Offers reflection & strategies for designing & managing a healthy in-person & online community of gamers, who gather to play together, support each other, & resolve conflicts respectfully.
Description:
When we think about game design, often we only think about how the game itself will operate, from the time the game starts until it is over. But games are social activities and we believe that as much attention must be paid to Community Design as Game Design. We will discuss strategies for designing and maintaining a community of gamers who gather together to play a larp, rpg, or regular board game group. Community Design includes establishing norms, encouraged and prohibited behaviors, ways to obtain consent, and what to do when boundaries are violated. Community Design sets the norms for how players treat each other when they gather to play, which makes gaming safer, more inclusive and accessible, and better for all participants. Also introduces some common community perils and offers some suggestions for preventing and healing.
As more instances of harassment & abuse are made public, having objective, enforceable, & legal community conduct guidelines & procedures is more important than ever. Learn some do’s & don’ts.
Description:
Describes the difference between a Code of Conduct, guidelines for encouraged behavior, anti-harassment policy, internal procedures for handling infractions, sensitivity training, confidentiality, privacy, and safety coordinators, and why you need to consider all of these if you are running a convention, a larp community, an online group or forum (including Discord), events in a gaming store, game night, or a continuing RPG or board games group.
In 2017, a diverse team of women wrote, designed, & organized a live game exclusively for women. Learn what happened in- & off-game when we created & brought to life the world of Immerton.
Description:
Immerton is a fictional world and live role-play experience written by women for women participants, taking place in a society of women in a polytheistic goddess pantheon. Designed to explore what happens in woman-only spaces, the game used a feminist sandbox design that emphasized rituals, relationships, collaborative roleplay, and transformational experiences through a meta room, mask play, and multimedia storytelling. Using feedback from participants and organizers, we will discuss this uncommon opportunity for a woman-only roleplaying space and community, one that has its heart in feminist design focusing on choice, collaboration, non-hierarchical spaces and relationships, empowerment, and communication. Challenges and opportunities in the women-only space will be presented, as well as how the gender-exclusive space created opportunities for exploration, bonding, and freedom.
Offers design strategies to represent & include intersectional identities & create play spaces that welcome people of all genders, sexualities, abilities, ethnicities, religions, & experience.
Description:
This seminar presents common issues that can create barriers to play for some participants, particularly those who are from marginalized identities, including gender nonconforming, physical or mental disabilities, chronic illnesses, non-white ethnicities, different body types, and varying sexualities. These include both physical barriers and representational barriers through gaming components, themes, and marketing. It is conducted in two parts: Awareness of the issues that can make a gaming space inaccessible for some people and strategies to remedy those issues. Includes models and scenarios for participants to practice solving the common problems. Good for game designers, leaders of gaming groups, gamers who want to make their games more inclusive, store owners who want to grow their customer base, publishers who want to become more sensitive and aware of how their games are received.
Quickly Creating Interesting Characters to Roleplay
Summary:
Creating interesting characters that are both playable & meaningful takes more than just rolling stats. Learn how to make a robust character in less than 15 mins & enjoy the character arcs to come.
Description:
Offers a series of must-haves to create a dynamic and realistic character and a set of questions to ask and answer when making a new character. Taught by a writing professor and game designer, this presentation showcases shortcut creative writing techniques that can be used individually and in pairs or small groups to improve your character’s backstory, motivations, conflicts, quirks, and other traits that make them more playable, intense, meaningful, and dynamic. Includes samples of arcs you can have your character follow over short and long-term play.
Safety & calibration tools help players establish boundaries & co-create intense & desirable experiences. Learn about several techniques & why they are useful; practice them in short scenarios.
Description:
Players of role-playing games have varying experience, abilities, triggers, and comfort zones, both physical and emotional. Trigger and content warnings help, but how do you ensure players feel safe and are able to consent to the roleplay they want and opt-out of what they don’t? What do you do when a boundary is crossed, or a player becomes overwhelmed during play? Safety and Calibration Mechanics are tools designed to help players feel comfortable with each other and with their own needs and boundaries and express them to each other. We will introduce and model various safety and calibration mechanics that can be used in tabletop RPGs, larps, and regular gaming groups. You’ll learn about the techniques, what they are designed to do, the assumptions and research behind them, and why they are important.
Discusses in-game and off-game design strategies to represent & include intersectional identities & create play spaces that feel safer for people of all genders, sexualities, and ethnicities.
Description:
In order to create games that are both representative and inclusive of a variety of intersectional identities, game designers need to pay attention to how a game's setting, roles, genders, races, and classes are portrayed. Gaming archetypes such as fantasy races and tropes may be shortcuts to help players understand how to play more quickly, but they may also replicate subconscious societal norms that reinforce stereotypes, prejudices and assumptions that contribute to racism, misogyny, homophobia, and marginalization. The presentation has two parts: in-game design for inclusivity, which discusses character writing and world-building for the representation of identities, and off-game design for inclusivity, which includes community norms and player conduct expectations to create play spaces that feel safer for players of color, and people of all genders and sexualities.