In some ways my experience last week could have been the closing scene from a cheesy Disney movie: a girl enters the room and a hush falls across the crowd. The sudden arrival seemed to have fundamentally changed the character of the environment. Except, of course, it wasn’t a ball and the response from the “crowd” was certainly not one I was expecting or desiring.
Last week some friends and I popped into a new tabletop gaming store. I’ve been trying for some time to find a local game store with groups that play the things I play (Dungeons and Dragons, Game of Thrones, perhaps some board games). So, after having a lovely dinner with my friends they agreed to check out a place near the restaurant. In went the four of us: two other women, a man, and I exploring a new store on what turned out to be Magic the Gathering night. As it would happen, the other two women and I were the only women in the store during our entire visit, and while our presence was not always directly acknowledged, it certainly didn’t go unnoticed.
I want to be clear: no one was at all hostile to me during our visit, and the owner was very friendly; he tried at one point to convince me to run an Encounters session for the store (psh, with my schedule? Not even close to happening, sorry!). But, while the environment wasn’t directly hostile, it was entirely unwelcoming and my female friends (who weren’t as familiar with game store environments) were so turned off by the response to us that they started looking for other stores I could go to.
As I mention above, there was a notable hush that fell as we walked in- conversations pointedly stopped and the Magic players seemed unsure of whether they should stare directly at us (which some did) or whether they should pointedly avoid making eye contact with us at all costs. One poor fellow nearly walked into a display as he attempted to walk around me without making eye contact or looking at me at all. At another table a player mumbled responses to everything we said (things that were neither questions nor directed at him) in a hushed tone that he clearly thought we couldn’t hear. The room as a whole, which had been fairly loud and raucous as we walked in, turned to mumbled conversation and remained that way for the 20 minutes or so that we were in the building.
What’s most interesting to me about this situation, one that’s both far from the worst I’ve encountered in gaming but also far from the best or most welcoming, is how each of the four of us responded to the way this community of players reacted to our presence.
My two female friends, as I said above, were pretty frustrated with the outing, eager to leave, and clear on their intent not to return. While they’re not pen-and-paper RPG players or card game players, they do play a fair number of board games and they were interested in some of the merchandise the shop had to offer. However, the players’ reactions to them essentially assured that they wouldn’t visit the store again and they were convinced that I shouldn’t go back either, saying they’d help me find a better store.
My male friend, whom I actually met at a game store and who has spent an excessive amount of time in such environments, said he found the reaction sadly humorous and unfortunately predictable. He wasn’t turned off by the other gamers’ reactions to us, nor did he find them atypical, and was generally willing to go back and give store events a chance.
And me? Well, I realized just how much I depend on “coping strategies” in environments like game stores. For most of our time there I spoke directly with the owner and one of their event coordinators, talking about DnD and WoW, and generally trying to ignore the rest of the room just as much as the rest of the room tried to ignore me. While my other friends, both male and female, were hyper-aware of the vaguely unwelcoming vibe in the room, I focused exclusively on the two people there who were interested in seeing us return and welcoming us into their community. I had a decent experience because I actively worked to only engage with certain people in the store. Nonetheless, I’m pretty set on going back. I got invited to play in a 5E DnD group AND I feel the need to see a greater female presence in the store.
I suppose on one hand you could read this story and brush it off- so she went into a store and people didn’t say hi to her or cater to her, so what? But reactions like these, ones that aren’t openly hostile or dismissive but nonetheless clearly telegraph dis-ease and distance, are the very definition of microaggressions: brief, subtle changes in behavior that signal that someone is outside of a particular community. I don’t think any of those Magic players meant any harm, and maybe they didn’t even consciously realize how they were responding to us, but their response to our presence in the store clearly indicated how outside their community they felt we were. With coping strategies in place their responses didn’t faze me much, but for my friends who were uninitiated in game store culture, this one experience turned them off the experience entirely. This is no way to build an inclusive, diverse, and rich gaming community.
