Having been in Japan recently, Japanese culture definitely counts as other. It’s the least western place I’ve ever been – far less western than China.

Recently, a friend started a Japanese based game. He’s a pakeha who’s spent a lot of time in Japan and has done a metric fuckton of research and planning for this game. Another friend was a bit reluctant to play largely because he wasn’t sure that he could play the game well. He overcame his inhibitions and was enjoying the campaign as much as pretty much any other game he’s played.

So, I know exactly what you’re talking about when you say that it’s about “what stories can I tell fluently and easily under time pressure”. That’s exactly the reason I find running sci-fi games tough as well. That doesn’t change the Sophie’s point – there are plenty of modern style games where you need to have non-white characters to be faithful to the setting.

In short, I think this is as much about players as it is about GMs – it’s good to play something that isn’t a direct extension of yourself and perhaps have some fun with the setting as a result.

Though that aside if you are playing a game in modern LA, for example, and you don’t have at least one Hispanic and/or Black character you aren’t being overly representative. Though then of course you get in to the murky waters of stereotype… which is a whole other discussion.

But seriously, while I can think of a handful of games that consciously encourage you to play characters in a different culture (Orkworld springs to mind, for some reason), I suspect that the reason that they’re not that common is the same reason that faux-medieval fantasy and urban fantasy games are more popular than sci-fi games — familiarity. While you need to absorb a bunch of background to know whether a laser carbine is more useful to grab than a PGMP when you’re scrambling out the airlock, pretty much everyone knows what a crossbow or submachine-gun is.

Which is why it makes complete sense that, for example, when our group played Universalis, my proposed setting of “Jamaican Folktale” got voted out — it is very hard to make an interesting story when you don’t know how that group of stories is supposed to work (the stock characters and situations, etc). As it happens, we eventually went with “Russian Folktale”, which seemed to work fine.

And I certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable running a game about, say, Thailand or Indonesia without an awful lot of prep — just because I don’t think I know enough interesting things about those cultures to make a compelling story. (A pulp game set in those places would be a different matter, of course; but they’re then more colour than countries.) I’d be a bit wary about playing someone from these cultures, too.

That said, there are plenty of cultures that I would have no problem running a game in — ancient China, for example. (Note that I do not say a *realistic* game.) There is enough media out there showing me the shapes of stories in that setting that I can have some confidence that I can say, “You meet in a teahouse” and have an idea of what might happen, and who might be around; and that the players will have some idea too.

(BTW, if you have not read the Barry Hughart books featuring Li Kao & Number 10 Ox, may I take this opportunity to recommend them.)

In summary — I think that much of the reason for the monoculture is not “fear of the other”, as such, and more “what stories can I tell fluently and easily under time pressure” (since you can’t go and research an appropriate response in the middle of a game).

Of course, the question then becomes, “Is it important to expand the contexts I can comfortably tell stories in?” And I’d say, tentatively, that I find it more fun.

[Sorry for the dump; I accidentally read this after your Kapcon post, and it's been rolling around in my head ever since.]