One of our players mailed me last night to ask why everyone in the EB art is white. I'm glad this came up, because it is something Paul and I have been mulling over.

A glib answer would be, there weren't that many Asians in Dickens. A glib answer to the glib answer would be, there weren't that many sorrow-spiders either. Then we get into the whole business of whether ahistoricity in fantasy is important because it's about suspension of disbelief, or trivial because it's fantasy. And three sentences later we inevitably find ourselves embroiled in one of those Wikipedia-based internet arguments, which isn't something I want. As a position statement, the approach in EB has always been not to be openly anachronistic but not to be too fussed: so there's a music hall culture that's more of the 1890s/00s than the 1880s, we slip in and out of Victorian turns of phrase, we probably have hundreds of other mistakes, but we don't have electric street-lights or Marxist-Leninists.

And yet, despite the powerful and pervasive chauvinism and homophobia of the nineteenth century, we allow players to pick a gender role and sexuality which suits them, and we treat characters of any gender identically in the storylets.[1] We've stretched gender roles by depicting female or vaguely gendered non-player characters with a distinctly ahistorical degree of independence and sexual freedom. So that's pretty anachronistic, isn't it?</p.

The thing is, we can go on to use the casual sexism of the nineteenth century to help establish period (three ladies faint at your scandalous joke, and all that), but the presence of strong non-male characters and protagonists takes the sting out of it. Unfortunately it's hard to pull the same trick with casual racism. And it's tricky to present Chinese, African, Indian, Jewish or Gypsy characters without addressing, erasing or ignoring the racism of the time. Paul has suggested the 'RSC option', that is, we simply go colour-blind and randomly assign characters to ethnicities regardless of context, but we're not the RSC, we're a little game on the Internets, and players see our stuff in isolated dibbets. We have to steer between extremes: if we have a nineteenth-century black policeman it looks like tokenism, if we have only black servants it looks like prejudice. We don't have crowd scenes, so it's hard to manage a traditional US corporate diversity rainbow effect.

We feel it deserves attention, though. And there are certainly roles that don't fit neatly into society but that players find sympathetic and exciting - monster-hunters, bravoes, explorers, poets - which could be filled by non-white characters without it looking like we're labouring a point. So you'll probably see a less monotone cast of characters as time goes on. But we'd be very interested in what our players have to say on the subject. By all means comment below.

[1] Which has, let me tell you, made writing content pretty fiddly in some cases :-)

[2] I think, incidentally, we're rather pushing the envelope by allowing player-characters whose gender can be 'not telling you.' I know this has been done in MUDs and other non-commercial contexts - how many genders did LambdaMOO have? - but as far as I know it's a first in casual social gaming.