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An Immersive Experience

Sarah Darkmagic - Posted on 26 May 2015

Every so often I see someone issue a challenge that goes something like this: for the next x period of time, only ready books by or about y and/or z. For instance, a challenge might be, "For the next year, read only comics where at least one of the creators is a woman."

While some embrace those challenges, others often try to argue against them. They often give arguments that say while the thing the challenge is seeking to fight against is real and bad, the challenge is just as bad. I'd like to provide a counter to this line of reasoning.

When I studied Japanese in college, the most frequent request our professors made was that we go to Japan and study there at least once during our undergrad careers. Part of their reasoning was that it was impossible to recreate in the classroom all of the nuances of the culture that are necessary to enable us to really grok both the language and the culture (they are interlinked after all). They were absolutely correct and my friends who went to Japan came back much better speakers.

I think this seems pretty obvious for lots of genres of media. If you want to write a game about slasher films, you really need to watch a ton of them (or have already watched them) so you can reproduce the similarities and differences between the films. It's relatively safe to do this on subject matter, but when people recommend it in other ways, say, gender or race, there's often a backlash.

One of the problems I see right now is that we have a small number of dominant view points (if not one) that rule at least US media. Many of our stories have a rather masculine viewpoint, meaning they tend to glamorize and reinforce certain behaviors and outlooks that we attribute to masculinity, and particularly white and heterosexual masculinity. Within that viewpoint, there can be and sometimes is a variety of viewpoints, giving the illusion of diversity, but they often can be traced back to the same node and other nodes are left unexplored. Likewise, even from that dominant node, there are a bunch of branches that also are underexplored.

These challenges are requests to explore those other branches and nodes. For instance, if I challenged you to read only books from female authors for a year, there's a chance that at least one of those books will not be part of the primary node. You'll now have a jumping off point. From there, you'll be able to start to see the nuances in presentation and the vast variety of ways in which women write books. It becomes harder to say things like female authors write in particular ways or about particular stories. You'll start to have enough different experiences that you'll be able to see the nuances between them.

None of this is guaranteed of course. As with learning a language, circumstances vary and often what you put into it can determine what you'll get out. But I do think it's unfair to claim that balancing out the scales is discriminatory, especially when they often are so unbalanced anyway.

So for the past three years, I've made a lot more conscious choices about what media I consume. I look for diversity in the characters and the creators and love when I find the ones that have both. I try to keep a balance of viewpoints (with rare exceptions). My life has improved greatly because of it. I now am better able to give examples of characters I like or ones that illustrate the difference between sexy and sexualized or that show not all nudity is sexual in nature.

A big part of my immersive experience over the past couple of years has been in comic book form. Comics are interesting because the initial investment is often relatively low and there's a relatively large number of titles so you can experiment. Here are some of the series I've enjoyed over the past three years if you are looking for a starting point.

Have you done something similar? Which comics, novels, movies, etc caught your eye?

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