I'm Getting Quoted by the Washington Post, for all the Wrong Reasons

So here's the good news: yours truly has become so internet-famous that he's now being quoted in the mainstream media.  One of my tweets on the subject of the atrocious selections for the 2016 Gencon panelists was pasted directly onto the Washington Post!

You can read the article here, but if you do, you'll note that it's a bit odd.  Written by someone I suspect has fuck all to do with gaming (at least, with tabletop RPG gaming), it conflates a whole bunch of nonsense, including Gamergate, Zoe Quinn, cosplay, and more with the core issue of the Gencon panel list.  And in the process, it puts a false spin on the issue with the panelists.  Namely, it claims that anyone who has a problem with the panelists is doing so because the panel is over 50% women this year.

Now, take a look at my quote, you'll see that I'm talking about ALL the panelists.

When I said that "several Gencon panelists are only famous for writing shitty indie games or trying to censor people (like me) on the internet", I was nowhere talking about gender.   But hey, we already know that the Outrage Brigade likes to lie about me. We can guess where that quote was obtained and how it was spun to the hapless fellow-traveller author of the Post article.

Likewise, when I said the Gencon panel is "a circle-jerking list of Forge Swine, SJWs, and Talentless Hacks", I nowhere stated that it was only the ones with vaginas.  And for the record, it is not.

When I said that the people on the panel are a list of "reprobates, motherfuckers, and worthless morons", I meant all of them, not just the wommenz.

And when I said I feel sorry for Kenneth Hite, the only qualified person on the ENTIRE list, because just being on that list is likely to harm his legacy by association, I did not mean "by association to them there women-folk".

Someone should really go tell the Washington Post that they're claiming my tweet makes a point it never did. 
Let me be clear: I wouldn't give a twopenny fuck if 100% of the Gencon Panelists were women, as long as they were qualified.

And there are MANY qualified women in the RPG industry, both historically (Margaret Weis has recently pointed out quite correctly, in reference to this debate, that women have been hugely involved with running gaming companies and managing gaming lines from the early TSR period onward), and in the present day. The problem is, neither the women nor the men on this list of panelists are those qualified people.

For all their crowing about 'diversity', this panel DOES have only one voice: the voice of Fashionable-Leftist Portland/Seattle Hipster "indie" pretentiousness. Everyone on that panel is either part of the self-declared 'industry' that's pissed off at their growing irrelevance, or part of the 'alternative' Storygaming movement that's pissed off that their theories and ideas have been colossal failures, and that the newest edition of D&D was guided not by their bullshit, but by old-school principles pushed by people like me.

It's an insider group alright, a gang of irrelevant no-talent would-be elitists selected by networking and nepotism rather than any actual merit.

You talk about diversity, why was there not even a single OSR writer on the panel?  The Forge, the failed gaming ideology which produced mostly pretentious nonsense and was utterly discredited, makes up the religion of about half the Gencon Panelists.  On the other hand, the OSR, which defined the direction of D&D today (thanks to people like me), has NO ONE.


There is ZERO gaming diversity on that panel.  For that matter, zero political diversity too. And very little regional, racial, or class diversity, for that matter.  It's a bunch of humanities-major white middle-class hipsters who either live in Portland/Seattle or left their hearts there, and think that they should get to own the RPG hobby (which they insist in pretending is an 'industry').  Ironically, these very people who are claiming that 'old white men' are trying to keep control of a hobby that's always been diverse are the only ones obsessed with control: THEY want to be in control of this hobby and marginalize or eliminate all dissenting voices or other groups.

And this all has fuck all to do with the gender of who's on that list. Oh, sure, someone with more qualifications in basic research than the idiot who wrote the Washington Post article could probably find an asshole or two angry at there being women on a panel, but for everyone who actually matters this never had anything to do with gender.  Only the Outrage Brigade Swine obviously want to LIE to make it about that, so that they don't have to argue the much harder real complaint we've put forward.

I'd say the Washington Post owes me an apology, but who the fuck reads them anyway? They're as irrelevant as some of the 'freelancer' hacks who are trying to pretend they're the RPG 'industry insiders' as if there was a real industry, and not just a couple of companies and the OSR (who is doing all the really innovative and genius stuff).

I'll close with this: it's a sad comment on the state of Gencon's panel list that I have had considerably more influence on the modern RPG hobby than almost anyone on it.

RPGPundit

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