2020

We wrote these rules in 2nd person
to avoid sexist pronouns (1987)

RPGs and Gender Differences 

A friend asked me to comment on a screen cap that’s going around Twitter, so here’s the comment. The screen cap is an insensitive post I made in 2008 about women and roleplaying tropes. It appears side by side with a quote by Gary Gygax in 2002 saying that there’s no sense trying to make a game that “will attract females”. The implication seems to be that I think the same way Gygax did, but in fact his quote serves as a useful counterpoint to my own views. He thought that men and women are naturally different and didn’t want RPGs to change. I think that in order to change RPGs to make them more appealing to women we need to understand both how men and women are the same and how we’re different. RPG designers have made real progress, and happily today’s RPGs are more inviting to women and less male-oriented than they were when I joined the hobby. This social-media incident also serves as an opportunity for me to make a number of related points.

A disturbing feature of controversies like this is that they hurt the very women that the accusers are trying to help. In 2014, Nobel laureate Tim Hunt made a bad joke about women in the lab. He used an ironic voice to let his audience know that he was joking, but his words were written down and shared across the internet without tone of voice. People thought he was serious and spread the quotes to shame him. A friend of mine said that Hunt’s words had a chilling effect on women considering whether to enter STEM. OK, but the only way those words had a chilling effect was by their being spread as misinformation. In 2018, University of Washington computer-science lecturer Stuart Reges suggested a way to get more women into computer science and referenced studies showing that girls tend to do better at verbal skills than math. The opposite is true for boys. A reporter from the Seattle Times garbled this reference and accused Reges of making a false claim: that boys are better at math than girls. The reporter ignored Reges’s proposal to expose more women to computing by making a computing class mandatory, and again women got misinformation about a prominent man in STEM looking down on them. Did the reporter help more women feel good about possible careers computing? No. In the current case with me, someone is implying that I have the same disdainful attitude toward women in gaming as Gary Gygax did. The people spreading the post feel like they’re helping women, but surely it doesn’t help to make the field seem more sexist than it is. Personally, it hurts to have people talking about me, but the real damage is to the many gamers who don’t know my true history and who are tricked into thinking that the lead designer on D&D 3E was a hostile to women in gaming. 

Another disturbing thing about this post is the implication that it’s sexist to take seriously the inborn differences between boys and girls. Common sense tells us that the differences we see result from a combination of inborn differences and social learning, and the science bears this out. In my career, I’ve worked repeatedly to raise the profile of women in characters, art, pronouns, and the workplace. Do I get disqualified from being a feminist because I take seriously the inborn differences between boys and girls? I don’t think so. In fact, it seems to me that we can do a better job of advancing women’s interests if we understand how women and men are different as well as how we’re the same. If you want to hear about inborn differences, listen to parents. And if you disagree with me, does that disagreement mean that we can’t work together to make a better tomorrow? Enough with the left’s circular firing squad already. My focus is on a Blue November, and I hope you’ll join me.

The original post from 2008 was a conversation starter, and it’s being shared as if it were a conclusion. The wording was needlessly provocative, and I’m sorry to everyone I hurt with it. That was the year my wife died, and I wasn’t at my best. The post was provocative, and what it provoked was a bunch of stories from women about how they’d been excluded from roleplaying games by all-boy groups. I learned that my post had been ill-informed. Sometimes I say things that are wrong, and then I get better information that I didn’t even know I needed. It’s all part of the process. 

The other thing I’ve learned since 2008 is that I’m on the autism spectrum. That explains why people sometimes react to what I say in ways that I hadn’t predicted—because they’re neurotypical. Looking back, it was pretty ignorant for me to talk about the gender skew in gaming without referencing autistic traits (“engineer brain”) and their role in games and game styles. Over the decades, roleplaying games have become less “engineer-oriented” and more story oriented, and that’s great. 

For me the big issue is the prevalence of misinformation on social media. I’ve been taken in repeatedly by misinformation myself, I’ve heard misinformation from my friends, and well-meaning people have spread misinformation about me. It’s a mess, and I don’t know what to do about it. 

Related Posts

Testosterone for Amateurs

Mother Love and Human Nature

Evolution Unites Us All