Totally fair; I’ll make sure to avoid the Howard jokes. I like Action Jackson a lot better, anyway.
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I do the same thing but I think the issue is more towards the type and line of questioning. We’ve spoken before a few times in tournaments in Durham and you’re just fine. You’re funny as hell and make draft tournaments a blast.
But that’s my point. If you’re going to have a code of conduct, you have to apply it universally. You can’t just ignore what you call an “edge case”. Any “edge case” has to have the same effect as what you would consider a “non-edge” case. That’s the whole point of a uniform policy.
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I agree with what you said - it IS important to find out what the behavior was. No one said interrogate, but it’s bogus if you can cry foul without explaining what a person did that warrants the embarrassment of being spoken to by a TO, likely in a crowded room where at least a few other people you don’t know will observe this and make snap judgments, all of which could be complete nonsense.
As for the due process comment, I’m a criminal lawyer so it’s harder for me to separate the idea from applications in daily life. No one is going to jail, but I find the idea of accusers going unquestioned a little suspect. :-/
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You’re talking about the [overwhelming - 83%] majority of the population of the U.S. If I sit down across from someone in any context (including gaming), I just default assume they’re christian until I hear otherwise. As a non-christian it would have never occurred to me to even make that joke. And, I’ll admit that as a non-christian I found the jesus-howard remarks to originally be “christianizing” my perspective of the game more than making fun of Christianity. And, most of the people making that joke are likely (though this can not be proved) Christian.
Being Christian is a choice. Being a woman is not. Being Christian is common in gaming groups; Being a woman, unfortunately is not. Calling a card (an inanimate object) Jesus Howard is not equivalent to eye groping a woman.
I realize conversations like this like to bring out the whole “I’m offended” card from every single person in existence. But let’s not go there. For realz. Lets just all agree that hate, harassment, and invasions of personal space aren’t cool and move on.
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I’m not sure why you think this. Are you saying for this code of conduct to be enforced you have to have TO’s check in people’s sleeves and playmats to make sure none of them could qualify under any rubric as offensive?
For something to be offensive, someone has to take offense, right? If someone has taken offense, then there’s a harm that should be corrected and it seems perfectly reasonable for someone to come over to @spags and say “Someone mentioned your playmat to us and thought it was offensive; can you stop using it or use another?” Even in law there’s prosecutor discretion. I don’t get where you think these rules have to be applied unthinkingly.
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Unthinkingly is not the same as non-uniformally.
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You realize women are a majority of the population of the U.S. Both segments are underrepresented in gaming (or at least M:TG/Netrunner sort of gaming). I actually don’t have any proof of this, but I’d be willing to bet on it.
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Ok, so what’s something that could result from this code of conduct that you think would be a bad result, and why couldn’t judges/TOs use their discretion in that case? Are you mostly worried about people claiming to be offended when they aren’t really in order to tilt their opponents?
Where does the “right to be offended” trump the “freedom to bring a playmat you enjoy,” i.e. Macho Man dropping the boom on Jesus? Clearly the playmat here is a JOKE. I doubt @spags is spouting Anti-Jesus commentary as he runs your servers. It certainly didn’t cross into the realm of “objectively offensive,” like say a Nazi icon for example.
Why does one easily offended person’s perspective trump everything else?
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I would make a bet that the majority of the netrunner community is NOT “Christian” (Although there are many differences within that group).
As to Choice/Not a choice, are we ok to be unwelcoming and offensive to things that are choices, then? According to the Code of Conduct posted, religion was definitely included.
To be a bit fair on this, there was the whole 90s “M:TG and Pokemon (and Harry Potter, etc) are instruments of the Devil” thing. So, that may be a situation engineered from outside of the community, if it is true, which I really really doubt.
On the toppic of harrassment, still totally not cool for any reason. Sex or Religion. That said, when you look at a person you can’t say “Oh That Guy’s Jewish, better Talk this Way” (Same often goes with sexual orientation). Whereas people who are going to be jerks to women have all the visual cues they need. So, the situations really aren’t equivalent and don’t come up that often.
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I see the confusion. @SimonMoon originally said:
He didn’t say that the victim shouldn’t say what was offensive, but they shouldn’t have to say why it was offensive. Given that the remedial stakes are so low (change your sleeves/playmat/conversation/etc), it seems better to err on the side of believing genuine offense and seeking to remove the offending behavior, rather than putting the person on the spot and having them navigate their feelings in front of what might feel like a hostile audience.
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“How did you get into Netrunner?” is actually a tricky case, particularly when posed to a woman! On one hand, many people sincerely do want to get to know how the women who play get into the game, in the interest of finding out how to interest others. Conversely, it can lead to a kind of trap for women. If you say, “my partner taught me” then that’s a slippery slope to 1) assumptions that they’re only in it for their partner or 2) testing their geek credentials. But that’s how a lot of women get into the game—via someone they feel comfortable with. The alternative answer is pretty much what you’d hear from anyone else: “I like board games and I heard this one was good from a friend/website.”
Small talk is fine! Welcome even. The above argument wasn’t even something I thought of until I talked to another woman who had a really uncomfortable first tournament. We’re all learning how to improve our interactions with others, and I think it’s important to be receptive to criticism of our behavior in the interest of being more inclusive. If we receive criticism as attacks on our character as opposed to constructive engagement, we make maintain the status quo and make it harder for people to speak up.
The policy is uniform in the sense that all TOs will use their best judgment. It’s not an auto-ban policy, and there’s room for TOs to interpret the appropriate response to a scenario.
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Because we’ve got a list of priorities here, and “Making the space safer and more comfortable for women and minorities” is higher on the list than “Making sure people can bring whatever playmats they want to events”.
I’m not sure what you mean by “objectively offensive”. I was under the impression that a behavior was offensive if it offended someone. Are we going to get into the business of telling people what they should and shouldn’t be offended by?
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I used to dish it out on Christians pretty hard. Last year, my sister married into a relatively religious family. She didn’t turn into a conservative or push her beliefs on other people, but she was stoic and there wasn’t anything I was going to be able to do to change her belief system. I started being a lot more respectful towards her and Christians in general. Despite Christians being a majority/not-terribly-oppressed group in the US, among our demographic, especially in certain subcultures, Christians really can get singled out. While I don’t think “Jackson Howard our Lord and Savior” is a terribly offensive joke that many Christians would take serious issue with, going out of our way not to play with sacrilegious materials isn’t going to hurt anyone.
I’m not suggesting we ban @spags or anyone who exclaims, “Jesus Christ!” when they lose 5 agenda points off the top, but it’s just good practice to watch yourself and try not to do those things, and if someone tells a TO that you’re being discriminatory, I would expect that you apologize to the TO and try to be more careful in the future.
With regard to the “microaggressions” I think I am going to remove the word but keep the general policy the same. Some people feel the term is loaded, and while I don’t really agree, it’s not something that we need to get into to communicate our point.
I changed it to:
- Repeated instances of small-scale discrimination including but not limited to, staring, gawking, and suggestive comments.
I feel like people in the Netrunner community will take these things seriously enough that no one is going to try to abuse the CoC to gain a competitive edge. I would much rather make sure that the wording of things are strict enough that no one feels any more apprehensive about reporting incidents than they otherwise would have. TOs are going to be able to use their judgement for these situations, which hopefully come up not very often, which means that we’re unlikely to end up with people kicked out of tournaments at all, much less those who didn’t have it coming to them. The most important thing is that the document empowers them to do what’s necessary when it is truly necessary.
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And here we enter into a rightly PC realm, and who knows where the line is drawn, and continually redrawn.
The playmat is a joke, of course, that many have enjoyed. Heck, even though I don’t believe (recovering Catholic), the fact that it has Macho Man and Jesus, IN HEAVEN, could imply I believe in all of those things.
I would concur with this in most gaming realms, but, have no evidence of this.
I do know a lot of people in this game, and have spoken to a ton IRL. Not a single one has mentioned having a problem with it. Now, it could be fear/embarassment/whatever, but, if anyone ever mentioned having an issue, of course I’d put it away.
Comedy has a fine line between being offensive and pointing out truths. Some comedians would say there is no line (see: rape ‘jokes’). Perhaps an ANR tourney is no place for comedy, but, it’s a place where I want to have a good time. I don’t want that at someone’s else’s expense (outside of the game; naturally, I want to break you in game).
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I am. Let’s ban @spags.
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Heeeeeeeeeyyyy.
Starting to sound like FFG, now. 
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Every-time he sits across from me, I feel all these microaggressions towards bad play. Its totally not cool.
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