Saturday, November 14, 2020

Diversity and Acknowledging Different and Dissenting ideas

So I was talking with my brother, who used to run a larp, and he talked to me about how difficult it was to be a person of color in the gaming industry. 

Background Preface (can skip)

the family business has more female managers than male managers, we are a matriarchial company in Construction and Manufacturing which was shocking to people who know engineering is typically a Boy's Club. 

We used to move back and forth between the USA and Philippines, until we decided on our permanent residential status. Then of course my work makes me encounter our unskilled helpers who earn 200usd/mo and very much aware of the economic costs and status of people in the company - from unskilled clerks and laborers to college grads and most working-class Filipinos. I learned to check my privilege as Filipino upper management. 

I don't know if you notice I write about my work and how It relates to gaming and gaming and how it relates to work. 

Diversity and Different Points of Views

Gaming is an exercise of Modeling - you can model People with Empathy and you Can model Reality with Systems, Simulations, Case Studies, Mechanics, Etc... But in the end, we always have some crucial element missing, some element that makes us remember it's just a game - and that is our blind spots, our biases, our expectations, and what makes us who we are. 

As people, we have blindsided and biases. that is a permanent bug of the limits of our mental capabilities and the human condition. It's not a bad thing - it's a fact of life like mortality, our ability to only work with the "visible spectrum", and the limits of our medium of communication.  Our limitations remind me on how we need each other and that needing other people is not a bad thing. 
It's not a bad thing to need help, its not bad to give help, it's not bad to want a similar point of view - but it's also not bad to challenge our points of view. 

I'm currently undergoing an Internal Audit at work and always remember that the Unknown and uncertainty is where improvement lies - because a better system will be always not the status quo - the concept that the Horizon will move as we move towards it. 

Diversity - Differences in POV/Experience/Values, etc... is important to discover what connects us and what reality we share. You cannot find something "universal" unless you have a larger and larger sample size. you cannot have a "human experience" if you cannot little by little accommodate and acknowledge the experience of other humans. The push for diversity is the push to be able to be interconnected. 

We would want interconnection because we want to make decisions that both allow us all to benefit (Liberties) and prosper, while at the same time avoiding harm. The feedback mechanism 

How this relates to gaming?

Gaming: the world-building and role-playing and System Designing make TRPGamers have a lot of interests that relate to being able to tackle Diversity and find common ground, allow for dissent and difference of ideas and world views yet still agree on universal truths/realities, as well exercise the empathy and system thinking that allows us to approach the scary topic and world of being able to relate, be sympathetic, and find common ground with people of different worlds. 

Of course, I'm speaking of TRPGamers who kinda find the humanistic philosophy and science part of their identity. Those who have a concept and word association of being a TRPGamer - game theory, psychology, systems thinking, world-building, economics, demographics, simulations etc... concepts unified by being a TRPGer. 

There is playing TRPGs and there are people who grew up with it and see it as something else, the way some people see basketball, sports, hobbies as part of their identity. 

Work blog 

I can talk about this in the work or life blog, but those blogs all draw from my Gaming Blog. From the game and wanting to run and play particular games - life and work kinda interconnect. You can say its my framework for how I see reality. 

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