Bear with me here; this takes a bit before I get to the point. So I'm a nominally heterosexual caucasian white male. I have a tiny little amount of street cred when it comes to prejudice and discrimination, but nowhere near enough to justify me going on about it (anti-Appalachian prejudice does exist, but I can pass, kind of thing.) That said, it's bloody well time for everybody to go on about it, because Trump and his fellows have enabled a huge amount of complete assholery and oh-my-god-are-you-really-saying-that that has actual, real world consequences for huge numbers of people across the planet. 

I want to do something. I donate to causes (it's hard to donate to political campaigns in the US from Canada), I vote, all that kind of stuff, but I was at a loss as to what. 

When I sat down and thought about the situation, I had an idea of something I can do. It's not a lot, and it won't actually affect the people who are most complicit in this disaster, but it might nudge the center of the bell curve 0.000001% in the right direction. The thing is, I'm worried about it. 

Here's the idea:

As a piece of art, I'm designing and building a game. Six players, concentric track-based - imagine Trivial Pursuit if it had three circles instead of just one- drawing cards to affect gameplay, etc.  Players draw cards -I'm stealing from Ticket to Ride here - that tell them what they have to do on that game board. So far, so good. 

The key bit is - I am building discrimination into the game rules. Certain players will have a definite, highly unspoken, advantage; they get more choices, they get a starting bonus, they can do things to the other players that  the other players can't do back, and so on. I won't state it in the rulebook that "Player X represents WASPs, and player Y represents Mexican-Americans" - it's just that there are more cards in the deck that let the blue player do things to the yellow player than vice versa. 

I'm thinking about including cards that let the players choose to vote on altering the rules - five out of six players can vote and say that the yellow player can't enter the inner circle, say, or that three out of six can demand the other three give them all their cards. 

It will be entirely possible to play the game so that everybody has the same shot at victory - just don't use the cards that screw other players over.

The goal is to get six male, white, cis players to sit down and play it - and maybe film the thing, maybe not, depending on human experimentation permission. Hopefully, as the game goes on, one or more of the players will realize that they are being systematically dicked over by both the rules and the other players. "Hey," they should say, "This ain't fair. I can't win", at which point I leap in and go "That's the point!"

There are games-as-art out there; there's one called Train that uses the act of playing a game to induce a feeling of complicity in an atrocity (I won't say how, that's part of Train's point). This one, though, isn't about complicity, it's about systematic discrimination.

The thing is: I am nervous. 

I don't want to be a dick. I don't want to be the white guy co-opting the oppression of others. I don't want to be Kevin Costner doing Dances with Wolves and thinking he's doing the First Nations a favor. 

I am, being white, cis, male, etc., complicit in the system that discriminates. I can't speak to the nonwhite, noncis, nonmale experience. What (I think) I can do is address how systems are put in place by people somewhat like me that result in systematic discrimination.

Is this fair?

Can I do this without being a dick?