Motivations And Responsibilities

As I've already said, I still agree with everything that I wrote in the review of Conception 2002. What I want to do here is address some of the issues that arise when you do such a review, particularly when it is pretty negative, as this one is.

I imagine a lot of people, upon reading the review, might have thought: "Who the hell do you think you are? This convention was organised by unpaid volunteers, motivated by an altruistic desire to provide enjoyment for fellow gamers, and to raise money for charity. What right do you have to criticise them?"

Another point that someone might make is:

"If you were so unhappy, why didn't you complain? And did you tell them that you were with a gaming magazine?"

Well those are basically the points that I want to answer here.

I'll do the last one first since that's the easiest: why didn't we tell them that we were from Critical Miss?

Well firstly, you have to look at why we went. Our primary reason was simply that we were gamers going to a convention. The decision had nothing to do with Critical Miss (i.e. if we didn't do a magazine, we'd still have gone).

But it is true that a secondary reason (once we decided to come) was to write an article reviewing the convention. We didn't actually come up with a formal "mission statement" for the article, but if we had, it would have been to provide an objective review of what the convention is like for an average gamer, so that if some of our readers are thinking of going to Conceptions 2003, they'll have more information to base their decision on.

Note the phrase "average gamer". We didn't want any special treatment. We wanted the bog standard experience. (Or course, the organisers have probably never heard of us anyway, so if we'd gone up to them and said: "We're Critical Miss!" they'd probably have replied: "Who?" and then we'd have felt like right wankers).

I should also point out that although we didn't go out of our way to tell them who we were, we didn't keep it a secret either. Attempting to run a game of Pimp, advertised by a poster that clearly stated: "Critical Miss Presents (www.criticalmiss.com)", was a bit of a giveaway. If they'd had shown any interest when we wanted to run the game, and were asking what to do, they'd have found out who we were.

Now let's look at the issue of why we didn't complain. This is a more difficult answer, but it probably comes down to there being two types of people in this world, those who complain and those who don't.

I generally don't complain about poor service, because it's not in my nature. You can say it's because I'm not assertive enough, or because I hate confrontation, or because I'm insecure. But I don't, and I'm sure there are lots of people like me. If I get bad service in a shop, I don't complain. I just don't go there again.

I'm sure there are lots of people like me, and that is a reality that anyone running any kind of service (shop, convention whatever) needs to recognise. Some people don't complain. They just don't turn up again. If you want to know that they are unhappy, then you as an organisation need to be proactive and provide channels to encourage them to provide feedback, in a way that won't make them feel that they are provoking confrontation.

A good example here is to provide a prominent suggestions box, with a supply of ready-to-fill in forms next to it. If something like that had been at Conception, I'd have filled one in. Another possibility is to give out a feedback form to each group as they arrive (to be totally fair, there might have been one in the bumpf I was given, but I don't recall one).

You also need to make sure that it is obvious who people should go to if they have queries or problems. At Conception, it wasn't always obvious who were the organisers. A few times I asked someone behind the desk something, and they would say something like: "Oh I'm not one of the organisers, I'm just helping out."

My idea would be for all the organisers to wear a badge. When people arrived at the convention you could then tell them something like: "Anyone wearing a red badge is one of the organisers. If you have any queries or problems just ask them. They're there to be accosted, if they're off-duty they'll take the badge off."

You might say that it's our problem for being "passive complainer" type people, and that it's not your responsibility to solicit our responses. But if say that, then you are saying that not just to the Critical Miss team, but to every "passive complainer" who went to Conception. You can't have it both ways.

Finally, and I'm aware that half of you are going to call me a namby-pamby pinko wet at this point, you have to look at the social dynamics of the situation.

We were feeling socially excluded. We're actually just normal gamers. We never went to conventions before a few years ago. We haven't been to that many. We'd never done any "public roleplaying stuff" before Critical Miss. We never went to roleplaying clubs. I know - to talk to - James Wallis, Phil Masters and Jay from Valkyrie, and that's about it (admittedly it's a good list, but a very short one).

If there is a "hobby elite" or "inner circle", we're not part of it.

There seemed to be some kind of a convention within a convention that we were unaware of. People who knew each other and could get into games that we didn't know about. (That might all be in our imagination, but it's how the "reservation roulette" game allocation system made us feel).

When I was at school, the PE teachers had hit upon a particularly sadistic method of allocating players to five-a-side football teams. They would pick one of the popular kids to act as captain for each team, and the captains would then take it in turn to pick people. I, of course, as someone who is both shit at sports, and the schools most popular bullying target, was nearly always left to last.

It made me feel like shit.

But I didn't complain. Because the PE teachers had made me feel bad enough already, without me letting them know how badly they'd upset me. Yes that's irrational, and they were probably doing that system though stupidity and ignorance, rather than genuine malice, but that was how I felt.

And it's how people feel.

And I think it was how I felt - deep down - at Conception.

The last thing I wanted to do - after the organisers had just left us standing in the foyer and walked off - was to run after them, crying: "But I haven't got a game..."

I know that's not how it would have been. But it's how I would have felt. So each time we just walked away, seething.

That hopefully addresses the issues of why we didn't say who we were, or how we felt. Let's look at the motivations for writing the review, and what responsibilities, if any, convention organisers have to their attendees.

I want to begin this section with a story from my past, that will hopefully throw a lot of light on the feelings in this area.

Several years back I was in a pretty depressed state. Between some friends moving away, and having rows with others, I'd managed to arrive at a point where my social life was effectively nil. It was so bad in fact, that my mum used to try to find things I could do.

One of the things she found was a roleplaying club in a nearby town. I think they'd put an advert into a local paper or a magazine or something.

I went along, very nervous, one evening, and ended up having a really good time. The people there were nice and friendly, they seemed happy that I was there, and I played a really good session of an Aliens board game. But what I didn't know was that I managed to fall into a trap / flaw in the structure of the club.

The evening I went along, one group were busy creating characters for a D&D campaign. They were too busy to get involved with me, which was why I ended up playing the Aliens board game with the other group. When I asked this second group what they were doing, they said they were starting a campaign next week. I can't remember what the game was, but it sounded a lot more fun than D&D.

But what I didn't know was that they had already created their characters the previous week and that campaign was full. What I needed to do was go over to the D&D GM right there and then and ask him if I could join in the game. But I didn't know that.

I was really happy after that first week, and came back the next week full of anticipation. But then it became apparent that there was a real problem. The second group (who I'd played Aliens with) explained that they were starting their campaign and it was full up.

One of them took me over to the D&D GM and asked if he could fit me into their group, but the GM basically ignored him (he kindof pretended that he hadn't heard). Eventually it became apparent that I wasn't going to get into either game, and that since these campaigns were going to last at least a few months, there was basically no point me coming again (at least not for several months). They all just looked really uncomfortable and embarrassed.

So I went home. I think my second visit to the club lasted about twenty minutes. And I never went back.

The whole experience really crushed me. My morale and self-confidence had been pretty low before, but this pushed it right down to rock-bottom. Any further suggestions my mum made I just ignored.

The point here is that although as individuals the people at the club were nice to me, as an organisation, by raising my hopes and then dashing them, they were - effectively - nasty to me. They hadn't thought through how they would treat the new members they were - after all - advertising for.

I think if they had sat down and thought it through logically, they might have concluded that running two six-month long, closed membership campaigns was incompatible with being an "public", open club.

(My suggestion is to say that a club is a meeting place for roleplayers. At the club you should only play short one-off roleplaying sessions, board games etc. Club members who want to play long-term campaigns can use the club to meet other players, and then set up a private campaign on a different night. So, for example, you might play one-off games at the club meeting place on Wednesday evenings, then participate in a long-term campaign with some of the club members at someone's house every Saturday night.)

I remember how much I didn't need an experience like that at such a vulnerable point in my life. So I've always been determined not to be in a situation where, thought not thinking things through, I might do something like that to someone else who's in the situation I was in.

What this means is that when I attend events like conventions, I end up considering how I would have fared if I'd gone to a convention like that when I was in that bad state. (Imagine that my mum had found out about a convention near me, and persuaded me to go, saying: "Go, on, you might meet some friends you can roleplay with!").

I've been to conventions where I see people wondering around looking lonely and confused and it worries me. When you're planning a convention, those are the people you need to plan for. The assertive will take care of themselves.

But enough of my little digression...

How much responsibility can we expect convention organisers to take for the happiness of attendees? Well let's compare it with the responsibility I have toward my readers.

In my case, I run a free internet webzine. If you start reading it, and think: "This is shit!" then you can just surf on somewhere else. It's cost you very little, either in terms of cost, or time. Where I do have a responsibility is is answering letters. My policy is that every non-spam email sent to letters@criticalmiss.com gets published and every email sent to editor@criticalmiss.com will get a personal reply, although I have to admit that I sometimes take a very long time to reply, and for that I'm sorry. But I feel that I have a responsibility to people who've taken the time and trouble to write to me to reply. I don't want someone to feel that I can't be bothered to think about them.

What about a convention? Well this I feel is different. People are making quite substantial investments: financial, in time, and perhaps even emotionally.

Financial: In the case of Conceptions, we hired a chalet costing Ł140, and spent even more than that on transport.

Time: We each took a day off work, and devoted 72 hours of our life to the convention.

Emotionally: Well I'm in pinko-wet territory here again, but we were really looking forward to it. We'd really got our hopes up.

So basically, if you're saying: "hey give Ł140 to this holiday camp company, and spent whatever it costs to get here, and we'll give you a really fun weekend"... well I think you have at least some degree of responsibility to ensure that the fun weekend occurs. The fact that you are unpaid volunteers, and that the profits are going to charity doesn't actually absolve you of that responsibility.

I feel that in certain areas the organisers of Conception fell short of that responsibility. Which was why I felt justified in writing the review as I did. It was - I feel - honest and truthful. Although I feel a bit bad about criticising a volunteer effort such as this, I also feel that I have a responsibility to tell the truth to my readers (I didn't mention this in the previous section because not lying is basically a given when it comes to responsibilities). What if I said: "go here, it's great!" and on the strength of that, next year, one of my readers did, and afterwards wrote to me: "it was shit, what the hell were you talking about?"

Well then I would have failed them.

I had already decided to write a review of Conception before I went there (because we generally write up what happens to us at conventions). I was envisaging a fairly short, boring article, saying that it was all good, and we enjoyed ourselves.

Once I realised that this was not the case, I only really had two alternatives:

1) Scrap the article, and remove the entry from the prototype index page that I had already created for it.

2) Write it honestly.

Option 1 seemed perverse and cowardly. So I wrote the article.

And hopefully this whole piece has explained why.

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