Star Crossed Musing

Last week I thought to myself, "Self, you need to do a blog post." In trying to think of what this blog post would be about, I thought that maybe covering stuff that had happened in gaming last year from and by women would be a good topic. The problem, of course, was that I didn't have any data. I made a Facebook post querying about interest in the topic and whether people would help with information, and someone on my list suggested asking what women had been playing last year. I pondered this and decided that a "year in review" survey might be a good idea. I then took a few days of messing with Google Forms and ended up with the survey you see a portion of above. I thought I might get as many as a couple of hundred responses, assuming people were interested. Oh, what a sweet summer child past Me was. On Monday, January 9th, I started sending out the links to it. I posted it on Facebook, G+, and Twitter -- once each. It went live at 4:30 PM EST that day...

I did not Game Chef this year. I wanted to, and thought I might, but then this whole bronchitis/hives/low potassium/dissertation thing happened and I was like, yeah, maybe not. And so I didn't. No one in the McFarland household did, although my stepdaughter at least came up with an idea. From what I've seen on G+, a lot of people were really taken with the theme and ingredients, though, and there look to be a number of fun entries to come out of it, which is awesome.  One of the things I've been musing on since I decided not to do Game Chef this year, though, is how high the bar to entry actually is for making room in game design for new designers. I mean, on the face of it, it's simple. Anyone can design a game, any time. But in reality, game design is a time sink. You need free time to think, to plan, to come up with mock-ups, to play, to write. You need stability and space and a way to find at least an hour every few days to yourself when you're not so exh...

Now THAT, my friends, is a title. But I digress. This is me. Taken last fall, over on campus. I have too many things to carry with straps, as you can see. I am also heavier than I would like, but I've largely made peace with that. Also, I have this weird camera smile. I blame the overbite. But whatever. I am cis, female-identified, heterosexual. I have glasses and I dye my hair purple in places. I also, although this picture does not show it, have boobs. My chest is not going to go down in history as one of the perfect chests of womankind. I am no Phryne. But breasts, I have them. And now that that's settled... I am also a game designer. A game designer, and I have boobs! Imagine! How did this happen, may you ask. Were they added later? [No.] Do I have a secret lab of subordinate male game designers whose work I claim as my own, in exchange for baked goods (as that's one of the things that breasts enable, right)? [Er, No. How weird. What a terrible supervillain that w...

So this is related to the kerfluffle regarding Emerald City Tabletop Coalition, OrcaCon & GeekGirlCon, and Chance Daniels. I'll start by saying I am connected to some of these people online via friends of friends, but don't know them personally. You can get caught up on the origin of the story here:  http://jessicalprice.tumblr.com/ FYI, I don't know Jessica personally, though I think we've met at a con once? I follow her on twitter and such because we're in the same community and I hear good things about her work. Reportedly, for the tl;dr version, ECTC removed mentions of OrcaCon from their feed because they viewed it as a "3-day political event that also had some gaming," and Chance stated that they/he viewed GeekGirlCon the same way. OrcaCon, fyi, is a new gaming con held in Everett, WA in January that has an inclusive focus; the theme for 2017, according to their website, isn't dragons or robots or superheroes, but rather "Race and Ac...

So designing games. One of the weird things I've discovered over the past year is that I actually have ideas about games. I have the game I made for Game Chef (called Vovetas), I have another all-ages game I'm still working out, I have Daedalus, and I have A Comedy in Five Acts still on my plate, in addition to some far flung ideas about the steampunk mad scientist game, and a couple other RPGs and other things that I'm doing freelance (and, you know, my dissertation and syllabi and whatnot but lets not talk about that right now ). I have discovered during this period of time that yes, I really am a game designer. Not just a mechanics inventor or writer or editor, but a designer, designing games from scratch. I have opinions about what works and what doesn't, and although I don't get things right all the time, I get them right often enough in games that I feel as though this is not going to be something I give up lightly. I think it's especially important gi...

Sandra Bland. A professional woman who'd gotten a job in student outreach at her alma mater in Texas. She looks like someone who would be good at that, doesn't she? She's got a great smile, good taste, and friendly eyes. Sadly, pictures are all we have to go on anymore, because she's dead. She's not the first black woman or man to be killed in police custody for doing nothing in particular wrong in the first place. She joins a long line of what are by this point martyrs. The list is too long and varied at this point not to acknowledge it, stretching back centuries and renewing itself unwillingly on a daily basis. We deny it at our peril, all of us -- and by us, I mean the people who don't live this reality daily and thus don't have to recognize it. It's our "privilege," by which I mean our fault. An African-American friend of mine, someone I admire, tweeted about how he was really nervous about driving his family cross country to visit hi...

That sounded way more exciting than it is. It's the weekend. My kids are around, and they're watching screens, as kids do when they're not being forced to do something else. The something else is coming, so they get some screen time this morning without me making a fuss. Choose your battles, etc. Also, it's hot out today and I don't feel I can, in good conscience, make them go outside until it cools off a bit this evening. Went to see Ant Man Friday night, and I really enjoyed it -- far more than I thought I would. Paul Rudd was very good, mostly playing a straight man for Michael Douglas (who completely rocked, btw) and Evangeline Lilly (who also completely rocked). The plot was a bit disjointed at times -- no movie involving significant shape change "science" is going to be wholly on point -- but we got as much backstory as we needed, and a lot of focus on the personal relationships and stuff to keep the plot rolling. I'm looking forward to seein...

This is the best damn cheesecake I have ever made. I win. Note: potential eating disorder triggers below. I've never had an eating disorder. If anything, I've let myself go the opposite direction. I'm overweight by something like 60 lbs, by my reckoning, though if you were to ask a physician based solely on BMI, they'd likely say something closer to 80 lbs. I have scoliosis and my ankles are prone to giving me hell, and in recent years I've heard a mysterious crackling sound in one knee. I also have high blood pressure, currently controlled through medication, and a history of heart disease and stroke in my family. I really need to lose some goddamn weight, as Patton Oswalt would say. My aunt, on the other hand, did have an eating disorder. She was 10 years older than I was at the time I remember figuring out something was wrong, which puts her in high school while I was in grade school. She would eat almost nothing, and it was typically a fight to get an...

Seems that way to me, at least. And I've got so much to post about! I've had a semester, and went to New Orleans, and worked on Chill, and had my kids out for spring break, and and and.... whew. No wonder I feel like I just rode a whirlwind. I'll get it all sorted and post something more meaningful about all of it soon, however. For today, I want to talk about this: Stuff for Girls. So, Chuck Wendig wrote a great piece here , like he does. And in doing so, he points out (without getting all about the menz) how gender divisions can run the risk of reinforcing stereotypes for men even with the best intentions. He gets why having something called out in specific invitation of girls is important, but at the same time, it has the possibility of "ghetto"-izing an intended audience and the material designed for it, rendering it "off-limits" to the mainstream, and hence keeping it from both being normalized and educating those who need to see what it's l...

On Facebook,  Chuck Wendig  pointed out a controversy involving a YA author named Andrew Smith. I do not read a lot of YA fiction currently (heck, I don't read a lot of non-eighteenth-century fiction currently -- grad school will do that to you) but I'm told that his work is very good. Recently he did an interview online where in he made a sort-of-odd statement in response to being asked where all the women were in his work. Thanks to a tumblr post then commenting on the inherent sexism its author saw in Smith's response, the YA world on the Internet apparently blew up. Smith's books are YA fiction for boys, about boys, with all the questioning of sexuality and what it means to be a man and how to find your own way in a world that is anything but clear that would seem inherent in that. There are apparently women in them, but as secondary characters at best. In today's female saturated YA market, that means his books are actually pretty unusual -- boys are not the...

So, I have hit a new game design threshold today -- I found a game system that I appreciate as a player, but I have no real interest in designing anything for it, as does the thing it does and doesn't have a lot of room for customization. That's not a bad thing, especially if your goals for game theme line up with the themes of that rules system. I'm a hippy indie gamer at heart, though, apparently, and I really have a thing for custom (or customized) rules systems that focus on bringing out a particular feel in a game. This is not to say that universal systems are bad, but rather that they aren't my choice anymore -- and I say that as someone who came up in the industry during the d20 boom. I mention this primarily because I think one of the underrated things about game design, particularly as a woman in game design, is having opinions about games. And I don't mean ethical or cultural or feminist opinions, because those are actually expected and hang like neat ...

Image property of Geek Chic  So, today I found a thoughtful and well-written piece by Eytan Bernstein published over at Kobold Press called " The Many Faces of Gaming: Female Gamers ." I appreciated his thoughtful and considered approach to the topic women in gaming, but even as I read it, and thought about how people I admire cared enough to approach this topic with care and consideration (Wolfgang and Shelly Baur are both friends and awesome people, for example, and I have nothing but good words for Kobold Press)... something bothered me. Again, no slight toward anyone behind the article. It just... it's like a splinter you can't see, you know? It's not anything you realizing until something rubs up against it. So I thought about it a lot, and finally, I realized what it came down to. Eytan's piece is careful in counseling how to deal with women gamers from a male perspective and ensure that your gaming group is an inclusive, welcoming place. There...

I'm currently reading James Gibson's The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception , which seems like it would have nothing to do with literature at all -- except you'd be wrong. (It also seems like it'd be boring, but you'd be wrong there too, amazingly enough.) Basically, this book applies early systems theory to visual perception and moves it outside the eye and into the environment in a very painterly, "what sort of things do we actually see and interact with" sort of way. In it, he puts forward the theory of affordances, which is basically that things give us opportunities or possibilities when we interact with them depending on their physical qualities. That sounds simple enough on the surface, but really there's a wealth of applicability there to things beyond just the environment, particularly when it comes to literature. If we look at literature as an assembly of concepts (setting, characters, plot, genre conventions, objects), then it'...