GenCon 2012: Why “Spouse Activities” is the Worst Thing

This is my first-ever guest column. The young lady who wrote it doesn’t have a blog of her own, but expressed her concern regarding GenCon’s off-putting programming for non-gamers, and I agreed to share her thoughts on my little corner of the web. I hope you find it as interesting and thought-provoking as I do.

So I guess I should start by introducing myself. My name is Natalie, I am 20 years old, a child and youth care worker and a nerd. I’ve attended Gen Con once, had an absolute blast and I just bought my badge for this August. There is, however, one thing that still sets me off in a red-faced rage: the “spouse activities” (SPA). Seriously, I’ve screamed in the faces of strangers about this, something I’m not too proud off. What enrages me even more is that in my courtesy Google search I found a few bloggers who were displeased by the issues, frustrated even. But not pissed off. I saw a gap and I plan on filling it.

Gen Con is amazingly diverse in its attendees and from what meager programing I attended out of the 2+ inch activity book it’s clear to me that the organizers did a damn fine job of providing for every kind of nerd. From table top gamers of all breeds to zombie lovers, anime freaks and LARPers; you name it there was a seminar, class, tournament or show about it. There was also a good selection for maturity/age level. Hit up the hentai cafe or chill with your younglings at the training grounds. No matter who you are or what you like, pull-ups to Depends Gen Con has something for you. Unless you’re female. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is good stuff for the nerd ladies, please refer to the 2+ inch program book. I’m referring to the Con Widow, the poor chick that gets dragged along by their boyfriend/husband to the biggest tabletop geekfest in North America. Upon arriving these ladies aren’t directed to Gen Con, instead they are provided with spouse activities. And what do the organizers think a non-nerd lady wants? Knitting.

The section for those, mostly female, who are not at the con for the con is full of activities like scrapbooking, beadwork, belly dancing and self-defense. Oh, and then there is “Crochet for Your Gamer” where you can “learn to crochet… so you can make fun little things for the gamer in your life.” The D 20 Girls project is running this event. They are also running “The Red Light District” and “Killer Bunnies: Quest for the Golden Carrot” among others. But not for the Widows. Rather than learning about a Dr. Who RPG (a free event, no experience required) or playing a Killer Bunnies game (always a recipe for fun times) the Widows get to crochet things for their gamer partners. Some, if not most of these events are things I can see being worked into the regular programming. They may not be inherently nerdy but as a family focused con it makes sense to have non-gamer activities for people to attend. And with some creativity any nerd can integrate their new self-defense knowledge into a RPG experience. But nope! Instead the randoms are labeled For Spouses Only and gifted to the partners of nerds in assurance that there is a space for them. A nice, safe and quite space away from all the hustle and bustle of the unwashed masses, not to mention their partners, where non-nerds can pass the days until they go back home. Which is just dumb.

So, ladies, if you’re at the con with your nerdy lad and you don’t want to game at all, have no fear for there are many other things to do. Into making or watching films? Maybe you could check out a seminar like “Film Budget and Finance” or “Trailer Park Jesus”, one of many featured films. Like anime? Learn with “The Guide to Anime Tropes” or watch with a room full of fellow fans with “Epic Battles of Amine”. Like crafty things? There are classes like “learn to make chainmail” and “21 days to a novel”. Have kids? Take them to the “Peter Pan Dress Parade” or “Create a Game” which as you may have guessed will teach your young geek how to create their very own game. Not to mention a whole butt load of child care giving you the freedom to check out all these events. And then there is the Misfit events section which has “Spot the Geek” a cosplay photo scavenger hunt and “BattleTech: Firestorm Tesla 11 Virtual Reality Cockpits”. That’s right ladies and gents, for 7 minutes you can command a battle mech on a 31st century battlefield. These are all event sections that require no playing of games and many of the events themselves involve less then nerdy things like watching movies or writing a novel. Yet none of them are marketed to Con Widows. So why have a completely different section for Widows full of non-gaming programing when there are already a few non-gaming activity sections?

If SPA was just another non-gaming category I think it would be pretty damn cool. Learning how to make your own yarn, taking a haunted walking tour of the city and learning the Thriller dance are all fun things that nerds and non-nerds can enjoy. The problem is this: the SPA is girlfriend daycare. Not to be left alone in the con to find the many non-gaming options the lowly Con Widow is dropped off at the SPA center to be entertained until the men folk return home. It is an unnecessary segregation of a group who could be having just as much if not more fun without the penned-in safe zone. There is no need for this category. It perpetuates the misconception that women lack ability or interest in gaming, and more annoyingly that they lack interest in peripheral nerdly pursuits. The insistence that women who do not want to game will be soothed by traditionally feminine hobbies is both condescending and rooted in a strange sort of sexism. For a convention that encourages families to attend it should be reaching out to those with less experience or exposure to the world of geekdom not shutting them up with zumba classes. One massively simple way to fix this would be eliminating the SPA.

It’s an easy solution; all they have to do is integrate the programming. Have an icon for non-gaming activities instead of activities for non-gamers, any overflow can go towards filling out the Misfit section. Design the programming so that gamers are invited to take part in knitting just as much as non-gamers are invited to take part in a D&D game. Don’t make it so that a person coming into the scene for the first time is shown the door to their roped in section of the party while their partner is off riding in a mech suite simulator.

Let’s Talk About 5-E-X

One of the things that seemed to stick out to people in my article regarding sexism, racism and ableism in the future art of Dungeons & Dragons was my mention of the Book of Erotic Fantasy. This was one of my favorite books during the 3.5 boom, because it offered something that no one else was doing with their products: it was offering a sex-positive look at the role of sex and sexuality in role-playing games, specifically in Dungeons & Dragons. It was, admittedly, campy, over-the-top, and deeply, deeply silly, but it was the sort of rare thing that doesn’t happen often enough in our hobby. It was a revolutionary book because it was an activist book.

Now, I’m sure the people who wrote it didn’t write it with activism in mind, but the fact of the matter remains it was a book about sex in a genre of books that never want to talk about sex. And that, to me, is a brilliant example of activism at its best. And it kicked up a hell of a fuss when it came out, enough so that the good folks at Wizards of the Coast had to include a provision against books like it from coming out ever again, effectively banning sexual content from Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition. It was this ban that I was speaking to in my article, the fact that there are actually provisions in the GSL wording that preclude the inclusion of sexual content from Dungeons & Dragons books, but no such provision exists for hypersexualized depictions of women in those same books.

There are two solutions to this problem, and I think one of them is more workable than the other. The first solution is to insist that any inclusion of sexualized imagery for one gender must include equally sexualized imagery for all of the other genders. This is, sadly, impossible, on two fronts: there is no way you could make a sexualized image for every gender that exists, and there is no such thing as a hypersexualized male. Argue all you want that Conan the Barbarian is a sexy nearly-naked dude, but he’s not hypersexualized, he’s just a badass. Western culture doesn’t have hypersexualized images of men (with one possible exception, and it’s deeply debatable). They simply don’t exist, not in the same category that hypersexualized images of women do.

The other option is to strike down the rule and allow sex back into Dungeons & Dragons. Now, that may not seem like a solution at first glance, it certainly wouldn’t change the fact that depictions of women in role-playing games are disproportionately sexualized, but that change allows the designers, in-house, freelance and third party, to open the floor for discussion. It would allow designers to discuss the role sex and sexuality have in our games, and it would actually serve to point out some of these issues within the context of the game text itself.

With the rule as it currently stands, there is no way to address the subject of feminine objectification within the text of the game. That is left to people like Tracy Hurley and myself, who speak to a limited subsection of D&D players. My traffic on this blog maxes out at about 300 people a month. Even reaching the few thousand who read my Open Letter, even reaching the tens of thousands that Tracy reaches on a regular basis, barely scratches the surface of the D&D community, as there are literally millions of people who play this game. By being able to openly talk about sex from within the game itself, we have an opportunity to reach, y’know, all of them.

But then, that’s a part of the problem for the guys behind the desks at Hasbro. By talking about sex from the vantage of the game books themselves, we’re actually talking to a huge swath of players about a thing that Wizards of the Coast doesn’t really want to be associated with. Sex is one of the major American cultural taboos, and while that is certainly working to keep the patriarchal oppression of women’s bodies alive and well, it also means that challenging it comes with the potential for damage to your reputation. As the company that makes Monopoly, Hasbro can’t really have one of their imprints running off and talking about anal plugs and nipple clamps when there are kids reading. Moreover, the threat of speaking directly to the subject of sex in role-playing games is so great that Wizards of the Coast felt it necessary to keep other companies from doing it in association with their product. Which is how we got to where we are now.

The question, I guess, is why? Why is it so difficult to talk about sex in D&D? Why is this a discussion we can’t have openly and publically? The short answer is that it might make some people uncomfortable. There are people who just don’t like talking about sex and sexuality, and it’s those people that Wizards of the Coast is catering to by implementing rules that restrict companies from publishing works that include those topics. There are even more people who don’t want to include sex or sexuality in their games, and I understand that and empathize with it. But that’s no reason to keep that product from being published. I’ve never actually used anything in the Book of Erotic Fantasy. I read it, and I think it’s incredibly valuable to the culture of the hobby, but my games don’t tend to have a lot of sex in them, and the games that DO have a lot of sex in them usually Fade to Black before anything graphic happens. But that’s a choice players should be making on their own, as a group and individually.

Someone asked me on Twitter today what ESRB rating I would give Dungeons & Dragons. My response was that the ESRB is deeply flawed for vilifying sex over violence. Which is a rubbish answer, so I also said “PG-13 with options up to NC-17,” which has nothing at all to do with the ESRB, so it’s still a rubbish answer, if slightly more useful to the topic at hand. Dungeons & Dragons is a game chock full of fantasy violence, but there is rarely any graphic content. You never get to see the fountains of blood pouring out of your enemies, or have to hear the sickening crunch of their bones under your weapons, so most of the violence has a distinctly clean PG-13 feel to it. And while the women are generally clad to appeal to men, and are posed ridiculously to ensure that they are showing off their secondary sex characteristics, they’re never naked, the sexism is generally pretty tame, and there is never any talk about sex or sexuality at all.

And that’s what they’re going for. That’s what they want, because it’s the age range in which their game will sell the best. 12-40 year old men are Wizards of the Coast’s key demographic, and they need to keep that younger group in mind when putting their books together.

Third-party game designers don’t. They’re able to take risks. They’re able to say things that the people at Wizards of the Coast can’t. And while I’m certain WotC got some nasty feedback regarding things like the Book of Erotic Fantasy, I can’t see anyone blaming the company for that product existing, and I can’t think that having books like it is at all a detriment to the game itself. Talking about sex is something we need to be doing as a community, because doing so opens the door to talking about gender role issues at the game table. And that, I think, is a pursuit worth risking some reputation over.