Holy shit… I remember making that thread! Like 100 years (and 10 or 15 jobs) ago.
I was just looking through that a few weeks ago, also very surprised to find it still existed!
Do you have a URL? I just did a search and can’t seem to find it.
Hey, I fully support whatever kinds of threads you guys want to start! Okay, maybe not fully, but mostly.
-Tom
Come on Tom. You know that was something you didn’t know that you wanted to know. :)
Apparently we bumped it late last year.
@tomchick can I make it in the games thread? It’s the most viewed place. I feel that if it was put in EE nobody would see it.
My feeling is that you shouldn’t have to ask permission to make the topic (unless it’s literally crazy of course), if the mods prefer it in a different category, surely they will be empowered to make that change?
I’m gonna hop into some stuff a couple of days late because my life’s been blowing up and this thread I am really appreciative of the existence of just couldn’t make it in. Apologies for the point-necro’s.
I’m a part of a large tabletop RPG-focused Meetup here in Raleigh. Our [active] membership is about 1/3 women and nonbinary folx, maybe closer to 1/2 these days.
And by god, those ladies can (and do!) nerd it up something fierce. My FB timeline is full 24/7 with their nerdery over everything from RPGs to Supernatural to Marvel movies to heavy metal to Tolkien to computer networking to Mass Effect. They’re wild about that shit, enthusiastic about it, and entirely open about that enthusiasm.
Now, sure, that isn’t mirrored in every other part of my life, but between these gals, the awesome nerdy women I befriended from my many years attending and then working at a “nerd” camp for gifted youth, and even my friend-group from Boston U (from amongst whom I’m meeting up with two awesome gamer women at GenCon this year to play and catch up), all come together to make it feel a lot like nerdy-ass women are common and proud and awesome. And they’re talking about this stuff online, on FB, on Meetup, on Discord, and yeah, in some cases, on old-school forums :)
While, yeah, I’m a few years younger than the average person on Qt3, a lot of the people I’m talking about have a few years (or decades) on me, including my awesome buddy Isa, who’s in her mid-50s and has more hours racked up on WoW (including the awesome podcast she used to host) than I do on all games combined, I suspect.
I suspect that if you tallied game-forum chatters, male vs female, it’d look fairly lopsided. But I have to wonder if the actual percentage of people interested in chatting about games, or movies, or TV shows, or what they’ve cooked here lately, isn’t a lot more even than the current subset, and if there’s not more we (in a very, very broad collective sense of the word “we”) could be doing to bridge the gap.
I think the new people intro thread is great.
In fact, to get off my usual, how was it put? Robespierre-style groupthink horse (and by god that’s hard to do), I’ll talk a little about the new user experience as I remember it.
It was 2008, or thereabouts. I’d heard Qt3 mentioned elsewhere–reddit, maybe–as one of a handful of “real” gamer boards to hang out on, and one where a lot of real game developers hung out! OMG! I’d recently lost my forum of choice, Infoceptor (an at one time quite sizable Blizzard fansite) to admin inactivity and disinterest and was hunting for someplace to hang my virtual hat in the way I’d grown accustomed to doing on the ol’ 'Ceptor boards. Gamingforce and Penny-Arcade’s forums were just too huge and fast and “entrenched” feeling, with so many memes and rules and subforums and user-levels that it just blew my mind. Infoceptor had a couple hundred active folks on it that I’d gotten to know well, and maybe 1000 total users who posted at least once or twice a year, but those places were just monumental.
So anyway, I hear about Qt3, along with a few other places–Octopus Overlords, GoneGold, maybe NMA–and gave it a shot. I lurked around. It seemed closer to what I remembered, but it was still overwhelming. People got into some pretty nasty looking arguments here! Folks were talking about games–systems, even genres–I’d never even heard of! I felt very young and very inexperienced compared to the people I saw on here, arguing and slinging banter back and forth and neck-deep in the memes and in-jokes of this place. Monitor-holes and chogglepants and Koontz and all manner of other nonsense. Heh, I even remember tracking down some sort of “Qt3 Inside Joke Explainer” thread another poster had made.
So I was intimidated. The site had a vetting process, by god! You had to convince the admin–this landmark, accomplished gaming journalist named Tom Chick (who was a TV star to boot!!) to even let you in in the first place! Jeeze. I wasn’t up to par for that. I was just some college kid who liked Starcraft and Warcraft and Baldur’s Gate and SimCity and had recently bought a GameCube and rediscovered Mario. I was a journalism major with dreams of writing for Play magazine someday, even if I hated Dave Halverson with the burning fire of 10,000 suns. What was it with that guy and his obsession with Bionic Commando, anyway?!
So I write into Tom and plead my case in what I’m sure was a massively, unnecessarily lengthy and detailed email, begging admittance, and, you know, i got in as soon as he read it because he was mostly just making sure I wasn’t a starving Indonesian child chained to a Pentium-II box in a basement somewhere, forced at whip-point to show up and try to sell you guys Viagra or iPhone repair or whatever.
But man, it took some nerve to start posting. I got shot down and called out and mocked and picked on a lot. I was an idiot then, to be fair. Then again, I still am. Then again, I get yelled at a lot nowadays, too. I’ve been called Robespierre-esque directly no less than two times! And possibly indirectly once!
But I’d been bounced around on the net before, and teabagged in online shooters and razzed by my friends IRL and, well, I was really desperate to make things work on a new forum, so I stuck it out and eventually, I guess people got used to seeing my name enough that the innate in-group groupthink response of “Newb? PILE-ON!!!” passed and I was more or less accepted as a background presence of moderate acceptability, or at least ignorability.
And a few years and a few thousand posts later, I was kinda known around here, and almost half-liked by a few folks, it seemed like. That was neat. Now people know me well enough to assume I must be talking about metal bands when I post a weird clue on our regular Codenames games on Dave Perkins’ Slack channel, or to ping me when they’re looking for advice on cooking curry, or to compare me to a fanatically violent and judgmental French Revolutionary, or whatever. I trust you guys enough to give a random person my address every year for the Secret Santa thread, and I’ve gotten some really awesome and thoughtful gifts out of it, and a ton of wonderful memories. Sometimes I even go out to eat with some Qt3ers!
But it was an investment, of time and effort and–I know this has to sound ridiculous to you all, but seriously–courage to make it happen. This place was intense. Not in the “thousand conversations occurring at a thousand miles an hour simultaneously” way that places like GamingForce or NeoGAF are intense, no. But in the “bunch of cranky, sarcastic, opinionated greybeard grognards who’ve been arguing with each other over the merits of Panzer General mission design principles since before I could read” sense, yeah.
And don’t get me wrong! That deep undercurrent of passion and experience that informs the “feel” of Qt3 (as a gaming board, at least) is part of its appeal, and something that I truly cherish about this place, whether I’m learning about bitchin Amiga chiptunes in @Thraeg’s awesome videogame music tournament thread or reading about how one of our ex-members did the campaign for one of my favorite 4X games of all time or getting some of @Brad_Wardell’s delicious fucking honey.
And, I think several people above are correct in that Qt3 is probably a less feisty, argumentative, and unpleasant place than it was a decade ago. But that doesn’t mean that we “won” and the fight’s over now! We’ve improved! It took some nasty wars and a lot of bans to get over that hump, but hey, maybe some of you aged bastards have just plain mellowed out over the years! But in any case, just because we got better doesn’t mean that we’re done. This thread, and conversations like we’re having here and in the Broken Forum thread, when it’s not getting interrupted by furry porn and drawn out description’s of JMJ’s sexual misadventures and football and beer, at least, are important steps toward moving the needle even further in the direction of welcoming and accepting.
So, again, fully outside the question of whether or not Qt3 is as welcoming a place to minority groups like women, people of color, LGBTQs, etc., I think there’s probably more we can do to not scare off any newcomer who gets the bright idea to click onto a gaming website’s Forum button in the first place! Folks don’t just wind up here because they accidentally typed the exact right keyword search into Alta Vista and clicked; they wind up here because they share at least some of our interest and are willing to give the joint a shot! Maybe that shot just lasts the 10 seconds it takes them to scroll their eyes over the recently active threads on the front page and realize that nothing there interests them, or maybe it’s 10 minutes of reading what we all think about the latest CODBLOPS before realizing that everyone here would rather talk about Yet Another Deckbuilder Roguelike Strategy RPG, or maybe it’s 10 years spending thousands of wonderful, fulfilling, life-altering hours sharing in this amazing community.
Let’s try to make more of the last group.
I mean, unless you hate the idea of more Armando Penblades potentially showing up. I wouldn’t really blame you for feeling that way. I mean, you’d be wrong, of course, on a fundamental and moral level, but hey, that’s your failing!
Great post man, just to pick out this bit. It is interesting but now you mention it, the vast majority of young women at work are all gamer nerds in one way or another. Now sure they work at a games company but this includes colleagues in HR & accounting etc. not just engineers , designers , producers, pm’s and artists. I hadn’t really noticed it before. Hmmm.
Of that entire post (for which, go you! Good read) I zeroed right in on this and promptly misread it as “cooking furry” and HOLY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THAT EXACTLY.
I think my eyes grabbed the word from further down the page. Anyway, it was badly disorienting, and I trust you will be more careful in future.
It has been interesting over the years to observe the forums shift from a troop of pissier-than-thou howler monkeys to the more stately parade of elephants we see today. And with the exception of the seismic activity of 6 (!) years ago, those shifts have been largely organic, and welcome.
But on the other hand, what dynamic young howler monkey wants to hang out with a bunch of elephants as they discuss the finer points of pachydermy? An admirable howler monkey, to be sure. A perceptive and sagacious howler monkey. But how many of them can there be? And did they bring peanuts?
And other elephants? I don’t trust ‘em. Never have.
My wife sings that song to me all the time. South Park = great.
At least he’s not somebody you looked up to as a kid. For me it was a little like Troy meeting LeVar Burton on Community. “All I wanted was a picture! You can’t disappoint a picture.”
I’ll try posting something on the introduction thread, but I don’t have much hope it’ll help. I’ve spent a year posting about figure skating, my teacup yorkie, and how I believe that TOAW is fundamentally broken because of its logistics system. What do I get for it? I’ve got multiple users blaming my toxic masculinity for a broken forum vanishing or something years before I got here. That doesn’t make me think I have to express myself more clearly, it just makes me think there are some weirdos here who I’d rather not interact with.
Here’s a tip for how to be welcoming to newcomers: Don’t try to involve them in The Great QT3 Slapfight of several years ago. Nobody who is new here, male or female, is going to want to participate in it.
You weren’t blamed for the Schism, you were pointed out as–intentionally or not–being emblematic of the sorts of problems we were (off topically) discussing in that thread and are now (on topically) discussing in this thread. Issues which lead, in some small part, to the Schism, yes, but they’re not restricted to ancient history is the main point.
edit: pointed out as being emblematic with one particularly unsavory seeming comment, which, as I understand it now, you feel was significantly misinterpreted in some way, but which scanned as very unpleasant at the time of its writing*
AKA, I don’t personally think of you as The Problem With Qt3. But that one comment was brought out as evidence of the kind of stuff we were (and are) talking about, in much the same way as some of the comments about “post pix of the hot girl-stranger you interacted with IRL today!” comments were mentioned. The users in question aren’t wholly unredeemable shitbags cuz they said one iffy thing, but the iffy things needed to be pointed out and talked about.
Come on Miguk. I don’t know if this is a blindspot for you, but you come out pretty curt and aggressive on certain things. And then later you finally explain yourself and it turns out more benign than it looked from your initial post. I’m not saying there isn’t blame on the other side, but if you just wrote slightly longer posts sometimes and explained yourself better, instead of trying to make a short, curt, provocative statement as Round 1, I don’t think you’d get into as many spats.
The explanation that came later wasn’t even really directed for the person involved either. The answer to a mishap is not to pretend that the minority person or woman doesn’t exist in the conversation.
I don’t know the history here, so maybe what I said really did need to be talked about. Maybe there are a bunch of guys here who really do want to make women feel unwelcome. But if that’s the case, it really turns me off on the idea of spending my time here.
Yeah, I should work on that. I have the bad habit of assuming that since most of my posts are jokes or at least not meant to be taken 100% seriously, people would catch on to that. But I can’t expect everyone over the internet to be able to read my mind.
Another thing I should keep in mind is to not engage with people who are actively trying to stir shit up and cause fights. It’s best to just ignore them.
That’s a great survival rule anywhere, Internet or otherwise, and one I try to live by. But man, it’s so hard sometimes.
