Staff Blog

gtz promised that this video would go up on the site once it was uploaded, so here we go! Jenny Haniver, Elisa Melendez, Morgan Romine and gtz spoke in front of a pretty much full theatre at PAX East. The panel was called N00dz or GTFO! Harassment in Online Gaming. We had a lot of fun and we got a lot of positive responses from the panel afterwards! Thanks to everyone who came out to see it. :) It’s great to see the interest in the topic continues. The FUoS panel at PAX Prime 2011 packed the room and we had another great crowd here. Again, thank you to the organizers and Enforcers of PAX. They have never failed to go above and beyond. Ongoing thanks to our friends whom are always ready to lend a hand on the FUoS project. :)

(click through for larger size and better quality)

Some perspectives from the panel that we’ve found:

[PAX East] Exposing The Harassment Female Gamers Receive Online

PAX East: N00dz or GTFO Podcast – Sexism in Gaming Culture

Games and Panels at PAX East - The Tech

gtz also found time to record a few other panels. Not all of them are online yet, but the first of those was the Press XY: Transgender Issues in Gaming panel. Check out the video and panelist perspectives here and here!

One month from today, where will you be? If you answered “PAX East“, then we hope to see you there! gtz will be on a panel about harassment in gaming with some amazing women, and it would be great if you could join us!

N00dz or GTFO! Harassment in Online Gaming

Arachnid Theatre

Saturday 2:30pm – 3:30pm

This seems like a good time to mention our Facebook page and Twitter account again. Honestly, between those two and the blog comments on the posts, you folks are WAY funnier than the posts written here. So far we mostly just notify the feeds when there’s a new blog post, and we don’t want to spam, but some of the comments from others are pretty great. We can probably tweet out a few funny ones sometimes, but I recommend you check out the FB page, watch our Twitter replies and read the blog comments for more hilarity and discussion. Special thanks to one of our FB readers who posted this to our wall just yesterday:

Maybe now I just see innuendo in everything, but I’m kind of taken aback at how well it fits with both our panel title and Penny Arcade “Expo.” See you at PAX East!!

The following piece is likeOMGitsFEDAY’s thoughts on the first year of FUoS. Series introduction here.

November 9, 2004. I had been looking forward to this day since the summer. I was a young, innocent, naive girl who was in love. With a game. On that day, Halo 2 was released, and came with a trial subscription to Xbox Live. I usually LANed with my buddies, spending countless hours sniping each other with magnums on Hang Em High,  so I didn’t really get the appeal of playing online, but a friend from work convinced me to play with him.

Sure, I had played counterstrike online with some guys I knew that went to another school, but we had our own private vent channel, so I was used to friendly chatter and one of the guys beatboxing. So I figured I’d try it out. My buddy was working, so I hopped online to set up my account and try out some of the maps. For my handle, I settled on Fedaykingirl, after much debate of using Chani, Irulan, or Alia instead.

I jumped into my first free for all match on Ascension. I won by a landslide. In the end screen I heard people talking, so I piped in “Good game, guys!” My virgin ears were not ready for the barrage of insult I would receive. “Shut the fuck up bitch!” “Is that a girl? Fuck you, girls don’t play video games”. This would only continue. It used to make me so mad, I couldn’t keep the tears from welling up in my eyes.

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The following piece is gtz’s thoughts on the first year of FUoS. Series introduction here.

I’ll get this part out of the way at the start: Thank you to Jaspir, likeOMGitsFEDAY and inklesspen for all their hard work. Thank you to our friends who have supported and helped us bring specific aspects of this project to life, whether through advice, camera work, image editing, etc. As continued thanks for his artistic help in bringing to life one of our more twisted entries, I’m using this space to encourage you to support my friend in his funding efforts for his next indie game, Daemonicon. His previous work was Out Of Hell, a (free!) gorgeously-detailed total-conversion zombie mod for UT2K4 that he did pretty much by himself. His talent and dedication in putting out a product loved by many are proven. Support, share, tell your friends!

I write the posts with a deliberate voice. It’s a character; an imaginary friend who sees the world with rose-coloured glasses. If you’ve submitted something and we never posted it, there’s a decent chance that it’s because I failed to find the ‘correct’ light-hearted style. We’ve had great success and received a lot of support by sticking with laughter and mockery; straying too far from that into biting sarcastic taunts is something I wish to avoid. So my apologies to those of you who sent without seeing the resulting posts. Those un-posted emails are my own personal failblog.

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The following piece is inklesspen’s thoughts on the first year of FUoS. Series introduction here.

I wasn’t originally part of FUoS. Oh, sure, I was in the channel when gtz and Jaspir came up with the idea, and I helped out with technical details, but I kept my distance because I didn’t want to intrude on their thing. I have enough things of my own without taking over one of theirs, I thought. And then they made me join up anyway. Hard to believe it’s been a year, but it’s certainly been a fun ride. I want to thank my co-hosts, and I want to thank you the readers, without whom none of this would have been possible.

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