Is it time to go back to coding orcs as fascists?

 

TL;DR. When I gamed in California in the late 1970s, orcs were coded as fascists. It wasn’t until later that I encountered them being coded as people of color. Maybe it’s time to explicitly add minority representation to humans and go back to orcs being fascists.

 

Back in the day orcs were evil, and they were fascists.

I think my TL;DR at the top pretty much catches what I’m going to say. When I started in what we now call “fantasy” in the mid-to-late 1970s, orcs were a timeless evil creature that helped some big-bad destroy all that was nice. They were sort of a rot that was destroying the world. Over time, TTRPGs recoded them to be various minority or – I think, more commonly – as a generic “visible minority”. Of course, once you do that, you need to stop making them inherently evil, and they should have normal intelligence, and all that. But you lose the central conflict of the world, the idea that some powerful people are manipulating the masses for their own gain and building armies of thoughtless people to enact their villainy.

Of course we have to separate these two things. We need visible minorities in games—but they should just be humans. Because… well, do I even have to say it? But we also need a cancerous evil that creeps through humanity—of all types—which needs to be fought and defeated.

I’m going to argue that we should just make sure TTRPG worlds recognize different ethnic and minority groups and then return orcs to being pig-head, low intelligence bad guys that need to be defeated before they destroy all that is good in the world.

History of the word, orc. I’m not the best person to do a deep dive on the origin of the word orc. But Tolkien did not invent it, instead he grabbed an Old English word that meant something like demon-spirit or specter or goblin and also sounded cool (he picked it for “phonetic reasons”) and used that for the servants of various evil Dark Lords. Tolkien scholars say that he was inconsistent in his notes about where they came from. Sometimes they were bred by the Dark Lord, other times they were elves corrupted by one or another Dark Lord, and even occasionally they were elves who were corrupted “in the wild”. Wikipedia covers this.

However they came to be, they were creatures of good who became evil. Now Tolkien definitely implied that modern human minorities are in some way associated with the orcs—and he wasn’t very charitable towards women either. But I still feel that he portrayed the orcs of the Third Age to be cruel, obedient followers of a powerful and evil individual.

Tolkien Apologist? It is easy for me to not get stressed over Tolkien modelling his orcs on minorities. I am certain that he did. We all have limitations. My father hated Germans, but he was very fond of African Americans. He was a working-class guy from downtown Detroit. He appeared to get along swell with American minorities, but he hated Germans. Of course, there was that time that a German fighter pilot strafed the bridge he was working on and left him with two holes in his legs which never healed. My father, like Tolkien, was an imperfect person who suffered through the trauma of war. Tolkien is an imperfect person, like myself, my father, and everyone else I know, but with his fiction he was trying to make comments about the nature of human conflict. It is the positive elements of that message I would like to focus on, well recognizing that there are negatives that should be addressed.

Don’t forget half-elves. In Tolkien’s world elves and humans lived mostly apart, except (I think) there were two cases where an elf and human got together and created half-elves. I have already written about how all this is driven by the idea of biological determinism (it is here), and how creating these fanciful different “races” with their separate origins is not doing anything good for gaming. But it starts with in D&D, with half-elves. They are an early entry. The first appear (as I understand it) in Greyhawk in 1974. By 1978 they are a standard feature of TTRPGs. This is when the half-orc enters the gaming world. So, by 1978 we are already seeing some gamers switching to “race” as ethic minority.

My Lived-Experience. I started war gaming around 1977 (about age 12) and by 1978 I was deep into TTRPGs. I was in a remote, university town and spent far more time playing in ancient redwood forests and along rock seashores that I ever spent in cities—and I had no idea of the breadth or scoop of the gaming community. But I had access to Runequest, Original D&D, Basic D&D, lots of Metagaming MicroGames including Melee and Wizards, and the AD&D Monster Manual.

How were orcs portrayed? And I don’t remember orcs ever being “stand ins” for people of color or any recognizable minority. Instead, they were fascists. I grew up in a house with multiple disabled veterans who had all been involved in fighting fascists—we all knew what and who they were. At least in my childhood home, the fascists were low intelligence, mean people who loved law and order, as long as they got to make the law and bully other people around.

How were orcs coded? For me, the orcs of D&D were always, basically, the same as the “mutants” of Ralph Bakshi’s movie, Wizards who were definitely fascists.

But let’s look at the early works. In The Arduin Grimoire, we are told that orcs have Intelligence and Wisdom limited to 4-11 (p.6, on the same 3-18 scale of D&D), so lower than human, but we are also told (p.11) that they, like elves, are immortal, they are savage and treacherous, as well as warlike, quarrelsome, and love to kill. And, interestingly, they are listed as chaotic evil.

In the MicroGame The Fantasy Trip, Melee, Steve Jackson says it most succinctly, “An orc is just like a human figure—except evil”

In the early Monster Manual, orcs (p.76) were common, pig-headed people with pinkish snouts who are brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen. They are bullies and the stronger will always intimidate and dominate the weaker. They are lawful evil and only live for 40 years.

I would argue that for TSR, even by 1978 (the year they released the Monster Manual) they are already starting the shift of orcs being coded as minorities and not immortal evil. We are told they have “unpleasant” brown or brownish green skin, and they have a short life span. But even for TSR in 1978, they were still lawful and evil. They were some hybrid of the outsider and the fascist. They were low to average intelligence pig-headed people who kept slaves and loved torture, but they are brown skinned and prolific (which I would argue are stereotypes held of by many whites of the African American community, and thus consistent with coding orcs as minorities).

Let’s make fascism evil again. Whatever their history, at least for a while in at least one place, orcs were fascists. They were low intelligence individuals who hated outsiders, who followed their leader unquestioningly, who opposed those that were not of their tribe. They were mean bullies and slavers. They were an ageless evil threatening our peace and security.

Let’s bring that back!

What I am Doing. In my current fantasy game, mean and evil people are transformed into orcs and goblins. Through the magic of the Evil powers, the worst humans give themselves over to evil. As they do, they transform physically and gain certain advantages which they covet. In this setting, orcs are not an ethnic group, they are people with similar moral convictions. They are people who give up elements of themselves for various reasons, in order to be free of needing to respect the rights of others.

Additionally, since the early 1980s, I have always tended to play d100 games which—mechanically—replace the D&D idea of “race” with cultures and ethnicities. Instead of different fantasy races or species or whatever they are, there are ethnic groups that reflect more accurately the variation in human backgrounds.

Here is one of my old Runequest worlds that I ran through much of the 1990s. There are three ethnic groups mentioned on the map, the Lomaran, Mnar, and the Loskalm. None of them exactly map to any modern groups, they are just the groups of humans in this world. In this world there were never any playable non-human races. These groups created the variation available to the players.

Racial and ethnic mixing in modern communities is for most of us a common element of our life. Historically, such mixing occurred, but there were also large homogeneous areas. Personally, since it is a fantasy world with dragons and wizards and magic and all that other stuff. I’m happy to just have all my humans be of a heterogeneous mixture of humans and not even worry about why or how. Half the town are black skinned, others are different skin tones, and others are white. I’m not worrying about why there are dragons, why the F should I care about why there are black skinned people in a medieval European-themed setting.

But what I do care about are the fascists. And yes, the Evil Overlord is raising an army. And yes, he (or she) is a threat to all that is free and good. And his pig-headed followers are a threat. They have and will continue to kill and enslave those weaker than themselves, and yes, your heroes are free to attack them on sight.

As always, think you for reading this and please feel free to leave any comments below.

 

Please Don’t Fall for the Tech Bro’s Trap…

 

Or, "What Everyone should know about AI."

TL;DR. AI is not a single thing. It is an arbitrary collection of algorithms group together only by the fact that the algorithms need a lot of computational power to work. I believe some people want us to sound ignorant when we complain about what they are doing with AI.

I’m sorry, but I like “clickbait-y” titles. But I think it is true. I think there are people who are trying to make a fortune off developing and deploying artificial intelligence infrastructure, and I don’t think they want the common person, or at least the common voter, to understand certain basics.

Background. 1. I’m a scientist who works in informatics. 2. Last week I was at a public, townhall meeting (held by a group of rational and thoughtful people) about how the Canadian government should spend $505 million dollars to support AI. 3. Next week I’ll be in a meeting about how we should be teaching AI to the biomedical community. 4. Three weeks ago, I was subjected to an interview with a candidate who’s answer to every question was, “We should use AI”, but who was never more specific than that. 5. Since February, I’ve spent at least one hour a day (often more) working on deploying AI on a certain real-world problem.

AI is everywhere, and I know a little bit about it.

Problem. I read a lot of material, both professionally and in the media, where people mis-use the term Artificial Intelligence. They say “AI” when they should use some other term, but—frequently—they don’t know what that term is. The reason I can’t just tell you what that term is, is that we are using AI to refer to hundreds of different things. And some people are using some of those hundreds of different things inappropriately, to make money while hurting other people. I think those people want us to sound ignorant when we complain about what they are doing.

They need us to sound like an ill-informed, conspiracy theorist, in order for them to make their money.

I would like us not to do that.

What I tell Scientists. In the last few months, I have read several grant proposals for researchers here in Canada who used the term “artificial intelligence” and what I have told them is, “Read the sentence, but replace the word “AI” with “statistics”, and ask if the sentence still makes sense.

Examples:

1. “AI is revolutionizing this field of study, opening new doors in hypothesis generation.”

This statement makes perfect sense. It is a broad statement about how new methods are changing a field of study. If I thought “statistics” was revolutionizing a field, such a sentence would make perfect sense.

2. “We will then analyze this data using AI to determine the cause of medical condition X”

In 2025 no scientist should ever write this second statement. If I wrote, “We will then analyze this data using statistics…” I would sound like an idiot. What statistics? How will you analyze the data? How will you judge the validity of the results of your approach?

I can’t tell you how many times I have written something like, “the differential expression analysis of the proteomic data will use hierarchical linear models with the sample replicates nested within each biological sample and the injection replicates nested within each sample.”

I don’t need you to understand what I just wrote there; I just need you to hear the difference between that and example #2. My comment is full of specific details about what I am doing and how.

Aside. I find it funny that the folks I call “Tech Bros” consider that sentence I used to always write about proteomics and hierarchical linear models to be machine learning and therefore part of AI. (A lot of people lumping those together, “Machine learning and AI”.) While I consider the approach to be part of classical, frequentist, statistics, and trace its roots back to R.A. Fisher himself.

Different Tools. AI is a collection of different tools. So is Machine Learning and so is Statistics. Not everyone needs to know all the different tools, but everyone needs to know that this is true. One thing that happens is that new names are given to basically the same thing. For example, I work a lot with something called Biologically Informed Neural Networks, or BINNs. If I put out a new tool for using BINNs on proteomic data, I might call it ProBINN—or whatever. Suddenly we have a new name. We have one approach called BINNs and another called ProBINN and soon there are a dozen different terms and no one can know them all and everyone is confused.

Bad Actors. There are bad actors who hope to profit from confusion. I have personally met one of these. The individual straight up lied about what they were doing and hoped no one understood the specific in the confusion of technical jargon.

Some people consider the hierarchical linear models that I have been using for over twenty years to be AI. I don’t, but they do. Why? Because hierarchical linear models work. They provide solid, technically correct answers (when used correctly) and are tried and true. By lumping them into AI, they make the field appear to be rigorous, and thus, by extension, the tools they want to deploy must also be rigorous.

And (I argue, they say) if you don’t understand what they are doing, your opinion must not count. They would say, “That person doesn’t understand technology—ignore them.”

“Steal a bunch of other people’s work and making stereotypes of them”

Everyone needs to know these three classes of AI.

1. Large Language Models or LLM. (Read More) This is a broad class of AI tools that are the backbone of things like ChatGPT and all those annoying “AI assistants” that all the tech bros are shoving down our throats on practically every application we open.

2. Generative Adversarial Networks or GAN. (Read More) This is another broad category of tools which are used to steal artist’s work and create copies (or stereotypes) from text prompts.

I have a colleague who described these two techniques as “Stealing a bunch of other people’s work and making stereotypes of them”. These tools require massive training data sets—the larger the better. They don’t have to be tools of evil, but they are. It would be great to have an ethically sourced GAN. And I’m not sure there is enough text for an ethically sourced LLM, but that would be interesting also.

The people making the discissions on how to allocate resources are choosing to steal people’s copyrighted work—I understand they took 32 of my copyrighted works—and figure that if they make enough money, they can buy off the courts and never get into trouble.

They might be right. Only time will tell.

3. Everything else. And then there are thousands of other approaches that are called AI. Many actually solve real-world problems when used correctly, though many do not. But they are technical issues, and I currently see no harm that most people only learn about them when they are either interested in them or find that they need one to solve a certain problem. This category includes things like neural networks, gradient descent, and random forests, and even my old friend hierarchical linear models.

What I want you to do. When you complain about the misuse of AI, whenever possible, be specific. Say, “Students are using Large Language Models to write their term papers.”  Say, “Generative Adversarial Networks are being used illegally to put artists out of work,” because they are. Because when you say AI instead of the technically correct term, the bad actors will argue that you don’t know what you are talking about, and therefore your opinion should be dismissed.

As always, thank you for reading this and I welcome any comments or questions below.

Biopunk: Can we make a Person without Human Rights

Biopunk #1: Meet some of the Archetypes

Biopunk #2: Dire Wolves versus Humanized Flies

 

One of the reasons I started a blog was that in my gaming, I stumbled upon an idea that is horrific enough that I wanted other people’s thoughts.

The question is, can humanity make a person that people would accept as not having human rights?

Now, six months ago, one could clearly argue that the answer was, “No”. But given that an alarming number of people in the United States who are comfortable denying due proses to people accused of violating immigration law—the victims obviously can’t be “known illegal immigrants” because that would require due process to show that they were in the US illegally—I have to think that there will be individuals who would accept that my artificial people have no human rights.

Human Rights. Now the folks at Oxford say that human rights are rights believed to belong justifiably to every person. I live in Canada, and we have a government website that talks about human rights, and it makes an interesting point:

“You do not have to earn your human rights. You are born with them. They are the same for every person.”

The United Nations has an established “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and Article 4 on this site says, “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms”.

I argue the problem is that the same people who are comfortable denying others due process would be perfectly happy if they could find a loophole around human rights—and one of the unstated fundamental premise of my game, Rubble and Ruin, is that a massive war was fought partially over this issue.

What I want to do is to articulate this loophole, and get people thinking about this, currently theoretical issue, long before it becomes real.

TAGs. In Rubble & Ruin I call these people transgenic anthropomorphic genomes. And before I can explain how this works, we have to know a little bit of biology.

The Tree of Life. First, let’s look at the tree of life. I like this visualization. Everything listed at the edge of the tree is a group of species alive today. The branching pattern shows how the different groups are related. The root of the tree is known as the last universal common ancestor (LUCA).

LUCA was a single celled organism that existed several billion years ago and everything that is alive today is a direct, linear decedent of that organism. All the plants, all the trees, all the bugs, all the bees. You. Me. Everything. If you found something that was alive today that was not a descendant of LUCA, it would simply push back the age of LUCA to the new common ancestor.

The 60% Limit. To understand where I am going, you first must understand how much genetic similarity all living things share. But to understand that you have to have a slightly nuanced understanding of genetic similarity. Genes are regions of DNA molecules that do something. There are all sorts of different “somethings” that they do, but a gene is a part of a DNA molecule that encodes another molecule that has some action.

A mutation is a permanent change to one or more of these genes. Most mutations are harmless. The mutation changes some little bit of the DNA but does not change the thing the gene makes.

Living things reproduce and small changes accumulate and over time species diverge. Ecologically, two groups of organisms might find different niches and stop sharing their genes and one way or another the two groups separate enough genetically that they can never re-merge into one. Eventually you get bananas and people.

And when we say that a banana shares 60% of the genes of a human. We mean that between those genes that can be recognized as similar due to common decent, their encoded protein sequences are 60% similar. And this is true for chickens and yeast cells and just about anything. And that is because of LUCA.

We all share the same underlying metabolism, because we all descend from the same ancestor, LUCA. If we break that metabolism, we die. And if we’re dead, we don’t pass on any mutations we might have. There is a limit to how far apart we living species can get from one another.

Until now.

Conscious Control of Biology. We are entering a period where we can build organisms according to intentional design. We’ve actually been doing this for a long time. Bananas as we know them were created by people. The yellow thing we buy at the store would, without human intervention, be full of big seeds. But now, with each passing year, we are getting greater control over what we can create. And I don’t think we are crazy far away from being able to make TAGs.

You have to eat. Humans are heterotrophs. In order to live we must consume the remains of other, formerly alive, creatures. And each of us has our own “line” about how far those creatures have to be away from us before we consider consuming them is okay. Likewise, we each have a line for how far away from us something will need to be before it gets human rights. And I suspect there is not a court in the world that would say that a mouse is due Human Rights.

So, let’s start with a mouse.

Chromosome Puzzle. Sinha and Meller give us a nice visualization of the relationship between human and mouse chromosomes. The majority of mouse chromosomes are, from common descent, the same as humans. They are just shuffled around.

Soon we will be able to unshuffled them. We just need a genetic technology that allows us to force specific crossover events.

We will be able to create a mouse that has chromosomes that look like humans. Of course if we want these things to live and breed, we will need to make a male and a female and take out anything that will lead to lethal inbreeding—but that is just work.

The 60% Puzzle. Once you have mice with human-shaped chromosomes, you need to go through and meticulously change all the genes. It is easy to knock out, or remove, those genes that are unique to mice. We could do that today. There are a handful of genes that are unique to human, those will need to be knocked-in. We will create those synthetically. We won’t take anything but information from existing humans.

And then we will take those genes and gene regulatory elements that are different between humans and mice and build DNA sequences that are functionally equivalent to wild-type human sequences—but that do not occur anywhere in the natural world. Again, we could do this today.

And there are a few steps that I glossed over—but in the end you will have a TAG.

Grow your first TAG. If you take this TAG genome and grow it in something not human, say a surrogate animal or some kind of exofetus growing machine, you will get something biologically indistinguishable from a human. You would create a single cell that mimics a just fertilized egg and the thing would develop over nine months into a neonate indistinguishable from a wild-type human. At least physically. It would be easy to sequence the DNA and see that it had all these synthetic sequences.

Since we’ve carefully, and purposefully, made the creature such that it can breed with wild-types (we wouldn’t have to unscramble the chromosomes, but we did). When this TAG matured it could produce children with wild-type humans.

But nothing about it is human by descent from human’s common ancestors.

Do They Deserve Human Rights? For me, the answer is a clear yes. They are functionally indistinguishable from wild-type humans. For the Tech Bro’s of the world, I’m not so sure. I can easily imagine oligarchs wanting a group of humans that they can legally enslave. That they can force to do whatever they want. That they can further genetically modify to follow whatever fantasy they have in mind.

I think these people would argue that human rights flow from being born from a wild-type human, and therefore these individuals do not get human rights—they are just genetically modified mice and gain the same rights as a mouse.

If you made it this far, I would love to hear from you. Would you extend human rights to TAGs? Or, was I clear enough in my description that you can understand why I think some people wouldn’t give these creatures human rights? Please feel free to comment below.