The Stories We Tell Make a Difference

I told myself I was going to do something a little more lighthearted for the next few weeks. I've been touching on some heavy topics of late, and I don't want folks to get burned out. But if you've looked at your news feed recently (or you just haven't been burying your head in the sand), then you know about what's going on out there right now. You know about the struggle, the riots, the violence, and all the rest. It's a big, confusing mess, and we all want to do our part to get involved in trying to fix it. To help out in some way. But as a post that came across my Facebook feed said, you don't necessarily need to be on the front lines to help. You just need to use your voice in any way you can.

Every successful party needs support casters, after all.

And while it might not seem like it matters, or that it's important, telling stories is a little thing that can have an impact going forward. Even if they're made-up stories about people who don't exist, and places that never were... because our brains are lightning-filled-jelly, and they're surprisingly easy to trick.

Before I get into this week's thoughts, though, if you have the time and extra dosh, consider donating to and boosting some of the following:

- Black Lives Matter (Chicago)
- Minnesota Freedom Fund

The stories we hear are what program our minds.

Variety in Stories is a Necessity

All too often the media we consume is dismissed as unimportant brain popcorn. Just distractions that we mentally munch on so we can get our daily dose of feel-good neurotransmitters and unwind. However, the attitudes, ideas, and even opinions and biases that we absorb from the stories we read stick with us. If you've ever talked to someone profoundly affected by the work of Ayn Rand (I don't recommend having this conversation if you've managed to avoid it thus far), then you've seen this in action.

The media we consume doesn't control our minds. But if your brain is a garden, then what goes in through your eyes and ears is a large part of the environment. It will affect what grows in your skull, whether you want it to or not.

For those who skipped the above video (I highly recommend giving it a watch when you have time for a Ted Talk), novelist Chimamanda Adichie describes what it was like growing up and only reading books about white people in America and England. Places she'd never seen as a Nigerian girl, and people who looked nothing like her. The total lack of representation meant that, when she first started writing as a girl, she wrote stories about places she'd never been, and people who were nothing like those she knew. Nothing like her.

Because she hadn't seen any examples that said people like her could exist in literature. Girls with dark skin and kinky hair were not the protagonists of the books she'd read, and it took expanding her intake of stories to realize that didn't have to be the case.

Those stories stirred her imagination, they engaged her, but they were windows instead of doors. They didn't let her in, the way they had let in children who looked like the protagonists, and who were from the places they were from. Part of her work, as a creator, was to change the nature of that message. To build doors so that children like her would be able to see people like themselves in the stories they read. So they would hear the message, "You belong here. You can be a part of this, if you want to."

And that is a powerful thing; both to say, and to hear.

Parasocial Relationships, and Fiction

There is another aspect of stories other than making sure that other people have a seat at the table, though. If you've never heard the term parasocial relationships before, it is when you form a one-sided relationship with a person. This is common in the cases of celebrities whose fans may feel connected to them, who may feel positive regard for them, and who empathize with a person whom they've never met, and who doesn't even know they exist.

This also happens with investment in made-up characters.

Parasocial relationships also extend to fictional characters, and our investments in them. This is something most of us have experienced to some degree whenever we develop a favorite character in a book, a comic series, etc. We get invested in them, and they give us feelings, even though they aren't real.

Remember how I said your brain is just a jelly jar full of lightning and pudding? Well, it's amazingly advanced in some ways, but in other ways it's really dumb. And one way that it's dumb is that it has the same reaction to reading about characters in stories, or watching portrayals in movies, that it has to actually meeting people of different backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, etc.

When you combine this with contact hypothesis (the basic idea that the more exposure you have to people from a certain demographic, the less "other" they become to you), it shows that proper portrayals in media can do two things at once. They send the message to people from other demographics that they are part of this story, and they matter. With the other hand, though, they give people from the more dominant demographic (people who may not come into contact with these "others" all that often) some kind of exposure to different people.

Innuendo Studios touched on this in the video below, Why The Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship.

So what does all of that mean?

Well, in less academic terms, this setup means that you can use fiction to empathize with people you've never met, because your brain thinks you have friends from that demographic. You haven't deluded yourself into thinking your fictional characters are real people (most of the time, at least), but your brain learns to ignore the knee-jerk reaction to "other" real people because you've had contact with them. Even if that contact was only in your mind.

Whether it's the LGBTQ+ community, black people, Native Americans, Jewish people, Muslims, those suffering from psychological trauma or mental disorders, your brain learns to identify with other humans through art, and the messages in that art.

However, the quality of the representation (and the message it sends) can affect what your brain receives.

For example, if you go back and watch a lot of cartoons over the years, you'll notice that the villains tend to be queer-coded. Whether they have soft voices, elaborate costumes, "weak" hand gestures, etc., the message being sent was clear; to resemble gay stereotypes is bad. We see it in action movies and TV where the only role you can get as a black actor is as a pimp or a gang banger, and the only role offered to those of Middle Eastern heritage is a terrorist. We see it in movies that always show tribal villages and insane warlords in Africa, but never acknowledge that would be like setting all American movies in the Alaskan wilderness ruled over my gangs of methed out religious cultists (which is to say it does happen, but it's nowhere near the norm).

And so on, and so forth.

Good or bad, the portrayals we see are poured into our heads, and they swirl around. The messages we see can color our perceptions, and make us think in certain ways over time. But just like realizing that not all stories have to be about apple-cheeked white boys having snowball fights, they also allow us to change our narratives.

What This Has To Do With Gaming

The games we play are just stories mixed with math. And even if we are in a place like the Forgotten Realms, Golarion, or a setting of our own making, the things we choose to include (or not include) in our games can make a difference. Like rain drops that fill a dry lake, or snowflakes that cause an avalanche, little messages can add up to big trends.

And I'm trying to do my part to help.

As a creator, it is my job to provide resources for people to tell stories. But part of that is also attempting to widen the variety of stories we tell, the messages we send, and the thoughts and ideas we can explore.

False Valor is a one-shot module that deals with people trying to start a race war, and taking extreme measures to provoke it into happening. Spoiler warnings, but it's not an accident that several of the NPCs in this book read like Proud Boys with hunting knives and longbows instead of AR-15s. My best-selling Azukail Games supplement 100 NPCs You Might Meet at The Tavern has gender fluid merchants, dark-skinned knights, big-boned wizards, and other characters that are outside of what one might typically expect to find bellied up to the bar. And for folks who saw A Response to The "Flaw" in my 100 Kinfolk Collection, I've made it very clear that my goal for creating more than 1,000 kinfolk NPCs for Werewolf: The Apocalypse was to specifically push back against the 90s edginess that led to so much cringe, and so much exclusion in what is supposed to be a global game. My goal is to do something, even if it's small, to make players think about what sorts of characters they have in their games, and even more importantly, why they don't have other sorts.

I don't expect my work, all on its lonesome, to make a huge difference. I like to think there are some players and storytellers out there who read through it, and smiled when they saw something unique and different between my pages, but I am under no illusions about the size of the community that follows my releases. However, given the chance, I'll make as many individual droplets of rain as I can. Because I want my hobby to expand. I want more people to be able to hear, and tell, their own stories.

And mostly, I want to try to show that we're not so different, when it comes time to stand together.

Like, Follow, and Stay in Touch!

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday!

Again, for more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, and stop by the YouTube channel Dungeon Keeper Radio. Or if you'd prefer to read some of my books, like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my latest short story collection The Rejects, then head over to My Amazon Author Page!

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