minorities in fandom

[asterroc]

I sympathize with those of you talking about Racefail and other instances of racial minorities in SF fandom. My own issue along these lines is women/girls in gaming, especially as it has many parallels to women in science.

Waaay back in 2006 I went to PAX (a con for video gamers) (back when it was only in Seattle) and had some quite uncomfortable experiences (REDACTED IDENTIFYING INFORMATION, summaries available to my friendslist here and here) including both blatant sexism from employees/volunteers working the con, and from other women/girls attending. (My point being that sometimes when the atmosphere is the most sexist, women respond by becoming our own worst enemies.) Well I'm going again now that there's another one in my neck of the woods, and Jonathan Coulton is one of the musicians playing and the tickets for the whole thing were the same price as a Coulton concert usually is alone.

In case you are not familiar with it, PAX is a gaming con centered around three or so things: (1) webcomics and specifically the Penny-Arcade webcomic and its creators nicknamed Gabe and Tycho (PAX stands for Penny-Arcade eXpo), and any panels with Tycho and Gabe have a are HUGE audience; (2) the keynote speech is always some hugely famous geek, Wil Wheaton being this year's and a previous one as well; and (3) another major draw is the concerts, one held on Friday night and one on Saturday night, of "nerd-core" and other geek-centric music, this year MC Frontalot is the star of Friday's and JoCo is the star of Saturday's. These three events are majorly important, like (if I'm getting my analogy right) Arisia's Masquerade is majorly important to that con.

When reading through the schedule for PAX East this year, I was happy to see that there's a panel on girls in gaming:

Girls and Games: The Growing Role of Women in the Game Industry
Manticore Theatre
Friday, 8:00pm

According to the ESA, more than 43% of video gamers are female, making women the single largest untapped market segment in the gaming industry. Look at the milestones crossed and the hurdles to come as developers and publishers reach out to this previously overlooked demographic. Are current strategies effective? What does this mean for the game industry as a whole?
Panelists Include: Brittany Vincent [Editor-in-Chief, Spawn Kill], Julie Furman [Founder, SFX360], Jeff Kalles [Penny Arcade], Alexis Hebert [Community Relations Manager, Terminal Reality]

When I first saw this, I was relieved to think that PAX had apparently made some progress from their gaffes of 2006. And then I realized something I'd missed on the previous line.

Friday Night Concerts!
Main Theatre
Friday, 8:30pm

Break out your cell phone and handheld gaming screens to welcome our musical acts to Boston! The Protomen, Anamanaguchi, Metroid Metal, and MC Frontalot will all be rocking for the first night of our Nerdcore Concert Series. The first 4,000 attendees at PAX Friday afternoon will receive wristbands for guaranteed entry, with the remaining seats being distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.

Yes, the Girls and Games panel is running against the Friday night concert, not only guaranteeing it a low turnout and showing that the people who made the schedule don't give a shit that it'll have a low turnout and revealing that they don't give a shit about the plight of women/girls in gaming, but also guaranteeing that anyone who attends the Girls and Games panel is unable to attend the concert and showing that the people who made the schedule don't give a shit that we can't attend the concert and revealing that they don't give a shit about including women/girls in the larger gaming community.

This pisses the hell out of me. Am I overreacting?

Edit: If your response is "yes, you're overreacting" and you're not yourself a member of a minority within a fandom please first (1) try viewing it from my point of view, then (2) if you still think I'm overreacting I'd appreciate it if you explained your viewpoint but be prepared for me to not respond. As usual, my rules for my journal are no bashing or insults or expressions of anger. Any such comments will be frozen at a minimum or potentially deleted.

Comments

[best-ken-ever.livejournal.com]

That is really crappy scheduling. How long are each of the events? How interesting is the beginning of the Friday-night musicthing purport to be? I wonder if a lot of people will show up late to the concert after the panel thing ends. I would, anyway, if I were PAXing.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I think the panel is 30min-1hour, and it starts a half hour before the concert. The problem for me personally isn't missing the start of the concert however, it's getting locked out of the concert entirely. These things fill up, as the event description makes clear, and I won't be able to get to the Friday afternoon PAX opening to get a guaranteed entry wristband (this little thing called "work").

If I've got to miss one of the two concerts, this is the one I'd rather miss, as the main act MC Frontalot I often don't get their references, but I like the sound of their music and the hard rock atmosphere while JoCo (Saturday night) is a more mellow concert from the ones I've been to.

And getting locked out of the concert isn't the problem overall: it's the way they clearly don't give a shit about girls in gaming even while claiming to do so. It'd be like if Arisia had a panel on Racefail (that is, why sci-fi characters are always white) but put it during the Masquerade. It'd be like putting a panel on people with disabilities in the basement without an elevator.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of a now-blessedly-dead Dallas convention a bit over a decade ago that featured Stephen Furst as one of the guests of honor. Mr. Furst had recently been diagnosed with diabetes, and he had ruefully funny stories about his coping with a long hospital stay (including the efforts made to keep him from losing a leg). The convention threw a big benefit party, intended to collect money for a diabetes research charity.

The event was an ice cream social.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Or like holding an NAACP rally in a KKK hall.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

A little more hunting reveals that the Girls and Gaming panel is scheduled for 8:00-9:00 in a room with maximum occupancy of around 900. The concert is scheduled for 8:30pm-1:30pm (so if I traveled w/ other people who went to the concert and I got locked out of it, I'd be screwed for four and a half hours), and the room is not given but the maximum occupancy auditorium at the Hynes Convention Center is listed as just over 3,000. (The exhibition spaces could be more, but they're going to be used for exhibitions.)

So if they're giving out 4,000 bracelets for guaranteed admission, they may not even be able to let in other people after that.

[allandaros.livejournal.com]

I don't think you're overreacting, and that this is very much a ::headdesk:: situation.

That said, I think that this is more likely to be a lack of consideration, rather than a deliberate choice to schedule against the concert. "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity," or however the phrase goes. If this schedule-fail is brought up, I see no reason why they wouldn't take steps to fix it, at least for next year's PAX/PAXEast.

This doesn't rule out the possibility of the decision being malice, whether writ grand ("If we schedule it there, nobody will want to attend, and we'll look like we'll have done something productive w/o doing anything!") or small ("Eh, nobody's gonna go to that anyway.").

I think that the first option is more likely, but still...

Is there anyone listed in PAX contacts who this can be mentioned to?

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I am sorely tempted to email Khoo directly, as I do have his email address. There's no contact info anywhere on the PAX page that I can find.

[best-ken-ever.livejournal.com]

Based on the information you provided above, this sounds like a good idea. You have a history of organizing your thoughts very well in emails. Even not knowing who Khoo is at all, I would guess that what you say wouldn't be taken lightly.

I suspect a lot of people will want to go to this. The question is, how many will be able to go to this and still go to the later part of the concert. Hrrm.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Robert Khoo is THE head honcho of Penny-Arcade, and he's the one who made it into the empire it is now. The story as I know it is that Tycho and Gabe are absolutely clueless when it comes to business. They enjoyed writing and drawing the comic, so when they were starting out and someone offered them a pittance of money for it, they sold the entire thing to them. Then Khoo, who is a business/marketing/accounting whiz and a fan of the strip in its early days, came along out of nowhere and made a pitch to them: he would get back ownership of the comic for them and actually make something of it, and if he succeeded then they would put him in charge and let him name his own salary. Tycho and Gabe didn't even realize they'd sold off the entire rights to the comic, so they said sure, figuring that at the worst Khoo would fail and things would stay the same. Penny-Arcade is now an empire, and it was one of the first webcomics to turn a profit.

A bio of Khoo from his Alma Mater puts it even more glowingly. It's kinda akin to sending an email to Obama because I didn't like something a (Democratic) state senator said. Chances are Khoo will never read the email, but if he does, hoo boy, things will change.

But yeah, I'm definitely thinking about it. If I do I'll probably post a draft here for feedback.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Oh and I don't particularly think there's any malice here, it's just the complete and utter lack of consideration that pisses me off. Like how I had a roommate in college who, every Saturday morning would wake up at 8am, flip on the overhead light, walk out of the bedroom into the common room, turn on the TV to "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" and proceed to laugh loudly for the next hour.

[allandaros.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK. I wasn't sure from your original whether you were falling on the side of malice or lack of consideration; thanks for the clarification. :)

Also now I want to hear a grim and grisly revenge story about what happened to that roommate. (8 AM on Saturday?!)

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Sometimes motivation doesn't matter, just the effect.

She didn't mean harm, so I couldn't see doing something back to her, and she was generally a nice person. And I tried talking to her multiple times, and she always was really apologetic, but she just kept forgetting always (or so she said, sometimes I suspected she just thought I was lazy, despite the fact that I was often up till dawn at the observatory that year). When one of the four suitemates went on a co-op in the spring, I just started sleeping in her space in the other room. My "sleeping roommate" I'd been real roommates with previously, and she was as quiet as a mouse despite routinely getting up at 6am on both weekdays and weekends, and she never woke when I came in at 3am, and I just avoided questions from the original roommate about why I kept sleeping there.

[karenbynight.livejournal.com]

That said, I think that this is more likely to be a lack of consideration, rather than a deliberate choice to schedule against the concert. "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity," or however the phrase goes. If this schedule-fail is brought up, I see no reason why they wouldn't take steps to fix it, at least for next year's PAX/PAXEast.

I think that one of the biggest problems with sexism is that most of it is lack of consideration, carrying on with the habits and attitudes one was taught as a child, doing what's culturally easiest. And most of the individual acts, nobody *meant* any harm. It's somewhat incongruous with the fact that all of those not-so-terribly-bad intentions add up to actually causing a hell of a lot of harm.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this comment. It can be so easy for non-minority members to dismiss sexist (or racist, or heterocentrist, or other -ist) events just because the perpetrator didn't mean it. And it's so easy for us to then get even more angry at the person who dismissed it because they are enabling the -ism even if unintentionally. My thanks are for explaining this to allandaros and anyone else reading this, and also for doing so rather than getting angry about it - I am angry enough about this event, and I really don't like anger, so I appreciate your not expressing any anger you may have immensely.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Wow. Yeah, that's some nice fail right there :\

Overreacting? Well, presumably you've seen how I rant about things; your response seems fairly mild.

I know that scheduling things is a tricky task (I see plenty of "please stop whining at us, we are doing the best we can, but there will inevitably be some bad conflicts" every year around Arisia), but if you REALLY REALLY want to ensure the best possible audience for anything, putting it up against a major event is not a very effective plan. So, hooray for them having a ("a?" as in only 1?!) panel about women in gaming; boo for scheduling it when they did.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

And I was delighted at first to see that there was *a* panel about women in gaming. Because 1 is better than none.

So, if I wrote an email to the guy in charge of all of Penny-Arcade, would that be overreacting? What if I arranged a letter-writing campaign? What if I went to the panel on Girls and Gaming and had a good long rant during the Q&A session?

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

I think writing to Khoo is a reasonable thing to do. Organizing a letter-writing campaign might also be useful; it shows that there are many people concerned. Ranting during Q&A? Might have some useful effect, especially if you are able to rant in the same way you write (which I wouldn't call "ranting"). Yeah, I can see how bringing it up -during- the panel is another way to call attention to the problem, and in the context of a panel about women and gaming, yeah . . . And it could be a good thing to approach it from every angle possible.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I'm going with writing Khoo first (plan is to have my email waiting in his Inbox on Monday morning), and using his response (or lack thereof) to guide further action.

[demigoth.livejournal.com]

At first I was like "MC Frontalot, nice!" Then I read your "Yes, the Girls and Games panel is running against the Friday night concert..."

Wow, yeah, that is pretty crappy of them to schedule it like that.

Hopefully enough of the people who want to attend the panel won't care about the opening bands and will still be able to see a good bit of the concert?

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Hopefully enough of the people who want to attend the panel won't care about the opening bands and will still be able to see a good bit of the concert?

From the description of the concert:

"The first 4,000 attendees at PAX Friday afternoon will receive wristbands for guaranteed entry, with the remaining seats being distributed on a first-come, first-served basis."

Meaning they expect to run out of space. I also mentioned in the discussion above that the largest auditorium space at the Hynes Convention Center is billed at 3,000 people. So yeah, I expect them to run out of space an hour before the show opens.

[demigoth.livejournal.com]

Crap, sorry. I skimmed the other posts but I must not be nearly as good as I used to be. :(

That is REALLY crappy of them.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

So my next question is do I just rant to my support network, send an email/snailmail to the highest ranking member of Penny Arcade (Khoo himself), organize a letter-writing campaign to Khoo, attend the panel and make a stink, or some combination of the above? I'm going to sit on it until the weekend, but feedback is also appreciated.

Any chance you're going to PAX? It'd be interesting to meet you in person.

[demigoth.livejournal.com]

Nope, I'm not going. :( I'm not much of a traveler (I loathe airports/airplanes) but the boyfriend is pretty into Penny Arcade and such (introduced me to it iirc), so I may yet be convinced one day.

Hrm, if it were me, I'd probably email Khoo and ask him for more information about the scheduling decisions (who made/finalized them, what processes they used in general) and also politely point out what you noticed about the scheduling clash and why you think it's Not Good. Depending on the answer, I might then organize a letter-writing campaign if there is enough interest.

I'd also attend the panel and make a snarky comment but I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one. I think you'll be in good company.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that's a good idea (asking Khoo how scheduling decisions are made)! Thanks.

For some reason I thought you lived in the Boston area. My bad! :-P After my experience at the 2006 PAX and some other fallout from that event I decided I wasn't going to travel to PAX again, but since this one's in my backyard I figured it was worth it just to see JoCo (I'm not as into MC Frontalot). If PAX keeps showing me that women aren't welcome though, I may just take the hint.

[demigoth.livejournal.com]

Yeah I'm down near DC and nothing like that ever seems to be held near here. Otakon is usually (always?) in Baltimore which isn't too bad to drive to, but I got tired of going to that a while back.

If they keep that stuff up with the scheduling, I'd also be soured on going.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Well, as you know it's not a scheduling fail that has me peeved, it's the sexism fail. If it keeps repeating (and this isn't the first time I've had problems with PAX and sexism) then yeah, I'd be even more soured on going than I already am becoming. I'm still hopeful I can help effect change however.

[captain-risu.livejournal.com]

aw that's a bummer. it couldn't hurt to see if they can move some scheduling around. i think you do have a point in that a panel like this should have a chance, and it's low when up against the friday night concert *uhg* good luck! i'm sure a lot of lady gamers would appreciate it!

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I don't expect them to be able to move scheduling around at this late a date - it's in a month. If I was asked for one thing to make it up to me, I'd ask that everyone attending the panel be guaranteed admittance to the Friday night concert. I'd hope that not just ladies are attending the Girls and Games panel though, women can't fix this problem by ourselves, it's mostly (though not exclusively) the MEN who are making this problem, and we need their help to fix it.

[captain-risu.livejournal.com]

ah and here i thought it was this weekend! they will probably be moving some things around within the month anyways, so it couldn't hurt to make the suggestion :)

[gemini6ice.livejournal.com]

Good edit :)

I understand that, of course, any panel is going to conflict with something. I also understand your frustration about the conflict, that something important is (very inconsiderately) being given barely a thought.

Aren't most panels in the daytime at cons? What other panels got the shaft in scheduling?

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I was worried my edit might stifle conversation, and especially opposing viewpoints, but I also wanted to make sure that any opposing viewpoints were given diplomatically. I'm slightly surprised that there aren't any truly opposing viewpoints, maybe I was too harsh in my edit.

Of course there's got to be a few things programmed against this big event. However to make one of them a panel designed to help the plight of an underrepresented minority is a big red flag.

This con has panels and other events until 2am. There are no other panels aimed at underrepresented minorities (none for girls/women, none for racial/ethnic minorities, none for people with disabilities). Other panels that are against the Friday night concert are on indie games, about other RPGs, a couple dedicated to specific games or websites, a couple movie screenings, and one on whether losing should ever be a goal in gaming.

[gemini6ice.livejournal.com]

I'll admit I did tiptoe in my response so as not to upset you.

It may be that women being a minority was a practical reason behind the scheduling conflict. When scheduling, it makes practical sense to create conflicts for as few people as possible. From PAX's perspective, would they rather have twenty angry people or three hundred angry people? So I understand their reasoning.

But I also understand the injustice inherent in the majority getting convenience, etc. at the cost of the minority.

I don't think it's a black-and-white situation.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Having been on many panels at conventions opposite (a) opening ceremonies, (b) closing ceremonies, or (c) big events featuring the guest of honor, I don't just agree with you that this was lousy timing. This was deliberately lousy timing.

Well, to be fair, considering the number of incompetents who whine and wheedle their way into convention programming, this may not be absolutely deliberate. The dolt who scheduled this may honestly think that s/he's doing everyone a favor by scheduling "serious" programming for the serious conventioneers opposite an event for the funloving conventioneers. The telling point will be the screams of indignation when the programming chief gets called on it: if the response is some variation of "like it or lump it," it's deliberate. If you get a 20-paragraph response and rebuttal as to how you just don't understand the problems with scheduling a big convention, it's incompetence.

Yeah, I dealt with a lot of convention crews in the past, both as a guest and as an attendee. Does it show?