Encouraging Women: How Not To Do It

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.

8 thoughts on “Encouraging Women: How Not To Do It”

  2. Morgue, I think there’s an inherent contradiction between “if women aren’t into playing RPGs, then that shouldn’t bother anyone, right?” and your general approach to women in gaming. I don’t think you have the neutral “anyone should play” stance that you claim: you prefer a gender balance.
    And my followup point is: why are you ashamed of that? Why try to obfuscate your real motives and interests? Women bring a different set of cultural markers with them to gaming, sport, religion, to damned near everything. You obviously appreciate that difference (see, for example, your recruitment of largely female gamers for SE!)… and I’m totally fine with that. I can’t see that admitting there is a difference between the genders, and that you like the differences in some ways can possibly be a problem. If anything, by trying to go the route of “we’re all exactly the same” you are introducing a kind of barrier of “women must conform, but they’re welcome if they do.”
    Generally I’ll back your bullet point conclusions though. And I think it’d be a nice idea if some cultural differences were noted along side the gender ones.

  3. Mash – you’re right that gender is very much a live issue for me, both in community-building stuff and in my personal gaming. The Slayers East game was specifically recruited to be female-dominated, as you note. Conversely, my old-school D&D game ended up a boy’s club. That wasn’t a goal, but it felt appropriate that that’s how it turned out.
    Hmm. Your comment does make me think. I suppose my position is, I want to get a place where a neutral stance would make sense? I shall ponder. Poke me with further questions if you like, they are helpful in figuring out where I’m at.

  5. As I commented the other night, I find it hard to really care about the female struggle for rights. I know I should, but gosh darn it, I’ve been beaten by women in academia and sport all my life, and many of the best roleplayers I’ve had in my games have been girls… so I tend to just think they stand on their merits and the gender issue is pretty fricking irrelevant one way or the other. Apparently I’m almost alone. :/

  6. “dogpiled by aggressive messages” is pretty much the internet in a nutshell. Too many people get behind a keyboard and suddenly transform into (or release their inner) thugs. Just like that old Disney cartoon about what happens when people get into cars…

  7. On one model, gender *is* irrelevant. Women may not want to roleplay simply as a preference regardless of how welcome they are. On another model, the preference and the welcome may be counteracted by the image of roleplaying as a “boy thing”. On yet another model, the conjunction of both the kind of person who turns into Mr Hyde when communicating via the internet, and the argument that gender is irrelevant, would serve to confirm not only that roleplaying is a “boy thing” but also that women are not wanted.
    If it seems that the last model contradicts itself (one of the conjoints is “the argument that gender is irrelevant”, but the consequence is anything but), you can think of it as a disjunction between “belief-in-the-head” (gender is irrelevant) and “belief-by-the-act” (women can fuck off).
    Although the above point slurs the fact that people are not all the same person. While I suspect that finding cognitive dissonance in this field will be like shooting fish in a dry barrel, I’d be staggered if it were universal. X can believe gender is irrelevant, Y wants women to fuck off, Z hears them both and decides roleplaying is for maladjusted boys. A also hears them both, notes that X is not Y, that neither have a monopoly on the idea of roleplaying, and takes part in a campaign with X, while Y stays at home and plays World of Warcraft.
    nb: I don’t roleplay, but if someone invented an equivalent system of, say, “ratiocination-playing games”, I’d be in like flynn.

  8. I see what you’re saying… but I just can’t get emotionally engaged with it. :/ I’ve never looked at a table of roleplayers and thought “this game would be great if there were more men/women/aliens.” But I have looked at a table and gone “bob/jane/fnarlafal would add something that I’d like to have.”
    It’s the person/people distinction at play I think.

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