GenCon & Gaming's Race Problem

Image courtesy GenCon LLC

GenCon 2014 officially starts today. It's a four day convention that draws over 40,000 attendees to a celebration of gaming, from tabletop games, miniatures, war gaming, board games, collectible card gaming and the like. This year will be its 47th year of operation, making GenCon the longest running convention of its kind (Friend of the blog, Drew of Drew's Robots will be there showing off his walker robot throughout the convention, btw).

However, for all of its long and storied history, there is little doubt that its demographic makeup hasn't changed as drastically as it could have. As A.A. George writes, in "Gaming’s Race Problem: GenCon and Beyond" for Tor.com:

As a lifelong gamer, I am excited to go to GenCon. 

As an ethnic minority, I am apprehensive about going to GenCon. 

For all that GenCon offers, it lacks in minority gamers. Last year was my first GenCon, and as I explored the convention, I saw almost no one who looked like me. By far, the most visible minorities at GenCon were the hired convention hall facilities staff who were setting up, serving, and cleaning up garbage for the predominantly white convention-goers... 

... GenCon is emblematic of this problem. Of the twenty-seven Guests of Honor (in various categories), only two are people of color. The judges of the prestigious ENnie Awards for role-playing, hosted at GenCon, have been almost exclusively white since its inception. The same is true for the nominees and winners of the Diana Jones Awards. There may be more efforts to include people of color in gaming artwork, but where are the real life people of color on the grand stage of gaming? 

Furthermore, GenCon is disturbingly tolerant of deeply offensive material. Shoshana Kessock wrote about her experiences with Nazi cosplay and paraphernalia at Gencon shortly after returning from GenCon 2013, and I had similar encounters... GenCon has weakly worded policies to prevent these horrific violations, but it has failed to enforce its own rules.

There are lots of well-meaning gamers that say that race isn't a factor in what they choose to play or who they choose to play with. I've even heard a number of gamers insights that they don't even see color, just a gamer. A.A. George responds:

I’ve been told time and again by gamers, “I don’t see race” as if they were doing me a kindness. This is not enlightenment or progressiveness. It is ignorance. If you do not see race, you do not see me. You do not see my identity, my ethnicity, my history, my people. What you are telling me, when you say “I do not see race,” is that you see everything as the normal default of society: white. In the absence of race and ethnicity, it is only the majority that remains. I am erased.

He does have suggestions, however, on what allies, advocates and those that want to make gaming an open, inclusive and more accepting and diverse:

• Listen. The Gaming as Other series is a great place to start. There are a handful of panels at Cons on the topic and I’ll be sitting on two of them at GenCon: “Why is Inclusivity Such a Scary Word?” and “Gaming As Other.” 
• Keep engaging, listening and supporting. We notice your support and it gives us the strength to keep going. 
• Hire more people of color and give them agency, visibility, power, responsibility, and credit in a wide variety of meaningful and important areas in your organization. Do not simply hire a token minority. Do not use people of color as a form of marketing. 
• Reach out to minority groups and invite them personally to conventions. Your neighbors, your co-workers, the people at your church, all of them. 
• Offer and play games that are actively and intentionally more inclusive.

These are all excellent starting points. I'd also encourage you to read the entire post of George's, because he addresses how fantasy gaming both helped and hindered acceptance his own identity.

Keep the Game Alive: Preserving Video Games For Art History

Image courtesy of Trevor Owens

Jeremy Parish has a new article up on 2-dimensions about preserving video games for the future, and it's a pretty interesting read.:

The fact that we even need to have a conversation about game preservation is just, like, the most pathetic thing ever. In a good world, it would be a no-brainer proposition. Of course the history of video games, and specifically the games involved, should be enshrined and preserved and presented in a clear and sensible fashion. Of course. And yet, here we are... the concept of video game preservation exists as an almost entirely grassroots movement, often skating at the edge of the law. That sounds so dramatic and important, which is silly; it’s just a matter of keeping old creations from vanishing into obscurity, which is really the furthest thing from going rogue. It shouldn’t have to be like that. And yet, here we are.

Video games and computer games are part of our shared cultural heritage and go back at least 50 years (and some would argue further back than that, depending on how you define "game"). The general public is very interested in early video games- as plenty of exhibitions on video game history, like the Smithsonian's show on the history of video games, and articles like Parish's show.

One problem faced by those looking to preserve classic console and arcade games is that the source code to video games is often proprietary. Other times, the original code has been lost to time, and the specific hardware used may be difficult to use later, as the team behind the Ms. Pac-Man & Galaga 20th Anniversary arcade cabinet found:

Galaga has three Z80 processors where Ms Pac-Man has one, Galaga has 64 sprites where Ms Pac-Man has six, Galaga's stamps are in front of the sprites while Ms Pac-Man's are behind, not to mention the additional complexity of switching between games in the attract mode and selecting which game to play... To make matters worse we would need to make some minor tweaks to the game code to enable the games to live together on the same hardware and Namco was unable to come up with the source code. So, we wound up disassembling and reverse-engineering pretty much all of both games.

As Parish notes, even documenting and compiling examples of game prototypes can be a daunting task :

...the effort, money, networking, and perseverance required to find code for a game that never made it past the unreleased sample stage is extraordinary. And that doesn’t even factor in the constant struggle to gain access to unreleased code that’s fallen into the hands of jealous collectors who are more concerned with being able to lord their possession of something truly unique over the rest of the collecting community than they are with making sure those one-of-a-kind rarities aren’t lost to time, magnetism, or bit rot… and so, here we are.

Hats off to those doing the hard work of curating video games, since as of yet they are not considered by mainstream sources to be an important part of our cultural history that should be carefully preserved like any other medium. However, if video games were ever to become considered culturally significant, or someday viewed in a different light, classic video games, (some of which are facing original & master copy data degradation, laser disc rot, bitrot etc) might meet the same fate as silent-era films that weren’t preserved because they were seen as cheap, disposable entertainment and have been lost to time forever.

D & D & D (Dungeons & Dragons & Diversity)

The newest version of Dungeons and Dragons is finally released this week. Last week, Wizards of the Coast released the Version 5 Basic Rules as a free PDF download.

Among the mechanics changes and rewrites and other things that come with a new release of a tabletop system come another welcome change in both the free and full price version: an explicit welcome of diversity! In the character creation section, the rule-set encourages players:

"Think about how your character does or does not conform to the broader culture's expectations of sex, gender, and sexual behavior... You don’t need to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender. The elf god Corellon Larethian is often seen as androgynous or hermaphroditic, for example, and some elves in the multiverse are made in Corellon’s image. You could also play a female character who presents herself as a man, a man who feels trapped in afemale body, or a bearded female dwarf who hates being mistaken for a male. Likewise, your character's sexual orientation is for you to decide."

Dungeons and Dragons has attracted players from all walks of life for ages, and in a nerd culture that can often feel ignorant of, or even downright hostile to, players from marginalized groups, seeing an unapolgetic and matter-of-fact welcome to this player base in the game instructions itself is awesome. Kudos to WotC!