The Only Girl at the Table: Notes from a Con

This is a post about some of my gaming experiences at Gen Con, a large convention where people play games for four days with lots of junk food and very little sleep.  Tens upon thousands of human beings gather together to do this, and one of the things that happens is that you and your friends, if any, sit down at tables with strangers, hoping against hope that they'll be nice, or fun, or (please oh please) at least tolerable and (ideally) showered as you join together as a unified group to do the thing you love. Such games can go spectacularly well, or they can be abysmal.  Most often, they're fun experiences with flaws.  I want to talk about a persistent flaw that carried over from game to game that I played in the Games on Demand room. 

First, however, this briefest of backgrounds.  My boyfriend and I learned to play Magic together about 20 years ago, which was a fun and lovely experience that is forever bound up in my memory with lounging around the living room, half-dressed, ordering pizza so we didn't have to find our pants or stop playing.  We played privately like that for years, and in fact, we didn't play with strangers, even at Friday Night Magic (FNM), until after we got married and had a kid who was old enough to play along with us.  Going to my first few FNMs felt like a shock that wouldn't wear off.  Whether we played on Friday nights, Saturday afternoons, or Monday nights in a 16K, I was never a real gamer; I was a real gamer's wife.  I was also very often the only woman in the tournament, which is an isolating experience on its best day, and on every day, a reminder that I didn't belong, not really.  I will never forget the day a blond guy came up to my opponent after our match and asked, "Dude, did you win?"  When my opponent shook his head, the guy said, "YOU GOT BEAT BY A GIRL?!"  He collapsed in a fit of laughter.  Defeating me didn't mean much either, though.  Of course guys beat girls.  Girls can't play Magic.

About a year later, I won a Pre-Release with more than 50 players in it, and I started trying to get more serious about the game, brewing up a deadly blue and white board control deck, play testing it for hours.  As it turned out, however, the higher the stakes, the less men want to get beat by a girl.  The behaviors escalated.  There was some pretty serious sniping.  One guy managed to do something no one else had ever done: He made me cry in a crowded room in the penultimate round of a tournament.  Unfortunately for him, he made a bad play with 35 or so people standing around, watching us, and the judge wouldn't let him take it back.  We drew.  Implicitly, that bad play became my fault. He dropped out of the tournament and spent the whole of my final match staring at me from across the table, about four seats down. I gave up even trying to win the tournament and allowed both of my opponent's Planeswalkers to go ultimate (i.e. I let him load two cannons and point them directly at my face), just to fucking see what would happen.  I stopped playing on Saturdays and Mondays.  I switched the format that I play on Fridays.  I don't like it when my hobbies make me feel like puking.

Last year, my husband made an interesting discovery: There are games other than Magic! Okay, okay, we all knew that already, but there are games that could overtake Magic in our hearts.  More specifically, there are RPGs in the world where you don't just slaughter goblins and loot their still-warm corpses.  On GooglePlus, my husband discovered a whole community of wildly creative independent RPG designers, many of whom - indeed, LOTS of whom - are women.  He also found them speaking about all kinds of issues that are politically important to us.  We played as many RPGs as we could squeeze into our days, and I liked all of them more than I had ever liked D&D. We talked about other games we wanted to buy at Gen Con.  We couldn't wait to get there.

It's quite possible that in my excitement about this online community, I might have made some overly generous assumptions about the people playing RPGs at Gen Con - to wit, that the players there would mirror the designers on GooglePlus in gender makeup and political coolness. Despite seeing women everywhere at Gen Con - far more, in fact, than we had seen the last time we were there - I kept finding myself as the only woman at the table.  And sometimes, that was fine.

But when people talked about the X card - that is, literally, the white card bearing the giant X that the Game Master (GM) places in the center of the table to be tapped or touched by any player who wants to signal discomfort with what's happening in the game - the men at the table looked at me.

And when I was one of three people whose characters decided to go investigate the noise down the hall, the GM didn't stray from his plan of having two baddies in that room.  Dude #1 got attacked, and he retaliated with lethal force, giving him two separate actions. Dude #2, same.  With my character standing behind Dude #2, eagerly awaiting her chance, the GM turned his head to the man next to him and said, "Let's move on to the outside."  Whoa!  Me, too?  I'm still here?  When I asserted my desire to have my turn, the man whose character was outside said, "Are you even going to do anything?"  That, I confess, really pissed me off.  I understand his point: There were two baddies, and they were already on the floor, dead.  But that's not my fault.  The GM could have invented a third baddie at any time.  Or put one in the pantry.  Or around the corner.  OR VERY LITERALLY ANYWHERE.  They were infesting our location, and they certainly seemed to be everywhere else.

The GM said, "I'm sorry; I guess I shouldn't let other players speak over you.  Go ahead."

Me: "Is there anything moving in the room?"
GM: "No.  What do you want to do?"
Me: "Go to my room and get my gun." 
GM: "Okay, you get your gun."  [Turns to next player, ending my turn]

Wow.

I don't mean to suggest that the GM was a jerk, because he seemed very nice, but by refusing to give me anything to interact with, he tacitly endorsed and actively perpetuated the idea that the only girl at the table had nothing to contribute and didn't even deserve the chance to try.  That felt superlatively shitty.  When I didn't get to take any actions on my next turn either, I assure you that didn't help my mood. 

The man facilitating the next game very kindly asked how I was doing, and when I referenced emerging from a rough game in which the GM seemed to forget my existence, he said, "I sense that you want to be listened to."  I laughed and agreed.  Unfortunately, the guy next to me went another way.  He had to have my turn re-narrated to him by his friend across the table for two rounds in a row because when I spoke, he apparently just . . . stopped listening.  No one else's narrative had to be summarized for this player, only mine.  From invisible to inaudible?  Seriously?!  That game turned out to be amazing, by the way, and I'm glad I pushed through the inaudible period, but there were several minutes there when I was fighting just to make myself stay at the table. 

We all want to escape for awhile when we role play, to have emotions and adventures and fantastical experiences.  Having to fight the internalized biases of other people at the table, however, is not the fun kind of escapist fighting.  That's just real life, needlessly and therefore cruelly reasserted in a fantasy space that's supposed to be enjoyable for everyone.  I'm certainly not giving up on RPGs, but I confess I'm inclined to stay home for awhile, guarding my table and playing it safe.