1980 D&D ad asserts that RPGs are woman-friendly

Cool. I wonder how many guys got into this game hoping it would make them more of a ladies’ man like that smooth playa in the tinted glasses and periwinkle undershirt.

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I was at a game store in Pasadena this weekend for a game tournament (Marvel Dice Masters) and the only woman in the room of at least 60 people was at the Advanced D&D 5th edition table.

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I moved 11 posts to a new topic: Using history as a time reference

Games Empire? It’s a great store and really friendly, but yeah, I hardly ever saw another woman in there.

As to the advertisement, I can’t say I remember anyone using miniatures and a fancy board like that in 1980. Maybe I just played with broke people.

But this post it is very specifically about the inclusion of women in gaming, and how it has changed since then (think “GMRGT”). A date says nothing about society. A gaggle of conservative leaders who worked hard to roll things back says a more. In 4 words. Without being preachy.

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Mod note: Stay on topic

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Yes, you do. That’s why I moved some stuff.

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Yes. I don’t know anyone who used physical props like that in RPGs either. Sure, later on people who were into Warhammer Fantasy Battles (or 40K) had lots of figures and sometimes built battlefields using model railroad scenery, as did the older folks who were into simulating realistic Napoleonic or WWII battles, but not the roleplayers as such.

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I still have my little inch-tall painted pewter druid from when I played in 1981 with my older cousin. He didn’t have walls, but he had made whole tabletop maps and a great set of paints.

I was young. I always died quickly and his friends always kept playing.

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From an article on why Gygax lost control of TSR

During TSR’s boom years of 1981 and 1982, it thrived under this ambiguous management structure, rapidly adding to staff and making prominent acquisitions. In the gaming space, TSR acquired the assets of wargames publisher Simulation Publications, Inc. (SPI) following a loan default, after a brief period where Kevin Blume served as President of that company. TSR also had a strong periodicals business by this time—circulation of its house organ The Dragon exceeded 100,000 by 1983—so it was unsurprising to see them purchase Amazing Stories, a seminal popular fiction magazine. A more curious acquisition was the Greenfield Needlewomen company, a craft firm that produced needleworking products. Gygax at the time justified the purchase internally by explaining that “we had been seeking likely acquisitions outside of gaming,” and that “crafts is a larger field than hobbies.” TSR predicted that the needlework company would contribute about a fifth of its gross income moving forward.

I wonder if this failed acquisition did anything to change the perception of women gamers–of course we’ll never know, because Gygax was forced out, so any minor cultural changes at TSR would have been swamped out by more major changes in management style.

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The only reason I know about D&D is because of the chilean coup d’etat.

Otherwise I would have lived in a communist dystopia.

Get your facts straight privileged white boys.

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I’m really surprised by this, actually, having read about the attitudes at TSR in those early years. When the game first started in '74, it was all male pronouns and the expectation of male-only players. Gygax said something to the effect that he’d consider changing it if any female ever bought the game (with the implication being that he thought that very unlikely). There absolutely were female players though, and perhaps in recognition of that they used more inclusive pronouns in the new game of AD&D that came out in '78. But having an ad that’s actually focusing on female players two years later is quite a turn-around - the game was hardly known for its inclusiveness.

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D&D started off as a wargame, using a map with miniatures. (It actually took a while for the term “RPG” to get used.) All those weird monsters in the game are based on the cheap plastic toys Gygax used to supplement the straight Mediaeval figures to turn it into a fantasy game.

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TSR employees picked up the game pretty universally, and Gygax was always a bit of a racist and misogynist. It’s not a surprise they would target demographics despite Gary’s opinion.

A lot of the history of D&D is intertwined with propaganda claiming it is evil or old employees that a bit rosy about the old days, so it’s hard to come back and put a good history together from the 80s and before.

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Steve Jackson Games at one point released a product set called Cardboard Heroes which included some dungeon floors and walls.

Here is the story of the photo: http://www.sarahdarkmagic.com/content/how-picture-girls-playing-dd-went-cool-awesome From the photographer: If I remember correctly, the male in the picture is my Nephew David, Now 50 who was showing his girlfriend and her friend how the game is played. Whether they continued playing, I do not know, but my nephew played D and D with his step brother and other friends.
Thanks for the memory,
Richard

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I used to follow a message board where Ed Greenwood, creator of the “Forgotten Realms” setting for D&D, would reply to questions from fans. Questions and answers were relayed through a proxy, a woman who was one of the players from his “home” campaign – the group had formed shortly after D&D was invented, and had been together for decades, and there were both women and men participating. Greenwood is a friendly old hippy librarian, with a very open attitude towards sexuality; from the anecdotes they related, there was a lot of sexual banter in their gaming sessions.

Some of the details of the setting as Greenwood wrote it kept getting edited out or bowdlerized, thanks to the surprisingly socially conservative editors, at TSR and its successors. The published game materials would keep referring to “festhalls” as a prominent feature of most towns and villages, without ever explaining what they were – which were public sex clubs, basically. More significantly, Greenwood complained that he’d spent years trying to get it acknowledged in print that same-sex relationships, in his setting, were generally accepted, but even oblique references to it kept getting eliminated. Finally, sometime in the 00s, he got it mentioned in a footnote that one leader of a town, a woman, lived with her spouse, also a woman; he wasn’t sure it didn’t get through just because the editors didn’t notice.

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This is as stark an example of the modern denial of human nature as you can find.

“a kind of sad snapshot of our lost, pre-Reagan/Thatcher/Pinochet/Mulroney-era past”

Either you believe that men and women, by design, enjoy imagining whacking each other with swords to differing degrees, or you believe that women are under the control of Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney, and oh yeah, Pinochet.

The latter is an insult to women to the extreme, if you think about it. The bed that today’s liberals and quasi-feminists have made for themselves is that they portray members of the female gender as sheep, or willing slaves. Of course, they also see every gender difference as manifestation of oppression and subjugation. Women like to wear makeup and have silky, heathy hair? The characterization of the “victims” is not so stirring, but the demonization of the male-dominated, agenda-driven beauty industry is.

To the deniers of human nature, the view of men and women as different is an insult to humanity. The reason? It implies to them a reduction of perceived freedom. It implies that we’re tethered to one degree or another to our biology. Obvious in the data, but not obvious to them, is that this is actually the case.

That phrase, the modern denial of human nature, is the subtitle of Steven Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate. This book should be required reading by liberal and conservative thinkers alike. If it was, 1/3 of all BoingBoing posts would dry up, and BoingBoing would be far better off.

Or, you can keep believing that boys who obsess about solving the Rubik’s cube really really fast are shutting out young women from doing the same. And their parents tacitly oppressed their daughters, too.

This winter, look down the next a hole in the street that you come across. You’ll see men wrestling with frozen pipes, possibly with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. The quasi-feminists rail against the relative dearth of women in Silicon Valley, but never it seems, in those holes. They don’t seem to lament the underrepresentation of female violent crime. On the other side of the coin, they don’t seem to lament the underrepresent the number of posts by males on Facebook. They don’t seem to lament the glass ceiling that prevents men from taking billions upon billions of selfies since the advent of camera phones. They don’t rage against the shutting out of men in the fields of early education, psychology, and speech/language pathology. They don’t rage against the near-total absence of men at Beyonce concerts, or of women at Rush concerts.

If you accept on its face that skewed outcomes are manifestations of injustice of one sort or another, then the above should have you deeply concerned. Why aren’t you? Here’s why: those inequities don’t result in the kind of charge you get from pointing out, and thus being a resistor of oppression.

To my gratification my son plays D&D on occasion. When they get together, there may be 7 kids, with two being girls. I suppose you have think that while they’re thrilled to have those two young women there (they are), they are tacitly pushing away all other girls that would otherwise want to participate.

Not to put too fine a point on it, if you and the other BoingBoing oppression pointer-outers give it just one further level of critical thinking, you will find that your worldview is built on sand. It’s the modern denial of human nature. You’re a part of it, and you’re wrong.

You aren’t doing that critical thinking. You should. J’accuse!

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If you’ll take a casual glance at some of the threads discussing how women are being threatened with rape and violent death for publishing critiques of computer games, you might get a sense what the point is, here.

Woman have participated in table-top role-playing games since the beginning, despite the recurring denial of their presence, just as they have been involved in computer games, and the IT industry as a whole. Pressure on them to leave has been escalating. This is not human nature. This is an active social conflict.

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