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.
@14
They nominally retconned the goblins to no longer be
evilunholy, but a lot of other species are still consistently described as bad guys. In their “remastered” Monster Core book, here’s how they start the description of ogresThe rest of the book isn’t much better as far as describing species goes.
“…but a lot of other species are still consistently described as bad guys”
It’s canonical that Drow worship Lolth, the Demon Queen of Spiders.
Right?
(Anyway, it’s more nuanced than that. Those are the base NPC characteristics, but any individual specimen can have an alignment other than evil as the narrative requires; and of course a PC playing such a race can override that. Devils and Demons and other such races, well…)
That quotation is way peppered with implicit caveats, btw. Quite noticeable.
Existential quantification (For many societies, The worst ogres, Anyone unlucky enough, Many of their captives) and contingency (Although, But) and likelyhood (Usually, Often, Sooner than the ogres might prefer and vaguery (As strong as they are vicious).
[related]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry
@16: Lolth is a creation of D&D’s so Pathfinder had to use a different deity for dark elves but other than that, yes. And you’re probably aware of the issues of saying “well, a PC can be an except” when the description of the race as a whole reads like a World War 2 propaganda reel about Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany.
“And you’re probably aware of the issues of saying “well, a PC can be an except” when the description of the race as a whole reads like a World War 2 propaganda reel about Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany.”
The description is not the game concept any more than the map is the territory.
You’re reading far too much into it, I reckon.
—
Look: there is an alignment system in D&D, simplistic though it is.
One of the alignments is “evil”.
And alignment is a racial characteristic in that milieu, just as other racial characteristics.
Consider Star Trek as analogic:
Ferengi culture is hyper-capitalistic and misogynistic.
Cardassian culture militaristic and authoritarian and sneaky.
Etc.
(Exceptions occur as the narrative requires, but otherwise, that’s what they are. NPCs)
Hm, maybe too oblique.
The relevance is that Star trek reduces entire species to a few characteristics, and D&D does exactly the same.
(Fantasy worlds are fantasy, and I know Tolkien for one was annoyed by such alleged claims about allegory)
[OT]
A novel that really hit the spot, at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunts!
I run a campaign for my 30 year old daughter and her friends.
5 women and me, once a month going for 3 years so far.
[Grr.
Naked links are fraught; one should dress them, but since I just copypasted the URL, I thought it’d be fine.
Ah well. A bit more clickey-clicking, and…]
Grunts!
DanDare, so… periodically.
(ahem)
Strong plug for Fudge, a rules-light system that encourages everyone to contribute to worldbuilding and mechanics. The 1995 handbook is free online on a non-commercial license. Any racism or sexism in Fudge comes directly from the participants, not the system.
“I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex.”
I thought wars were supposed to have spoils. What happened?
John, Wizards of the Coast has admitted that there’s a longstanding issue with humanoid D&D monsters like orcs, drow, and goblins being written with racist coding. The fact that you don’t want to see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Yeah, I know about the PR, microraptor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_controversies#Attempts_to_address_racial_issues_in_D&D_5th_edition
“In June 2020, Polygon reported that “the D&D team announced that it would be making changes to portions of its 5th edition product line that fans have called out for being insensitive. That includes racist portrayals of a people known as the Vistani, an in-fiction analog for the Romani people. The company will also be making a substantive change to character creation to broaden the permissible spectrum of character types within each of the game’s many races”.[79] In its official statement, the D&D Team wrote: “throughout the 50-year history of D&D, some of the peoples in the game—orcs and drow being two of the prime examples—have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated. That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in. Despite our conscious efforts to the contrary, we have allowed some of those old descriptions to reappear in the game”.[80][71]”
Gary Gygax is not “the D&D team”, he’s the (now deceased) co-creator of D&D.
(Heh)
cf. https://screenrant.com/dungeons-dragons-satanism-controversy-demons-devils-tanarri-baatezu/
This news does not surprise me one bit. I was a very young toy industry exec who fell sideways into the business side of role-playing games in the early 1990’s as D&D had just created this new market over the past decade that was dedicated to role-playing and war games and metal miniatures. In short, I got a front row seat to witness TSR burning-down as Gygax/the Blume Brothers/the Dille Family Trust all wrestled one another for control. I got to meet and socialize a bit with Gygax through business dealing and trade shows. He was never the friendliest fellow to deal with, a bit of a loner, somewhat socially awkward, very arrogant, pretty smart, self-educated, but also fat, balding, and a crappy dresser. By the time I met him, he was already famous and a cocaine fiend. Despite never looking the part, he was also an unrepentant womanizer (that, along with the cocaine, utterly destroyed his marriage to his childhood sweetheart). …so there is that too. Not a charmer by any stretch of the imagination.
Yeah, also doesn’t surprise me. But, if you look at the origin of D&D and the changes that happened over time with it, it started out as a bloody medieval war game, with the only different element being that people could “create their own fictional history”. Every aspect of the rules was otherwise about “war gaming”, and war gaming was boring to everyone other than the war gamers, who, ironically, tended to be obsessed with “accuracy”. So, that, more recently, rules changes have allowed for races to not be just evil by nature, but to have alternatives, and even entirely different civilizations, is a) something that was always possible, but b) not going to happen in a campaign setting based in any existing world, in which the “evil nature” of the races was tied to worship of a deity that either misleads them into being evil, or twisted them from what ever they where before, into something evil. What ever the original point might have been, within the general mythos and history created for them, at the time, having them be anything else makes no sense. But, they do not have to exist as that in other worlds, and people where coming up with variations for a long time that broke the model.
Still, looking at it from that perspective, we get new idiocy – case in point, the “controversy” over making a TV/internet series based around Drizzt, in which everyone is whining about Drow being “black”, and evil because they where black… I mean, what? This makes about as much sense as an argument to me, never mind the fact that “Dark Elf” isn’t the same as “black”, any more than if they had been lizards instead of something vaguely human, as if someone was making a story based on African Zulu warriors, and their violent interaction with other tribes in the region, and someone started babbling about them being “black”. I am not, honestly, sure which is stupider, hiring all African Americans to be Drow, despite them looking in “any” art or story like Africans, or actually hiring people that could play Galadriel and the like, then coloring their faces, knowing that idiots will jump to “black face” with it… Just.. seriously people? Do you not understand the difference? At bare minimum, even if it counted, it would be like making a film “about” black face, and refusing to have anyone actually paint their faces. The argument seems to me to be just insane…
Still, on the issue of women and girls playing.. yeah, the game very much, for a long time, didn’t welcome the idea, or offer much for some people. Until like version 3 it practically ignored role playing entirely, emphasizing, “murder hobo”, behavior, and while alternatives for gaining XP, via interactions, now exist, its much less clear how that works (since you can’t apply a DC and a XP total to convincing the town guard to let you get away, for example, the same way you can to just killing the guards, and its worse with inanimate objects). As a result, its now an “option”, invented by DMs, but not kind of acknowledged as plausible, to do a kind of, “landmark” system, where you level after achieving certain goals. But, the heart of the old system was always, “Some people will level faster than others, and missing sessions will cause your character to lag behind, because you where not there to gain experience.” Heck, the last DM I had gain a small bonus for “being” there. It was only like 50 XP extra, but at low levels this added up, if you kept missing sessions. Later on… not so much. But, he still, mostly, gave the group the same XP otherwise for each session, instead of doing what the original rules said, which was, “Obsessively track what every player did, so you can grant each one different amounts for actually being the one to do X or land the killing blow on Y.”
There are a lot of things making it friendly todays to “everyone”. But, go back to when it was invented and trying to get women, whose end carrier goals was likely to be a house wife, or other “female profession”, while the men where expected to become literally anything involving math, and then create a game that is absolutely obsessed with math, and involves virtually no social interaction in the game play, and.. yeah, its not going to go well at all.
Modern D&D is still rules heavy, but a lot less than it was, is far more open to options, lets you create what ever world you want, though it still references the worlds previously created for it, with the limits they had, and is vastly more flexible and open. Its real problem is that its owned by Hasbinbro and they keep f-ing with the player base, firing the people they hire to interact with that base, and most recently decided that they want to try to make every single thing they publish “digital only”. Yeah, that’s right, no more board games in the closet, rule books on your shelf, or anything else. It will all be, “an app for that”, and probably, given the trend in stupid corporations, likely, at some point, “Sorry, you don’t really own it. Despite paying $60 for the ebook, if you want access to character sheets and stuff, you have to rent it monthly from us.” AKA the Steam model, but worse – like, if Steam decided that you could play the game you don’t really own, and they could delete when ever they want, but also “rented” you a monthly fee to have save games, or some similar madness.
What ever D&D is now, compared to what it once was, its current owner seems to think that “market share” means no one else will replace it, despite bloody insane numbers of alternatives, and they can just do what ever the F they want, and it won’t have any effect. They will, probably, kill it instead.
Yeah, the history and present are a tangled mess. I’m in one game as an exception for a friend’s sake, but I likely won’t be spending any money on D&D, again. I’ve gone into making the games I want to see, myself. Hoping to publish a few in 2025.
I have a lot of experience with Pathfinder and can definitely say that human inclusivity is fantastic (LGBTQ, racial, religious etc).
As others have (accurately) pointed out there are canonically evil species. It always bothered me and when I GMed my own homebrew setting, I ignored that “rule”.
That being said, certain species (devils/angels) were MADE of morality and were always evil or good.
While there are still species that are primarily antagonists, the concept of alignment no longer exists in the most recent iteration of Pathfinder, so there are no longer “canonically evil” species.
Ah, I haven’t tried Pathfinder 2e.
Showing my age I guess.
Ah, I haven’t tried Pathfinder 2e.
Showing my age I guess.
@35
No, they’re canonically “unholy ancestries.” I don’t think that’s actually better: it’s just a euphemism.
Women don’t like Gygax’s games. Or Gygax. And D&D rules were always a shitshow–I don’t know anybody who ever used the rules as canon, they always needed heavy modification, no matter what generation of D&D or AD&D, for that matter. If nothing else, the spell casting classes are inevitably wildly underpowered and the fighting classes are usually not useful for anything else.
As far as his daughters not liking his RPG… it wasn’t exactly a secret that he didn’t have particularly good relationships with any of his kids from his first marriage. Something tells me that it wasn’t the RPG that caused the daughters to lose interest.
@31 I saw him in ’83 at a con. He was a jerk then too, with an oversized ego and a massive sense of entitlement. I’m only surprised that TSR didn’t crash and burn sooner than it did–that guy never stuck to terms. He signed a contract to appear at the con, then immediately started demanding extras, then started pissing and moaning when the extras were not forthcoming, because it was a small, fledgling con and there was no money in the budget. He was not asked back in subsequent years.
@32 There are a ton of better game systems and milieus than D&D. If you like fantasy TTRPGs, maybe check out Runequest or Chivalry & Sorcery. Fringeworthy is an exploration & adventure game but one that emphasizes negotiation & cooperation–you literally get the fewest XP for combat. For comedy games, there is always TFOS or Paranoia. I was always partial to Shadowrun, even if the original combat system was a hot mess. And of course there was always Rifts (for the power gamer types) or for the emo/goth gamers, there’s the World of Darkness by White Wolf.
“This calls to mind when Lionel made pastel colored trains and train cars to appeal to females.”
Pastel colo(u)red?
Really?
Female brains might be different from this man’s (and thank goodness for that) but they also differ considerably from the brain of a three years old. I do hope he has no daughters!