GGG Conduct & Anti-Harassment Policy

Golden Gate Gamemakers welcomes guests from all experiences to our community. We require participants to follow, and organizers to follow and enforce, the guidelines below. These guidelines apply to all community spaces, in-person and digital.

General Code of Conduct

Respect Others and Yourself
Always consider the wellbeing of others and yourself in your actions. Maintain a welcoming environment. Respect different levels of game experiences and preferences.e respectful to organizers and follow their direction as necessary.

Respect Venues
Do not damage or interfere with our event venues, and respect venue staff. Do not be disruptive to those not participating.

Respect Organizers
Be respectful to organizers and follow their direction as necessary.

Keep Things Family Friendly
Explicit language and content should be kept to a minimum.

Be Responsible With Personal Intoxication
Participants are expected to be in a state that does not compromise the enjoyment or safety of themselves and others. If an organizer feels someone is overly intoxicated or otherwise unfit to participate, that person may be asked to leave.

Gain Consent Before Taking Photos, Videos, or Audio Recordings
Everyone included must explicitly opt in, and informed consent must include the potential uses of the material (e.g. “Are you OK if I take a picture of you playing the game for social media?”).

Gain Consent Before Touching, Hugging, Or Impacting The Agency Of Others
Everyone has the right to their own body, words, and identity. Always respect consent and gain it where it is appropriate, and if consent is denied, do not violate that denial.

Ages Under 18 Must Have Parental Or Guardian Consent
All those under the age of 18 must have consent from their parent or guardian to participate. Verbal or written consent is OK. Any situation that would require additional consent from a participant normally, such as playtesting with potentially uncomfortable content or asking to include them in a photo, must gain permission from the parent or guardian as well.

Events May Have Additional Guidelines
Please review the description for each event beforehand to know what to expect.

Events May Have Additional Guidelines
A game may be excluded from community spaces for explicit or sensitive content, such as sexual imagery or historical violence, as deemed necessary by an organizer. If you are unsure if your game, or another’s, is appropriate for an event, contact the organizer.

Additional Rules For Playtesting

Playtesting Is The Focus
Playtesting events are for playtesting, not demo-ing or selling finished games. Only run a playtest if the primary goal is to gather feedback and be open to changes.

Playtesting Is Voluntary
Any participant can choose not to join a playtest. A player can ask to stop or leave a session early, especially if they feel that continuing play won’t result in any new feedback or the game is breaking a boundary for the player. As a gamemaker, empower players to set limits on what energy and time they give you.

Introduce Games Before Players Join
A gamemaker should briefly inform potential players what to expect from a playtest. Things to cover include: content warnings, game setting, game mechanics, play time, development status, and what is being playtested.

Playtest Session Maximum Length Of 90 Minutes
There is a soft cap of 90 minutes per playtest. This includes setup, teaching, and feedback. Some events may generally reduce or extend this limit. This time limit gives more designers a chance to test their games, keep tests more focused, and give players more options. If you want to run a longer playtest, check with your organizer beforehand.

Be Constructive And Respectful With Feedback
Share your opinions and provide constructive feedback about games you playtest, without criticizing individuals. Keep feedback focused and respectful. Avoid arguments.

Give More Than You Take
Gamemakers are encouraged to give more of their time than they take from others (e.g. A one hour playtest means a gamemaker should ideally give at least two hours back to the community). This allows all gamemakers to get time at the table, and provides more perspectives.

-Content Warnings and Safety Tools-

Before playtesting, gamemakers should assess their content for potential player discomfort or mental health consequences, including for players who have different experiences from them.

Games with player-generated content:
For games where players are contributing to content directly, the use of support and safety tools is encouraged, though they are not necessarily required for all games. In all cases, put safety and wellbeing of players first, and encourage the active use of tools that support those.

For a variety of recommended safety tools, check out the RPG Safety Toolkit at bit.ly/ttrpgsafetytoolkit. Specific resources are Script Change at briebeau.com/scriptchange and the X-Card tinyurl.com/x-card-rpg. The organizer should be able to provide X-Cards for playtesting as needed.

AI Policy

Golden Gate Gamemakers wants to give players genuine human expression and intention in every aspect of the games we make. The use of Generative AI does not align with the values we want for our community or the games it produces.

What is Generative AI?

Generative Artificial Intelligence, shortened to Generative AI, is a specific subset of artificial intelligence focused on creating new content such as images, text, or music. Generative AI systems use large sets of existing data to identify patterns and then generate new content based on those patterns. Some major Generative AI tools may include Midjourney or Chat GPT.

Issues With Generative AI

Golden Gate Gamemakers has the following issues concerning Generative AI in game products:

• Philosophical: We make games because we love and value the act of creation, and the use of Generative AI undercuts those principles. By using Generative AI, a product makes a statement that it doesn’t value the creation of that kind of work (art, writing, etc).
• Ethical: Most major generative models rely on the work of our fellow creatives without their prior consent.
• Representative: Generative AI takes a vast number of sources and aggregates them into the most common denominator. This results in reductive use of marginalized people, sexes, and genders, as well as other stereotyping.
• Environmental: In an industry already creating waste, AI training and operation is particularly wasteful of energy and water.
• Commercial: Using Generative AI art and materials for a final product is a poor business decision, and we want games created in the Bay to have the best chance at success. Art and text generated by AI isn’t protectable by copyright – you don’t own it and it opens you up to a wide array of potential legal issues. Regardless of a given model’s output quality, there is a broad perception of AI materials as low-quality, low effort, and unlikeable due to the reasons above.

Overall, associating Generative AI with Golden Gate Gamemakers devalues our entire community’s games.

The following rules concerning Generative AI apply within the Golden Gate Gamemakers community:

–Do not promote or sell published games that use Generative AI materials. This includes sharing information for pre-orders and crowdfunding campaigns.

–Do not ask for feedback on Generative AI materials.

–Discussions around Generative AI and tools should be moved to private conversations to keep community discussions focused.

–Generative AI for prototypes is discouraged yet permissible.

Anti-Harassment & Anti-Discrimination Policy and Procedure

Golden Gate Gamemakers is dedicated to providing a welcoming experience that is free of harassment and discrimination. Harassment of participants in any form is not tolerated.

Harassment and discrimination can include:

• Offensive comments or exclusion related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neurodiversity, physical appearance, age, race, religion, socioeconomic status, game experience, or game preferences.
• Deliberate intimidation.
• Threats of violence.
• Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm.
• Physical contact without consent or after a request to stop.
• Deliberate misgendering, use of ‘dead’ or rejected names, or misuse of pronouns.
• Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent.
• Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior.
• Unwelcome sexual attention.
• Harassing photography or recording.
• Stalking or following.
• Sustained disruption of discussion.
• Pattern of inappropriate or unwelcome social contact.

Reporting Violations of the Code of Conduct and Harassment

If you notice violations in conduct, or feel like you or someone you notice is being harassed, please inform an organizer who may be able to take immediate action and/or email contact@goldengategamemakers.com .

Please make sure to include the fact that you are reaching out about a code of conduct or harassment violation to ensure it is prioritized. We will respond as promptly as we can.

Can I report harassment that happens outside of GGG?
Our Anti-Harassment Policy applies to our community spaces, but if you are being harassed elsewhere, we still want to know about it. We take all reports of harassment seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. GGG organizers reserve the right to exclude people from our events based on their past behavior, including behavior outside our spaces.

How does the organizing team handle reports?
If the person who violated our conduct or harassment policy is part of our organizing team, they will not be included in the investigation or the process of deciding consequences.

Organizers reserve the right to reject reports we believe to have been made in bad faith. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may go without response.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of our members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Consequences

If a participant engages in harassment or other behavior against the code of conduct, an organizer may take any action they deem appropriate, including:

• Verbal warnings
• Mediation
• Expulsion from an event
• Banned from hosting events
• Bans from future events and/or community spaces
• Contacting local authorities

This is a living document, intended to reflect the changing needs of our community. Last updated August 1, 2025.