Category: Convention Report

Nazi Redux, Year Two: Or, It’s Still Not Okay To Cosplay As A Nazi

by Shoshana, posted in Convention Report, Cosplay, Geek Culture, Speaking Out, Uncategorized

My GenCon wrap-up post has been delayed once more to bring you this late breaking bulletin: 

It’s still not okay to cosplay as a Nazi.

In case you forgot. Just checking in.

You’d think a girl wouldn’t have to put this up a second year. I had a post up last year about how it was impossible to miss the presence of Nazi memorabilia being sold at GenCon. How there were cosplayers who thought it was cool to walk down the street wearing their Nazi gear. Over the year that issue remained relevant as such instances of Nazi cosplay and memorabilia being sold were reported at other conventions, such as NYCC. Apparently, it wasn’t just a GenCon thing.

"Selling Nazi gear right across from Cap hoodies? Not cool!"
“Selling Nazi gear right across from Cap hoodies? Not cool!”

Last year’s article then got reposted in A.A. George’s post about race issues at GenCon and so the issue has come up with a huge number of people talking about it. And y’know what I’m hearing a lot of? Apologizing. I’m hearing apologizing and excuses made FOR THE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO WEAR NAZI GEAR. And not in the context of, y’know, historical reenactment where they’re going to get punched in the face by the Allies, like Captain America did to Hitler.

Some of these apologies are in two posts that have gone up in response to A.A. George’s article, found here and here. I’ll save you reading through the entire things because, frankly, they’re not all that impressive to begin with. They rely on Fisking their way thru George’s piece, going line by line to dissect terms rather than actually addressing the issue with courtesy and respect. So I’ll hone in on the salient points to THIS conversation, namely where they talk about my article. 

The first article lies here and here’s a screenshot. The quoted part is the original article by A.A. George while the second half is the opinion of the article’s author: 

naziargument

No, but pinup girls in Nazi uniforms are. And last year there was Nazi military stuff. This year at the same booth there was vintage anti-Japanese propaganda posters. Are these really necessary to make games about bad guys at cons? Are these somehow necessary to display Nazis as the villain of some pieces? Or are they a contextless representation of racist crap, being sold to people right across from where folks are buying cool t-shirts? It’s someone using the GenCon space to financially profit from selling hateful memorabilia with ZERO context to a game. The same would be cosplayers who are walking around the con. There being zero context for their costumes in some cases, we’re looking at folks doing their shopping or playing their Pathfinder games, and looking up to see a dude sporting the old ‘fetishized militaria’ costumes. 

That’s my response to THAT article. A conversation then came up on Google+ where someone defended the very fact that making Nazis a taboo subject would… create Nazis. Hang on for a ride here, folks, this is what we’re up to: (Names filed off this quote for anonymity of the poster)

Anytime you make it taboo, you plump it up, invigorate it, make it more virile. Anytime you make it off-limits, you make it off-limits to mock, you make it off-limits to parody, you make it off-limits to deconstruct, to integrate, to drain the power from it into a wider form of expression. Every time you say “no Nazi imagery is acceptable,” you reinforce the idea that just the appearance of a thing, just the visual stimulation of a thing, is so powerful that rational people must reject it for fear that they become tainted merely by association.

Congratulations, you’ve just built your own enemy and fêted on your own blood. You’re kind of an idiot.

There are very few more dangerous statements, ideas, or strings of expressions than, “that part of history is too close to home for freedom of expression.” Freedom of expression is how you contextualize history. Freedom of expression is how you get beyond history. Freedom of expression is how you make new history. So long as Austria and Germany have strict and constant vigilance against the threat presented by Nazis, they will always have Nazis. They build Nazis. They make Nazis. They have least themselves to the very idea that the Nazi has power over them, so much so that the very whiff of National Socialism is outside the purview of what can be discussed or represented.

You want Nazis? Because that’s how you get Nazis.”

First, whoa there tiger. You create Nazis by not allowing people to be Nazis? No, last I checked, people become Nazis because they choose to personally associate with the symbols, beliefs, and ideas of a hate-based party. Countries that have strict laws against the presence of Nazis, neo-Nazis, and fascists of the like are, last I checked, trying to check the creation of hate groups within their country. Which in my eyes is not a bad thing. 

“But wait! What about freedom of expression! If we’re not careful, soon we’ll be treating Nazis like You-Know-Who in Harry Potter! We’ll be censored! Oh no!” Oh we could do a dance about what freedom of expression really means, and the fact that freedom of expression is in fact NOT universal no matter what we think (cannot shout fire in a crowded room, ect.) and also does not take away from the fact that when you express, you must be responsible and accountable for the repercussions of said expression. Which includes people saying you’re offensive and even potentially harmful at an event when wearing and exhibiting Nazi paraphernalia. 

What’s so sad is I agree on one point: freedom of expression allows people to address difficult subject matter. It’s what makes us able to explore it. But there is such a thing as exploring it in a manner that is respectful for the nightmare that it caused. It’s all about context, as is so many things. And where, for example, games like Achtung! Cthulhu or Weird World War engage with Nazi material, as does many games that touch upon WWII, it’s the context of “UR MER GERD, NAZIS ER COOL!” that is blatantly problematic. This isn’t a question of white-washing them out of history, of a chance of us forgetting that Nazis are one of the worst evils around. I don’t feel that by saying that you can’t cosplay as a character that we’re risking future generations not knowing about the evils of Nazi Europe. It’s about creating a space in which people don’t walk into a convention hall, or past a booth, and overhear some dudes going “wow, look at this cool Nazi gear! It’ll look great in my collection!” 

Which is exactly the context by which I ran into that booth the year before. I went into that booth to buy patches for my zombie-fighting LARP armor and ran smack into Nazi imagery, paraphernalia, and a couple of guys talking about adding some of it to ‘their collection.’ I fled that booth as fast as my legs would go. I wanted to be nowhere near it. Too bad it was right across from the booth of a friend of mine. I had to pass it every damn time I came to visit them. This year? It was right across from a booth I normally visit to buy t-shirts. I didn’t go anywhere near that t-shirt booth or any of those around it. That’s my business gone, my dollars not spent at any of the booths in the vicinity of the nazi gear. And maybe that’s just me. But that’s a financial repercussion: I voted with my wheelchair wheels and got the hell away from that booth for the second uncomfortable year. 

This conversation, having been brought up by the Tor.com article, has highlighted some nasty, uncomfortable parts of the gaming world that seemingly think it’s benign to wear these things, to display them. That some sort of freedom of expression will be indelibly damaged by a rule against Nazi cosplay and the selling of Nazi paraphernalia at conventions. Sure, you have the right to wear these things thru freedom of expression. But there’s a big difference between you CAN wear something and you SHOULD. 

Once again, I reiterate a previous stance I have: gaming spaces are shared spaces. And the impact displaying hate-associated imagery in that larger convention space, especially without the context of ‘Nazis-as-despicable-villains’ is harmful to those for whom historical Nazis are a personal nightmare. The display of such callous disregard for the feelings of others on the matter in the face of “BUT I WANNA COSPLAY!” is crude and tasteless at best and harmful and cruel at worst. 

And you know what’s the worst part? I said all of this last year! Most of this post is almost verbatim what I said in last year’s post after engaging with the booth and first their sexist stuff and then their Nazi gear. This comes up again, and again. And again. And what worries me is that it isn’t going to be addressed. People who are afraid of their precious ‘freedom of expression’ being violated by so-called ‘social justice warriors’ are going to scream at the heavens when I mention that contextless Nazi cosplay and paraphernalia for sale is uncomfortable. They’ll slap that old “Oh this is just those crazy Social Justice Warriors” again on it and ignore.

Y’know what? You can’t say that you’re all about engaging with arguments when you ignore their content for the sake of saying that it’s just something brought up by social justice warriors. I loathe that term so much. It is the most reductive, diversionary tactic by those who are too lazy to actually engage with issues and want to hand wave away the credibility of anyone bringing these topics up. But for those who want to avoid talking about issues, who just want to have things their way and not consider the comfort of others, then the answer will always be “Get a thicker skin.” 

Well my skin’s pretty thick. That’s how I got into this fight in the first place. To speak up for something that I find repugnant against a cacophony of apologists and excusers. And I’ll bring it up again, next year, if the topic comes up again. Which, considering our luck so far, it almost assuredly will. 

A Context On Equality: GenCon, Ferguson And One Week In August

by Shoshana, posted in Convention Report, Geek Culture, Speaking Out

This past week in August, I had a lot going on. I returned from a fantastic academic conference called DiGRA in Snowbird, Utah only to take a few days off and then headed to GenCon in Indianapolis. My friends and I drove the twelve hours over two days to Indy and spent “The Best Four Days In Gaming” running Dresden Lives, being on panels, spending time with friends and (of course) gaming. I’m going to post a Top 10 Highlights from GenCon in my next post, but first I had to look at something else going on at the same time as GenCon, a moment in history occurring just a few hundred miles away that echoed a narrative going on in the gaming community with much more serious results. I’m speaking of course about the events going on in Ferguson, MO and the death of Mike Brown at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson.

If you have not heard of the shooting of Mike Brown and the protests going on in Ferguson even as I write this, you must be living under a rock. Yet for the first few days of these events, unless you were keyed into social media, you wouldn’t have heard much about the tragedy. A young man is shot dead by a police officer and immediately questions arise as to the validity of the shooting. Protests break out around Ferguson as it becomes clear the police are blatantly mishandling the investigation. And then the cops decide it’s a great idea to roll in with riot gear, armored assault vehicles, and semi-automatic weapons into the neighborhood. They tear gas whole streets of people of all ages, including young children. People march in the streets of Ferguson with their hands up, crying “Don’t shoot!” The media reports mass violence, a neighborhood out of control. Audio and video on the ground tell a whole other story, spread through social media like wildfire. The whole world is watching. 

I was watching too, from GenCon. I caught news every chance I got at my hotel room, and checked Twitter constantly. I could not forget that while I was having my fun at GenCon, there was a moment in history going on, memorializing this fallen young man who was the victim of ongoing institutional racism. This kind of systematic oppression by the police has existed, apparently, in Ferguson for a very long time. Yet the stories that came out of this tragedy, spread across social media, tell the tale of an America in which people of color are treated deplorably. To many, this was no surprise. You only have to talk to folks who hear stories about PoC victimized by police, suffering aggressions of every kind. This is the world we still live in. We still have to have dialogues about race. 

It’s no surprise then to me that when A.A. George wrote a strong piece about race still being an issue at GenCon, he received a hell of a lot of flack. This article came out three days before the convention and drew a lot of attention to the question of how people of color, women, the disabled, the queer community and pretty much anyone outside of the dominant narrative of the gaming community have been treated. A.A. George joined me at GenCon on a panel called “Why Is Inclusivity Such A Scary Word?” alongside Elsa S. Henry, Jessica Banks, Strix Beltran, and Tracy Barnett to talk about our experiences facing down the battle for inclusivity in the community. The comments section on A.A. George’s post on Tor grew, and got filled with some strongly worded opposition to his opinions about the lack of racial diversity in the gaming community. (If you’d like to waste some of your time you can even check out an exhausting response from someone named Louis Correia who’s willing to tell you all about how these issues don’t exist).  People stood up and said that they don’t see color, that we don’t have to talk about race, that if people of other groups wanted into the community they can just come and have fun because there is no issue. And two hundred miles away from Indianapolis, the events in Ferguson were unfolding, fed directly into our Twitter stream and the slow-reacting mainstream media, all for the world to see.

Please understand me because I am going to be VERY clear here. These two situations are, by no means, equal. The death of Mike Brown and the systematic abuse of the people of Ferguson by law enforcement officials cannot in a million years be put alongside the dialogue about race and representation in the gaming world. I want to say that before someone stands up and in outrage shouts about ‘how dare I’ blah and blah and so on. Yet the fact that so many responses to A.A. George’s article claimed that issues of representation and inequality are non-issues shows a staggering lack of awareness to the national conversation of inequality. And having those kinds of responses when people are being tear gassed and arrested, their civil rights violated, only a few hundred miles away from our safe hotels and gaming tables staggered me. 

There are folks who are far more qualified than I to speak about racial inequity. I toss in my hat when talking about women in the gaming world, about religious representation of Jewish culture at large, of the issues of being bisexual and seeing representation of one’s self and being treated fairly with disabilities. I stand with ears open and mouth shut and support those who are so much more articulate than I about the issue of combating racism. But with those ears open, I hear a lot of talk about a color-blind gaming world, where people are treated equally and it’s all about the fun. That’s what we came here for, after all, the fun. And there’s no need to get our stupid ‘social justice warrior’ stuff into the gaming. 

How utterly, utterly absurd and totally absent of any world context.

Just because we step up to the gaming table, grab our dice, and sit down for some Pathfinder, or for a good game of King of Tokyo, doesn’t mean we’ve suddenly divorced ourself from issues of inequality. It doesn’t mean that the people who have faced racism or any other -ism suddenly forget that the world can be a hostile place if you aren’t normative. And it’s not as though gaming culture isn’t rife with the same problems of inequality as the rest of the world. We all want it to be a magical, fantastic, utopian world where we play out our fantasies and don’t have to worry about real world concerns.

Guess what? The world doesn’t work like that, and neither does the gaming world. You can’t just shuck the concerns that exist out there and pretend they don’t exist. And the folks who usually try tend to be the ones for whom those problems won’t really BE a problem. They’re the ones who are willing to ignore issues for the sake of the status quo being perpetuated.

The gaming world is a normative one, built on a history of a pretty single-group kind of community. And now, in a time when that normativity is being questioned, the backlash is staggering. It mirrors a conversation that has been rumbling up across the country about equality on a larger scale. Equality in gay marriage, in classist economic issues, in the fight for feminism against a torrent of hate, and especially in the issue of race. And just when people want to shut their ears, ignore the problem, or abuse those who would stand against such inequality, they would also turn a blind eye to the tragedy that took a young man’s life for the fact that he’s black in America. Worse, they’d scream their heads off to the sky about how we’re making an issue out of nothing. That we should just calm down. Get a thicker skin. Get over it. 

Or in the context of the games world, stop trying to ruin their fun. 

Once more I will say, these two situations cannot be considered equal. By comparison to what happened in Ferguson and what is STILL happening in St. Louis, the problems of the gaming world are miniscule. Nobody is losing their lives over inequality in the art in a game master’s guide, or dying for being excluded from a gaming session based on their identity. I’d be a damn fool to put the two on the same level. But there are those suffering from professional backlash, harassment, trolling, doxxing, death and rape threats, and other such tactics because of the inequality in our industry. And that provides examples that we are, despite all our claims to be colorblind and welcoming, NOT over issues of bigotry.

The events in Ferguson brought me to a place of humbled, terrified certainty that we have all missed the point. While we’ve worked hard to create fictional worlds and fun experiences, the world outside has been experiencing upheavals. Some of us have been interacting with it, but the trolls and hatred of internet tough guys and self-appointed social justice warrior bashers have distracted from issues far larger than issues in the gaming world. It gave me the context to say that while we must continue to stand up for representation within the gaming world, for inclusivity in all spheres, the attacks of the haters is almost laughable in the face of the repercussions of such hate elsewhere. True, harassment hurts a hell of a lot and no one should ever have to put up with the trolls – I stand by my previous statements regarding a zero tolerance policy on trolling, bullying and harassment. Those who choose these roads must still be confronted and rebuffed. Yet the actions of those who WOULD harass seems so small now, so petty.

Issues of inequality everywhere are serious topics, meant for serious people. They are not the place for internet tough guys who use their online anonymity to discount the experiences of others in favor of narrow thinking. And placing their behavior side by side with the events going on in the outside world put their relevance to the bigger picture in context. 

I am tonight in solidarity with Ferguson and my hopes for justice for Mike Brown and his family. My solidarity also goes to those like A.A. George, who are getting hate from the outraged haters out there, and to anyone trying to bring up issues of inequality in whatever their community is and in whatever capacity. There are serious issues going on and they require serious discourse to work them out to build the communities and the overall world we’ll want to leave as a legacy. Haters and unethical harassers need not apply. 

PS: Included below are links to places that you can donate to help the cause of Mike Brown’s justice fund or even to help the protesters down in Ferguson. Consider donating if you can.

GoFundMe – Justice for Michael Brown 

Campaigns for #MikeBrown #Ferguson

Ferguson Support – Ways To Support The Fight

The Wandering Designer’s Convention Update!

by Shoshana, posted in Convention Report, Game Design, Geek Culture

It’s been a while since I was able to give an update here about what I’ve been working on. That’s probably because I’ve been busy working and traveling! Here are some of the highlights:

  • I was a guest down at Escapist Expo in Durham, North Carolina, and had the pleasure of being on the ‘You Game Like A Girl’ panel there with my compatriots in feminist discourse, Anja Keister, Iris Explosion and Stella Chuu. (The panel video is up online here to check out!) Along with the fantastic ZP Keister, they did their amazing D20 Burlesque show for the Escapist crowd, and I got the opportunity to hang with the gentlemen of Evil Hat Productions, Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks, as well as Daniel Solis. We played games, we had fun, and it was an honest to goodness blast. I really recommend Escapist if you are a fan of their site, if you’re a fan of a nicely sized convention with great people, and if you’re a fan of a friendly city for a visit.
  • I attended New York Comic Con and did some reporting on it for Tor.com – you can see my coverage of the Marvel Television panel, the Dracula Screening and the Cosplay over at Tor. I also got a chance to see the Defiance panel and ask the cast my question, plus got a great chance to see the Welcome to Night Vale panel. Had a fantastic blast, with much thanks to my friend Justin Reyes for helping me with my camera gear. I also was a convert to the Pokemon nation that weekend – Pokemon X for me! It’s my new relaxation helper. Highlights were getting a chance to shake hands with Kelly Sue DeConnick, the Marvel writer of Captain Marvel and the Avengers. I’m a huge fan of her work and her constant contribution to the discourse about women in the geek world.
  • Not long after I was on the road again to head to GeekGirlCon out in Seattle. It was an absolute pleasure to meet up with folks out there. I had the pleasure of being on panels about creating safe spaces at conventions with brilliant folks like Jennifer Stuller, burlesque performer and organizer Jo Jo Stilletto, fiction writer and safe space advocate K.T. Bradford, pop culture scholar Rob Salkowitz. The second panel was about Female Characters in Video Game Design and was sat by some fantastic folks like Kimberly Voll, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry and Anita Sarkeesian. It was my honest pleasure to be a part of both, as they gave me a chance to talk about my two favorite things – how to create convention space for all and how women are represented in video games. Later I got the chance to do a panel/workshop on LARP 101 and then presented the Nordic game LIMBO to a crew of players. (I’ll have a full write-up of that shortly). It seemed the game really touched everyone very deeply. I was floored by how well people did with the material and how deeply they threw themselves into the roleplay. Overall it was an incredible weekend – I found the entire community to be welcoming and fantastic, and I was loathe to miss the whole Sunday program to fly home. But family vacation in Orlando called!
  • Shortly thereafter I was out at Dystopia Rising‘s big season ender for New Jersey known as DeathCon! Every October we throw a big four-day zombie apocalypse adventure and this year all the stops were pulled out, folks. My shift with fellow storyteller Liam Neery created a cacophony of in-game screams as we unleashed terrifying raiders on the fictional town of Hayven, and madness and fun was had by all. As a player I enjoyed myself a great deal, but it was my pleasure getting a chance to once again rain storyteller heck down on the player base. Special shout out to the Unholy Sideshow and D20 Burlesque for performing at the game- it was overall a hell of a weekend.

So now I’m back in the workflow of things, my traveling having been completed for the season. Well, almost. Because next week is… Metatopia! I’m very excited to say that I’ll not only be attending Metatopia but I’ll be sitting on a couple of panels, as well as running a few playtests. I’m planning on doing a playtest for my RPG Wanderlust plus doing a run of my freeform game Service as well. It did well being tested on my NYU Game Center friends, now let’s see how it holds up against other gamers. This Metatopia has so much on the schedule that I’m excited to just get a chance to sit in on panels and talk to people. It’s going to be pretty packed. So check me out at the following:

  • Friday 11AM – Translating Tabletop to LARP
  • Friday 2PM – How to Manage Adult Content
  • Friday 3PM-5PM WANDERLUST RPG Discussion
  • Saturday 4PM – Inclusivity: Inviting Women to the Table

And after that… well, it’s just work time. The con season will officially be over until February, when Dreamation 2014 has me plotting LARP fun. Until then, I’ve got some projects to do – including all the stuff to prepare for my thesis at the Game Center. There’s going to be a full article on here about that very shortly, so stay tuned!

So the travel season is over, and I’m glad to be home. In truth, traveling is fantastic but it does take away from work time. I have lots of projects coming up in the near future and I’m excited to buckle down and get to work. Meanwhile, my bleary-eyed self is getting to bed so I can get up for class tomorrow. And so it continues!

Pax, You’ve Gone And Done It: An Open Letter

by Shoshana, posted in Convention Report, Geek Culture, Speaking Out

Dear Penny Arcade,

I don’t honestly know where to begin. You’ve really gone and done it now.

Let’s start from the top: Dickwolves. Dickwolves were a thing a while back. You remember dickwolves, right? It was the huge controversy about your sometimes funny comic strip offering up rape jokes as part of your attempts at humor. I won’t go into the madness that was the entire issue because, frankly, it is like one giant labyrinth of PR nightmare meets the worst insensitivity high school locker room humor can offer. (If you need the long description, this exhaustive timeline chronicles the Dickwolves madness). Suffice to say, the dickwolves controversy is just the tip of the iceberg of a serious problem I’ve come to recognize about Penny Arcade and its Pax conventions. Penny Arcade and it’s creators Mike and Jerry (aka Gabe and Tycho) have a serious problem:

They’ve become part of what’s wrong with geek culture.

And its not funny anymore. In fact, it’s goddamn insulting.

First it was “The Sixth Slave” comic that kicked off the dickwolves. Then it was the guest comic about the non-consensual breakfast cereal. Then came the ridiculous Twitter implosion of Mike Krahulik regarding using the term cis-gender and generally being an insensitive human regarding the trans community. Should we toss in the case of the Pax Enforcer that was involved in a sexual harassment case that was all-but covered up? Each time, creator Mike Krahulik has come out with new and wonderful ways to explain support of rape jokes or transphobic speech, or has sat by while those who spoke up against his particular brand of ‘humor’ have been threatened with rape and death just for speaking out. And each and every time this has happened, there has been a controversy and Penny Arcade has ended up back in the geek news sphere long enough for people to get riled up. Then an apology is issued and everything calms down for a little while. Still, folks sit back and wait quietly to see if Krahulik will say something else, do something else, that shows off just how tragically out of touch they are with the evolving geek community. And BAM, it happens again.

Switch over to my side of the tracks for two seconds. I am a game designer, a video game fan, a creator and a panelist. I get invited to go to Pax East to speak as a woman about everything from women in game design, women’s representation in video games, and of course female harassment in convention culture. People look at me sideways when I say I’m attending PaxEast. “But Shoshana, what about the dickwolves? Why go somewhere that supports this kind of rape culture? Why go to the middle of dickwolves central?”

Because, I responded, it can’t be all that bad. And besides, shouldn’t that be where the conversations about women in video games should be happening? Isn’t that where these battles should be fought?

Oh, Penny Arcade – look at me, trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. Look at me, trying to have a discourse.

imagesPax East was difficult. There was trolling I personally had to put up with in my life. But in the end, we had a good time there and were treated with respect for the most part. In fact, things go so well, you invited us out to PaxPrime. Then came the wonderful cis-gender conversation from Krahulik on Twitter. And people brought it up again. “Shoshana, you can’t possibly be going there! Look at what he said! Do you still think that you should be attending the convention?”

Yes, I said, because that’s where the conversation about these things should be happening. Take the conversation right to PA’s door and talk about how we are folks who use the word cis-gender without snickering, without being insulting. People were very receptive, the audience was great, this is where the conversation should go on.

Oh Pax – look at you, giving me hope that things wouldn’t devolve into something ridiculous FIVE MINUTES AFTER THE CON.

Do I sound frustrated to you? It’s because I am. Pax Prime gave me a little hope, you see. I counted the number of panels you had on diversity and inclusion, on women in gaming and on LGBT representation, and I rejoiced. See, here were the conversations I was hoping to see! There were tons of them, hosted by people from tabletop and video games, from cosplayers to the female employees of Bioware. Here were the inclusive community discussions I was hoping to see at a convention that has been plagued with a reputation for misogyny and sexual misconduct. This was the kind of community reform, from the inside, that I love to see. I got on a plane after spending the weekend meeting people and talking about these issues, happy to have attended. I got off the plane to this exchange in a Q&A panel where Mike and Jerry answered questions to Robert Khoo, their business manager. Here’s the video (with the exchange in question at 2 hours and 35 minutes) but enclosed is the offending transcript:

Robert Khoo: I mean, speaking of, I know the three of us have like, a really great working relationship, like, probably the best given the circumstances that we were thrown together in, given our personalities, it really is sort of a dream scenario, I couldn’t have written any better. But, is there anything you wish I would do better, or anything you resent me for doing or saying, or um… besides this panel. Outside of this panel.

Mike Krahulik (Gabe): This is honesty time?

Khoo: Honesty time, yeah. Absolutely.

Gabe: I… You know that I don’t hold grudges.

Khoo: Alright

Gabe: Like, I can be incredibly mad and then fine the next minute, so long as I get it out.

Khoo: Okay.

Gabe: And I feel like we got this out, so I’m not mad about it anymore.

Khoo: Alright.

Gabe: But…I think that pulling the Dickwolves merchandise was a mistake.

Khoo: Clearly, had I known the falling steps that would follow after that move, I would never have brought it up to you. Course I wouldn’t have, because I did not know… I mean, I don’t wanna say “Alright, well, because of this, this happened, people said this, I said this, you said that, clearly it would have just been better to just like, not say anything. That’s sort of our policy on all these types of things now where it’s like, it’s just better not to engage. And in fact, pulling it was, in a way, enga-

Gabe: – engaging –

Khoo: – A way of engaging. And then, then you actually engage. That was a direct result of pulling. And I totally agree. I totally agree.

Gabe: Okay.

Audience Member: Bring it back!

Khoo: No, that’s a terrible idea.

Do I have to go on, Penny Arcade? Do I have to say a damn thing else?

apology

After the last piece of sludge that fell out of Krahulik’s mouth (the cis-gender issue), he issued an apology for what he said. I was pretty critical of that apology because of the language used there, namely where Krahulik made it seem as though he couldn’t stop himself from being, using his words, ‘a dick’. Well apparently that is the case! Because right here, in the above transcript, we have it: ‘Gabe’ saying it was a mistake to pull the dickwolf merchandise from their shelves.

Let me reiterate: he said it was a mistake to pull merchandise referencing a rape joke off of their website. It was a mistake to stop making money off of rape jokes that offended, hurt, and insulted members of the gamer community. This was the statement made by Mike Krahulik. And Robert Khoo agreed to it. And audience members cheered.

Three strikes. You’re out.

I have no more excuses for you, Penny Arcade. I have no more excuses for how you imagine you can, in one breath, invite people to your conventions with promises of a ‘safe space’ and in the next support rape jokes and rape culture. I cannot imagine how you presume to invite professionals from across the country to speak on your panels, broadcast across the internet on your Twitch stream, about the very issues you are helping to perpetuate and then have your leadership say things like the above transcript. Have you looked up the definition of hypocrisy lately? Because I believe with this last statement, Krahulik and Penny Arcade has used up their last piece of ‘oh well, you know, he didn’t mean it like that’ cred that might have ever existed for ‘Gabe’.

So what now? Now, I say this: Pax was fun. Both of them were fun. I have great memories of both. I won’t forget the faces of the people I spoke to at the panels, or how great it was to chat with the game devs and representatives and the wonderful fellow nerds. But fact is, what the hell am I supposed to do when faced with a statement like this? Do I go to a convention that is headed by people who regret engaging with the fans they hurt, who regret taking down merchandise that supports rape as something to be joked about? Who haven’t seemingly learned a damn thing about being respectful to all parts of their audience, but instead continue to cater to the lowest common denominator of juvenile, offensive humor in an attempt to stay relevant? Sorry. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a third time, and I gotta have my damn head examined.

sorrynotsorryIn my eyes, as of this statement, Krahulik has proven finally how grossly out of touch he is with the evolving gamer world. This is a geek community that is socially conscious and responsible, that takes into account the feelings and considerations not only of the ‘mainstream’ demographic but of all its membership. This is a community of peers that is demanding, not just asking, that offensive content be reconsidered and shelved to be replaced by content that doesn’t make folks feel hurt. That asks creators to consider whether just because you can create something potentially harmful (not just offensive but downright harmful), does it still mean you should. This is the evolving geek community, and Penny Arcade’s frontman has once again proven he’s got eyes shut to those changes.

No, I’d say its worse. This latest garbage is a slap in the face to every Pax Enforcer or employee who has gone out of their way to try and make the environment at the conventions friendly and safe for all. It is an insult to anyone who attended the conventions to bring about talks about inclusivity and gender/sexual/racial equality in games and gaming culture. It is the comments of someone tragically unaware of the changing face of the gamer world, whose actions are supported by their business team (remember Khoo in the above transcript supports Krahulik’s statement) and therefore indelibly intertwined with the Penny Arcade brand and its subsidiary, Pax.

Do I sound pissed off, Penny Arcade? I am. Because I attended your convention in good faith. Good faith that the voices of people like me, who went to your convention to speak about these issues, were welcome. Instead, I feel as though whatever voice I bring was just used to give legitimacy to your convention. ‘Look,‘ you could say, ‘we have some women talking about these issues! Now maybe they’ll ignore our rape jokes and other nonsense.‘ Do I sound like I’m feeling a little used? Probably because I do. I feel used. Insulted. Frustrated at your misuse of your cultural clout in the geek community. And sad for all those who believed in your corner of the community more than I did.

You’re going to ask, of course, what does it matter if you feel betrayed? Sure, I’m just one tiny game designer, Penny Arcade. But funny thing: there’s a lot of folks out there right now who have read that transcript. Or saw the video. And a lot of companies and individuals who are questioning their consciences about whether or not to continue supporting you. I might just be one. But there’s plenty of ‘ones’ out there. So congratulations – you’ve proven today how tragically out of touch you are and because of that, I’m taking my time, money, attendance and support elsewhere. And I think a hell of a lot of others are going to do the same.

Hope that was worth the price of a few dickwolves.

Signed, Shoshana Kessock

Other articles about this issue:

Gaygamer- Pax Honesty Time: Pulling Dickwolves Merchandise Was ‘A Mistake’

Elizabeth Sampat – Quit Fucking Going To Pax Already, What is Wrong With You?

Leigh Alexander – Still Never Going To Pax

Lillian Cohen-Moore – Why I’m Quitting Pax

Make Me A Sammich – Gabe: We Made A Mistake Removing Dickwolves Merch

Kotaku – Penny Arcade Artist: Pulling Dickwolves Merchandise ‘Was A Mistake’ 

GenCon Come and Gone: The AfterCon Report

by Shoshana, posted in Convention Report

GenCon 2013 has come and gone, and there is so much I could say about the experience. I’ve already done a little bit of talking about some of the more unsavory parts of the convention that went down (UnderwearGate 2013 and the Nazi cosplayers), but I wouldn’t want anyone to think that the only things that went on that weekend are unfortunate. Quite the opposite actually! Most of the time the convention was a pleasure, and I want to give a shout-out to all the amazing things I got a chance to participate in this year.

  1. Getting Started In the Industry Panel: I had the opportunity to speak on the Getting Started panel, talking to a full audience about what it’s like getting into freelance work in gaming as well as self-publishing. Brian Liberge, Tracy Barnett, Eloy LeSanta, and Matt Parker were wonderful to speak with and the audience was exceptionally receptive to our information dump. It was a wonder to sit back and be able to tell folks honestly that five years previously, I had been sitting in their seats with the exact same hopes to get into the industry. Now, I have this information I could share with them about how to get going!
  2. Religion in Gaming and Mental Health Panels: I’m lumping these two together because frankly, both of these panels were amazing and went by entirely too fast. The Religion in Gaming panel covered appropriation with Jaym Gates and Lillian Cohen-Moore and we went right after the topics about appropriating icons, legends and practices without context. The Mental Health panel was also way too short, but John Adamus and I really dug into how to work on taking care of one’s self while still working and being part of the gaming world. I felt nervous going into both panels too for different reasons – one is that I always get nervous being a moderator (for religious appropriation) and the other because speaking about dealing with my illness is still hot button for me. Nevertheless, both panels put me in a place to share information I had and discuss topics important to me.
  3. Mental Health And Game Design: This was the panel I was the most concerned about being a part of, and maybe rightly so. There’s still a lot of folks who don’t feel comfortable with hearing people talk earnestly about their mental health and the challenges it presents when you’re trying to be a professional. Still, John Adamus and I did a decent job for a short panel – there could have been a lot more to talk about.

The best parts of GenCon however came from the people I got to spend time with over the weekend. I was able to sit and talk about upcoming projects with a number of folks including Josh Jordan (author of Heroine), Tracy Barnett (author of School Daze), Brian Engard (author of Becoming), and many others. Needless to say its been a joy because I got the opportunity to plan some great work with amazing people AND just spend time with folks I don’t get to see very often. 

Now I’m just recovering from this adventure and getting ready for the next few – PaxPrime, WyrdCon and the return to graduate school. Tune in next time for more!

Can’t Swing A Con Badge Without Hitting A Nazi

by Shoshana, posted in Convention Report, Geek Culture, Speaking Out

21805945Welcome back from GenCon, fellow gamers! To all those who attended as part of the nearly 50,000 gamers who hit the Indianapolis area… are you as tired as I am? Good lord, it was a heck of a convention. I will talk more about it in my next post. First, however, I’m going to riff on a different problem. Let’s talk together, shall we, about Nazis.

Nazis are the bad guys in so many games its hard to make a list. They serve as the ultimate expression of evil given form. Nazis represent the boogeyman of human devastation, of dehumanizing monsters in uniform who have no consideration for their fellow man. They are the perfect example of a person divorced from their empathy for the ‘other’ in the world, willing to destroy lives based on their rhetoric. It’s hard not to see a Nazi in a piece of work and not say ‘that is purely evil.’ That is, in fact, what most game designers count on when they add Nazis into their work. Need a villain that everyone can rally around kicking around? Make it Nazis! Want people to feel comfortable with walloping the crap out of a person in a game with, say, a rocket launcher? Make the villain a Nazi and suddenly people don’t feel anything anymore because, well, it’s the personification of evil. That’s what Nazis have become in games – the shorthand for a villainy so vile there is no explanation needed. It is #evil with a capitol hashtag. And for some people, that’s all Nazis are.

For other people, they are the nightmare of our grandparents’ childhood. They are the stories we heard growing up about relatives we’ll never meet. They’re the reason our relatives never felt safe all the remaining days of their lives, and named their daughters and sons after children that were no longer alive. They were real boogeymen that crawled out of history and into our lives. And to some, they’ve become a media punchline.

I won’t go into how difficult that can be for me. After seeing my third product in the dealer’s hall at GenCon, I may have exclaimed loudly that I could use a moratorium on Nazis for a little while. I could go one year without seeing Nazis used haphazardly in a game. Then I considered that thought and moved beyond it. Nazis being used in games might bother me, but they’re contextualized in those games as the villains they are and ought to be in media. I even saw games that treated the material well, such as Ken Hite’s book Nazi Occult and realized that not all Nazi representations were created equal. The content might be difficult for me but that is me. I can avoid those games, or choose to appreciate them from afar.

Then, I encountered the Nazi cosplayer.

I wish I had a picture of this person, walking down the street past the noodle shop in downtown Indianapolis. I was sitting with a friend, talking about how wonderful the convention had been so far, but not five minutes before I had been discussing how tired I was of seeing Nazi EVERYTHING lately. Then, no sooner had we moved on to another topic but BAM. Here comes a Nazi down the street. I got a good look at the whole outfit and even as I tried to place what he might be cosplaying from (was it a video game? an anime? a film?) my brain came up with the only answer that counted: NOT OKAY.

Context is a very important consideration when looking at difficult content in media. If there is, say, racist content in a piece of media, is it contextualized to represent that racism as acceptable or unacceptable? Is it historically placed? What does the piece of work say about racism through the events going on around it? All of these things provide context. However, cosplay is one of those mediums that offers very little context. Unless someone is crystal clear what that person is costuming as, there is no context between a cosplayer in a Nazi outfit and, say, just someone wearing Nazi regalia and walking through a convention. And left without the context, I couldn’t tell what the hell this cosplayer was intending. Was he intending to just represent the villain of some piece of fiction, or was he glamorizing Nazis through his pristine costuming? I had no idea. All I saw was a Nazi walking down the street past where I was eating and I couldn’t drive that image out of my mind.

Say what you want about freedom of expression. Say what you please about being able to wear what you want. But when you put on a swastika or the whole regalia, death’s head and all, you are taking on the symbology around that and the context that comes with wearing the uniform of one of the most reviled groups in the 20th century. And you carry that around with you into other people’s lives. Is that what you want to bring to a convention of 50,000 people who are there to have fun? Is that what you want people to see?

Now let’s talk about retail. There’s been a lot of talk about what I like to call UnderwearGate 2013. A booth called Belle and Blade (adorable name) put up some underwear that was some of the most ridiculously offensive merch I’ve ever seen at a con. One of the undies actually said “I could use some Sexual Harassment.” Gareth Skarka pointed it out and I got a photo of it out on Twitter, which got folks talking, and there were complaints about it. It’s all chronicled here on Skarka’s blog. But here’s the other part: did you know this booth, which makes its bones selling military movies and gear, also has tons of Nazi stuff?

Previous to seeing what kind of awfulness was available, I went to buy a ‘zombie killer’ patch from this booth for some LARP costuming. It was only after I paid that I turned around in my half-exhausted state and saw boxes with Nazi symbols on it, Nazi signs, and even Nazi pin-up posters on the inside of the booth. That is ALONG with the underwear. So in one shot, Belle and Blade became one of the most egregious examples of what not to represent at a convention by repping sexual harassment AND Nazis in one cash grab.

“But Shoshana,” you might ask, “isn’t it freedom of expression? Isn’t that his right?”

Actually, not entirely. See, the sexual harassment stuff is straight up against the terms of GenCon’s policies on convention harassment and reports were made. But the Nazi paraphernalia is more of a grey area, just like Nazi cosplay. The policies say something about not being able to costume anything that resembles a uniform from the 20th century, but that certainly didn’t stop Nazi cosplayers that I saw. That didn’t stop the stuff from being sold in a booth.

Freedom of expression is the backbone of so many conversations about offensive content. However just as it might be someone’s right to go out and walk the streets of a convention wearing Nazi gear (barring any rules at that event that says you can’t), it’s my right to feel that is unacceptable. It’s my right to question what that person is trying to represent or express. And it’s my right to say that maybe you ought to consider the time and energy you’re putting into so meticulously glamorizing such a symbol of human evil.

 

Note: In my consideration of the situation, I want to make clear that I don’t blame GenCon for the situation. GenCon is a wonderful convention that I enjoy very much and that puts on a hell of a show every year. Take that as a disclaimer.

GenCon 2013 Approaches: Where I Will Be

by Shoshana, posted in Convention Report, Game Design

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That time is almost here: when gaming geeks of all kinds extricate ourselves from the rest of the world and head to Indianapolis for that mecha of nerd fun, GenCon! GenCon stands as my favorite of the big conventions. It is huge, noisy and full of people, all of whom are coming together to bask in the glow of the gaming things we love. If you’ve never been, it’s a jam-packed experience full of panels, demos, games to play, merch to buy, and people to meet. There are parties, awards ceremonies, and after-hours fun to be had too, then you get up in the morning bright and early to do it again!

This will be my fifth year attending GenCon but it is my privilege to be going this year not as an attendee but as a speaker. On top of attending great events like the Diana Jones Awards and the Ennies (go Night’s Black Agent! Win!) I’ll be behind a microphone at the following:

Thursday August 15 @ 2PM – Getting Started In The Industry – Crowne Plaza Ballroom C – Have questions about how to get started in the industry? Want to know how freelancers got their beginnings? What about self-publishing, is that really for you? Come and ask questions and listen to people who have gone through the process answer you back. I’m pleased as hell to be on this panel with the likes of Brian A Liberge (Beer Star Games), Tracy Hurley (Sand and Steam Productions), Eloy Lastana (Third Eye Games), and Matt James (Vorpal Games) and can’t wait to speak to folks about my experiences thus far.

Thursday August 15 @ 4PM – Depression, Anxiety, Treatment and the Gamer – Crown Plaza Victoria Station C/D – John Adamus will be leading more of a conversation about how to be a game developer (or just a gamer) when facing issues of mental illness. It’s my privilege to be involved in this discussion, as this topic is near and dear to my heart and my experience as a designer struggling with bi-polar disorder. This talk is meant to be a supportive environment to discuss how to keep creating and working in the industry while still dealing with the monsters you have to face. Come to share if you feel comfortable, or just listen.

Friday August 16 @ 5PM – Religious Representation In Role-Playing Games – Crown Plaza Victoria Station A/B – Come join me as I sit down with Lillian Cohen-Moore and Jaym Gates to discuss how religions are represented in role-playing games. How are real-world religions such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism treated by mainstream gaming? What are the tropes, trends and territories explored by gaming when it comes to religious characters? And what about the issue of religious appropriation of icons, traditions and mythologies integrated into gaming works? Can it be and has it been done respectfully? We’ll pick apart this difficult question together.

So that’s my schedule! In between I’ll be attending lots of other panels, getting down with the awesome D20 Burlesque crew as they show off their best to the GenCon crowd, and celebrating the awards at the Ennies. I’m also super excited to hear Patrick Rothfuss speak – he is one of my favorite fantasy authors! It’s going to be a busy GenCon. To those who will be attending, I look forward to seeing you there!

Interested in getting together with me at the convention to talk shop? Hit me up @ShoshanaKessock on Twitter and we can see about setting up a time.

Hell’s Bells and Character Sheets: Running Dresden Files The LARP

by Shoshana, posted in Convention Report

It is no secret that I am a huge Dresden Files nerd. If you haven’t read the amazing book series by Jim Butcher, you are missing out on some of the best urban fantasy around. If you watched the TV show, you’re nearly there – now go to Kindle or the library or your local bookseller and make your eyeballs do the walking across those amazing pages. Ahem. So, as I said, huge Dresden nerd. (I even cosplayed as a female Harry Dresden at last year’s NYCC – no joke).

So when I thought a few years back about what LARP I would love to run, the Dresden Files came to mind. I was a huge fan of the tabletop RPG created by Evil Hat Productions and once i got my hands on the book, we were off to the races. Now, two and a half years later and three versions of the rules (at least!) gone by, my team and I run The Unofficial Dresden Files LARP out of the Double Exposure conventions in Morristown, New Jersey. Over the July 4th weekend, my team and I ran our fourth Dresden Files game to the tune of forty-five people. The game, entitled “Final Frost” was the culmination of our very first chronicle. And it has been a wild ride. Here’s how it all went down.

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The cast of the Unofficial Dresden Files game “Final Frost”

The Unofficial Dresden Files LARP

Design Team: Shoshana Kessock, John Adamus, Josh Harrison, Kat Schoynheder

Production Assistants: Justin Reyes, Abigail Corfman, Andrea Vasilescu

Location: Double Exposure Conventions (New Jersey, USA)

How This Happened: As I said before, I’m a huge Dresden Files fan. After running a few tabletop sessions of the Evil Hat tabletop RPG, I came upon the idea that Dresden Files would make a great LARP. Why? It has all the factors that make supernatural theater LARP great – a multitude of different supernatural creatures, a decent balance between human characters and the things that go bump in the night, and a world that ties everything together so perfectly. The fact that the world has such a fan following and such a strong intellectual property made it a perfect level of buy-in for players. Moreover, I felt that Dresden was a supernatural world with all the moral ambiguity and personal choice play that people could get with World of Darkness games without a lot of the darker, sometimes depressing overtones that WoD games can bring. Dresden is a rollicking adventure world where people take their adventure in their hands and go for broke, and that’s the kind of games I love. So I got together a team and we began planning. Now, two and half years later, most of the original team have gone on to other projects but the passionate players of this convention game experience have stayed. The result is a growing player base who have come back four times in a row to see what we can offer.

The Premise: The world of the Dresden Files is a supernatural playground of wizards, vampires, were-creatures, fae and their changeling children, and every flavor of supernatural whozamawhutzits that might come in between. These characters try to coexist in a world that, for the most part, doesn’t know they’re around. Dark powers wriggle around in the background of course and those ‘in the know’ try to figure out how to stay afloat in a constantly shifting supernatural world. The main themes of the game are personal choice between power and humanity and we tried to keep very close to those themes when designing our very first chronicle. We began with “Trouble Signs” in which a powerful CEO tried to jumpstart his career in the supernatural world by signing onto what are known as the Unseelie Accords. His idea? Host a massive auction where he would sell off some of his prized magical items for support. Of course nothing goes correctly and he causes everyone to get in dutch with the Queen of the Winter Fae, Mab herself. By the time game four rolled around, the characters had to travel into the very heart of Winter to the stronghold of Arctus Tor to ask Queen Mab not to explode a huge section of New York City with Mordite. In between there were Denarians, dominance battles by werewolves, possessions and corrupt cops, reconstituted faerie courts and wizards risen from the dead.

Yeah, it kind of went like that.

The Preparation: This chronicle, as I mentioned, has been two and half years of work in the making. From concept to final execution it has had literally hundreds of hours of work by multiple people. For the sake of brevity, however, I’ll focus on the prep for Final Frost, our most recent game.

The player briefing before game.
The player briefing before game.

Final Frost was perhaps easier than the previous games in that we had been through the process several times before. In between games two and three we had junked our entire rules system for a brand new adaptation of the brilliant tabletop Fate Core system (also by Evil Hat Productions). Fate is the engine that drives the Dresden Files RPG and the newest version gave us a lot of the agile storytelling options that we wanted to focus on for the LARP. I was lucky enough to team up with John Adamus, who worked as editor on Fate Core, and we schemed ways to adapt Fate Core into a system for the LARP. The results from John was a brilliant adaptation of the Fate numbers system for a card-pull based mechanic that kept the core of Fate games – the Aspect system- intact. The Stunts and Powers for each player were individually crafted to suit the player character’s needs and skills were stripped wholesale from the tabletop in a simple adaptation. The mechanics were tailored to make the resolution systems more narrative focused and quick, as our intent was to foster games where player agency was key. The Dresdenverse is driven by characters that take chances, do amazing things and step out on the edge and that’s what we wanted to support in our players.

Power versus humanity - bargains being made.
Power versus humanity – bargains being made.

For the actual game session we relied on very bare-bones theater-style setting with rooms set up with sparse lighting. We relied heavily on narrators setting the scene and describing what was seen since, to be frank, we didn’t have the budget to build a giant ice castle. Relying on the players imagination and the judicious application of props, we lead players through everything from a Queens warehouse under siege by Black Court vampires, darkened roads through the Nevernever, and the heart of Queen Mab’s territory itself. We relied heavily on small props as well, cleaning out local stores for props that could represent magic and transformations in game. For example: were-forms were a big part of our campaign. Yet transformations into werewolves always bugged me in games. So to indicate transformation we handed out little plastic face masks that went over the nose and mouth. Whenever a were-form would transform, they would pop on the nose and presto, insta-werewolf!

The characters for the campaign had always been pre-generated since the beginning of the chronicle. Players however began to get so attached to their characters that they would register with us before the convention in the hopes of reprising their previous characters, so much so that we had almost a 75% retention rate for players coming back by game four. Each player was provided with a character sheet with stats and a full backstory. Though these backstories originally topped out at over a page long, by game four the necessity for that much information had decreased since players knew their characters well and we managed to get down to one paragraph. That dramatically shortened the workload for me considering I was writing most of those backstories (that’s a lot of typing). And that was predominantly the workload for this game – story ideation, character management, system building and iteration, and sheet generation. Paperwork. Lots of paperwork.

A wizard back from the dead.
A wizard back from the dead.

The Game: When Final Frost started, the players were headed into the Nevernever to confront Queen Mab over what might become the destruction of everything on Earth. They had opened up a trapped box that held Mordite, an anti-magical substance that would have exploded and eradicated most of New York. The reason for Mab’s ire? The players had managed to help reconstitute the Autumn and Spring courts of the fae, causing upheaval in the fae realms. To that end, she started a near war in New York and the players were out to stop it. The game before had seen some players escape into the Nevernever to find Mab while the others stayed behind to guard the Mordite trap from being stolen by the Black Court vampires. They too however escaped into the Nevernever by wrenching open a gateway using the power of some faeries and the sacrifice of two were-forms (they lived but lost their ability to shapeshift). Once inside the magical Nevernever they were reunited with their friends and headed for Artcus Tor. There they fought Mab’s guards until she stopped the battle and issued a challenge – break the Autumn and Spring Courts and she would stop the box. Pretty straight forward? It’s never that easy! The players were forced to track down the sword of Spring and bargain for the lost magic of a wizard (a player character) to be able to take on the power of the Spring Queen, whose life Mab demanded be forfeit.

Its funny as a storyteller when you set out events before players what happens. The end results might be the same but nobody ever gets there the way that you expect. I had the honor of playing both Queen Mab and the Mother of the Winter Court, Mother Winter, and throughout the night it was fae bargains left and right. Souls were sold, deals were brokered and power changed hands. In the end, however, the Spring Queen was eradicated and the power of the courts broken when the players were given some insight into what would happen if they didn’t do what Mab said. The Mordite box was removed and plenty of people ended up owing Mab their lives when the destruction of the Spring Queen nearly killed everyone involved. For the most part, however, the players returned from the Nevernever in one piece – all except for a lone wizard who had stayed alive long enough to do his job. Then he was taken away by Mab, after sharing a last meal of burgers and fries with his apprentice and their fellow wizards.

The part of this game that was so satisfying was watching the character arcs for so many players come to a (temporary) close after “Final Frost.” It would be impossible to talk about all the great events that went on for the characters but I’ll give some highlights of my favorite story lines:

  • Changelings hiding from the madness outside.
    Changelings hiding from the madness outside.

    A rookie New York City discovers he has a magical past that goes back further than he knows. He gains tremendous power, transferred to him by his dying relative, whose violent murder at the hands of a Denarian sends the cop on a mission of vengeance. In the end he found new wizards to learn from, others who share his vengeance, and maybe a girlfriend?

  • A young woman tries to escape from her bargain with Queen Mab and talks her way into becoming the Queen of Autumn. Yet everything comes with a price and while she’s trying to understand what being a fae Queen is all about, she has to try and save her people from Mab’s wrath. In the end she sacrifices her new power to end the Spring Queen’s life before she can cause calamity.
  • A charismatic White Court Vampire tries to lead his family through the turbulent times in New York and ends up making deals that drive him in the middle of a war with the fae. When he’s trapped in a warehouse, trying to find a way to rescue himself and his cousin from destruction, he is killed fighting when thrown into the Mordite trap.
  • A wizard of the White Council comes up from New Orleans to track down the Denarian that murdered his mentor. Upon arrival he’s pushed into the middle of a war, ends up with an apprentice after watching a Warden killed in front of him, and sacrifices his own magic. By the end however he was returned to his power and even found himself the oddest of ladies to fall for, all before watching the Warden rise from the dead to help battle Mab’s trials.
  • A young werewolf tries to keep his pack together after most of them were slaughtered, including his father, by Red Court vampires. Along with his sister, they long to find protection from anyone who would hurt them. Too bad it was his actions that caused the Red Court to come after his family in the first place- and all over the love of a blood-addicted girl! Reunited with the girl, he ends up forsaking his pack and following her into the Nevernever to end up a servant of the fae Queen of Autumn who rescued her, sworn together as true lovers and leaving his de-powered were-form sister behind.

The list of stories go on and on. And they’re not done yet! This chronicle may be over, but the game will continue. After the success of the last few games, the team decided that we wanted to continue running the game…. with a few changes.

Change Is Coming: There were some things we wanted to change from the original chronicle in response to player feedback and our own experiences running the game. First of all, we wanted to hand over control of characters to the players. Convention games often breed pregenerated characters, but that requires a lot of work on the staff’s part and also is a hell of a pre-game casting process. Moreover, we felt that to create a personal experience for players, we wanted them to be able to have their own characters that could travel with them from game to game. New players would be able to create their own characters as well going forward. Those who played the game in the past would be able to continue playing the characters from the first chronicle – with a few adjustments.

Players learning the new mass combat rules.
Players learning the new mass combat rules.

As said before, the game was kind of high powered. We had faerie queens. We had Denarians. We had dragons for goodness sake. The game, much like the tabletop, is meant to focus on a lower power scale so as to emphasize the notion of power versus humanity, a staple of the Dresden Files books. This chronicle stepped up that power level to make the events of the game earth shaking. After all that, we decided that we wanted to take the game back down to street level, where players would be dealing with less world-changing problems and instead focus more on manageable power scales. This answered feedback from some of our players who felt that their characters were just not scaled to fit some of the threats showing up in the game.

That said, we also took a look at some of our mechanics that were and were not working. We’ve taken the feedback given to us and gone after our stress system (which is the damage system for Fate) and how it adapts in a faster-paced LARP session. Mass combat was also tested and, for the most part, held up – yet there were a few considerations that needed looking at that we’re taking back to the drawing board. In the end, the stress test of high powered combat worked to give us the data we needed to work on polishing up the system.

A Special Shout-Out: We also had a wonderful experience hosting a LARP guest at the game. RPG editor Amanda Valentine, who worked on the Dresden Files tabletop as well as a host of other games for companies like Evil Hat and Margaret Weiss Productions, came by to watch the game. Specifically she came because her daughter, Mary Rose, wanted to see the game in action. Instead of watching, Mary Rose got to join us by playing the guest star for the evening, the twelve-year-old Archive Ivy. The Archive is a favorite character of mine from the Dresden books and it was a pleasure hosting Mary Rose to play the character. It was her first time LARPing and she took to the whole thing like a champ, which made her a lot of fans among the players. We hope to have her back sometime soon!

The Final Analysis: In the end, the final analysis of the first chronicle of the Unofficial Dresden Files LARP is that its a labor of love for us. I’ve had such a great time working with John, Josh, Kat and everyone else to get this game off the ground. Now that we’ve come this far, there’s no chance we’re going to stop now and with the amazing support of the Double Exposure convention organizers, we’ll be back at Dreamation 2013 with the beginning of the next chronicle. In between now and then, we’ll also be taking our show on the road to present a game at WyrdCon 2013 in California, where the special guest for the weekend at the convention is going to be none other than Dresden Files author Jim Butcher himself. Between now and then we have a lot to do but it’s been a pleasure working on this project so far.

So tune in next time, Dresden Files fans, because we’re just getting started.

So Say We All: DexCon 2013 Gets Some BSG

by Shoshana, posted in Convention Report, Game Design

This is the first of a few articles writing up my experiences regarding running games at this year’s DexCon 2013. The reason this one convention is broken down into several articles? My team ran three LARPs this year. That’s right, we took on the monumental task of working on three games at once over the last few months and presented those games within a single twenty-four hour period. It was an exhausting, exhilarating experience and I’m going to break it down from my perspective in my post-convention recovery period. (And there is a recovery – I am one exhausted game designer).

Please note: this post is meant to be as extensive a documentation of the game from a design perspective as I can get. When possible, pictures and other evidence of design are included. All photos unless otherwise indicated were taken by Matt Yanega or me, Shoshana Kessock.

bgl2013

Game Name: Battlestar Galactica – Tales of the Rising Star (Game 1 – “Straight On Til Morning”)

Created By: Phoenix Outlaw and Last Minute Productions

Design Team: Shoshana Kessock, Michael Maleki, John Adamus, Josh Harrison, Kat Schoynheder, and Ericka Skirpan

Technical Production Crew: Matt Yanega, Joe Auriemma, Abigail Corfman, Justin Reyes, Ashley Teel

Location: A Double Exposure DexCon 2013 Signature Event (Hyatt Morristown, New Jersey)

How This Happened: Both myself and my team, Phoenix Outlaw Productions, have been running games at the Double Exposure conventions for several years now. After Dreamation in February of this year, I had a conversation with Michael Maleki, who heads up Last Minute Productions. He and I talked about the idea of a Battlestar Galactica game on Friday night of the convention. Apparently on Saturday he mentioned it to Vincent Salzillo, the head of the convention, and Vinny approached me the very same day. He said that he would like to see Battlestar Galactica made into a signature event at DexCon. That meant that we would be producing bigger than we normally did in parlor/theater style games. We’d have to pull out all the stops. I agreed and Mike and I brought our teams together to produce “Straight On Til Morning.”

The Premise: Tales of the Rising Star was an ambitious idea inspired by the amazing work done by the Monitor Celestra team overseas and fantastic full-immersion games like PST Productions Terrorwerks. The notion was trying to design a convention game inside the confines of a ballroom setting that would harken to the Celestra’s immersive atmosphere through prop-building and a focus on more freeform roleplaying styles. Players would get the chance to play one of five groups of characters aboard the Rising Star, a medical ship in the Colonial Fleet, as it escapes from the devastating nuclear attack on the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. Officers, Marines, Engineers, Medical Officers, Scientists and Civilians would work together to keep the ship from being destroyed as they dodged Cylon ships, tricky jumps, and of course internal pressure as they try to decide if they’ll join the ragtag fleet of Commander Adama or go their own way.

The Preparation: The game preparation began months before DexCon between myself and the team. We realized that this was a game on a scope that was new to almost all of us: a seventy person game with more prop building and system development than we had handled before. Most of us were used to dealing with games that either a) had lower physical build, b) less players or c) an already established game system. As it was, we were creating a great deal of set design for the game for a max of 75 players and were building an entirely new system to boot. So we broke down the portions of the design, split the work load, and rolled into production.

IMG_1121Build-wise, Mike and his team spent 20+ hour weeks building a nice sized engine prop with working lights and switches for the Engineers, painted nerf guns for use and designed simple mechanisms like cat litter buckets to hide items in. At the same time he coordinated with Abigail Corfman, our computer technical director, who created an interactive DRADIS system to detect Cylons, as well as a system to show characters how much fuel, oxygen and power the ship had. This system was controlled by Abigail herself during the game, hidden behind a screen where she could directly respond to things like jump coordinates that were input into the system.

On the game mechanics side, John Adamus worked with Mike Maleki and Josh Harrison to create the actual system. It drew upon the idea that we wanted the game to be very role-play heavy versus skill-check focused. To that end, all players had three stats to differentiate their strengths and weaknesses from one another. They also had two professions that gave them special abilities they could call upon during game. All challenges were time based. A character would need to stay and repair or heal or calculate for a certain amount of time to accomplish their task, where abilities could cut down on time to use their skills. The currency of the game was Mental Energy (ME) that was expended to do tasks. Items in game, such as drinks or food could bring back Mental Energy. So could spending time with Civilians, which kept them integral to more technical characters. That, then, was pretty much it – the system was meant to support a simple ‘yes, and-‘ improvisational role-play model that encouraged players to support and carry along the story with their actions. This system development was extensive, going through nine drafts before it was codified.

Storyteller Ericka Skirpan in character as a pregnant Minister of Health.
Storyteller Ericka Skirpan in character as the pregnant Minister of Health and rival for Laura Roslin’s presidency.

Then came the characters. We were creating pre-generated characters for all the players, which meant that there had to be 75 individual characters created and available to players. In the past, I had focused on writing extensive backstories for players that interwove them not only into the plot but into each other’s backstories. However with a group this large, that amount of writing for one person would be prohibitive. Instead, we chose to focus on creating short but concise backstories that included: a) a few lines regarding the characters backstory, b) personality traits and c) how they reached the Rising Star in the wake of the Cylon attack. Then we looked at the colonies themselves as inspiration for ways to give roleplaying hints to players. Each character was told their colony and given some suggestions as to the stereotypes for that colony. Additionally we integrated a mechanic I heard about from the Monitor Celestra team, which were roleplaying suggestions at the bottom of a character sheet. For example, a Raptor pilot who had lost his whole family on Picon might be ‘a burnt out stim jockey looking for his next score’, or else ‘a haunted survivor intent to help out his fellow crew’. We provided three options and let players take inspirations from these ‘might be’ hints, giving them the agency to select their own character motivations and goals.

The characters were also split up between their profession groups – Civilian, Officers, Marines, Engineers, Scientists, Medical- and each section was assigned to a storyteller. That storyteller was responsible for not only writing the characters but organizing their backstory ties to other characters, as well as taking charge of the plot lines that would be seeded into each of the groups. Puzzles, challenges and plot goals were designed by each of these storytellers.

So we went. And we wrote. And we built. And printed sheets again and again. And finally we came to game.

The Game: Right off the bat there were challenges. First, massive printer snafus caused paperwork mayhem at game check-in. Characters that were assigned were not where they were supposed to be. Then came the build. It began at noon with the build team going straight on until right before game on at 6PM. At six, we gathered the players outside in the hallway in their self-selected profession group and gave them a chance to look over their sheets. Then at 6:30 came the system briefing. Just before 7PM we went in character and so it all began.

The Civilian survivors debate the future of the Colonial government.
The Civilians debate the future of the Colonial government.

Players dove in to their characters with gusto. Engineers raced around the ship to keep the Rising Star flying against missile attacks, shrapnel issues, and various failures and shortages. The bridge crew stayed at their stations and monitored situations thrown at them by Abigail, as well as monitoring communications with other ships (including guest communications from ships left behind by the Galactica due to no FTL and a discussion over the comms with Colonial One towards the end). The Marines secured the halls and lead sortees into space depots where they encountered toasters (of course) that shot them all to hell. The Civilians politicked in the bar while dealing with a mysterious illness that the Scientists and Medics had to try and counteract, or else see the entire ship wiped out by illness.

Meanwhile, storytellers and out of character techs for the game moved around the space wearing white masks. Players were instructed that if they saw anyone in a white mask, they were invisible… Until they touched a player on the shoulder. At that point the player would be able to see and hear everything they said. This was inspired of course by the Cylon projections in the series, specifically the proclivity of the Six Cylon to touch Baltar on the shoulder. This technique for play was inspired (nay, nearly lifted directly) from one used in the Monitor Celestra game in which staff wearing red would do exactly the same thing. Cylon projections spent their time poking at the buttons built into the characters and helping provoke, terrify and inspire them.

It would be impossible to tell all the stories from that five hour game, but some highlights included:

  • A Virgon reporter getting her foot shot off for trying to make a run past the Marines to confront the Captain.
  • A lost Viper pilot lands aboard the ship and finds himself unsure if he’s hallucinating or receiving visions.
  • An opportunistic Engineer decides to frak stealing supplies and instead saves his commanding officer, throwing him over his shoulder as he escaped a Cylon attack aboard a supply depot.
  • A Priest of the Lords of Kobol begins receiving visitations from an apparition that promises to lead him to the One True God, and throws him into a crisis of faith under a hail of nuclear missiles.
  • A lone engineer braves a decompressing airlock to help repair the ship, only to be accidentally vented into space when her crew vents a discovered Cylon device without checking if the airlock is empty first. Her inconsolable brother tries to get the captain to send a Raptor out to get her body, but is refused. Despondent over the loss, he chooses to commit suicide out of the very same airlock.
  • The civilians decide that they do not accept Roslin’s ascension to the Presidency and decide to challenge it based on their own delegates aboard. The discussion of whether they were committing a military coup against Roslin was put on hold as a base star appeared and they joined to Ragnar Anchorage to join the fleet, and potentially a very tense political situation.

As can be seen by anyone who watched BSG, the events in the game were following the miniseries plot but did not necessarily follow the canon exactly. The Rising Star is a canon ship that is mentioned in the series several times, but events aboard the ship in our game are now in the hands of the players. The game ended with the ship joining the fleet at Ragnar (or at least executing the jump to get there!) but from there, who knows what will happen?

The Wins: The success of this game truly came down to the fluid storytelling style we designed for the game. The team created instances we would put into play around a looser framework of events we would throw at the players. However, for the most part the events were being written by the players themselves. The events in game are completely created by the players and whatever happens from here will be set by the characters in game. (And yes, that means that a sequel game is already in the works for next year). I would also say that the game could not have succeeded had the players not embraced the notion of cooperating to create the best story. To use a Nordic term, these players truly embraced playing to lose often. Who could have imagined a player choosing to throw himself out the airlock in despondency over his sister? That moment set the tone for the story for the evening and drove home the sadness of Battlestar so hard, all because a player chose to let himself (and his character) go.

The Not-So-Wins: Every game has its issues and this one did as well. One thing we discovered was the difficulty of integrating the profession groups together within the game play. The military, of course, was interested in locking down their ship and keeping the non-military characters isolated. That lead to a number of characters trapped inside either the ward room (which became the bar very quickly) and the medical bay. While some players were able to talk their way out into the rest of the ship, that left a number of people left inside one room or another for a large part of the game. It took a more active player to get themselves out into the rest of the plot, and some frustration was felt by players who didn’t know what was going on because of their isolation. This came down to a mix of the profession set up and the proficiency of the military characters at locking down the ship, but it was definitely something the team looked at for the future.

Then there were the technical issues. We had aimed large for the game and had lots of issues with our build, from lights that didn’t always work correctly, expensive lighting bulbs that broke in transit, speakers that shorted out the day before the game, and walkie-talkies for an intercom system that were unusable days before. We won’t even get into the printing and paperwork problems brought on by a complete failure of Staples to print things correctly. All were logistical issues behind the scenes that gave us roadblocks. In the end, myself and Mike Maleki as team heads agreed that we would have to scale back from what we originally intended based upon one simple problem: economic constraints.

The Final Analysis: The game seems to have been a glorious success. Players overall responded positively both in person and online on the Facebook group. The feedback we received as well from the convention organizers said that they would like to have us back for next year, and we’ve already agreed that we’ll probably continue the story of the Rising Star. We have some technical and storytelling lessons we’ve learned, but now we have one year to grow our design.

For now, however, we get to sit back with a glass raised to a great bunch of frakin’ players, the games that inspired us before (all hail the Monitor Celestra and her amazing team!), the convention that hosted us, and the people that came together to make this happen. So Say We All!

Players of 'Tales of the Rising Star' - DexCon 2013
Players of ‘Tales of the Rising Star’ – DexCon 2013

My Thesis Given Form: Graduate School Thesis Preparation

by Shoshana, posted in Convention Report, LARP Discussion and Theory

When I was accepted into NYU’s first MFA class for Game Design, I knew I was going to want to do my graduate thesis on LARP. Despite the possibility of doing anything else related to games, I was sure that live action role-playing games were going to remain my focus throughout the program. That obviously hasn’t changed. I’m still a die-hard LARP enthusiast and I believe that there is so much to be talked about and written about and explored when it comes to the game medium. Recently, I was asked to put together my thesis proposal in preparation for my second year at the Game Center. Now that it has been accepted, I’m very pleased to introduce my thesis project to you.

My project is tentatively called Living Games, and I will be organizing and running a LARP conference at NYU in 2014.

Sounds ambitious? It is. The conference will (potentially) bring together LARP designers, enthusiasts, academics and professionals from across the world to spend two days talking about live action games. The conference is meant to bring together people from all forms of LARP, from theater/parlor games to boffer and Nordic and freeform traditions as well. Attendees will get to listen to lectures, sit in on discussion breakout groups, challenge themselves in a LARP game jam and then participate in games featured by attending designers.

Additionally, LARP scholars will be able to submit papers to a journal that will be curated alongside the conference by yours truly. A call for papers will be put out at the beginning of the fall semester with a physical journal to be released along with the conference, tentatively to be scheduled for April or May.

Like I said, ambitious.

Folks have asked me why I wanted to make this my project. I could have done anything. I was first of a mind to write a book on LARP, inspired by great writers like Jaakos Stenros, Markos Montola, Sarah Lynne Bowman, Evan Torner and Lizzie Stark. I could also have run a LARP or a set of LARPs and then reported on my work with documentation and perhaps an academic analysis of my work. Yet the fact of the matter is, I do plan on writing a book about LARP but I think the project would be much longer than a graduate thesis. And I run LARPs already on a regular basis, as well as work on writing experimental ones in my spare time. So that would not be a new experience for me. Moreover, while those are worthwhile, they don’t fill my one burning interest right now.

I really want to bring together folks who love LARP as much as I do to talk about why LARP matters.

LARP as a game design form gets a bad wrap. It has a public relations problem, it has an inter-geek community relations problem, and it has an inter-tradition problem between different branches of the hobby. It doesn’t have a ton of bodies of work to pull on for those inside and outside the community, and it often gets folded into other forms of roleplaying games when the design challenges and opportunities in LARP are often unique to the medium. Still, LARP stands as a performative games medium that can not only be a force for artistic expression all its own, but can serve to teach and inspire other forms of game design and collective storytelling… if its merits can be heard.

Moreover, if there were more places within the community to discuss and share ideas, the form could grow and evolve even further than it already has. There are great places already doing this around the world, like Knutepunkt, Intercon, Wyrdcon, Fastival, the Double Exposure conventions and more. Hell, I’m sure there’s plenty I’m not even aware of out there (but I’m dedicated to finding out about). Now, I’d like there to be one in New York, under the auspices of a great university like NYU with a history of supporting innovative artistic endeavors.

So that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. In the coming months you’ll hear more about the project as it evolves. There will be a lot of learning curve for me – fact is, I’ve never run a conference before. There’s plenty to consider and not as much time as I’d like to do it in, but I’m going to get there. I’ll be reaching out into the community to find people who want to attend and especially people who might be able to help. There’s got to be other people out there like me, who’d love to see another meeting place for LARP minds springing up on the East Coast, and I’m going to do my best to find those folks and get us together to make it happen. The details? Well, the devil’s in ’em and I’m going to wrestle with that as we go along.

For now, this is the course I’m on. Let’s get it started.