I would like to take some time out to speak to you, our players, about the ongoing Covid situation continuing in the world and how it pertains to Knight Realms. I am going to focus on being honest and open about Covid instead of dancing around words that may allow for mistakes and misunderstandings.
I will preface this by saying that I care greatly for my community at large and for other people. Although I may reference people looking after themselves and having personal responsibility and agency, that does not mean that I think that we should not care about one another or not take measures to help one another. I believe that a balance of the two methods of thought are better than one of those paths taken to the extreme. We should look after one another and take measures to keep each other safe and we should also realize and practice our own responsibility for our own actions, personal comfort, safety and wellbeing. Both of those things can happen at the same time.
Covid is a very real virus that has caused a great deal of destruction to many people’s lives in the last few years. Many businesses including Knight Realms canceled its live events for over a year out of a concern for safety. Since reopening our live events, we have been a mostly Covid safe environment due to our Covid policies. While many players had made public comments about catching Covid in between events, we went almost an entire year without any noticeable infectious situations and then had the incident in June. Many people in the country are vaccinated and vaccination is meant to reduce the severity of symptoms that an individual suffers from when the virus is caught. New strains and variants of Covid are coming out periodically and these strains and variants seem to have less severe symptoms but are also easier to spread.
Many businesses, communities, and events all over the country are operating at full capacity with very little if any imposed restrictions. As the Pandemic transitions into an Endemic, the world is transitioning into a phase of requiring each individual person to make decisions for their own comfort levels and risk assessment. When you walk into a grocery store, mall, movie theater, casino, festival, or sports game you will often see some people wearing masks and some who are not. When you walk out your door and go out in public you are making a decision. Whether you are wearing a mask or not is another decision, whether you are still practicing social distancing or shaking hands and giving hugs is yet another decision, but you are making these choices and you are responsible for your own well-being and health as well as still being considerate of the health and well-being of those around you.
Our safety team is volunteer. They have jobs and family responsibilities in their own lives, just like everyone else. They are also subject to suffer the same stress and hurt feelings that you are all subject to. They are here to guide, but they are not responsible for your health and not responsible for the decisions you make. It is unfair to think that they would maliciously seek to cause harm when in fact they are volunteering their time to help you. You might disagree with their assessments, but they are the ones who I unapologetically trust to make the most effective and level headed calls. They have been helping me to decide our Covid policies for the last two years and I trust their guidance and they have my full confidence. What our policies are at any given time is a tool for you to use to make an informed decision about your own risk assessment.
I have looked at the guidelines and Covid policies of other monthly campaign larps and some quarterly parlor larps in the NY/NJ/PA area in comparison to the restrictions that the Safety Team has imposed upon Knight Realms and have found that they follow roughly in line with many of them. Some have shown looser restrictions, and some have shown stricter. No one at any point is required to attend a Knight Realms event if they feel that our guidelines are either too strict or too loose. In fact, I encourage those who don’t feel safe to not attend, even if you would be slated to run the main plot of an event and chose to back out the week of. You should always be free to make the decision that allows you to feel the safest.
We have two BIG things you can do to reduce your personal risk. 1) You can choose to wear an KN95 mask while attending events - which we keep a supply of in logistics - and 2) you can choose to wear an orange headband, easily informing others that you need a little more space to feel Covid safe while you actively practice social distancing yourself, which has been in place since we returned to live events. Every one of you always has had and still does have the option to perform those actions.
We will also not accept bullying related to Covid. If someone knowingly comes to the game infected, that person will be banned, however this is a highly unlikely scenario and requires someone to have egregious malicious intent. Because of the nature of the virus, in most cases the person will not have reasonably known and so the person will face no repercussions. Furthermore, anyone attempting to ostracize the person will be punished for bullying. Bullying about Covid also extends to those making claims that it is not real, or those who accuse others of being on the moral low ground for not being on the same level of concern. We all have different degrees of concern surrounding Covid. Stating in earnesty that it is fake when so many have been affected by it is hurtful and unacceptable. Stating in earnesty that those who do not share your same level of concern are less caring people is also hurtful and unacceptable.
Asymptomatic carriers who do not know that they are infected, coupled with testing that is not always accurate (evidenced by people having to take two tests before finding out that they are infected), spell out a formula for not being able to 100% guarantee safety. Place on top of that the fact that every time one of us goes down the street to the supermarket during an event, it creates the opportunity for one of us to catch Covid and bring it right back, undetected, to everyone else. For these reasons, we cannot fully guarantee your safety. We can say with confidence that we are imposing substantial policies that reduce your risk but that reduction will never be to 100% safety and it is up to you whether you reduce your risk even further by wearing masks or wearing the orange band at an event. We are doing everything we feel is appropriate and effective and with each month, the safety team continues to assess what changes to the policy need to be made, and what changes they feel are appropriate.
I am honestly surprised that we went so long without something noticeable transpiring. It is possible another Covid incident will occur. Whenever this occurs in the future, we will evaluate the situation and investigate it to see if we can determine what helped contribute towards it. If the cause appears to be something that we feel is within our control, we will make adjustments to our policy if we think those adjustments will be effective in addressing the cause as well as be reasonable to impose on the player base. We will not be imposing restrictions on our player base that we do not feel will be plausible for us to enforce. We will not be likely to cancel an event unless the government mandates a shutdown.
All of us likely know someone who is innately at risk, were harmed, or even died during the last few years. Do not mistake my statement for saying that we no longer care, because if that was the case we would have no Covid policies and we would not spend the tremendous amount of time that we do on them. I am saying that there is a point when circumstances evolve and transition from what they were initially and much of the world has acknowledged that we are at that point.
I hope you understand the purpose of my frank honesty with everyone, because I believe it has been overdue. Despite all the possible fear and uncertainty, the odds are in your favor. If you are vaccinated your symptoms are likely to be way less severe than the symptoms were in 2020. Our policies are likely to keep out anything but the hardest to spot cases and you are perfectly likely to enjoy events without any issue at all, however the decision to play our live events is yours and the responsibility for your health is also yours.
Thanks – James