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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.
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...
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.
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.
It probably doesn't help that most programmers are male. And so when making a game (of their own initiative) would make a game that appeals to them. Of course this is changing now, but it is not surprise that it started skewed and it will be no surprise when it remains skewed for quite a while.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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.
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 was amazed to learn, 10+ years ago, that the biggest demographic playing Everquest was middle-aged women, far more such gamers than teen males. From some chats with players (limited sample size, to be sure), there was a lot of appeal in having a social outlet outside the norm, where it was OK to be a geeky woman, with no social stigma in discussing geeky stuff in EQ chat (this was before there was anything cool about geeks).
EQ was fairly bad at putting the female characters in "slut-mail" (seriously, plate mail with a thong) and other design choices focused on teen males, but apparently that was a small downside in comparison.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Atari consoles
Were the hit
An entire generation
Of girls loved that sh*t
Burma Shave
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
I've never seen any rage against female gamers. That's certainly not what "gamergate" was/is about: game journalism. Feminist (not necessarily female) journalists were the target of their ire.
Gender-issues aside for the moment, game journalism is rotten - financial and/or romantic relationships between game journalists and games publishers is normal. I hope that doesn't get lost in the noise about misogyny - even by the falling statanrds of journalism generally, blatant conflicts of interests are uncool.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It may not be as ubiquitous as some would make it out, but that rage certainly exists. I was witness to it happening to a woman in a multiplayer shooter, and it was so over the top and angrily aggressive it really shocked me. If I hadn't seen that, I might have felt the way you do. It put me off multiplayer games for a long time.
Regarding journalistic ethics, the facts of the Zoe Quinn case don't support that there was any improper relationship. Grayson never reviewed any of her games, and the only time she appeared in any of his columns was well before they were involved. So that's kind of a red herring.
The most egregious violations of journalistic ethics in game media are the ones that happen in the biggest sites, like IGN. It's a little suspicious that there was no outcry from the gamergate types about those situations. Certainly the gamergate people aren't all hateful monsters, but they're giving cover to the hateful monsters that are out there..
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Yep, the rottenness in game journalism isn't about any one journalist, but about the high frequency of conflicts of interest: almost no "gaming" publication even has a formal ethics policy to rule that out in the first place (while e.g. every major newspaper does).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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?
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
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.
My guess is that women were willing to take up D&D because it was about creating stories and using the imagination, not unlike the written fiction we prefer to cartoon donkey kongs and little falling blocks that boys seem to like.
4chan and Reddit was a knock-on effect. Both sites heavily censored discussion of gamergate in the early days, choosing themselves to side with the gaming publications and ban all discussion of their ethics.
you think Motor Trend has a published, formal ethics policy?
I'd bet all the large car mags do - if a reporter had a significant financial stake in a particular manufacturer, for example, that would matter to the editor. I remember when Car&Driver was accused every month of being a wholly-owned subsidiary of one Japanese brand or another (for daring to point out that the Japanese cars were, well, better), and was pretty uptight about ensuring there was no truth to the regular accusations.
I'm sorry, but the whole "journalistic ethics" gamergate complaint seems to me to be a way to give cover to some very ugly and unseemly sentiment.
Possibly. There's certainly ugly sentiment - longtime gamers are quite upset about the longtime prejudice against them, about being stereotyped, about being told they're no good or their games are no good. This was just another Jack Thompson event, and people are still pretty bitter about the original.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
It's very easy to respond, because clearly, you're not entirely informed. The violation is, and the accusation was from the very beginning of getting free publicity. Nowhere did I say that a review of the game was made by Grayson. However, it is worth pointing out, that after the failure of the game jam written about in the article, Quinn decided to use this publicity to 'start' her own game jam, which had no date, no location, no judges, and was accepting donations into her personal paypal account... Why was her game jam website registered on the day the article was published? Surely you aren't going to say conincidence. It was definitely cronyism; that's why the article should never have been written. Grayson should have recused himself from the whole thing, due to his building relationship with Quinn, which arguably had began before the article was published.
There has also been significant criticism that the game jam which failed, was sabotaged. Other people involved had come out to say so, and it was all because Quinn took umbrage to their transgender policy, yet wouldn't say why. Furthermore, there was no fact checking to a previous claim of harassment from Quinn, relating to wizardchan. That appears to have been completely made up by Quinn for free sympathy and publicity. None of the publications fact checked anything, just ran with it and got her game greenlit after it had failed previously.
This is the stupidest of the gamergate arguments. "You shouldn't be outraged about abuse, because there's so much abuse."
You could try to read what I wrote, and you'll see I'm not saying that at all. I guess that's why you need to misrepresent what I've written. I'm asking what makes abuse against women special, compared to any other abuse. I don't like getting harassed and abused as much as anyone else, but I don't see why abuse leveled at women deserves any special place considering how toxic some communities are. More to the point, why is abuse against straight white males completely unremarkable, and ignorable?
So, if you want to make me guilty by association, because I do support GamerGate, then I guess you're no better than all the harassment produced by anti-GG people, such as more recently Briana Wu, teasing a disabled woman (cameragirl) on twitter, and Devin Faraci, who has labelled us as worse than ISIS (yes he went there, and wasn't the only one), so why haven't you just gone out and called me a fucking aspie terrorist already? You're explicitly standing with bigots!
"I've received an anonymous death threat, therefore my opponents are scum" is pretty fallacious "reasoning".
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.
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.
That's pretty fucking sexist of you. "Hardcore gamers" are all just men? Fuck you.
Women are just as capable of being competitive, and hard core gamers. Yeah, make sure of course that there's flexibility in avatars for representation, but ignorant statements like that insult men by making it a man only activity that they repeat and keep women out, and insult women by thinking they wouldn't be interested in beating level 4 of halo in the fastest time possible.
What you have next? Women aren't interested in being soldiers and firing guns?
Are you sure that your bad experiences do not just come from the fact that you're a racist sexist nazi? I'm not saying you are, just want to point out that I know from personal experience that there are a lot of racist sexist nazis out there who have no idea that they are one.
Also, what about this constant rightist/leftist bullshit, is this alleged dichotomy really still relevant where you live? Because where I live it sure isn't, except perhaps for the extreme left and right totalitarians who tend to agree on almost everything anyway and sometimes switch their allegiances several times during their lifetime.
Anecdotally, I occasionally play EQ and EQ2 (yes, there really are players of EQ2 still out there). As does my wife.
More than half my guildies in EQ2 are women (we use voice chat a lot, if you're planning on asserting that they only claim to be women). The GM's include two Grandmothers. And (some of) their children are in guild. As are a grandchild or two...
Yah, that always annoyed me. One of the reasons I started doing EQ2 was that I could avoid that sort of armour for my female characters (about half of them, in each of EQ1 and EQ2)
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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?
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.
A quick glance of magazines targeted at women and girls disagrees. "Sexy woman" seems a very common and successful marketing strategy for women. Perhaps it is off-putting to "a lot" of women but definitely not enough to make an impact.
#gamergators are just gamers. Most gamers (myself included) give approximately 0 fucks about gender issues, feminism in gaming, or any of that BS and just wish the SJWs would be noisy somewhere else and let us get back to gaming. But it sure would be nice to have game review site that reviewed games on their merits as games, not on whether it's the kind of games one is "supposed to" like, and especially not based on whether the game is from the game company the reviewer is currently sleeping with someone from, or renting an apartment from, or the like.
Now I feel a burning need to re-install Duke Nukem Forever and play it through again. I blame you for this Ratzo - the blood of triple-breasted aliens will be on your hands.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.