Sexism in gaming isn’t a new thing at all — good ol’ Dungeons & Dragons was full of it. Here’s Gary Gygax, one of the creators of the game, opining on women in gaming sometime in the early 2000s:
There were never many female gamers in our group. My daughter Elise was one of two original play-testers for the first draft of Wi, Usa ‘what became the D&D game, and both of her younger sisters played…and lost interest in a few months as she did.
In our campaign group that cycled through in a couple of years (74-75) something in the neighborhood of 100 or so different players, there were perhaps three females.
As a biological determinist, | am positive that most females do not play RPGs because of a difference in brain function. They can play as well as males, but they do not achieve the same sense of satisfaction from playing.
In short there is no special game that will attract females–other that LARPing, which is more csocialization and theatrics and gaming–and it is a waste of time and effort to attempt such a thing.
This calls to mind when Lionel made pastel colored trains and train cars to appeal to females. The effort bombed, the sets were recalled and re-dine as standard models, and those pastel ones that survived are rare collectors items.
So much for this topic.
One thing that jumped out at me was his flat statement that he was a “biological determinist”. Gygax had no training in biology, no college degree at all — he was an insurance agent before he became famous as a gamer. You can dismiss anything he says about “brain function” as a product of ignorance.
He mentions that few women were interested in his game in 1974-75, when they “tested” the idea. Women were not interested, according to him, because their brains were different. I have an alternative explanation: here’s Gygax writing about the subject in 1975.
I have been accused of being a nasty, old, sexist-male Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female role, more non-gender names, and so forth. I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in the ‘Raping and Pillaging_ section, in the ‘Whorses and Tavern Wenches’ chapter, the special magical part of dealith with ‘Hags and Crones’, and thought of perhaps adding and appendix of ‘Midieval Harems, Slave Girls and Going Viking’. Damn right I am a sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower in the men’s locker room. They can jolly well stay away from war-gaming in droves for all I care. I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.
Wow. Just wow. What an asshole.
Were you shocked by gamergate in the 2010s? I was. I shouldn’t have been, if I’d been paying attention in the 1970s. I don’t think Gygax was a cause, but a symptom of an attitude common at the time.
Let’s not forget the weird racism in old school D&D, either. I suspect he was a “race realist” in addition to being a “sex realist”, and now it’s coloring my impressions of the game.
The only good thing he ever did was put the kibosh on Marvel Sunbow sticking a dog into the D&D cartoon back in the 1980s. That gave us Uni the unicorn, which was a much better fit.
Calling women and girls ‘females’ is already a red flag. I feel sorry for his daughters.
None of the females in my household play video games either.
They tend to cuddle up with me and purr while I play though. Unless the food bowl is empty, at which point they will tap me and vocalize their discontent.
Recently, I watched No Pun Included discuss a Gary Gygax module, “Tomb of Horrors” (see first 16 min)–and let’s say it’s unsurprising that women may not have liked the gaming culture that it implies.
Early D&D canon was very racist and sexist. They also gave female PCs lower strength prior to Second Edition.
Modern D&D is less bad, but it’s not exactly great. A few months ago I was browsing a D&D-adjacent forum that I used to be more active on when I was more into D&D. There was a discussion where some people said “We dislike how in D&D, you can tell whether someone is (probably) a Good Guy or a Bad Guy based on their species, so we house-ruled things so that there is no correlation between alignment and species.”
Other people responded “Nu uh! You can’t do that. The Monster Manual says that certain species are evil so you aren’t allowed to dislike that the Monster Manual says that certain species are evil because the Monster Manual says so!”
There’s extra irony when the people who insist that bigotry is mandatory also claim to be “old school DM Empowerment” fans. “All Rules are guidelines and the DM has the absolute power to change any rule on a whim. Unless the DM wants to make the fantasy world less racist or sexist, in which case the rules are sacrosanct and cannot be altered.”
I wasn’t shocked by GamerGate, but I thought that was more a result of bigotry in the video game community than in TTRPGs. I recall in 2006, shortly before Nintendo released Super Princess Peach, there were proto-Gamer-Gaters outraged at a video game with a female protagonist, because “The Mario franchise has always had really consistent world-building and verisimilitude, and by making Peach a hero Nintendo breaks my suspension of disbelief!”
I was shocked by GamerGate but only because it showed that gamers had become a large enough demographic that its shittiest subculture could have political impact.
Yeah, when I played in the 1970s the rules were so sloppy and bad that we regarded it as permission to completely ignore everything about them and play with ad hoc rules that the DM made up.
God, what a schmuck. Way back in the early eighties I played D&D with a passel of friends and easily half of them were women, who seemed to enjoy the game plenty. The whole point, I would have thought, is that you can make it anything you want it to be: ignore any rules that don’t suit, make up your own, invent, have fun. We sure did. The only thing that would keep women from playing the game is people who insist that women weren’t suited to it.
As a biological determinist, I am positive…
Hey, at least he’s admitting his beliefs are based entirely on prejudice and a particular doctrine — and not on real-world knowledge, experience or reason.
I am on the convention committee and a part-owner of an SF Bay Area gaming convention: DunDraCon. About half the owners are women. The women on the committee are–I think–a somewhat lower, but still substantial, fraction.
As for Gygax… I never met him, but I have met and talked with Dave Arneson, the other half of the original pair of authors. Arneson was a nice guy.
i am not surprised by the sexism displayed in the 70s.
gamergate did surprise me. WTF gamers?
but then again: the Equal Rights Amendment.
proposed to congress 1923, passed by congress in 1972, sill not ratified over 100 years later.
though Virginia ratified it in 2020, we still don’t have 3/4 of the states approval to have the amendment pass.
i’m sure our next president will take up arms and fight for women’s rights. /s
If you’re looking for a good alternative, Pathfinder is excellent, very responsive to their community, and they license all their creative materials to a third party so they can never rip away the rights to them from derivative creators!
Also, too, along with his boorish nature, he is an ignorant speller.
jsonstache @12: While Pathfinder does have a better record for things like gender and orientation representation in the game than D&D does (thanks to having started including LGBTQ characters years earlier), it’s still got issues with going hard in on racist depictions of characters like orcs and goblins as Always Chaotic Evil.