By now, if you’re a game or puzzle fan, you might have seen Gamers4Harris. It’s a website where more than 1,100 game and puzzle creators have supported Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
People who make just about every popular game and puzzle are on here: D&D, Destiny, Marvel Snap, Magic, The Sims, Call of Cthulhu, God of War, Cards Against Humanity, the New York Times crossword. It is not easy to get a thousand game and puzzle creators to agree on anything. We are a contentious bunch. But we agree on this: Kamala Harris and Tim Walz must win today.
Gamers4Harris followed a number of “for Harris” events: first Black Women, then Black Men, then White Dudes, and so on. Soon they started sorting themselves out not demographically but by interest: Writers, Caregivers, Train Lovers, Cat Ladies. The group Geeks for Harris even did a call for gamers specifically. Our pals at Puzzazz organized Puzzlers for Harris, a set of free puzzles to which I contributed a Kamala-themed crossword. (You can still get it!)
We wanted to give our people a voice too. But, non-trivially, game and puzzle creators aren’t the kind of people who get hyped for a Zoom call. We have a lot of Zoom calls. We needed to do something where we could all gather behind our cause, in a way that felt right for us.
So, like we do for every card set, word search, and monster book we make, we made a list.
On Friday, October 11, we contacted about 30 designers, artists, and industry vets who we thought might be nexuses for other creators. People who were inclined to our political direction and willing to contact their networks. Shane spent a couple hours making a prototype website where we had some endorsement text and those 30 or so names at the bottom. I put a link to it on my Facebook wall and encouraged folks to join, as did many of the initial contacts. Then we went to sleep for the weekend.
When we came back Monday, Shane asked me how many people I thought filled out submissions to be on the site. I said, “I don’t know, maybe 40 or 50?” He laughed and presented me with an Excel file of 400 names. I blinked twice and said, “I need a minute.” I spent a bit figuring out a method to sort and edit the submissions, which I expected would be coming in abundance. We launched that day with 400 creators on the site, and by the end of the day we were at 500.
At this point, we had saturated our contacts. We needed to spread the virus to places our channels could not reach. Help came from the unlikeliest place: anti-woke gamers. They made videos condemning Gamers4Harris, which had the effect of putting it all over a bunch of gaming sites. Creators who never would’ve seen it on social media were now aware and contacting us. We hit 600, then 700, then 800.
There was a consequence to this unique “advertising” through hate videos: The trolls submitted wave after wave of fake entries. The “Adolf Hitler”s were easy to spot. We had to do a little digging for some of the others — obscure video game characters, testicle puns, even furry porn characters. We checked them all. (“For research purposes!” became a running joke at Lone Shark.) The worst were spoof submissions of famous game creators who didn’t actually intend to join the site. We built a combination automatic-and-manual checkstep system so nobody got on that shouldn’t.
With the site in full swing, I did something I’ve never done. I door-knocked. Well, “Facebook-knocked.” I contacted a bunch of creators I didn’t know. These were friends of friends, people whose profiles indicated support for democracy. I probably contacted 800 folks. Every day Facebook would cut me off after a hundred messages. (This is a really good feature.) It felt like quite an intrusion, but a couple hundred people thanked me and joined the list. We cracked 1,000 creators and got some coverage in interesting places.
We were assisted greatly by Harris delegate Angel Viator Smith, a tabletop creator. She hooked us up with the Harris Victory Fund, helping us build out our backend. We created pathways for people to vote, donate, and volunteer. Several hundred folks did each of those things off our site. Over the launch window, we got 7,500 unique visitors to the site.
Over these two weeks, people talked to us. I had conversations with at least 500 creators personally. (The joke became “How do you get a thousand game creators to sign up on your site? Ask two thousand.”) Nearly all were positive. Many were just grateful that someone would listen to their hopes and fears. I talked to so many nice people this way. One of them, Amber Cook, passed away a couple days after she thanked me for doing this. We kept her on the site, of course.
A number of people told me they didn’t want to be on the site. I never tried to persuade anyone. The reticent folks fell into three groups.
- Group one was the Trump supporters. Most of these folks were really nice! (One described herself as “a Trump gal” who was nonetheless thrilled people were standing up for what they believed in.) A few were not nice. I got some all-caps messages. A Kamala-laughs meme. No death threats.
- Group two was the fearful people. They expected retribution from somewhere: their bosses, their fans, their friends. I let them know I felt for them. Safety comes in numbers, but that’s not reassuring for people who fear personal attacks. Just a sign of our society, I guess.
- Group three was people who couldn’t publicly support Harris because of her Gaza stance. I totally get that. To a person, they volunteered that they supported Harris winning — sometimes begrudgingly, but OMFG the other guy. Signing an endorsement was a bridge too far, though.
We finished out at just under 1,200 game and puzzle creators. There aren’t that many at any game convention. We all felt unified over something we cared about, and hoped you cared about too. We’re used to getting told to “shut up and make games.” We don’t like to be told that.
Overall, this was a thrilling and fulfilling bit of outreach for the Gamers4Harris team. We met hundreds of new creators and interacted with lots of new fans. With luck, we changed some hearts and minds. The goal was to give people belief that the people who made their games and puzzles really wanted them to vote, and to do so in a positive way. We think we got that.
We don’t know how this election is going to go. It won’t be our efforts that produce a win or a loss. But we can say we did everything we could to save democracy. We left everything on the battlefield. As gamers, we all had a role to play.
Here’s to America.