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Behind and forward

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Posters from Convergence 2015Convergence 2015 is over. Was some two days ago, actually. But the combination of being 13 hours away from CST, then coming right back into Convergence, is still messing with me. I’m starting to get back into the flow of things, but posts here are going to take a while. I still have a bunch of WisCon to talk about, and then at least one more post about Taiwan, before I even get to Convergence.

Short form, though: Convergence 2015 was overall pretty good. The con was crowded again, meaning it was harder to just run into folks I wanted to hang out with. And there were a bunch of little things that annoyed me, from geek self-loathing/nerd social hierarchies being performed all too frequently, to various microaggressive expressions of privilege. I didn’t manage to get in any actual gaming, I think; the usual folks I would’ve played a game with weren’t around, and the Artemis sign-up sheets filled up very quickly. But, as I said, it was overall good. There were some amazing costumes. There was wonderful fan squee a-plenty. A lot of the panels were quite good; I hope to write some of them up here, eventually. It was good to see the folks I did manage to meet up with. Overall, it’s just fun to be surrounded by that kind of fannish energy, of people enjoying their cool geeky hobbies together, and of mostly not harshing each other’s squee.

More later, as readjustment to real life allows.


WisCon 39, part 3: Are casual gamers “real” gamers?

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Squeevolution!How do you structure a discussion about gaming? What kinds of gaming count as gaming? How do you assume your audience relates to gaming — as creators, players or something else? Do you assume your audience is all gamers? Do you assume the audience is knowledgeable about all kinds of gaming? Who gets to talk? How do they justify their ability to speak, where other people don’t get to speak?

Many places in fandom, these questions get answered as “White cis hetero guys who play electronic games get to take the floor, because why wouldn’t they?” And the white guys who have played the most electronic games are naturally the ones who should get to talk the most. According to this logic, the white cis hetero guys who have the most time and money to devote to electronic games are clearly the ones who are most serious, most dedicated, most crucial to the hobby and are the ones who deserve the loudest voice in where the hobby goes.

The logical fallacies in this are abundantly apparent. Why should white cis hetero guys get to talk any more than anyone else? Lots of people play games, and have all along, and pretending otherwise is ignoring the diversity that exists in the world. And giving louder voice to the ones who’ve spent more money and time on electronic games is messed up. It means that people who have to work at low-paying jobs, or have to raise kids, or don’t have reliable housing to keep their games in, or otherwise don’t have so many social and financial resources get excluded from the discussion. And because that discussion often includes discussion of who gets access to what resources — what games are available to whom, and what kinds of games get created — it creates a vicious cycle where the white cis hetero guys dominate more and more of the discussion. Or begin to feel like they deserve to.

So clearly the discussion needs to be broader and more voices need to be heard. But unfortunately, it is difficult to even structure a discussion about gaming without re-instantiating these biases. How, for example, do we talk about gaming in a way that doesn’t assume that people who spend the most time on the hobby are the ones who should get the loudest voices? How do we talk about gaming in a way that doesn’t assume that all gaming is electronic, or that all gamers enjoy gaming the same way? How do we talk about gaming in a way that doesn’t assume spending money on products is the primary way to enjoy it? How do we do it in a way that pushes for better representation while not ignoring the diversity that has always existed?

Many discussions — too many discussions — about gaming don’t bother to examine the framework of the discussion, even when they intend to work against the white cis hetero bias that so many discussions have. Many panels, for example, talk about “gaming” as if it’s basically all electronic gaming, and maybe occasionally deign to note that tabletop/pen & paper gaming exists, but assume that it’s not anything worth talking about.

And many discussions about gaming still happen in a larger context where we (often unconsciously) privilege people based on their similarity to the “white cis hetero affluent guy” stereotype. People who have enough spare time or money to play lots of electronic games, or people who’ve managed to get themselves branded as gatekeepers of culture, or people who play games that deal with “serious” issues — we have a lot of ways of re-instantiating hierarchies even as we work to dismantle those hierarchies.

This panel’s discussion turned out to be both great and frustrating. One excellent part was the panel’s dissection of the term ‘casual’. The panel noted how ‘casual’ gaming equals, almost 1:1, gaming that women do; and how it has an equally close relationship to class, and how people who don’t have tons of money and leisure time to throw at the hobby often get labeled as casual gamers. And several people of color on the panel noted the racist slurs they’ve been subjected to in gaming communities, and how this makes the barriers for enjoyment of gaming that much higher for people of color. This leads to a continuing vicious cycle where white people get to be the gatekeepers of who is or isn’t a gamer, and continue to feel like that’s as it should be.

The panel also noted how the term ‘casual’ itself is used as a slur, and really shouldn’t be. Calling someone ‘casual’ insults them for somehow not being ‘serious’ about their gaming. One panelist noted how, despite their long interest in tabletop gaming, they were once introduced at a session as so-and-so’s girlfriend, rather than listing her interest in the game or her possible contributions to the group. This has the complex effect of devaluing anyone whose interest in gaming isn’t single-minded, of assuming that all women are ‘casual’, and of generally making gaming hostile to anyone who doesn’t match the white cis hetero affluent guy stereotype. This attitude that ‘casualness’ is a bad thing pervades too many parts of gaming. You don’t even have to expose yourself to the truly vile corners of the net to experience the argument’s negative effects; see, for example, the many people — a seeming majority of whom are women — who ‘admit’ that they’re casual in their gaming, as if casualness is a fault that requires confession.

The panel also addressed a whole bunch of really important related issues. They talked about how to create better online gaming communities; a major part of this requires treating community moderation as an important job, not just an afterthought tacked on to avoid lawsuits. The panel also discussed how to change the close relationship that ‘winning’ has with ‘hardcore’ status, and how this meshes (often harmfully) with social hierarchies.

But the panel also had a few of the same problems that these discussions so often have. First, the panel largely ignored pen & paper gaming. At least one panelist who is more interested in tabletop gaming got largely passed over as a result; they didn’t get to talk much, because the conversation didn’t touch on their interests much. (The above example about being introduced as someone’s girlfriend was one of the few chances they had to talk.) One audience member deliberately tried to bring analog gaming back into the discussion, which was very nice; and the panelists interested in tabletop gaming got to say a bit more at this point. But the scales were still heavily tipped towards electronic gaming.

I think part of the problem here is that the panel’s description didn’t distinguish between different forms of gaming. This is a problem that I noted above, and which I’ve noted before. This problem continues with many gaming-related panels; many cons that have great fannish discussions continue to suffer from a lack of understanding about what gaming is, or how to structure discussions about it. I’m thinking more and more that panels about gaming simply have to explicitly clarify what kinds of gaming they’re talking about, even if that means explicitly stating that they’re about all kinds of gaming.

Part of the problem was certainly that the panelists themselves just seemed to start with the assumption that “gaming = electronic gaming” and that other kinds of gaming are basically obsolete or excessively niche. This assumption seems to have taken hold early on, and like so many majority assumptions, once something gains critical mass, it’s hard to challenge or change.

Another problem was that there seemed to be an underlying assumption to the discussion that gaming equals ‘consumption’. It seems to be more and more popular to discuss fannish issues in terms of ‘consuming’, as if our only purpose as fans is to hand over scads of cash in order to digest whatever ‘media’ the corporations want to churn out. I think it’s extremely dangerous to think of our fandoms in these terms. For one thing, it means that fandom is just another commodified cog in the capitalist machine, eternally unable to inspect or reconfigure its surroundings. For another, it means that our enjoyment is primarily about passively accepting what someone else (far too often, a large corporation) deigns to spew at us; it means that we ignore the amazing potential for self-creation that gaming holds. And last, viewing fandom as a process of ‘consuming’ ‘media’ means that our discussions about it will continue to privilege those best able to ‘consume’ that ‘media’ — in other words, to privilege the ones who have the most cash to spare.

Another assumption that seemed to thread through this panel was that celebrity is the main way to deserve a voice in the discussion. Panelists began by describing themselves in terms of what they’ve published, or where they blog, or otherwise bringing up their qualifications to be on the panel. One panelist felt moved to introduce themself by apologizing for not being a blogger or podcaster. It was like the panelists had to establish their places in the geek social hierarchy before they could move on to discussing the issues at hand.

I’ve discussed this tendency before — this tendency to frame discussions about the problematic hierarchies in fandom by reinstantiating those hierarchies with only somewhat different pigeonholes. I think it’s important to start examining how we construct and perpetuate celebrity in fandom. If the apex of the geek social pyramid gets replaced by a slightly different crowd, or if we fight with each other by trying to prove our adherence to the old hierarchy, things aren’t going to change much. I’m not sure what we can do to really change it — when it comes to convention programming, we seem to want a panel of famous people who do most of the talking and an audience who does most of the listening. But I’m pretty sure that continuing to list our resumes at the beginning of panels is a bad way to make everyone feel like their voice is important.

A final potential problem with the panel was that a panelist stated at one point that it’s good that games don’t require as much math now, because this allows lower barriers to entry for women. Traditional tabletop RPGs, this argument would seem to imply, are outdated because of their need for large amounts of math. This, the argument continues, makes RPGs inaccessible to women.

This argument makes me pretty angry. It gradates very easily into the ‘math is hard’ trope, trotted out to remind women how incompetent we are at arithmetic or anything that requires ‘higher level’ thinking, and how we therefore shouldn’t really try. Applied to gaming, it implies that women only want light, fluffy games that don’t require a lot of thought.

(Light, fluffy games are, of course, wonderful! Often, and for many people. Sometimes, though, I want a heavy-duty simulationist game that gives me tons of specific detail about what’s going on and, yeah, sometimes requires some arithmetic. I want different games at different times; I like different games that ask me to use my brain in different ways; I contain multitudes.)

Many times when I hear the “traditional games require too much math for women” argument, it also gets used to imply that somehow women are only now getting into gaming, because in the past the barriers to entry were too high. This erroneously implies that women haven’t been involved in gaming since the beginning. This argument erases the struggles and creativity and overall amazingness that women have had throughout the history of gaming.

I later talked to the panelist who had seemingly appealed to the “math is hard” argument. She explained that she wasn’t saying that, and I believe her. She explained that she was saying, instead, that mechanically simpler games require less time investment, an important consideration if you’re (for example) working long hours or parenting your kids by yourself. That mostly makes sense, and I’m glad I had the chance to clear it up with her.

Still, I think we should be careful about how we discuss barriers to entry and women in gaming; there really is a tendency to slide into the “math is hard” mode, even if we don’t consciously mean to appeal to it. It’s all too easy to appeal to one wrongheaded notion in order to fight another.

All in all, this panel got me thinking a lot — perhaps the most of any panel at this year’s WisCon. It brought up a ton of really important issues. The panel didn’t discuss them in quite the way I’d hoped, of course. I feel like an additional 20 minutes or so probably would’ve cleared up all the issues it left me with, and then this post would’ve been much happier. Still, the panel overall was a great discussion about the cultures of gaming, and a great look at many aspects of a bunch of very complex problems.

Getting back into my posting rhythm, hopefully.

The ideal gaming con III: Membership

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What is the role of attendees at a con? And how much should they pay for the privilege?

Emphasis on membership

The role of attendees at cons has has been an ongoing, but somewhat subtle, conflict within fandom. When you hand over some money to attend a con, are you buying a ticket? Or a membership?

It may seem like the two terms are just different labels for the same thing. Does it matter what you call it? Aren’t you just forking over money and you get to go to this cool place in exchange and who cares what you call the being at the con?

Well, sort of. Certainly, you can treat them both the same: it’s entirely possible to ignore the conflict and attend cons the same way regardless of what terms they use. But really, there’s a pretty important difference in emphasis.

Cons that emphasize ‘tickets’ tend to be cons where the emphasis is on passive entertainment: sitting in the audience while movies, famous people, game trailers and dancing penguins put fun in your head. When I see that a con sells ‘tickets’, I expect that a big part of it will consist of waiting in long lines to pay for my Shatner autograph or to get into the Firefly panel. Cons that emphasize ‘tickets’ tend to be ones where attendees don’t actually create very much of the schedule. They also tend to emphasize the ‘consumer’ aspect of fandom, with huge halls of commercial displays for the latest, niftiest product. And these kinds of cons tend to emphasize and reinforce geek hierarchies; in these, the place of the average fan is to throw adulation and money at people who are already rich and famous. The further down the hierarchy you are, the more passive and consumerist your role is.

In case it’s not clear, the more tendency there is towards the ‘ticket’ mode, the less interested I am in the con. I go to a con to meet and share with cool people of many sorts — people with whom I have a minimal, or nil, hierarchy gradient. I believe that the fun of a con lies not in the big-name, hierarchy-approved guests of honor; in fact, I sometimes don’t look at a con’s guest of honor list at all. For me, there’s a lot more fun to be had in interacting with my fellow fans.

A lot of smaller cons in the Twin Cities don’t sell ‘tickets’. Instead, they sell ‘memberships’. The idea is that when you’re attending this kind of con, you yourself are contributing meaningfully to the fun of the con. Programming items still tend to have certain people on the panel and certain people in the audience, but not nearly as much; you don’t have to be rich, successful (whatever that means) or famous to get on a panel. There’s a much larger expectation that the audience will also have useful things to add, and the programming becomes richer as a result. There’s an assumption that the fun will lie in hanging out with your fellow fans — that the fans themselves are the main source of the fun.

Obviously, the tendencies I’m describing for ‘ticket’-style and ‘membership’-style cons are not absolute. Lots of cons that sell tickets manage to allow a huge amount of the fun to be interactions with fellow fans. And there are tendencies towards fannish hierarchy at even the coziest of membership-based relaxacons. But it really does seem like the different styles of cons have different emphases. It seems like I often hear people saying that the fun of GenCon lies not in the con-sponsored, con-promoted Big Events, but in just sitting down in the hallway and reconnecting with friends, or in a pickup game of Diaspora, or whatever. And every so often I hear that someone has discovered that GigantoCon has a nifty programming track, but the con has put it in the furthest-away hotel, and the programming schedule is only available from a neglected bulletin board located in a disused lavatory with a sign on it saying “Beware of the Leopard”. Cons that sell memberships tend to put a lot more emphasis on the fan-generated fun, which is by far my preference.

It seems like all this should be even truer for a gaming con. Although recent years have seen the rise of spectator RPG sessions, and even at-con events where people play D&D or whatever in front of a huge audience, the thought of a gaming con where that’s the main focus seems somewhere between silly and abhorrent to me. Broadcast gaming sessions can be fun, for sure; and they’re a good substitute for face-to-face gaming if that isn’t available. (Or even just not your cup of tea.) But I don’t want to go to a gaming con to watch famous people play. I go to a gaming con so I can play.

Without you, we’d have no convention.Con of the North registration website

An ideal gaming con, for me, is one where everyone gets to play in, and contribute meaningfully to, a wide variety of games that they like. That seems, almost necessarily, to mean that a good gaming con should be membership-based.

Pricing memberships

This is a trickier question than whether to sell ‘memberships’ or ‘tickets’, I think. How much do you actually charge for that membership?

Clearly, the con should pay for itself. Unless you happen to have an eternally reliable wealthy benefactor, the price of memberships needs to cover all the function space, printing of program books, computer rentals, water dispensers, free food, bulletin board rental, insurance, supplies, and whatever else your cons supplies to attendees. If your con is supposed to raise money for some cause, that needs to be figured in, too.

Once the basic costs have been paid for, though, there start to be other, tricky considerations. The one most relevant here is, do you incentivize contributions to the running of the con with discounts on memberships?

Free memberships for being on programming or otherwise contributing to the con is a big issue for a lot of cons. If George RR Martin says he’ll come to your con and be on five panels in exchange for a free membership, do you say yes?

If you say yes, you’re effectively knocking all the work that other people put into the con. Someone who volunteers to runs the registration desk for the weekend probably puts in more work, and arguably benefits the con as a whole more, than any given programming participant. Giving discounts for specific kinds of contributions to the con means you either a) have to be okay with giving almost everyone discounts, or b) you suddenly have to start ranking all the work that various people perform. Not only is it difficult as hell to quantify this kind of thing, it is really easy for it to lead to severely hurt feelings (and with good reason), and it also has the effect of reinforcing the fannish hierarchy.

However, with a gaming con, while there shouldn’t be a gradient of fannish ‘worth’, there is most definitely a gradient of fannish work. People who run games usually end up putting in more work than people who don’t, and if you don’t somehow incentivize people for running games, you’re effectively discouraging the variety of gaming that you’re working towards.

There are some perverse incentives at work here. If you give big membership discounts for running a game, there’s an incentive to register to run games with the minimum prep possible, and then maybe even to forget to run it. I have certainly experienced both those things, though it’s hard to say whether the GMs were canceling or prepping poorly out of desire to do the minimum work possible.

If, on the other hand and as I said above, you don’t give any membership discount for running games, there’s no incentive to actually run anything. You could argue that the people who want to run games only if they get a free membership in return are not necessarily the people you want running games. But that doesn’t really deal with the fact that running a game can be a lot of work: designing a scenario, creating maps, doing pre-gen PCs, creating other handouts, maybe painting minis or finding props… Not every game calls for all that prep, and not everyone does that much prep. But some games do get that much, or need that much. If person A puts in more time preparing for the con than they do actually attending it, while person B puts in zero time, yet A and B both pay the same amount for their memberships, then A may feel, regardless of their commitment and enthusiasm, that the con is quietly discouraging their dedication.

You clearly can’t use fine gradations of pricing for memberships based on the amount of prep done. Some GMs can prepare an amazing game with 15 minutes’ work, while another GM might spend days of labor only to end up with something disjointed and bland. And trying to do something like ‘discounted membership based on how fun games were’ is clearly a recipe for headaches and hurt.

Still, it’s good to have some kind of gradation for how much work people have done in running games or playing them. This is one thing I think Con of the North is probably doing just about right. They have three basic membership types:

  • Players: These folks only play in games and don’t run anything. This kind of membership costs the most.
  • Judges: These folks both run and play in games. There’s no differentiation by number of games run. There’s a slight discount on a Referee membership as opposed to a Player membership.
  • Referees: These folks only run games. They get a completely free membership, but can’t play in anyone else’s games.

Overall, I think the rates are right about what they should be. I’ve never felt like there’s much of a fannish hierarchy to the different membership types. It mostly just feels like the appropriate level of reward for doing different amounts of work to help the games happen. And while there is still some slight perverse incentive to, say, register as a Judge and then not prep well or to cancel events, the incentive is pretty small.

If I ran the circus con, I think I’d price memberships just about as Con of the North does.

Not too expensive, or charged per game

There are a few other issues that are worth considering in the same breath as memberships and pricing of them.

First is that the con shouldn’t be too expensive. If the only way you can make it work is to charge everyone US$500 for a weekend of gaming, it’s probably time to look at a different hotel, or a different city altogether. And even US$50 may be too much if it’s for a single day of gaming.

I also tend to strongly dislike cons where specific events cost extra to enter. I suppose that some things, like Magic tournaments or whatever, don’t work if participants don’t pay. But the idea of having to pay extra to get into the ultra-exclusive Sunday afternoon D&D game strikes me as wrong in a whole bunch of different ways. Hopefully, all games get treated equally. And hopefully, actually getting into games doesn’t cost more than registering for the con itself.

I suppose that some people might just want to wander the dealers’ room or whatever. Should they have to pay extra for games they’re not going to actually play in?

I like how Con of the North handles this. There isn’t much badging, except for people getting into games; at the beginning of a game, the Referee or Judge is supposed to collect tickets from everyone, and also to make sure that everyone is a correctly-registered member of the con. It’s pretty possible to just wander in off the street and look at the dealers room, though, if that’s what you want to do. The con doesn’t point this out as an option, because of course they hope that everyone will be full attending members. But it is possible to do.

Also, different games don’t cost different amounts. Registering for an eight-hour Civ game or a 15-minute Guillotine session costs the same, because membership includes any number of games you want to register for. There’s no feeling of being punished for registering for multiple games. Con of the North is effectively encouraging people to register for lots of games, and try lots of things, and contribute to the fun as players.

Encouraging membership by those who can’t afford it

Something cons have started doing recently (or at least something I’ve noticed recently) is putting together assistance funds. The fact is, even in the best of times, there are people who can’t monetarily afford to attend a con. It’s not just the price of membership; there can often be additional effectively-required costs, like a hotel room, dining at restaurants, parking fees or transport costs, airfare, childcare, etc. etc. Often, the membership is actually the cheapest part of attending the con. And taking the attitude that attending your con is a privilege, not a right, tends to enforce fannish hierarchies and social injustice. It cuts people off from amazing communities that they should be able to access. And it makes the con more boring, because it limits the pool of amazing people from which to draw members.

I think the Carl Brandon Society may have been the first group to create assistance funds for fans to attend cons (in their case, to help fans of color to attend cons, writing workshops, etc.). WisCon also has an assistance fund. Other cons are starting to do likewise.

It would be nice to see this happen for gaming cons, too. There’s no reason that attendance at a gaming con should be different from attendance at any other kind of con. The con benefits by having a diverse group of members, and many folks otherwise wouldn’t be able to experience the amazingness that is a gaming con. Clearly, the ideal gaming con should have such a fund.

Goodbye, Ursula

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Ursula K. Le Guin recently passed away. Lots of people have mentioned how she touched their lives with her prose fiction, her advice, her politics, and many other things. Like so many others, I’m saddened at her death, but glad that she got to do so much good in her time. And like so many others, I want to share a couple ways she touched me.

A Wizard of Earthsea was one of the biggest influences on my aesthetic preferences for fantasy. I think I read a lot of other fantasy fiction before I encountered it, but when I finally did, something clicked. That stark but flavorful style is pretty much exactly what I like in fantasy, both when I read it and when I create it. “Mysterious, powerful and rare” describes much of the magic systems she created there; and no wonder (cause, or effect?), that’s also how I like magic in RPGs to be. I’ve always wanted to create a name-based magic system for a game, perhaps B&C, but never gotten around to it. That desire comes directly from reading A Wizard of Earthsea. If I’ve been lucky, some of the aesthetics of Earthsea have rubbed off on B&C.

Book cover of Always Coming Home, the edition I readMaybe an even bigger influence on me, though, is Always Coming Home. Not enough people know about this book. It’s always a pleasure when I meet someone who likes it. Always Coming Home is a great, deeply flavorful mix of fiction and fictional nonfiction. Recipes, songs, myths… I think it was the first time I’d ever seen plot and thoroughgoing exposition mixed so evenly, and so well. I’d seen the genre before, but I think it was one of the first examples that reveled in being fictional nonfiction. Always Coming Home gives the worldbuilding-sans-plot equal footing with the plot; really, in some ways, the worldbuilding is the focus, not the plot. That was kind of mind-blowing to experience. And of course the worldbuilding itself is lovely, with a very lived-in feel, yet also great amounts of wonder. Like my other favorite books, Always Coming Home inspired a lot of ideas to percolate.

Goodbye, Ursula. You will definitely be missed.

A thought for Wiscon

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A thought that I keep thinking in the run-up to Wiscon: I can’t decide if it should be “Grant minorities in RPG-maker circles the confidence of mediocre white men“, or “Grant mediocre white men the confidence of minorities in RPG-maker circles”.

WisCon: Geekiness and ‘Productivity’

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Squeevolution!In May, I again got to go to WisCon, one of my favorite cons. The con was overall great: thought-provoking, energizing, validating, and just generally fun. Plus, I got to see a bunch of people I otherwise don’t get to see.

I got to be on a bunch of different panels. Most were also pretty great. One of my favorites, and apparently also the most popular one, almost requires a write-up.

Geekiness And ‘Productivity’

Capitalism tells us that we are only worthwhile when we produce or when we consume. As a result, many of us end up justifying everything we do, whether for work or pleasure, in terms of “productivity”: “I’m useful to society because I make widgets.” “My crafting/stargazing/gaming/reading/writing make me work better and consume more.” “That person is a better geek than me because they spend more money on their hobbies.” These kinds of framing buy into and reinforce capitalism. Are there ways of framing geeky pursuits that don’t buy into a capitalist framework? Are there ways of justifying our geeky pursuits that don’t commodify them? Are there ways to avoid needing to justify our geeky sides at all?

It turned out to be by turns thought-provoking, entertaining, and helpful.

An audience member did a really nice panel write-up over on Dreamwidth. Go check it out — they documented it quite thoroughly. There was also some good discussion and note-taking over in the Twitter-verse.

One major insight the panel brought me was how often work done by women gets considered insubstantial, and therefore not worth money, and therefore worthless. This includes things like emotional labor, and editing, and the creation of art that is ‘only’ emotive, and much more. So not only is measuring our worth in terms of ‘productivity’ implicitly buying into the capitalist machine, it’s also inherently sexist.

We also tried to give some practical advice. One of my fellow panelists discussed setting work limits for oneself. Not minimums, but maximums. A good idea, I think, for a whole bunch of reasons. I suggested, as I am wont to, that we practice compersion for other people’s interests, rather than feeling like our geekiness is somehow threatened by someone else enjoying the same thing; that we not feel guilty for ‘only’ reading RPGs; that, for those of us who are gamers, we commit to games that take exactly as much time as they should; and that we all demand our geeky fun, of and for itself, without having to justify it in terms of how ‘productive’ it makes us, among other things.

Perhaps the biggest insight for me was something one of my fellow panelists said: that we should practice viewing our hobbies, not in terms of ‘productivity’ (or alpha-geekiness, or wealth-generating possibilities, etc.), but in terms of fulfillment. Do your geeky interests give you a sense of fulfillment? Not “Do they generate income”, “Do they produce sufficient widgets for society”, or “Do you perform a geeky function no one else could possibly do”, but “Do they help you feel fulfilled?” It was a very good angle on the question that I hadn’t thought of in quite that way before.

All in all, a great panel to have been at, and to have been on.

How to “Build a World”

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At WisCon 41 in May, I again ran a session of “Build a World”, the quite fun group-world-building activity. It went pretty well. We ended up with a world where “with great hair comes great power”, powered by some sort of hair singularity at the center of all things. Rather than writing up the world, though, I thought I’d write up how to run one of these sessions.

I give credit for this way of running the game to Ben Rosenbaum, who ran it much this way the first few times I encountered it.

You need an audience, hopefully between about a half-dozen and a couple dozen people, and a moderator. Too few audience members and I think it wouldn’t be as fun; too many, and it gets difficult for folks to have input. One session takes about 1 or 1.5 hours.

You also need some way to write up suggestions and have them be constantly visible to everyone. You could possibly do this with a projector/laptop setup, or an overhead projector, or something of that sort. The best format I’ve found, though, is using giant Post-It easel pad paper (c. 25×30″) and easily visible markers (dark and not running dry). If they’re Post-It-style, then they’ll stick to walls pretty well. As long as you have a nice, big, blank wall space available where the audience can see it, you can stick the sheets up as you get to them, and then leave them up afterward to help everyone immediately see what’s going on and what’s gone before. (This assumes that you have fairly decent handwriting, and that folks in the audience can see easily; if not, you might want to have someone do the writing for you, be in charge of restating what’s gone before as necessary, etc.)

As the moderator, you start by explaining the premise to the audience: We’re going to create a world together. It might end up silly, it might end up serious, it’ll probably be fun regardless.

You can pretty much go into the first topic. I generally recommend calling your first topic “Metaphysics/Themes”, “Atmosphere & Mood”, or something similar; not only does this help you set very high-level aspects of the world, it helps nail down some important questions: Are we going for serious? Silly? Rigorously self-consistent? Realistic? Steampunk? SF? Uplifting?

The way I do it, I put everything that gets suggested (or, well, almost everything — it can be difficult when multiple people talk at once, when one suggestion is only a slight variation on another one, etc.) up as an idea. I try to put things up as affirmative statements or descriptions:

There are talking cats

Afrofuturist eco-utopia

Humor has mass

You get the idea. It’s usually a good idea to include some basic style propositions, even if folks don’t suggest them:

Rigorously self-consistent

Silly is okay

Upbeat

Realistic

Basically, I aim to fill up a single sheet, then vote. That usually means around 10-20 propositions get listed per sheet. How many of those get accepted is up to the voting.

For voting, I basically have everyone do a “thumbs up” (approve), “thumbs down” (disapprove) or “thumbs sideways” (meh/abstain/I wasn’t paying attention). I use this to get a sense of how the audience feels about a given proposal. Generally, if thumbs up outweighs thumbs down, the proposition passes. And I don’t vote myself, and I try to avoid influencing the vote.

It can be important to nail down issues about consistency right away, because otherwise you will very quickly end up with a world that’s a far-future, ancient Egyptian humorous noir where there are no humans but everything occurs the way it really happened in history, and everything needs to be strictly self-consistent and logical. Honestly, the most fun worlds are the ones where strict self-consistency isn’t a major goal. But if consistency is going to be a major goal, that’s something you want to clarify very quickly after starting. (As before, this part of Build a World makes me wonder if shared narrative control automatically tends toward gonzo settings.)

I put a check-mark by things that pass, and (if necessary) strike through things that don’t pass.

If necessary, I will suggest to everyone that things that got on the list later but which were directly contradicted by things earlier, shouldn’t make it. But if we end up with a world where water is a time machine and fur is also a time machine, and self-consistency isn’t necessary, then that’s not really a contradiction — just another interesting detail to work in.

When we finish with one sheet, I like to refresh everyone’s memory of what we voted on: “Okay, so we have a world where light only travels in curved paths, air is denser than water, there is no metal, and magic was once real but isn’t anymore… Wow, how would you know magic was real, when you can never look directly at something? Interesting…”

Then we move on to the next sheet. Generally, I let the room suggest what the next one should be, depending on what topics they most want to explore next. Some ideas:

Physics
Magic
Geology
Sociology
Economics
History
Religion
Technology

If everyone was really taken with the idea that taffeta grants magical abilities, then you might end up with a whole sheet about Fashion or even Taffeta. But make sure there’s room to explore on each sheet. If the group isn’t going to be able to come up with a dozen or so different propositions about that topic, maybe think about folding the topic in with something else. And let the most recent topic suggest the next one — if you were just coming up with a bunch of questions about how the economy functions in a world where the cats are the nobility but are also the main form of currency, then maybe economics should be the next topic.

At some point, someone will say something like, “Well, because the main technology is based on cucumbers and lemon batteries, the sentient lightning storms obviously want to get rid of the batteries, because the batteries are making the storms redundant…”. Once you get to this kind of “well, obviously…” moment, I like to note this to the folks in the room. This, it feels to me, is the point where everyone is invested in the world and is starting to understand it, on its own terms, however silly they may be. It’s always a great moment.

Also worth noting: When discussing religion or similar questions of belief, we’ll usually come up with at least two contradictory ideas:

Wood is the divine element

Wood is a sign of moral depravity

When two such contradictory ideas both get passed, I like to commemorate the moment by saying “Schism!” After all, the hallmark of reality is that it is complex; you know a world is starting to feel fully fleshed out when people have beliefs about the world that are at once logical with their experiences of it and completely contradictory with other people’s ideas.

Many times when I’ve run this, someone in the audience will suggest that next we need to write a story set in this world. I tend to downplay this — the assumption that we have to write a story set in this world or somehow we’ve been ‘wasting’ our time buys into some messed-up assumptions about worldbuilding that I stridently don’t agree with.

The way Build a World tends to go, we finish around a half-dozen sheets in an hour. By the end, we usually end up with a wonderful, silly, fascinating world. Many audience members end up feeling like they’ve taken a visit to a world that is at once utterly bizarre and completely familiar. It can be a lot of fun. If you run it, let me know how it goes!

The right tool for the job

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In May, I got to go to WisCon again. (Recovering took a while, thus not getting around to posting last month.) There was a lot of great gaming programming, including some very fun and mind-expanding conversations. One thing that kept coming up, though: A whole lot of people invest way too much energy and money into trying to fix D&D.

Image: A well-worn sledgehammer, resting on a ledge.D&D is a very particular game, with very particular assumptions. It works great for a certain slice of play styles, I think. But I get the impression that a lot of people are constantly having to fight the system to get it to work for the play styles they want — play styles that lie nowhere within D&D’s fortes. Can you use D&D to run a system-light, non-violent game that isn’t focused on acquiring things and defeating objectively evil baddies and progressively getting better at fighting bigger, eviler baddies? Yep, for sure! I am firmly of the belief that you can run any game with any system. But that doesn’t mean that it will be easy to do so. You can use D&D for a system-light, non-violent, etc. game, but doing so is like using a sledgehammer to drive a staple. It’s entirely possible to find a way — but why bother, when there are these things called ‘staplers’ out there? And why (to further extend the metaphor) keep spending money to accessorize your sledgehammer for the job?

The main reason, of course, is that a lot of people have never had experience with anything but D&D. But even that isn’t a satisfying answer. The amount of effort a lot of people invest in carefully hand-crafting their sledgehammers into devices capable of driving staples, when they could spend that same amount of energy — or considerably less — finding and learning to use a stapler… it continues to amaze me.

A lot of people also just play D&D because of that closely-related reason, critical mass. Everyone plays D&D because everyone plays D&D. (This way lies a metaphor about social networks, and how D&D is basically the Facebook of RPGs. But enough with hackneyed metaphors.) And there isn’t really a good argument against that, other than “But you could be having so much more fun if you just played a game designed to do what you want to do!”

I found it both fascinating and frustrating that this issue came up so many times at WisCon. One panel I went to, and at least one I couldn’t go to, directly addressed this issue. But all the panels I saw still seemed to come to the default assumption at the end that, yeah, everyone is just going to play D&D anyway. Like I said, fascinating and frustrating.


WisCONline, weekend after next

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The in-person Wiscon 44 has been canceled, due to the pandemic. I’m sad to miss that; it’s always great to connect with a lot of people in person.

Six abstract figures in a variety of colors arranged to appear like a videochat.However, Wiscon has moved online! Registration for the con, which will be May 22-25, is now open. The online version will include streamed panels & readings, gaming, an auction, a whole chat system, and lots of chances to interact with fellow geeks. The con is also trying hard to make it all highly accessible; there will be closed captioning, and the membership rates are very reasonable, I think.

I wish fandom in general had started to seriously explore online cons in more depth before now, but I’m very glad it’s finally happening, and especially glad that Wiscon is making such an effort (which, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m part of). If you’ve been wanting to attend this great feminist SF&F convention but haven’t been able to make it in person, this is your chance to try it out.

WisCONline

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While it’s still in memory, some notes about WisCONline, which happened at the end of May.

Six abstract figures in a variety of colors arranged to appear like a videochat.I was part of the concomm, doing a bunch of work behind the scenes, so I’m kinda biased. But at the same time, none of my opinions are official or anything like that — I’m speaking for myself here, not the con.

The gaming folks had arranged a huge slate of games, but the way things worked out, I didn’t get to play in any of them. Largely down to what shifts I was on.

However, with our tech setup, I was able to watch some of the games after the fact. (I have a lot of thoughts about people broadcasting games for other people to watch, and parasocial gaming, and similar things, which I may write up here at some point.) All the games I saw were really cool!

  • Atop a Lonely Tower is designed specifically to be played in a Discord channel, with the GM as an old being of magic, using leading questions to very gently guide the narrative, and all the players drifting in and out as ravens, acting as the GM’s eyes and ears and taking most of the narrative control. The players all really went with the conceit, and it worked brilliantly!
  • Are You There, God? It’s Me, the Quarterly Earnings Report is about a group of angels, all having a business meeting to discuss who’s going to take over the department for the next 1000 years. It’s designed to be played as a videochat/conference call, using the quirks of this technology as innate parts of the game: players can deliberately mute themselves, accidentally drop calls on purpose, etc. If all the players understand that it’s a playfully passive-aggressive game, it works beautifully; and all the players at Wiscon did. It worked gorgeously, with some superb roleplaying on the parts of some players.
  • I saw even less of Court of Ferns, but what I saw again seemed brilliant: A game played entirely through a Google Doc spreadsheet, with players as part of a (dysfunctional) bureaucracy.

I assume the other games were equally neat. The gaming folks did a great job of planning and running things. It was also really cool to see how games are expanding into and embracing entirely new kinds of media (a game played through an interactable spreadsheet! omg!).

There was also some cool discussion about gaming and RPGs elsewhere. bankuei from Deeper in the Game pointed out the websites Roll For Your Party and Playing Cards.io, which look very handy for online gaming. And there was a lot of other wonderful geekery — too much to detail here.

Overall, it was really cool to finally see, and help, a con go online. It would of course be nice if we didn’t have to, but it’s very good that we can.





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