I don’t know of anything like this happening in our store - we had to train a few people out of gay as a pejorative, and that sort of thing though.
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Sorry to hear about your experience. My wife is much more of a gamer than I am (she won a Mechwarrior tournament as a 12 year old for crying out loud) and it still took months to convince her to go to our FLGS when we first moved here because she was afraid of a situation like this happening. Luckily, the local netrunner scene here has been extremely welcoming, but threads like this remind me that I need to do my part to bring the community up if I see it happen to someone else.
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Thank you all for your comments. I would like to add that the store in question, Table Top Cafe in Edmonton Alberta Canada, is a well respected venue that is an excellent place for all genders to come out to. We hold our regular Wednesday night meets there. The store owner would never stand for such a thing, and has been a paragon in the community in this regard. On a nightly basis the crowds there playing board games can be 50/50 male to female easily, and what few larger incidents have happened have been handled by the staff in excellent ways.
I want that noted because I this is a case of that Guy being a regular there and because we’d never had any ladies playing with our group before, it never came up before. I also want it noted because this is something we need to handle in our groups, not expecting store owners to be the first, last, and only line of defense. I’d leave the big things to them, but something ‘small and quiet’ like this is on us at that table. Like I mention at the end of that, I feel ashamed I didn’t speak up stronger than I did at the time. That’s on me, and I’ve asked Amber’s forgiveness on that end.
Netrunner is a passion of mine, and I want to see it grow. Excluding half the potential player base because of these kinds of experiences is incredibly frustrating.
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I really don’t want to take this thread off topic (so I hesitate to even post this) but the term “Hit” in reference to adding counters to a card goes way back in card games (Magic, the mana batteries come to mind, as one example, probably originally from blackjack) and I don’t think have anything to do with the fact that Kati is a woman, or any thing else of the sort. AFAIK, it’s just a card term.
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It may be a regular term, but depending on context and tone it can get pretty unacceptable pretty quickly. Likewise the term “tap” may be a regular term for interacting with land in MtG, but it doesn’t take much to turn it into a harassing term in the right context.
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Thanks for some background info. I’ll take that into consideration with context if it ever comes up again.
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I certainly wouldn’t want a raid on this guy as you put it. He screwed up. His background and life seems to point to factors that make sense why. These aren’t excuses for him, but factors in how male-dominated culture (both in geekery and in other ways) just permeate everything.
When I see him next, if he comments on it, I’ll answer any comments. If he apologises, I’ll accept it. If he asks me to pass along any messages to Amber. I wouldn’t consider him a good friend, and he’s lost some of my respect, but I won’t ostracize him anything. (unless he’s going to be a thug and keep going on about it)
What I want, myself, is that we keep thinking on these things. That, like other have said, it’s still something we as a whole community can’t just expect to go away because the vast majority of us are ‘good’. That it still takes just one guy and some ‘harmless’ comments to set back all our good intentions.
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Sounds like he was just alpha-ing. If he’s not a total dbag, you can maybe just say something like, “Dude, you don’t have to alpha just cuz Amber’s here. If you want my partner and I to pay attention to you, maybe we can just talk some netrunner or play a game or something.” If this gets a reasonable response, maybe you could throw in a sotto voce “now might be a good time to apologize for making Amber feel uncomfortable.”
If he’s just a little bit of an asshole, he might need some peer pressure to restrain his social aggression.
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Yeah, that would have been a good approach initially. As I said, I’m kicking myself for not saying much at the time. He’s not a total d-bag and if I’ve read him right in our interactions in the past he’ll probably feel guilty as hell when he understands how he made her feel. Probably. I dunno.
For me personally, if I already felt uncomfortable from someone paying inappropriate attention to me having someone else highlight me this directly, even in my defense, would make me feel worse. I think more just laying out that the behavior was inappropriate (maybe “No one needs to hear that, man” or something to that effect) without directly referencing and highlighting Amber would be better.
Could be just my take on that, though.
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Had a friend in college who was a psych major. Big part of our board game/roll playing/anime group. We’d all get together every Friday. We had a mix of people, a wide range, and by the time we were seniors we had a mixed group of people (and I mean that in almost every way possible). Every gender, most sexual orientations, and probably a few other ways too. You would have thought, looking in on a Friday while we all played games, that we were a strange but awfully balanced group of people. Truth was, we weren’t. Like at all. There was drama all of the time. And this particular friend wanted to do a study.
So, he ran a normal psych evaluation of the group with a closed survey and reported his results as his final project. We were all off the charts (in the totally wrong direction). As functional as we appeard; as much as we liked to think of each other as family; we were all totally messed up. No confidence, suspicious, delusional, and beyond that; to the point my friend was accused of doctoring his results by his advisors.
But he didn’t and in hind sight I believe they were accurate. So what’s this got to do with that guy? I was part of a group of those guys, and we still found a way to welcome tons of people in to our group. We were 40+ degenerate human beings, and we had our issues, but no one did that to anyone, and if they did we told them to knock it off.
There’s no need for it. But, you also can’t expect to create an environment without those guys if you’re not willing to talk to them directly and bust them out of the funk. Lots of people who play games are off balance, not nearly all of them, but enough you should have realized going into this that this could happen especially if you weren’t willing to be proactive about curbing that kind of stuff and this was going to be a drastic change in the demographic of the group.
Short anecdote: New freshman comes in my junior year. He’s hitting on every woman in the group. He’s making them uncomfortable and all of their significant others. I talk to the group and make sure its not just me, they say it isn’t; so I take him off to the side one day or find him and have a 1-on-1 conversation, details on how it happened are sparse, but here’s the gist of the conversation:
Me: Hey, I don’t know if you’re doing this intentionally or if you’re just uncomfortable but you’re hitting on all the girls and all of their boyfriends want to punch you in the face. You might want to knock it off.
Him: Thanks, I had no idea. I’ll cool it down.
And he did. From that day on he was a beloved member of the group and everyone was fine. What I said was potentially risky, and the way I said it wasn’t even that nice. But, he latched onto me and we were friends for a good while after that. Direct honesty is surprisingly effective in situations like this.
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You know your gaming group is fucked up when a psych major submits it as his final project 
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Counter-point: I’ve been working on my dude to get more tank tops. 
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Good call. I’m an extro and sometimes forget that being highlighted can be uncomfortable. However, I don’t know that “no one wants to hear that” is a strong enough statement to restrain this behavior, nor does it educate the offending party or encourage reflection.
I guess my take on it is that there is a way to confront situations like this that doesn’t require pretending gender is not a thing. The presence of a woman in a group that ordinarily consists of only men will tend to trigger changes in behavior. I think it’s constructive to acknowledge that as part of dealing with it positively.
And you wonder why I play crazy train and try to abuse batty in awful inhuman ways. 
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That’s totally fair. I was trying to find a way of addressing it directly without requiring that the person who was harassed be kept in the fray. If she wanted to get an apology or be part of talking to him, that’s totally awesome. Otherwise, I could see her just wanting to be done dealing with him.
EDIT: Also, this sort of tactical discussion is part of why these threads are good, even in spaces which we assume are full of people who aren’t part of the problem. It’s hard to figure out how to deal with this stuff in the heat of the moment and more talking through options beforehand can make the right call easier in the moment.
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So yeah, I lean towards SimonMoon’s comment that the onus shouldn’t be on an individual. Having some safety measures at the event from the get-go would probably go a long way. I’ve heard of some stores putting up conduct policies, and I know a TO sent out an email before his event educating players on microaggressions. It’d be good to brainstorm some practices along these lines.
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This is a really cool idea. I think encouraging mailing lists or something for league night/gnk regulars and then sending out these kinds of announcements every once in a while could do a lot to increase communication in the community and let folks know about the kinds of behavior that’ll be acceptable, and what could cause issues.
This is pretty important imo. Lot’s of people might not realize they’re doing them.
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