Values Dissonance / Tabletop Games

---

• Castle Falkenstein: Oddly enough, not from the residents of the Alternate Universe 19th Century, but from Tom the narrator. Tom is a solid member of Generation X, raised on a steady diet of disaffectation, Cyberpunk and early environmentalism, and is very quick to decry technology as a tool of corporate greed, oppression and destruction. This stands in stark contrast with Millennials and Zoomers, who are more likely to see technology as a tool for corporate greed, but also for grass-roots empowerment and self-determination, and are likely to consider it, on average, a net good.
• Several Milton Bradley games where children were expected to be the target consumer, both traditional favorites and those based off long-running TV game shows, made reference to tobacco smoking and alcohol use. For instance:
  • The home game of Video Village had a prize card (similar to the ones seen with the Home Game adaptation of Concentration) of a gold-plated cigar lighter (from the "Jewelry Shop"); a "Finders Keepers" card credited the player landing in said space with "a box of cigars" (worth $5). Some of the "Town Council" questions were risque for the early 1960s as well (e.g., one question asks whether women should be allowed to wear bikinis in public).
  • Multiple editions of the game Go to the Head of the Class - an education-based trivia/quiz game set to a one-room schoolhouse theme - had questions asking players to identify brand names of cigarettes; even before the health risks became widely known, it was never socially acceptable for school-age children to smoke, and such questions continued at least into editions published in the late 1970s. Several other editions asked players questions concerning the nursery rhyme "I Love Little Pussy"; anyone who has not heard that poem may get the wrong idea, especially today, when children might have learned the poem as "I Love Little Kitty" ("kitty" being a synonym for "pussy", as in "pussycat") and never heard the original, since "pussy" has been a vulgar slang term for both "vagina" and "sex".
  • Multiple TV game show adaptations, most notably Jeopardy!, have had Potent Potables categories. (In particular Milton Bradley's Jeopardy! adaptations, since they took questions directly from the show; Pressman's late 1980s adaptations, wherein the question writers from the TV show wrote questions exclusive to the home games, also had alcohol-based categories.)
  • In a 1990 computer game based on The Price Is Right, one Grocery Game item was a six-pack of Bland-Name Product beer. As far as anyone can tell, alcohol has never been used on the actual show.
• The board game Public Assistance is a satire of people living off welfare and public assistance programs. The object is to win with the most money at the end. The game rewards you with lots of money for being on welfare, selling drugs, having illegitimate children, going into prostitution, and being thrown into jail. Getting a job is dubbed "Worker's Burden" and you'll wind up losing money towards bills, school, raising a family, and so on. The game was released in the 1980s, during a time where being on welfare was seen as being lazy and getting everything for nothing (the tagline "Why Work for a Living?" only solidifies this further). While the game wasn't seen as being that humorous back then, people of today's time would be appalled by the way the game glorifies living on welfare, since public assistance in the current times isn't as glamorous as one would think, and getting into the program is a lot tougher due to the change in standards.
• Hanafuda cards remain popular in Japanese-American communities and in Hawaii (where they are used to play games like koi-koi), but in Japan they are often associated with the Yakuza and so make people wary, to say the least.
• In the West, mahjong is generally seen as a harmless game for little old ladies, particularly mahjong solitaire, which is popular as a computer game. But in Japan and other East Asian cultures, it is a hardcore gambling game that Asian parents would rather not teach their children, the same way Western parents don't encourage their kids to play poker. Many jansou (mahjong parlors) had (or still have) ties to the Yakuza.
• The World of Darkness: Early editions of various games portrayed Roma people as thieving and duplicitous, much in line with their portrayal in old media and stereotypes that still linger today. This is to say nothing of its continual use of the term "gypsies" to refer to culture, which is considered a slur. The Ravnos clan of vampires has its roots in Roma people, and their clan weakness is the compulsion to steal. The World of Darkness: Gypsies was filled with offensive stereotypes and was ultimately discontinued due to protests.
• Vampire: The Eternal Struggle: There's a "Gypsies" ally card that gets +1 stealth on all of its actions, further playing into the "thieving gypsies" stereotypes found in the pen-and-paper The World of Darkness games.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Ravenloft setting has historically portrayed the Vistani, who are transparently based on the Roma, using the Magical Romani and Roguish Romani stereotypes. The Curse of Strahd Revamped release did away with this, along with several smaller tweaks for similar purposes.
  • The earliest Forgotten Realms lore was written in the 1970s. It isn’t very surprising that a game about adventure and danger like D&D would feature stats even today for a Threatening Shark, but it does feel a bit shocking to read older descriptions of aquatic elves as killing sharks on sight because they see them as evil and associated with the sahuagin. With the awareness in recent decades that sharks are endangered and in need of protection, such behavior sounds wildly out of character for a species that are supposed to live In Harmony with Nature.
  • The use of the term "race" to describe the various D&D beings (Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, etc.) has come to be this. Not only do the increasing racial tensions in Western culture making any mention of the word a touchy subject at best, but there are also those who feel that assigning specific traits to an entire "race" to be uncomfortably close to real-life racial profiling of decades past. In 2022, Wizards of the Coast officially announced they were scrapping the term entirely for the revised version of 5th edition, and likely replacing it with "species", a change most find was needed.
• Warhammer 40,000: American audiences are often turned off by the Crapsack World setting and question how a game world as bleak as Nineteen Eighty-Four and the really dark Conan the Barbarian stories could be marketed at children. In other countries like Russia and its native Britain, where the culture of humour is more cynical and dry, the setting strikes as darkly absurdist. It is telling that the game's increase in popularity in the US trends towards the game's more recent shift in tone towards A World Half Full - there are more well-intentioned characters than before and the Imperium is finally starting to show signs of moving out of its rut.
• Several Pokémon cards were changed for their Western releases
  • One of the best known is Koga’s Ninja Trick from one of the early gym leader expansions. The original Japanese art featured manji symbols, which are good luck symbols in Asia but were flipped around by Those Wacky Nazis to make the swastika. Some westerners mistook the symbol for a swastika even before the Western release, so the art was changed in the Western versions of the card.
  • Misty’s Tears depicted Misty hugging her Staryu and crying. The problem was that she was topless in the art despite being only 10 in the games. There was no way it would be accepted in Western countries, so the art was changed to Squirtle wiping away a clothed Misty’s tears.
  • A Grimer card had him emerging from a sewer and the fact his eyes were gazing up made him seem to be looking up a girl’s skirt. In the Western version, he’s looking straight ahead.
  • A Magmortar card from one of the fourth-generation tie-in sets had Magmortar aiming his Arm Cannon at the person viewing the card. Due to differing views on guns and kids in the West, the art was changed to remove the action.

---