We are running about eight minutes behind in a 30-minute panel, so we're going to try to rush through this. I'm Lexi Whittemore. I reached out to Jackie here as well as our mutual friend Tyler last year after Expo about doing this panel. We did some brainstorming, put it together. We were really excited to present. Unfortunately, Tyler had a work conflict and had to cancel last minute, but he sends all of his love to everyone. That is Tyler White from, I believe he's in Los Angeles right now. Yeah, so all three of us have had experience in the pinball community that have made us want to create a more inclusive space, and we'll get more into that in a moment. um but yeah so i'll just i guess i'll just start with myself and we'll move on down um i'm lexi winnemore i'm from portland i use she her pronouns um i entered the pinball community in 2015 ish through a program called pinball outreach project um my buddy greg dunlap ran it in portland provided free pinball to kids during the day um and then did like a free play model like pay to play um type thing and then all the funds from that went toward maintaining the games as well as putting games into places like ronald mcdonald houses children hospitals um stuff like that um so that's how i got into the pinball community is volunteering through that um with my now husband And I guess the experience that I had, this was like 2017. I was just starting to enter into like pinball competitions, tournaments. I was at a tournament. I think it was my first like fully sanctioned tournament. And a player from the community came up to me. And I had not met this man before. And he came up to me. He goes, oh, are you performing your wifely duties and supporting Colin in the tournament? That is a direct quote. And my response at the time was, I'm sorry, who are you? I feel like I would have more choice words now, but I was a lot more shy and timid at that point in time. So what I do now is I run women's pinball events, mostly. I do do some open tournaments, but my main focus is on my women's events. and I operate them through a gender inclusive lens. All of my tournaments are advertised as being open to anyone that identifies as being a marginalized gender. I don't believe that it's really my responsibility or role to be the gender police if somebody wants to play in a more inclusive tournament, I'm going to include them. So that's kind of the philosophy that I brought in just to create that open and welcoming and safe space for players to come and compete and not be met with, quite frankly, blatant misogyny when they're just trying to play in a tournament. So that's what I do. My tournaments are called FLIP. That stands for Fantastic Ladies in Pinball. And that's kind of the main thing I do. And I'm going to pass over to Bird. Check. Is this thing on? No. Check, check, check, check, check, check, check. Hi, everyone. I'm Bird. I go by they them pronouns I live in Seattle and I like pinball a lot um I got into pinball right before COVID started and even before COVID was a thing I've always been pretty active on the internet so when I found this new hobby that I loved a lot I wanted to talk about it on the internet and I don't know if anyone here has tried to talk about pinball on the internet but it's not a great time you got two main options and they're both bad uh you got pinside which you know um has resources and they're good resources but if you've tried to interact with the community on there yeah it speaks for itself and then you got facebook uh the pinball enthusiast group and you know while that's a nice place to scroll on your phone it shares a lot of the same issues with Pinside, there's a lot of homophobia, misogyny, racism, subtle, not so subtle, and a lot of negative attitudes towards the hobby, which can kind of, you know, be unproductive when trying to have, you know, good discourse about the hobby, new games, old games, designers, new ideas, etc., etc. I don't know if people here know what Discord is, but I really like Discord. I've been using it since 2016 and you know I decided kind of on a whim that I wanted to be the change I wanted to see in the world and create a place to talk about pinball with none of those bad you know issues found on other platforms so I created what is called the pinball people discord server we started in February of 2020 and my main goal and philosophy for that server has been to have an inclusive of space for all people to talk about pinball all chillers you know no misogyny no racism no homophobia it shouldn't be a hard thing to achieve yet someone has to go out there and kind of create that space it's been like what five years since then and we have over 1400 members we've been growing on a pretty grassroots level word of mouth we're now publicly listed on the discord directory So if you open up your computer and you type in pinball, it's right there. If anyone here has used Discord and has been on larger Discord servers, you know that sometimes joining a Discord server can be overwhelming. And I know that pinball has a lot of people who don't really use Discord or aren't super up to date with new technology, new platforms and stuff. So one of the side goals of my server has been to make it as accessible as possible on a simplicity scale, right? You're not going to be bombarded by one million channels and a bunch of, you know, roles or whatever. You know, there's channels for general talk. There's a repair help channel. We probably have like 12 channels that we use. And every time we think about adding one, it's a huge discussion. And oftentimes we don't add that channel because it's not necessary. There's other larger buckets to put that content into. I'm pretty proud of it. I think it is a nice replacement or solution to Pinside and Facebook and the other groups that kind of have their problems. And that's about all I really have to say. But, yeah, pinball is for everyone. And I didn't really feel that interacting with the online pinball space. So I tried to make a space that really spread that message around. Jackie? Hi, my name is Jackie Olson. I use she, her pronouns. I'm based out of San Francisco. I started playing pinball around the same time as Bird, just before COVID. Getting into pinball, into competitive pinball, I think everyone can relate, is very intimidating. and it's sometimes really hard as a new player to learn how to play pinball. I feel like especially in competitive pinball people kind of like to hoard their information so that they can win and have a advantage so i created a league that focuses on new players and helping them learn how to get better and it's a queer pinball league because i also wanted all my friends to come um i have found that in trying to introduce other queer people to pinball and taking them to the regular tournament scenes it's very overwhelming and intimidating for them and then they end up not coming again so i created this league and it's for brand new players it's very very basic and we go over super basic pinball skills in an inclusive environment it's open to queer players and their allies it's super fun and we meet every tuesday we just finished our sixth season and our most popular night had 55 people which is really incredible um and it's been super fun and there's there's we're seeing a lot of spillover into the regular sort of tournament scene and there's a lot more queer people showing up which is fucking awesome um yeah that's that's me yeah um so i know that a lot of people came here with questions so we're going to try to speed through this next part and then we'll just open it up let people ask questions about maybe starting their own inclusive spaces questions they have about conflicts they've had we're more than happy to welcome more than happy to answer those questions for you excuse me um so i guess we kind of already covered most of the things i had written down except um i have a note about talking about changes we would changes we foresee or would like to see in the future of pinball obviously I'm speaking from a space of gender equality that's something that I'm really passionate about I think we are seeing that change I mean we just watched that amazing women in pinball panel a couple of you are still in here I see you Rachel so if you're here for the last panel you obviously already heard really incredible stories but I mean I feel like every time Stern announces new employees, there's usually at least another woman being added. And we're seeing women grow in the community. There's more female content creators. There's more women TDs. There's more women running social events, women opening their own pinball bars, opening their own leagues. So I do see that change happening. And it's kind of nice seeing that pendulum swinging. I know history, pinball has a long history of the community being filled with mostly white men, so to see that change and be more balanced to reflect the actual community that surrounds them is quite frankly awesome to me, and I love to see it. Another thing I'm really passionate about that I forgot in the beginning is I'm really big on disability inclusion. He is at the hotel right now, but he did want me to mention him and include him. My buddy Stuart, you'll see me around with him around the weekend we go to three or four pinball shows a year he's autistic so I travel with him I drive with him we do tournaments together we check out shows together but without you know actual accommodations and inclusion he would not get to participate in the events the same way that I or my fellow panelists or any of you would be able to so by I believe in doing the work and walking the walk and talking the talk. So if I say I'm going to create an inclusive pinball space, I'm going to do my best to advocate to make sure that if I'm allowed an event, my buddy Stuart's going to be there too. He doesn't want to play in women's events, obviously, but I just make sure if I'm at a big tournament, I'm like, is this one that he would be able to play in? And if not, then I'm like, let's send our money to another event because there's plenty of inclusive events around. And I do believe in talking with your wallet and voting with your wallet it and if the if the tournament or event does not match up with what you believe it should be um there's a lot of value in that and i think a lot of those events also appreciate the feedback like i have sent feedback to events that we've went to that we've had negative experiences at and that has been uh really positive actually i was really impressed with some of the um responses and the changes that were made in like future years for that so i definitely advocate for speaking to what you want to see i don't i don't have much else oh question sorry i got so enthralled yeah sorry what kind of changes do you foresee um for more inclusivity and default you know i'm not super sure like you know we discussed it's it's been changing in a positive way which is good um you know i'm more focused on the online side of things and you know it's more of the same in the last five years it has gotten a little better i have seen people be more vocal about issues especially on like facebook and stuff i try not to go on pin side so i don't know how things are going over there i'm gonna be honest but you know when when there's you know a meaningful fight to fight i see people fighting that fight and sometimes you know i join in and that's always good maybe a few minds will be changed maybe a few people realize that they're being a little rude and a little exclusive. Everything that everyone's doing with queer leagues and women's tournaments and women in the industry, that's great and stuff. One thing that I always like to see is more racial inclusivity in pinball. I think that's super awesome because, like I said, pinball is for everyone. It's a game where we play with a little ball and some flippers and we hit ramps and stuff. There's no reason why any group should be excluded from that. I know in Seattle, one of our prominent tournament directors, his name is Dwayne. He's amazing. And he's this black American, and he always has a great attitude, and he's always trying to bring new people into the hobby. And I was just in the homebrew section, and I saw Coming to America Homebrew, and it's like a crew of African-American people making pinball machines. And I thought that was the coolest shit I've ever seen. And I just want to see more of that in the future. And I expect that to change. Yeah, I agree with all that. I think for me, the thing that I'd like to see is more, just more diversity in pinball. It's been a white man's game for a very long time. and as a brown trans woman i i i think you'll notice even especially in the tournaments like you'll see more and more trans and queer people show up and that's awesome and i just want to make sure that other people that might be intimidated see us and other people other trans people here and having fun and then they feel like they can come to and it's not so intimidating so i think just growing the community and making it more diverse is what i'd like to see yeah yeah i agree and uh one thing i'd like to add is i i have noticed especially i would say like post-covid like the past five years or so um we're seeing more vocal allies i have noticed the men in my local community have been more verbal about calling out misogyny making sure that events are inclusive because honestly inclusive events are good for everyone just because you're a man doesn't mean that women's inclusion does not affect you your tournaments are going to be more fun and they going to be more quality if you have more women involved and my women tournaments we i was looking at statistics um about 40 of our players are openly trans or non um so 40 of our our women's league is trans and non-binary and it makes more for more fun events um when you expose yourself to people with backgrounds that are different from yours um you get a stronger worldview um you walk with less fear because you know those people um and you get to live your life knowing like so many learn hearing great stories and making cool connections and yeah like some of my best friends like would not be up here if we did not have inclusion in pinball you know like i wouldn't know these people i wouldn't have these experiences i wouldn't have 3 a.m runs to waffle house if it wasn't for like you know meeting all these great people through this community and i believe that like having the allies be vocal about that and being like hey no i want this person here um i think it makes it other people feel safer to call that out as well um so i think that there's something that everyone can do to actually make things more inclusive um can i add to that in my queer league i make sure that it's for queer people and their allies and And I've had a ton of allies come up and say how much they appreciate the league. I have one friend who deals with a lot of people at work, and he had told me that he was dealing with a mother of a child, a trans child, and he felt so much more comfortable with his communication with this mom about the child from queer pinball, which is huge. And I thought that was so cool. So it's not just very beneficial for queer people, but for the allies that show up as well. It's true. yeah everyone the unknown the unknown can be intimidating but when you make the unknown become not known then it's a lot less and you can do more with your life I feel like we only have a few minutes left hopefully they'll let us run over because we got started late but yeah if anyone has any questions we're more than happy to open up to the audience right here in the jacket oh you are okay oh cool uh one of the things that i myself i'm from dc and uh it's one thing to cultivate the community from within and i i hear that and i really appreciate that but what about bringing new blood uh into this league into this community into the sport um how has that process been have you done anything i tried to do something in honor of juneteenth called freedom to flip out and uh it was tough uh because i think social media in any form facebook instagram whatever your reach is only as good as the people who are actually looking for it so how do you communicate and i remember you said bird you say that like it's just some people just flipping you know flipping balls and stuff like they're getting the concept of you know space cadet or something remedial and actually making it real how has how's been the process of recruiting new blood into the sport been for y'all um yeah i actually make it quite a big point in my life to whenever i meet somebody um or i'm friends with somebody they're not into pinball i always try to invite them out and try to show them the basics um i've had my my hiccups doing that you can't overload them with information or toss them into the weekly three strike with 20 people right i try to put them on a machine that they want to play you know take them to an arcade what game looks interesting to you right and you know and pay for their games don't even give them the option don't offer it just put those quarters in that game like flat out pay for their games and you know i know pinball i know these games but i try to simplify things and be like hey it's medieval madness right hit that castle right and when you get people to have a simple goal and have them achieve the goal or get close to the goal and make that progress and they make that connection that hey wait I can do this there's more to this game it is easier for people to kind of get into the hobby that way um I found pinball you know randomly you know I might be an exception to the rule here but you know you just gotta you just gotta build that bridge and and keep things simple for them and when they're ready for more they'll tell you right and pay for their games take them out buy them a drink hype them up yeah hype them up you know oh that was a great catch you know like they don't even know what they're doing but you're making them feel like they know what they're doing and that's really important because you know like like we've all seen or like we've done in the past we sometimes we just flip around and we don't know what's going on and we're like ah that game sucks and we don't know it you know and i can totally empathize with you on your juneteenth event you were talking about um i tried to do a an international women's day tournament and i spent about a month researching different women in the industry who worked on art packages animation programming throughout the history of pinball and there's so many of them that just you don't see in the credits because they're not the lead designer um and i wrote info cards with qr codes that you could scan to learn more about this woman in pinball and everything and i spent a month poring over this tournament and i had eight people show up like it it can be really uh like disappointing um but i decided to do it again the next year and the next year and it's been growing and those people that do show up and have a good time they're going to tell their friends and they're going to show up again um with my flip tournaments i have posted um posters around town in the neighborhood of the bar that we were attending and my buddy who now is a big pinball player evan he saw the posters and he's like oh this is a women's pinball tournament i'm not gonna play but i have two friends that this sounds fun for so i'm gonna tell them about it and he brought them through and he hung out and he held their purses for the whole night and let them play like um because he knew that it would be a fun event for them and both of those women still play in our league um they're some of the top players in the state um top women's players top standard like open uh tournament players like just because the event existed and um there are so many ways to advertise an event these days uh facebook instagram uh posters honestly bring back just postering your entire neighborhood every telephone pole it will get people's attention have a QR code have a website for people to go to you can make a free website on Google and update it whenever you want um that's how I run my flip website um post winners photos um tag people use hashtags on Instagram um your first event is probably going to be smaller that's okay do not let that um stop you from doing it again and people are going to see that they're going to be like this person's passionate about this we're going to keep going we're going to show up because obviously there's some merit to this and then you will meet some of the coolest people. I have a question for Bert on the online thing. I've been hanging out in Pinside for the past few years, mostly in history topics where the identity of the person posting never comes up. But one thing I want to ask you about, I've seen on Pinside the topics relating to Pinball Expo have taken some funny turns based on the identity of the person who's coming or not coming for whatever reason uh is there anything that you've seen in discord or anywhere else you're looking lately online discussing pinball expo in particular where John Youssi something that is maybe suggesting a person should or shouldn't be there um well most of my experience is uh on my discord server you I tend to look at it a lot And our expo talk is mostly about like hey who showing up Where are you going to be Are we going to play roller games for a dollar You know we love roller games in our discord server Um, and you know, oftentimes we don't even, you know, talk about who identifies as what, or if they should be participating, because like I said, like we aim to welcome everyone, you know? and we're always like encouraging people to show up to expo or to other local events that are local to those users um you know despite the mission being you know no homophobia uh misogyny racism etc we don't really have a hard time uh moderating because most of the people are with the program you know they want a space like that they're in that space like that you know so when it comes to expo or tournaments or other events um you know that kind of weird turn those weird arguments that shouldn't even be arguments they never even come up you know it's always a good time a happy time yeah i think that's true of most of pinside but yeah i can add from my personal experience i never leave the west coast i love my bubble i feel very safe last year was my first time coming out to Expo and I love it here. It's super inclusive. It's amazing. It's a great event that I will continue to come to. Yeah. And I think a lot of it as well is, you know, if John Youssi people that look like you, you're going to be more likely to go to that event. So the more representation we get of people who are not the same race, color, sexual orientation, identity, gender, the more people of different backgrounds we see, the more people of different backgrounds are going to come and we're going to get more human interaction, more connection. And I think, especially, you know, with COVID and the pandemic and the shutdowns, a lot of people lost that human connection and events like this are what brings it back. You know, you can be like, oh, there are people like me. There are people that have had this experience. There are people that are passionate about this hobby as much as I am and who look like me and who care about the same things that I do. And I think there's a lot of merit and importance to like pointing that out and celebrating it. Celebrating differences is such a huge factor. Do we have another question? Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to ask you about, I feel like there's a back glass problem where the people depicted on the back glass don't necessarily depict a diverse range of human beings. Can you guys speak to that? And is there anything you can, is there anything we can do about that? Yeah. I mean, give the feedback, honestly. I'm not going to call out anyone. This is not a call out on any one company over another because all of them have had issues and i could call out any of them but i'm gonna choose to punch up this time um woe nelly big juicy melons was released in 2015 that is a recent game um uh american pinball when they released oktoberfest they originally had an image of a monkey groping a woman on the game um and they received feedback online and they changed the art so being vocal about that and being like you know what i don't like this um the companies will hear it and then listen woe not we got rethemed twice the companies are very behind it's going to take them all to catch up but it's not going to slow us down we're going to keep yeah be more vocal see what you want to see um and speaking of you know being vocal there's a lot of older games that aren't being made anymore but there's also a bunch of artists out there who make alternate back glasses you know So if you're an artist or you know an artist and you're like, I really like, I don't know, Aztec or some other EM, but, you know, the back glass is just bad. And call out the art you do like. On the Flip website, I use photos from the back glass of a game called Superscore. It's an EM. It's just like some women playing pinball together in some big pinball space. And there's dudes there, too, but they're not interacting with the women. They're leaving them alone. And I'm like, this is what a pinball event should be. All right, let's start with that image on my last question. All right, one final question. I wanted to hear from Jackie actually about the question you asked about growing the community. I'm from San Francisco, and I've seen the queer pinball community explode. They're by far the fastest growing segment of the community in SF. And so I just wanted to hear more from like what you did. Was it just word of mouth? Totally. So I actually do want to add on that. You have to be very, very careful with new players. It's very easy for them to get overwhelmed and not want to come back. So you really have to baby them. And that's very hard as someone who plays a lot of pinball. You have to start very slow and from the basics. And in the Queer League, we, before every match, we make sure that we spend a few minutes as a group on that game talking about basic skills, what you know, a skill shot a feed that's really nice we want to make sure that these people are not overwhelmed and want to come back but to answer your question I started posting on an app called Lex which is a queer app and I got a lot of return from Lex people showing up and there are queer people love pinball queer people love pinball if you give them a space to do it they're going to want to do it you just have to try your best to retain them um i had to stop advertising because we have grown out of our venues um we focus on and i also want to say that we pinball is not the pinball is not the first thing that we're there for the first thing that people come to queer league for is for the community and we just happen to play pinball as well so you want to make sure you're giving them community first and that i think would help them yeah and retain them there's so many ways to do that as well yeah i know wedgehead in portland runs the howdy partner tournament which is a team-based co-op tournament shout out wedgehead i also want to shout out indie darling because that is one of our venues uh christian and biff um run and we love it there it's amazing yeah um and uh some advice that i always give to people because when you're running a tournament and you invite someone to play the thing you inevitably hear is oh but i'm not good at pinball i can't play it and uh the response that's gotten the most success from me is well that's why you have three balls if pinball was supposed to be easy it would be a one ball game pinball is a challenge and that's the fun of it and like framing it that way so they don't feel bad if they get a house ball on their first ball they're like oh that's how it's supposed to be that's why they give you three tries um i think that really helps get them in the mindset of oh okay, I didn't get this time. We can try again and try again. And then they're going to get hooked. They're going to play World Cup soccer. They're going to play Attack from Mars and destroy the saucer. They're going to play stars and end up with a tattoo six years later. That's me. Crush on Nelly. Yeah, they're going to catch the bug. It's just about framing it the right way. Okay, well thanks very much. Thank you. Yeah, thank you all for coming. We'll advocate for an hour time slot next time. I got QR code stickers if you want to join the pinball people. Just come find me.