Capes and Consoles at WisCon 32
June 2008 Issue
Features
- From the Editors
- Craft Check: T-Shirt Patch Jacket
Interviews
- Industry Interview: Sara Girard [Marketing Lead, D&D]
- Blogger Interview: Monique [Girls Don’t Game]
Articles
- Gender & Live-Action Role Play: Into Monster Camp, Part II
Author: Samara Hayley Steele
- Heroic Villainess
Author: Melissa Velte
- Capes and Consoles at WisCon 32
Author: Robyn Fleming
- Guest Star Villainy
Author: Brendan Davis
In this ongoing series, Samara shares her experiences as a female LARPer in a male-dominated LARP organization.
Melissa breaks down dichotomy between good and evil, hero and villain, with her piece on the complex motivations of Legretta the Quick.
Robyn regales us with tales of her adventures at this year's WisCon.
Brendan talks about how a "guest star" villain can add the necessary threat to motivate players without wiping them out before they can get started.
Gamer Stories
Reviews
Odds 'n Ends
This year, the excitement and planning for WisCon (“The World’s Leading Feminist Science Fiction Convention,” held every year over Memorial Day weekend in Madison, Wisconsin) started early for me, when several of us from Cerise and sister-site Girl-Wonder.org put in a request to throw a party at the con. We were allotted a room for Saturday evening, and the plotting for a truly excellent party – codenamed “Capes and Consoles” – began. The party wasn’t the only thing going on, of course. Here’s an overview of all the cool things I did at and leading up to WisCon:
Tucson, Kansas City, and Beyond!
Karen Healey (of Girl-Wonder.org) flew in to Arizona to visit with me for a few days before the convention. After some delays with her flight, we settled in at my apartment for a few days of wacky fun with comics and gaming. She got me reading PS238, and I invited her to join my weekly D&D game for a session as a guest star heroine. We also played a few rounds of High School Musical Mystery Date, but it’s probably best not to speak of that.
When Tuesday rolled around, we boarded a plane together and took off for Kansas City, where we met up with Olivia Luna (an editor here at Cerise) and KC Kupperman (costumer extraordinaire, and active on the forums at both Iris and Girl-Wonder). We spent the night at KC’s place, staying up late to play lots of DS games, and then piled into her car in the morning for the drive to Madison.
It was a long drive, but we passed the time with chatting, DS games and geeky music mixes on our iPods. By the time we arrived in Madison, we all knew the lyrics for H.I.M.’s “Vampire Heart” by, well, heart, and we’d become pros at slinging Metroids at each other in Metroid Prime Pinball.
Arriving in Madison
When we arrived at the Concourse Hotel in Madison, we connected with other friends from Girl-Wonder and the Iris forums, and made plans to enjoy Super Munchkin and Rock Band later in the evening. In the meantime, several of us went swimming to cool off and relax after the long drive.
After showering off the chlorine, my roommates and I got dressed to go downstairs for some gaming. I remembered reading somewhere or other that women really only enjoy gaming when makeup is involved, so I thought I’d try it out and see if it made a difference for me. Karen gave me an over-the-top makeover, which was pretty fun – but it actually made it a lot harder to play Puzzle Quest, at least while she was applying the blush.
Friday
On Friday morning, we had a short meeting to coordinate what everyone would be doing to prepare for the Capes and Consoles party on Saturday, and then split up to enjoy the WisCon programming.
I took part in a panel about toys, which I had hoped would cover miniatures and other toys used in gaming, but which focused more on a sort of nostalgic overview of children’s toys that were popular before I was born. I very much enjoyed a fun panel about encouraging more creative aliens in science fiction called “Not Enough Octopusses,” and in the evening I moderated a really interesting panel about speculative poetry.
Friday night was given over to more swimming, and several of us had fun playing with some Justice League diving toys that Karen had brought with her.
Saturday
Saturday was a big day for most of us! I managed to take in one panel in the morning (on the subject of co-writing), and then went dashing off with KC and Karen to do some shopping for the party. After that, we all took turns setting up in our party suite. Karen and I had gone to a copy center to get some high-quality prints of Cerise cover images and some iconic images from Girl-Wonder, which we put up on the walls. One of the features of our party was to be a prize draw, and we were lucky enough to get a suite with mirrored shelves that made a perfect place to display all of the loot.
KC designed a sign for our “DS Lounge,” a space with a comfy couch and a coffee table that we set aside at one end of the room for people to sit while playing games together, and we made labels for all of the snacks we planned to serve. Cabell Gathman, a friend and serious gamer, came by with the ingredients for a mixed drink that she had created for the party.
Once everything was arranged, we got into costume. We had a wide spectrum of heroes and villains from gaming and comics, from Karen’s Dr. Pamela Isley to Olivia’s Claire Redfield. Then, we stood by to welcome our guests.
It’s hard to judge the success of a party from the position of the person greeting people at the door (where I spent most of my evening), but Capes and Consoles seemed to be a hit. The DS Lounge was full, there was lots of conversation and laughing, and when we did our midnight prize draw the room was so packed that Karen had to stand on a chair when she drew the numbers.
After the prize draw, the party started to wind down a little, and I had more opportunities to chat with some of our guests. I particularly enjoyed conversing with people about their favorite games, and what they enjoy most about gaming and gaming culture.
Sunday
I found it very hard to get up on Sunday morning! I didn’t make it to any programming until after noon, and the first thing I attended was the reading titled “Roleplaying: Gender & Heroism” on the academic track. In this programming item, Anastasia Marie Salter presented a paper titled, “Queen’s Quest: Gender and the Heroic Quest in Adventure Games,” and Robin Woods presented “Still the Slowest Kid on the Playground: Coming of Age in World of Warcraft.”
I very much enjoyed both papers. Anastasia Salter wrote about gender in early adventure games (such as the King’s Quest series), focusing not only on the playable avatars but also on NPCs and the gendered dynamics between main characters and their love interests. I particularly liked the way she tracked the changes in the visual presentation of female characters as video game art became more sophisticated.
Robin Woods’s paper was a funny and thoughtful look at the ways in which World of Warcraft, rather than being an escape from socialization, actually enforces social interaction for players. She followed an unnamed (and presumably hypothetical, though possibly somewhat autobiographical) player from character creation up through joining guilds in order to complete instances, showing how important it is for a player to make connections with other players in order to be successful at the game.
After listening to the paper presentations, I had to dash off to sit on two panels back-to-back. I had signed up for the second of these, titled “Violence, Destruction, Degradation and Catharsis,” in my capacity as a tabletop role player. Though the panel focused largely on the sort of role playing that goes on in the bedroom, the other panelists and I saw many interesting parallels between sexual role play and the tabletop gaming sort. I definitely walked away with some new ideas to ponder.
I attended more parties Sunday night, and then went to a super-late panel (starting at 11:30) on “Gender in Virtual Worlds,” where I was joined by Cabell Gathman and Regina Buenaobra. The panel was moderated by Olivia Luna.
It was late enough in the evening that our audience was small, and the panel took on a very comfortable, conversational tone. We talked about our own experiences with gender in gaming (particularly in multi-player online games), and what it’s like to be visibly female in online games. We also discussed people we know who don’t identify as women but play them online, and the reasons they give for doing so, and a host of related topics.
Saturday was the Capes and Consoles party, but Sunday was really a bigger day for me as a gaming geek!
Game Over
There were panels on Monday, but I was too busy packing and snagging friends for last-minute conversations to attend any. Olivia, KC, Karen and I were on the road back to Kansas City by early afternoon, where we’d spend another night together before going our separate ways in the morning.
WisCon 32 was both incredibly fun and intellectually stimulating, but all good things must come to an end. Fortunately, there’s WisCon 33 to look forward to next year!
