What to Do When 'Toxic Gamer Culture' Enters the Classroom

[Music] okay thanks so much for being here first thing in the morning i think we're going to get started we're right at 10. um so i am bonnie ruberg i go by bo i use they them pronouns and i'm going to be talking to you about what to do when toxic gamer culture enters the classroom a quick note i'm i'm not going to be talking explicitly about details of violence but i will be discussing experiences of harassment by the way it's totally fine to tweet this talk i am at my ownviloria on twitter um i just ask that you please don't use hashtags that are there to alert specific harassment groups i think i know you know what i mean so a little bit about me and where i'm coming from i'm currently an assistant professor at the university of california irvine and previously i've worked at the university of southern california and also at berkeley as an educator i tend to teach courses that are about games and culture

primarily for undergrad programs where students are learning to become game designers or game programmers so i'm thinking about the kind of cultural social side but my students are often there for more technical or development skills i'm also a queer person and a gender non-binary person this is the bumper sticker that's currently on the back of my car i'm pretty sure it's the world's best bumper sticker my research is also on lgbt issues in games i believe in intersectional feminism and social justice so i'm telling you these things because they shape how i approach games education um but also because they shape how students interact with me how they react to me this is a quick totally shameless plug for my book which just came out like two days ago um it's called video games have always been queer thank you i will take all the applause i can get um so it is about how video games even

when they don't seem to include lgbt representation can be understood queerly through interpretation through play and through design if that sounds like something you're into or something you think your students might be into come say hi i'd love to tell you more about it so here's the big question that i want to tackle today how do we as game educators teach students who are skeptical resistant or even hostile towards diversity so when i say hostile towards diversity i mean hostile towards either diverse instructors or towards learning about diversity issues in the classroom we all care about our students i think we're here because we care about education and we really want to think the best of them but the reality right now is that for many university level game instructors especially folks who have been marginalized in games cultures so people like women non-binary folks queer folks folks of color um we're finding ourselves facing

identity-based discrimination and even harassment from our own students we all know that games culture can be toxic but toxic gamer culture isn't just something that exists somewhere out there on the internet it's also in our classrooms more and more i find that when i teach new students about discriminatory online culture i'm also teaching students who are participating in discriminatory online culture so what do we do when we experience problematic interactions with students around these issues and how do we thrive as instructors in the face of potential harm there's a lot to talk about here this is a really big issue i'm going to just talk you through some kind of main points so here's what i'm going to cover i'll give you a quick primer on toxic gamer culture which basically boils down to it is totally a thing um i'll talk about what happens when that toxicity intersects with games education so how it manifests in the classroom but

also outside of the classroom to illustrate some of this in action i'm going to walk you through a kind of quick post-mortem of a course that i taught last year where my tas and i really wrestled with these issues i'll talk about some of the particular challenges and potential negative effects of dealing with toxic gamer students so these are things that i learned through teaching this course and i'm going to bring us around to actionable steps what we can do to make sure that being diverse or encouraging students to think about culture in diverse ways isn't grounds to turn a teacher into a target and more specifically those actionable steps are going to be oriented towards um educators who are affecting or who are experiencing this this toxic environment the colleagues of marginalized educators who are affected by this and then also folks who are in charge of game programs or even institutions at a sort of higher level

i'm going to be drawing from my experience teaching at three different institutions i've also had a ton of kind of behind the scenes off the record anonymous conversations with colleagues at other institutions many of the institutions that you may represent here in the room so this is not just a me problem this is a broader problem you may be thinking already i'm not really a diversity person right i teach technical classes and this isn't my thing maybe not because you're here first thing in the morning to hear about this which i appreciate but whoever you are and whatever you teach this is your thing right it's everybody's thing it's a thing for educators on the front lines but it's also a thing for the colleagues of those educators especially colleagues who think about themselves as allies so let's get into this first topic toxic gamer culture i'm going to start with a fun fact

i am probably going to get harassed for giving this talk i don't know what form that harassment is going to take it might be a flood of angry social media posts it might be menacing emails from strangers i've been doing this for a long time i've been working in this area for 14 years so i have seen it all but what's notable is that i'm not just going to get harassed for being a feminist or being a queer activist who works in games i'm going to be harassed for being a games educator i gave a short talk two years ago here in the educators summit about how we need to teach our students not just to make games that are technically strong but that are socially engaged and politically aware if we think about any other medium how we would teach it that's a totally obvious statement but because i was talking about games and specifically because i was talking about how to teach games the internet got pissed for a whole bunch of days following that

talk my twitter notifications were just a fire hose of angry people a number of whom identified themselves as students raging at this idea that video games could be taught as objects of culture that's toxic gamer culture right so what do i mean when i say that i mean this culture that has grown up around video games a kind of dominant culture that's grown up around video games that privileges players who fit this mold of the traditional gamer white straight cisgender men and boys who play hardcore games at the same time this culture devalues and often actively discriminates against those of us who are seen as different who don't fit that mold toxic gamer culture insists that video games need protecting from social justice warriors who will spoil them with cultural analysis and diverse representation it also longs for this imagine time past

when men were men and video games were video games toxic gamer culture has been a long around for a really long time it's not a new thing but it's kind of come to the fore and come to a head in recent years alongside major online harassment campaigns and the rise of certain affiliated political groups it's more prominent prevalent and insidious now than ever if you want to learn more about toxic gamer culture or if you're feeling skeptical about what i'm saying to you and you want some research to back it up there are tons of folks doing work on this area these are just three recent books that i recommend gaming masculinity by megan condis toxic geek masculinity by anastasia salter and british bridget blodgett and the toxic meritocracy of video games by christopher paul all of them are great i also know that there are plenty of you in this audience who don't need to be convinced that toxic gamer culture is a thing because you're experiencing it firsthand and i just want you to know that i see you right i value you and i

see that you're having that experience for a lot of us toxic gamer culture this kind of looming threat of the potential of harassment is the background to making playing studying or teaching video games it's there constantly it's like a background radiation almost except that sometimes it explodes and comes into the foreground okay so let's talk about the relationship between toxic gamer culture and games education and just a note my focus here is on the experience that educators have with toxic students or students who are behaving in toxic ways but there are whole other parts of this conversation we could have that are also important so peer-to-peer toxicity student to student or we could also talk about toxicity between colleagues right between faculty or admins within a games education program so before we dig into this intersection of toxicity and games education i want

to ask you a couple questions you don't have to answer these questions out loud i just want to give you a moment to ponder them here's the first one have you ever felt unsafe in the classroom so unsafe might mean physically unsafe or it might mean that the classroom felt like an actively hostile emotional or social environment here's the second one has a student ever acted negatively towards you because of your identity so not just negatively in general i think we all run into students who are feeling grumpy they've got things going on in their lives right but they act negatively towards you because of your identity so that would be a negative interaction with a student that you're pretty sure was motivated in part by your gender or your race or your sexuality or disability or body type things like that

so is that something that's happened for some of you the answers to those questions were yes right yes i felt unsafe yes i've been discriminated against but for some of you the answer is no right and for those of you who answered no it's particularly important to confront the fact that even if you're not personally experiencing this behavior there is toxicity in our classrooms right it's happening even if it's not happening to you i know this is uncomfortable to admit i for one really love teaching so i think one of the things that i find just emotionally really hard about this issue is that i love teaching students i love teaching undergrads and and when the environment is right when you have a diverse group in a small enough classroom you can have a real conversation you have these awesome amazing students who are willing to dig into big issues

but for a lot of us we don't teach in these small intimate classrooms we teach at large universities like i do and we often find ourselves teaching these kind of big faceless rooms of people uh we heard at the hevga event last night that we're seeing more and more women come out of games programs that's awesome but the overwhelming majority is still male so the folks who we're teaching are still often tied to this toxic gamer population many of our students see themselves as technical i think that's a big part of this education track as well that we're thinking about how to give students technical or design skills but when they see themselves as purely technical they often resent the idea of learning about games and culture and i've encountered this firsthand a ton they feel like those classes are requirements they have to get out of the way and they resent that their time is being wasted thinking about the cultural implications of games um so in that environment when we try to teach these students we're often met

with hostility this is true and lots of areas of education today it's not just a games thing um so we've seen folks who've been called out by their students and had their information sent off to right-wing news sources we've seen um professors kind of driven off campus we've seen bomb threats but games are a lightning rod for this right it's not that games aren't tied to larger cultural issues it's that games are this kind of microcosm where the larger cultural issues have just exploded and here's how emma vossen who's a fellow feminist game scholar and an educator talks about this and i'm really indebted to emma because she's been really bold and really brave and really like emotionally open about what she's experienced in the classroom she says i've become more and more nervous around my students any one of them could write a reddit thread about their professor being a social justice warrior or they could be

recording you waiting for you to give them a bad grade to retaliate against you the hate mob that looms around you is like a giant weapon that any of your students could wield this is more than just tough students this is being in the same room with someone who would probably send you death threats if you weren't their teacher and i think what's important to point out about that beyond just the intensity of that right that's very real is also that this is not just tough students this is a broader cultural issue that these students are being sucked into and they're kind of repeating back to us so i want to make a radical statement right which is that teaching games teaching games students about diversity or teaching game students while being diverse should not be grounds for harassment and at this point i love the conversation [Applause]

you all clap for strange things um at this point you might be thinking of some objections right um you might be thinking this sounds rough right that sucks for for you but it's not a program at my game program it's not a problem at migraine program right my program is different my program doesn't have these issues um let me tell you something no game program is exempt from this um it is true to some extent of all schools and it's true that if you have a larger student body if you have a more technical student body if your gender ratio is different it may well be different but no game program is exempt from this even if your student body is diverse right this is still the air that our students breed so when they go online this is the culture that they take in so this is the culture they have to give back to us you may also be thinking

isn't this just the same thing as when students speak up because they are offended about something that you assigned to read right they want content warnings they want trigger warnings they seem to be using these like weird they them pronouns aren't you also being oppressed because of that as an instructor and the answer is no right this is about vectors of power right this is about students who hold positions of privilege trying to um be hostile towards or even harass teachers who are in marginalized positions so no when your students speak up they want more social justice they want better readings they want better representation that is definitely a different thing to be able to address this we need to start to see it so especially for those of you this might not be happening to you might not be able to see all the ways it's playing out because it doesn't always look like what you might expect harassment to look like there are a few places that it plays out

primarily the first one is in the classroom itself um i've added cupcakes to these because screw it it sucks right so we might as well have cupcakes that's my feeling um so the first place that this manifests is in bad faith questions so what i mean is you may be giving a talk about the cultural meaning of games and you may have a student at the back of the room who raises their hand and says yeah but aren't games really just for fun do they even mean anything right and in some ways that's a valid question but you can often tell you develop a sense when that question is sincere when that question is in bad faith and it's trying to rouse um ralph's a fight credit checking so this most often happens unsurprisingly to women non-binary folks folks of color but the idea here is to challenge you and say you're my professor but you don't really look like a gamer which is a sentence that gets uttered like verbatim very frequently

um can you prove it right what are you playing right now did you play that game all the way to the end so that's credit checking disruptive behavior you might have a large room of people and you have students who are sitting there talking loudly to each other or they're using kind of aggressive body language to try and disrupt the classroom inappropriate comments about the instructor so this is comes from an anecdote that sounds really unpleasant from a colleague who was using on one of the pieces of software that allows your students to anonymous anonymously respond to questions that you pose while you're teaching um and when she showed the answers up on the board they were all comments about her body right so they said things like um she's too hot to know anything about games in the middle of the classroom right so what do you do when that's the reality of the people sitting in front of you and you didn't even know it until they start putting those comments up sometimes you get walk outs and so

you'll be talking about something and a student will sort of in a huff stand up and walk out and which is a kind of physical display of displeasure it's a performance but then this hostility also bleeds outside of the classroom so we see it oh they're dolphins this time i also like dolphins um so we see it on uh essays and tests anywhere that the students write comments so um i've had a test question that was uh thinking about intersectional identities and asked about you know is whiteness part of an intersectional identity and the answer is yes right any any identities that intersect we could talk about is intersectional and the student was very angry and we got a long screed meeting the tas that was like cursing at us um about this question so it appears places like that um disrespecting tas so tas are another big part of this if you're teaching large classes if you're in an institution with grad students you may well be responsible for your tas

um so how to protect them from this hostile behavior one-on-one meetings so sometimes students will come to your office and kind of use physical hostility use verbal hostility to try and intimidate you so this is one where i highly recommend always leaving your office door open i had a student once come to my office and tell me um he was just so angry about all the lgbt people he wanted to hurt someone right and what do you do with that as an instructor sitting across you know from someone in a room sometimes you get this kind of peer-to-peer trash talk that's also meant to be performative so a student will very vocally go around to their peers and be like that professor ruberg they're horrible and the point is to circulate it within the program and then teacher evaluation so this is a particularly tricky one especially for those of you who rely on these for like your personnel reviews for your tenure reviews they will leave comments on evaluations that are things like and you

can hear a lot of my examples are from lgbt stuff because that's what i teach but um things like this professor has a gay agenda um they are a bad professor because they didn't give equal weight to the other side of the argument which is that gay people are bad i am i'm just like totally unwilling to give equal weight to an argument that gay people are bad um and then sometimes they post online so sites like rate my professor they might uh go on reddit like the quote from austin suggested these public forum forums but then there's a place where this hostility in the classroom out of the classroom which is always kind of fuzzy right like what constitutes harassment is always kind of fuzzy but there are moments when that um line gets less blurry and it very clearly transitions into harassment you get pizza this time this is the last of them you got cupcakes oh there's like a food thing anyway um so sometimes you end up with

threatening messages right so direct contact from students sometimes anonymized but very clearly from students um i got one last year that said uh i'll try not to curse at you you are you are a communist and it's disgusting right i am a communist i don't know that's interesting um but apparently it's disgusting as soon as you get physical intimidation so people very clearly using um being in small spaces with you i had a student who was very prone to come up to me stand kind of square look at me with like dead eyes and say almost nothing um and that is clearly an intimidation tactic and then things start to blow up from there so um when students start reaching out intentionally to online harassers things can very quickly escalate so there is a culture of students sending syllabi to larger harassment campaigns or

notifying folks you know there's a day in class we're going to talk about feminism come and help out and what happens is they send agents into your classroom so this is a kind of organized harassment campaign technique where folks show up in your classroom who are not enrolled and they try to document you and intimidate you and i'll talk more about that in a sec so it becomes this whole big muddle of different techniques and you can see how together they're a broader picture of toxic behavior hostile behavior even though each one individually may not seem like such a big deal so let's see how this played out in this particular course i was making this slide yesterday when i was sitting in another session and the person behind me like visibly groaned which i'm really happy about um so my first quarter uh teaching at my current institution which was the fall

of 2017 i was given this class it's not a class i designed but it's a class that's regularly taught it's called games and society so that's a big thing right um all of games all of society we teach on the quarter system so all of those things in a 10-week course this is kind of the basic information about it and this is what i knew right we had 260 students quite a lot of students and we had three tas and one reader so i intentionally picked tas and a reader who were women or non-binary folks i wanted the students to see that the experts in the room were not necessarily cis men which is great they were wonderful but it opens up a whole other host of ethical questions um the majority of them were computer science majors or what we call at a uci computer game science majors so they were very technical students

75 of them were freshmen since it was a fall class and 90 of them were men so that's quite a breakdown but there were other things that i didn't realize were going to affect how the course worked and things that you might want to think about as well so it was a required course it's actually their required intro course so it was their very first introduction to being there and they felt like they were just forced into it right it started them off on a bad foot it was also the only course that they were going to take in their entire education in this major that was about culture so it was a like check off the box get out get your eza get out the other side when i was prepping to teach this course i kind of knew there were going to be problems right like i said i've been doing this for a while i've always had you know problem students here or there at other institutions so i started asking around for resources right what happens um if i have a student who's aggressive in the

classroom what happens um if the students are generally kind of toxic like what are these students like right what should i do with this new group of students i'm getting to know and the response i got from my super well intentioned super lovely colleagues who i'm thrilled to work with was amazingly unhelpful um i had one professor who i respect a ton say to me kind of look at me like i don't really know what you're talking about um but just be nice to your students and they'll be nice to you if anybody has experienced harassment on the internet or in your classroom you know that this is not correct right it's not about being mean often actually when we're nice that's when we open ourselves up we make ourselves vulnerable especially as people who read as women in the classroom right i was also trying to find resources for what to do with students who were being disruptive right and the university had all these resources for what to do if your student is having a mental health crisis

like one solo student having a mental health crisis but this is not a mental health crisis this is a broader cultural issue it's a systemic issue and there were no resources in place for dealing with something like that so what it meant is that when i went into the classroom i had this experience i've never had before i'm in about a decade of teaching which is that when i looked out at this room it was just a sea it was a sea of dudes and it was a sea of hostile faces and i think that that's probably an overreaction to a certain extent right it's a kind of vocal minority but a very present minority and it's hard when you're standing in front of a room you want to be generous you want to be present you're there for them to learn to be seeing the faces that are scowling at you and kind of shooting hate at you so we wrestled with that me and my tas um until we hit a day where it just felt like this is too much right this has

gone beyond and what happened is we had a day on the syllabus that was the gender day right we kind of in 10 weeks you can't do a whole lot so we just had little smatterings of things right day on disability day on race stay on this we had one gender day i've got lots of radical pain in the ass feelings about gender this class was not about that right this was like the world's tamest gender class designed not to like get me harassed um and yet when i stood up in front of the podium something was weird because i had a policy of not wanting students to use screens and i've kind of backed off of that but that's that's a separate pedagogical thing and there were all these people in the audience holding up their phones and clearly actively recording and i said something to them from the podium i said like hey folks remember we don't have we have a policy of not doing

that and they just didn't stop and it started to feel like the room was fuller than it normally was so i had my tas do a head count um and it turned out that there were 11 extra people in the room and we know it was precisely 11 people who weren't enrolled because they took a pop quiz that day and the people who were there filming us took the damn pup quiz they took the quiz but they all put um pseudonyms on it so i was able to go through the whole directory for uci and figure out that none of those were real names so this was a coordinated effort somebody had notified a larger system of harassers and they had sent 11 people into the classroom to be there both to record so they could share this material online and also to intimidate i gotta be honest this really messed with me so i live in a place and some of you may as well where our students and our

faculty live very close together um i live on a campus where there's student housing there's a whole faculty suburb and you like go to this you go to the supermarket at midnight to buy some milk and it's like they're all there right your lives are very close but because it was such a large class i couldn't get to know them all i couldn't get to know their faces and so i didn't know who all of my you know toxic students were um some of them who i would call active harassers right so it made me very anxious it made me kind of paranoid that when i would look around at the sea of students there at uci which is a large campus it felt like they were everywhere and i know that's not true but i just point that out to say that this is not just a logistical problem this harassment issue it's also a problem of feeling right it's a problem of how it kind of eats away at you this sense that your own students want to do you harm so from this experience there were some things that i learned are very specific challenges and effects that come from the combination of toxic gamer culture and the classroom in games education

i'd like to think of these challenges as kind of this like bouncy house gauntlet of things that you have to do to get from one side to the other to deal with it um it's not just one obstacle it's like a whole obstacle course that you go through so one thing is that your problems aren't visible to your privileged colleagues you may have wonderful colleagues who want to be supportive but they just literally don't see it because they're not in the classrooms where it's happening they're not the ones getting those evaluations it's just not visible to them so not only are you experiencing it you're always trying to convince your colleagues that it's happening people outside of games don't get it so you might have other communities for me my work is very interdisciplinary so i'll often be at conferences or things like that that aren't game specific and trying to talk to folks they're just like i literally have no idea what you're talking about when you talk to games people especially women and non-binary folks who teach games they're like oh my god this is my life every day right so

it's hard to find support networks outside of games because it's games are kind of different environment you end up in this pedagogy catch-22 which is that you're there because you care about diversity right you're there because you live in a body that is seen as diverse and so you have a stake in changing games in games education and if you put that in your teaching you're gonna get at best hostile responses at worst harassed right but if you don't put it in your teaching then you've backed off your politics and you might not make games better right so do you try and make it better or do you back off and then this is the kind of larger question right because people will say to you you're doing such great work you're converting the next generation thank you [Music] um because there's a balance between converting folks and trying to support your personal well-being so given this there are also some very specific effects some of these are obvious right but they're worth thinking about especially if you run a games program especially if

you have this concern in mind like i want to make the best games education i can how is this affecting me it has a direct effect on your program and its efficacy for teaching so to start with you have less happy less engaged teachers one way to deal with feeling like your students are hostile is to check out right you walk into the room you give a lecture you piece right i'm not saying that's a bad way to teach but that's a different way to teach than being interactive because it shields you right and i understand that you get less teaching about culture i'd like to think that all our games programs are slowly moving towards incorporating more of this but if you hire folks who can teach culture and games and they are facing this issue they're going to back off of that too that also hurts your program you get a less diverse student body and this takes a few steps to explain but i think this is important to a lot of folks who run these programs to have a diverse student body so the reason is that if you are getting hostile responses or harassment in the classroom that means

that you are less likely to keep working there right as a marginalized instructor and also that you're less likely to keep teaching these courses that explicitly engage with culture and those two things having diverse instructors teaching diverse topics are the things that um kind of hail direct diverse students right they're the things that show diverse students you care about them they show them their role models that they can see themselves in the program so when you start to lose those instructors or lose those courses you lose the comfortability that your diverse students started to feel you end up with all this extra labor for your marginalized instructor so some of that is is time right you get an email that tells you that you're disgusting communist right and then you got to do something right you forward it to your chair you notify the appropriate person there's just work that goes into dealing with this kind of behavior but there's also emotional work right if you have been harassed in the past and you can get harassed and then like go home and

feel good and be productive and like write a research paper god speed but i know that when this happens to me even though it's been a long time that i've been facing things like this it gets to you right it gets under your skin and it takes the time away from being productive to have to deal with that set of feelings and then there's this whole promotion thing so i i come up for my tenure soon so it's like feeling super close to home which is that when your students leave you these negative feedback um bits of feedback on your evaluations it directly affects your tenure track faculty because it can come up in their promotion cases it can affect um their career their tenure review and it can actually like very really in a very real way affect their whole career just to have these students acting this way okay so let's jump to actionable steps so like i said this falls into three areas steps for marginalized educators steps for colleagues steps for programs

so let's start with that first one there are things you can do before you even start a class so let's say you're starting in a new institution it's an institution you suspect from getting the kind of temperature of the student body you suspect this might be an issue you can do things before the class even begins you can assemble a toolkit so like i said this isn't always easy but finding the resources on campus what do i do with a disruptive student what do i do if i feel unsafe what's the reporting process right as much as you can assemble so that if you're in a moment of crisis you have it i recommend it cultivating the right teaching personality so i know this sounds a little like calculated i think we all want to think that we get up in front of our students and we're sincere and we're present but for folks who are marginalized it's worth thinking carefully so for me i've always been the kind of teacher who's like a big smile and is like you're all awesome thank you for being here i want to hear your thoughts and it

turns out that backfires a lot of the time for people who are red in the way that i'm read in these big classrooms where we see this toxicity so i would actually recommend if that's your teaching style thinking about what you can do to take a step back right it's in your how you hold your body it's in what your students call you right could be docked or something professor something instead of your first name and that personality can help shield you from this behavior so that's what you can do when you're right at the beginning what do you do when you're sort of in the middle of it in the middle of the course and you're seeing problems i highly recommend embracing ambivalence so here's what i mean some days you may wake up and be like my mission is to educate the misguided youth right i will make them think differently about games and about the world um and it may take time but i'm on a mission right and there are days you may wake up and be like i am so tired of trying to beat my head against the wall to educate the misguided youth

because often it takes time right they may be jerks all the way through your class and then three years later wake up and be like oh that was so useful but they're long gone and you're long gone right and so you have to i don't know that there's one answer or another but i think sitting with that sitting with the fact that it can be both important and it can suck that's really important giving yourself the permission to do self-care right so if you need to walk away from a situation you need to go like hang out in your tub and like pet your cat or whatever people don't really pet cats in tubs so that seemed like it seemed like two comforting things at once right um that it is your right to have that time for self-care and i think for those of us who do research as well as teaching it's really hard to feel like you have the right to take time for yourself what do you do when things are on fire right not at the beginning not in the middle but when there's an active crisis

don't keep quiet right there's a sort of sense of shame and unspeakability around this stuff and this is one of the reasons that i wanted to give this talk is that it feels like you can't talk about it because we're supposed to want to support our students because we think this is just an issue that's happening to us but i highly recommend telling people they may not always be receptive but it's going to go better in the long run for you if they know document the hell out of everything so if you get an email from a student make sure that you've saved it if you um have an incident in class do a little write-up of it and send it to your chair and you can even send it and say not asking for any action i just want to document this while it's fresh and let you know this happened and that creates a paper trail so if there's a larger issue right so let's say your tenure track and you go up for your tenure review and they say oh your students hate that you teach feminist and queer stuff you can say let me show you the paper trail that demonstrates that there is systemic discrimination going on here

you may encounter very well-meaning people who say don't write that down let's just chat in my office don't do that right i'm sure they mean well but it is in your best interest to have a trail and then what do you do for the long haul so you made it through the trash fire um how do you just keep going i recommend building a community of folks who know what you're talking about so it can be amazingly amazingly helpful just to talk to someone else who's like that happens to you that happens to me because again we feel like we're alone with it we feel like it's really overwhelming and that community may well be outside your institution so in moments like this right where we have other educators around us from other institutions i recommend just like scooting up next to somebody and be like is that happening to you and then when it happens text them and be like what what just happened to me and it really

actually helps this is a technique that i learned from alex agloro who used to teach at wpi and is now at asu i feel mixed about it but the idea is to teach the students who are there for the right reasons to teach the students who you want to teach so that means look out at a room at 260 people and find the five that really care and think about teaching to them now it's tricky right because you're not trying to jettison all the other students you're not saying they don't matter but it helps you sustain it helps you survive and thrive if your intended audience is people who want to be there so what can you do if you are colleagues of folks going through this we're going to do this one as kind of do's and don'ts and i'm going to ask you again to take a second before we do this and sort of ponder so do you think of yourself as an ally

if you think of yourself as an ally when was the last time you actively advocated for a marginalized person in your program right so not just in private said oh yeah that's that's hard for you but actively went to bat for somebody that's what we need right this is what we need is active advocates this is true in all of diversity issues not just in education we don't need just allies we need advocates we need your help as our colleagues who have more privilege and who aren't facing these same issues so when you're trying to address things right maybe you're like yes i'm an advocate now i'm going to take a stand here's what i recommend not doing don't give advice without knowing what you're talking about right and that's going to take some active education that might take going online and reading about things that might take having conversations with your colleagues if they're up for it right you don't want

to like be like can i pick your brain about how people are mean to you that sucks too but before you tell people what to do make sure you understand the situation don't dismiss the concerns by saying oh you're making students better right yeah maybe but that doesn't mean that all these other issues aren't true please do not debate us or interrogate us right if someone comes to you and says gosh i could really use your help i'm being harassed or i'm facing a hostile environment if you ask us 20 questions to make us prove it or you try and play devil's advocate we're done right it doesn't feel like you're there to support us like we live these experiences you have to trust us don't ask marginalized colleagues for extra labor so for example another very well-intentioned colleague said to me gosh you had such a hard experience in that games and society class wouldn't you like to do a tour of all the other classes in our department and go and tell all the students about how hurtful

it is when you're harassed and that'll help them realize that you're a person too yeah i bet so but you know what you don't want to do when you've just stared remember the thing where i'm like really paranoid now like to go and be emotionally vulnerable in that way is not the best way to support your colleagues so here's what you can do the flip side believe your marginalized colleagues i can't stress enough how much this is really important so seriously just making us feel like you believe us is a huge step teach diversity in your own classrooms so there is literally no class you can teach i mean this absolutely where cultural issues and social issues are not relevant that doesn't mean that you have to have half a semester on those things but they are always present and the more that you normalize teaching them the more that it doesn't make us the weird ones right they can't be like oh that professor that's where we did the

like weird queer stuff if it is spread out across your program if you're modeling for them that privileged people also care about this it helps tone down the hostility across the board be an advocate not just an ally and show the heck up right so let's say there's a diversity event in your department it's about working with students it's about uh diversifying your faculty whatever it is if you do not think of yourself as a diverse person or like diversity is not really the thing you work on you need to be there right often it's the people who are already working on these issues who show up to those things and we need to be on the same page you need to see these things for any real change to happen so i'm going to close by thinking about this broader question programs and institutions those of you who are currently running game programs those of you who are spinning up game programs i think we know that more and more are popping up all over so it's actually a really important moment to get these things in on the ground floor

hire multiple diverse instructors so when you have one person it all falls on them right and i know this isn't always easy right you have budget constraints you have tenure line constraints like this is easier said than done i get that but i came into uci with a colleague aaron trammell who was in my position too that has been amazingly helpful because when these things are happening someone is there with me offer multiple courses that address culture so like i said with that games and society class when it's just one class and they take it off and they try and get the heck out they don't engage thoroughly if you can incorporate these concerns across your curriculum then it becomes normal for them and they know they have to confront it educate your students about how to act with their faculty right and how to act in the classroom this isn't just about me wanting them to be nicer to me right this is a professionalization skill

this is something that's going to serve them in their team building and their teamwork right simple things like how to write a polite email actually goes a long way i do a workshop at the beginning of every class on how to write a polite email and it gets a breakdown of like write this sentence then write this sentence then write this sentence and oh my god they get so much nicer after that because you don't get those 3am emails they're like what's the assignment i don't know it reply asap i highly recommend it if you're working on the program level or this is kind of the institution level right recognize the labor that goes into these issues so if you're doing a review for example of someone who's been facing harassment recognize that you may need to take into account that they've been able to produce less work because they've been dealing with these issues and then have your own resources at the ready so have a kind of packet for this stuff right it shouldn't be professors who have to figure it out and reinvent the wheel especially if you're hiring um hiring folks who haven't worked as professors before educators

before or folks who are brand new to the institution right it's hard to navigate that so do it once share it with folks and it'll be there tell your instructors that you support them and then actually support them right it's really easy to say we're here for diversity we're here for you but you have to actually put your money where your mouth is and do it so i'll just wrap up by saying that if we are serious about diversifying games education and i think that's something that does matter to a lot of us we need to be serious about addressing student toxicity we need to create an environment where diverse educators and culturally engaged education cannot just be part of our community but can thrive thanks

thanks very much so i think we've got like 10 or 11 minutes for questions um and i'm told that you should come up to uh the mic and also i totally forgot to tell you at the beginning to silence your cell phones little late for that and also to fill out your evals hey uh hi my name's brian i teach game development at a high school in california yeah and it's kind of contextually different high school to college but my main interaction with toxic gamer culture is student to student yeah and invariably my best students are my young ladies yeah and i'm i'm pretty good being reactionary about issues you know starts cred checking and sometimes ramps all the way up to full-blown sexual harassment yeah i feel like i'm good at being reactive to those issues do you have any tips on kind of proactively heading those things off before they show up yeah it kind of depends on the structure of how you're teaching them but i would go back to this thing of setting expectations ahead of time like if

there's a way to have a workshop about that ahead of time um so that they know that something that's on your mind and something that you expect of them i was also just having a conversation about toxicity and esports the other day and this great suggestion that came up is to try and promote the value of sportsmanship right like i'm not a sporty person but people who play sports often care about the value of being good community members so if it's possible to kind of foster that and get them enthusiastic like have a sportsman of the month or something right if there's some reward for being a good community member then that might model for them that that's something they're striving for thank you yeah thanks hi i'm naomi and i teach and i'm currently running the game program at nyu uh so my question is about the the curriculum aspect and specifically the course that you were teaching which like you said is a required first year course right um i'm wondering after having taught that

question experiences you talked about how do you feel about the idea of requiring a games and culture course as part of the curriculum as opposed to other approaches some of which you mentioned right like rather than having a required course uh having these topics spread throughout the curriculum that's a sort of you know required part of multiple syllabi or uh you know having an elective that goes deeper into these areas or multiple electives where then you might mostly be getting the students who who want to be there i think it's a great question right because the advantage i mean the fact that it was required wasn't a mistake right it was a pedagogical decision that um all students coming in and the fact that it was their first class also also wasn't a mistake someone put real thought into that right which is that they come in the door they're required to think about games and culture right off the bat and when you make it an elective then the people who opt in and i've totally seen this at other institutions the people who opt in are already on board right i think i think it's a kind of both and approach

right that if there's some element where it's required but also some element where they can opt into more or even if there's multiple courses that at least address culture in some way that are required there's something about it being that one token class that they get out of the way as opposed to something they are really expected to engage with throughout that i think that's where that attitude that dismissive um yeah that dismissive attitude comes from so i know not every program has a ton of space for new courses but if it's if there's a way to bring it in at multiple points i think it helps so would you favor something like you have to take at least one course within the area and you have a number of choices or like take this many credits of this type of course during your yeah i think that's actually a really smart answer which is like let's say you have um three different courses that are games and culture courses and they have to pick one of the three what's nice about that is that um they still have to do it but they feel like they've made a choice and they have made a choice but they feel like they've opted in in some way that they have agency over and i think that would actually really help

okay thank you yeah thanks hey hi i'm a game student what would be your advice from underrepresented group students especially in a class where there's like no courses about genders or something like that yeah where they have to be the teachers for their other students while also being afraid of being judged by the others because the course just started and they're here for three years with like other game students yeah so just to make sure i understand your question so what do you do when you are yourself a marginalized student in a class where these things aren't being addressed and you kind of are in the role of needing to educate your peers at the same time plus you feel nervous about it because you're worried people will respond badly yeah i mean i think it's a it's a big issue right and right now when we don't have these classes that address things when it's not on the table then it does fall to our marginalized students and they get pushed further and further out like that extra labor falls on them but

also then they feel like farther marginalized so i would say um to whatever extent those students have the bandwidth to build community it helps like it's sort of like being a professor being an educator and and finding other folks who have similar experiences i have an undergrad who's amazing and she um felt really pushed out of our games major for just that reason so she switched majors but she built this amazing team of like queer women of color who make badass games who don't come out of our games program and i think it's really helped her so that's i would say one thing is i'm not saying exit the games major i'm just saying like if you can build community it helps i would also say identify the faculty who are your who are your allies and your advocates and that might mean looking to other departments that might mean i'm looking for folks who aren't your instructors now on the instructor side that's extra labor that you take on to work with those students but i've seen it be really helpful for students themselves yeah i've seen situations where like there's like only one teacher who could

be an ally and so it's gonna be like an extra label for them and the students that are from this group are not gonna be checking on them because they know that it's gonna be extra labels you're absolutely right i think it's i think it's a big system of problems like i guess my feeling is that like privilege i'm thinking about these vectors of privilege right and like an undergrad isn't going to solve the larger systemic problem and undergrad has the right to be supported so i would rather than an undergrad come to someone like me and look for assistance and then i go up the next right but different faculty may feel differently i just feel a lot of responsibility to those students because they don't have the power to change that you know okay thanks yeah thanks hi um i have a similar question um i'm my game design program that i'm enrolled in is very small we're growing but we certainly lack diversity in the students

and especially in the faculty i'm not convinced that my teachers my professors the upper faculty are aware of this issue and how it's affecting students yeah i like to think of myself as a leader in my program and i would like to know how can i personally try to shape and change the atmosphere in my program before i graduate that's a great question and also thank you for doing that work that's really hard to do on the stage level um yeah i think this thing of finding allies who can be an ear and sometimes what an ally can do is even if they don't have the power to change things they can go up the ladder right they can go to the chair they can go to somebody like that and be your advocate in that direction and the other thing i would say is if you feel comfortable talking to someone like whoever runs your program or your chair i'm not sure what kind of program you're in and i know that doesn't always feel comfortable the more that you can make your voice heard it's helpful at least then they can't

say they didn't know it was happening and the third piece of it sounds like what you're already doing which is organizing your student community because then let's say a new student comes in and let's say a woman's student right and she sees you right she sees you as a role model she sees your community as a role model so it's a slow process but i think you're doing pieces of it really right all right thank you for your time bo yeah thanks hi thank you for your talk yeah this is great um my name is price jones i'm the mfa director at the academy of arts school of game development and uh my question is more about how do you um address your colleagues yeah do you do it always one-on-one or do you ever set up workshops to have these kind of conversations yeah that's a super good question because it's touchy i think again there are a lot of well-intentioned people who um it can be hard to have these conversations even colleague to colleague and academia especially like on the tenure track is super hierarchical we like to think that it's flat but it's super hierarchical um

so especially if you're coming from a position a more junior position like myself it can be hard um i think having one-on-one conversations in my experience has been the most effective um or if there are moments like in a faculty meeting to shout out something small it kind of depends what the affordances are in your program so where i work right now the preference of my chair is that we don't do like a big group workshop when i worked at usc we had opportunities to do stuff for faculty specifically which was really nice so i would say finding the opportunities that you have and also finding what feels comfortable to you where it's not going to be you're not going to then become the um target of hostility right right yeah great it's yeah it's kind of dependent on the program that makes sense thank you thanks okay i think we've got time for one more question if anybody has one hi thank you very much for this talk um

i teach at a small in a small games area in a larger like interactive media program and um my this feels like a really problematic question but i've been having it so i'm let's do it kind of curious to hear how you respond um we have we do have a lot of lgbtq students in our program and marginalized students and what i'm curious about because of how we our faculty aren't very diverse yeah because of how i present i i'm sure there's toxicity in the program but i don't know about it so my question is sort of how and and should i want to surface it in order to address it i would say yes how yeah how how do you have any recommendations for how to yeah i would say two things one is um town halls i found really useful so it's where you at the end of a semester or whatever you get the students together and you just open the floor and say please feel free to share um

what your experience is like and the faculty just listen the faculty don't talk and often that stuff will bubble to the surface the other thing is identifying students who you think maybe could use some support and just being like hey come to office hours i'd love to chat with you about what school is like not to pressure them not to tokenize them but then sometimes those things will start to come to the surface there too okay thank you thanks okay i think that's time thanks very much for your questions thanks for listening