Introduction

It is the fall of 2014, and my partner and I are walking down the dark, dank stairs of a basement games shop in the north of our Canadian city. The stairwell is papered over with posters of comic book heroes: muscle bound men, and scantily-clad women. We were in this place to attend a Thursday-night table-top role-playing (TTRPG) meetup for the very first time. The owner is pleased and welcoming, and walks us over to several large folding tables filled with mainly men of various ages, from teens to middle-age. Another woman who is roughly my age walks over to me, and beckons us to walk with her. She introduces my partner and I to a seated group of young men, and in turn introduces them as the beginner’s table: a place that would be perfect for newcomers like us. She then turns to a young man seated at the centre of the group, and hisses, “You be nice to her or I’ll murder you.” I laughed nervously, and thanked the woman for the kind introduction, and my partner and I sat down. There are some mumbled and downcast hellos. Our appearance seems to have deflated this close-knit group. At no point during the game does the Dungeon Master (DM) look me in the eye, instead directing instructions to only the people he knows, my questions, quips, and character points go unanswered. There are in-jokes, quiet asides, and boisterous laughter out of nowhere. It felt like junior high all over again, with the sniggering happening at my expense. Throughout the game, it is made clear to us this experience isn’t for us, and we aren’t in on the jokes. I realized we were marginalized in the game before we began.

The Real Story

Taking stock of the evening in later months, I thought to myself. Would I have gone to that meetup without my partner? The honest answer would have to be: absolutely not. The basement location was musty, poorly-lit. The photos on the walls were filled with images that would have looked at home on a heavy metal- and pinup-loving 14-year-old boy’s bedroom wall. Women on their knees, and bent over in diaphanous, skimpy clothing. There was a lingering odour of unwashed hair and skin in the air, as much attributable to the crowding of bodies into long, crowded play sessions, as it was to the poor ventilation, and limited air conditioning in these industrial park locations, selected presumably for their low rents for large, open spaces.

A middle-aged woman asking for a MTG booster box generated some odd looks, some eye rolls, pedantic corrections, and often, I got ignored outright. Everytime I entered these stores, particularly alone, I felt like I was committing a transgressive act; I felt like I was somewhere I shouldn’t be.