Welcome to my first podcast in an ongoing series about my PhD dissertation on #boardgaming the #boardgameindustry and #gamedesign. I am fairly unique in the world for having done an entire #dissertation about modern #hobby #boardgames. I'm going to post regular episodes of this podcast every week starting next Monday.
Chapter One: Learning the Game: Board Games, Power, Cultures and Change
“People don’t like change, particularly when something has been so engrained, for so long.” ~Mandi Hutchinson, content creator, and founder of Salt and Sass in 2018.
Preamble: The Hand We’ve Been Dealt
In the summer of 2020, one of the largest board gaming conventions in the industry was in trouble. In the late afternoon of June 10, days before this industry gathering was set to begin, the North American board game industry establishment was roiled by a series of vocal protests led by women, LGBTQiIA+, and Black, Indigenous, and Persons of Colour (BIPOC) players and industry influencers. The protests started when one of the largest and most influential board gaming associations in North America, the Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA), was spotlighted for keeping silent about the Black Lives Matter movement, a silence which was in keeping with an overall lack of support for BIPOC community members over the years (Jarvis, 2020). GAMA is the organizer of Origins, a key institution in the board game industry since it was started in 1975 by a group of wargamers by the name of the Interest Group Baltimore (Exhibit City News, 2012). Origins has been a pivotal annual event in the board gaming sector, attracting more than 20,642 attendees in 2019 and driving board gaming sales (Origins, 2019).
In 2020, when the traditional, in-person convention was canceled because of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the GAMA team, contributors and volunteers scrambled to mount a virtual conference. Slated for June 19-21, 2020, Origins Online planned to host panels with a board game industry who’s who, including: award-winning designer Elizabeth Hargrave; Eric Lang, the prolific Black game designer responsible for the top-selling game Blood Rage; Black designer Omari Akil; Mandi Hutchinson, long-time contributor to The Dice Tower, one of the leading tabletop games review sites, and a Black tabletop content creator; Black board game reviewer and content creator Jeremy Howard, a host from the channel Man vs. Meeple; and publishers Restoration Games and Leder Games.
In the wake of the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, industry players in the video game space such as Microsoft, Sony, and Riot Games (also the maker of a popular board game called Mechs vs. Minions) spoke up in support of the Black Lives Matter protests happening around the world (Taylor, 2020; Jarvis, 2020). GAMA and Origins organizers were notably silent. As the date for the virtual event neared, Hutchinson, along with other women and BIPOC game designers, artists, enthusiasts and content creators, called for Origins Online organizers and GAMA to make a statement reinforcing the message of diversity and inclusion in gaming, and urged GAMA and Origins organizers to publicly state support for the Black Lives Matter movement. After a chorus of calls for a statement, Origins Online organizers continued to remain silent (Jarvis, 2020). At 2:04 p.m. June 10, Hutchinson tweeted, “After careful consideration, I have decided to step down from my hosting duties at Origins...” (Hutchinson, 2020). After Hutchinson announced her decision, a cascade of cancellations followed over the next few hours. Eric Lang wrote hours later: “I'm afraid I'll be stepping down as a guest of Origins TV, in solidarity with fellow POC [persons of colour] hosts and guests who have also stepped down. Sorry all” (Lang, 2020). In the early evening, Elizabeth Hargrave wrote: “...Now many POC [persons of colour] have withdrawn over @TheGAMAOnline refusal to say that Black lives matter. I stand in solidarity and won't do Origins Online without them” (Hargrave-a, 2020).
Origins Online participants and exhibitors continued to announce their solidarity with the hosts who announced their departures and dropped out, hour after hour, until finally Origins Online organizers issued a statement cancelling the entire event outright later that same evening, stating: “We cannot responsibly hold our virtual convention, Origins Online, in this setting. Even if it were possible to hold it, it would not be appropriate to do so. So, we are announcing here that Origins Online is cancelled.” (Origins, 2020). The GAMA statement made no mention of the BIPOC and women members of the industry who took a stand, leaving some in the industry and hobby to declare a permanent break from GAMA and Origins. Leder Games, makers of an award-winning tabletop wargame called Root announced the following day that they were severing all ties with the convention going forward. Further, Leder vowed never to participate in any GAMA-sanctioned events/convention again, and that the publisher would return its Origin awards, stop displaying the awards emblem on their games, and donate their Origins Online refunded booking fees to the Black Visions Collective, a non-profit organization in Minnesota focused on Black liberation. Another long-time member of the industry, Scott Nicholson, a Wilfrid Laurier University professor, Director of the Brantford Games Network, and celebrated LGBTQiIA+ board game designer wrote that GAMA and Origins had “lost my trust” and he would not participate in Origins “in any form” in the future (Nicholson, 2020).
GAMA is very influential in the games industry, and to some, GAMA is considered the mainstream establishment of the hobby board game industry. BIPOC, LGBTQiIA+ and women in game design, publishing and content creation were voicing their opposition to the GAMA-run show at great professional risk. Formed in 1977, GAMA describes itself as the “premier trade association for the hobby games industry” (GAMA, 2020) and, today, GAMA represents thousands of board game publishers, and the retailers and distributors of board games. GAMA did not experience its reckoning alone. Days later, a similar exodus of staff and contributors occurred at a board game site called Everything Board Games, with 17 reviewers quitting simultaneously because the site refused to make a statement about Black Lives Matter, and the leadership refused to allow any discussion on the site about social justice issues (MamaGames, 2020). The site’s editor responded by calling the former reviewers' joint statement “false and defamatory” and accused them of engaging in “lies and cyber bullying”, adding that the board game review site had “no interest in virtue signaling, requiring the membership of our community to prove their moral and ideological purity, and all the other nonsense that comes with adopting that kind of mindset” (Leafty, 2020).
In parallel to these events, there was a spate of resignations from the company that makes the best-selling party game and popular staple in the tabletop industry Cards Against Humanity. The Cards Against Humanity organization has been said to be a toxic, abusive work environment particularly to “women, particularly women of colour” (Sarkeesian, 2020). A whistle-blower and former employee of CAH’s publishing company, Theresa Stewart, a Black LGBTQiIA+ woman, accused company head, Max Temkin, of creating a company culture that enabled sexist and racist harassment (Stewart, 2020). Feminist Frequency founder and media analyst Anita Sarkeesian (2020) acknowledged that she was “complicit” in not doing more to call out the problems within the company, for accepting donations from Temkin, and conducting herself with “passivity and continued silence” when she heard the accusations against Temkin and CAH.
This cross-section of protests represented a convergence of calls for increased support for women, BIPOC, and LGBTQiIA+ players and industry members in the board gaming industry and hobby. What do these 2020 protests reveal about the state of the North American board gaming industry, especially in regard to the dynamics of equity, diversity and inclusion in board gaming? The board gaming sector continues to undergo gender and racial reckonings, mirroring other evolutions and revolutions happening in other cultural and industry spaces. I’ll explore the dynamics at play in the board game sector and hobby in the episodes that follow.
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