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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.
Women are no longer really the minority in gaming: http://www.dailydot.com/geek/adult-women-largest-gaming-demographic/
My other UID is three digits.
Anyone who says "casual mobile gamer scum" is definitely worse than children.
I've never seen any rage against female gamers. That's certainly not what "gamergate" was/is about: game journalism. Feminist (not necessarily female) journalists were the target of their ire.
Gender-issues aside for the moment, game journalism is rotten - financial and/or romantic relationships between game journalists and games publishers is normal. I hope that doesn't get lost in the noise about misogyny - even by the falling statanrds of journalism generally, blatant conflicts of interests are uncool.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It may not be as ubiquitous as some would make it out, but that rage certainly exists. I was witness to it happening to a woman in a multiplayer shooter, and it was so over the top and angrily aggressive it really shocked me. If I hadn't seen that, I might have felt the way you do. It put me off multiplayer games for a long time.
Regarding journalistic ethics, the facts of the Zoe Quinn case don't support that there was any improper relationship. Grayson never reviewed any of her games, and the only time she appeared in any of his columns was well before they were involved. So that's kind of a red herring.
The most egregious violations of journalistic ethics in game media are the ones that happen in the biggest sites, like IGN. It's a little suspicious that there was no outcry from the gamergate types about those situations. Certainly the gamergate people aren't all hateful monsters, but they're giving cover to the hateful monsters that are out there..
You are welcome on my lawn.
Famously, the class that would later be called a “Fighter” was originally a “Fighting-man,” a term that appeared in much fantasy fiction, applied to characters like John Carter and Conan. The list of level titles also expresses a certain gender bias, with entries like Lord, Warlock, and strikingly Patriarch.
So it would seem that the original rules may not, in fact, have had such sexless classes.
There generally isn't any rage. The problem is you have a whole swathe of 'journalists' who are pushing their wheel-barrow full of opinion that there's oppression against women and other minority groups. Part of the backlash towards the 'journalists' is how duplicitous they are, but also how heavily slanted they push these view-points, to the detriment of their main readership and audience.
People suspected that at first it was just provocative click-bait. But when it started to become visible that a lot of the authors genuinely believed it, people started to see it more like a conspiracy. The 'journalists' have always run the line that any criticism is misogyny or bigotry, closed comments and then proceed to stroke their ego's about how brave they are. I'm no bigot, but I really hate constantly being preached to like as if I am one. Then to top it off, this holier-than-thou attitude completely turned on its head when people started uncovering mountains of evidence that the 'journalists' have no ethics in their work, since having relationships with people they cover, or actually having monetary ties with them is completely fine, according to them. It has really turned into an us vs them issue and I can't see it finishing any other way. They want to continue doing what they do; have a soap box to infect everyone with their miserable lives!
I for one have decided to 'check-out' from games; I'm no longer spending any money on games with anyone for anything. I'm not pushing a boycott, I've just decided that the well has been so poisoned, that I don't want to be supporting anyone with my custom. This is all due to the constant propaganda that gamers hate women amongst other minority groups, and the constant pandering of the industry to promote that fiction. So much of the industry has been goose stepping together on this issue, and so ready to throw their customers and readers under a bus. I feel like this has been an abysmal failure on the part of the games industry.
Regarding the improper relationship between Grayson and Quinn, the official line of kotaku is contradicted by the chat logs released by the boyfriend. In any case, the time line wasn't 'well before' either. An article was published 31st of March, which featured Quinn, written by Grayson, and then they supposedly started a relationship merely days later...
In the chat logs, Quinn admits that her relationship with Grayson got close at a Las Vegas trip, approximately two weeks before the article was published. So either Quinn is lying and backdated her relationship or Grayson/Kotaku are lying and moved the date forward... While the relationship ultimately doesn't matter (but it did happen, and Grayson should never have written the article he did), kotaku went back and edited numerous articles by various authors, one of which, Patricia Hernandez, was also covering games from people she was living with, and in relationships with. Then the 14 or so 'gamers are dead' articles also sprung up all within hours of each other.
Regarding rage, have you ever played a game of DotA? That has an awful community. No one is saying that abuse doesn't happen, but why should only abuse against women be remarkable and others not?
4chan and Reddit was a knock-on effect. Both sites heavily censored discussion of gamergate in the early days, choosing themselves to side with the gaming publications and ban all discussion of their ethics.
you think Motor Trend has a published, formal ethics policy?
I'd bet all the large car mags do - if a reporter had a significant financial stake in a particular manufacturer, for example, that would matter to the editor. I remember when Car&Driver was accused every month of being a wholly-owned subsidiary of one Japanese brand or another (for daring to point out that the Japanese cars were, well, better), and was pretty uptight about ensuring there was no truth to the regular accusations.
I'm sorry, but the whole "journalistic ethics" gamergate complaint seems to me to be a way to give cover to some very ugly and unseemly sentiment.
Possibly. There's certainly ugly sentiment - longtime gamers are quite upset about the longtime prejudice against them, about being stereotyped, about being told they're no good or their games are no good. This was just another Jack Thompson event, and people are still pretty bitter about the original.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Gamer Gate" is about misrepresenting markting as journalism; and all the evils that walk side by side with marketing types. The triggering for all the outrage, which spilled over from mere complains about ethics to an entire campaign, was this Quinn fellow performing sexual favors for gaming journalists in exchange for good reviews. She did this five seperate times, once with a married man.
Now an entire industry is trying to spin this as a feminist issue, yet getting the actual facts behind this story isn't hard. It is impossible that the outets carrying the story are unaware of what has been going on.
Let that sink in.
All rites reversed 2010