This month, the winners of our society of the month are Oxford Brookes and their Gaming Society! We sat down With Ulli, their president, to learn about the society and about what they do.
What is it that makes Oxford Brookes Gaming Society unique?
At Oxford Brookes we have, like others, a large focus on gaming and tournaments. But where we might differ from others is with our close relationship to other societies, like The Guild, which is a society for tabletop gaming, LARPing, D&D, Warhammer, and Assassins. We realised there is a big crossover with our members and decided to merge many of our events to cater to as many people as possible. We are also a very inclusive society, as many parts of the gaming world are very male dominant, we made a very conscious choice to ensure all of our members, no matter what they identify as, feel included and safe. A small thing we did to ensure this was to add a pronouns role choice and encouraged everyone to chose their preferred pronouns, we also implemented an LQBTQ+ officer for anyone to reach out to.
Tell us more about the LAN that you recently threw along with The Guild.
The idea of a crossover event started during Freshers Fair when we were talking and realised how many of our members were in both societies. We had a number of meetings trying to figure out what exactly we would need to do to cater to everyone, from our members who are there for competitive play to those who are there for the social aspect of the event. With big help from NSE and the Brookes union we were able to have 12 insane gaming pc setups, a Wii U for some casual Mario Kart, and pizzas for everyone. The Guild had prepared and hosted a one shot D&D session, and brought in a ton of their board games whilst making sure that a member of their committee was there to explain the game and help people out. We also collaborated in creating a pub quiz with questions from the gaming world, board game/D&D world, pop culture, movies, and general "fun facts" questions about Oxford.
What is your favourite activity as a society, outside of gaming?
We love social trips to the pub! Due to covid it hasn't been the easiest thing to facilitate, so we changed a lot to be online with movie nights, and more social game nights like mafia, drawing games, and of course, Among Us!
What are Oxford Brookes' longer term plans?
We would love to go back to hosting regular in-person LAN's and social events again, which is definitely happening! Not just as a gaming society alone, but we also plan to run many more crossover events with both The Guild and the anime society! We also have big plans about our performances in tournaments and becoming a university others fear to play against again! To do this we are going to focus more on each individual team to ensure they are all at a similar skill level, and all interested in improving and competing to win. We will ensure that the captains for each team have a training schedule in place, and are able to guide, help, and motivate their team.
If you want to hear more from Oxford Brookes Gaming Society, you can find them on Twitter, Instagram, or you can join their Discord.
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