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As most of you will know, I’m a big ol’ role-playing game geek. I love it all, from the cheesiest old-school Dungeons & Dragons experience to the most cutting-edge slice of indie goodness. I’m also what my buddy Dave Wright calls a “community builder” (he’s one too) – and building communities to support my hobby, and in which my hobby can thrive, is really important to me.
This includes thinking about demographics. The RPG hobby is overwhelmingly white and middle class and, the subject of this post, male. I’d estimate about 4 in 5 RPG gamers are men. This isn’t a problem in and of itself – if women aren’t into playing RPGs, then that shouldn’t bother anyone, right? The problematic aspect is that we’re not dealing simply with free and informed choice. There are, in fact, barriers to participation for women. And I consider the existence of barriers around my favoured hobby to be offensive.
All of which brings me around to this weekend just gone. At Gen Con, the big RPG dance in Indianapolis, Wizards of the Coast announced that there will be a new edition of D&D next year. This is big news, with major ramifications for the RPG hobby industry. As part of the roll-out of this news, Wizards set up a special messageboard with a bunch of pre-set discussion threads, ready and waiting for fans to come in and discuss, cheer and complain. Just before the launch I’d seen a preview screengrab of the page, which had one line that interested me: a thread called Astrid’s Parlour: A Haven For Women Gamers. My community-building brain switched on – this was a sign that WotC, the company that makes D&D, was taking a positive step to lower the participation barriers for women. If nothing else, one of the barriers is that walking into an environment obviously dominated by the other gender can be intimidating; this thread would be a big flag removing any doubt about whether women were welcome there or not.
As I posted on Gametime, it didn’t go well.

I quickly realised that I had forgotten something important: aggrieved guys with internet connections… [It is] notable for being the most heavily moderated thread I’ve seen on a WotC forum. Dozens of posts have apparently been deleted, and every dozen posts a moderator turns up to say something like “Will people please stop being sexist idiots?” A game attempt on the first page to get some positive discussion going (“I am a guy. Women, tell me the story of how you got into gaming.”) garnered some neat responses which were rapidly drowned out by the bleating, pooing, whining masses.

After about twelve hours of this, the thread was pulled entirely from the site with no explanation. It had been a complete trainwreck. Obviously, because it’s gone you can’t view it – but essentially it was lots of guys saying “why do we need a special thread for women? this is inappropriate! where is the special thread for men?” “why do women need a special hiding place, that’s sexist, they don’t need your protection” etc. etc. etc. All the usual stuff. The moderators said that it was meant to tie in with an upcoming book written by a woman gamer about getting into D&D (Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress), but because that book hadn’t been released many commenters felt entitled to question and ridicule and attack the existence of the thread. The subtitle, A haven for female gamers, was forgotten in the chaos.
It was not a good look. I felt very sad, to be honest. The thread was dogpiled by aggressive messages questioning its very existence, the vast majority from men. Women who posted their support for the idea were absolutely drowned out by the massed negative response. Somehow, the very existence of this thread was offensive enough to rouse these masses into action. Thinking about it now, I’m not sad any more. Instead I’m kind of nauseated.
Look, here’s the thing: if a minority group in your community says, “hey, maybe it’d be nice if we set up some kind of haven over here”, and even if you think it’s unnecessary, would you really stomp on over there and loudly insist that it be taken down? Surely, as the majority, you’re not the right person to say whether a haven is needed or not? And what does it matter to you anyway? How exactly does it hurt you that this group has a haven somewhere?
Arguments over “womens rooms” at university campuses always go a bit like this, but at least in those cases there are actual resource issues at stake – money from a student pool is being directed at one section of the student body. In this case, all that was at stake was one one-screen link – and this as part of a free service, to boot.
In any case, a few hours ago the thread was resurrected in new form. You can find the new thread here. It has had a significant change. The title is now Astrid’s Parlor: Ways to Support Female Gamers.
“A Haven For Female Gamers” has become “Ways to Support Female Gamers”. The first was clearly intended as a female-friendly space. The second… well, the title seems to imply that it’s meant for male gamers to discuss ways to support female gamers. It just seems like a horribly misjudged title.
Stepping inside, we find instructions to “Use this thread to discuss the interiew [about Shelly’s book], Shelly’s book, or your ideas on ways to encourage and support female D&D players.” And following that, a whole lot of men saying that female gamers don’t need any support, so what is the purpose of this thread anyway?
The thread starts with a link to an interview with Shelly Mazzanoble, author of Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress. (Interviewed by her fellow gamer Sara Girard.) In the interview, the subject of the discussion thread comes up (around 5.10 to 5.38):

In response to a question about where women can go if they are interested in finding out how to get into D&D or to increase their knowledge and involvement
“Check out the messageboards, there should actually be a forum for women up there [now]… Men can be on there too, but there should, there really should, there is a place for women to just get on there and ask these questions and find out how to be involved and get support from one another, and hopefully people like you that have experience in gaming or working in the industry can get on there and respond to some of that or I can use my experiences… We can all just be out there to support each other.”
“Do you think that women need a special forum just for their gender, or…?”
“No, I don’t think it should ever be a gender specific thing, but I think that women might feel like they’re not being supported in this community or in this industry, so it might be nice for them to feel that there is a place that people are listening and we want to know what they’re feeling and what they’re thinking and what they’re interested in.”

I think that when Mazzanoble, and Girard, see what happened on the messageboards while they were at Gen Con, they’ll be very disappointed indeed. And they’ll be right to be disappointed – in WotC, in the people who dogpiled the thread, and in the gamer community at large that seems so complacent and ignorant.
Botttom line:

• The people who dogpiled the thread should have refrained from doing so.
• WotC should have given their moderators a clearer idea of what the original thread was for, and should have instructed that anyone questioning the value of the thread gets bumped into another venue.
• The moderators should have been vigilant in pushing criticisms of the thread out of the thread and clearing space for it to actually be a “Haven for female gamers”.
• WotC should not have restored the thread with a new, “less controversial” title.
• WotC should not have pulled the thread in the first place even if it was a trainwreck.

All of these failures add up to a big unpleasant situation. I will be watching with interest to see where this goes from here, if anywhere. It all serves to tarnish the 4th edition launch for me; which is a shame, because it sounds to me like 4th Ed is going to deliver the goods.

(while I’m on the subject of teenage girls)
Something that has been doing the rounds in the last couple days…. a photo retouch service, with some incredible comparisons of photos of film stars before and after retouching. You see the beautiful, smooth, magazine-cover image, and then when you mouse-over, it changes to the untouched version. You can wiggle the mouse back and forth on the edge and see the images switch back and forth. Watch boobs get bigger and smaller! Watch wrinkles appear and disappear! Watch waists and arms get thinner! etc. But there are also a bunch of less obvious changes – the way brightness and contrast are enhanced, in particular, has a crazy impact on how we see them.
I would say checking this out is required for anyone operating in the early 21st-century media environment. We’re being bombarded with these images – a quick look at these will give you a bit of mental shielding you don’t even know you need.
To view, follow this link, and click on “Portfolio”. There’s an array of little thumbnail photos there – click on any one and the big image will appear.
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Today I met my artist for coffee. Can I say “my” artist? She’s drawing the comic I’ve written. It’s quite cool. I looked at her latest page breakdowns and handed over some more script. We’re not working at full-speed smooth-collaboration level yet, because we’re both still just starting to feel our way through the whole comic-making process, but signs are very positive. Yays.

1. If you are a teenage boy, and you are worried that somewhere there are teenage girls talking about you in less-than-flattering terms while they ride on the bus: Yes, they are, and very loudly.
2. The customary riposte to a bus driver who has the temerity to (for example) ask you to pay for your ticket: “fag”.

So Karl Rove is to resign. If the wickedness of Tony Blair could be said to arise from his infatuation with his own unfolding narrative, and that of George W Bush from his absolute lack of creativity and empathy, then the wickedness of Karl Rove could be said to arise from the gnawing sharp-toothed brain lizards that sit inside his skull where other people have a “conscience”.
The article says: “There’s always something that can keep you here, and as much as I’d like to be here, I’ve got to do this for the sake of my family,” he said.
Translating that from the brain lizard: “I’ve presided over such a fouling of my own pool that even I can’t handle the stink any more.”
(Oh, and where it says “family”, he means the Cheney inner circle, not his wife and son. There’s a subpoena coming his way and he really needs to be out of the White House circuit for damage control purposes.)
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In good news: Newsweek runs a cover story on the climate change denial industry.
And, via Paul Cornell, clips from every single classic Doctor Who story forming a 5-minute summary of the classic series run.

“…and basically, this is the best new show that HBO has picked up in a long, long time.”
– Salon.com’s “I Like To Watch” TV column, on Flight of the Conchords. Go go Wellington styles.

When I finished my last post with a blatant lie about gambling away my meagre savings, I was tempting some kind of karmic payback. It didn’t take long to show up. About fifteen minutes after I made that post, I started editing a spreadsheet; less than two minutes into this activity I noticed that the entire bottom left of the screen was invisible to me. It just didn’t exist in my visual field, as though it had disappeared into a fold in reality.
As I normally do when some kind of visual anomaly turns up, I turned to face a neutral surface (the other wall of the room) and blinked to clear my vision, hoping that it would turn out to be just a bit of rogue moisture or something.
Nope.
Five minutes after that I’d brushed my teeth, taken some neurofen, and gone to bed. As I lay in the dark, the flashy halo was well-established, expanding across the complete darkness of my visual field from the bottom left like the filmy edge of a gigantic soap bubble. About ten minutes after that it hit the far side and disappeared, and the migraine proper began.
About four hours later, 5.30 in the morning, I was finally able to drift off to sleep. It was not fun getting there. But it wasn’t too bad either; the neurofen and the quick departure to peaceful darkness must have helped. I slept through the morning, rising at about 10.30 to groggily wander around the house and slowly come back to my senses. By 1pm I was feeling okay enough to go to work. So that was nice.
That’s the first migraine since January ’04. As usual, I have no idea what set it off – staying up late on the computer is what I do literally every night, so, huh. Anyway. It did remind me of the blog comment I received from Klaus Podoll, asking for permission to excerpt the very weird dreamstuff of the last migraine on his migraine-aura website. I don’t think it ever turned up there, but the site is worth a look. The migraine art section is particularly interesting. A sign of how well this stuff captures the experience of migraine is that I can hardly look at most of it.
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Back up to Hastings this weekend.

Basketball’s end-of-season game was a win. Post-season celebratory drinks at the pub with teammates and we enter the pub quiz because, why not. But I leave early to go play netball – another win. And I come off the court to find a text from my brother, saying that we won the pub quiz as well.
And as I’m getting a lift the short distance home, a new text message beeps in, and it’s my mother saying she’s found Freaks and Geeks exactly where the Alligator said it was in his comment. Aaron found my DVDs from the other side of the world! Truly he is gifted.
Anyway, it was clear that everything was going my way, so I’ve just spent the last three hours internet gambling, and I’m sure my winning streak will kick in there too aaaany time now. Yup.

I was amazed the other day to stumble upon this:

That’s a genuine Disney Mickey Mouse newspaper strip from the 30s which has, as a punchline, a despairing Mickey’s decision to blow his own head off with a shotgun. It wasn’t a one-off – the actual suicide attempt is the subject on the next strip, and the two after that. See the full story where I came across it, at Comic Book Resources’ Urban Legends column.
And while I am thinking of matters strip-like: why are you not reading Perry Bible Fellowship? New three-panel gag strips once every week or two, it hardly takes up much of your time.
(Behind the cut is what may be my favourite PBF strip. It is certainly today’s favourite. It’s too big to fit before the cut, though.)

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