The more things change, the more they stay the same: on the relaunch of Go Make Me a Sandwich

Well, it turns out I don’t know how to quit, because I’ve tried it twice and here I am, getting back on this horse again. But just to make it official, sound the trumpets or throw confetti or whatever, because I’m relaunching Go Make Me A Sandwich.

What the hell happened to change my mind?

When I shut down my blog in 2016, I was not in a good place. I was tired from years of beating my head against a wall and feeling like I wasn’t making a difference.

I was broken down from years of trying to juggle too many commitments.

I was isolated from the fallout of men who decided it was easier to exile me from communities than it was to confront the reality of their own toxicity.

I was traumatized by years of harassment and being terrorized for committing the crime of being a woman-appearing-person who had opinions on the internet.

I was unsupported by a community that thought it was more important to have “good art” than it was to listen to marginalized people and finally do something about known abusers, and that told me I was the villain for not being “nice” in talking about my abusers.

I was unheard by people in power who knew what was happening but did nothing because action would have required personal inconvenience.

I was burned out. Because. Damn. That’s a lot.

I was also newly diagnosed with PTSD, and wow did I not have a handle on how to deal with that.

It also turns out I was extremely gay. Yeah, shocker. Turns out when you spend years loudly and frequently proclaiming how cisgender and hetero you are, that maybe you are in denial. Straights, you’d be surprised how many spoons pretending to yourself that you aren’t extremely gay can eat up.

So what’s changed? Well. I’ve put in a hell of a lot of work since then.

I’ve done so much fucking therapy, y’all. All of the therapy. And I’m definitely not done. (Sidebar: EMDR is fucking revelatory and changed my goddamn life. If you have PTSD, go get you some sweet sweet EMDR if you have access to it.)

I’m (slowly) recovering from burnout by learning to say no. And I’m learning not to use activism as a form of self-harm, because I feel like everyone else’s needs must be seen to before I can see to my own. I’ve spent time rebuilding relationships damaged by illness and neglect. But I’ve spent even more time removing toxic people from my life who were compounding my trauma. It was hard, messy, painful work and I cried. Like wow. So much.

I learned to vocalize what I need and prioritize the people in my life who won’t use that against me. (Yay therapy!)

I’ve done a fuckton of emotional labor behind the scenes to make the communities I am part of more equitable. I’ve had hard conversations with people about how to build better and more just communities, how to work toward equity and justice for everyone, not just the people with the most privilege.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the largest obstacle to me blogging is. Well. No longer an obstacle that I have to worry about.

But. You know. So what? The absence of obstacles isn’t a reason to write. Just because I can do something doesn’t mean that I should. So why do it? Why come back to a thing that has harmed me? Well. My asshole mental illness has a sense of irony, because my anxiety and PTSD – which once drove me away from blogging – is now driving me back to it. It turns out that writing is how I put my thoughts in order, and very often when I am dealing with anxiety about trauma or sexism or other patriarchal bullshit, the only way I can get my brain to leave me alone is to vomit my thoughts onto a page and rearrange them until they make sense. Quite often, this is the only way I can get my brain to goddamn leave me alone. And once a thing is written, what’s the point of sitting on it?

I’ve spent a lot of time the past two years composing epic tweet rants, but using Twitter to write about nuanced social justice topics is like trying to draw the Mona Lisa on a beach – the nature of the format causes your words to erase themselves. The impermanence of the format started to bother me. I wanted to blog again, but fear kept me silent. Or at least it did until Mandy and the other women spoke out.

So here I am. In a place where all the reasons I had not to blog have been removed, and where I have these words that have to escape me, that need to be voiced. And I want them to be heard.

I’ve been thinking about this for several months, but life has been busy. I have a job and a partner (who has been amazing and supportive about how extremely gay I am) and a six year old and I do theater. It’s a lot. But preparing for GenCon seems like as good a time as any to begin.

What does this mean?

1. New content

I’ve got a lot of old content that has previously been screamed at Twitter and Google+. So for the next while, I’ll be converting and posting the old stuff. I’ll be writing new stuff, but I’m honestly not sure what form that new stuff will take yet. Right now I feel pretty certain I won’t be doing the sort of deep dives and research that I used to do, but who the fuck knows? Three years ago I thought for sure I would never want to blog again, and four years ago I was convinced that I was a cisgender straight woman, and look where that got me.

2. No comments

Many of you are lovely, and I thank you for the support I’ve received. However, I simply can’t deal with the people who aren’t. So. No comments.

3. Patreon?

It probably won’t happen until after GenCon, but I’ll be re-branding my Patreon. Again. It’s going to stay monthly, though. I can’t commit to a consistent level of output, but even when I’m not writing, I’ve got lots of meatspace activism on the boil, and sometimes that has a way of eating up dollars. If you want to support my blog, you’re welcome to pledge, or not. Just as last time, everything I post to my blog will be public and freely available to all.

Something worth acknowledging.

I’m a very different person than the person who shut down this blog in 2016. (Obviously) I’m an even more different person than the person who started this blog in 2010. That person said some seriously ignorant stuff, which I’ve left up because accountability is important, but also as an acknowledgement that people learn and evolve. I’m going to think about how best to flag the content that I no longer agree with or stand by. But. You know. Please don’t be a jerk about shit that I said when I wasn’t the me I am now.

Gender is messier than a singular point on a two-dimensional line

My daughter is nearly four years old, which means that gender and the social construction of identity around gender is something that I think about on an almost daily basis. For one thing, it’s really hard to not hyper-examine the nuances of social expectation when you live with a gnome who asks “why” about everything under the sun approximately three hundred times per day.

There’s also the issue of trying to fight the awful socialization she’s picking up from the other children at her daycare. In the past year, since my daughter has started to become aware of gender norms and expectations, she’s gone from a self-confident little girl who didn’t particularly care what she wore as long as it was brightly colored to a child who is scared of the dark and climbing, will only wear girl colors, is obsessed with Disney Princesses, and insists that she is a princess – along with all of the attendant awful baggage that comes with.

So I spend a lot of time trying to teach her that being female doesn’t mean being limited by these reductive stereotypes, although my resounding lack of progress on that front has been discouraging to say the least. Something else that I am trying (and failing) to introduce as a concept is the fact that there are more gender options available to her than “boy” or “girl”. There’s an entire universe of gender options out there that I didn’t know about growing up, and I don’t want her to feel shoehorned into a gender by her biology simply because that’s the way that the majority of her caregivers conceive of gender!

Of course, actually having these conversations turns out to be super difficult for two reasons:

1. Part of being able to teach her about this stuff involves finding language for it. And that’s HARD when talking about gender, because there is A LOT OF JARGON involved in educating yourself on gender issues that can be really hard to navigate without unintentionally stepping on toes. And figuring out how to phrase all of that in terms that a not-quite-four-year-old can understand is even more challenging!
2. The language that a lot of people use when talking about non-binary gender identity is that of a spectrum, but I’ve never been a fan of the idea of gender as a spectrum. If gender is a spectrum, that implies that all possible genders exist as points along a single two-dimensional line with “male” and “female” as the two extremes along that line – which is incredibly reductive.

So it was with all of that in mind that I decided to make this comic – which will hopefully provide a useful visual representation for understanding some of the basics of the complexity of gender identity:

CLICK FOR LARGER, MORE READABLE VIEW

Why a complex view of gender matters: personal reflections on my own gender identity

My entire childhood, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was “failing” at being a girl. I HAAAAATE dresses, I’m disinterested in makeup, and hair? Between generally not understanding how to girl and having curly hair, my hair has always been a perpetual struggle for me.

(It didn’t help that my classmates ALSO thought I didn’t know how to girl. When I was 13 I cut my hair short and my classmates called me “Pat” – after the horrifically awful SNL skit – for a year.)

In high school and college, I’d joke about “being terrible at being a girl” or (after getting married) that I was “the man in my marriage”. But by then, I’d found ways of performing femininity that felt (mostly) comfortable for me. I still don’t wear dresses (unless I’m LARPing), and I mostly avoid makeup (except for LARPing or job interviews). But I’ve learned ways of dressing that look feminine without me having to put a lot of effort into PERFORMING FEMININITY. Because even now, that shit makes me feel like an alien from another planet.

This is how I feel whenever I have to put on makeup for a job interview.

It wasn’t until a few years ago when I started learning about non-binary gender identities and getting really obsessed with gender in general that I was introduced to the term “cis-by-default”, and was like YES. THIS. Because that perfectly describes how I feel about my gender now. If I had known that being genderqueer was a thing that existed when I was a kid, or shit even in college – I would have been all over that. I would be genderqueering like nobody’s business.

But finding out that’s a thing after 30+ years of figuring out how to be feminine without performing femininity? After having a kid and not having the time or bandwidth to even care about bathing regularly, let alone experimenting with gender presentation? No way.

In talking with my husband about this the other day, I compared it to a favorite pair of sandals. You get them because you like how they look, but it turns out that they just don’t fit right – they rub your heel, or they keep slipping off, or give you blisters. But you’re stuck with them because these are the only sandals you were given. Eventually you break them in, and maybe they end up not quite the way they’re supposed to – maybe you have to cut a strap to make them fit, or maybe they look too worn to be professional once you get them to that comfy stage. Whatever. What matters is they are comfy and are your go-to footwear.

And then someone shows you a pair of strappy ultra-high stiletto heel sandals. And shit, you love them SO MUCH. You’re mad you didn’t even know that strappy ultra-high stiletto heel sandals were a thing! Except… you have your comfy sandals. The ones that maybe weren’t supposed to fit you, but they fit now. And sure the new sandals might be amazeballs, but those things come with a learning curve. You’re going to fall on your ass and embarrass yourself in public at least a few times before you get it right, and who knows, you may even break an ankle. And shit, trying to be in school, do freelance, and have a three-year-old? I need sandals I know I won’t break my neck in if I have to chase my kid all of a sudden.

…but still. I have some awesome non-binary friends, and watching them experiment with their gender presentation makes me a little sad for younger me. For the me that definitely would have made different choices if she’d known those choices existed.

Indie publishers donate money to Pulse families and survivors [Freebie]

[Edited to add: The total has been updated to reflect a donation at the time that wasn’t reported back to me. Thanks to Emily Care-Boss for contributing and for letting me know.]

It’s been two and a half weeks now since the Pulse shooting in Orlando, Florida. Unfortunately, while I’ve seen some good, heartfelt conversations in private channels about the tragedy from those I know in the games community, the largest game publishing companies have been largely… silent.

At E3, the only AAA game publisher to address the Pulse shooting in their press conference was Microsoft, who led their event with a moment of silence. (Bethesda’s presenters did wear rainbow armbands, and their Twitter avatar was briefly given a rainbow background – though their avatar has been changed back already.) The lack of commentary from an industry famed for its continued reliance on misogyny, toxic masculinity, and heteronormativity to drive sales was disappointing, to say the least.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any contacts to speak of in the video games industry. But I do have contacts in the tabletop industry. Like, a lot of them. So I did some research and ended up contacting all of the indie publishers I know. Here’s a portion of the message that I sent:

The Pulse Tragedy

The mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando was a horrific tragedy that has already touched so many lives. But worse than the loss and trauma, there is a real fear that I have heard expressed by many of my LGBT friends about how to navigate a world that hates and fears them when even their safe spaces, their spaces of refuge, are not safe.

There are so many talented and wonderful LGBT people in game development – developers, publishers, editors, designers, writers, that have contributed so much to our hobby. Without their voices and their talent, our hobby would be infinitely poorer. Unfortunately, while there are LGBT-friendly enclaves within gaming, the hobby as a whole continues to be unwelcoming to LGBT gamers. And I think the lack of response by “leading lights” in the gaming industry might contribute to that perception of gaming as an unsafe space.

And I get it! It’s hard to know what to say or do in the face of such brutality! And it’s hard to figure out how to express support in ways that are meaningful beyond “thoughts and prayers” or in ways that center the conversation around your distress and not the real needs of the people affected.

So Here’s What I Propose

I would like to have an informal donation drive, of sorts, to have publishers come together and donate money to a charity directly doing the work of providing services to families and survivors; The GLBT Center of Central Florida is a charity that has already been providing these services – you can read about their ongoing efforts here.

And I’m pleased to be able to report that people stepped up. Because much as I devote a lot of space to the problems that the games community and industry faces, there are a lot of good and conscientious people on the publishing end of things who are trying to make a real difference.

The Outcome: $1173 Raised for the GLBT Center of Central Florida

Indie tabletop publishing is an industry with incredibly narrow profit margins – it’s tough when RPG consumers expect stunningly beautiful, art-rich, 300 page game books for rock-bottom prices. So I’m pleased to be able to say that between the ten publishers who participated, we were able to raise $1173 $1223 in contributions. Here are the publishers (in no particular order) who donated:

• Evil Hat Productions
• Northfire Games
• Peach Pants Press
• Magpie Games
• Kira Magrann
• John Wick Presents
• TCK Roleplaying
• Matt Forbeck
• Andri Erlingsson
• Genesis of Legend
• Edited to Add: Black and Green Games

The contributions were made individually by each publisher, who communicated the amount of their donation to me, for the purposes of knowing the overall total only. Publishers were linked to the GoFundMe campaign as well as the direct PayPal donation link, so that contributing publishers could use whichever was more convenient or ethically preferable. (Myself, I prefer to avoid GoFundMe whenever possible, because of the company’s problematic business ethics.)

(It may be worth noting that Peach Pants Press (aka me) is one of the listed contributors. I don’t believe in asking people to do something that I wouldn’t do myself.)

I’m grateful for the contributions made by my publishing peers and hope that this can be at least a small step from one corner of the games publishing industry to indicate that we care about LGBT people, and want to continue doing what we can to make safer spaces within the gaming community. All too often, silence can feel like a lack of support and caring. This small gesture can’t possibly erase all of the awfulness that happens within our community, but hopefully we can signal that there are lots of people who make games who want to do what we can to continue making gaming spaces better – more safe, more inclusive, and more welcoming.

Project Preview: The Watch

Hey, folks. Today I thought I’d take a moment to preview a project that I’ve been working on. Since this past December, I’ve been co-designing a low fantasy Powered By The Apocalypse game called The Watch with Andrew Medeiros, co-designer of Urban Shadows and designer of The Forgotten, Star Wars World, and a number of other PBTA projects. And I am SO. EXCITED. Because this game is going to be SO. GOOD.

What is The Watch?

Well, to quote myself (from the current draft of the book, which I’m writing now):

The Watch is a low-fantasy game about women (and other female-of-center people) who are fighting to retake their homeland from the Shadow – a darkly sorcerous threat that has the power to possess men and use them for its own violent ends. So much has already been lost to the Shadow – land, loved ones, and traditions. But your people have come together, forming a new fighting force from those able to resist the Shadow, which they call the Watch.

The story of The Watch is structured around the military campaign against the Shadow’s forces. You will tell stories of war, love, and sacrifice as your characters fight to hang on to what they have left. … The military campaign is what will give structure to your story, from the early defensive days of the campaign when the Watch is just trying to dig in and hold the new border, to the final days when you are closing in on the stronghold of the Shadow itself.

That you will defeat the Shadow is never in question. What you are playing to find out is how much will it cost you? On the day of the Shadow’s final defeat, who is it that you will say should have been standing beside you? Which of you will burn bright and fast, and which of you will hunker down and see this thing through to the end?

In other words, if you want to play a fantasy military campaign where all of the PCs look something like this:

Illustration by Anna Kreider

…you’ll probably be interested in this game.

How finished is it? When can I play it?

The Watch is currently in limited playtesting. The first playtests at Dreamation were very successful, and the game has only been getting more polished since then, thanks to help from local groups and external playtesters who have given us lots of great feedback, and a lovely community of folks on G+. We will open it up to wider playtesting at some point, although it’s hard to pin down a precise date, since game development is a messy process and both of us are busy people. Still, we’re very much in the polishing and refinement stage. All of the mechanical subsystems are in place and working very well, the basic and secondary moves have been finalized. The game runs smoothly and it sings. Right now we’re just focused on tying off loose ends and making things as polished as possible.

We will be running some sessions of The Watch at GenCon, among other things, through Games on Demand. So if you’re super curious, you can try to find us there.

What are our plans? Will there be a KickStarter?

It’s safe to say that we are definitely going to publish The Watch as a standalone game, and like most other “finished” PBTA games it will be a book similar in form factor to Apocalypse World or Night Witches, since I’m currently in the middle of writing the book. That means there will also be a KickStarter at some point. Unfortunately, we can’t get any more specific than that. We’re currently looking into different publishing options and aren’t really sure what the final arrangements are going to look like. Trust me, when we get that figured out, I’ll be sure to shout it from the rooftops!

If you’re curious about following the project, we’ll be posting semi-regular updates on G+ using the hashtag #joinTheWatch.

Creating while female & mentally ill: the difficult intersection of bias and disability

I’ve been pretty quiet the last few weeks. Partly that’s because I’ve been dealing with the end of my school term (final exams were last week).  However, it’s partly because I was dealing with some pretty frightening mental health issues, and between the two it took a while before I had energy to deal with normal “adulting” things, let alone having energy to do creative things.

My most recent experience has gotten me reflecting on the difficulties of trying to function as a creative person while also dealing with the lived realities of being a woman and someone with mental illness. A lot of the time, difficulties that arise from one of these factors spill over and aggravate the other. And sometimes it’s easy enough to pick apart all the inputs and discern what’s going on and what the underlying causes are when things get tough. But sometimes when things are bad, everything is a jumbled up mess and it’s too difficult to tell if it’s just my mental illness, or if there are other factors at work.

[Note: You’ll probably need to click through for some of the text to be readable]

Drawing this comic was an interesting exercise. The last comic I did about mental health, I started with a script that was meticulously written out, where the precise wording was very important. This time, however, I had a general outline of what I wanted to cover, but for the most part the ideas that I had were more about the pictures than the words.

Of course, the thing that BOTH comics have in common is the fact that this time, as with last time, I can’t really shake the idea that posting this can only be a bad idea. That someone I respect will lose respect for me for being honest about my mental illness. That talking about my difficulties will only further establish me as a “toxic” “negative” person that people need to stay away from in order to be happy. Or that I’ll be giving ammunition to anyone who wants to discredit me in the future, because after all, why should anyone listen to someone who admits to being crazy? I’m lucky to have a lot of support, both here and other places, but I’d be lying if I said that being honest about my difficulties with mental illness didn’t sometimes come with painful consequences.

It’s a question that I’m not likely to find conclusive answers to anytime soon.

Data Analysis of Trolls and Sea Lions in 2015 [CW][TW]

For about the last month, I’ve been dealing with an increase in trolling. It seems that writing a 3-part series that examines data sets in detail to analyze sexist trends in representation in D&D 5E isn’t nearly as controversial as writing posts in which I talk about simply having feelings about a game. Because my post about my personal reactions to opening packs of the latest Magic: The Gathering expansion attracted a whole lot of assholes – not just here in the comments, but in other parts of my social media. Frex:

Those are all comments from ONE POST on Google+. (As someone else pointed out in that thread, it’s like I put out jackass fly paper or something.)

It’s gotten to the point where the last week or so, I’ve been leaving notifications on on my phone while I’m socializing with friends (something I usually make a point of not doing) simply so that I can keep an eye on comments on my blog, in case something particularly odious gets posted that I’d really rather not leave up for any length of time. Which, of course, presents a bit of a dilemma. If this sort of nonsense is getting to be more common, shouldn’t I just lock down comments completely?

The problem with that is that my patrons and other long-time readers are pretty damn smart, and often contribute quite a lot in the comments sections of my posts. Case-in-point, the comments on my recent semi-tongue-in-cheek post about games I don’t plan on letting my daughter play are actually full of some really great recommendations of fun and progressive games. One other notable example is my post from last year about Lightning Returns and its bonkers wholesale cultural appropriation of Western religious iconography. While I stand by the content of my post, the commenters added a lot of context that I hadn’t been aware of regarding the historical oppression of Christians in Japanese society.

Closing down comments entirely would mean that I would be cutting off actual intelligent and enlightening contributions by supportive readers, and I’m not quite ready to do that. However, while I’ve gotten pretty damn jaded when it comes to people calling me a crazy fat lesbian, there have been quite a few commenters that have started dragging my daughter into their attacks on me since my recent post, and that is… a lot harder to deal with.

To quote myself from Twitter:

I’ve been awake for half an hour, and I’ve already had to remove three comments from my blog that weren’t there when I went to bed. All because I wrote a post, which included GAMES I LOVE, about how I’m worried about sexism in games re: my 3yo daughter. And honestly, I’m so used to people talking smack about ME that it doesn’t even matter. Fat? Uh huh. Jealous? Sure. Lesbian? Whatevs. Man-hater? Obvs. Misandrist? You know it. Seriously, that shit just doesn’t even bother me 99% of the time anymore

But when they start dragging my DAUGHTER into it? That shit really fucking sucks. “it’s a good thing she doesn’t spend much time with you” “you’re raising her to be a dysfunctional lesbian” “you’re a bad parent”. They say all of this because I had the nerve to say even HALF-seriously that there are some games I might not let my daughter play. But for all that their objections are framed around her, they don’t actually CARE about my daughter, her feelings, or her upbringing.

It’s an entirely new level of sexist bro entitlement. They don’t just feel entitled to games that cater to ONLY THEIR INTERESTS… They feel ENTITLED to having MY DAUGHTER playing the same games that they want to play, like several years from now. Because fuck her feelings and her development as a healthy woman in a toxic patriarchal society. That bitch better like their favorite games. And honestly, I don’t know how I can find any of this shit surprising anymore. I really don’t. But I do.

So, you know, thank you, you entitled shitstains, for proving my damn premise about why sexism in games is so fucking toxic.

One of the things that I have done in an effort to make dealing with this sort of nonsense a bit easier is to write a FAQ covering all of the most common shit that gets hurled at me, so that I would have something to point at when removing comments instead of having to type out the same justifications over and over (and over and over…).

In the post which rolled out the new FAQ, I vented some of my frustration over the increased nonsense level around here by saying:

I don’t feel bad in the slightest about summarily trashing comments that insult myself or others, and I’ve grown to quite enjoy replacing derailing comments with sarcastic memes. Because again, see #3 – this is MY house where I make the rules.

But of course, there are certain types of people (men) who think it is LITERALLY JUST THE WORST that I don’t run an open forum for them to insult, abuse, and generally dispute everything I’m saying here. And those people get really. Fucking. Tiresome.

But of course I got questioned on it. Because despite that this is a feminist blog in which I write about sexism in a perceived-as-male-dominated-geeky-subculture, somehow me complaining that it’s always men who have a problem with me removing their comments from my blog is somehow suspect because… uh… reasons?

At the time my response was terse and to the point, since I felt that was about all the attention that particular question deserved.

However, since then, the continued activity of trolls and sea lions got me thinking. As 2015 winds to a close, wouldn’t it be an interesting exercise to set about doing a data analysis of the comments that I’ve gotten to date in 2015? So that’s what I set about doing.

Data analyzing troll and sea lion comments

This has probably been the least fun post that I’ve written in a while. Gathering numbers to do one of my data analysis posts is always an exercise in tedium. Worse, it required going through 11 months of comments, including the ones that were so horrible that I simply deleted them from my blog without even meme-ing them.

I’ve left email comment notification on for the purpose of archiving all comments in their original state, so the process of reviewing them was actually simple, if rather unpleasant. Because breaking down the comments enough to categorize them and analyze the underlying trends required… actually reading them. In detail. Something which I do my best to avoid. And it also required digging up a lot of hurtful stuff that I’d honestly forgotten about from earlier in the year.

Originally I’d conceived of this post as something I’d be able to knock out in a day as a quickie “fuck you” to the trolls that have been plaguing me lately. However, I didn’t count on the fact that it is hard and upsetting purposefully immersing yourself in the words of people who want to make you feel like crap about yourself. What I thought would be a relatively easy task for one day has turned out to be a grueling and exhausting task that’s taken all of today, and parts of yesterday and the day before, and has left me feeling pretty emotionally raw.

Still. It’s done, and the analysis proves pretty clearly that my hypothesis was pretty near correct. You can read the entire summary here, with fancy interactive charts and everything, on Infogr.am. Though I’ll ask that you please exercise caution, since it might prove triggering for anyone who has experienced online harassment, gender-based or otherwise.

This is how it starts, and it gets “better” from there.

I’ll note that I know some readers have issue with accessibility re: color blindness with some of the charts that I use here. That’s mainly why I used Infogr.am to put this together – mousing over any particular data point highlights the data segment in question. This is especially useful in the couple of charts that have A LOT of different colors, if differentiating colors is something that is difficult for you.

Of course, I don’t believe that this sort of analysis is actually going to solve anything, because the sorts of people who troll and sea lion my blog aren’t the sorts of people to be swayed by actual facts. Besides, the fact that I’m making this a patron-supported post is pretty likely to draw at least a few trolls out of the woodwork, given that I’m literally being a “professional victim” by doing so. But I haven’t let the asshats and the haters stop me from doing what I do yet, and I’ll be damned if I’ll start now.

Administrativa: FAQ, and update to the comment policy [LONG]

So here’s the deal. My comments policy is not all that complex: 1) no insults 2) no derailing 3) my house, my rules. And yet, this is something that a lot of commenters seem to struggle with – especially #3.

Since re-opening my blog, I’ve taken a much more liberal approach to enforcing the comments policy. I pretty much have zero fucks left when it comes to people coming into my space and behaving like an asshat; I don’t feel bad in the slightest about summarily trashing comments that insult myself or others, and I’ve grown to quite enjoy replacing derailing comments with sarcastic memes. Because again, see #3 – this is MY house where I make the rules.

But of course, there are certain types of people (men) who think it is LITERALLY JUST THE WORST that I don’t run an open forum for them to insult, abuse, and generally dispute everything I’m saying here. And those people get really. Fucking. Tiresome.

Because I’m getting real tired of this shit recently, I figured that it’s probably time to clarify the comment policy, just for the sake of transparency, so that when people whine about me removing their comments, I have something to point to instead of having to repeat the same five responses over and over again. I will also be updating the comment policy in the sidebar accordingly.

So. FAQ first, and then updated comment policy.

Frequently Asked Questions and Complaints

While this is not a comprehensive list of the terrible comments I get here on this blog, these are definitely the worst offenders. You’ll note that there are a lot of links in my answers to these questions. That’s because Go Make Me a Sandwich is not and never has been a 101-level feminist blog. I do not have the time, interest, or obligation to educate you if you have not done the basics of self-education with regards to feminism as it applies to geekdom.

1) BUT ALL THE MENZ GET OBJECTIFIED TOO

[sigh] No. Just… no.

First, attempting to dispute that game art is sexist by saying that men get objectified too completely misses the point. I have written extensively on how game art in every segment of gaming consistently under-represents and over-sexualizes women as compared to their male counterparts. This is not speculation – this is based on careful analysis and data collection of a wide variety of sources.

My original article written for Pelgrane covering video game art is here. Additionally, you can find many other posts using the same methodology if you search the “numbers” category here on my blog.

Second, saying that all men are idealized in games and game art is demonstrably factually incorrect. Male characters in games have always enjoyed a diversity of depiction of body size and shape that does not exist for female characters.

Third, male power fantasies are absolutely, categorically not the same as sexualized depictions of women. See my takedown of people who claimed that male characters in TERA were “as bad” as female characters. Or you can read either one of these great posts tackling why that’s just not the case.

2) THAT CHARACTER IS STRONG AND EMPOWERED AND WANTS TO SHOW HER TITS, YOU ARE SLUT SHAMING

For this, I am going to straight up quote myself from this post I wrote about the first Bayonetta game, since Bayonetta is a pretty classic example of a character that is frequently cited as “strong”, “liberated”, and “sexually empowered”:

If Bayonetta were an actual person, then it would make sense to proclaim that her sexuality is a choice and that she’s an empowering female figure. But she’s not a real woman. Everything about her was designed to be sexually appealing by a man who in his own words thinks that all women should strive to be as sexual as Bayonetta. …

It all comes back to the male gaze. (Seriously, please visit that link if the male gaze is a concept you’re not familiar with.) When looking at fictional characters like Bayonetta, you can’t disregard the creator. It’s not enough to say that she embraces her sexuality, because at no point did Bayonetta ever get to make a choice. Her creators made the choices for her. So I totally agree with Jonathan Holmes in his assessment of Bayonetta:

she’s an empty shell of a character; a shell made from here creators’ sexual fantasies, negative stereotypes, and misconceived notions of the female gender.

As for the people who claim you are somehow sexist or slut-shaming when you hate on Bayonetta, the same point applies. Bayonetta is not a person with agency, she’s a fictional creation devoid of any free will or choice. It is not slut-shaming to decry Bayonetta as a hollow stereotype whose sexuality is nothing more than a harmful perpetuation of the stereotypes surrounding female sexuality. It is a judgement on the designers and writers who created her to be what she is. Bayonetta is not for women, plain and simple. She is designed by men for men. As such, I feel no need to pretend that she’s a positive role model.

3) WHAT’S WRONG WITH CATERING TO MEN’S SEXY DESIRES

Nothing! Nowhere have I ever said that I think that there should be no games ever that include sexy women, for cishet-normative values of sexy. What I object to is the idea that every woman in every game must be designed to appeal to the cishet male gaze, because that makes no goddamn sense.

Women have represented juuuust under 50% of the video gamer market for quite a while now, not to mention that 85% of all consumer purchases (which includes video games) are made by women. And yet nearly the entire games industry is focused on designing characters that exist solely for the sexual pleasure and titillation of a presumed male player.

And that sucks! It would be like going to a restaurant that purports to serve people of any gender, but any cisman who walks through the door gets punched in the face. And if you try to complain, the restaurant staff deny punching you, and the other patrons form a lynch mob and run you out of the restaurant.

Further, this kind of thinking assumes that all men are a monolith, which they are not (of course). As shocking as this may be, not all men who play video games are straight. So the hyperfocus on the hetero-normative view of game development also does a disservice to men who don’t really care about sexy women, thanks.

4) GAMES ARE MADE FOR MEN

See the above response.

5) WHY DO YOU WANT TO CENSOR ART AND STOP ARTISTS!

Again, see #3. Also, stop being stupid.

6) IT’S THE ART DIRECTORS YOU SHOULD TARGET

Art direction is definitely a huge piece of the puzzle; I’ve written about the inconsistent art direction coming out of WotC, how internally inconsistent Magic: The Gathering’s art direction is within their own product line.

However, the ingrained sexist attitudes of the artists doing the work is also a huge problem. To quote Erik Mona of Paizo from a comment that he left on my old post about Pathfinder and racial diversity:

“The number of times over my 10-year career in this industry that I’ve had to send back an image with a note like “um, thanks, but can I get this without hard nipples showing through the leather armor, please?” would shock just about everyone.”

So does art direction need to get better? Absolutely. But the artists are just as culpable.

7) WHY DO YOU HATE WOMENZ WITH BIG BOOBZ?

I don’t hate women with big boobs. I am a woman with big boobs. What I hate is that there is a complete lack of body diversity of women depicted in games, despite that male characters come in every shape and size imaginable. It’s the bullshit double-standard that pisses me off, not the boobs or the women they’re attached to.

8) YOU ARE A MASSIVE PRUDE

Quoting myself again:

One of the charges that routinely gets hurled at me is that I’m a sex-hating prude that hates sex in games and thinks that people who put sex in games are just the worst. Which is pretty ludicrous, but it’s the lowest-hanging fruit of dismissive criticism aside from “she’s crazy”, which means it’s something I hear a lot. For a lot of people, it’s easier to attack the messenger than it is to engage with the message, especially when the message is openly critical of something that you like.

For more details on why I actually quite enjoy sex in games when it’s done well, go read the rest of the post that’s taken from.

Or if you’re too lazy, the TL;DR is: I’m not against all sex ever in games. I’m not against all sex ever in art. I’m not against all people ever who like sexy art, or who like sex, or who like sex and games. The end.

9) WHY ARE YOU WRITING ABOUT THIS INSTEAD OF [X]?

Where do I even start…?

First, asking this question somehow implies that I can’t care about more than one thing about the same time. Frex, if I care about Cause Y, then why would I devote time to writing about Cause X? Which is silly, because the vast majority of humans are capable of being passionate about more than one thing. Odds are, you don’t spend all of your free time pursuing ONE activity. So assuming that me taking time to write about something that I feel passionately about – feminism in games – completely precludes the possibility of me engaging in other sorts of activism is… odd. (For more on this, see Derailing for Dummies)

Second, in application this question is almost always racist. Every time I have seen it used, people are asking things like “why are you writing about feminism in video games when you should be writing about female genital mutilation”. Or the violence against Afghan women and girls attempting to access education? Or poverty of women in the Asian subcontinent?  Which becomes really awful when you think about the context.

I am a white, middle class, cishet, able-bodied Christian-ish woman living in Canada. I am privileged as fuck, and I acknowledge that. So for me to devote myself to some crusade to save “foreign” brown women from the evils of their own culture would be the height of White Feminism. And while I am a feminist who is white, I do my damndest not to be a White Feminist. (I’m not saying I’m perfect, but I really do try.) And not attempting to save brown women from their own culture is the low-hanging fruit of not being a goddamn White Feminist.

Third, asking this question is really just trivializing my passion. I write about feminism in games because I am passionate about games, and sexism in games is something that impacts me personally. So for you to say “well actually, this thing you’re passionate about isn’t really all that important” makes you the asshole.

10) IT’S JUST A GAME

Refer to point number three of the previous response.

11) WHY DON’T YOU PLAY SOMETHING ELSE OR MAKE YOUR OWN GAMES?

Telling me to play something else if I don’t like a particular game is predicated on the assumption that there are a cornucopia of games out there that are perfectly enlightened and not at all sexist. Which, uh, yeah. Yeah that’s not even close to being true.

Usually, my game selection process involves finding the games that are the least sexist and still appeal to my play preferences. It’s a lot like the Monty Python spam sketch – “how about the spam eggs sausage and spam, that’s not got much spam in it” – in that one my primary criteria is always “is this game at least only minimally sexist?”.

Case in point, I play a lot of BioWare games, because they do get an awful lot of stuff right. Even if they really do fall on their faces when it comes to women. Like, a lot.

As for “why don’t I make my own games”? Uh. I do.

12) FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!1!1!eleventy! RAARGH!

Quoting myself again from this post in which I first implemented the comment policy:

most of all, I want this to be MY PLACE …

It’s not my place when I feel constantly challenged to assert my expertise on the matters I’m discussing, when I feel that I must always re-affirm my credentials.

It’s not my place when people come here to tell me that I’m crazy, ugly, irrational, stupid, ignorant, or a fascist.

It’s not my place when they tell me that harassment against women doesn’t matter.

It’s not my place when they tell me to lie down in front of a train rather than continue to speak out.

I can’t handle the volume of negative comments that I get anymore – it drains my energy, wastes my time, and sucks air out of the conversation. This was never intended to be a forum for other people to vent their hatred, and I’m tired letting toxic comments stifle real conversation in the name of welcoming free speech. Fuck free speech. This is not a democracy, and I am not obligated to give you a soapbox.

If you want a forum to tell me that I am wrong, or stupid, or even to just vent your hatred of women, that’s called THE REST OF THE GODDAMN INTERNET.

13) YOU’RE AFRAID OF REAL DISCUSSION

A lot of the time when I replace a comment with a meme, said commenter whines that I’m not “interested in real discussion”. Which, uh. Yeah. You’re right!

The reason I haven’t entirely closed down comments is that sometimes commenters are able to provide valuable and interesting perspective about a related topic or angle that I didn’t have knowledge of. Take, for example, my post on Lightning Returns and cultural appropriation. There were some really interesting things in the comments said about the history of oppressive violence in Japan against Christians. Similarly, in my post about MMOs and the lack of diversity of female body types, where a commenter provided personal perspective as a female employee who had worked on one of the MMOs I wrote about. That’s the sort of thing that I want to allow for!

The sort of thing that I have zero interest in, however? Shit like sea lioning, insults, cred-checking, or mansplaining. Especially since a lot of what people (men) attempt to mansplain is my own goddamn feelings.

So, you know. Not interested in real discussion? Yes! Way to hit the nail on the head! Where you go astray is thinking that I somehow actually give a shit or think that’s a bad thing.

Policy: Removing and Replacing Comments

If you violate rule #1 (no insults), your comment will be trashed. Period.

If you violate rule #2 (derailing), your comment will be replaced with an appropriate meme of my choosing.

If you complain about rule #3 (my house, my rules), your comment will be replaced with a meme on the first offense, with summary deletion thereafter. You don’t get to come into my house, trash my shit, and whine when I tell you to get the fuck out.

NEW RULE #4

WRT #2, any comment that resembles one of the above questions will be removed and the commenter will be instructed to see the FAQ for reasons why their comment is a waste of everyone’s time. Further, comments on the FAQ itself will not be allowed. This is not a democracy, it is a dictatorship.

Self-promotion sidebar: The Starlit Kingdom

[For those of you who don’t follow me on other social media channels…]

The Golden Age

Many, many centuries ago, the people of Earth co-existed with the people of the Moon in peace and harmony. This might surprise you, as the Moon queendom was a place rich with beauty and full of wonders, not the least of which were its people, who were blessed with magic and long life. It might seem natural that the people of Earth would look upon their neighbors with jealousy, but the people of the Moon shared freely of their gifts and kept to themselves.

It was thought that this golden age would last forever. Such is the complacency that peace brings.

It Comes To This

It may be that the golden age of humanity will crumble. It may be that Elysium will fall into civil war or declare war on the Moon queendom. The future is not yours to read. All you know is that you have been called to fulfill a sacred duty and you will uphold that duty even at the cost of your life.

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It’s been a long time in the making, but The Starlit Kingdom  is finally finished and available for purchase. The Starlit Kingdom is a game about magical girls struggling against tragic fate, and is inspired by Sailor Moon, but you don’t have to be a fan of anime or magical girls to appreciate this game. This game tells beautiful, sad stories about the fall of a magical kingdom full of beauty and wonder, and your doomed efforts to save it and the people you love. It is GM/MCless, and runs 2-4 sessions with 3-5 players.

You can purchase The Starlit Kingdom in print at Lulu, or in PDF through my PayHip storefront.

(Lastly, I will note that The Starlit Kingdom is a hack of Thou Art But A Warrior, which is powered by the Polaris system by Ben Lehman – who is awesome.)

Recent radio silence: on hiatus for one more week

Hello, friends.

The last few weeks I’ve been dealing with a pretty horrific collection of circumstances that have been sapping my bandwidth. Most of the stress has been coming from the day job, which I will be done with and out of as of next Friday.

I hope to be able to jump back on the horse right away and get back to blogging – there are several topics I’ve had in the back of my mind. It may take me a little bit to get back into the swing of things, but I just wanted to pop in and say that I’m not dead and I’m not turning my back on the blog. I just haven’t had the energy for anything creative, much less writing.

I’m not quite dead

I’ve been having a tough week and haven’t really managed to write anything. However, I did yell at Twitter a lot the other day about patriarchy and how it makes women crazy, and a friend Storifyed it here so maybe go check it out?

I’m still alive and still working on some stuff for the blog. However it’s big and time consuming and I’m running low on both time and bandwidth. Many apologies.

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Sidebar: Ruined Empire – my social justice-y campaign setting and sourcebook inspired by Final Fantasy – is finally available for sale now that the books have shipped to KickStarter backers. You can get it in print here, or in PDF either on my PayHip store (which makes me the most money) or DriveThru RPG.