Go Make Me A Sandwich

It occurred to me I hadn't posted this over here yet. I've started a new blog about sexism in gaming called Go Make Me A Sandwich. You can check it out over here.

Sexism in Gaming: A list of links

At GenCon this year, Simon Rogers asked if I was interested in writing an article about sexism in gaming for a new issue of See Page XX. Sexism in gaming is a pretty huge topic, and I wound up taking a pretty narrow focus for the article. Initially, however, while I was trying to determine what direction to take the article, I amassed a pretty impressive list of links that I wanted to organize and make public.

So! Keep your eyes peeled for the new issue of See Page XX. But in the mean time, here's some food for thought:

Detailed Analysis of 300ish Covers of Dragon Magazine

Part One of Seven (links to subsequent posts)

Response from Editor of Dragon Magazine


The Infamous Quote By Jonathan Tweet About Evolutionary Psychology and Gaming

John Kim's LiveJournal entry with the offending paragraph (the original post has been removed)

A scientifically-minded response to Tweet that blows him out of the water: Gaming is Not a Genetic Trait, Part 1 and Part 2


Holy Shit, What the F*ck is Gamecrush.com??

GameCrush.com: Find a play date

Explanation of GameCrush.com's business model

Gallery of Porn-tacular GameCrush profile pics (now with horrid comments!)


Sexual Harassment in Gaming (I can't believe this needs sub-headings)

Jade Raymond (Assassin's Creed) v. Something Awful

Detailed explanation of chronology of harassment of Jade Raymond

Ubisoft's legal response and SA's response

Horrific "she had it coming" response

Another awful "she had it coming"

Another "she had it coming" with actual comic excerpt (NSFW)

The full comic (NSFW. Warning: It's pretty horrific.)

Completely remorseless response by the comic's creator

"Where's Jade?" forum thread afterward


StarCraft II forum harassment

Summary of harassment incident on Team Liquid's StarCraft II forum

The actual thread (you have to be logged in to view)


EA Fail: Sexual harassment as a promotion

EA puts a sexual bounty on its booth babes' heads

Good critique of dangers of this promotion

"She had it coming" and rebuttal

Guy who won a prize and declined it

EA's "apology" - since retracted

EA Fail link roundup


Sexism in World of Warcraft

Awesome, awesome, awesome article about sexism in WoW

WoW Lore breakdown

Claims of "reverse sexism" and forum comments by female anti-feminist

"Deal with it or don't play WoW"

Trying (and failing) to have a conversation about sexism in gaming


Sexism in Game Ads

Video games as women that beat you

Discover the luscious hills and valleys of Rappelz (and here, and here)(Maybe NSFW)

Awesome chronology of Evony ads

Evony sues blogger for defamation over criticism of ads

Amazing Evony ad spoofs

Most sexist game ads


Relevant Forum Threads

StoryGames: Is Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress sexist or not?

StoryGames: Sex with chainsaws? Not sexist? Really? (start with post #4)

StoryGames: Racism (and sexism to a lesser extent) in the 4E PHB (turns into a bit of a shoutfest)

StoryGames: Gender and gaming

StoryGames: Why don't women play roleplaying games? (actually quite positive)

StoryGames: What do you want to know about minorities in roleplaying games? (not all that useful)

StoryGames: Maid RPG (quickly devolves into uselessness)

D&D: Gender violence in gaming (absolutely horrific)


Statistics

Nick Yee: WoW demographics - 2005

Men v. women in app gaming

Women outnumber men in online games

EQII demographics

Numbers of women in gaming


Women in game development

Sexism in game development

Facebook gets women into game development

100 most influential women in game development


Miscellaneous Articles

BBC: Female Everquest avatars sell for less than male avatars

Female characters in video games are designed to appeal to men

Sexism at E3

Excellent Breakdown of the fiasco at the PAX East Women in Gaming panel

Collectible porn cards in The Witcher

Frag Dolls

How D&D started a forum FOR women in gaming, closed it, and started another one to talk ABOUT women in gaming.

Female apologist for sexism and rebuttal

Derailing for Dummies

The One Girl in RPG comics

Are D&D encounters sexist?

Sex scenes in games

Terrible article, but good photoset

Converting chainmail bikinis to fully-clothed avatars that are still sexy

Careers for girls

Not that you care, but...

I updated the links list on the side there, since half of them were either abandoned or defunct.

Also, I've started re-vamping Under The Sun - my Game Chef entry. Hopefully I'll have a more complete version to show off soon, though laying out Thou Art But A Warrior remains a priority.

Finished!

So I just squeaked in under the deadline, but I finished my Game Chef game! I'm feeling pretty good about myself, since this is the third time I've attempted to do Game Chef but only the first time I've finished anything.

Under the Sun
The good spirits have spoken. In order that the People are not entirely destroyed, your tribe must journey into the heart of the Deepest Desert to find the Promised Land – a land that until now was thought only to exist in myth and legend. Will you have the strength to survive?

It's a super-rough draft, but you can find it here. I'm going to give it a week or so of lying fallow and then I'm going to go back and start adding all the stuff that I didn't have time to add in for Game Chef.

Fiasco playset: GenCon

After I recovered from the sleep deprivation and mild insanity that always results from attending GenCon, it occured to me that GenCon would make a perfect playset. Think about it, tons of nerds with no sleep, lots of booze and/or caffeine, and easily-provoked nerd rage are just a fiasco waiting to happen. So here for your Fiasco enjoyment is GenCon: The Worst Four Days In Gaming.

Big thanks to Travis Farber and Nick Frankenhauser for helping me playtest it. And thanks to Jason Morningstar for giving me excellent advice that helped me make this as terrible and awful as it could possibly be.

Game Chef 2010: My entry

The ingredients this year instantly made me think of my time in Egypt. The Theme this year is Journey, and the 3 ingredients I'm working with are Edge, City, and Desert. This will be a game about a tribe of people on the edge of survival, trying to survive in the desert.

My Game Chef Thread can be found here if you're interested in following the contest.

Sagefight.org

New edition of Thou Art But A Warrior! (Plus updates on other projects)

(Quick note: Yes I know my website is down. Again. It'll be back up soon.)

It's been a while since I posted - I've been a busy, busy geek. Since it's been so long I thought I'd give an update on various projects that I'm working on. But first, my plans for the revised edition of...

Thou Art But A Warrior

I've mentioned a few places online that I'm working on a revised edition of Thou Art But A Warrior. The past few years, I've encountered some issues with play that have led me to want to make some changes. Also, sales have pretty much slowed to a small trickle, which I attribute to the fact that Thou Art But A Warrior is a supplement. $30 is a tough sell for a supplement and the base game in this economy.

After some examination of my numbers, and looking back at my experience last year trying to sell Thou Art But A Warrior as part of Pirate Jenny, I've come to the conclusion that most of the people who own Polaris and are interested in Thou Art But A Warrior already own the supplement. For people who don't own Polaris, the price of both books is acting as a barrier. Ben has been kind enough to give me permission to release an edition of Thou Art But A Warrior that includes the Polaris system.

This represents a substantial addition to the book, effectively doubling the amount of text. It required a lot of writing, and re-writing, and more re-writing, but I did finish a first draft and that draft is currently being edited by my long-suffering husband who I voluntell to help me with my projects for no pay. (I love you, sweetie!) Currently, it's too early to say what price point I will be targeting, but I can say that I would like to include color in the new edition if it's at all feasible. I can say that I plan on releasing the revised edition for the end of this year.

As for the current book, there are a few print copies of Thou Art But A Warrior in stock. I plan on letting the book go out of print, which means once they're gone they're gone. My struggle to access a professional copy of Acrobat that will let me add bookmarks continues, but I have every intention to start selling PDFs once I have run out of books, and anybody that buys the unrevised PDF will receive a free copy of the revised supplement PDF once revisions are complete. At the very latest, I will have PDFs for sale around mid-August.

Lastly, while the book is being edited, I've also been working hard on completely re-vamping the design of the book. When I published the first edition, I gave myself a month and a half to do the layout and all the illustrations. Considering that I laid the book out in Word, that wasn't nearly enough time. As a result, I wound up rushing the interior illustrations and I've never really been happy with the quality of the artwork. Since the interior design is changing anyhow, this is a good chance to re-work the illustrations for the new edition. I've already penciled two updates to existing illustrations in the book that I may or may not add color to digitally. (Experimentation is in order.)

The first (graphite and white prismacolor on tan sketch paper):

With the old illustration, I was super happy with how the fabrics and the swords came out, but I always hated the anatomy and the faces. I also thought the shading was kind of flat. I'm much more pleased with the new version.

I also did a new drawing for the Islamic angel that appears as an illustration. Here's the old version.

Not bad. It was actually my favorite illustration from the previous edition, but I'm not crazy about the face or the wings. The drapery is nice in spots, like with the sash. But overall, I thought I could do much better if I had more time to do it right. Which is why I drew this:

MUCH better. The wings don't feel stiff, the shading is much more interesting with the hand as a light source, and the drapery looks much more natural. (Click to view a larger version. I'm very proud of the subtle shading.)

So that's it for Thou Art But A Warrior. I think it's safe to say that things are proceeding well. I just hope I can get my hands on a copy of InDesign by the time that it's time to start doing layout!

And now, something completely different: A card game

I've been cheating on Black Sky lately. There are several problems that I'm not sure how to fix, so I'm letting it lie fallow for a while. In the mean time, I've been working on a silly card game about playing MMOs. I have to admit that the original idea came from Cape Freak, but he's taking his MMO card game in more of a dungeoneering direction. So I decided to design the MMO card game that I wanted to play - game about MMO economies and screwing over your fellow player. I just finished the prototype deck yesterday:

Now I just need to give this baby a test run and see if it's any fun. I hope it will be fun, but who can tell?

That novel I've been promising to write

I've been working on this novel off and on for the last two years, obsessively outlining the plot and detailing all kinds of background information. Lately I started actually writing the damn thing. Currently, I'm ~15,000 words in - significantly further than when I attempted this thing last time.

It's amusing that the valuable lesson I'm applying from having completed NaNoWriMo is that I'm giving myself permission to not write perfectly. I'm not writing at the break-neck, mind-numbing NaNoWriMo speed that results in huge volumes of crap, but I'm not spending two hours on four paragraphs either. That's what re-writes are for.

I feel good about this. This is something I will finish. I just hope I don't take too long about it.


And that is all for now.

Tea Party: some commentary

My struggle to acquire a copy of InDesign continues. I hope to God that I get it soon, because I did all of the layout for Tea Party in Word, which was enough to make me want to scratch my eyes out! I did eventually get it to look the way I wanted, but I wound up putting way more work into it than I should have.

I blame Jason Morningstar for all of this. I wound up taking a look at an early draft of a Lady Blackbird hack of his called Death School. One of the characters reminded me of something I’ve always wanted to do with an RPG – have a character who got mechanical bonuses for offensively gratuitous uses of the American flag. I suggested this to Jason, and he used it, but then I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

So I’m thinking about this, and then I hear a news story on NPR about the Tea Party, and I realized that I had to write a Lady Blackbird Hack about the Tea Party. (So, sorry, Jason. I liked my idea so much that I had to take it back. Oh well. It happens.)

This was frustrating to me, as I had other creative things that I wanted to work on! But noooo… I couldn’t get Tea Party out of my head until I wrote it. So here it is, and it’s been posted on my website. Just for laughs, I’ve also re-posted STAB! STAB! STAB!!, my original foray into satirical game design.

I’m glad it’s done. Now back to other things.

This is Satire

(Crossposted from Story-Games)

Tea Party
A Lady Blackbird Hack by Anna Kreider

Despite decades of warnings from conservative visionaries like Ronald Reagan,
the creeping socialism propagated by the intelligista and the liberal media has
caused the collapse of American society as we know it. Under the crippling
double-burden of national debt and entitlement programs, the American dollar
has collapsed and everything is in chaos.

The last of the Tea Party patriots have formed a stronghold in Nashville where
they have stockpiled food, weapons, and ammunition. But it won’t be long
before they are overrun by forces in league with the new socialist regime. It’s up
to you to make things right.

Free PDF here: http://www.browserbeware.com/TeaParty.pdf

It amuses me to think that someone, some time will find this and not understand that this is satire.

(Jeez. I guess there’s some kind of Lady Blackbird-hacking mania going around. Anyway, I blame Jason Morningstar for getting me started on this, and Graham Walmsley for encouraging me to finish. Thanks, guys. That was a week that I didn’t work on other projects at all.

Dear BP: In Case You Forgot

Dear, BP

I know you've had a lot on your mind these past two months. I know that I have trouble remembering things when I get stressed out, so I thought I'd send you a friendly reminder. I hope the following helps you out:

(All before photos taken by me in 2008. All after photos taken from the Associated Press)

Now selling prints on ImageKind

I've been wanting to sell my fine art photography for a while now, but the problem has always been finding a way to do it where I don't have to handle fulfillment; shipping from Canada to the US is problematic at best, and expensive to boot. The problem was finding a service where I could make more than a pittance on each print.

Thankfully, I found ImageKind. They're owned by CafePress, and have very civilized pricing and payment options. And best of all, I don't have to worry about printing or shipping anything. Sold!

I've uploaded selected prints of my fine art landscapes and wildlife photos, and I plan to put up selected illustrations for sale within the next little while. So please, go check it out.

[/crass plea for money]

Brief updates

Website: Browser Beware and the Tasty Bacon Games site are both back up and running, thanks to assistance from Joshua A.C. Newman. (He rocks, go buy a copy of Shock:) There's a couple areas of Browser Beware that still need to be fixed, but it's 90% back up and running and will be fully restored in the next few days.

Thou Art But A Warrior: I'm about to do my third print run of Thou Art But A Warrior! Hooray! Unfortunately, because of how horrendous the service is with my old printer, I'll be switching to a new printer with slightly higher costs. This means I'll be raising the price a bit after I've sold out of copies from the current print run. More details on this once I've finalized the print run.

Wundergeek Writes: A bit of an analysis of my progress so far and future goals over on my other blog.

Where the hell have I been???

So I just wrapped up a one year volunteer gig as Chief Script Writer in charge of herding cats coordinating writers for a local amateur theater company known as FASS. It's a group affiliated with the University of Waterloo that writes and puts on a musical comedy each year. The show is in January, which meant that during November and December I was wrapping the script, and January I was busy rehearsing for the performance in February.

But Anna, you say. It's now most of the way through March. Well, my time since then has been spent on three trips to Ohio, battling the plague, and recovering from a cracked rib. (Tae kwon do sparring accident, nothing sinister, I promise.)

And now I've got a lot of catching up to do. So first thing's first.

Yes I know my website is down.

My webhost went out of business in December and I somehow didn't get notified. I didn't really find out until we were about to go into production on the play, and I'm only getting to rectifying the situation now. I know, I know, bad me. But I hope to have something up no later than Easter - I'm making inquiries about new hosting right now.

Secondly, I'm getting back in the swing of being creative. For the past year, I pretty much haven't done anything creative that wasn't script-writing; I just didn't have the creative energy to work on FASS and my own projects as well. Unfortunately, my drawing and writing skills are horribly horribly rusty. I have two different plans for this.

Getting back into writing form

So I started another blog. It's rather embarassing as of yet, but it's a blog in which I will attempt to force myself to do writing daily. It hasn't happened yet - getting back in the groove is hard. But I'm hoping by mentioning it here that will make me feel a bit more accountable to the five of you weirdos who have actually followed this blog and to the ten or so of you who check in every several months or so.

Anyway, here it is: Wundergeek Writes. Fair warning that I fully expect the things I post to suck for at least the next six months. I've had to do this before and I'm pretty familiar with how it goes. But the only way to get good again is to actually write, so I suppose I'd better get the pain of sucking over with now.

Getting back into drawing

Drawing is a bit of a harder faucet to turn back on, since it's not so much a thing that you do as a way of thinking. I've found that when I sit down with my sketchbook, I have trouble of thinking of things to draw. So I've been visiting the Daily Sketch Group over on the ConceptArt.org forums to mine old DSG topics for ideas of things to draw.

It's been working out well, so far. I'm starting to get back into the groove. I even did an original sketch the other day. So I thought I'd at least post some of those here so there would be something concrete to show:

Dude, the topic was "freaky looking creature that has the qualities of owl and grub". I kinda freaked myself out drawing it, which is why I draw an owlcat to make sure that owlgrub wouldn't get too uppity. Brr.

The Valkyrie is one of my favorite roleplaying characters ever. When I was playing her, I would draw her with a silver-age style costume - very skimpy and superhero-y. But I thought I'd try my hand at a more heroic and less scantily clad Valkyrie. I like how it turned out.

Zombie Santa! I had a lot of fun with zombie Santa here. I hope you can read my hastily scrawled notes.

The oft-talked about novel about my old job

From the day I turned in notice at my old job, I swore that I was going to write a novel based on my time at [Dysfunctional Company], a 'names changed to protect the guilty' kind of affair. It will make a metric asston of money, because everyone will think it's fiction because it will be just too absurd to be based in truth. I've kept a lot of things that I wrote about my time there, and I've made notes about how such a novel would be structured, and from time to time I consider dusting off the project and making a serious go at it.

The only thing is that every time I start to go through my notes from that time, every time I start to remember all the stuff that made me crazy and angry and miserable about that job, I find myself shying away from the project again. It's been more than half a year, and I still don't know if I have enough space yet to be able to work on this project and actually make it funny.

Huh.

An amusing side project

A friend of mine is having her first book published soon, and the person who was originally going to put her cover together had to bail out at the last minute. She asked if I could take the photo that had already been manipulated, add a neon sign, and put together a simple cover with title and her name.

I wound up doing two different versions, as the photo I was given was horizontal and I wasn't sure how cropped she'd want it. Since I had extra space to play with, I made myself some custom splatter and set it as a multiply layer over a free rust texture I grabbed off the internet and... voila!

I do have to admit that I added the line break in the middle of the title to assuage my angst about the lack of an oxford comma. My inner grammar nazi strikes again!

Total time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

I wish I got emergency design projects more often. This was fun!

The state of affairs (long post)

Happy Birthday, Robot!

At GenCon, I was lucky enough to be able to play Happy Birthday, Robot! with Marc Majcher and a friend of his. (Alas, her name escapes me. I met so many people at GenCon...) It's an adorable little game in which you tell stories about robots that always start with "Happy Birthday, Robot!". I think Daniel Solis has hit upon a real gem, here, and I highly encourage interested parties to go check out the threads on Story-Games pertaining to HBR.

I enjoyed the game rather a lot, so I promised that I would do an actual play in the form of drawings. Which I did.

Success. I should do comic stuff more often.

Illustration

I've got a few jobs in the works, right now. Not to be coy, but I'll have more about that later once I have something to show for my efforts.

Photography

As mentioned in my previous post, I've updated my website to bring my online portfolio up to date. I'm working hard on putting together porfolios to send out to local galleries, as well as sending out letters to local photographic studios that might need assistant photographers. I've also been working on beefing up my portfolio of fine art landscape photography as well, and hope to be able to post photos from some of my most recent hikes soon.

If you know of anyone local to the Greater Toronto Area or Region of Waterloo who needs some photography done, please do consider referring them to my website.

Updates have been a long time coming

So! I do intend to do a full GenCon report. Ever since getting back, though, I've been working on finding a new job.

Anyhow. In the mean time, go check out the Pirate Jenny blog for some post-mortem information on how we did and links to podcasts.

Also, do go check out my website. I've revamped the design as well as adding a crapton of photos in the portrait and art photo section. With hope this will help me make some money off of my photography whilst I am job hunting.

Wish me luck!

An update on what went down with my job.

So, as I’m sure many of you are aware, last Friday I turned in notice at my job. This was precipitated by a crisis that has, or so it has become apparent in the last week, turned out to be much more Head Office’s fault than mine. Still, the crisis made me sit down and face facts about my job. Things are not getting better – as evidenced by me having to sic HR on my boss for trying to make me work unpaid overtime, or by such managerial “genius” as banning the word “busy”.

That’s right. I’m not allowed to say that I’m busy. Not even to head office.

(Amusing parenthetical anecdote:
So, on Friday of my play - when I have the day off - the regional manager sends out a memo. We're not allowed to use the word "busy" anymore. So Monday comes. I'm sick as a dog, and we get EIGHTEEN SETUPS in. Our previous record is 11, and anything over 6 is a heavy, heavy day. We get a request to do something that can wait until Wednesday, and I tell the customer care person relaying the request that there's no way we can do it today.

My boss overhears me, and the following conversation happens:
"By the way, we're not supposed to say we're busy anymore. [Regional Manager] wrote a memo, I'll show it to you later."
"Okay, then how am I supposed to deal with --"
"Just use your best judgement"
"Can I see the memo? If I'm supposed to be restricting --"
"No. Later. Not right now. It's too busy."
(HA!)
"Okay, but then how am I supposed to --"
"If you want, you can call [Human Resources] and ask if you can say the word "busy".")

So when the crisis initially sprung, I was very much in a mode of “my options are quit or get fired”. This week, as regional middle management started to intervene, it became clear that that probably wasn’t the case. But the initial spur of panic had given me the impetus to review our finances and discover that thanks to Kit’s raise, our gap in expenses would be relatively small and that we could afford to have me quit.

It took some hard thinking – was this really something I wanted to do? But when I looked at the effects that my job has been having on my home life, on my health, on my stress levels, there was no question. Especially when I considered the fact that due to understaffing, the stress was only going to get worse – not better!

There wasn’t any recrimination, which I was half-expecting, and there’s been no attempt at negotiation – which is a relief.

It’s been scary, though, quitting with no position lined up. I’m trying to use nepotism, but I haven’t heard anything yet and the economy is always a factor. I just wrapped up a freelance job, which along with some evening hours I’ll be picking up at a theater box office will cover the bills for March and mean that I can stay home to concentrate on job searching, at least for a month, who knows if I will have found something by April?

It’s hard to remember that I’m doing the right thing. Giving up a secure job is a scary, scary thing. But I have hope that this time I’ll be able to find a job that doesn’t slowly suck the life out of me.

Survey for the Women of the Redemption Woodstock LARP

Hello, LARP ladies!

This summer, as part of a general effort to get more women involved in gaming, I’m going to be part of a booth of female game designers selling independently designed and produced roleplaying games. As part of this endeavor, we’re going to publish and sell a ‘zine called RPG = Role Playing Girl with a collection of articles about women in roleplaying.

It’s been pointed out to me that our LARP group is a bit unusual in the number of active and involved female players that we have – as the gaming population at large tends to be largely male. I’ve been asked to write about my experiences as a woman with LARP, but I thought it would be much more interesting if I asked the women of LARP to speak for themselves.

So! Here’s the deal. I have a short survey comprised of a few open-ended questions. I’d really appreciate it if you took the time to fill it out. Feel free to write as much or as little as you care to. For that matter, answer the questions that appeal to you; feel free to ignore questions you don’t feel are relevant to you.

Some caveats, I may not use all of what you send me, but by sending me answers I am taking that as permission to publish your comments. Anything you say will be properly attributed, but may be edited for spelling and/or grammar.

I’m hoping that you’ll take the time to answer these questions. I’m excited about trying to get more women involved in gaming. And I’m excited to hear what you might say in answer to these questions.

RPG = Role Playing Girl Survey

1. NAME (as you would like it to appear)
2. How long have you been at LARP?
3. How did you get involved with LARP?
4. Do you think that women are discriminated against in roleplaying? If yes, why? If no, why not?
5. Is LARP more female-friendly than tabletop roleplaying? If yes, why do you feel that way?
6. Have you ever experienced discrimination by male roleplayers because of your gender? If yes, would you be willing to provide examples/anecdotes?
7. (For people who roleplay outside of LARPs) Have you ever played cross-gender characters? If so, have you encountered resistance from other players about playing male characters?
8. Have you ever felt that certain plots were expected of your character because they were female? (i.e. rape, pregnancy, etc)
9. Is there anything else you’d like to say about being a female roleplayer?

My deadline to submit the article is the beginning of April, so I need responses by the end of February so that I have time to compile answers into a finished article. Please send responses to my gmail address: anna (dot) kreider (at) gmail (dot) com.

(Also - a bonus question. We're trying to come up with a name for our booth at GenCon. If you had to come up with a name for a group of female game designers, what would YOU call it?)

Thank you!