A friend of mine has an as-yet-unfinished documentary about the early history of RPGs, based on interview footage he shot in early 2000s (including interviews with Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson). My favorite moment in the rough cut starts with Frank Chadwick of GDW talking about how the anti-RPG frenzy didn't affect them (at the time, GDW mostly made a science fiction RPG called Traveller). Cut to Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games - an incredibly animated person - having an absolute freakout while explaining how the Secret Service raided his business and seized all his inventory, computers, everything. Someone found out about their upcoming game "Cyberpunk", declared it a "manual for computer terrorism", and the Secret Service flipped out. They nearly put SJG out of business. No charges were ever filed, as SJG didn't do anything even remotely illegal or dangerous. This event was one of the things that led to the founding of EFF.
So yeah, the SJG "Cyberpunk" raid was probably the peak of the anti-D&D frenzy. That's not just moms and journalists freaking out. That was the full authority of the US government.
> Someone found out about their upcoming game "Cyberpunk",
Nitpick, but the work in question was "GURPS Cyberpunk", and its not a game in itself but a genre supplement for GURPS, SJG's generic RPG.
> So yeah, the SJG "Cyberpunk" raid was probably the peak of the anti-D&D frenzy.
The SJG raid had pretty much nothing to do with the larger, moralistic anti-D&D frenzy (even though that frenzy did also target other parts of the RPG industry), and was more related to completely separate anti-hacker panic, the bureaucratic turf war between the FBI and Secret Service over computer crime and the Secret Service's desire to show results on that front (coupled with a near-complete lack of knowledge about what it was doing in that field), and the fact that the freelancer who was writing GURPS Cyberpunk was a highly-visible hacker with an arrest record.
Other than the fact that it happened to effect a company in the same industry, it was a completely separate thing.
Bruce Sterling wrote about the raid as part of his book "The Hacker Crackdown". As far as I know, the sting against SJG "Cyberpunk" was part of Operation Sundevil, a larger-scale federal effort to suppress this vaguely public 911 document that a phone phreak got his hands on. Here's a link to the text: http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part2.html
The author of the SJG book, Loyd Blankenship, was involved in the transmission and storage of the 911 documents that the Secret Service was all fired up about. He ran the Steve Jackson Illuminati BBS. My favorite part of the Hacker Crackdown book is when Sterling talks about how Steve Jackson couldn't convince the investigators that what he'd written was a game. They kept insisting it was real.
EDIT: From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil "The raid on Steve Jackson Games, which led to the court case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, is often attributed to Operation Sundevil, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation states that it is unrelated and cites this attribution as a media error." Whoops! My bad.
That's a rather different situation from thinking that gamers are going to summon demons and stuff like that. cyber attacks have turned out to be a real thing, even though assuming SJG was a front for terrorism was nonsense. On the other hand, I have yet to hear of anyone successfully calling up spirits from the vasty deep.
This is a good point. The Steve Jackson raids were ridiculous, but given that the perpetrators didn't even know what a role-playing game was, I doubt they drew a connection between Cyberpunk and D&D.
I remember my parents showing us a video about "satanic" music. Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, Rush, Styx, the Eagles...you name a late 70's band, they were in there. Some of the bands actively courted that image, of course, but the whole thing was pretty patently ridiculous.
Their lyrics, their iconography, their album illustrations were all trotted out as 'proof' that the bands had sold their souls to the devil and were trying to recruit us to the dark side.
On the other hand, I strongly suspect TSR was pandering to the ironic satanic heavy metal crowd when they put evil-looking demon things on all of the AD&D core rulebook covers.
Well, admittedly, nowadays I know at least one metal band whose logo is Moorcock's eight-pointed Star of Chaos. I just also know that they don't mean any occult bullcrap by it.
What baffled me most as an child during the "Satanism Panic" was what the grownups thought the danger was. Regardless of whether there were really people worshipping the devil, and regardless of whether such people believed what they were doing, did the panicked adults believe it?
Did they worry that someone was going to perform dark rituals so well that they actually summoned the devil?
There were two concerns, as I understand it: there were (and are) Christian groups that believe that "dark rituals" can have real and serious consequences for not only the participants but the society that allows them to occur, whether that's literally summoning the devil or, more commonly, just provoking divine disfavor (the kind of people that blame various disasters on divine disfavor due to tolerance for abortion, gay rights, etc.) But there were also concerns that satanic cults, whatever activity they started with, progressed to ritual violence including sex crimes, assaults and murders, and suicides. Overtly, the government and law enforcement involvement in the satanic panic was driven by the latter type of concern, though a lot of the propaganda that fed that concern was spread by people who were also involved with the more.religious concern -- they weren't independent phenomena.
It still baffles me as an adult that actual adults can believe that stuff.
Edit: I'll add I don't go around telling people how silly I think they are for believing these things, but it makes as much sense to me as telling me aliens live in our shoes and if we don't tap then three times before taking then off they will harm us.
The Satanic Panic most prominently involved railroading childcare workers on the theory that they were sexually/satanically molesting the children. The threat model there is fairly easy to understand.
People say we've come to our senses, but the unreasoning panic about anything that might be related to pedophilia is actually still very much with us.
This lasted well into the 90's as well. I remember in middle school going to an after-school youth center with my friends and attempting to play D&D there. They actually had some person come in and sit down with us trying to convince us of how evil the game was. I think they contacted our parents, too. The only thing they accomplished was motivating us to stop going to a nice enough after-school place. We were in 8th grade, I think, and we were sitting there looking at the guy like, are you out of your mind? To us it was just a dumb game.
Honestly, it was a great way to keep kids off the streets. You were motivated to sit around for hours, doing something harmless while being very social. For many introverted kids, it was a godsend.
One night in the early 90s, I was hanging out with some friends, playing D&D at an all night diner. At some point in the evening, a fellow patron of the establishment, on her way to pay her check, stopped by our table to warn us of the mortal danger to our souls, and handed us a stack of Jack Chick tracts.
I've seen that before, but the thing that really amuses me about it is that Dark Dungeons is the name of a rather fine RPG: http://www.gratisgames.webspace.virginmedia.com/darkdungeons... I'm about 95% sure the game is named after the comic, but I don't know for sure. Maybe I should ask the creator some day. :)
Thanks for pointing this out. I had a look and the rulebook starts with an adventure featuring... Black Leaf, the thief. I think that's a definite clue, innit :)
Wow, I've got all my D&D rulebooks, but it is kind of nice to see them all laid out in one place; the optional weapon proficiency rules and PC Mystic rules are both in a book that has a bunch of optional rules.
> Honestly, it was a great way to keep kids off the streets. You were motivated to sit around for hours, doing something harmless while being very social. For many introverted kids, it was a godsend.
In prison, I DM'ed 4 game groups a week. All the introverted guys flocked to the games, and I watched them develop social skills over the years. They had to learn to interact with each other, share, work together, and express themselves if they were to be part of my games.
I never have written anything about them. Playing DND in prison was a coping mechanism I used to make up for the lack of video games (which I loved to play and code).
I would love to hear those stories. I think a lot of other players would as well. We all can learn the most from the 'edge cases' of our community, the constraints you had and the resources available. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. I think prison DMing would be such an extreme and you may have had to invent things others never would have thought to do. I would love to know what it was like, your challenges as DM that are not 'normal', your players and their psyches, the story you ran, etc.
My parents used this excuse to get out of buying Magic: The Gathering cards when I was young. It didn't make any sense to me - how could images of islands and mountains and angels be demonic?
I once, in the name of socializing with a coworker at his house, noted a stack of cards obviously belonging to his kids, and asked "Are those Magic cards?" His son replied, "No, they're Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic cards are Satanic." I looked down at the topmost card, saw it was something like "Demon Lord" (memory vague, but it was obviously evil and occult-looking, the exact thing that moral guardians cited for Magic) and went "uh-huh."
I played AD&D in high school in the late 1970s, in the Deep South (aka Bible Belt country), and I'm grateful to my parents for not freaking out and taking it away from me.
Years later, what I realized was that all those people who were in a tizzy were reflecting their own fears onto the game. The highly Christian saw demonic influences. The tightly-wound saw loss of control (letting random chance determine reactions). The extroverts worried that their children weren't getting out often enough to meet other children.
i dont think so. its the same thing that has always gone on, someone in power wants to push an agenda so they segregate people by fear. it was more focused back then because there were less sources people could be told what to fear.
A friend of mine had his D&D books burned by his parents. I was pretty young at the time and I remember thinking: "Burned? Like book burning? What? That DMG never hurt anyone!"
I was young and it was my first brush with a moral panic. Changed my perspective. Made me realize that it's not Evil per se that you need to watch out for, but simply regular people who are afraid of something.
The demons are also supposed to suffer torment, in hell. They're not there for their amusement with the souls of the damned, but rather because they rebelled against big G.
This bit of Christian mythology does make sense, I find. Actually, a fair few do, it's just that, well, angels and demons, right?
Oh and now that I mentioned it, there's an RPG where you play devils or angels duking it out in the land of the living:
Actually I don't think there was any logic behind the directive. It's just a matter of, that's what the sorcerers in Acts 19 did to their magic scrolls when they heard word of the Lord Jesus Christ, so that's what you should do to your D&D materials.
My Dad gave a fairly elegant defense of D&D to one of my relatives when he saw me reading the Monster Manual. I remember being pretty impressed (I was 12 at the time). Ice fishing sometimes require reading materials.
If my Dad had burned ANY of my books that would have probably also burned any relationship. I can only guess at the sense of betrayal, and that's one of those run away and join the circus type events or go to a far way college / join the military life choices.
I could have been your friend. I managed to find a different set of people to hang around with and I'll say that wasn't the company that my parents should have preferred.
Did you friend benefit from this experience? In fairness it could have freed up time for team sports or community service.
All those moral panics in the past were so embarrassing and obviously silly in retrospect, and I feel for all the innocent people who were attacked and ostracized.
It's a good thing that the moral panics we have right now are clearly righteous and accurate, and the people being attacked and ostracized unquestionably deserve it.
I'm not sure about your age or background... but having lived through "D&D or Heavy Metal Music == Satanism" moral panic myself, I'm not sure that such a phenomenon is even possible in an Internet-enabled world.
If you were into any kind of nerd subculture, or really just any subculture to begin with, then it's really hard to describe the sense of social isolation that you would have felt prior to online communities (especially if you didn't live in a major city).
The Internet has ushered in an era of social fragmentation, but before then there an immense pressure toward social cohesion and conformity. Today, no matter what you're into, there's a subreddit and 1,000 other websites dedicated to that. There is community, social connection. Conventions and other gatherings emerge from that.
Back in the 80's, there was just... nothing. You were a freak, and completely socially isolated, just for being into non-pop musical genres... or having hobbies and interests other than those deemed mainstream (e.g. sports, hunting and fishing, etc).
Yes, there are still moral crusaders today. There are still assholes in Kentucky that don't want to give marriage licenses to gay people, and so on. I don't mean to make light of that. But it's just... not... the... same... as it was a generation ago, when any deviation from the norm placed you in complete social isolation without even an online escape.
That isolation was also a blanket of security. If you exhibit any attributes that today's moral panic is against, you could find yourself facing down a horde of harassers. They'll find all your friends and family on Facebook and try to get them to turn against you. They'll look up your employer online and tell them you're sexist or that you're sharing child pornography online. If you're in university, they'll convince the school to expel or otherwise ostracize you.
There are a lot of similarities between this generation of moral panic and the past, but the differences are not at all an improvement.
Ehh... I won't argue that the Internet hasn't opened up the door for new modes of harassment. However, the "cyberbully", "stalker", or "brigade" phenomenons are a totally different animal from a moral panic. Maybe they're even worse, but they're not the same.
Brigades and harassment can be expressions of a moral panic.
In the 80's, moral panics led people to write leaflets, call their senator, and push their local TV station to cover it. Today, technology lets the people caught up in a moral panic directly interact with the people they see as the cause of their panic. It's not surprising that we see brigades and harassment on those new front lines.
Of course, that doesn't tell us that every antagonistic movement is a moral panic. But certainly the moral panics, if large enough, will have unpleasant aspects. That's just the cost of allowing easy direct interaction between anyone at any time.
Growing up, I was probably the member of our social group from the most "panicked" home. I am more tempered in my ideas now, but I suppose I still lean that way myself, at least compared to most of the opinions here. However, I'm sorry if I said or did anything rude to those on the other side of the fence back in the day. I am also sorry if I just made this weird, but I did that a lot growing up as well.
We as a society have no ability to recognize and arrest a moral panic while it's in progress. At best, the people who point out that it's a moral panic get lumped in with the targets of the moral panic and marginalized.
In fifteen years when we've moved on to panicking about, I dunno, artificial intelligences or space colonization or whatever ("Sixteen Reasons Why Moving To The Moon Is Racist") we'll all look back on 2016 and smugly shake our heads at those ignorant, benighted simpletons and how they freaked out over the most minor things.
When kids play thieves vs cops or cow boys vs indians parents are not scared. Acceptable social games perpetuating legitimate fights between arbitrary good and evils.
However you see maybe D&D is racist : elves have boni in beauty, dwarves are ugly and strong ... but any characters can choose their morale demeanor.
In fact you needed assassins as much as paladin. No true D&D party could survive without diversity of classes, races and moral demeanor.
Yes D&D is a dangerous fantasy.
It is a fantasy that states that for making a strong team you have to embrace diversity and that teach you how to deal with discrimination positively.
It teaches you that mainly your talent were random (initial dices) but it was up to you to make them a strength and it did not even mattered you were weak you could level up through doing.
Yes D&D dangerous fantasies should stop because they are turning kids in better adults better understanding that everything is a weird cocktail of luck and determinism and that we can have nice adventures out of it and improve ourselves.
Dangerous game indeed. Giving hopes to kids should be forbidden. We better need an adaptation of 1984 in AAA format.
While this is a very uplifting interpretation of DnD (and one I really hope people would subscribe to), it's somewhat undermined by the number of players who get bent out of shape when you don't min-max your character into a perfect PvE machine.
This of course isn't all players nor to say that this (honestly really) good interpretation isn't valid, it's just that it's not a constant when it comes to the games. Sometimes a game, despite best intentions, is taken in a less than positive way by a small few.
Though...it would be nice if more players just lived with the results of the RNG.
When I ran an old-school D&D (1st edition) game a few years ago, I incentivised the players (come in at 2nd level, full hit points and a simple magic item) to "roll straight" (that is, 3d6 for each stat, in order on the character sheet, and play the resulting character) and all but one did so. It made for a very fun game (one of the highlights---the paladin backstabs a (obviously evil) NPC and with the cleric's help, sets fire to a carnival; both are arrested while the thief and magic user help bail them out).
...or played with systems that got them more of what they want, instead of insisting they want a RNG despite always being unhappy with what it gives them.
I played D&D a lot from about 1982-1989 with the neighborhood kids. None of us fit the stereotype for D&D kids. The parents didn't think anything of it at first until all this media stuff. Some parents stopped allowing their kids to come and play because of it. I recall my mother taking me aside to talk to me about the game. I distinctly remember her saying that "some people say that game is evil." I don't recall what I said in response but she seemed satisfied and that was the last time she ever asked me about D&D. I even got the Fiend Folio for Christmas that year.
I have to say the darker and scarier the modules, the more into them we were. We must have played and replayed Ravenloft dozens of times. We made up our own versions to it.
We had an official club called "Strategic Games Club" in my high school. We'd meet after school once a week and play D&D. One day 1995, our sponsoring teacher oddly started trying to steer us into playing chess. We kept refusing. Eventually she came clean and told us someone complained and there were new rules... our games could no longer contain any references to monsters, demons, killing, or magic. There could also be no games of Magic the Gathering (which was new at the time, and no one in the club was playing yet).
The club instantly folded. We never heard another word about what precipitated it. Seemed pretty late in the game for D&D moral panic, and this was a pretty liberal Chicago suburban school district.
Even much later, there was residue from the panic. It's not like newspapers published articles going "Hey, this stuff is harmless."
Crazy Egor's, for those of you that remember it, used to advertise on the local independent/proto-FOX station for where I grew up, because their store was local. I once called them up to talk to the station manager about running news stories about the evil of Magic cards... in the late 90s.
"Dark Dungeons" is also the name of a rather good "retroclone" of the Basic D&D Rules Cyclopedia, which a lot of people consider to be the best rule set. Dark Dungeons also does a really good job of organizing the rules and fixing conflicts.
"Darker Dungeons" is a similar concept but with some mechanical modifications the author thought were sensible.
My first D&D group was broken up when two members (who were brothers) Mother heard it was satanic and forbade both of them from gaming. They were the thief and cleric, so we were basically SoL without them.
Made more frustrating by the fact that they went to the same church as my family... sigh.
Oh, man, I lived through the '80s hysteria about D&D, to the point where one of my (parochial school) friend's mother wouldn't let him associate with the rest of us classmates if D&D was even suspected. Years later in college, I read "Mazes & Monsters", and while I thought it was an interesting story, I could clearly see the mental illness involved, which was entirely outside any concept of RPGs. If anything, one could lay blame at (spoiler warning!) J.R.R. Tolkien, for the "twin towers" references in his works and where the title character ended up.
Watching the video clips had me howling/cringing. The later frenzy directed at other RPGs, like the SJG stuff already mentioned, just pretty much seals the deal that "the previous generation" (let me live in the past, please) just didn't understand fiction/fantasy. That was a whole 'nother set of data points in my education/maturation process as an independently thinking adult...
Probably not, there wasn't much study of the D&D moral panic in the 80's at the time either. Academic interest comes much later, not in time to help.
For example, Elizabeth Loftus [1] was pivotal in discrediting the "satanic abuse" panic of the 80's (which as other comments say was related to the D&D panic). But she did so a decade later.
Great deal, indeed, but good luck downloading the PDFs right now. Paizo watermarks them with your info before you can download them, and their servers are overwhelmed.
It's about those old "interactive fiction" books you got in the 80's where you could play a whole adventure by making choices and jumping to different pages and paragraphs. Quite a blast from the past as was being reminded by this article of playing MERP[0] for hours and hours back in the mid to late 80's when I attended college.
I started playing Pathfinder (a DnD varient, don't ask me about all the variations) with some friends on a weekly basis starting about two months ago, and it's fantastic fun. Lot's of people aren't really familiar with it, but from my perspective if you would ever play any sort of videogame with an emphasis on thinking (not a reflex-shooter, that is) you should really give it a shot. It's extremely social, and enables fantastic creativity that even the latest games have barely started to compete with. Combined with dice rolling forces some insanely implausible events that would be nearly impossible to program into a video game.
The Dark Dungeons movie mentioned is actually a movie made by people who DO understand D&D et al, but are trying to create an accurate film portrayal of Chick's cartoon tracts:
As a gamer myself, it's just kinda weird to watch my favorite hobby get distorted like that. I'd say it'd be more fun to remove all the gaming references and replace them with actual Lovecraftian Cthulhu cultists, but that's just my opinion.
I was in the gaming club in HS in 1979 to 1982, and we basically played military strategy games and D&D. The Tom Hanks movie still resonates, because I remember thinking I didn't know anybody like the characters in our club. My parents only wanted me to balance it with 'real life', getting out and breathing some fresh air (in Brooklyn ;)
I remember the age of moral panic well. It went far beyond DND. Really, they were deeply suspicious of anything kids liked enough to form a subculture around. Punk, goth, fantasy, arcade games, Star Trek, you name it.
They expected bored compliant teens they understood. Liking stuff was a subversive act.
I played in a group for years in middle and high school. The town I grew up in was sort of backward and religious. Let's just say there was considerable pressure to abandon the game.
We didn't have book burning though. (saw that down thread, and I can only imagine what younger me would have thought of that!)
I think these games are just great! Many of us took turns being the DM, and that's where a lot of learning happens! Theater of the mind becomes something tangible. You need to make it real enough for the others to get their own creative juices running, and when you do it right, the whole thing is immersive. We soon learned to replace things like, "you enter a dark room and encounter two trolls looking to fight!" with, "you enter a musky, dark room..." Players then ask what do they see, or cast light, or listen, and the whole exchange takes a bit longer. However, the interaction quality goes way up. So does the fun.
A good friend, who died early (sadly), had the seriously great idea to take a movie, "Escape From New York", and turn it into a campaign playable by 4 people. Several of us worked on it, maps, translating rules and setting up the damage tables, etc... so that it would work reasonably with "modern" type weapons, no magic, and so forth.
That campaign ran a few times and we really enjoyed it. Sometimes I feel that's a potential branch of fantasy gaming that got missed, or just seriously under exploited. The D&D idea, rules, dynamics, works for a lot of things. We found that out more or less accidentally. The realizations falling out of that were something our group thought about for a long time afterword.
Sometimes, it was necessary to play the game in secret. A gathering would be arranged under some other pretense. Fear of evil, the devil, and other inane things was enough to make it very highly controversial. Nobody I know was impacted in any way, other than positive ways.
This also made it difficult for both genders to play at times. Our group had one girl in it early on. She really wanted to play the game, and just kept at us, until she was in. Once she was, that was it! We all bonded and it was just something we enjoyed doing. Years later, she talked about that experience at a reunion, and it mattered far more to her than it did us. Being accepted and being able to play on par with the others in the group was liberating and empowering to her. Interesting how these things play out.
I purged my set of stuff during that last year of High School. Sometimes wish I hadn't, as some of it is totally collectible now. And it would be fun to read through and remember... I took a mechanical drafting class once, just for access to the tools to make big, great maps!
Someone should make an audio / text type adventure / campaign. Let the computer be the DM, it can present information in various ways, offer up maps on the screen, and provide audio clues. Maybe it's a stretch, but it could also query the players and take voice commands. The idea here would be to use a display to present and manage all the tedium, but use audio and voice input to actually communicate the players actions and game state in a way that would closely simulate the experience.
Yet today, nobody is bothered by GTA, where you can run over people and shoot whores. (But not have sex with them; that still generates bad publicity.)[1]
Lots of people are bothered over GTA. Jack Thompson, for instance, led a long campaign to have games censored, and GTA was a centerpiece. So, if you are insinuating that video game violence is a real-world problem, we've gone through that moral panic already. If you're insinuating something else, it isn't obvious and clarity would be nice.
Such policies seem practical and neutral, but ultimately just create a new avenue for bullying minority viewpoints - eg writing off a plain-stated comment as "trolling" (implying dishonestly on the part of the author), rather than say "flamebait".
It's harmful to optimize for apparent signal/noise ratio at the expense of making it harder to differentiate signal from coherent groupthink noise.
For instance, the response of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11226101 is even more polarizing. Yes, the followup's flamey nature adds to the indictment of the original comment. But due to the upvotes I'm guessing that the viewpoint of the follow up, if it were making a non-argumentative top-level point, would be less likely to be flagged as "trolling". Because impartial rules are still ultimately enforced by people, who inherently have biases.
It would be great if all overly political comments could be eliminated [0], but I don't see how that's going to happen. So the tradeoff is either having low-quality irreconcilable flaming, or preventing such by marginalizing dissent and encouraging a groupthink that permeates discussion but can never be called out - the noise will still be present, just masquerading as signal. IMHO it would be better for violent disagreements to act as flypaper and be more easily ignored, ideally through technical features.
[0] I guess that would necessarily include all non-technical anti-surveillance articles/comments as well, due to the opposing viewpoint of pro-surveillance. I don't think it would be good for this community to neuter itself in the fight against surveillance, but here I am showing my own bias.
I have to admit I'm pretty tired of having to police my conversation here. I always try to be civil and this post is definitely on topic. Would it not be better to not allow contentious submissions in the first place?
I get plenty of upvotes (and downvotes) so obviously what I say is resonating with some of the population here.
Edit: To be clear I don't think you can talk about moral panics in gaming without mentioning the one that's currently happening.
Gamergate trolling (which is obviously what you posted) is not on topic in a discussion about the history of Dungeons and Dragons—nor, for that matter, anywhere on HN.
You've subtly changed the subject by saying "contentious submissions". That's not what this is about.
The guidelines hold independently of upvotes. HN is a constitutional democracy. If you're tired of following the guidelines, please stop posting here until your energy is recouped.
The actual, demonstrable amount of misogyny in gaming stupendously, overwhelmingly dwarfs the even theoretical number of satanists or mass shooters in gaming. Hell, the amount of misogyny in gaming probably dwarfs the number of satanists or mass shooters in the entire world.
When I was young, I played dungeons and dragons (the board game). I remember how this campaign ostracised people who wanted to play. In particular, girls were very vicious with the insults about being a freak (to all of us that played).
I would compare the stigma to those that liked computers.
I can't think of a single girl who liked either d&d or computers in the 70s or 80s (my wife tells me she started in computing in the 80s though and I don't doubt her). Strangely, supposedly, revisionist reality is the opposite - girls were driven away by mean men (it's revisionist history, but misogyny is the buzzword of the new century and truth be damned).
I'm glad misogyny was mentioned because my life experience was the exact opposite. However, I enjoyed these pursuits and no amount of bullying stopped me. The attitudes have changed so much today and not for the better.
Men in technology who self-identify as nerds and write about their experiences being tormented by girls in their childhoods don't do much do allay concerns that their industry is pervasively biased in favor of men and against women.
I was as nerdy a kid growing up as I am in adulthood, and I while I had virtually no problems with girls, I had a whole fuckload of problems with cliquish and bullying boys. That, I'm afraid, didn't do much to make me more tolerant of men bullying and excluding women today.
Take from your bad childhood experiences the lesson that deliberate and calculated exclusion is bad, not the idea that anyone has somehow earned a right to justify excluding others.
>I was as nerdy a kid growing up as I am in adulthood, and I while I had virtually no problems with girls, I had a whole fuckload of problems with cliquish and bullying boys.
I'm going to jump in here and second this. I also had a fuckload of problems with cliquish and bullying boys, and none with girls. It would have been nice if girls had been more interested in me, but I finally figured out much later that much of that was because I never took any initiative and approached them or socialized with them; once I figured that out, and how to be more outgoing with them, things changed rapidly. Boys were always the source of real misery in middle/high school.
I've heard (in more recent years) of girls being vicious little back-stabbing bitches to each other, and there's movies that reinforce that stereotype, but as a boy that got picked on, I never saw that myself or had any problems with girls that weren't my own fault.
I'm sorry that there were mean girls in your childhood. I'm not sure why you think your experience disproves the experiences of thousands and thousands of other people, though.
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting more than one downvote here. For example, my gaming group in college was about 1/3 women, and they got along fine with the men, in both directions. I could follow rustynails' example and call him a liar and a revisionist for saying that he knew mean girls--but that would be a stupid and shortsighted thing to do, wouldn't it? There are all kinds of people in the world; you don't get to claim that the ones in your little circle are the only prototype for all the rest, for better or worse.
> Not sure why I'm getting more than one downvote here.
Not from me, but I might explain.
> I'm not sure why you think your experience disproves the experiences of thousands and thousands of other people, though.
[ citation needed ]
A youtuber by the name of Sargon of Akkad had a guest on his show talk about her experiences with online hate after she gave a public talk. The following link is to about 32:00 in:
She explains how terribly misogynistic everyone has been. He explains why those insults are gendered: because that works as an insult. Men get different insults than women do. The people claiming "the internet is misogynistic" largely seem to ignore insults directed at men, and talk loudly about the insults directed at women.
She later explains how she gets death threats, and this is an example of online misogyny. He explains slowly that he gets death threats, too.
Her response is that she's clearly shocked. She's never for one second thought that anyone else might be having problems on the net. Just that she's having issues, therefore it's personal, and it's only her (and people like her).
It's an astonishing admission to make publicly. That everyone else on the net is so unimportant as to be not worth human empathy, or even 30 seconds of rational thought.
That's why every time I hear "the internet is evil towards X", I have to ask "Oh? And how is everyone else treated?" Usually the response is "Uh.. I don't know".
Or, as another comment here shows... studies demonstrate that the sex which gets the most death threats, hateful comments, etc. is not women. It's men.
Heck, I've had death threats online. Do I go to sleep worrying about it? No. The people involved are cheap losers who live thousands of miles from me. They can muster up the hate to issue death threats online. They can't muster up the wherewithall to book a bus ticket to my home and ring my doorbell.
The solution to feelings of powerlessness is to give people power. Not to control the majorities speech because a small number of losers are assholes online.
Teach people how to deal with assholes, and they're less afraid. Teach people to be afraid, and they'll demand that we "safe space" the world in order to assuage their fears.
Since your statement is overly broad, I'll address the probable root as online harassment. First, men are more likely to receive any form of harassment online, while women are more likely to receive harassment in the form of sexual threats or stalking:
This is widely believed to be because each form of harassment is specifically targeted to have the maximum effect on the victim. Women are more generally upset by sexual harassment, men are generally more upset by emasculation.
Second, the reason the media narrative seems skewed in the opposite direction is because women are generally more likely to be upset by harassment:
But neither of those studies are particularly important, because "gaming" is a market so huge that it basically encompasses the entire population, or at least a significant enough portion that any truthful statements that could be made about "gamers" would likely hold equally true of the superset.
Overly broad statements such as yours actually hinder the cause of preventing the above issues, as it denies the existence of healthy and positive women gamers. By getting an accurate picture of harassment in general and how to address it we can more effectively treat it, but painting the whole issue as "because men hate women" is an uninformed appeal to emotion and overly defeatist. It implies that the problem is either unsolvable or only solved by removing men entirely.
This looks like market segmentation and not misogyny. If the known market for Borderlands is mostly male and some large percentage of those males have a girlfriend, it only makes sense to try to attract that segment to the product.
Actually it seems quite the opposite of sexism since they're deliberately trying to make the game more accessible to women.
Note this does not mean women are worse at first person shooters, it just means that the game is currently designed for "experts" and there's an adjacent segment that gets exposure to the game via watching their partner play. "Girlfriend mode" is an attempt to reach that segment.
Having a "boyfriend zone" in a women's clothing store would be analogous and also not sexist.
Of course, it's especially interesting to note the gaming media response in both cases. When it's religious conservatives attacking gaming, then they're idiots who should be mocked, yet when it's 'liberals' attacking gaming, they act like there's an actual point. You can see the old boys club a mile off...
As for why gaming is so often attacked? I supected it's an audience thing. Hardcore gamers are often conflated with nerds (same with die hard tabletop gamers and roleplayers), and are seen as an 'easy' target for populists and media mouthpieces. People love a scapegoat...
My daughter has been writing a paper on Gamergate. The stuff she's had to read for it makes my skin crawl. And getting decent media sourcing has turned out to be surprisingly challenging. The explosion of creepiness and misogyny on Twitter and elsewhere is the sort of thing that mainstream media misses, because it's just too unbelievable.
Three women who were interviewed all commented in the video about how BBC misrepresented their views and cherry picked quotes to fit the narrative
YOGSCAST Hannah: I pointed this out during my interview, and said online gaming companies need to step up and help support reporting and banning like DOTA 2/Valve did - looks like that didn't get through, they just kept the bit where I said abuse happens to everyone :(
0Apes0: 3 days ago Being the manager of the HoG (shooting the shot gun) I am very disappointed at the finished edit of this. This was supposed to be a film about women in gaming but 'sorry we had to change direction) in the last couple of weeks. It's only purpose is to make women feel like victims when we're not. MEN and women experience a use everyday online, the bet thing to do is to ignore it and ban the stupid people on Twitter, live, psn and twitch. Not worth the worry. I said this but clearly this was deemed too logical to show and we must all remain victims. Not happy with the finish product only that it's appeared on YouTube and not real TV. Also lol good job at bringing KSI in.
Ms 5ooo Watts: 1 day ago I'm honestly disappointed with how this turned out. I was approached to speak about women in gaming as a whole not to only talk about the negative side. Even during the interview I was asked to give my positive experiences with being a gamer as they didn't want this to be a one sided thing. None of my positive comments about my community and the gaming community as a whole were included at all. The initial email that I received asking for an interview said, and I quote "I’m working on a BBC3 documentary looking at the experiences of female gamers, how experiences are changing (and how the games themselves are changing)" No where in there does it say that the program will be about "the dark side of gaming" I never signed up to be some kind of warrior against sexism online, I was asked to talk about the experiences of women in gaming, how things are changing and how games themselves are changing to reflect women in gaming now being more represented. Not happy at all.
That was just one recent example. A simple google search of '{network name} + gamergate' will turn up multiple articles from every single major news network.
The gamers are grassroots because no media outlet represented them but old media (and mainstream new media) did run with the anti-gamer story. It was covered in CNN, NYT, Forbes... There was even a CSI episode.
Well, there are some news sites supporting the GamerGate side of the story. They're the ones on the GamerGate support lists, which include twenty/thirty/forty/whatever sites of various sizes.
I have no way of knowing if you’re old enough to remember, but that level of coverage is nothing compared to the ongoing nonsense in the late nineties and 2k’s. I never thought Jack Thompson would go away.
Anyway, look at it from the media’s perspective. “violent videogames turn your kids into sociopaths” is a pretty great hook, it’s going to get the suburban parents attention, it’s going to turn into endless PTA meetings, it’s going to make it to the House of Representatives. “women are getting horribly harassed in a particular industry” just doesn’t make the headlines.
So yeah, the SJG "Cyberpunk" raid was probably the peak of the anti-D&D frenzy. That's not just moms and journalists freaking out. That was the full authority of the US government.