Nine Worlds 2017, part 1: Friday 4th August

              (T-shirt from Genki Gear) 

Note: apologies this has taken longer to write up and post than I had originally thought. Lack of sleep and anxiety are both bastards, but ones I’m starting to deal with again. So, onwards! 

Prologue here
My first day at Nine Worlds (9W) started off hectic. As I said in my last post, we were travelling/checking in on the day 9W started, so I was already a bundle of nerves before we even arrived. 

We got there reasonably early, around 9:00 am. This gave us more than enough time to register and get settled. The person on the registration desk complimented my dinosaur dress and asked if I was a big dino fan, which I am because of course dinosaurs are amazing. She told me the name of an author (which I stupidly forgot to write down) who was writing a book about time-travelling dinosaurs.

Suffice to say that, unless I can remember the name of the author, my Google search history is going to see the term “time-travelling dinosaurs book” crop up quite a bit in the future. 

We were each handed a goody bag, containing our programmes, lanyards, flyers and a book. Yes, you get a free book – mine was Guns of the Dawn, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and I’m going to be starting it shortly. Also included within were cosplay tokens – these are for attendees to hand out to cosplayers whose outfits impress them. For every 15 tokens handed in, the cosplayer gets a small prize. I remember giving mine to a miniature Luke Skywalker, the Glow Cloud from Welcome to Night Vale, a Lemming, Squirrel Girl and, of course, No-Face.

I then had the option to choose my overlay, pronoun sticker and lanyard colour. I went for the blue overlay (looking to engage in conversation) and blue lanyard; a yellow lanyard was for those who wanted to communicate they absolutely did not want to be photographed. It’s a small but effective change and empowers people to set their own comfort zones and requirements.

9W was held over several floors at the London Novotel West hotel, and the rooms were, from my experience, spacious and well set-up. The Tech Team would double-check mics and fix any technical issues before panels and presentations. There was priority seating outside and inside the rooms for those with access needs, in alignment with the inclusivity at the heart of much of what 9W does.

My first session was Podcasting 101, a talk by Matt Dillon, the GeekPlanetOnline Editor-in-Chief. GeekPlanetOnline is an online community and podcasting network which has been going since 2008. I found this to be the most useful session of the day, though all panels were informative.

Dillon’s talk was often funny, with humorous touches to his PowerPoint presentation. He also made sure that there were accessible copies of his presentation for those who needed it. The aim of Dillon’s talk was to give a rundown on how to set up a podcast with minimum equipment, and I gained a lot of information. I had no idea that I could use Audacity to edit, nor what hosting involved. I also had no idea I’d need album art to put a podcast on iTunes, but things like The Morgue File allows you to use photos for free as long as they are slightly altered. I came away with lots of notes, which I’ll hopefully be able to put into use soon (me and a couple of friends are setting up a podcast about films). However, if you’re looking to start a podcast about movies, games, anime, or general geekdom, hit me up! Dragon Age is a particular love of mine… 

The next session was the Shut Up & Write panel, featuring Dr Tiffani Angus (senior lecturer & course leader), Dr Val Nolan (lecturer), and Angus Watson (author). The panel dealt with writer’s block, or rather the importance of putting that term aside and getting on with the task at hand. As a serial procrastinator, I was looking for some useful tips. The overall message was that there were ways to get around it, and you had to pick and choose what worked for you.

One helpful tip was that, if writing about a place, go visit it. They conceded that, if writing about New York, hopping on a plane to the Big Apple wasn’t exactly within everyone’s means. However, it was about at least getting out to a different space or location that evoked that same sensation. True, you can’t travel to a fictional fantasy land, but maybe you could go to a forest or a well-known place of oddities (Forbidden Corner comes to mind). The other very useful tip I came away with was using these questions to examine your goals, and to provide motivation:

• What project am I working on right now?
• Why?
• What will I have when I finish?
• What’s the big dream?
• What happens next?

The next part was about asking yourself what would happen if you didn’t complete the project, in terms of how you viewed yourself, your goals, how it would impact society, and on you professionally. The combination of this with visualising goals to drive you forward acts as an incentive to move past the block and just start writing.

Dr Angus mentioned that she was course leader on the MA in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. I believe it’s blended learning, with a lot of distance learning, so those wanting to hone their skills might want to check it out.

The next talk was Westworld: All the Feels, All the Thoughts, moderated by Tom Parker, featuring Samantha Jayne (Access Coordinator), Iris Fritschi-Cussens (artist), and Steph Rennick (lecturer in philosophy, who also wins extra admiration from me for having a Flemeth quote on her site). If you haven’t seen Westworld, I highly recommend it as it was a breathtaking piece of television. Also, some mild spoilers coming!

I didn’t take any notes during this one as I was there more for geeking out. What followed was a fun discussion about our favourite characters, how they grew and changed, and the twisty nature of the plot. The Funko Pop Westworld character statues sitting on the panel’s table were put to great use demonstrating their alive or dead status. I asked whether Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), given his actions throughout the show, was a bad guy or a good guy, a la Dumbledore. I believe the conclusion (apart from Dumbledore was a good guy!) was that yes, Ford was good, or trying to be. The means were brutal, but he was trying to honour his friend. I think I agree, but with a LOT of “buuuut”s.

The last panel was Twisted Tales: The Darker Side of Fairy Tales. Karen Graham acted as moderator, featuring Chris Wooding (author), Charlie Oughton (lecturer and journalist), Sandie Mills (researcher), and Jessica George (independent researcher). The session focused on the origins of the sanitised, Disney versions we have today. The discussion about The Little Mermaid hit me hard as I remembered that was one tale I had read in its original Hans Christian Anderson form as a child, before the Disney film came out. The real ending is a great deal sadder and darker than the film, and is why I never loved the Disney version as much as my childhood friends did; though the original was bleak, it was the first time I had experienced a story where happy endings were not guaranteed, and I liked it for that.

The talk covered how fairy tales had been collected, noting that whilst The Brothers Grimm are often seen as the original writers, fairy tales had been going for much longer. The term “fairy tale” was originally coined by Madame d’Aulnoy in the late 17th century, when these stories gained popularity in Parisian salons. The Grimms also removed all premarital sex, but kept or even ramped up the violence. No sex outside marriage, but gory details, like slicing off toes or heels to fit a slipper, were seen as perfectly acceptable. My favourite fact was finding out that the ending of Snow White had the evil Queen dragged to Snow’s wedding, with her feet then encased in red-hot iron shoes. The Queen was forced to dance until she dies in agony. Makes the waltzing scenes in the Disney films just a little unnerving, now.

I think the only problem I had with the panel was that it covered quite a bit that I already knew. Having had a fascination with the darker side of storytelling for a while, I may not have been its intended audience as I was aware of quite a lot of what was covered. I think I might have enjoyed this more as a one-person presentation, where a bit of history was given, but then direct comparisons made between the original versions of several fairy tales versus their newer incarnations. The subject felt like it didn’t need a panel discussion, and perhaps instead more structure, though it was well-moderated. However, that would have just been my preference, and I believe that many in the audience got a lot out of the discussion as it was. 

I think the only real bum notes for me were when one of the panellists arrived late and departing this a bit, the same panellist who, during Q&A, acknowledged they were not the best person to talk about a question (I think it was about representation), and then proceeded to answer it anyway. At. Length.

The last event of the day was the one I had been looking forward to most: the Videogame Burlesque! I want sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised at the diversity of performers. The Bioshock Big Daddy strip tease by Artemis Queer (AKA Tab Kimpton) was sublime. Sadly, I didn’t get the game reference from John Celustus’s performance, but as I overheard once adoring fan tell John later, he looked like a literal piece of art. The show featured homages to Princess Peach, Watchdogs, with a special shoutout to Tanyisha Rusbridger for an outstanding Grim Fandango-themed performance.

It would be remiss of me not to mention some criticism I saw about part of the show. There were several angry tweets on Twitter during and after the show about a section where a performer dressed and stripped as Chop Chop Master Onion from the PaRappa the Rapper game. There were accusations of reinforcing Asian stereotypes, particularly as there was a segment of audience participation before it, where audience members had to play the Chop Chop part of the computer game to win prizes. I’m mixed race, with Asian heritage. However, I also did not initially understand the implications of using this character. After thinking about it for 5 seconds, I realised that this was of course a harmful stereotypical character, and one who really didn’t need to be used. I doubt that the segment creators thought it would cause offence, either. I think what is important, though, is that it did, and that those affected raised valid points which should be discussed.

9W day one was over, and I left feeling more energised and enthused than when I started. Day 2 would, of course, bring its fair share of surprises and randomness…

Nine Worlds 2017: prologue

So much happened over the 3rd-6th August Nine Worlds convention that I want to break it into days. Whilst Nine Worlds (9W) 2017 officially started on Thursday 3rd August, we were unable to get there for the very start due to work commitments, so I’ll only be talking about the Friday programme onwards. However, before I get into the actual content of 9W, including the panels, workshops, discussion groups, entertainment, and obligatory No-Face, I want to do a little introduction to explain why I love this convention more than any other event I’ve attended in the past (insert sound of fanfare and hopefully unironic cheers)! 

Nine Worlds is a convention/geekfest celebrating and covering topics ranging from anime, movies, comics, race, gender, neurodiversity, literature, books, history, gaming, disability, sexuality, LGBTQAI, and much more. It is unlike all others. It’s also relatively young, having started in 2013. My then fiancé and I heard about 9W too late that year, just missing out on attending. Nonetheless, I was hooked: I had heard about 9W’s focus upon not just all things geeky, but also inclusion, regardless of gender, race, or disability. I wanted to know more about this convention that stood out from the corporate comic cons and trade fairs. 

We’re both geeks (we met on a geek dating site, ffs) so we wanted to try and attend as soon as financially possible. When we finally managed to go in 2015 (a mini-honeymoon before our full honeymoon in Tokyo the year after), we were impressed at the level of organisation and commitment to creating a space everyone could enjoy. 

An example of how the organisers listen to the attendees: in 2015, there were some reported issues about how that venue’s staff were dealing with the convention guests. Along with other considerations, such as accessibility of location, Nine Worlds decided to move to a more central London site, with a hotel chain that was a bit more on board with the ethos of the convention. 

The organisers also started to offer a payment plan option, breaking the cost of tickets into a small upfront fee with the rest divided into monthly chunks. This is one adjustment I’m personally very happy to see as gathering together £85 x 2 in one go (and that’s the early bird rate) is a massive hit to finances when you’re already on a tight budget. Did I mention that kids and carers can attend for free? It’s just another example of how committed 9W is to ensuring access for all. 

The thing I love most about 9W, however, is knowing it’s a space I can enjoy being myself in, despite my own barriers. And I can put up a lot of barriers. You see, I was already in a mild state of anxiety even before travelling to London; when I had booked the cheapo hotel a few months back, the reviews had said it was average, basic but OK. 9W has a deal with Novotel West, the convention site, where you can get a discount on accommodation. I had instead tried to save a bit more cash, and gone with an option that was about £40 cheaper in total. 

Turned out to be a bit of false economy on my part. 

The problem was that, 2 days before we were due to travel to London for 9W, I had made the mistake of looking at reviews again. Within the last month, there had been 5 scathing reviews from guests dissatisfied with the cleanliness, the space, and the amount of damp in the showers. 

This set my anxiety off as I started to imagine sleeping in a filthy bed, and I developed a nice bout of insomnia. By the time we actually travelled to London, I was in a zombie-like state, increasingly worried about all the things that might possibly go wrong. 

The cheapo hotel was, well, let’s just say that should you ever want to spend the night in a room which stinks of cigarettes and is practically a corridor, I can recommend you a place to stay. 

It was not as horrifying as I thought it might be, and the staff were extremely friendly. However, it’s likely that next year I’ll stay in the convention hotel and write off the slightly higher room rate as the price I’ll pay for preserving my own mental wellbeing. 

We wandered down to the convention early to register and found it to be a stress-free affair. The registration staff member complimented my dinosaur dress, and I explained I was a fan of all things historical. They recommended me an author whose name I sadly forgot, but who was writing a book about time-travelling dinosaurs. 

I also discovered the location of the Quiet Room, where overwhelmed guests can hang out and escape until they’re ready to return. That’s when I started to relax, because, coupled with my nice little dino chat, I felt welcomed, like I belonged. 

It’s not always easy being a geek, especially being seen as a misfit. The world is changing, of course: in modern culture, things once considered the purview of nerdy outcasts alone are now mainstream entertainment *cough Marvel cough*. However, we do speak a different language. The night before, I had been at a workmate’s leaving do. I was chatting with a fellow geek colleague about the wonders of Rick & Morty, Steven Universe, and Hearthstone. Our other workmates remained politely bemused and let us get on with it, despite attempts by us to broaden the topics for the less geeky inclined. It was a strange reminder that I and my interests are, for the most part, still considered an oddity by the general public. And that’s fair, not everyone has to like the same things. However, what confuses me is the relative ease with which the things I care about can be labelled irrelevant to anyone else. 

That’s why it feels like coming home when I go to 9W; I’m suddenly surrounded by people who understand what I’m talking about, who have a frame of reference that matches mine, and it’s refreshing to not feel like I have to explain or, worse, justify my interests. 

Generally, inclusion and accessibility is a huge focus of 9W, including having a committed Access Coordinator. Besides installing a Quiet Room for people like me (who need that little safety valve at busy events), one of the other ways they promote inclusion is by having pronoun badges available. This is so you can tell the rest of the con how you would like to be addressed. It’s a small thing, to have a little sticker on your con badge, but it makes a massive difference for those often misgendered in society. It’s a way for the 9W organisers to empower the attendees, to show support, and to ensure others do too. 

Besides this, panellists and moderators are given strict guidelines about addressing attendees and not assuming gender. For example, instead of taking a question from “the lady at the back”, the moderator might instead say “the person with the red jacket, at the back”. It takes such little effort that it makes you realise how easily these changes could be made outside of the convention, and makes you question why it doesn’t. 

Another approach is the use of coloured lanyards to communicate a person’s feelings on photography. Blue was the standard colour, but the 9W photography policy is clear: if someone is wearing a yellow lanyard (available at registration), it means that they do not want their photo taken, and other attendees need to respect that. It’s a marked difference in attitude from other cons where permission to take photos is automatically assumed. There are many reasons a person might not want their photo taken, but all another attendee needs to know is that they don’t have a right to take that photo. Again, you have to wonder why this can’t be enacted at other cons; it would certainly help challenge some of the more troubling attitudes people can have over their rights to another person’s image or body. 

The other nice touch is the communication overlays. You could choose from one of three different types, to be worn on con badges. The purpose is to communicate to others whether the attendee is happy to be approached for conversation or not. For those with anxiety or social communication differences, it’s a way of allowing people to choose the level of engagement they are comfortable with. As someone who’s had anxiety throughout their life, knowing I had that option (and one that would be respected) instantly removed some of my social anxiety.

There are many, many other examples of inclusion and accessibility good practice, and hopefully I’ll cover all of them as I talk about the content of Nine Worlds 2017. Over the next three days, I saw many examples of attempts to include everyone. I saw a lot of things go right, and some not so much, but what struck me was how quickly the organisers, crew, volunteers and tech staff all sought to address and fix these problems. Yes, I was also at *that* panel, and I’ll get to that soon.

If you want more info on Nine Worlds, you can find it here. Early bird tickets are already on sale, by the way. Part 1 will focus more on what I did and saw on Friday, and I’ll throw in a link below for that ASAP 😄

Part 1 now here! 

Acceptance: a game review

Before I start, some quick definitions (via good old Google):

Transgender – denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex

Cisgender – denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex

Now, onward!

As someone who’s often dealt with the common assumption that both my parents are white, and endured the inevitable guessing game of what kind of mixed race I actually am, identity is a deeply relevant issue to me. Acceptance is a game about identity, but it is not about searching for yourself. You know who you are; this game instead focuses upon the perceptions of others, and who they think you should be.

I must start this by saying that, despite being a cisgender woman, I still don’t exactly know what that means for me. I identify as female, but only in the sense that this is biologically what I am. I’ve never been “girly” or really fit into the gender stereotypes, but I am a feminist and agree that gender is performative (i.e. society dictates what is thought to be acceptable behaviour as men/women, and we act accordingly). There are some things I do which are considered traditionally feminine in Western culture, such as wearing makeup and dresses. However, I also like things that could be considered masculine, such as playing computer games, or debating ideas in public forums. If you scoff at me labeling the latter as a perceived masculine domain in Western culture, I’d like you to think about how many times a woman discussing an issue has been shouted down, interrupted, or described as bossy, shrewish, or shrill (*cough Hillary Clinton cough*) because women are not supposed to be argumentative. If we do debate, it’s always seen as a negative.

So, I’ve never really cared much for the arbitrary distinctions of what behaviour is considered feminine or masculine (after all, why is blue a boy’s colour, really?). Instead, I find that the reason my gender matters to me is due to how people react and relate to it.

The point is, I know what my gender is and society (positively or negatively) treats me as such.

Acceptance sets up the premise that what you believe your gender to be is unimportant, at least according to those you encounter in the game. This is a short, visual novel game, up for pay what you want on Itch.io, Itch.io being a haven for non-mainstream narrative games, and created as a part of Jam for Leelah (JfL). JfL was a 2015 charity event set up to honour the memory of Leelah Alcorn, a transgender 17 year old girl who committed suicide after her family forced her into “conversion” therapy and refused to accept she was female.

Acceptance was made with this in mind, adapted from a Twine game which was, according to the game’s page, “made around three years ago by a Trans woman in the early stages of gender transition”.  The story is by Laura Kate Dale and 8BitGoggles, with coding by Lex Roberts, and music by Joanna Blackhart. Laura Kate Dale is herself a celebrated games reviewer/journalist, most recently famous for founding Let’s Play Video Games, along with Vikki Blake and Joe Parlock, and for revealing details of the Switch and PS4 Slim consoles before Nintendo and Sony held conferences.

She is also transgender and a suicide survivor. Laura Kate Dale has said that she created the game in order to give cisgender people an idea of what is is like to be transgender in modern Western society. In an interview from 2016, she stated that it was important to raise awareness, to give cisgender people more of an insight into what a transgender person can face on a daily basis.

The game begins with a warning: depending upon the choices you make, there may be sexual assault, assault, harassment, and suicide to contend with. This is because these are things transgender people often face; the number of transphobic hate crimes trebled between 2011 to 2015, and only 19 of the 582 crimes reported in 2015 were prosecuted. I can already hear people thinking, “But, Angie, you fabulous bastion of awesomeness, cisgender men/women also deal with these crimes regularly!” I’m not disagreeing, and of course it’s not right to do those things to anyone, regardless of gender or any other categorisation by which we define ourselves. However, this game’s aim is to show the harm we do on an everyday basis, to show cisgender people that we can often, without thinking, create a transphobic culture.

It’s asking cisgender people to be more aware, to try and see the world from another perspective.

The game focuses on the negative ways transgender people are treated, and I might normally say that this is a one-sided view, that there are probably also very positive interactions in everyday life for transgender people. However, Acceptance acknowledges this: on the Main Menu screen, there’s a statement that says: “Some days are worse than others, that’s just the way it is.” This game’s aim is not to say that good things can never happen, but rather that very, very bad things can as well, and are likely to do so.

Acceptance is a game which challenges you from the start. You are asked a simple question: Are you a Man or a Woman? As a cisgender woman, I answered accordingly, only to be instantly told by the game that I was wrong. The game told me that I might think I was a woman, but I was clearly a man, and nothing I could say would change that fact.

From that moment, I was placed in the supremely uncomfortable position of having someone else tell me who they thought I was – what I thought did not matter. Having dealt with people in the past doubting me about my mixed race heritage (to the point where one very “subtly” asked to see a photo of my mother, an unspoken demand to be given evidence that I was indeed half-Filipino), this was a profoundly familiar feeling.

As the game continues, it takes the player through a day full of people either misgendering you (getting called “Sir” a lot, in my case), excluding you, and/or generally treating you as something other. You may experience common forms of abuse, ranging from whispered remarks about being a pervert, to having punches thrown at you.

I noticed, as I was playing, that I was making certain choices. I could go swimming or go to the gym, for example. I chose the gym. My reason was that I wanted to avoid being shouted at, because being unable to mask my body’s real shape at the pool would be a dead giveaway, surely? That, for me, was the moment I realised my behaviour was being controlled by how others in the game would react. I was avoiding possible confrontations, and thus limiting my participation in the world.

It’s a feeling that resonated during another section. There’s an option to walk home either down a busy high street or along a quiet road at night. As a woman, I instantly found myself choosing the high street because women are taught that walking down an abandoned road in the dark is just inviting trouble.

I suddenly realised what I was doing and found myself empathising with transgender people over this issue; Western culture teaches potential victims to fear and plan because it’s their fault if something happens – we are taught that it is our responsibility to not be attacked.

“I mean, she chose to get that drunk.”

“Who walks through there at night?!”

“Well, look at what she was wearing…”

During different playthroughs of this game, things were done to me despite the fact that my existence did not endanger or harm the perpetrators of this abuse. I was made to suffer purely because my very being offended someone. It’s a dark and unsettling experience, emphasised well through the stark art and beautiful swells of music.

This game is about acceptance, but not necessarily about accepting who you are. It’s an effective story about the continual struggle for society’s acceptance, the begging and pleading for what are just basic human rights. For a few brief minutes, you are given a sense of how it feels to be told that everything about who you think you are is wrong, and that you must therefore be treated as something lesser. If, maybe just for moment, you find yourself realising how much our society goes out of its way to alienate and isolate transgender people, then the game will have achieved its intended message.