It's really quite pathetic. Because the fact is, I know that there were women who had very important parts to play, and significant influence, on the early D&D hobby.
But if you read Kotaku's supposed 'feminist' article about how important women were to early D&D, you'd come out feeling like women were inconsequential. The article is ironically entitled "D&D wouldn't be what it is today without these women", and yet when you look for the list of who these 'journalists' managed to get together, ironically you could very easily remove all of them from the history of D&D and the hobby would have been practically unchanged.
Instead of being able to provide an article that talks about the important early contributors to the hobby, what this article does is show us a group of second-tier writers, mostly admitted non-gamers, who did very peripheral products for D&D like maps, choose-your-own-adventure stories, and some art. Stuff which was in no way central to early design. Stuff that anyone else could have done.
I mean, I know, it's Kotaku: everyone who works for them actually hates gaming of all varieties, gamers, and thinks all geek hobbies are The Enemy that needs to be destroyed. But do they really have to be so incompetent they can't make their own title argument!?
It's probably because the person writing the article has no idea what they're doing. If they did, they could have mentioned Lee Gold, who published Alarums & Excursions and had enormous early influence on the hobby. Or Jennell Jaquays, which seems an odd omission, unless Kotaku now thinks that transgender women don't count?
On the other hand, it's more understandable that they would miss out on most of the other important and influential women in early D&D. Because these were not writers or game designers or publishers: they were gamers. Some of them were related to the early creators of the hobby (like Elise Gygax), and naturally that would discount them in the minds of the third-wave feminist author of the Kotaku piece; even though the Gygax women (not in spite of but by virtue of being related to Gary) probably had much more influence on the early hobby than anyone the 'reporter' mentioned in her piece. Others were women like Mary Dale, who had joined with her brother and had an influential early character in Gygax's original campaign.
But to Kotaku these don't count, because they're not the 'strong independent female designers' that they want for their narrative. Never mind their real influence on the hobby, they just don't fit the story, even if no one actually does because the type of female influence Kotaku wants to 'discover' on early D&D (where there was some hugely influential female game designer as important as Gygax or Arneson) just never happened. So instead, they pick the nearest facsimiles they can get a hold of and try their best to make an untenable argument. They start out with Jean Wells, who was certainly an important early figure, as their best possible argument, which just shows how weak their argument is. And from there they proceed downward to Margaret Weis, who helped make the shittiest D&D setting in history, long after the influential early period, and was basically a novelist rather than a game designer. Her contribution to the hobby was a series of modules that enshrined railroading and metaplot, causing enormous harm to the game and arguably being one of two markers of the end of the original Old-School period (the other later marker would be the printing of 2e itself, under the supervision of another destructive woman, Lorraine Williams; I'm kind of shocked that Kotaku didn't try to rebrand that hobby-destroying she-harpy into a feminist D&D heroine!).
Anyways, way to shoot yourself in the foot, Kotaku. It's a lucky thing you got it at least partially wrong, because if you were right, it would have meant that women were of absolutely no meaningful significance in the creation of D&D.
RPGPundit
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There you go again Pundit. It seems once again you've written an "I don't like it, therefore it's bad" article.
ReplyDeleteJust because you don't like it doesn't mean that Dragonlance wasn't a massively important or influential setting within the D&D universe.
Similarly, the World of Greyhawk Folio (with said maps from Darlene) was a massively influential and important product for early D&D fans. Downplaying the significance of that amazing piece of cartographic art is bullshit.
Similarly, the Choose Your Own Adventure books were HUGELY influential in spreading the D&D brand outside of its original audience. There are many, many RPG players who started not because they learned the game, but because they read those D&D and Lone Wolf CYOA books.
But you have those "I don't like this thing, therefore it's bad" blinders on... as always.
IMO the Pundit is correct, Dragonslance is garbage and railroading is garbage. Both are the antithesis of old school gaming. Where is the gain in recruiting people through tools that do not involve using their imagination, i.e. the whole raison d'etre of D&D.
DeleteThat "garbage" kept TSR afloat for many of the years it was badly mismanaged. The books brought in tons of profit and thousands of players.
DeleteScrew you and your gatekeeping bad, wrong fun.
No, it brought in thousands of low-quality B-novel readers. It wasn't something that happened in spite of TSR's mismanagement under Lorraine Williams, it was a fundamental part of that mismanagement!
DeleteIt was the moment that TSR turned into being about making novels and all the game designers who worked there were really frustrated novelists.
Pundit, you have proved you do not know what you are talking about. Williams didn't take over until 1986.
DeleteDragonlance came out THREE YEARS EARLIER and was already a phenomena prior to her taking the leadership.
Dragonlance was a Gygax initiative, Mr Revisionist.
I was talking about how, under Williams, producing novels became the central focus of the business, and TSR became a novel mill, it's game designers were all novelists or wannabe-novelists, and its games were all oriented to selling more novels (by following the metaplot of the latest piece of shit trilogy).
DeleteWhile the original Dragonlance-trilogy was published in the pre-Williams era, it was under Williams that "publishing novels" became the central focus of the company, and the ultimate cause of its ruin (when the bubble on Shitty D-Grade Fantasy Novels burst), and that was what I was referring to when I referenced Williams.
There's no part of TSR's history you know that I don't, and plenty I know that you don't. For example, that Dragonlance was mostly created without any involvement from Gygax, that far from a "gygax initiative" it was something that was promoted ostensibly to make up for the lack of Greyhawk material from Gygax on account of his being in Hollywood snorting coke off hooker's tits while producing the D&D cartoon, but more factually to provide an alternative to Greyhawk as a setting for people who already wanted Gary Gygax gone altogether.
I should have said 'attempt to provide an alternative' because it quickly became clear Dragonlance (being created to tell one single story, rather than as a complex world) was not up to that task, and that's why TSR shifted its main focus to the Forgotten Realms instead.
DeleteI found the article interesting because it basically showed the women as haters of D&D the game (and specifically the folks drawn to said game) and yet sort of blamed the game for not having enough female involvement in earlier editions.
ReplyDeletePerhaps if they'd given the game a chance, or set up their own game in which folks didn't over rules, and helped the game back in the beginning... but no.
The omission of Lee Gold is telling though. Odds are they assumed she was a man. She should be near the number one spot for women who were a huge influence early on in RPG history.
ReplyDeleteI've been playing since the very early days and had never heard of her. I knew of the existence of A&E, but never seen nor read an issue.
DeleteOn the other hand, almost everyone I know of a given age group read and owned Dragonlance and CYOA books.
So while Gold may have had some influence on the early mechanics, her contribution to the larger milieu of D&D is of a much smaller proportion.
That is not to say she should not have been mentioned, but just to put some perspective that OSR gamers probably have a different view point than the larger D&D population on who was most influential to the game as it stands today.
Absolutely.
DeleteMarty, makes a good point, much of the so-called OSR is made up of people ignorant of the history of D&D and those whose basis for what they do is Dragonlance and similar garbage are part of the reason SOME of the OSR is despised.
DeleteI would add that what parts they are even aware of are in the majority either partials or skewed. Even in the books about D&D, these are strewn with misconceptions and outright made up stories, same for a lot of fora as in Wikipedia articles, etc.
Delete@Arnold Master - Not what I was saying at all. I'm saying that some groups within the OSR have perspective on the many minor contributions of those early players because they are so laser focused on the early rule sets.
DeleteAnd while those contributions may have been important to the early design of the game, they are still relatively minuscule from a cultural perspective to the overall milieu of D&D.
Whether you like Weis' work or not, there is no arguing that between her writing and Elmore's artwork within Dragonlance, the two of them defined a huge chunk of the D&D cultural context across different media in which the brand was presented.
(This is not meant to downplay the contributions of others; I am just using them as an example.)
To say that Lee Gold had a bigger contribution just because you like her better is a fabrication. Her contribution was minor at best and had little impact on the overall culture that grew up around D&D.
When you ask long time D&D players what the defining touchstones of D&D were during its explosion, you are going to get answers like Dragonlance, Ravenloft, FR, Dark Sun... which means Weis, and the Hickmans, Greenwood, Elmore, Parkinson, etc.
Whether you rail against the play style of that era or not doesn't matter worth a crap. They defined the look and feel of D&D to the public. Pretending their contributions weren't important because you don't like them while elevating those who are unknowns is also false history.
I could be wrong but the touchstones you name are from the late 80s. D&D exploded into the big-time long before that.
DeleteMarty, the fact that you don't understand Alarums & Excursions and don't know what it was or why it was important, only means that you don't know what you're talking about. It doesn't mean Alarums & Excursions wasn't hugely important to the formation of the early RPG hobby, and influenced and sometimes created some of the most important RPGs and most important RPG designers in history.
DeleteWhat you're doing right now? It's like trying to claim that the New Kids on The Block were more important to the history of rock & roll than the Velvet Underground.
False metaphor.
DeleteIf we're going to use music as an example, Dragonlance is more like Madonna. Yes, she came well after the Beatles and the British invasion, but her music was hugely influential on popular music as a whole (as well as other media). You may not like Madonna, but that doesn't mean her impact wasn't massive on modern music.
If you don't like Madonna as an example, you could use Nirvana in her stead. Nirvana also had an immense impact on modern pop and rock and roll.
Neither of those artists are ones that I have much interest in as a listener. But I would never claim neither of them didn't have a massive impact on the modern music scene.
That claim would be bullshit biased by my musical preferences.
As is yours.
@Rob Schwarz - Ravenloft (I6) was originally published in 1983 with its sequel in 1986. It wasn't turned into a full campaign setting until later, but it had already made its impact on the D&D scene. Dragonlance came out in 1984. You are correct that FR didn't come out as a box set until 87, but Greenwood had been writing for Dragon Magazine for years prior.
DeleteNirvana or even Madonna would imply creativity and meaningful contribution. Dragonlance isn't that. It's derivative pop-culture garbage. NKOTB are the PERFECT metaphor.
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ReplyDeleteI should moderate my tone. I think it's a passive-aggressive jerk maneuver to link to a copy of an article rather than the source material.
DeleteCookie Corey, Elise Gygax, Debra Nafzigger, Mary Champeny, Kennan Powell these were the women who were involved with D&D as early as 1973 in Lake Geneva. Did that make D&D or RPGs a women-centered endeavor then? Nope. But it didnot exclude them, either. It actually widened women's participation in table-top games when compared to wargames that had proceeded them, as women traditionally did not take to toy soldiers and that sort of thing like men did.
ReplyDeletePrecisely, and being there at the very start meant these women had huge influence compared to the people named in Kotaku's article. But they weren't the "right" kind of "women in gaming", so they don't get mentioned.
DeletePeople - women and men - who are not SJW's always are at the forefront of innovation.
DeleteDismissing Weis' contributions to the game because you don't like the direction she went in seems a bit myopic.
ReplyDeleteI'm tempted to say it basically reflects an attitude of "play the game the way we men play it or gtfo."
What Weis did was not garbage because she was a woman, it was garbage because it was just disgusting, revolting garbage and would have been the same disgusting, revolting garbage if it had been written by a man.
DeleteKotaku is a good example of why feminism, like all ism's, is stupidity enshrined as an object of worship.
ReplyDeleteAs some of you may have noticed, D'Anastasio completely misdescribes the Palace of the Silver Princess incident. Wells did get screwed, but not in the way that D'Anastasio suggests. The "S&M" art - one piece was an offensive inside joke - was added without her knowledge or permission, and she was just as offended by it as the others, or so she would later claim (see her last interview on the Podcast Save or Die). But in the service of the narrative, D'Anastasio wants to make her out to be an edgy pusher of sexual boundaries of whatever.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which, there's no mention of the female artist who painted one of the most iconic D&D cover images of all time. Her name was Deborah Larson, and she painted Eldritch Wizardry's naked woman on the sacrificial slab. Now, Larson is/was obscure (no one seems to even know what happened to her), but it's fair to assume that she wasn't cited because her piece wouldn't pass D'Anastasio's feminist PC test.
D'Anastasio isn't interested in women in gaming. She's interested in her kind of women in gaming, and what that means is, of course, ever changing, according to whatever silly and arbitrary political prejudices are hip at the moment.
Many of you might have seen the essay, The First Female Gamers by Jon Peterson. If not, it's a fascinating read - https://medium.com/@increment/the-first-female-gamers-c784fbe3ff37 - and a great antidote to D'Anastasio's emanations.
I find it telling Kotaku doesn't even know what Diplomacy was by describing it as " the play-by-mail game Diplomacy, a pre-World War alternative history game." in their beackground section on Gygax and the male dominated area of War gaming. My parents used to play it wirh another couple and invariably one of the two men would start a bloody war and one of the two women would win shortly afterward. Never heard it mentioned as "alternative history".
ReplyDeleteGood catch. I also initially missed this howler:
Delete"Part of why this flew was because, in its very ruleset, D&D assumed a mostly-male audience. In the mid-70s, that ruleset faced accusations of chauvinism when it became clear that women characters’ strength was capped four points lower than men’s. It compensated with the 'Beauty' attribute, a substitute for 'Charisma.'
As anyone familiar with OD&D or AD&D knows, this is out and out false. This was actually from an article on "Woman and Magic" in The Dragon magazine, by Len Lakofka. The ironic thing is that D'Anastasio sources this with the Peterson article, which also makes it clear that this from an article in The Dragon, not from any rulebook text.
as at least half the people in the article didnkt play the game and didn't like debating the rules of the game it's comes as no suprise the artcile is moderately ignornt of the game in question.
DeleteI also find it amusing they said "Gygax shall remain the face of TSR" when he didn't work there for half of the lifespan of the company.
Must admit I've never bothered to read the credits of games to see if there are women or men involved. Must be because I don't care at all. Must be because it makes no difference.
ReplyDeleteI also note that the same people who call out the article for its inaccuracies also do not call out Pundit on bullshit statements like this:
ReplyDelete"I mean, I know, it's Kotaku: everyone who works for them actually hates gaming of all varieties, gamers, and thinks all geek hobbies are The Enemy that needs to be destroyed."
Pundit, the problem is that your posts have so much crap in them, that those few salient points that may be present are covered by the mounds of other garbage.
You could have simply posted about the innacurracies or oversights in the article but instead chose to make it another foaming at the mouth screeds.
That statement is completely factual. Kotaku have total and open contempt for gamers and traditional gaming culture. They have repeatedly described it as "toxic" and needing to be punished for its sins.
Delete