Slashdot Mirror
How Women Became Gamers Through D&D
An anonymous reader writes: To add some historical context to the currently controversy surrounding attitudes toward women in gaming, Jon Peterson provides an in-depth historical look at the unsurprisingly male origins of the "gamer" identity. It also examines how Dungeons & Dragons helped to open the door for women in gaming — overturning a sixty-year-old dogma that was born when Wells's Little Wars first assumed the "disdain" of women for gaming.
Maybe, just maybe most games appealed to more males, so males were more drawn to them. This is of course a consequence of sexism in early decades discouraging women from taking up programming and making games themselves.
This is all being corrected, naturally, it's just going to take time.
There isn't disdain for women in gaming, it's just that women are the minority in games and tend to play games that the majority looks down upon (The Sims, Candy Crush etc), although even this is changing. There are plenty of girls who play GTAV, Injustice, COD etc and are amazing at them.
Articles like this don't help, they hurt. They spread FUD and misinformation without any facts, only serving to promote a continuation of the idiotic war of the sexes.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Gamergators are the real victims. Clearly, it's the people who are intolerant of their intolerance that are the real intolerant ones.
They're just engaged in a righteous crusade for journalistic ethics, as you can clearly see if you read the 4chan and Reddit forums where the movement started.
You are welcome on my lawn.