Complexification
Not unexpectedly, I only made it to one panel yesterday, and only about 15 minutes of that.
It was a panel on gender in gaming, and by the time I got there (toward the end), it was mostly audience comments and questions. The bit I specifically wanted to mention, though, came from panelist Victor Raymond, who--after a discussion of romantic and/or sexual interaction between characters when one of the players is uncomfortable being romantic and/or sexual with the other player (actually, the focus was much narrower than that, but this is the general issue that they were touching on)--noted that he wanted to approach the issue from a sociological perspective. Specifically, he said:
"It's more complicated than that."
I want to adopt that as WisCon's official motto.
Except, of course, that having a single simple official sound-bite motto is contrary to the ideas of diversity and complexity.
Also, I'd like to polish the phrasing a little, to make it even more sound-bitey and catchy. I've been using the phrasing "Complexify, complexify, complexify," but that isn't especially euphonious.
Anyway, my real point is that regardless of the phrasing, I always hope to hear a comment along those lines at pretty much any panel or other discussion at WisCon. It's easy to oversimplify and overgeneralize; I do it all the time, even in this very sentence. I want us to keep reminding ourselves that it's always more complicated than that.
So thanks, Victor!
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