After an amazing event last October, the Queerness and Games Conference (QGCon) is back for 2014. QGCon runs from the evening of Friday, October 24 to the evening of Sunday, October 26. Registration is free and open to the public, and all sessions will take place in UC Berkeley’s beautiful South Hall. I couldn’t be more excited about this year’s line-up of speakers, talks, workshops, and games. The wonderful undergraduates from the Queerness and Games Design Workshop that I’ve been co-running over the last few months will be presenting as well, and I’m already very proud of what they’ve accomplished.

This year our keynote speakers and their talk titles are:
– Naomi Clark & Merritt Kopas, “Queerness and Beyond: Rethinking Human-Game Relations”
– Brenda Laurel, “Enabling Realities”
– Lisa Nakamura, “Racism, Sexism, and Social Justice Warriors in Video Games Culture”

Feel free to join us in Berkeley for as much or as little of the conference as you like. Thank you in advance to our generous volunteers and sponsors, without whom this unique opportunity for collaboration and queer visibility would not be possible. See you at QGCon 2014!

This summer I’ve been knees-deep teaching an intensive course on race in video games. I’ve taught games plenty of times before as part of classes on digital cultures and/or new media, but this is my first shot at all-games-all-the-time. One of my main tenants for students is that we don’t just talk about video games, we play them. Interactivity is, for obvious reasons, crucial when it comes to understanding games. I want the class to experience that together.

Playing games as a group sounded great on paper, but the reality has been challenging. Most classrooms and/or university media labs don’t have the resources to support access to expensive mainstream titles. Meanwhile the balance between long play-through times and busy teaching schedules makes pedagogical decisions tough. A new 80+-hour game has just come out; it seems right on target. How long do I need to play it before I responsibly present it to the class?

I’m also learning the importance of setting ground rules that make the classroom a safe space for all students to feel comfortable playing. For me, it’s crucial that the group doesn’t replicate the dynamics of sexism and one-upmanship so ingrained in gamer culture. This is especially important, and especially tricky, because any given bunch of undergraduates will likely include players with considerably different levels of experience and considerably different social backgrounds.

Here are the ground rules I’ve learned to set before the group plays a game together (students take timed turns on one-player games):

1. Watch carefully and think critically even when you’re not playing.
2. Never tell another player what to do or offer “help” unless they directly ask.
3. Be patient with yourself and others.
4. Don’t skip cut scenes or text boxes. Do feel free to explore.

And here’s one more ground rule I wish I’d set at the very beginning of the semester:

5. This is a class about viewing media critically. It is not about performing extensive outside gamer knowledge. References are fine, but our focus is the material at hand.

These ground rules help promote inclusivity by taking the wind out of competition and pressure. They encourage the group to watch with intellectual engagement and mutual support. Most of all, they make it clear that those who “do well” at the games we play or can list off obscure game facts are valued no more and no less than those who are still learning their way around the medium. We are experiencing video games, and experiencing them together.

I’ve been making my living writing about video games, in some sense or another, for nearly a decade. And like many woman in the industry, I regularly confront my own compulsive need to assert my gamer cred. The fact is, people still assume that being female means you’re not on the inside of gaming, not really “one of us.” Gamer cred is the currency you use to buy back the right to be considered a goddamn human being. In a games conversation with a homosocial gaggle of men who figure you’ve never held a controller, you’re invisible — until you bust out the Ocarina of Time reference, jangle around your N64 keychain, and roll your eyes at the success of whatever new title in whatever longstanding series is still nowhere as good as the original. Throw down!

Over the last couple of years there’s been a lot of talk about what makes women “real” or “fake” gamers (see the “Idiot Nerd Girl” meme). Long told by society that playing video games wasn’t girly enough, women are now being condemned for not being gamer-y enough — at least in the eyes of the insular, defensive gaming masses. They’re being accused of jumping on the nerd wagon for the sex appeal and glory (really, people?) without earning their cred through long years of dedicated play. See also: you’re pretty, you intimidate me, get out of my tree house. The feminist pushback has largely focused on the hypocrisy and the pervasiveness of “fake girl gamer” shaming. Female gamers are just as “real” as male ones; whether you like it or not, we have the cred to prove it.

The problem is that gamer cred as an institution is fundamentally sexist. Let’s think about what counts toward your “gamer cred” score. 1) How much you play games. 2) How you perform your own gamer-ness. 3) How long you’ve been playing games.

Let’s start with 1 and 2. Cultural expectations prescribed for women are different than those prescribed for men (duh). If I am male, the contemporary culture around me encourages me to play games. I see other men playing games on TV and in movies. I have been socialized to bond with other men by challenging each other to rounds of Smash Bros. I have also been encouraged to perform my gamer-ness in loud, proud strokes. A wide array of t-shirts and paraphernalia specific to boy bodies is available to me. If I am female, on the other hand, I may play games a lot, or I may play games less frequently. I may socialize through gaming, or I may not. I may rock a games shirt (despite my limited options), or I may “pass” as a “normal” lady in normal lady clothes. But when I make those choices, I make them under a different set of conditions than men do. Your cred is not my cred. When you claim they’re the same, that there’s some objective scale, you impose on me a male standard that I’m going to have to fight uphill hard to live up to. And that’s straight up discrimination.

But it’s 3 I want to focus on: the incredibly sexist idea that you have more cred the longer you’ve been playing video games. You’ve seen the slogan with the NES controller: “Know your roots.” Let me make a confession, a confession that I have made to groups of male gamers before, a confession that is always met with looks of surprise and mild disdain. Here it goes. My first video game console was the N64. My first console game was Mario 64. Before the age of twelve, I had only ever touched a computer game. Now you know my shame. As a (male) fellow journalist once said upon hearing this, “Wow, Bonnie, I thought you had cred.”

Let me tell you something about a system like the Super NES, which came out in 1991, when I was six years old. No six-year-old buys her own game console. She plays with the toys that are bought for her, and what is bought for her is dictated by what society tells her parents are right for her age and gender. If I had waited until I could buy my own game consoles, I wouldn’t have started playing until I was sixteen and bought a GameCube (the horror). As it stands, the only reason I had access to a Nintendo 64 was because my little brother — who was around six himself when the console came out — got one for Hannukah. Like so many young girls, I had access to video games only through my brother. This isn’t because I wasn’t a “real” gamer. It’s because I was a girl.

When you judge gamer cred by how long someone has been playing, you discriminate against them based on factors outside of their control. You discriminate against women. You discriminate against people of color. You discriminate against those raised poor. We are here now, and we make the choice to play games. Counting our cred based on our past reveals how little you know about what it means to “really” love something, and what it means to just “fake” it.

Things are still winding down from the wonder that was the Queerness and Games Conference. Video of the talks is now available online. Many touching thank-yous have been sent and received. Polygon’s Danielle Riendeau and UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian both honored us with thoughtful, insightful write-ups. My favorite quote, from Danielle: “I can’t imagine something like this existing ten — or even five — years ago, but now, I can’t imagine a future without it and other similar events.”

In that spirit, it’s been important to us to find ways to keep the ball rolling, and that means sharing what we learned from the event so that others can create their own inclusive, alternative games conferences. In my last post, I outlined our event budget. This time I want to talk about our major steps and timeline. The short version: the event, which was held at the end of October, 2013, took about nine months to create. Communication, organization, persistence, and a diverse and dedicated team of organizers was crucial. Here was our process, broken down into 10 steps:

1. The idea (December, 2012). “What we need is a conference about queerness and games!” proclaims Bonnie in a fit of wide-eyed idealism. Finding your idea means more than enthusiasm though. It also means knowing the field. Does your topic interest others? Is it currently underserved by the community? Can you imagine it becoming a conference?

2. The organizers (February, 2013). The Queerness and Games Conference didn’t become real until it had a strong team of organizers. For us diversity was key. By chatting with friends, listening through the grapevine, and reaching out into the unknown, we ended up with the perfect team that bridged academics and game development.

3. The date and location (March, 2013). The earlier you can lock down your days and your venue, the better. Knowing helped up present a concrete plan to potential speakers and sponsors.

4. Web presence and registration (March, 2013). Having a website and Twitter feed as soon as possible gave us somewhere to send people who wanted to learn more about the event. We used pretty basic tools for this, like WordPress and Eventbrite, so that the organizers could leap into creating our web presence as fast and easily as possible.

5. Writing the CFP and soliciting speakers (April, 2013). A call for papers is pretty standard in conference land. For us, however, we had a few different types of person to appeal to: academics, game developers, etc. We ended up writing an academic CFP as well as an adapted version for the website. We sent this out through public channels, and we also used it when we contacted individuals who we thought would make rad participants.

6. Funding (April, 2013). As I’ve mentioned, all of our funding came from university departments. We emailed or spoke to department heads individually, followed up doggedly, and made sure that our endless paperwork was in order.

7. Selecting and scheduling talks (July, August, September 2013). This takes a long time, in part because it requires being in regular contact with a lot of people. Our speakers had to submit their abstracts by July. In August we sent them feedback. In September we began collecting info on who was definitely coming, when they could speak, etc. By the end of September our schedule was set.

8. The volunteers (September, 2013). Also in September we tracked down volunteers. We found that doing a general online call for volunteers wasn’t too successful, but asking our friends, family, and coworkers turned up some amazing people.

9. Advertise, advertise, advertise (October, 2013). In a way, we’d been advertising through our web presence since the spring, but we definitely stepped up our game in the month before the conference. We had flyers, post cards, and posters — yes, like made of dead trees — that we plastered around campus. We sent out emails to related university departments. We posted a ton of friendly reminders on our Twitter feed.

10. Crunch time (late October, 2013). And then everything happened at once. In the final weeks we were active all the time: designing and printing the programs, locking down the catering, managing last-minute speaker crises, etc. This was definitely a good time to have blocked out with no other obligations.

Conference time! October 25 – 27, 2013. Also, we’re finding that It’s good to plan for about a month of post-conference work as well. This, so far, has involved things like getting speakers their honorariums, posting online content, and writing follow-up pieces like this one.

Yes, all in all, it’s a lot of hard work, but it’s totally worth it, and (with patience, passion, and a team of awesome people) it’s very doable. Now YOU try, because we want to hang out at your conferences.

Last week’s Queerness and Games Conference was more inspiring than we organizers ever could have imagined. During our final session, where we discussed the future of queerness and games, many participants expressed interest in starting conferences like QGCon in their own communities and/or universities. That is rad. After nine months of making QGCon a reality, there’s a lot of nitty-gritty insight into the process that I’d like to share, in the hopes that we can make your road to organizing a shoestring game conference a little less mysterious. So let’s talk about money,

One thing to remember before I toss out a bunch of numbers: the Queerness and Games Conference was free, free-ity, free. Huzzah for financial inclusivity! However, that meant that none of our funding came from ticket sales (though, if we had it to do again, we would have added the EventBrite “donate” button to our site much sooner). As a basic comparison, here is how the cost of attending QGCon compared to the cost of other popular 2013 games conferences:

Game Developer’s Conference, all-access pass: $2,100
Indie Cade, all-access pass: $450
Penny Arcade Expo, four-day pass: $95
GaymerX, three-day pass: $70
Different Games: free
Lost Levels: free

Given that, we’re particularly proud that we pulled off the following budget, though admittedly by the skin our teeth. First off, here is a list of everything that we spent money on:

$1,400: keynote speaker (travel and accommodations covered)
$400: featured speakers (travel and accommodations partially covered)
$1,250: space rental (technically one lecture hall and one classroom, but we really a whole building)
$300: printing (posters, post cards, 200 programs)
$65: assorted materials (name badges, plates and napkins)
$420: breakfast Saturday and Sunday (coffee, bagels, and fruit for 40)
$510: lunch for speakers/volunteers Saturday and Sunday (burritos for 30)
$200: dinner for night games (pizza for 50)
$540: speaker and volunteer dinner (Mexican food buffet for 40)
$95: drinks (wine, bottled water, soda)
—Total spent: $5,180

You’ll notice that a large chunk of our budget went into food. On first glance, that might seem unnecessary ($200 for pizza?). However, it was important to us to promote conviviality and a sense of community. Providing meals encouraged people to spend more time at the event space. It also allowed speakers and volunteers to grab food between sessions without stressing about local eating options. Plus, free food made the conference more financially accessible to speakers and attendees from out of town. Another large chunk of our funds went to speakers. It was important to us, as much as possible, to use our funding to promote accessibility and diversity, which meant finding ways to include participants from beyond the Bay Area.

Where did we get that money? All of our funding came from academic departments on UC Berkeley campus. If you’re also looking for university funding, we recommend searching widely; think interdisciplinary. Some departments will likely shake their heads at your silly games. Others will like the snazzy idea of a games conference. Keep on pushing and prodding, and eventually the numbers will add up. Note: despite some concerns about corporate presence at the event, we did approach a handful of games companies for support. All of them turned us down, even those with dedicated “diversity” departments. Here is where our money ultimately came from:

$1,210: Berkeley Center for New Media
$1,500: Dean of Arts and Humanities
$500: Townsend Center for Humanities
$500: Department of Film & Media
$500: School of Information
$400: German Department
$200: New Media Working Group
$200: Comparative Literature Department
$100: Gender & Women’s Studies Department
—Total funding: $5,110

Anecdotal evidence from conversations I’ve had with grad students organizing conferences on more traditional topics tells me that $5,000 is in the low-to-middle for a weekend-long event. These other conferences also included significantly fewer speakers and participants (and significantly less tasty pizza). If you were operating on an even smaller budget, you could 1) spring for less food, 2) try to find a space that’s donated instead of rented and 3) do less dead-tree printing and offer more purely web-based materials.

Given the modest nature of our funding, we got creative in a few places to help keep our costs down. First, we arranged home stays with friends instead of stipends for our speakers who needed help with accommodations. Next, we printed a lot of our less formal materials on a departmental printer. In terms of people hours, we had an enormous amount of support from a core of volunteers, whose expertise replaced the cost of A/V help, etc. Finally, we ended up cutting out one of our free food moments — the closing reception, which was supposed to have wine, cheese, etc. Instead, we announced to the crowd that we were our of money (seriously), but that they should feel free to hang out, chat, and enjoy each other’s already intoxicating company.

Next time around, assuming there is a next time around (fingers crossed), we’re hoping that the success of QGCon 2013 will help us raise funds with a bit more eeeeeeease. In the mean time, though, we are grateful to all of our sponsors, our volunteers, our speakers — and everyone who made the Queerness and Games Conference amazing, even on a shoestring budget!