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.

Comments

Re:I don't get the rage

[PopeRatzo]

An article was published 31st of March, which featured Quinn, written by Grayson, and then they supposedly started a relationship merely days later..

I'm sure you know that the article which "featured" Quinn was about a reality TV show and not a review of a game or of Quinn.

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.

Again, "the article" was not a review of a game or of Quinn's work, so where exactly is the violation?

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?

This is the stupidest of the gamergate arguments. "You shouldn't be outraged about abuse, because there's so much abuse."

It's pretty funny. The #gamergate people are so ridiculous that no response is required. They just don't matter. Even with their touchdown dance over Intel pulling some ads from Gamasutra (and by the way, new Intel ads are coming to Gamasutra), the truth is that nobody really cares. Like other loud but numerically insignificant culture warrior groups before them, they're croaking into the wind. People just slowly edge away from the embarrassing, smelly person on the bus. And make no mistake, giving cover to men who would stalk and dox and threaten a family out of their home because they don't like something they wrote is smelly and embarrassing.

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."

Re:I don't get the rage

[PopeRatzo]

I'd bet all the large car mags do

You would be wrong.

longtime gamers are quite upset about the longtime prejudice against them

Where is the "longtime prejudice" against gamers? Is the industries 30 year history of tailoring games to "longtime gamers" evidence of this prejudice?

This was just another Jack Thompson event

But this time the gamergators are Jack Thompson - crying victim, making ridiculous claims and generally whining about how awful everyone is being to them. How unfair it is that abuse is being called out. How unfair it is that gaming publications are finally trying to include female writers, writing about things that affect women gamers. How unfair it is that there are now female characters in games. I was just reading an interesting exchange on a gaming site about how gamergators intend to boycott games with female protagonists, just to show those feminists. I've seen the (ultimately deleted) comments are Rock Paper Shotgun. I haven't heard such whining since they started letting black students into the University of Georgia (yes, I'm that old). "It's going to ruin our culture!" And they've suddenly developed an expertise in "journalistic ethics", the same way the hard-core racists became experts in phrenology in order to give some authoritative air to their pitiful cries.

Death threats. By name. Publishing the home addresses, personal information and names of children. If someone telling you that some of your games are sexist brings you to this level, psychiatric treatment is more appropriate than a hashtag campaign.

When you have been a privileged class, as male gamers have been for decades, it's hard to see things start to change. But the hard time you're having doesn't make the change any less inexorable. There has never in history been a successful campaign to stop a culture from changing.

I've been playing computer games avidly longer than most gamergators have been alive. I will continue to play computer games avidly long after gamergators have become a sad footnote to the history of gaming (which was about a week ago). The only threat to "gamer culture" is coming from their continuing embarrassing behavior. It smelled from the day Adam Baldwin (!) gave this sorrowful movement a name.