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Liberation MUSH
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@Aria said in Liberation MUSH:
Here. Have some statistics from 2019.
I was curious about the numbers and they seem to be behind a pretty hefty paywall.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring The stats themselves are, but the abstract is readable:
“The graph shows the share of adults who are fans of comic books in the United States as of April 2019, sorted by gender. The data reveals that 43 percent of men said that they were fans of comics books, compared to 24 percent of women.”
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@MisterBoring said in Liberation MUSH:
@Aria said in Liberation MUSH:
Here. Have some statistics from 2019.
I was curious about the numbers and they seem to be behind a pretty hefty paywall.
Ahhh, sorry about that. It was 43% of adult men and 24% of adult women. So not wildly different than what you’d see from older statistics.
If you do want to see older statistics, there’s an interesting spreadsheet here that breaks comics related search terms down by publishing house, with some pretty massive disparities between publishers - 12.5% women readership for Antarctic Press (Robotech), versus 64.71% for JC Comics (who I’ve literally never heard of) and 62.26% for Slave Labor Graphics (publishers of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Lenore, etc.).
Interestingly, the manga related terms skewed much more heavily female than other categories. But bear in mind that data is from 2013, so it’s a decade out of date.
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Shitty MUSH idea, 7/31/2023: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: the MUSH using a combination of FATE Accelerated for character sheets and FS3 for combat.
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I suspect part of the change in demographics is that nerdy things aren’t being gatekept quite as hard for women and femmes, and are more easily accessed online.
No more do you have to walk into a comic shop or a TT gaming store to buy stuff, only for all conversation, and laughter, die as a group of nerdy guys glare at you and whisper angrily because you dared to enter their domain, like you just walked into their damn living room instead of a place of business, all for the crime of being a woman or feminine presenting person.
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@Adora said in Liberation MUSH:
No more do you have to walk into a comic shop or a TT gaming store to buy stuff, only for all conversation, and laughter, die as a group of nerdy guys glare at you and whisper angrily because you dared to enter their domain, like you just walked into their damn living room instead of a place of business, all for the crime of being a woman or feminine presenting person.
JFC, if only that was the weirdest and worst thing that ever happened to me in the local comic/gaming shop…
The one where I went to high school was mostly just silent shock and awkward staring. The one where I went to college I maintain was actively dangerous to women.
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@Aria
The world would be a better place if more comic book stores hired women to station their front counters.
It might ease the nerds into being normal around women by giving them regular exposure to girl-cooties. -
I feel very fortunate that the comic-book and gaming store of my teens did almost always have a woman at the counter.
And very fortunate that now most of the gaming stores in town are places where hot trans girls want YOU to play Magic: The Gathering with them.
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Probably depends. Relying on women to give men attention as a means of making them less inappropriate if they are steeped in a culture where men tell each other they are owed sex, dominion, and it’s women’s fault if they don’t feel like a strong man and no matter their behavior they are entitled to female attention of their choosing-- it just doesn’t work.
Just ask any woman who was raised in and especially spent a portion of their adult life in a fundamentalist religious group.
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@De-Villefort said in Liberation MUSH:
@Aria
It might ease the nerds into being normal around women by giving them regular exposure to girl-cooties.Or it would give said nerds a constant target to creep on and abuse and behave inappropriately with due to an inherent power imbalance of the paying customer and someone just trying to earn enough money to pay their bills.
What needs to happen is for their fellow nerdy guys to chime in and say “this behavior isn’t okay, stop acting like a goddamn incel just because Mia turned you down for a date in 7th grade.”
It’s not on women, or any other marginalized group, to help heal people actively bigoted toward them.
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Also I have to say that most “nerds” that I was around were actually very normal guys. Maybe more quiet until the game started? Far less creepy than the religious nuts I was used to. Sensitive towards how others might feel. Or on the spectrum. I felt safer with them than I did with my former youth group. I did notice though at conventions and more comics oriented stores that I tended to feel less safe, but there was a lot different cultures there than at the small game (rpgs/cards) store in college. In fact it was some of my tabletop buddies that noticed the gross convention behavior stuff the first time I attended one before I did and really the first time in my entire life to that point I’d seen any men take other men to task for their predatory behavior rather than assume the woman was inviting the attention somehow. It was shocking to me.
I did meet other women at conventions and via mushing and that frankly was the best part esp in the days of assumptions about how real girls wouldn’t be interested. My older kids embraced gamer geekism and over the years I’ve been thrilled to see how different their gaming conventions have looked from when I first started going. But that is more about people showing up and seizing enjoyment and directing programming for themselves not trying to train misogynistic men. I wonder if there might be less of them in some gatherings not so much because they are finally getting the attention owed them but because they’re not comfortable joining in where they don’t feel like they are catered to/bad behavior is accepted.
But there’s still plenty of it. And still plenty of people who blame women not giving them enough attention for it.
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@Aria I don’t really trust a paywalled article where I can’t see any type of breakdown about how they came to this conclusion or what the polling size was, etc.
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yeah, I’m just going to say from deeply frustrating personal experience that toxic “nerd culture” has nothing to do with a lack of exposure. That kinda fits their narrative, because-- hey surprise-- it’s transactional. “I’m shitty towards women because they haven’t paid attention to me.”
but like if your default state is “shitty unless” your problems are much, much deeper. It took most of my 20’s to realize some dudes in my tight-knit group of friends didn’t need long talks about how we were raised to think a certain way, because they were beyond talking. They actively thrived in and enjoyed their shitty views, and that is just the unavoidable depressing truth about a lot of “proud nerd” men.
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@Wizz said in Liberation MUSH:
but like if your default state is “shitty unless” your problems are much, much deeper. It took most of my 20’s to realize some dudes in my tight-knit group of friends didn’t need long talks about how we were raised to think a certain way, because they were beyond talking. They actively thrived in and enjoyed their shitty views, and that is just the unavoidable depressing truth about a lot of “proud nerd” men.
Along with their probably life-long misogyny, “proud nerd” men are also, at least in my experience, extremely hostile towards LGBTQ+ people (and I would say especially towards their male friends/gaming partners who come out to them, I’ve gotten the “oh gross! are you going to hit on me” reaction from them more than anyone else that it made me zoom back into the closet), and there’s definitely a certain cohort of dudes who really love to say they’re not racist, but…
I always come back to this time when I was just starting college in the early 00s and joined a D&D club, where someone cornered me to tell me about their homebrew world that had an “only humans” gimmick, but there were still racial modifiers. That certainly wasn’t the only time that I heard some fucked up racist shit from gamers, but it was definitely the most egregious outside of WORA.
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@Wizz said in Liberation MUSH:
hey surprise-- it’s transactional. “I’m shitty towards women because they haven’t paid attention to me.”
It’s really just the exact same principle as the kinds of people who believe in “The Friend Zone”. The friendship is the valuable piece in the relationship. And yet, there are still weirdos out there who insist that they are such “Good Guys TM” that they “deserve” more than just friendship, and the fact that they’re not getting that “upgraded” transaction from their investment as a friend suddenly means the friendship is meaningless and they’ve been slighted.
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@Jenn said in Liberation MUSH:
not getting that “upgraded” transaction from their investment as a friend suddenly means the friendship is meaningless and they’ve been slighted.
This lootbox SUCKS.
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Liberation really does work differently from most games out there. A lot of games have one comingled ‘staff’ who have all powers, see all jobs, get involved in everything.
Liberation does not work that way. Sundance has taken upon herself the SOLE responsibility of handling interpersonal issues. She is also the only person who handles cross-splat PvP, and thus the only person who can see all sheets on the game.
There’s a reason for that. She needs storytellers, and she knows if her storytellers have to deal with these things, they will burn out a heck of a lot faster. So she tells her storytellers “Don’t worry about any of that stuff. Let me handle it all.” And she tells her players “Come to me about all of that stuff. Let me handle it all.”
At present I’m not a splat storyteller on Liberation. I play on Liberation, I own the AWS account that our servers are on, and I manage the website (both the Wordpress main site, and the Mediawiki player wiki). That gets me listed +staff on there, but I have no role in things that some games consider “staffly” tasks.
On the storyteller side I’m effectively a Director Without Portfolio. I know how storytelling and CG work on Liberation, since I’ve had several Director and Subdirector positions on the game over the years. I know how to answer questions. I’m still on +st for that reason, but my Polk bit can’t see anyone’s sheets, jobs, or anything.
The only time my +myjobs isn’t empty these days is when someone forgets a wiki password, whose READ THIS @mail didn’t get auto-saved.
That’s a lot of paragraphs to say that any issues people have raised with Sundance, are things that no other storyteller or “staffer” on the game is privy to. She doesn’t burden anyone else on +st or +staff with the issues being raised. When she makes the occasional Board 1 post about something, we only know about it if we’re directly involved.
This all also means that if you think she’s doing a bad job, then it’s a bad idea to play on Liberation. I’ve had many, many conversations with her obviously. So I know how she operates. I like dealing with her, and I like playing on her game.
But as elaborated on in painful detail above, I’m not privy to any issues any specific people have raised. Nobody is but Sundance. Trusting Sundance to be a good game runner is necessary for playing on Liberation.
I’ve left games in the past. It’s not easy, but it was the right call, and there are games I should have left SOONER than I did. So I really mean it: If you think Sundance is a jerk or whatever, do as Roz so clearly illustrated, for your own well being:
https://brandmuday.mythicus.net/post/17437
If there are bad players there who need handled, I hope Sundance will handle them. I encourage anyone to give her a shot. If any player feel she’s failed, I’m not going to try to invalidate that player’s feelings and experiences. I will just say that any players who feel that way who DO leave, I think are making what is the smart and correct decisions for them.
I like the game. I like Sundance. But I’m not gonna vilify anyone criticizing the game or criticizing Sundance, and I’m not going to try to dismiss people’s experiences I’m not even privy to.
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Is it just me or is it irresponsible to take resolving all of the interpersonal issues between players, or players and
staffstorytellers and throw it on one single person’s plate?I know from previous experience in MUs and LARPs that doing that causes a very very contagious form of burnout.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring I worry about her.
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@Polk You are correct to. A lot of the really successful larger LARPs I’ve been a part of that I’ve felt handled interpersonal issues well had a team dedicated to it so that if one person was the issue, or felt they were compromised in sorting it out because of existing relationships, others could step in and handle it.
I don’t know of any MU that’s done it well, as I’ve always felt that the interpersonal OOC stuff isn’t something that any of us want to deal with if we can avoid it.
