Bluestocking's Organic Gaming

As I sat on a roundtable talking about removing toxicity in gaming, a lot of the topic kept swinging back to men in the community. Specifically, straight white men. I'm the first in line to do a call in with a toxic dude or a dude exhibiting toxic behaviour. I'm also regularly concerned when I'm at a table with all dudes, or when I'm at a con with mostly dudes, or when I'm in a space with only dudes. Whether these men have done anything to me or not doesn't matter, it's the memories I have of other men who have. Whether it's the threats I've received, the doxxing, the harassing, the stalking, or the straight up sexual harassment, I've received enough problems from men in the community that I don't need more. I don't need to blog and podcast about problems in the community that often are committed by men. But I do it in hopes that our communities will get better and do better and ultimately be better. It opens the door to a lot of issu...

Decompressing after a convention can be hella hard. We're combating con drop and con crud and just that overall sense of "fuck that was good" or "shit that was horrible" and unpacking everything around it. We've ben surrounded by our people for several days, had some intense experiences, and then had to return to the mundanity of our joe jobs. Gaming conventions are a weird space of dreams and fears all rolled in to one. If it's a good con, you'll have a good experience and the safe space you're in won't be invaded. But what happens when that safe space is invaded? What do you do when you're sitting at a convention shaking after a man got aggressive with you and is now doing everything in his power to ruin your reputation? What do you do when the con you've loved and support for over a decade has a token woman on panels and when that's called out, stays silent as you take the blame even though you had nothing to do with it? Wh...

I spent a lot of time at Gen Con going to panels about inclusivity and making our community better. I learned a lot. I listened. I asked questions when things got derailed in an attempt to bring them back on focus. I asked questions with stuff I was struggling with personally. If there's one message I took away from the con, after playing Psi-Run and the Watch and Love in the Time of Seid I came to some interesting conclusions about my gaming experiences. At first I thought my conclusion was that men can't share a table very well. Even when we were playing games about women's experiences, or men were playing women, they still dominated the table and the women had less speaking space over all. It annoyed me, even though I loved the people I was playing with. They are good friends. I didn't really play with strangers during Gen Con, but I did notice the way gender dynamics played into how much each person spoke at the table. As I sat, listening to an amazingly diver...