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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, it is a put-down for the average girl, since "the more intelligent sort of girl" would be the one who likes "boy's games and books."
My guess is that they were just looking for a quote to back up their bogus thesis. After all, quotes are like statistics - you can find one to prove anything :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
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.
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.
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?
#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.