Back at Essen I met some very nice people.
Where I grew up in Bristol there was this trade show celebrating wine. It was the World Wine Fair. It was held annually – every wine producing country would take a stand, every wine distributor – wine, wine, wine. Everywhere.
The consulates would be involved. Everyone wanted to show off their wine. To highlight it, in friendly competition.
Nobody brought very much. Everyone would sell out, pretty much. All those countries that could have been bombing each other forty years ago, coming together, to celebrate how one grape ferments slightly differently to another.
That’s my Essen.
And that’s my game industry.
Of course, we are encouraged to play fight at choosing sides. Pathfinder or D&D? Pokemon or Yugioh? But at its heart that we know enough veterans who have worked in multiple camps for multiple companies that its more like the WWE than WW2.
At Essen I met a group of Iranian game designers. Did you know there are boardgamers just like you in Tehran?
They couldn’t ship their goods out of course. There’s a global embargo on goods from Iran. Because Iranians just want war and terror. They don’t sit in boardgame cafes like mine, drinking tea and coffee and arguing about the hit points of kobolds. Only that’s exactly what they do.
It often surprises me when folks in our industry express racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic views. We can be anything anywhere, at any point in human history. Heck, I can play Pugmire and be a dog. I can manage the power output of the lower Ruhr valley. No. Not as a dog – that would be stupid.
Games bring people together like wine did. They are a lubricant. You enter a game store as an individual, and you leave with friends. And those friends? They are people who accepted you, for all your faults and stupidity. Because they have faults too.
Essen truly is the World Wine Fair of games. Sworn enemy states tasked with the destruction of each other discussing meeples and chits and mechanics.
That’s my industry. My world is both smaller and wider because of it.
But not everyone got the memo.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft died in 1937. Robert E Howard in 1936. They were writers of their time, and both struggled with severe mental illness. I don’t think if they lived today they’d be those people. But they didn’t have a choice.
We do.
Now, you might look at the world and think ‘but Dave, Trump is in the White house and Boris ‘piccaninny watermelon smile’ Johnson is in Downing Street. Racism is cool, right?’
Fear does not make for better grapes, any more than wrath does. And history will judge all of us, as it does Lovecraft and Howard.
You see, we can accept that our countries don’t like each other. We can accept that. And we can still sit down and game and drink wine as individuals bound together by a higher purpose. Those individuals have different genders, different skin colours, different religions, different sexualities but the same love. For games. And that last part is how we define who is in our team and at our table.
And if you don’t understand that, maybe you should stop posting on social media. Because we aren’t the film industry – set on rehabilitating Mel Gibson or planning Harvey Weinstein’s comeback party.
Hey, you are clever. If you could learn the rules for Advanced Squad Leader you could learn how not to be a dick on social media. Plenty of folks come into the industry afraid of people who don’t look like them or love like them or worship like them. And we play together. And we laugh together. And we work together.
If you are a long standing industry professional who gave many happy memories to adolescent D&D players, and you’ve recently posted anti-semitic shit on your wall, you might want to think about that.
The Quantum Retailer 