For the community — our first Town Hall
On Saturday 24 February 2018, we held the inaugural London Gaymers Town Hall meeting at the offices of Shoreditch-based developer ustwo.
This event marked the start of an exciting new era for London Gaymers, following two years of sustained growth that has seen our membership increase more than tenfold. Over fifty members attended in person, with as many tuning in to watch proceedings on Twitch. The stream was just one small demonstration of our commitment to keeping events inclusive and accessible for everyone.
At the Town Hall we shared our plans for the remainder of 2018 and beyond, answered members’ questions, and collected valuable feedback in the room and from the Twitch stream. After formalities had concluded, we had — of course — set up a room full of video games, and we made sure to get some quality gaming time in!
If you missed the town hall, then don’t worry! This article will give you a brief overview of what happened on the day and detail some of the big announcements and initiatives we launched and spoke about. We’ve also uploaded an edit of the live stream onto our YouTube channel so you can watch a replay at the bottom of this page.
24 Months Ago
We kicked off the live stream with an overview of our past 24 months. Originally we were a much smaller group — mostly connecting through Reddit and a Facebook group which was quite new at the time and had around 150 members. The group was secret so there was no way of finding us unless you were invited through Reddit, and we met up once every 1–2 months.
At the time, the message we were hearing from members again and again was always the same:
“Wow — this group is great! I wish I’d found it sooner”
That was when we realised that, the way things were — wasn’t helping people find us, or join in with the group. People were being left out, and people who wanted and needed to find a community like this, didn’t have the opportunity to do so. We weren’t doing everything we could do to help that, so we decided to change things
We established a very simple new mantra: Ensure people who need to find us, can find us. And we set about a number of ways to achieve that.
- We opened up new ways for people to keep in touch by adding a Facebook fan page, Twitter feed and Instagram account.
- We started a Discord server to help people chat and play games together online.
- We did our best to make sure we were listed on community group websites; such as Stonewall, GMFA etc.
- We started to run regular online gaming tournaments and streams for people to get involved in.
- Started online communities such as Guild Wars, Dungeons and Dragons and World of Warcraft
- And encouraged word of mouth (thank you to everyone who has shared links to our social content, invited friends, or told others about what we do!)
This promotion led to an increase of Facebook group members to 2000 and an incredible 100+ events being put on every year!
So what’s next?
What does that mean for the future? If we’ve achieved those goals and they’re maintaining themselves now, what are we looking to do going forward?
We’ve set some new goals for the next 18–24 months:
• Double down our efforts on diversity
• Expand our reach to connect with the wider LGBT and gaming communities.
• More events, more involvement, (and less of us!)
We discussed how we plan to achieve these goals during the town hall session, and we’ll touch on them briefly in this blog too.
Our Values
We always strive to be a safe place for the LGBT+ gaming community in London and across the UK to connect with like-minded individuals. To help make sure we are achieving this vision, we set out four values that will underpin our future activities.
Anyone who’s been part of the group for a while will likely recognise some of these values and behaviours:
Inclusion for everybody
We are inclusive and accessible to everybody, regardless of sexuality, race, gender, age, disability or any other attribute.
Better together
We embrace diversity and believe we are stronger when we bring people together and share our skills and experiences.
For the community
We are proud to be a part of the wider LGBT+ and gaming communities.
Part of the family
We are family, here to share our love of gaming and help our members make new friends, have new experiences and create new memories.
If you would like to learn more about our values, we’ve put together a short 2-minute video detailing the values and how we’re living them.
Doubling-down on Diversity
Our diversity lead, Justin Harbottle, outlined our diversity agenda for the next twelve months, including a programme of events especially targeted at female gamers.
But the wonderful Emily Wheeler, one of our female members, captivated the audience with an impassioned account of her personal experiences:
“Before I had this group, I loved gaming, but I didn’t tell anybody I was a woman online because you do get attacked a lot,” she explained.
“When I first joined [London Gaymers] it took me a long, long time to come out because it was very, very male and I felt I wasn’t going to have anybody to relate to, couldn’t fit in to the conversations and didn’t really have a place here.
“Now that I’m in, I think it’s actually fantastic, and I want to share this.”
With the help of Emily and Justin, we’ve made an excellent start towards our Gender Diversity Outreach Initiatives:
- A brand new women identified only space on our Discord server.
- More events to highlight gender diversity, like our recent visit to the Museum of London to learn more about women in gaming.
- Blog posts and other content focusing on women in gaming.
- Targeted ads to promote events, content and enrol women gaymers.
You’ll see all these and more rolling out very shortly as we continue to increase our efforts on gender diversity.
Expanding our reach to connect with the wider LGBT and gaming communities.
We’ve had the pleasure of being involved with some fantastic gaming and LGBT+ initiatives and events over the past 12 months. These included:
- A panel on LGBT+ diversity at MCM London Comic Con in October.
- We ran a ‘Pride in London Festival’ gaming meet up.
- A fantastic fundraiser with Xbox UK for gaming charity Special Effect
- And more recently, we attended an LGBT+ youth outreach day in Southwark.
We realise we don’t operate in a bubble, nor do we want to! And we’re making sure we continue to get involved with community events and initiatives whenever possible.
We’re planning to head back to MCM this year for another fantastic LGBT+ gaming panel, and we have some new ideas and partnerships in the pipeline so keep your eyes peeled for future surprises.
And of course, this extends to showing our colours at Pride in London, which we’re thrilled to say we’re planning to march in again this year. We’ll share more detail about our plans as soon as spaces are confirmed.
More events, more involvement
In the past year we’ve hosted over a hundred events — an enormous increase from when our community started six years ago. Our London Gaymers Events Lead, Rafael Campos Valdez, explained where we’ve come from, and what our plans are for the future:
“Our mission was always to attract as many gaymers as possible. We wanted to make sure that if you’re a gaymer in London, you knew about us and you had somewhere to be yourself.”
Now that we’ve built that member base, we want to make sure we can offer something to suit the varied interests of all our members, and we’re opening the door for more people to get involved.
Rafael went on to discuss how members will be encouraged and supported to run their own events in the future:
“We’d love to see, instead of more big events that target everyone, more niche events for smaller communities and interest groups.”
“We can help you with planning, we can help you find venues — and the event will be owned by you. We don’t want to tell people what to do — it’s up to you”
“And we’re creating an events Discord channel where people can easily find out about all of our upcoming events.”
We’ve made some changes to make it easier than ever to make sure you’re kept up to date with all our events and meet ups. On top of the new Discord channel mentioned above, you can subscribe to our LG calendar and have all the events and alerts delivered directly to your calendar app! Just visit:
- Google Calendar http://lg1.me/GoogleEvents
- iPhone/Outlook 2010+ http://lg1.me/iCalEvents
- Hotmail/Outlook.com http://lg1.me/HotmailEvents
We’re also reviving our regular LG Newsletter to help keep you up-to-date with upcoming events, we’ll post details of how to sign up as soon it’s ready.
And of course, we will continue to post the events on the Facebook group, Facebook fan page, Twitter, Instagram and our website.
London Gaymers Ambassadors
And of course, our fantastic new volunteering programme — LG Ambassadors! This is a way for you to get involved with the LG community in any way you like. Whether you want to start running events, get involved with content creation, social media, blogging, photography, diversity, accessibility, outreach, networking, online guilds and communities — the list goes on and on!
We want you to share your ideas; and for you to tell us what you want London Gaymers to do. Whatever idea, we’ll try our best to help you make it happen. We already have over 30 ambassadors signed up and getting involved — a massive thank you to you all!
Watch it again!
If you want to watch the stream again, or maybe you didn’t catch it and want to see it for the first time, you can watch a replay of the entire Town Hall now on YouTube. Please note, full subtitles will be provided shortly.
Finally, I just want to say a massive thank you to ustwo for the use of their fantastic space — we love you guys — some extra love for Chris and Hamish for helping us organise and run the event, from early morning until midnight, couldn’t have done this without you, and a big old thank you to Matt Hurst for assisting on writing this blog!
Thanks to everyone who came along and we hope to make the next town hall even bigger and better! ❤
With love,
LG Admins
