all cops are bastards; be gay, do crimes, kiss your friends

1. ask yourself what it takes to create a more just world

1a. this means material justice

1b. shoot fascists

2. try and do those things

2a. be as kind as you can, esp. towards the marginalized and facing injustice

3. femininity is good

Kill your gods.  All geese are bastards. War is terrible.

I am definitely very deliberate when it comes to thinking about the political nature of the themes in my games. The most prominent and recurring one is "marginalized people exist and should be allowed to exist" which is sadly a contentious issue sometimes. I also tend to lean very pacifist in my works, seldom presenting violence as the primary mean of conflict resolution, and in many cases not even having it as an option at all. The engine I'm working with primarily, the Objectives Engine, also stresses scarcity and economics and making wise decisions about resource allocations, from the somewhat fantastical point of view that the characters actually have control over their resources.

While Tales of Space and Magic doesn't reflect that very well, the stories it's based on have some common political themes:

• Violence is the last resort, it's a big deal when things come to that, and usually it's the innocents who get hurt or killed.
• Imperialism is bad.
• There is no freedom without belonging and purpose.

Power is also a recurring theme throughout, and of course transhumanism too, insofar as it's political. Does this count?

For ten long years, one sword I whetted, 
Its frosty edge, as yet, untried.
Today, I hold it unsheathed before you;
Of you, to whom was justice denied?
~Jia Dao: (The) Swordsman

i keep using this poem because it's so good for my purposes. EDIT: let's break it down line-by-line;

1. Cultivate your conduct. Take all the time in the world. But do it. Whet that sword.
2. Steel in your heart, fire in your belly, ice in your veins. You contain multitudes. You contain a world.
3. Consent. Make sure you know what the people need.
4. Justice. The first word and the last curse.

Building up a community benefits you more than tearing it down

Everything worth doing carries risk

Oppression gives you no choice but to resist

Privileging violence as an option creates immoral narratives

(I feel like in many ways I might be too close to it to see it clearly, but this is what I feel those four might be). 

I'm answering this thinking of Beta Maxx X.
Premise
Systems, Structures, and Leaders can be fought. The people who will likely do the fighting are "ordinary Joes" who get screwed or attacked by those things further up the ladder. Species are not culturally monolith in the "D&D Sense" but Species have their dominant cultural elements (you can be brought up 'out of your culture).

Action
If you can figure it out, you can try do it. It might not succeed. Violence is just another tool in the box which also includes magic, cybernetics, social methods, and thinking methods.

The Art
It depicts a lot of surrealism and futurism (and a fairly high number of women, but has predominantly white people because of the ways my budget has constrained my art options and I really wish it could be more diverse. There are pieces I would probably replace and more that I would want to add).

1) Subverting systems can happen in small, but powerful ways.

1a) Subverting systems is punished.

2) When we overthrow what currently exists,  we do it as communities, not alone.

2a) There will be bad actors in those communities. They will hurt people, and we will hurt each other.

2b) We have to struggle as communities anyway, and figure out how to best do that.

I think these actually work for both games I've published so far, and for the one I am currently working on. Thank you for this, it was helpful to outline it explicitly in these terms!

My politics are all over my games and, hopefully, pretty bluntly. Still I do want to make games that anyone is welcome to play as it's not like I will be sitting at their table playing with them very often. That said, I have no problem putting things like "if you believe *this terrible thing* maybe don't play my game or join any community that comes up around it."

My recurring themes, which I suppose could be taken as political as well, is based on the following: Love is an action that attempts to do the least amount of harm and the most amount of good; justice is what love looks like in public (Cornel West said that I believe). Conflict resolution is the first action to attempt, and physical violence is last resort.

Most of my games are focused on:
1. Exploration and discovery (this can take the form of identity exploration/discovery, environmental exploration/discovery, or scientific exploration/discovery)

2. Radical Inclusion. (We live in a highly diverse world. Why would our fantasy or science fiction settings be any different? I want to mirror the glorious diversity within our world.) 

3. Truly living by love requires actions and follow-through. This can be done through conflict resolution, restorative justice, assisting others, positive support, dismantling of oppressive systems through nonviolent (or if no other option available through revolution) and violence is seen as last option when dealing with intense conflicts.  A lot of my games tend to be non-combat oriented and more conflict resolution oriented.

4. We all have a limited amount of energy in the day. To assume we are limitless in games troubles me as it excludes those who have little spoons from being present in our stories (a lot of systems don't have a good mechanic for this outside of the stress factor I saw in Blades). Thus, I prefer to set my games with a mechanic where there is only a certain amount of energy in a day, and that energy can be replenished by eating, resting, doing a self-care action. This then allows the characters to do a bit more strategy and discussing amongst themselves the best way to proceed, in order to avoid overextending themselves, which can lead to injury or exhaustion (that can set them back from achieving a goal). This way if someone wishes to play a neurodiverse or disabled character, they have a mechanic that feels more true to how that character would exist within the setting.

Characters can be evil and try to subvert or obstruct the above, which is possible in my games. But it makes it a bit harder for the party to have cohesion if so. Morally gray characters have very interesting reactions to the above, which makes for interesting gameplay I think.

Indulgence. Wish fulfillment. Healing.

I want to be the Lisa Frank of game design.

Not aesthetically. I don't want to make the game where you rainbow unicorn until you do something risky then roll a d20 to see if you succeed or fail. I want to make the game where you unicorn until you rainbow then you roll rainbow dice to decide how many unicorns you are.

BUT ALSO I wonder if I can make queer games. Is it enough to make games that stuck up cishets will look at and find too cringeworthy. Or is a game only a queer game when its design actively rejects gaze of patriarchal values and gender norms. But the insidious nature of patriarchy is such that its gaze is forced over all regardless of rejection. The Wachowski Sisters made an entire film about coming out as a trans woman, and violently misogynstic cis men appropriated its mythology into an extremist right wing political movement. Estrogen pills somehow became a symbol of men rekindling their masculinity.

Maybe the problem with the Matrix was that it was never explicit. Well how about our own darling, Monsterhearts? A game that explicitly tells you, your sexuality is not your own. That anyone can roll to turn you on. But even here, patriarchy is reinforced. Time and again I hear people praise Monsterhearts as "it's like Twilight but good". "I heard it was a game based on Twilight and to my surprise I actually enjoyed it". Monsterhearts does nothing to deter people from weaponising the game itself to draw a clear line in the sand of 'this femininity is good and that femininity is bad'.

(Twilight is deeply racist and misogynistic and spawned that dreadful 50 Shades. But more often than not, that's not what people mean when they say it's crap and certainly nothing of value can come out of 'cringing' criticism.)

Is it possible to make games that challenge people's bigotry? Is that a worthwhile goal to strive for, is it not enough to simply make games with queer content for queer players and simply not fight against audiences coming despite queer content? That we don't make games that challenge people's bigotry, is that evidence that the bar is too low? Should we have been doing that already? The Big Publishers have set the trend of putting a gay NPC in an adventure module or rulebook illustration and then creating a play experience that completely contradicts that anyway. Should we choke the life out of the Big Publishers before they choke the life out of us? Have we gone too soft subsisting on the breadcrumbs off the table of mainstream media?

What does it mean for a game to be queer and how can I make my games about cute baby monsters into queer games? How can any of us make queer games?

I can't remember who originally said this. But "queerness has not happened yet". How do we make it happen?