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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.
Gammer gamers of old,
Whose mettle proved hard,
Taking scalps untold.
Even the grizzled grognard!
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Sex change!
Maybe, just maybe most games appealed to more males, so males were more drawn to them. This is of course a consequence of sexism in early decades discouraging women from taking up programming and making games themselves.
This is all being corrected, naturally, it's just going to take time.
There isn't disdain for women in gaming, it's just that women are the minority in games and tend to play games that the majority looks down upon (The Sims, Candy Crush etc), although even this is changing. There are plenty of girls who play GTAV, Injustice, COD etc and are amazing at them.
Articles like this don't help, they hurt. They spread FUD and misinformation without any facts, only serving to promote a continuation of the idiotic war of the sexes.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
I don't get the rage against female gamers. You'd think the basement dwelling geeks would be excited to know that there is a female counterpart out there for them.
The idea that there are few women gamers has always been a myth in the first place. Sure there are certain genres where men and boys dominate the demographic, but there are also genres where women dominate the demographic.
The idea that women "don't belong in gaming" or are "under-represented in the gaming community" is a myth perpetrated by the same kind of childish mentality that thinks "l33t speak" makes one cool and special.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"Jim Dapkus wrote one of these: he loved the game but expressed concern that it offered little by way of roles for female characters. He complained that a “witch or female counterpart to the magic user is not listed,” aside from the lone illustration in Men & Magic of a “Beautiful Witch.”"
So women don't want to be a magic user, barbarian, thief, ranger or paladin (all arguably sexless) but... a "witch"?
O'RLY...
Dear /. owners, fuck off with your daily sexual harassment.
Yes, it was totally some dorky game almost no women play and not the convenience of a Nintendo home console and the accessibility of facebook candy crush.
overturning a sixty-year-old dogma that was born when Wells's Little Wars first assumed the "disdain" of women for gaming.
The quote is "for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books." Nothing about disdain.
And judging by the gaming friends I've interacted with over the years, the quote holds true for gaming even today. The ratios are close to even in social games (including MMOs), not so much for shooter/wargames.
The idea that misogyny is some how rampant and women like Sarkeesian are specifically targeted because there women is in itself sexist. Never mind that people disagree with Sarkeesian scamming that kick starter harder than the girl scouts selling me cookies or Gaben stealing my wallet every quarter. The bigger issue here is that none of these women can take criticism or have someone disagree with them at all without screaming misogyny. What can be more accepting and gender nuetral than judging you by the content of your character and your work and products? You don't get to demand to be treated equally then scream that your a special snowflake when that doesn't work out in your favor.
Hell, even the trolls don't care there women. There looking for public targets that get riled up at the push of a button. Find a male dev that cries on television when he gets made fun of and they will tear him a new one too. This is for every single public figure ever.
How Women Became Gamers Through D&D
Yup, lump them all together as one homogenous mass. They love that.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Shit, worst initiative roll EVER.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Mostly it's that female gamers don't find male gamers any more attractive than the general set of women does.
This tends to upset the male gamers who presume that because they find female gamers more attractive the female gamers should reciprocate by finding them more attractive.
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.
I've seen a surprising number of women that see gaming as a "boys thing". That is slowly changing with age, but it is still more prevalent than with men. When I was a kid, only nerd played video games or PnP games. Real boys splayed sports. That has changed now, and it is perfectly acceptable for all boys to play games, and most people are even coming around on male adults gaming. With girls/women, there is still a more prevalent view of it not being "normal" to be in to gaming.
Funny thing is, it'll come form women who do play games. They play something like Angry Birds or Farmville or the like. Despite being a video game, they don't see it the same as playing on a AAA video game on an Xbox or the like. It is different in their mind, probably because they have a hangup about gaming being an ok activity for a woman.
The good news is that it has been changing, and is continuing to change. I think before long it will be to the point where video games are just something most people play. Different people will have different interests in types of games, but it won't be a "kid thing" or a "boy thing" or a "geek thing" it'll just be an activity that is ok for anyone to partake in, much like TV is now.
Also, DnD is like playing house with goblins and swords. Too bad the goblins are real.
sort of gatewayed me into D&D...... Deedlit was a role model :)
you don't know what you are talking about. You must be young. Back in the early days of D&D (and I'm talking nearly 40 years ago - so if you relate to that, you are in your 40s, 50s. or 60s), we had plenty of women in our groups (my best friend's mom was even a passionate player) - and it wasn't odd, or revolutionary, or reactionary, it was just normal, that wasn't even a consideration then, and it remained so all the way up to the 90s (and the same was true for comic books, science fiction or fantasy novels, anything currently commonly associated with being a 'geek'), coincidentally when the world wide web became mainstream. The considerations seemed to begin appearing when 'nerd' became a fad, became a source of bizarre credibility of some sort, became codified, became Internet and social media currency. Back then, people pretty much just loved what they loved and participated in what they wanted to participate in, the rest just didn't matter. Wendy Pini was a woman, Madelaine L'Engle was a woman, Margaret Weis was a woman, ad infinitum and nauseum, and at the time, nobody thought twice about it. Millennials - a term I don't particularly care for, but it simplifies things in this case - seem to have both revised history (as children often do, until they know better, because their own experience of the world is inherently limited by comparison) and manufactured conflicts where before there really were none. Pretty f***ing silly. I feel for this generation that was robbed of experience and a history of their own because of the way they were raised and the vicarious, networked world they grew up in, never having the opprtunity to experience anything directly. I have never seen a generation so thoroughly obsessed with their own version of 'boys vs. girls' while simultaneously claiming to decry such notions. That is truly a pity. The rest of us will continue to enjoy what we enjoy and get on with our day, and not feel the need to justify or apologize for any of it. Like what you like and do that thing. It's that simple.
I have been on the receiving end of plenty of disdain about my gaming, from multiple members of the opposite sex.
I am male.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
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Sheldon: I've never played D&D with a girl before.
Penny: That's OK sweetie; no-one has.
- The big bang theory
There was a study out there that actually men and women gather "trash talk" post both, but men do receive twice the rate. The difference ? Men most probably ignore being told they are "faggot" or long accepted it as being part of the game voice-over-game, but women seems to take offense far more quickly when they are told they are "bitches" or whatever other stuff. Make of that what you will, some colleague think women should toughen up, personally I think trolls/trashtalker should tone down, probably we have both irrealistic expectation.
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I do not want to hear this anymore.. .. I used to play tombraider and I loved it, and I bet women love it too. I love GTA and my girlfriend love it too.. She burn more cars then I do.
There is no such thing as games for men or games for womens. There is fun simulations of the world. And guess what womens live in the same world as men do.
Just stop this, I agree with ealier poster that said "a screwdriver does not need to have a pink handle for women to use it".
Always have to make life complicated. I don't care what sex you are. All I expect depending depending if the game is for fun or serious competition you help either make it fun or bring your 'A' game.
I figure its those little pamphlets that really brought girls into D&D.
http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Dark_Dungeons_(Chick_tract)
I was in 3 different long lasting D&D groups in the 1980s. I think most of us would have loved to have girls join, but no girls played with us in that decade. Whenever we got the balls to ask a girl to play they just looked at us like we were crazy, like they would get nerd cooties. I went to a D&D convention in New Haven at that time and I remember there was only one girl out of about 500 guys. She was very popular, with a whole lot of guys wanting to be in her group.
There certainly was a social penalty for me being a nerd at that time, but I didn't feel I had a choice. I loved gaming and it was part of my identity. At that time, however, I think there was a larger penalty for female nerds coming from the non-gaming community than for male nerds. Any girl joining our very small and admittedly not very attractive group probably would have been marked as a pariah by mainstream social groups.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I'm reasonably sure that girls that like books are more intelligent that the ones who don't. And if they like boys games, they are more likely to develop competitive behavior, which in turn make them better and more focused to whatever they do besides gaming. So, yes, the statement is likely to be true regardless of what the PR police thinks (and yes, I know thats an oxymoron)
To deny the obvious truth that women as a gender are far less inclined towards games, or at least the same types of games, as males ought to be entirely uncontroversial, and not counted as an "assumption".
Denying this obvious truth out of some well-intentioned desire for equality-through-isotropy is bullshit.
It's one thing to say you're a democrat and I'm a democrat but we disagree on Obamacare.
It's another thing to say that I'm a Nazi because I believe in the way they support the economy but I don't believe that anti-jew crap. Well, you could say that, but the antisemitic part of being a Nazi is such a fundamental part that by supporting the Nazis you are supporting the antismetic part just by being a part of the group, even if you disagree with that particular principle. At some point you have to say I can't support this main tenant of a group and I'm going to go find a group that doesn't stand for such a horrible thing. For me, any group that have a policy that specifically mistreats or alienates another group, is too much for me, even if they have other sane tenets.
I would suggest you investigate more about GamerGate. My understanding is that they prey on having reasonable people in the group that want reform in the industry but aren't sexist to keep their momentum against the minorities of the gamer community going and to make themselves look like a bigger weight in the game market than they are. (See for instance them getting Intel to stop supporting Gamasutra). As a woman, I can't condone GamerGate because of the way they treat minorities, even though I agree that sites that review games like IGN are a bit too in bed with companies like EA to give impartial reviews.
I have seen a very strange, to me, behavior.
Some Background Information: For some time I have been a member of a clan for an on-line FPS game. The clan gathers on a voice chat server. The clan is broken up onto small teams. You have to formally ask permission of a Team Leader to join that team. Each Team has it's own channel in the voice chat server. You can jump between channels an play with other Teams, but you are really expected to play with your own Team when they are available. You can leave a Team and join another Team with little to no excuse required, but it must be done formally between both Team Leaders.
The Observation: By playing with different Teams and joining in on general conversations, I have determined that there is only 1 woman that is a member of our Clan out of about 200-300 members. That 1 woman is a member of a Team. Judging from my experiences playing with each team, both while she was present and when she was not present, I have observed the fact that the Team that she is a member of is the most misogynistic of all the Teams in our Clan. If I had to rate on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is no misogyny and 10 is constant misogyny I would say that most of our Teams are 1 or 2, where the Team she is a member of is about a 3 or sometimes 4. When she is playing on that Team, I have observed that there are more comments, leaning towards the 4-5 range.
Why does she stay with that Team? I have observed that when she plays with the other Team there are little to no misogynist comments. So, she could switch Teams and be rid of most comments. I have heard of no factors that would keep her there, like a husband/boyfriend/relative. She does not initiate the comments, but when they occur she does not rebuke them. She usually responds with something witty or if not then makes no comment. However, her profile picture in the voice chat client is almost always something racy/sexy/suggestive that is updated frequently.
The best theory I have is that she is seeking attention and is willing to put up with the comments to get it and the nature of the other members of her Team make it so that she gets more attention from that Team than she would from any other team in our Clan. Her profile picture and pattern of responses seem to suggest this. Therefore, she does not leave that Team because that is where she knows she will get the most attention.
Does her presence on that Team make the Team more misogynistic? I have insufficient data. Perhaps if she switched Teams, I could make a comparison of pre-switch and post-switch and draw a conclusion. I can say that the Team in question has a much higher percentage of players I would describe as "A-holes".
Or conversely, did she join that Team because it was more misogynistic? A case of being drawn to the "Bad Boys". Again, insufficient data.
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"for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books."
Clearly the "boys'" applies to both "games" and "books". So, no, the author of the quote is not saying "that reading a book is something boys do", as you have misstated.
Furthermore, a girl who likes "boys' games" and "boys' books" is more intelligent, from a male perspective. "She gets it! Why don't any of the others?" could apply to video games, bacon or the 3 stooges. Similarly, you probably think that males that don't share your worldview are troglodytes. See how that works? (That's not a question for you, per se, as the answer, in your case, is 'doubtful').
In the end, your position makes no sense, because as a feminist why do you care what a dead man thinks, or a living man for that matter. "Boo hoo hoo, you think women are more emotionally fragile, boo hoo hoo, now I'm sad", makes about as much sense as all of this current noise.
Real gamers are still playing games, SJWs and GamerGaters are sad and I'm starting to think possibly the same set of people.
I understand that cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, who made the statement that the best thing men could do to support women was to believe them when they say they are being harassed, has had a death threat made against her. Are the police involved? If somebody made an anonymous death threat against me I'd call the police and expect them to take it seriously. How is this being handled in this case (I don't know how things work in the USA).
Yes I heard all about the "listen and believe" nonsense. What a farce. As if enough people didn't think she was a con-artist before so she's gone right out and said "hey don't question me; just believe everything I say."
Public figures, especially ones that purposefully stir up controversy like Sarkeesian, get death threats frequently enough that police get a lot of reports. There seems to have been some questioning of whether or not there were police reports for some of the incidents; couldn't find the actual reports (I have no idea how true this is) and police always explicitly instruct not to publicize the threat. The most recent one I believe the police issued a statement that they investigated and found no credible threat.
Hopefully they can track down the people behind this nonsense and put an end to it.
"Adult women are now the largest demographic in gaming"
Sure, that's a valid statement...when you include casual gaming like Bejeweled and Farmville. When you drill down to AAA titles though the truth comes out, which is that women are a tiny fraction of the marketplace.
Except that Angry Birds and Farmville and Bejeweled and Candy Crush are making serious coin and better ROI than the "real games", There's a reason EA (y'know, your "real game publisher") bought PopCap (y'know, makers of *sniff* "casual" games) for 1.3 Billion dollars.
So, yeah - pretty sure game publishers are including "casual gaming". And you sound like an idiot for excluding them because it's not your particular flavor of teabagging.
AFAIK, only a very small minority of women became gamers through D&D.
Call of Cthulhu, though, attracted a lot of women to role-playing, mainly because the game was actually about role-playing (and solving mysteries) rather than trying to find who had the bigger sword.
How can i convinge my girl to play league of legends with me? She doesen't want to hear this ideea. I don't know exactly why she thinks she isn't capable to play it.
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