London Gaymers year in review: 2018
It’s been another fantastic, and busy year for London Gaymers — we take a quick look at some of the biggest moments of the last twelve months.
London Gaymers Town Hall
In February we kicked off our first ever London Gaymers Town Hall — an opportunity for members of LG to join the conversation how London Gaymers is run, hear about our plans for the future and learn about how you can get involved with the community.
The entire event was live streamed on Twitch to ensure as many people as possible could get involved and join in. You can watch a replay of the stream, and read our longer follow up on our blog post.
It’s an event we will absolutely be repeating this year to reflect on the progress we’ve made and talk about new opportunities going forward, so keep an eye on the usual channels for more details.
Ambassadors Programme
At that same Town Hall, we announced our ambition to launch the London Gaymers Ambassador Programme — our fantastic new volunteering programme to encourage more people to get involved with the LG community.
Since launching the programme we’ve had a great response to people joining up as an ambassador, and this year we’ll be continuing to push and improve the initiative.
Women Gaymers
Out of the back of the Town Hall, we also kick started a new Women Gaymers effort, primarily to help welcome and address the balance of women identifying gamers in LG, and we’re pleased to say has been an enormous success! We’ve held two women-centric events with our friends at SheSoho, and we already have another planned for the new year.
If you enjoyed, or worse, missed out on either of those events — keep you eyes on our Facebook page, Twitter account and EventBrite page for details on date and time.
Hooking up with Blizzard
We’ve been very fortunate to host not one but two official pride themed Blizzard events with help from Blizzard themselves — the Overwatch League official UK pride event/viewing party and the BlizzCon pride viewing party. Two fantastic nights filled with tension and excitement (London Spitfire won, just to make it even better!)
And we even got a shout out on the official Blizzard Overwatch League stream for our official pride gathering!
Finally, a big thanks to Blizzard for also sending us some very special pride themed swag, exclusive to these events!
Retro Gaming Party with Monzo for SpecialEffect
In April we joined forces with Monzo to raise money for gaming charity SpecialEffect, a charity that helps gamers with disabilities get gaming.
Monzo kindly agreed to host the event at their office in central London and with their help we put on the most amazing night, with loads of gaming zones set up across the building, a movie chill out zone, gaming LAN systems, an insane amount of pizza, and fantastic prizes to be won, including an Xbox One X! You can read about it in the blog post we did covering the event.
Thanks to the efforts of everyone who came we managed to raise a little over £1,200 for SpecialEffect ❤
Pride in London
Once again we took to the streets of London for the biggest event in our yearly calendar — Pride season! We had our biggest ever presence in the Pride in London Parade, hosted a pre party BBQ, ran a gaming meet up event for the Pride in London Festival and attended the Black Pride picnic at Vauxhall.
MCM London Comic Con
We were welcomed back to MCM London Comic Con twice this year two host two new panels around LGBT+ topics in gaming.
Our May panel was on the topic of trans/bi/homophobia in gaming, and our October panel looked at how well brands represent LGBT+ gamers.
Check out the recording of the May panel here. And you can read more about the October panel, and watch a replay of it at our blog entry here.
Gaymers United for HERO
In September teaming up with Gaymers Inc to raise money for HERO we packed out the Vauxhall Street Food Garden. Consoles and VR adorned booths, and various raffle prizes including a Nintendo Switch helped to raise over £860.
National LGBT+ awards
This year we had the incredible honour of making it to the top 10 finalists in the Charity and Community Groups category of the National LGBT Awards. We were up against some incredible groups so sadly we didn’t win but it was still such a huge honour to be listed against so many enormous charities and organisations.
…and more!
In addition to all these, we held over 100 events last year!
This included 8 Loading events, 25 Friday Welly events, a week long stream, board game events, anime events, book clubs, several pub quizes, and more!
We know 2019 is going to be just as big and busy as 2018 and we hope you’ll get involved with all the events and activities we’ll be running both online and off throughout the year!
