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.
several marriages have emerged from my gaming group, Lots of dating, I've been running games since I was 13, I'm 49 now. In college, I was running groups that were always co-ed. after college, once I was married, I was running games with a mix of married and unmarried couples. Nowadays I pick my gamers based on whether their kids get along with my kids.
Retirement is going to rock, a bunch of old fogies, rollin' for initiative.
Let's be honest there was also a ton of anti-gaming marketing targeted at women by existing female targeted products. The whole scam being, don't spend you money on games that are meant only for teenage pimpled nerds instead buy makeup, but clothing, buy shoes, buy buy buy more shoes. This is real competition for the consumer dollar or credit line as per the current reality and a huge amount of counter marketing going on, to deny competition.
The computer game does in reality block a lot of other sales opportunities, not just because of the money it consumes but also because of the consumer time it consumes and how cost effective a recreation it is for the consumer ie dollars spent for recreation gained. Something that made it a pretty solid target for peer pressure marketing for decades and this marketing is clearly failing as more females get directly exposed to gaming and benefit by the low cost recreation (money saved from not be spent on other forms of recreation and you don't need to fancy dress to play an online game with others).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
My lady friend is 51 and has been playing an MMO called "internet bridge" for well over a decade, there are some serious players, competitions offer good prize money, a high ranking player can actually make a decent living teaching others how to play well. She also enjoys "world of tanks" (no blood and guts), 20K+ battles under her belt. She's not upset because I won't play bridge, I'm not upset because she won't play StarCraft.
My lady friend also happens to have a PhD in marketing, the whole "controversy" is simply a marketing exercise so that people like my lady friend can identify with the label "gamer". However the way they have gone about trying to broaden the definition of "gamer" by associating it with adolescent "greifers" and throwing it overboard has blown up in their faces since the demographic you point to overwhelmingly interprets the whole thing as political correctness gone mad. Rather than broaden their audience they have divided it into two camps; people who play games, and people who claim the ability to read their minds....for a price.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
My brother worked construction with a guy who used pink tools because pink tools won't walk off with the other guys on the crew. Other than that, what difference does handle color make?