Tough read re: being a woman in the games industry

ubarose wrote: I think that having a woman, a person of color and at one point in time a person whose pronouns are they and them, on our staff has shaped this community and our content. Inclusion and representation matter. Also knowing you are surrounded by members of the majority who have your back creates a space where you can just be a board gamer - not a woman gamer, not a black gamer, not a gay gamer - just a gamer among other gamers.

Yeah, this sort of difference is what led me to check out F:AT in the first place, especially when compared to BGG's default stance as stalwart champions of the status quo. With people putting in so much time and effort to build out the site in its new incarnation, I feel like TWBG has the potential to go even further in bringing in more diverse perspectives and standing out as a truly inclusive alternative to so much of the garbage that's out there.

BaronDonut wrote:

MattDP wrote: In terms of board game and nerd culture, I feel it's really important to recognise that it's not really nerd culture that's the problem here. The problem is angry, entitled, badly socialised young men. There just so happens that nerd culture holds a lot of appeal for that demographic.

You make some great points and I agree with a lot of what you're saying in your post, but I disagree with you here. I think there are problems with misogyny that are specific to nerd culture and deeply embedded within it. I feel like the lion's share of nerd content (and gaming content in particular) is made by white men, for white men. And when you have a culture largely centered on commodities, the audience for these commodities is going to determine the community you create. And I think, without necessarily meaning to, the gaming community, well-intentioned though it may be (for the most part), has created the conditions for these sorts of toxic attitudes to form. The community is too narrow, exclusive, and insular to be properly critical of itself.

I mean, let's look here. What percentage of regular users here are white men? And what are we missing out on because of that? I don't think it's anyone's fault, but it's a thing to think about, especially as the site is rebranding itself and trying to draw in a broader audience. What kind of content do we want to cover? What kind of content do we want to promote? Who gets to be involved in that process? And how will these decisions change what kind of content gets made and community gets formed in the future?

All this to say, I think this will remain a problem in the gaming community until we change the composition of the gaming community. While we can't necessarily address the problems of sexism and misogyny in society at large, I do think we have power in our small little corner of it. This is our house--it's our job to clean it.

Here to join the chorus.

I was a lurker on this site for many years before "outing" myself a year or two ago and joining the community. This is largely due to changing tastes, but partly due to the cesspool that BGG admins have made of the site.

It's not that the old site has become a chortling 4chan clone. It's worse. The admins scrub through the site looking for references to women and people of color and banish them to the outskirts of the site (because women and poc are "political") leaving only abashed praise for semi-openly racist and hostile shit written by middle-class man-babies who "don't care whether or not someone's purple ," who like math and trackable non-hidden information, who "don't come to this site for politics." As long as what Octavian does is thought of as being the standard for decent behavior, obscenity will be the standard for people like Katie (and like my wife, who loves games but hates crawling into the stinking pizzaesque beardholes where games are usually being played).

Nonetheless, this isn't a problem that's going to be fixed by tweaking the buttons of consumerism until everyone's happy. We are a civilization that creates almost nothing but bullshit jobs manufacturing safe spaces for cops, redundant administrators, and ICE agents. Consumerism doesn't do other things, and serves no other purpose.

ubarose wrote: Just a nudge. Let's all keep this discussion focused on the board game community, and try to keep the tone supportive. Let's not allow it to veer off into other political discussions where it may become hostile. I know it can be hard for us to separate our concerns about sexism and harassment in society separated from our larger political beliefs, but we can do it.

That’s me, I guess. I get your responsibility in this regard, ubarose, and while I continue to maintain that consumption itself, and who it serves, is at the heart of the problem, I’ll consider it dropped.

I'm sadly not surprised by this. Wish I were, but it's so extremely common I'm just not surprised. I'm also not surprised that the guy was known to do this and it had been known for years and to many people. That's no reassurance, though, just sad.

I think the biggest and most important change ought to be a change in policies and rules. The problem is often not so much that they don't know about the shitty person or that there's no evidence but that it's simply allowed or seen as unimportant. This is less obvious at cons, but it's very obvious at internet forums. How many of them have policies against doxing? Or policies against creepy guys hitting girls through PMs? How many do, de facto, protect harrassers out of inertia?

EDIT: For example, Spain's biggest boardgame forum has a thread on a well-known, controversial group rape incident. There are several people there being massive sexist fucks, but they are not banned. There's also a thread literally called "The lies of religion" where people just...shit on religion and religious people but it's not seen as bad moderation or creating an unwelcome community.

Regarding boardgaming itself, there are two aspects which I think should be mentioned more often, but aren't. The first is that much of what is written online about internet harrassment is often not so much a reflection of nerd, but American nerd culture, which is noticiable different from that of other countries. For example, there are far more conservatives and more religious people than in other places. It is actually kind of a culture shock to go to BGG sometimes and I think this is part of the reason.

The second, which ties with the first, is that the average boardgamer is in his forties or older and often quite closed to other age groups. I think this is an undercurrent in the hobby that permeates it and shapes how it views many topics. While younger people can be bigoted pieces of shit, I think the way sexism and bigotry works in boardgaming is very heavily correlated with the age of its participants. Younger assholes act different and use other methods.

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That said, I oppose and will always oppose public shamings and online mobbing. I do not think they are justificable under any circumstance, I do not think online randos are the kind people who ought to handle these topics and most of the time they result in the same old targets, that is, women, gay people and innocents being made an example of, not actual bad people. I do not think more public shamings or "right kind" of public shamings will help anyone.

Remember: If they have the power to abuse, they have the power to not be publicy shamed on the first place. And they very much have the power to decide who is the one getting the shaming. See: James Portnow, the golden boy of Extra Credits who managed to blacklist every woman he abused out of the industry or the rape-video-posting writers of Gawker that got jobs at other publications when the site went down. Public shamings favour those with power and victims of abuse don't tend to be those.

Also keep in mind that if you want to create a space where all kinds of people feel safe and welcome, promoting public shamings is not exactly the best way to do it. You'll attract people who want to harass, not people who don't want to be harrassed.

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Anyways, while fighting against the nasty parts of gaming is important, I think the focus should be less on the harrassers and more on providing safe, peaceful places for people to gather and build. Knowing that this guy or that guy is an abuser is good but it doesn't provide women with an actual place to discuss games or play.

I also believe that focusing so much on the harrasers has given them power. They have received massive amounts of publicity, and internet traffic and attention, which gives them an audience and a bigger platform to harrass people from. My Twitter feed is full of ironic #DNDgate posts, but those posts won't be there to support people when they create a blog, try to game or talk about their game designs.

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I'm tired and not being particularly good at explaining myself, but I hope it's readable and kind of gets my point across.

Erik Twice wrote: The second, which ties with the first, is that the average boardgamer is in his forties or older and often quite closed to other age groups. I think this is an undercurrent in the hobby that permeates it and shapes how it views many topics. While younger people can be bigoted pieces of shit, I think the way sexism and bigotry works in boardgaming is very heavily correlated with the age of its participants. Younger assholes act different and use other methods.

I hate to have trimmed the rest of your excellent comment, but I wanted to focus on this.

The "average boardgamer" who posts on Internet forums is often in his forties or older, but that's a skewed view of the hobby. There's a quite healthy game group at the San Francisco office of my company (that I occasionally visit) who don't give a fuck about BGG or cons or anything else. Just a bunch of twenty-somethings enjoying games in an environment where being a dickhead can have real-world consequences. I get the feeling they're not alone at all in that.

To quote a dude now in his 70s, the kids are alright.

BaronDonut wrote:

SuperflyTNT wrote: Until people witnessing this or are subject to this start punching these people, hard, in the face, nothing will ever change.

I disagree. I don't think you can solve the problem of unchecked, out-of-control masculinity with more unchecked, out-of-control masculinity.

TLDR: Force and threat of force by cops is still force. Until someone is punched in the mouth they won’t change. If you see a person harassing a woman and don’t step in to help, you’re a failure as a human. Even if it’s calling cops.

Longer version:
Being a sexual predator isn’t masculinity, it’s entitlement. Chivalry is masculine. Being a perv isn’t.

Call cops. Cops attempt arrest via threat of force. If they resist, they get beat the fuck up, tased, or otherwise violated.

Violence and threat of violence is ultimately the only thing that ever changes society. You can either punch them in the face and end it right then and there, or call cops and have them do it for you, either via threat of violence or arrest (which is violence).

Someone eyeballs my 9 year old daughter, I fucking guarantee there will be immediate words and potential escalation. If someone says to my wife “want to play test my dick” they are going to be hurt in ways modern medicine cannot yet fully fix.

In the real world, laws are enforced by threats of violence and realized violence. Same on the ground in Des Moines as in Geneva on a global scale.

Any other interpretation of how societies change and order is built are, in my opinion, overly optimistic at best and wildly unrealistic in practice at worst.

Holy shit. That BGG thread is a trainwreck. Lots of people into my shitlist. The admin asking for evidence and then only saying thank you after it had been presented is just the worst.

I don't really agree with Pete's post, but sometimes I do want to do something bad to these people.

I read the thread front to back, and for those who haven't:
1. Cocktavian have somewhat hardened his position.

Asking someone to touch your genitals is NOT a crass pick-up line - it is harassment. Anyone suggesting otherwise is endorsing and/or normalizing harassment and will be moderated.

Putting the burden on victims to be able to prove harassment prior to reporting it results in silencing victims. Anyone demanding proof before listening to victims is endorsing and/or normalizing the silencing of victims and will be moderated.

2. Marc has made a statement on his facebook page, denying all, but it was quickly pointed out that he deleted incriminating comments on that post.
3. Reverend Uncle Bastard is awesome.

It's soo bad that I started to think that there might be something in this SJW movement, and gender-based work allocation. The root is so deep that it takes extreme measures to remove it.

Michael Barnes wrote: I really wish that Katie felt she was in a position to name names, but for whatever reasons that are not my business she feels that she shouldn’t.

Katie didn't name them, but the person who initially talked about this going on did so the designer's name is going around. He recently worked with another designer who is on a lot of media outlets "Never work with/review/publicize" lists. I get why people don't want to name names publicly as they end up being on the receiving end of a lot of shit. At the same time, as a reviewer/podcaster, I want to get plugged into the whispernetwork so I don't in any way give a platform to some of the shittier people in this industry. I have a small but unfortunately growing list of my own.

I am very close to a woman who is currently working in this industry. She knows that gaming is one of my main hobbies, but to her it's just a job that happened to fall within her career path. She has asked me to not mention her name or her employer's name. When she got back from Origins this week, she started to talk about the way women were treated poorly there, then abruptly switched topics. I didn't get the impression that anything terrible happened directly to her, but that she had seen or heard things while there. And in general, she deals with more than a few man-babies who are unable to deal with women as peers.

SuperflyTNT wrote: TLDR: Force and threat of force by cops is still force. Until someone is punched in the mouth they won’t change. If you see a person harassing a woman and don’t step in to help, you’re a failure as a human. Even if it’s calling cops.

I mean, I'm not gonna lose any sleep if an abuser gets KO'd, and I'm sure punching a creepy dude would feel pretty righteous for the puncher, but beyond that I'm not sure how much concrete good it's going to do for the community as a whole. I think a convention where dudes are spontaneously brawling in the aisles isn't going to feel significantly safer for anyone. It's certainly not going to change the pervasive, insidious, and toxic ways the gaming community can treat women.

And I'm not talking about nation states, or policing, or the just application of force on a large scale. I think there's plenty of self-policing we as a community can do to make this hobby more inclusive and safer that doesn't involve the application of force at all. Blacklisting known abusers is a start. I'm not interested in changing these people--I'm interested in removing them from our spaces.

That BGG thread is not insane. It's the standard for what happens when sexual harassment is mentioned. But it's nice to notice that the most thumbed posts are those speaking up against the chorus of "do you have proof!?" and "innocent until proven guilty!".

I'm not at all surprised that this happens at a con, though. But I know that Nordic RPG cons are doing something about this issue, and things have changed for the better in the years I have been part of it. So I'm optimistic and hope things can also change in the board game world.

Jexik wrote:

I think there's already some northern European or Scandinavian country that does this. I forget... maybe Denmark or Holland. Saw something about it on FB. In any case, they have really low teen pregnancy rates, abortions, and high sexual satisfaction on both genders according to studies. Unfortunately, I don't see this happening in the United States any time soon. We'd much rather reward "players" and shame the sluts and pedos.

Now, Denmark is also a shitty place in some ways when it comes to sexism and male entitlement. And there was a lot of "what about justice! What about the mens" after #metoo happened. But when it comes to sexual health education I think things are pretty good. It's part of the curriculum in schools and in week 6 (pun intended) there is usually a lot of focus on sex in schools. I myself have been making a stand-up lecture with a sexual health educator for about nine years, and we focus on how to be safe, how to have fun and the importance of consent.

BaronDonut wrote: You make some great points and I agree with a lot of what you're saying in your post, but I disagree with you here. I think there are problems with misogyny that are specific to nerd culture and deeply embedded within it. I feel like the lion's share of nerd content (and gaming content in particular) is made by white men, for white men.

You're not wrong, but this is a circular argument. The reason nerd culture is full of content for angry white men is because it attracts angry white men who make the content. What attracted them originally wasn't the angry white content but the power fantasies that are a staple of geeky content, and the way the culture accords respect to those who recite encyclopedic trivia over people who put in effort and responsibility.

I'm going to stop there because we're starting to disagree over inane particulars instead of addressing the big, important issue, on which we are in total agreement. Namely, that this is a problem in our culture, and we need to do more within that culture to step up and fight it. End of. The point I was trying to make was not that we should abdicate responsibility because it's a wider problem, but to encourage people to take the fight to the mainstream, and not just in geekspace.

Mark Sierens posted an apology on Facebook several days ago. It was long, but not much of an apology. He apologized if anybody might have been offended (always the hallmark of a non-apology), deflected by mentioning that he has two daughters, and finished by denying the specific offensive remark that people had been quoting. He also deleted responses to his apology that called him out for a variety of reasons.

My opinion of Octavian has gone up a notch due to his handling of the thread at BGG. But I also discovered that I am able to put a (different) BGG admin on my plonk list.