So SinSynn asked for people from the non-straight-white-guy category to speak up I figured I’d answer the call as I fit in a few of those.
He sent a couple of primer questions:
- How did you get into gaming
My dad is a model train maker, and my brother and I both loved looking at the dioramas at the local hobby shop. Add in getting Heroquest, paints and – most importantly – rulebooks and I’ve been hooked ever since.
- What games do you play, and why?
Not necessarily play, but I’ve collected - 40k, Warhammer Fantasy, Blood Bowl, Space Hulk, Necromunda, Epic, Reaper, Infinity, Lord of the Rings, Reaper, Hasslefree, Red Box, Studio McVey, Heresy, Dark Sword, WarMachine, Kingdom Death, Soda Pop, Statuesque, Antenocitis and more that I’m probably forgetting.
Why? It’s all about aesthetic, never optimising. Games I love to death tend to have stronger narrative focusses or ties, such as Blood Bowl & Necromunda.
- What do you feel needs to change in the hobby to attract a broader spectrum of people?
This is a bit trickier, but I don’t think it’s as simple as simply putting more girls or brown people or whoever on the cover of rulebook X. Part of it comes from the archetyping of factions – you have the generic ‘good guy’ faction, which often has many sub-sets, but each of the other groups is dominated by a singular idea.
Taking 40k as an extreme you have the Imperium made up of space knights, space nuns, tech guys, foot soldiers, fanatics and everything else in-between. Even on a closer view the Marines have huge variance of theme, as do the Imperial Guard (paratroopers, conscript hordes, elite spec-forces etc). One thing in common – 99% of the time they’re portrayed as white guys. The ‘girl’ group comes in different coloured dresses, but is stuck as a single archetype.
Looking at fantasy in general, it is a pretty common thing that you have a huge variety of western European archetypes mixed up, and then one group who is (pick one): a mish-mash of Middle Eastern / North African tropes, a mix of Chinese and Japanese concepts (“Asian” – completely forgetting the rest of the Pac-rim), or maybe stereotypical Native American.
This is an obvious move from a design perspective as to make each group as complex as each other would make them remarkably similar without turning a miniature game into a full-blown RPG. Each faction has to be an amazing, unique standout to catch the eye and crossover dilutes that – see complaints of Eldar players not being the best psykers/fastest vehicles/most elite army anymore.
But the hobby isn’t just the minis on the tabletop, there’s the background attached to them. Seeing your ethnic heritage reduced to a stereotype can be (can, some people don’t care I know) anything from groan inducing to alienating. Now, I’m prettymuch as white as they come, so I’m not going to go down that road too much more, but there is something I do know a bit about – gender and orientation.
This part comes in to play firstly in the store/club – the first point of contact or regular point of call. Often if you are a non-cis straight male a gamestore can be a very uncomfortable place. Example:
Guy: “*variety of homophobic slurs to another player in regards to his Dark Angels*”
Me: “Can you not say ‘fag’ or use ‘gay’ as an insult?”
Guy: “Why?”
Me: “It’s pretty offensive.”
Guy: “But they wear dresses, they’re a bunch of queers!”
The guy doing the insulting was a GW employee, who was in charge of the store at that time. So in one encounter we got a fair dose of homophobia and a serve of transphobia to boot. Add in the alarmingly regular use of ‘rape’ as a synonym for ‘defeat’ in gaming communities, and it isn’t a good environment for many female gamers to enter. Now, most gamers do tone it down around women and kids, but is that really good enough? Is it ok to be horribly racist so long as no people of your chosen ethnicity are around?
Part of this I feel is that gamers feel the need to be friends with the employees and vice-versa. When you have gaming in store and/or staff drawn from the community this obviously is going to happen, but there often develops what seems to be the mentality that it is more a club than a public space and place of business. This does seem to be a peculiar side effect of game stores, probably due to encourage games in store, painting and so on.
To illustrate the ridiculous nature of how some people behave in a game store imagine you walk into a bookstore to get a cookbook. You pick up the one you want when you are approached by some random stranger. He looks at your choice and snorts.
“Jamie Oliver? That’s so gay, I cook from the Cordon Bleu ‘cause anything else is shit. Go in the kitchen with me and I’ll rape your casserole.”
Absurd right? Say that and you’d end up kicked out at best, or with a punch in the face at worst. Yet that’s how people act in stores – and staff often allow or participate in it. Obviously I’m highlighting the worst infractions and I’ve never seen someone not taken to task talking like this around kids, but it’s bizarre that this behaviour is tolerated in the slightest in a place of business. In a club the dynamic is obviously different, and if a club can still pay its rent or whatever with that attitude, fine for them, but getting new members may be… problematic.
Oh, and don’t think it’s unintentional insults either. This one comes from a seminar with a well-known designer at a recent Games Day:
Female Gamer (with her kid): “We’re recently into the game and we love Sisters of Battle! *question about their design being very severe - can’t they be more colourful?*.”
Designer: “Well, they are nuns.”
Guy sitting right behind the gamers: “They’re space hookers!” (exact quote)
Seriously gamers, what the fuck is with acting like this?
Our designer friend did lambast the idiot, but then went on to make a crack about “colourful nuns like you get in San Francisco” *laughter from audience* “and not all of them are really women” *more laughter*
Wouldn’t have wanted to be a transgender person in that audience or you might have felt ridiculed by one of your idols (oh…).
Too often gaming (and geek culture in general) creates a self-perpetuating bubble around itself – a certain type of geek, a certain gender of geek, a certain sexual orientation of geek. We need only see the backlash a recent Miss USA contestant got for calling herself a “history geek”. She was slammed for being too pretty, that she must be lying to try and fit in with nerd chic, that she wouldn’t know the War of the Roses from a World War etc.
Nerd culture of all types often fights to retain its outsider status and is often as unwelcoming as the stereotypical “cool” group of outsiders. This can extend to game stores and clubs, the first point of entry for many. Often there seems to be a fear of being ostracised that leads to not speaking up when things offend or upset. If there’s only one game store in town do you want to be known as the kill-joy who always complains when everyone else’s just having a laugh?
Like that classic phrase “tits or GTFO”. I recently had that said to me and when I responded in an unimpressed manner I got the reply “well obviously I was joking”.
You may just be “joking around”, but I don’t know you very well so, no, I can’t tell that you’re just joking. Especially when it’s online, and especiallygiven there are plenty of people who act like that who do mean it legitimately. Relevant quote #1:
“Have a laugh and a joke, but in no way mean it; no one likes being insulted, whatever kind of person they are. People can be douchbags, and yes, those people should be shown the error of their ways -in no uncertain terms- but people get too hyped over this kind of thing. Take it like water off a ducks back, and reply in kind; if they cannot take it, screw them.”
That’s an excerpt from a comment in a HoP article on Nazi players in FoW. Now, in an ideal world that would be great. But consider this: for many LGBTA+ people and other minorities this isn’t a joking matter. What may be a joke from one person may be a prelude to assault, rape or murder from another.
Someone calling out “hey queer/faggot/trannie/nigger/kike/slope/curry/etc” (all things I’ve heard in game stores) as you walk past may well be a poorly judged attempt at humour, but there is always the fear in your mind that you’ll turn around and find someone standing there ready to cave your skull in for the sin of simply daring to exist.
When someone saying those things might literally kill you if they knew you belong to that group, it makes it a bit harder to say anything back or just laugh it off.
Relevent quote #2:
“Now that I know you’re joking I don’t feel hurt or offended anymore!”
You know who said that? Nobody, that’s who. Nobody ever.
James S touched on this in the comments of the original article – people see the world differently depending on their life situation and that introduces a bias:
“[Systematic Bias] means the current market (mostly white males in developed nations), without even thinking about it, expects a rich white male point of view in the products offered them, and that's what they get. It also means that in a way these products are a dark mirror of the lazy thoughtless assumptions about the world that white rich males tend to have when they aren't consciously thinking about stuff.”
If you’ve never experienced discrimination you don’t know how an offhanded comment can easily offend. I have been very fortunate to avoid most throughout my life, and am still in a fairly privileged position in the scale of things. I don’t experience racism, being white, or if I do (where I work is only a 25% white demographic) it’s so rare that I don’t notice it.
But, since it affects me, I notice when people are casually homophobic, sexist and the like in my presence. That’s not to say I don’t notice when people demand to speak to “a real Australian” when talking to someone of Indian descent at work of course, but I don’t notice little things that someone who’s put up with this their whole life might.
To illustrate little things: people saying Glee is super supportive of the LGBTA+ community – but how come they cut out the word Transexual from Lady Gaga’s Born this Way in the TV episode (not due to time as they duped a different line [though the line is intact on the cast album]), and felt ok to make a joke about someone “looking like a tranny” and use the term “she-male”?
Supportive indeed…
But almost anyone non-Trans wouldn’t notice that, or might think “did they change the song around?” but not much more than that. It’s often these little insensitivities that hurt more than the bigger things, or when somewhere you felt was safe, or above that sort of thing stabs you in the guts. Take the above Dark Angel bashing employee – that made me think “awwww maaaan, really? You used to be cool.”
Tl;dr: Don’t be a jackass to people you don’t know really well, do whatever you want with your friends so long as they’re cool with it.
But, to answer the question, how to get more “others” into the hobby?
I think things like Black Library and Fantasy Flight are a great boon to the hobby, along with tie-in games. They allow a table top game to show off the diversity that does exist in these universes. More positive portrayals of diverse characters – when you can easily list non-white/male/straight leads in your books there’s a problem. For a prescient example see: the decline of traditional comics and the rise of webcomics.
This is probably why pen and paper RPGs relatively kick tabletop’s ass in terms of ‘minority’ gamers – diversity is so much easier to create, true, but RPGs adjusted to their increased interest from people who would have been traditionally seen as outsiders by embracing them. The chainmail bikini is largely gone or used as a self-parody, different skin tones and ethnicities started appearing in class archetype artwork and so on. Whilst D&D may have had a rocky path of late, I know more people who aren’t straight white guys who play RPGs than wargames.
As an interesting aside I was running a 40k RPG and my three players of Indian descent played white guys. Influenced in their design by the art in all the 40k books they’d seen to see anglo-saxons as the sole inhabitants of the grim darkness of the far future?
Dream Pod 9 handled this situation in an amusing fashion by commenting that a lot of people in the Heavy Gear universe are kinda beige from the mixing of their ancestors of the years. I found it refreshing that a game actually acknowledged ethnicity as a thing, rather than just sweeping it under the rug and ignoring it like so many games do.
So how to put this on the tabletop? That’s harder in the world of archetypes – a Pan-Oceanic trooper would look out of place wearing a hijab due to them being Christian fundies, but why not a Sedition Wars soldier? Or did only whities colonise space? Ok, that’s really very unfair on Mike McVey as Sedition Wars features for an incredibly diverse cast for a wargame, but there aren’t exactly many other non-male, let alone non-white lead characters in any game.
Of course the flipside is you get tokenism, which is just as bad because bigots just point to the token and go “but we gave you a character/army etc”. No really, female 40k players asking about female IG troops just love getting directed to Sisters of Battle or Eldar as the ‘girl’ armies [/sarcasm].
Obviously I’m not of the opinion that with a bit of work there will be a proportional representation of every societal facet at the game table – it will mostly be the pursuit of males until the eventual heat death of the universe (same time plastic Sisters come out I believe), but why white?
That one is honestly beyond me, and I’m sure has a myriad more societal reasons than can possibly be changed by any game. But would it really hurt to have people of diverse ethnic heritages depicted? Is it really a bad thing if the sort of person who won’t buy a book because it has an African guy on the cover stays out of the wargaming community?
The answer to both of those things is no, in case you were wondering. And the answer isn’t just “hey, just paint your dudes a different skin tone” either. Different ethnicities look different, so we need to get sculpts that look different first. It’s some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, like “boys won’t buy toys of girls”. By that I mean that a toy company won’t make an action figure of a prominent female cast member of a tie in cartoon under the idea that boys won’t buy her. Or when they do make her, she’s shortpacked in a case assortment, so there are literally less to buy, so she sells less thus proving the point.
It used to drive me crazy when I was a kid that I couldn’t get a Scarlett or Lady Jaye figure for my GI Joes as there wasn’t one produced for the block of time when I was the target age despite her featuring heavily in the comics and cartoon. Of course my desire may have been somewhat disproportionate given how I ended up, but I think I illustrated my point…
Dragging myself back on topic… with GW / Jes Goodwin’s seeming desire to make plastic kits consisting of nothing but alternate head sculpts I’m hoping that if/when the various Imperial plastics get redone there is a bit of ethnic variance amongst the seventy odd noggins they’ll pack in each box. If people want to keep them the same race, good for them, but it will give people who don’t the option not to, and to represent what they see better on the tabletop.
Defiance Game’s recent offerings coming with enough heads to make every trooper female is a real positive step. Infinity is another good example, though they do have a habit of over sexualising some of their female sculpts compared to their male counterparts of the same unit type (see: high heels on almost everyone, midriff armour). Those things are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things and seem to becoming less and less frequent as Corvus Belli expands the range, but it can take one incident – be it interpersonal or something to do with the background, art or minis to turn a potential gamer4lyf into someone who thinks wargaming is for purile man-children.
We, as gamers wanting to bring more people into the fold, should:
- be aware of the outside world if we want to be a part of it (which I believe we do if the hobby is to continue growing) and not alienate it. Things like the infamous Wet Nurse, Relic Knights or other risqué or sexy models are fine – but situational. We need to acknowledge that if they were photographs many would have adult-only classifications for sale, or that some people may find them offensive.
- understand that just because we’re personally ok with something, doesn’t mean that every gamer shares our worldview. We need to accept that sometimes in a public space we need to just admit that we’ve offended someone and shut up about it for the sake of not being a complete douche.
- see that people might get pissed off with stuff and that we won’t fully understand why, but maybe it would make the world a better place if we at least tried to understand where they were coming from?
- accept that we’re living in a society. We’re supposed to act in a civilised way.
But that’s just, like, my opinion man.
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