RogerBW's Blog

UK Games Expo is happening on the first weekend of August. I'm really glad I'm not committed to going.

Their plan earlier in the year was to require evidence of a recent lateral flow test before first entry, and to have wide aisles, but to have no policy at all about masks or vaccinations.

They have now decided to enforce nothing beyond the legal minimum. They're keeping the wide aisles, still saying nothing about vaccinations, but now they have a explicit mask policy:

• We do not require face masks but recommend you bring one as you may find times during the day where you decide it is sensible to wear one.
• UKGE and Exhibitors will not require you to wear a mask, but their staff may decide to wear one.
• Other attendees may wear a face mask.
• We do require that EVERYONE who attends the show, in any capacity, respect the choices of everyone else.

So I look at this from the perspective of a demo guy, because that's the capacity in which I spend most of my time at UKGE. If you come along to my table, I have no assurance of your vaccination status or any recent tests, but I'm not allowed to say "wear a mask or play someone else's game"; I just have to sit there and put up with you sitting across from me.

Of course the aisles will be full of breathing people anyway, but it's an aggressive pandering to mask-deniers: not only do we say in advance that you don't have to wear or even bring a mask, nobody on site will be allowed to require you to do it either, oh and by the way please don't hassle people for doing it themselves. Clearly the organisers think they will make more money allowing in the mask-deniers than they are losing by excluding anyone with a smidgen of common sense. And I'm sorry to say that they're probably right.

(Being charitable, it may be that they think that with their current model of volunteer staff they can't enforce any rules. But GenCon, in September in the USA, is requiring either mask or proof of vaccination from everyone, and Essen SPIEL in October is going full-mask for everyone plus either proof of vaccination or recent negative test. Assuming they happen at all, obviously.)

I'm a little surprised at how shocked I am; I mean, I expect that capitalists gonna capitalist, just like all those film studios that were happy to say "only in cinemas!" at the heights of infection last year. But, dash it, I know some of the organisers. They aren't especially friends but I've sat down and played games with them. And now they're throwing in with the government's "a bunch of you will die as a direct result of our policies and that's just fine with us" attitude.

(A bit under two-thirds of the population fully vaccinated when you return to full stranger-licking mixing of people is a great way of brewing up new vaccine-resistant variants. No wonder the rest of the world is looking hard at red-listing the UK. Do it now before the next major outbreak.)