spiritual. I mean, you have passages from the Quran, which is the Islamic holy book,
00:26:18
Speaker
on these game pieces basically you know and that's that can be a little bit disrespectful um you know i don't know if there are any muslim magic players who you know particularly don't feel like it is but i think there should be some acknowledgement of the fact that it can be it can be a little bit issue issue some if you don't think about the way that that's represented and and how you're doing that um yeah
00:26:48
Speaker
You know, there are some things, parts of Rabaya too, where it's entirely a desert. Well, the entire Middle East is not a desert. Yeah. There's beautiful, you know, coasts. There are the rolling hills of Israel. I mean, there's beautiful parts of that world. But it's all we see is like, you know, camel on the sand dunes. And it's like, well, OK, sure. Got it. We're in we're in the Middle East. Cool.
00:27:25
Speaker
Well, yeah, and also too, another part of this that I didn't mention in the lore part, but Rabaya was originally back when this was a thing that happened pre-mending. Rabaya generates random planer links to other planes, and so one of the shards of Rabaya essentially might brush up against on other planes.
00:27:42
Speaker
Yeah. Put some sand on there. And then we know it's the Middle East.
00:27:50
Speaker
Metaspace and those those planar links those portals manifest in her by and not as like a portal not a shimmering like portal that appears Somewhere it's a giant desert twister like a sandstorm and it's just like I don't know something about that just strikes me as weird Yeah, and I think some of that just ties to Wizards kind of realizing after they were you know Couple years into the game even not even that
00:28:18
Speaker
Like their very next set was Antiquities and then Legends. And they started to build their own mythology and build their own worlds immediately after that. I think they kind of realized that that's not the direction that they want to go in almost immediately. And so I think their thing was, well, let's just not make a big deal about it. Let's just leave that alone and we're not going to do that anymore. And I mean, outside of kind of being an anomaly in one or two cards that
00:28:48
Speaker
make a big splash in the older formats, the Arabian Nights doesn't really show up in modern magic. Well, and another part of that, too, is I don't remember if the card is exactly named this, but the Whirling Dervishes are also mentioned, the Dervishes, and the Dervishes are, you know, initiates of the Sufi path of religion.
00:29:17
Speaker
And, you know, the Sufi order of Islam, it's sort of like, you know, if anyone is Christian, this is just my easiest reference point. It's like, this would be like Lutherans, for instance, it's one sect of
00:29:35
Speaker
the greater religion. But the whirling, that dancing, the spinning dance is a form of, you know, celebration and praise and prayer. And so it's a little bit weird that it's then becomes this soldier card, essentially, you know. And so again, you have this weird sort of mushing of a real world thing into what the game needs rather than taking ideas from a real world.
00:30:03
Speaker
Culture and sort of then interpreting them into the game. You know, it's it's more of a direct rip and then I guess that you're pulling something out of it and then putting putting a new Idea over it rather than taking the idea and sort of shaping it into something completely new You know, yeah
00:30:26
Speaker
And I guess that's maybe a good point for us to talk about. We've seen magic do this really well in recent years. And so we don't want to completely bash wizards and magic for how they've handled culture. Because I think, and again, we're both two upper midwestern white guys talking about this. So we don't know exactly. And maybe this is going to be something that we're going to learn more about. And I'm open to that.
00:30:52
Speaker
But I think they have, at the very least, improved in the 20 years since Arabian Nights came out. Yeah.
Kaladesh and Cultural Representation
00:31:01
Speaker
In how they handle real world cultures. Like we just had Kaladesh a couple of years ago. Yeah. I mean, and they've done a few and I think Kaladesh is actually not the most recent. I'm going to get came out after, but you're right. Both. Yeah, both of those based on the not even based on. And I think that might be the
00:31:21
Speaker
the difference here. They weren't based on real world cultures. They were inspired. They took elements from those cultures and built their own world, but used elements and inspiration from those cultures to kind of suffuse that world and to build more life into it. And I think both in both places, you could really see that especially Kaladesh, I think had more of that. Ammonkhet definitely had some Egyptian, but I
00:31:50
Speaker
inspiration. There was definitely inspiration there, but that was also a lot of bolus inspiration in that world too. So there were some other things going on there as well.
00:32:00
Speaker
Yeah, they definitely took the aesthetics from Egypt, but it wasn't an Egypt story. I mean, the closest thing they had to a story Egyptian-wise was actually that it resembled the biblical 10 plagues narrative. Yes, and I think in the actual first Amonkhet set, there was
00:32:27
Speaker
There was little bits like the Serpapod is a thing from Egypt. I just know that because of the Serpapod from Amonkhet is an element from Egyptian stories and things. And I only know of that thanks to us, Sonia Greer, who's at Rude Jettet, R-U-D-J-E-D-E-T on Twitter.
00:32:54
Speaker
who's a big part of the magic community and also an Egyptologist. Yeah, Amonkhet was real interesting with you following her. She talked about a lot of stories from Egypt in general and different little elements that wizards put into the set that kind of tied to things. So there was definitely pieces of that there, but I think overall they were going more for the bolus flavor on the world of Amonkhet.
00:33:23
Speaker
Yeah, that was definitely, she's a great follow in general, but she was getting to hit home run after home run while Amonkhet was coming out. That was great. And right when that set was announced, she was very excited, rightfully so. Those were like her two passions coming together. It was great.
00:33:41
Speaker
to watch. Yeah, no, Amonkhet was definitely a great example of how you can take some elements and aesthetics of a world, you know, drop in some of those cool little references so that people like Sonya can see them and go like, oh, this is really cool attention to detail because XYZ without it being about that culture, without it being based on that culture.
00:34:05
Speaker
And it also allows someone like Sonia to share that with the community. And then we get to learn. We get to learn more about that culture's history. And maybe Amonkhet's not a great example because ancient Egypt is obviously a dead culture at this point. We've moved well beyond sphinxes and pharaohs and such. But another great example, I think,
00:34:31
Speaker
at this point is Kaladesh where you do have, again, some of those references. You have, you know, lots of very Indian sounding names. I can think of Pima, Rishkar, Rashmi, Sahili Rai. I mean, these are all very sort of like Indian sounding names.
00:34:59
Speaker
On top of the fact that there is caste system, which I'm not sure that a lot of people really caught going into Kaladesh. I didn't see a lot of talk about it, but that's kind of a reference to India's colonial history and the imperialism that was foisted onto it. But then we see this revolution story where this caste gets thrown off
00:35:20
Speaker
it casts C-A-S-T-E, you know, these rigid structures of categorizing people into social hierarchy ranks. We see that get thrown off and this revolution, this equality happens by the end of this. And so I thought that was actually a really cool, possibly accidental, but I'm going to hope that it was intentional reference to how India has made social progress. And I think a big part of
00:35:49
Speaker
what made that a better use of a real world culture too is like I said, they made it their own world. So there was definitely influence there. There was definitely references, you know, some maybe deeper than others, but there was definitely elements there. But then there was this whole clockwork invention thing, there was this whole aether element. So there was a lot of
00:36:09
Speaker
world building around it to make it its own unique place that just had these elements to make it feel more real, I think. And I think that's when it's at its best. Right. You have the little spice in there, but it's not the meat of it. And it adds a verisimilitude to these things when you can add this little bit of the real world, it makes it feel more real.
00:36:32
Speaker
But we can only talk about this really, in our own opinion at least, from the perspective of two middle class, midwestern white guys. And that is a very limited and often privileged world view. And so sometimes
00:36:53
Speaker
often honestly we should be listening to somebody who goes through this experience who goes through the process of seeing their own culture represented and reflected in the game and so I wanted to also bring
00:37:09
Speaker
Shivam Bhatt's article into this. So Shivam Bhatt is a great magic creator, a magic content creator, awesome dude. You can find him on Twitter at electrotal, E-L-E-K-T-R-O-T-A-L, or GearporeGears. But Shivam wrote a piece on Tumblr back when Kaladesh was released.
00:37:33
Speaker
and I just want to read like a brief section of this and we'll link to his article in the show notes. There were people with Indian names, coloration, hairstyles. The buildings were all weird Mughal architecture that had been splattered with a million colors as if the artist had seen one picture of the Taj Mahal and the movie Aladdin and then decided to spray paint them together.
00:37:56
Speaker
It was an amazing anime, but it was not Indian. Or even India. All those buildings and clothing styles were Persian, not Indian. And over and over, I was told we didn't want to offend anyone. We didn't want to step on real beliefs, or real cultural influences, or do anything to make anyone mad. So, no fore-armed vidalkin, or elephant-headed loxodon, or gods, fine. But then they kept going. No snakes, no monkeys, no rakshasas, no Indian birds, no cultural markers of any kind at all. Literally, just the skin.
00:38:26
Speaker
No, it is not what I've wanted. It is not what I've waited my whole life for. This isn't me or my people or anything to do with me. So that's a really powerful and different way of viewing Kaladesh than we had. Yeah, and I'm glad that you brought his perspective into it because
00:38:52
Speaker
We don't have, as you said, you and I don't have a lot of perspective on that culturally. So having the best way, if you don't have a perspective, is to go listen to other people who have a perspective, who have that perspective. That's the best way to learn, is to just shut up and listen sometimes, a lot of times really.
00:39:14
Speaker
Yeah, and it's that lived experience that we don't have the lived experience of not seeing ourselves in media. There have been plenty of white male protagonists in media all over. Just talking about magic, the beginning of magic, the first
00:39:32
Speaker
real, you know, central story hero that we had was Gerard Capation, white dude. But there wasn't a ton of representation other than that. I mean, the weather like the original weather like crew itself, there was a good kind of smattering of people humanoids, both fictional and, and real sort of representation. But
00:39:57
Speaker
to your point that the main sort of character of the story, the central protagonist of the story. Wait, dude.
00:40:06
Speaker
Yeah, and I came away from reading the Weatherlight saga at first going, oh, okay, that's great. Great story. Awesome. Come back to it, you know, a little bit later, I look at the cards, all that sort of stuff. And I realized that Sisay was the captain of the ship. I didn't get that in my first reading because Gerard is the guy. Gerard's the dude in charge, it seems like. And so that, you know, that is kind of how magic positions itself. And so you have this,
00:40:35
Speaker
you know, sort of bring it back to Kaladesh here in Shivam's perception of it and perspective of it, which is totally valid and totally fair. He's he has all these experiences, he knows this culture in and out. And he goes, that's not even, that's not even my culture. So where we see, okay, this is
00:40:54
Speaker
a step in the right direction, we see this is something and we see that sort of treating a subject matter and a cultural inspiration gently. Shivam sees that as disrespecting that and that's completely fair and valid, you know? And I think this point is it's it's like they're trying, they're trying so hard to be respectful that they're not actually engaging. Right. I think that that seems a decent read of
00:41:23
Speaker
what he was saying in that quote. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's fear of offending somebody by being too representative of it so far that you dilute it down into something that it's not. Yeah.
00:41:38
Speaker
And I think that's an important thing that we do need to realize too is that being truthful to source material and being truthful to cultures that inspire is, I don't know, is maybe more important than even just the step in the direction. We've talked about this when I was in teaching school, sort of how do you teach multiculturalism authentically?
00:42:06
Speaker
and there's there's kind of different like stages of a multicultural classroom. One of them is sort of the like you talk about it or like you do you know just like the minimal bare surface level type stuff like we all sort of like knew vaguely about Cinco de Mayo as kids and like maybe
00:42:24
Speaker
you know you learned it you like maybe you learned it was a mexican holiday or you know maybe the next level is like oh and then you guys you know wore little sombreros and ate like rice for lunch that day you know and like did a little thing about it but like that the next level is actually engaging with the real
00:42:44
Speaker
meet of what it's about and thinking through, you know, and like actually learning, like, okay, no, this is, this is a completely different thing than just like a celebration. Like, this is where it came from. And this is who is involved. And this is why it's so critically important to this culture. And I think that's what you see here. And you do see too, that like, that cross-cultural mushing that we talked about with why Rabaya was a bit messy too, because it wasn't
00:43:13
Speaker
really just Saudi Arabian or, you know, one specific culture was just kind of this messy mush. You get that too in Kaladesh. Yeah, in a lot of ways, Arabian Nights was kind of a high level of what people in the West would recognize as things from the Middle East. And that's smashing a lot of different people together and not really representing any of them.
00:43:38
Speaker
Right. And we do see that a little bit with when we have top down or, you know, for lack of a better term in this discussion, but skinned, you know, sort of sets where there is some sort of culture laid over it. You know, Mark Rosewater has said specifically, like we want to do the touchstone things that people will recognize, like Egypt set gotta be pyramids, you know, like, sure, I get that.
00:44:07
Speaker
Yeah.
Challenges in Game Cultural Representation
00:44:08
Speaker
But you also want to be true to the culture, especially when it's a living, breathing, vibrant culture, like Egypt, ancient Egypt is dead. At a certain point, like we do know that like, okay, yeah, the Egyptians today still exist, but they're a very different culture than the Egypt of old. Whereas there are still, there's still a living, breathing, vibrant, thriving Indian culture today. And all sorts of it's a big place with a lot of people.
00:44:37
Speaker
There's a lot of different cultural touchstones to the whole thing that don't necessarily, aren't necessarily applicable to all of them, like any given place in the US. There are cultural touchstones here that just don't, that aren't universal to the country. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Like you said, there's huge different regions. It's just a further complication of, well, then what is this, you know, Indian or what is this American or what is this thing that we're trying to represent?
00:45:05
Speaker
right absolutely and so i think that's it's important to recognize that there are multiple facets to this and there's no there's there's no easy answer to figuring out how to do a cultural take responsibly
00:45:22
Speaker
There's no easy answer, but one of the surest ways to get closer to it is to bring in people who have those lived experiences, who have that exposure to that culture, and have them guide you and lead you.
00:45:39
Speaker
And I think, too, it helps for something being appropriately representative, something like Amonkhet or Theros, you know, planes like that are reasonable and non-problematic because we're not only removed in space, we're removed in time. We're moved, you know, a thousand years from those places. And so that is super helpful for it being
00:46:06
Speaker
It's a little more of an artifact as opposed to, Rabaya is a living, is based on, and I say based on intentionally there, Rabaya is based on some of the lore of a living, breathing culture currently today. And it uses references from living, breathing religions. And so that is hugely dangerous. Yeah.
00:46:32
Speaker
difficult to walk and kind of pointless to do so. Right. What's the outside of it? That's that's that's definitely an element of its of its high ranking is it's not just that it's difficult, but that it's there's not a lot of payoff for it. There isn't anything special at this world that's worth trying to navigate these difficult
00:46:52
Speaker
situations. And now that's not to say that Wizards maybe shouldn't look at doing a world, you know, with a similar sort of idea in the future or based on some cultural elements of, you know, you know, whether it be, you know, say they go the Kamigawa route and they
00:47:14
Speaker
base it based on the religion say okay we're gonna do something vaguely Islamic or maybe they base it on a specific region and they say we want it right we want it to be Babylonian, Babylonian, Sumerian maybe we want it to be you know
00:47:30
Speaker
Saudi Arabian in in nature, you know or specifically Syrian we don't you know, that's not to say they shouldn't do something like that They should because I thought it was the coolest thing when I saw Ixalan being the first, you know Western hemisphere culture essentially set
00:47:49
Speaker
You know in in magic history like that's the first time that's happened And I was so pumped about that and it's got me thinking now about you know and although there are representation issues in this Not not in his work
00:48:05
Speaker
I'll get to my point here in a second, not in his work, but in the idea of, again, representing a culture in the story in the game. But it got me thinking about Ryan Pankos' fantasy frontier series of drawings. One of the magic artists who's done sketches and paintings of
00:48:26
Speaker
what a fantasy setting in the American West would look like, sort of in that frontier, you know, 1850s range. And, you know, you'd have maybe like instead of cat folk and that sort of thing, you'd have like bison folk and that sort of stuff. And I think that's so cool. Like as somebody who lives in this country near those things, you know, near bison, near the Great Plains, I think that would be so great to see in a magic setting.
00:48:53
Speaker
But you have to be careful and deft about dealing with something like saying, you know, any any of these cultures specifically, you know, reference Native Americans or, you know, reference the imperialism of white settlers into native lands back then.
00:49:14
Speaker
Like that's something you have to be very delicate about and know how you're approaching it. And I know that in preparation for this episode when we were talking in our Twitter DMs, you know, one thing that I mentioned that I thought did a really great job of also representing religion in
00:49:49
Speaker
are the Assassin's Creed series of games. And it's beautiful to me what
Assassin's Creed: A Success in Representation
00:49:56
Speaker
errs at the beginning of every single Assassin's Creed game. It's this little blurb, this disclaimer that says, and it's changed a couple of times, but the original one
00:49:56
Speaker
what could be a controversial
00:50:13
Speaker
This game is inspired by historical events and characters. This work of fiction was designed, developed, and produced by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs. And eventually it was changed to also add sexual orientations and gender identities, which is also a great addition. But to me, that's that's important because it wasn't a couple of white guys
00:50:35
Speaker
doing this. It wasn't just a couple of Muslim guys. It wasn't just a couple of black guys. It wasn't just a couple of women. It was a huge team that sat down and said, we all bring different perspectives to this table
00:50:52
Speaker
And we want to be respectful of each other's perspectives and the perspectives that we represent, that we are coming into this room and representing. And how do we make this game and this world incredible and compelling while still respecting everybody else's cultures? How do we bring these references in while still not slapping anybody into things?
00:51:26
Speaker
That's our show. You can find the podcast at goblinlorepod on Twitter, or you can email any questions, comments, or concerns to us at goblinlorepodcast at gmail.com. We've also now launched our Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com slash goblinlorepod. Our $1 tier is open and gets you access to our private Discord server, where you can talk about all things lore and all things life.
00:51:58
Speaker
This episode was produced and edited by Joe Redman, who you can find on Twitter, at Findhorn, that's F-Y-N-D Horn. This episode was hosted by Alex Newman, who you can find on Twitter, at AlexanderNewM. HobbsQ can be found on Twitter, at HobbsQ.
00:52:19
Speaker
Goblin Lore is a member of the Geek Therapy Network. Geek Therapy is a network of like-minded individuals who seek to use our hobbies and our love of games to understand our minds and the cultures that we live in. To learn more about Geek Therapy, check them out at geektherapy.com or at geektherapy on Twitter. Thank you all for listening and remember Goblins, like snowflakes, are only dangerous in numbers.