Safeguarding Tabletop Gaming Spaces

Are you interested in promoting safe and inclusive gaming communities?

We know tabletop gaming can have many benefits for participants, and gaming spaces are often safe spaces for neurodivergent people, the LGBTQ+ community, and people with mental health issues. It is also a set of spaces where intergenerational friendships can develop. Many people build new and lasting friendships as owners and volunteers in gaming spaces intentionally seek to develop the community.

However with these benefits come unique risks including the potential for malicious actors to have access to gaming spaces, predatory trading practices with card games, and ‘rage quitting’ or ‘salty’ players.

This workshop will help you to reflect on your own gaming context, which could be a volunteer-run club through to the owner of a chain of game shops. It will particularly help you highlight safeguarding risks, while working together to find actions to reduce some of those risks that you can begin implementing straight away to promote the safety and wellbeing of your gamers.

Dr Peter Hart, Lecturer in Inclusion, Childhood and Youth

Ana Korzun, PhD student

18+ (due to the potentially sensitive nature of the discussions around safeguarding)

This is open for all to attend, but is aimed at people with responsibility for gaming spaces and communities (e.g. leaders of games clubs, or staff and owners of games cafes and shops).

Booking via Eventbrite, or email games@leeds.ac.uk

20th October 2025