So, my week has been completely mullered by the events that took place
over Expo this year, we normally get some problems over Expo, some you can deal
with easily, some are the sort of thing that you hope to only ever have to deal
with once. This is my personal thoughts (I do not speak for Expo in this) and resolutions from what happened. Just for the record, I’d like to say that there
hasn’t been a single waking hour that I’ve had in the last five days where
something about this hasn’t come up, so I’m putting this out in the hope that
it will stop some of the questions
On Friday evening, I was advised by a good friend (Thanks Anthony) that
there had been a situation in one of the afternoon games whereby a GM went
completely off the reservation and subjected the entire groups characters to gang rape and
other things that shall not be mentioned. In the seconds
following reading the advisory, my immediate thoughts were both that I know
the gm in question, and that it couldn’t have been true.
My investigation was swift and through, as I have always promised it
would be, the GM in question did not dispute the charges and was summarily
removed from the Expo so that no more harm could be done. In the two days that followed, I spoke to all
but one of the people who played in that game, and the general consensus was
that they were all having an excellent time, when about two and a half hours in
(the game finished at three hours), the GM made a shift in tone that none of
them (or anyone who ever knew that GM) could have predicted, resulting in the
horrible situation that all of them found themselves in.
I have to give every credit to the Expo Directors and the support team
that we have in place to deal with anything like this, I was allowed to
investigate and report back my findings and recommendations, and then they make
the decision based on that and their own investigations. The GM in question was removed from the Expo
roster, the game he was running at the time was halted, all future games were
pulled, and he was expelled from Expo.
Given that I am also RPG manager for Airecon, Dragonmeet, and Longcon,
he will also be pulled from those conventions for the foreseeable future, a
question many have been asking.
What I need to address, in the aftermath of what happened and the
resultant hysteria, is the truth of what happened, and what we as a community
need to be doing, going forwards.
And we do need to go forwards.
I’ll start by saying that I have known this GM for more than a decade, he’s
now been identified by someone who was seeking to use these events for their
own publicity, whose name I won’t give out because it will give him the
publicity he wants. Prior to that, the GM wasn’t named by Expo and he wasn’t
going to be. He always turns up to
events on time, always runs his games, and until now, has never (at any event
I’ve been running) had a complaint levelled at him or his style of gaming. He’s worked for almost every games company
out there, he’s done demo’s at nearly every shop out there, and he’s absolutely
worked at every convention at one time or another, and up until now, never an
issue.
Which is why it was such a shock.
I’ve been hearing a lot in the last few days about #Notinmygame and #Notatthiscon,
and it’s missing the whole point of what happened here. Someone who had a previously spotless record
went completely off the board and betrayed the trust of everyone who’d
ever known him, this behaviour was so far out of context that many refused to
believe it was him. When we confirmed that it was him, we dealt with it
immediately and without any consideration to the years of service that he’d put
in for the roleplaying community.
Because when you do something like this, you have to be taken to task,
the world has to see that we do not tolerate this sort of behaviour, not from a
newbie running a first game, not from a person who’s put in decades of service,
no one gets a free pass. We have a duty
to our players and to our community, and that cannot ever be forsaken.
But here’s the other thing, because social media is a wildfire, and
I’ve seen so much unsubstantiated nonsense in the last few days that it beggars
belief, so here’s the truth of it.
The reason why the Room Captain didn’t step in on the game when it went
sideways is because the GM in question was the Room Captain, he’d earned
that position with years of good work and trust.
The scenario as listed did not include anything about Gang Rape, and
given that the setting deals with teenagers, would have been rejected had
anything of a sexual nature been suggested by the scenario listings. There are those who say that BBFC age rating
guidelines should be used to assess the nature and content of games, and to
those I would say that while it’s fine as a general guideline, there’s a
massive difference between the content of Stir Crazy (Rated R) and Hostel (Rated
R), and in this particular case, the description was deliberately vague. This is not uncommon in game submissions, but
going forwards, the description will have to match the scenario to try and head
this sort of thing off. As anyone who’s
ever organised a convention will be able to tell the world, that will add a
massive amount of work to the preparation of a good games schedule and even
then, isn’t a guarantee that someone won’t go off the board.
The system and setting used for the game bear no responsibility for the
scenario that was run using them. There
have been a number of people saying that certain game settings should be
censored so that things like this can’t happen.
Roleplaying games occur in the boundless world of human imagination,
anything can be done with any setting, Rule 34 really does exist, it’s not the
setting that makes the scenario, it’s the person running the scenario. If it wasn’t, Call of Cthulhu could never be
run at a convention.
The reason it took Expo as long as it did to make a resolution on the
situation was because the problem was reported over social media and not to
Expo directly. Nothing was reported to
the Expo front desk, the Hilton Manager, or any of the roving staff. There was an email sent to me directly, but
that was sent more than half an hour after I’d been made aware of the situation
and by then, I was already investigating.
And that brings us to where we are now, a community still in shock
about what’s been done, some people trying to profiteer off the controversy, and
everyone looking around to see what we need to do next.
What we need to do is act in a rational manner.
We need to vet games more carefully, the descriptions can’t be what
they have been previously.
We need to ensure that everyone is familiar with what to do if there’s
a problem (several cons I know already do this).
We need for people to know that we don’t stand for this, and I think
that Expo’s response has gone a long way to letting people know that, but it
needs to be everywhere.
What we don’t need is people spreading wild rumour and supposition, consider
that I’ve had more than twenty people contact me, both at the show and
afterwards, saying that they’d splashed the name of the GM out there, so as to
make sure that they could never do it again…
Twelve of those people had the wrong name…
Now if you’re talking about someone cheating at a board game and
getting caught, or storming off from a game because they didn’t like the ruling
against them, that carries little weight in the non-gaming world. An accusation like this one can have real and
serious impact on that persons life, particularly when they aren’t the one that
did it.
We need facts before we act on them…
The initial complaint wasn’t put in to the Expo team, it found its way
to us half an hour later, after several people had pointed out that getting me
involved in something like this was probably going to be a good idea. I’m glad that someone pointed it out to me,
because I’m not normally on twitter (and after this week, I’m turning it off
again), so I didn’t see what had happened, and most of the Expo team work the
whole weekend, so we don’t get chance to look for things like this.
People need to let us know that a problem has occurred…
Please, if there’s a team at the convention, you take it to them, they’re
the people most likely to know what to do in the situation and they’re absolutely
the best people to talk to about it, because not a one of us does this for the pay,
we do this because we want other gamers to have a great time, and when someone
pulls something like this, it puts into jeopardy all the works that we’ve done
before. In my particular case, I offered
my resignation when this came out because it happened on my watch. Everyone in the world has told me that there
was nothing I could have done with this, no way I could have seen, but it still
happened on my watch and I feel responsible for it.
We are all responsible, these are our shows, our people, we are all responsible…
We do not stand for behaviour like this, and I’m glad it made the national
news, because anyone looking can see that not only did it happen, but that it
was stamped on hard and that the community does not stand for it. A short while back, I did an interview with
ENworld, the content of which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMKilVWLdtQ
with my comments on Harrassment policies being found around the 1:13 mark. This was how things were back then, they are
still my comments now, we did what I said we would, and we did it fast.
And that’s it for now, if anyone’s got any questions, please let me
know, but if I don’t respond immediately, forgive me that, it’s been a very
long week and there’s been a lot of questions.
