Well, here it goes...
Here is one thing that might be part of the lack of non-white, non-male, non-cakey people is that one, as has been pointed out we all want that idealized self and two just how many of the artists are white or white and male?
I ask, because I as a white male of some artistic persuasion I find I have to remember not to make everyone in my universe a weak copy of myself. I also know that part of it is I suck at figure drawing women and trying to get folks turning out good much less not white is also a pain. One of the reasons I turned to using words to paint with. But even there I find myself giving nice Euro-American names to an endless procession of generic males. I got a name generator for the names and I try to balance my genders as well (though to me there are only two).
I wonder is this me, or is this a thing which all artist have to watch out for?
If it isn't just me then maybe another thing we could do is try and get more non-white, non-male artists to do more work for the games we love.
Comments?
I think that non-white, non-male artists is possibly part of the answer, but I think that another answer is that an Art Director also needs to give said artists some direction. I also seem to remember an interview with one of Vallejo's who talked about the difficulty finding a color that worked well when painting African subjects - you do what you know, or what you are taught, unless you stretch yourself.
Referee's can also do this if they use pictures gleaned from the Internet for NPC's simply by choose pictures with a variety of ethnicities, races, and genders. Similarly, if they are that worried about it they could create an "Random Ethnicity/Race Table" and use that to assign characteristics.
The problem is that with so much black and white art in Traveller we have no way of knowing who is white, who is ivory, who is olive skinned, who is golden yellow, who is black, who is dark brown, who is flame red, and who is purple. That's a limitation of that artistic style. We can get light skinned, medium skinned, and dark skinned - and that's it.
The real issues is the typically blandly Caucasian features.
Personally I have always thought that the canon Traveller setting is a fantastic exploration of race and gender. From the Major/Minor race divide, to the multiple Human Races, on through Psionics and Geneering - Traveller has implicitly had a series of dialogues around racism and how it might manifest in the Far Future when skin color clearly seems to be a relatively minor concern to most of Humaniti.
Gender vs. sex, famously, gets discussed over-and-over in the discussions of the Aslan. But it also gets plenty of potential discussion when looking at the three Droyne sexes, single-sexed Hivers, etc. There has always been plenty of room to have game where this matters in some way - in fact with the Aslan it almost begs to.
Personally, I'm less concerned with "naked people" or "skimpy clothing" and more concerned with someone else deciding that a bare breast or buttock is automatically sexualized (which I would strenuously argue is an inappropriate response). In that respect I'd simply prefer equal amounts of "cake" for both the male and female gaze - as well as to avoid lurid or prurient.
I'd like a Far Future where people have a variety of "normal" and "weird" cultural practices, and I'm not afraid of seeing that reflected in the art.
One of the most memorable characters from my game was a guy who played a Scout who had done lots of X-Boat duty (thus lots of time alone). He was also a follower of basically the Society for Creative Anachronism and dressed and talked like a cowboy from the North American West of the late 19th Century - at least what people in the Far Future thought they were like. The party travelled using his DD Scout, but also had to put up with the eccentricities he'd developed over the years. Namely that he mostly like to sit around in his cowboy boots - and nothing else.
Ok, occasionally he'd wear his chaps sometimes too.
And nobody, I mean nobody, was going to tell him how to dress on his ship!
There was no lurid or prurient point to this - it was merely funny watching everyone roleplay through this odd habit - and people are still talking about that character many years later.
What I want is a game that encourages people to have fun, not make them feel or suggest that X is inherently morally wrong (as opposed to against the law of this planet or that Interstellar polity). Traveller is a game, oftentimes, about cultural relativism and boundary crossing - even cultural warfare and imperialism. Not one that has set up an alignment system with Good and Evil, Lawful, and Chaotic - and I'd like to keep it that way.
D.
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