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.
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.
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?