A petition letter from ‘DiGRA Diversity Collective’ was delivered to the DiGRA Executive Board on August 10, 2024, including signatures. Below you can see the letter together with the PDF as an attachment.
To the DiGRA community and Executive Board:
We the undersigned are present and former members of DiGRA, people who have left the organization due to negative or harmful experiences with it, people who stand in solidarity with those who have resigned, and people who have never attended DiGRA or actively avoided it due to its bad reputation among diverse, marginalized, and early career scholars. We share this statement with you as a call to action and as a warning to people who are not familiar with the longstanding issues with DiGRA.
DiGRA has long sidelined and dismissed game studies work focusing on race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, caste, and other intersecting identities and systems of power, and many scholars who have presented on these topics at DiGRA no longer attend the conference.
People submitting such work to the conference have commonly experienced being rejected not on the quality of their work but on the topic and content of their work. People presenting at the conference have often had negative experiences with DiGRA members (including established, senior scholars) treating them badly at the conference, including dismissing others’ ideas and concerns, claiming early career researchers’ ideas as their own, or using DiGRA as a platform to share work that has been colonial, racist, transphobic, sexist, and more. The DiGRA listserv, GamesNetwork, has developed a reputation as being an unsafe and antagonistic environment that allows members of the community to bully, belittle, and harass others, especially more junior members of the community.
The recent events at DiGRA 2024, including a case involving abuse, are the latest, glaring examples of longstanding exclusionary trends in the organization. We emphasize that the concerns of individuals who have recently resigned are not just the fabrications of a few disgruntled DiGRA members, but are representative of the feelings and concerns of many diverse scholars working in game studies.
To the DiGRA community and its Executive Boards current and future, we issue these points as a call to action:
1. Put the Code of Conduct into practice, and enforce procedures to make the Code meaningful. Live up to your stated values, beyond just paying lip service to them.
2. Ensure that any diversity committee in DiGRA is actually diverse, and implement policies and practices that ensure the organization actually listens to the people doing diversity work.
3. Support the DiGRA Ombuds program in whatever form it takes, and consider paying professional ombuds for their time and expertise if possible.
4. Develop structures for centering and promoting students and early career scholars, and give them meaningful shared governance of the organization.
5. Platform and highlight the diversity of scholarship within DiGRA, ensuring that at least one keynote is offered to a junior scholar and that current and former DiGRA board members are not overrepresented in these sessions.
6. Be vigilant in protecting and supporting marginalized people in the organization. Look out for predators and abusers who remain a part of it and hold them accountable.
7. Actively engage with, cite, and support scholars working in issues of diversity and social justice in games. These are not special interest topics for a few specialists, they are broad concerns for anyone sincere about building diverse, inclusive, just organizations.
8. Establish and enforce regular order for Board meetings. This should include agendas circulated, minutes taken and regular reporting from treasurer and ombuds. Members should be able to find how and why decisions have been taken.
9. Consider restructuring the organization and board to give regional/local chapters more agency (e.g. chapters co-hosting annual conferences). As an association formed in 2003, it may be time to find new ways for greater – and more genuine – forms of international collaboration.
Many of us will no longer be part of DiGRA. To those who remain, we urge you to put these points into action and to look out for each other and for new people who enter the organization.
To those considering joining or attending your first DiGRA, be careful, and if you have a negative experience then know you are not alone and it isn’t just you. If you see or experience injustice, please consider sharing it safely and/or anonymously with people you trust.