Harassment in gaming

[I'm A Banana]

I'm still waiting for him to explain what a "masculine gaming content" is...

"It is an excellent opportunity for friends to gather when you play Hunk Rump: The Gathering."

 

[Ancalagon]

Content that glorifies masculinity and/or tends to appeal to men more than women and the genderqueer, esp. content that the latter find unappealing or even repulsive.

In a tabletop gaming context an obvious example would be pinup art, e.g. chainmail bikinis. More subtly, a game that assumes the PCs will engage in bloody combat primarily for conquest rather than to defend their communities or express their social bonds, as D&D used to.

So you want your gaming space to be a "male space"? I'm not sure if that is your intent, but that could be the effect...

 

[Cergorach]

I foolishly clicked the link and read the article, first thing that goes through my mind: "Not this crap again! Why did I click this?". The I read "I am thirteen years old..." and I start getting angry, after reading the whole damn article I'm asking myself "In what kind of god damned hell is she living/gaming in!?!?".

I know people are horrible, both men and women are equal opportunity offenders in that regard. But this experience is extreme!

That comment from a grown man to a 13 year old girl would have made me take that old metal 40k dreadnought, put it in a sock and start beating that grown man! And if any of those kids were significantly older then 13, they would have been next... Kids can and will be extremely cruel to each other, that's not the worst thing I've heard a 13 year old say to another.

Geeks and Nerds tend to be... not socially apt, especially not around the opposite sex. Staring, awkward and inappropriate comments are to be expected, especially in the 9-21 year age bracket. Sure you can say "They should be better!", but if the were, they wouldn't be the social awkward geeks/nerds in the first place. But behavior that goes beyond gawking at women to touching without consent, sexual assault and rape are... Inexcusable! That's not a geek/nerd/gaming problem that's a generic problem in society, that happens in all social and hobby groups. Even though we all would like to think it doesn't happen in gaming, it just would surprise me if it didn't happen in gaming, but just in clubbing, frats, sports, etc.

Not learning self defense is foolish imho, not because she's a woman, but because she's a person. I'm a guy, I advise all kids to start judo/karate early in life and make your teacher teach you practical stuff that you can use on the 'street' if your in trouble. Because while girls/women might have to deal with sexual assault/rape, the non-alpha males often get the crap beaten out of them "Just because..."'. And while that might not be as bad as sexual assault/rape, it is more socially acceptable and often ignored, so it happens quite often in that young age bracket. Being a victim might not be your fault, but making sure your not a victim makes your life a whole lot more pleasant then being right and pointing out how wrong someone else is...

You can never really know whether your gaming with Hannibal or Theresa, no one ever really does when interacting with other people. But you can use common sense, gut feeling, etc. People who've known me for years or even all my life are still surprised at how aggressive and viscous I can be when I or others are threatened in my presence. Not that that has happened often since leaving school behind me, looking like someone one does not want to mess with helps though ;-) Talking about defense mechanisms...

The only 'sexual assault' I've ever personally encountered is when I was 9-10, boys doing things to girls. I interfered, got my ass kicked, stood up interfered, got my... Rinse and repeat until they got tired of me. The kicker in that case was that I got looks from the girls involved that convened "What the hell are you doing interfering!". Not that something like that would stop me in the future, I've just made sure that I can do the ass kicking...

The Internet... Well... That's a whole different piece of cake. The worst thing I've ever done over the Internet is to a girl, a Shadowrun site called Shadowland BBS back in the day. We were young, everything was still drama, every 'problem' we had was live changing, etc. One of the regular chatters was a girl whose handle I've forgotten, but after a while it became clear that she wanted to be the center of attention, a dramaqueen, hinting at to0 much and chat sometimes became... Unhealthy for all involved. Some of us warned her that this wasn't healthy and this could attract the wrong kind of attention, she was adamant that no one knew her real name or where she lived. What she forgot that over all that chat over many months we all had revealed some personal details, enough for me to find out where she lived (on campus), I emailed her roommate that she should get a 'grip' and send an aerial photograph with their dorm circled. That freaked her out pretty much and luckily made her more careful in later conversations. This is something like 20 years ago, so nothing like social media is now, folks weren't so open on the Internet like they are now. There's a reason, why I'm not on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn... ;-) While at the time I was focused on proving how easy it was to find out who someone is and where they live, not realizing how much that could scare someone.

That said, on the Internet folks can be everything they can't be in real live, threats don't surprise me. By now everyone has had them to a lesser or greater extent. If they are systemic and the police won't act, hire a private investigator, in this day and age tracking those folks isn't hard. Because most of them are indeed mindless dicks that don't know how to make themselves untraceable, even if they think they are, they are often not. It's not the first time that arrogant pricks that are supposed to know something about computers forget the social aspect of the Internet and forget how much personal information they leave lying around. Personally I've had very little interaction with the police, especially none with regards to threats, sexual assault or rape. So I can't say anything about how the police act, is this specific to this particular Canadian city? Canada? North America? This doesn't sound familiar to someone living in Western Europe...

The only part of this whole article I have a problem with is that it's talking about white male gamers as if we all do this... We don't, the folks I've played with over the last 28 years don't. And if someone is found out to do something like THAT, he's corrected with a heavy hand, if not kicked out. If I found out something like that happened to a Con I attended, they might have a murder on their hands instead of a rape... I hope I'm not the only one...

That said, I think that sexual assault and rape are in different galaxies from the male nerds/geeks staring at a girl/woman in the game store, being awkward, not knowing what to say around them, often being smitten. I was one of those awkward nerds, but again touching without permission would never ever happen, nor sexual threats! I don't know whether to blame the hormones during puberty or society (bullying)? Till age 8, most of my friends were female... It took until age 21 until I changed a bit from a total social inept introvert to someone that's skilled at communicating with people, I'm still a weird nerd though ;-) Weird thing happened, I was sat down by my manager at my first fulltime job after six months and what he said made such an impression that something clicked and I did a 180 regarding how I communicate with people. The problem is that many geeks/nerds never have that sitdown moment and something goes click, they always stay those socially inept introverts. That is not something you can change by wanting it to happen, not by force (of arms or will)...

On the other hand I think it's not bad advise from the police to treat certain social groups with care and maybe not associate with them. There's a reason why mom never wanted you to hang out with the Hell's Angels, not go to fratboy parties, etc. I personally think that if a female joined our RPG group when I was age 11-21 I think we would all have had a bad time. Not because I hated girls, but because being awkward around them doesn't mean fun for anyone involved... I just didn't know how to handle them. I did game with women though, but often at the gaming club (often board/cardgames), these were older women. I was the youngest person around by 10-20 years, I could handle older people a lot better then kids my own age (of any gender).

As for racism, I don't see that often from people my own age, often from older folks. But can't remember anyone in gaming being racist. Growing up in a multi cultural society as a kid kind of... Makes you immune to the about race... I think... I hope... Might be a NA thing? That said, I don't know many black people that game, a 20 year old gaming buddy is half Turkish and and my best friend at school was from Hong Kong, but most gamers are white. Not strange when 80%+ of our population is white, not all that strange that 1 in 5 of us is not white. Also not that strange that we don't see that many black gamers when only ~3% of the population is black... Stats in NA might be different...

I also don't buy in game stores anymore, for around 15 years now (started with D&D 3E).
#1 Price
#2 Time
#3 Selection
I generally play with friends, I'm not a big fan of pickup games. I'm also not a fan of Cons for the same reasons. Gaming clubs depend on the people, I kinda miss the old group in Amsterdam...

Overall, it's just sad and enraging that something like this happened anywhere.

imho a whole different animal then a Conan Brom painting with a half naked women, a cover of a chainmail bikini clad woman (Alias, Curse of the Azure Bonds), or a boob heavy miniatures line by producer xyz... Let me also be clear, if you think these issues are comparable or related, your NUTS!

 

[billd91]

Guess we have to stop discussing about this topic then. If you were not aware, women in third world countries face much worse then people in first world countries. Hundreds of thousands of women raped every year, thousands murdered as part of "honor killings", most young girls forced into arranged marriages. Much worse than people in first world countries can even imagine.

We must prioritize, and all this discussion about harassment in gaming conventions is doing is distracting from the bigger problem.

But by all means continue to focus on the harm done to priviliged people in first world countries if you feel that is the real priority here.

/Sarcasm

See, the problem with your Fallacy of relative privation(AKA The children are starving in Africa! argument) is that there is always a bigger problem. So we can never discuss about anything, since according to you, the world can only talk about one problem at a time.

Oh, look, I can bring up a fallacy too! Did Umbran make the argument we can only deal with one problem at a time? No, so making it on your part would be setting up a straw man. But in the two related problems of sexual harassment/assault and having male feelings hurt by women complaining about the former, one's certainly a higher priority than the other and deserves more serious discussion.

 

[PurpleDragonKnight]

"Real nerds"?
"middle of the bell curve"
"must now deal with idiots"

Where do you get the impression that members of the hobby before some point "T" in time before today that nerds were statistically better citizens than everyone else? When was this "Golden Age of Geekdom?

I mean, you do realize we're all humans, and as such, are just as vulnerable to all the same flaws as others. "Nerd-dom" does not innoculate you from being a misnthrope. A con-man. A stalker. A rapist. A killer.

Dude... a lot of people gaming now can barely add a fixed number to a d20 roll. For some, the GM has to dumb it down to "rage only stats" using one weapon only, and always power attacking. Forget going off power attack. Forget even suggesting TWF -2 penalty.

Now, take those people 30 years back when they had to figure out THAC0... I think their brain would implode and they'd walk away to go play rev engine n' burnin tires with the other dumbasses from my home town.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I was introduced to AD&D in Aurora, CO in 1977- plenty of "mere mortals" played back then, too.

 

[Hussar]

Dude... a lot of people gaming now can barely add a fixed number to a d20 roll. For some, the GM has to dumb it down to "rage only stats" using one weapon only, and always power attacking. Forget going off power attack. Forget even suggesting TWF -2 penalty.

Now, take those people 30 years back when they had to figure out THAC0... I think their brain would implode and they'd walk away to go play rev engine n' burnin tires with the other dumbasses from my home town.

ROTFLMAO. If you honestly think that 5e is simpler than AD&D... well, I'm pretty much flabbergasted. Yeah, good luck with that one. Never minding games like 4e or 3e. it's called Mathfinder for a reason.

------

On the whole "sexism in the game has no objective problem" thing.

That's, quite frankly, ballocks. For one, sexism in gaming, even fairly low level stuff like chain mail bikinis, actively drives women away from the game. That, right there, means that there are less people available to play D&D, and limits the size of the hobby. So, right off the bat, you have objective consequences to "in game" sexism. Good grief, it took Vampire and LARPing to bring any significant numbers of women into the hobby. It sure as hell wasn't D&D.

So, the idea that "Well, it's just all fantasy, so, it doesn't matter" is ridiculous. It all matters. It's all connected. When every major NPC is a white dude, every depiction of women show them being victims held in the hand of an over sexualised red efreet, then, yuppers, you better believe it's an uphill battle to expand the player base. When women are treated like faltering gazelles in front of lions every time they walk into a LGS (I refuse to add the F here, because it certainly ain't friendly) then of course it's limiting the player base. And when complaints by women in the game are marginalised by white dudes claiming that it's just "boys will be boys" or "citation please", it certainly isn't helping one iota.

 

[Hussar]

You are rather leaping to conclusions here in a desperate hope of trying to catch me in something. I don't assert that I've ever been mistreated by strangers, deliberately denigrated, or picked on or the like. The very fact that the groups were willing to welcome a stranger into their private activities and play space I would be a louse not to have some gratitude for. In many cases the individuals were quite kind and gracious and as welcoming as they could be under the circumstances.

But I find standards of behavior, standards of content, standards of aesthetics of play, and standards of maturity just vary too widely from table to table. If anything, it's unfair of me to have the expectation that some other table will necessarily cater to my tastes. So one table might delve overtly into occult material I feel uncomfortable with. Another table is content with traditional "beer and pretzels" play, where you kick the doors down, kill the orcs, take there stuff, and never get tired of doing it over and over - while often as not joking around and using the occasion as simply focus for socializing. Another table might turn out to be filled with people who are painfully autistic even by my nerdy standards, so that I can't quite gel with them. One table might be far more comfortable with casual profanities than I am. Another might be entirely power-gamers that enjoy imposing their will on the game and blowing away every obstacle with ease. One group had a DM who thought he was great at extemporeous play... and he just wasn't. Another DM was so purist about metagaming, he refused to let the players see their own character sheets. And so on and so forth. In some cases, I don't actually have a problem with how that table chose to play, it just happened to not be my thing.



Yes, but unless the table is doing something utterly morally repugnant, who is to say the problem isn't mine? Obviously they are enjoying themselves.



It's one thing to not expect another's experiences to be good. It's quite another to expect some other gamer to be in fear for their own safety, or to be subject to harassment or abuse.

You misunderstand. Has nothing with trying to "catch you" in anything. Simply pointing to the fact that while you're arguing with [MENTION=9037]Elf Witch[/MENTION] about behavior at tables, and how you find it surprising that women might be harassed at gaming tables, you also talk about how you don't play with strangers and how playing with strangers is very often a poor experience. Of course it might be your problem too. That's of course true.

But, why the surprise when you talk about "painfully autistic" gamers?

Heck, you're talking about how various groups can make you uncomfortable in various ways, so, why would it surprise you that women would be made to feel uncomfortable as well?

 

[Libramarian]

So let's zoom out a bit, okay?

Instead of getting all Zapruder Film on a single blog post, can we acknowledge that there's a rather constant stream of first-hand experiences of harassment, groping, sexual assault, etc. from women gamers? Both in this thread and in others? Not everyone's experienced it, just like not everyone's harassed women.

Big picture here. Adding this to the rest of the evidence, are they just making it up?

I am listening. So far in this thread we have [MENTION=9037]Elf Witch[/MENTION]'s experience of being groped by a Hugo-award winning writer in the late 1970s, and [MENTION=82779]MechaPilot[/MENTION]'s experience of rape by PC proxy in the early 1990s. Did I miss anything?

I went to Comic Con a few months ago with a friend of mine (granted, this is the only con I've ever been to). I didn't notice anything I would call harassment. I asked her yesterday in response to this thread if she experienced or witnessed any harassment then, just to be sure. She said no, it was a great time and she didn't have any problems at all.

Why be skeptical? For at least two reasons:

1) In case the person making the claim has an ulterior motive, like Emily Garland (author of article in the OP). She has a vendetta against Wyrd Miniatures. I know you consider it gauche to actually read up on something before forming an opinion, so you'll have to trust me on this. She attacks Wyrd in her blog post. She includes their phone number and asks people to call and complain to them.

2) These claims themselves turn women away from the hobby! [MENTION=82779]MechaPilot[/MENTION] mentioned upthread that she thinks she would enjoy gaming at a con but doesn't want to go because of what she's heard about them. That sucks to the extent that she's been mislead.

That agenda would be ...?

I mean, "Let's be less sexist than we were in the 90's" sounds like a pretty fair goal?

As was asked, what agenda is that?

The agenda of removing sexist content from the game...

One one hand, I think it's pretty crass to co-opt existing IP to further any kind of sociopolitical agenda. Their only agenda should be to make a great game that entertains fans of the series. If you want new fans, make new IP.

However it depends to what degree and by whose definition the content is sexist. I haven't played Baldur's Gate for many years but I don't recall anything striking me as sexist.

If there were a quest in the game that involves the player abducting, assaulting and destroying innocent women, or a companion who hates women and harangues the PC on how they're evil and cannot be trusted, that would be outrageous and I'd support its removal from the game in all expansions and re-releases.

But a female character who flirts with men? That's sexist content? Not by any reasonable definition.

If a woman has been groped, the men and babies re: breasts comparison makes a great deal of sense for her to make, particularly while exasperated about the topic of sexual harassment/assault. The biological purpose of breasts is to feed babies after all.

The context of the joke was her lobbying to reduce the the breast size of female Wyrd miniatures. The biological purpose of mammary glands is to feed babies. Breasts are a secondary sex characteristic.

As for your disbelief about the cop and the chant, I can't speak to what Winnipeg is like, but real life can very much be just as horrific as a horror film. Recall that Texas Chainsaw Massacre (a 1970s horror film) had elements inspired by real life murderer Ed Gein. Also, you should be aware that cops are not paragons of humanity. I'm sure we can all find articles online about cops who abused their authority by sexually assaulting women. If some cops are willing to sexually assault the women they pull over (and some very much are), then it's not much of a stretch at all to consider that some cops might react to a claim of rape as was described.

Of course they're literally possible, but the less likely it is that they occurred, the less we ought to be afraid of those scenarios occurring again.

Ultimately, we know for a fact that the terrorism against her occurred. Whether Wyrd was complicit or not in the terrorism against her is irrelevant to the existence of the problem of women being harassed and/or assaulted by members of the gaming community, a problem whose existence has been corroborated by multiple sources, including members of this forum.

It's not irrelevant to the interests of the forum! People should know that it's by no means proven that Wyrd was complicit in her harassment. They make tabletop games and this is a tabletop games discussion forum.

(Just to repeat, I'm not denying that she received threats and that that's terrible).

 

[Libramarian]

So you want your gaming space to be a "male space"? I'm not sure if that is your intent, but that could be the effect...

My point upthread was that the moral obligation we have to fight against the harassment of women dwarfs that of making games more appealing to women, and one can support the first fight while actually having little interest in the latter.

I think there's nothing wrong with making a game, finding that the vast majority of your fans are men, and then not really caring to change that. You're making a fun little thing, not drafting a constitution.

I think game designers are prone to superiority complexes and delusions of grandeur, and feminist critics prey on this.

I support the creation of games for (and preferably by) women and the LGBTQI community. I'd be interested in playing them. I also support the creation of games that are unabashedly masculine in orientation and theme. I'm interested in playing those.

I don't generally like the idea of co-opting an established game and changing it to make it more appealing to women and LGBTQIs. Especially when disagreeing with these changes is automatically considered tantamount to bigotry. That would be Social Justice Warfare in the original Gamergate context, for those unclear on what that phrase means.