At Dystopia Rising, we often talk about our Community, and we’re proud of the group of people who create and attend our events at Dystopia Rising New York. But a community is more than a group of people with a common pastime: together, we create a culture, a collection of norms and behaviors that drives our events and allows us to come together to play safely and effectively. As we enter the home stretch of our second year of live games, we want to talk about the culture we - both staff and players - are creating together, and how we can continue to excel in 2023 and beyond.
You Are Dystopia Rising New York
Nine times a year, we schedule an event where a couple of directors and a handful of storytellers build a plan, a few dozen guides provide the structure, and a hundred players create a game. We’ve achieved tremendous growth since we reopened eighteen months ago, and that’s not just because of our storytelling, or marketing, or logistics. It’s because of the enthusiasm and effort that the players bring month after month, co-creating with us, and lending their support during set-up, throughout the event, and clean-up. We want to thank you for this - we get a lot of credit for Dystopia Rising New York’s success, and we want to share it with you. Specifically, we want to thank you for what you do, and point out the specific things that make our culture a success.
A Culture of Safety
First and foremost, we, as a community, have to provide each other with a safe and accessible space to play. You’ve been a key part of this in two very important ways. First, you’ve consistently brought your concerns to us in an open and honest way. Our staff between events is relatively small and we can’t see everything. Your emails and conversations serve as our eyes and ears, and let us address everything from inappropriate comments towards other players to logistical concerns at the site. Your inputs have helped us successfully introduce initiatives such as topfree equality, made our site more accessible, and allowed us to manage the risk for events such as The Feast of Flesh. Second, when we respond to your concerns by offering tools to mitigate risk, you use them. We can’t thank you enough for your preparedness during the cold winter and spring of 2022, particularly when we had unique challenges on site. Again and again, when we communicate our problems and our solutions, you work with us as a team to make sure our events are a success.
As we go forward in 2023, we want to formalize this process. As our culture matures and we iron out large problems, we increasingly see individual issues arise that require our attention. When you have a problem, we want to work with you to create a reasonable accommodation that is specific to your needs. This is a flexible and interactive process, and relies on you continuing to bring us your concerns. Remember, when you come to us with an issue, we’re going to assess whether this is a general or specific issue, and likely work with you to establish a solution that allows you to play safely and effectively. Please understand we can’t always implement the specific solutions you ask for; this is a back-and-forth where we work together, and we have to consider the larger picture with all of our solutions.
A Culture of Accountability
Over the course of 2022, our staff worked very hard to make sure that when we had to make a correction to behavior, we did so to improve everyone’s play in the future, and not to punish past actions. And for having nearly a thousand players, we had very few problems. It’s not that you avoided bad behavior… you actively supported the games. You showed up for early set-up, stayed late to help with other clean-ups, and gave us your all on NPC shifts. Most importantly, you took care of each other, and we knew that if we weren’t there when something happened, our players would step up until we got there.
We can always improve, and as the game grows, we also know we’ll have more instances where people need reminders to do the right thing. These are not call-outs, they’re call-ins; we know people come to our games with the intention of being a positive addition to our community, but sometimes get tired, or distracted, or have problems. Part of our initiative for 2023 is empowering our guides to talk to people on the spot if they’re late for a shift or not engaging in clean-up: we know it’s not because you don’t care, but that we just need to refocus. We’re also going to address underlying issues rather than just telling you to do more: if you’re tired on an NPC shift, expect us to ask you to go to bed and come back, or if we’re worried about an injury, we might ask you to non-com for an event. We understand that sometimes people push themselves too hard, and we’re accountable for your well-being at an event. Accountability isn’t just making sure people do what they’re supposed to, it’s also about taking care of each other.
A Culture of Play
We’re extremely proud of the culture of play at Dystopia Rising New York. You all have handled challenging mechanics such as Compulsion and Unstoppable, long-term plotlines that have taken months to pan out, and altered your playstyle in some cases to buy into the storyteller’s vision. As we prepare for our premiere event in June and Honor’s Fall in August, we’re confident you’ll have a good time, as we all have cultivated a culture of play where we support each other’s choices and come together as a group.
In 2023, you’re going to see more discussions where we talk about how to engage with our plots and mechanics, so you can understand our intent, and engage with them on those terms. We’ve found that if we just roll out a mechanic, you might not understand our vision for how it plays out. Likewise, we often get action requests or emails from players describing what their character does, without telling us the experience they want to pursue. Our goal is more open and direct communication, so that we can continue to build on our current culture of play.
No game is perfect, and we, as a community, have dealt with many problems over the last eighteen months. However, we have, as a community, built a culture where we address problems and continue to communicate about potential solutions. With many of our policies and mechanics now set, we want to work with you to fine-tune our culture, and eagerly await the opportunities to do so in the coming months.