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.
I really hate things that are made to "appeal to women". There's no reason a screwdriver needs a pink handle, and there's no reason why women can't play and enjoy the same games that man do. When you start a game of Skyrim it doesn't ask "do you have a penis?" and boot out of the game if you answer no.
Skyrim's actually really popular with women. Partly because it's so open-ended and exploratory, and is presented more as an adventure and less of a proving grounds ("I'm so hardcore I killed all the halo aliens on the level in 4 minutes"). You're free to play the way you want to play, and your decisions are meaningful.
Even just being able to play as a lady character makes a big difference, rather than having to play as Generic Grizzled White Dude #58.
So yeah, building games that appeal to women isn't hard to do - but it does require that you build games that don't cater exclusively to the "hardcore gamer" audience.
Right -- there is no controversy about women in gaming. Not about women playing games, and not even about women making games.
There's a controversy about women (mostly two particular women) criticizing games and gamers on feminist grounds, and there's a controversy about one woman game developer who was involved in some rather public relationship drama involving game journalists. And there's a controversy about all their journalist supporters conspiring against gamers -- which the damn fool journalists went and set afire by proving their opponents right (on that point at least) by launching a coordinated attack in their respective publications.
As John Scalzi put it: "Face it dudes: "Gamergate" is a toxic thing. You can't say you support (it) WITHOUT explicitly standing with those who hate and harass women."
It's this sort of utter bullshit that offends me. I hear it constantly from the left - all arguments are ad-hominum. "If you disagree, you can only be a racist." "If you disagree, you can only be sexist." "If you disagree, you must be a Nazi". And on and on like that for decades.
And then discussion sites ban all discussion of the issue. It's the most frequent leftist argument of all: "I'm right because SHUT UP".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.