Cotton WIP

[Anthias]

Well, after an agonisingly long harvest season,the cotton is done for the year! My first year on the farm, and we harvest for a bunch of other places as well. A wet year slowed the harvest considerably, but now it's over I have an idea to theme a game around it.

That raises the question, would the title "Cotton Pickin'" carry any overtones that might offend? I know it is a term used in southern US states, but I'm not up on all the stuff around it. Should I just go with Cotton Harvest? Or Cotton? Bugs bunny gives me Cotton Pickin' and through him it sounds fun, but bugs is from another time.

The table will require you to lock a ball each for two pilot vehicles and a picker, then shoot to get to the destination farm, and commence harvest. You'll build your stack of modules/bales, with the value per bales fluctuating as the market swings. When you have enough you shoot to gin your crop and score based on the current value. Throughout this process, things can go wrong. Wet weather, bale fires, pickers hitting overhead powerlines, among other things, and you must complete tasks to resolve these before you can continue your harvest.

I feel this could be fun if I can pull of the rules effectively.

I have a rough layout sketched, and will start building soon...

But what about the name?

 

[AnonTet]

As a non native English speaking person even if that offended me I would not know :)

In any case, pinball is for fun and plays on words is fun (for me).

My opinion, "just do it"(TM)

 

[Anthias]

For the curious, here is the rough layout beginnings as of day one.

 

[Anthias]

Slow going, but here is the layout with some minor updates. I plan to make that block thing at the back to be a model of a cotton harvester.

 

[Runner]

Well like anything that has had an association with racism, it's complicated in my opinion. Although cotton picking's origin wasn't racially used or associated with black people because cotton picking was also done by any ethnicity including caucasians, the term eventually became associated with slavery labor in America. However, it can still be used in a racially derogatory way. A U.S. sports announcer once said of a black basketball player that he was "out of his cotton-picking mind". While this could have simply been unintentional, it was certainly in my mind a lapse of judgement and was insensitive considering the history.

"cottonpicker" is deemed as a racist derogatory insult towards black people and I believe that if slavery hadn't existed, "cottonpickers" would have been considered a low social class and would still have been used in a derogatory way the same way "poor people" which is not better when thrown at people for insult.

Here is an article about it:

Widely considered offensive, the adjective cotton-picking is seen as belittling labor that millions of Black people were forced to do in the southern United States from the late 18th century and into the 20th century, first as enslaved people and later as sharecroppers. First Known Use of cotton-picking 1917, in the meaning defined above
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cotton-picking

Here is another one:

The expression began life in the late 1700s and differs from the 19th century Dixie term, 'cottonpicker', in that the latter was derogatory and racist, whereas 'cotton-picking' referred directly to the difficulty and harshness of gathering the crop. This didn't extend to the specific expression 'keep your cotton-picking hands off of me'. This no doubt alludes to the horny, calloused (and usually black) hands that picked cotton.

Of course, 'cotton-picking' must have been in use as an English phrase for as long as English-speaking people have picked cotton - originally without any racial overtones. There are numerous citations of 'cotton-picking' seasons/jobs/machines etc. since the late 1700s. J & E Pettigrew's Letters has an early example, from 1795:

'One of the students was banished... for going to a cotton picking after eight at Knight.'

Manual cotton picking was tough work. The southern expression 'cutting in high cotton', which means 'have it easy', refers to the relatively easy task of cutting cotton without having to bend down.

'Cotton-picking' - the meaning and origin of this phrase

The meaning and origin of the phrase 'Cotton-picking'.

www.phrases.org.uk

So my opinion would be that if you make the theme and imagery classy and about actual farming, without caricatures, and if you include people, that they include not just one ethnicity (meaning if you only put caucasian people then it could become white washing, but if you only put black people then you're directly associating to slavery, and also stay away from the slavery or any imagery associated with slavery (the U.S. civil war which includes the confederate flag), I would think it should be fine.

I'm a white French Canadian though so I might have this wrong. I like the expression out of sight, out of mind. So it's sometimes hard to see the other side of the coin when we haven't experienced it.

Hope this helps.

 

[xenonph]

I wouldn't worry about it.
Nowadays you are called a racist if you just want your borders secure.
But it is ok to be sent to other countries and die to defend their borders.
I think I even heard that Math and Science is racist.
As a matter of fact, they are teaching right now in public schools how all white people are racist.
Critical Race Theory I think they call it.

I say do what makes you happy.
You will not please everyone. Specially the race baiters, or race dividers.
Do you have to include a gay Chinese midget, or Egyptian siamese twins to your table, so those particular folks aren't offended also?
I mean you need to represent everyone on your table right?
That is ridiculous.

Do what makes you happy. That is all that matters!!
I am sure it will turn out great.

 

[Anthias]

It's a long time between drinks on this, but since this week I finally got a working PC again (and the cotton harvesting is in progress again lol) I have started tinkering. NOT final artwork but you'd guess that lol.

 

[Guinness]

What did I stumble across here? From the thread title I actually thought a table was being built based on... Well based on this Cotton. Now that would be awesome

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

Oh dear, that's some interesting thread necromancy there, @Guinness.
What's next up to bat? :D

I agree with @Runner that "cotton pickin'" is obviously less than ideal in the States, and I'd say that there's a decent argument that it's also pretty obsolete as a term.

But THEN AGAIN, I got a hilarious story for you for my FB'ers.
Just posted, and if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, haha. XD