Well, Jonathan Tweet just managed to prove LeGuin right. Robin Laws tries to moderate the dumbth of this post a little, but good grid, I thought the “but girls just don’t naturally WANT to play D&D cuz they’re girls!” thing was something most gamers got out of their system after, oh, losing their virginity or so. I didn’t realize there was a kind of middle-aged Saturn Return on this one.

I already commented on Tweet’s blog, but for the slow or LJ-averse: “they just don’t want to” is a convenient excuse. It means never having to think about whether something about, I don’t know, behavior puts females off gaming; much less stressful to pretend instead that was fixed in our genes for all time hundreds of thousands of years ago, as Early Man strode across the savannah with his spear in a Museum of Natural History-approved manner, hunting for wildebeest. (No doubt these thrifty hunters carved primitive 20-siders from animal bone.)

I’m old enough to remember when gaming-store owners gave me funny looks, instead of helping me find the latest Trail of Cthulhu supplement; when I literally had guys crowd around my gaming table at a con staring at me, not because I had a nice rack or killer boots, but because I was a female DM and such a thing had never before been heard of. I rather like not being the only girl in the room. I just wish clueless dorks would quit fucking that up with their half-assed evo-psych intellectual masturbation.

Frank Micciche writes about how the recession is hitting over-50s, and he’s right; it’s hard to compete for jobs against people half your age who are willing to work for peanuts, it’s difficult to face retirement when your nest egg got flushed to pay for executive ‘retention bonuses’ at AIG. His solution to this? Screw the next generation, of course. That’s what we’re for.

. . . .Restoring Medicare as the primary payer for all seniors would reverse this calculus.

. . .Elimination of all payroll taxes for those over 60 would not only leave more money in their weekly paychecks but also make them cheaper to employ for businesses, which would be spared their share of the payroll tax on these workers.

…On the savings side, policymakers could temporarily quadruple the amount of savings that households headed by individuals 50 or older are allowed to put into retirement savings tax-free.

Huh. And what are we going to do to cover that extra Medicare and those payroll and retirement-savings taxes? It’s as if Micciche thinks that we can just have the Summer of Finance, where if we all hold hands and think love of money at the world, the recession will go away, like, by the power of our minds alone!

Because the alternative is that he knows, but isn’t saying, that the lost tax income and the increased Medicare expenditures have to come from cutting services to and/or raising taxes on existing taxpayers.  Apparently Micciche doesn’t think or care about how that will affect Generation X and own down, since those are the people largely starting, raising and supporting families of their own – and often, their aging parents.

Hey, that’s what everybody else is for, right? Keeping the Boomers happy?

Fuckers.

(“Ma’am,” says the concerned GameStop clerk as I hand him my $5 for pre-order, “you know that this is an M game?” I’m not sure whether he thought I was buying it for Kid Peligro, who was impatiently waiting for me to pay for a DS game, or whether he thought that as a mommy, I would faint on finding out that my new MMORPG had explicit bloodspatter and quests involving a whorehouse.)

I obviously haven’t had time to play it much, but I give it a D- on implementation given the lousy launch and backfilling on things like buddy passes, and an A on flavor and gameplay. It clearly wasn’t ready for launch. Surprisingly, though, they did a fantastic job on capturing the flavor of Conan. And there is a surprising lack of d00dz on the PvE servers. Yes, you can run around topless, but nobody does. Amazing.

Those of you with a low threshold for old-geek nattering should wander off and get a fresh cup of coffee at this point.

Back when I was a slip of a girl and Dragon was just about It for gaming publications (White Dwarf would soon be the hip, new enfant terrible, but it wasn’t yet), I sent an article in to Dragon. It was probably awful; I don’t remember it well, but I was fourteen at the time, so you can pretty well guess. Roger E. Moore was the editor. He didn’t buy the piece, but he sent me a nice letter offering helpful suggestions. I incorporated them, and sent it back.

I think I sent it in four times before I gave up. But every time, he sent suggestions, encouragement, and thanked me for my interest in the magazine. At one point, he even photocopied some notes he and Kim Mohan had sent to each other, so I could see what they, as editors, were interested in. I don’t know how or why he found the time to do this,  but for an aspiring writer, having an editor put in the effort to help improve writing he wasn’t even going to buy was an incredible boost.

(Years later, at GenCon, I ran into Mr. Moore and thanked him. He looked slightly afraid. In retrospect, I realize that being surprised by a fangirl wearing thigh-high leather high-heeled boots can be startling for the average middle-aged gamer.)

And now, sadly, the lawyers have taken over. Not the gamer ones, either.

The Queen, looking over my shoulder, asked “Are you going to get that for Daddy?”

In all seriousness, I said “Probably not. Daddy likes hexadecimal than binary, I’m not sure he’d want it.”

Clearly, there’s no hope for me. Just dip me in honey and throw me to the gazebos.

Old Master Fu! Reborn heroes! Giant scaly evil wyrms devouring elephants! Helicopter vs. flying dragon aerial combat over Los Angeles! Grim-faced FBI agents trying to figure out just what the hell we’re dealing with here, Mr. Secretary of Defense! Angst-ridden Korean doomed lovers!

Gamemaster Joe-Bob says check it out.

 h/t: Infocult

You know, the type of movie that people who declare “Vive le difference!” love to watch, where the battle of the sexes is conducted in witty repartee, and where a man who gets too far out of line earns himself a ringing, yet feminine, slap in the face, after which all caddery ceases.

How else to explain the mindset that if you point out a problem, you can’t possibly be doing anything at all about the problem, and the best response to sexist assholes in gaming is “STFU or GTFO”? That if enough women silently pick up their dice/character sheets/epic armor and go elsewhere, the fools will see the error of their ways?

I’m all for action as a result of, rather than a substitute for, a complaint, but I’m also rather cynical. Which means I’m also aware that people who bleat about “STFU or GTFO” really mean one thing: STFU. They don’t want to hear about it, they certainly don’t want to hear that they might be part of the problem, and they don’t want the ladies casting any aspersions on their beloved hobby, which is both a downer and might lead to armor models that actually cover female avatars’ entire bodies, if you can believe it.

As daskindt pointed out, some people get extremely petulant when it’s pointed out that their hobby is not as wonderful for everyone as it is for them. Especially if “making it better for others” means an ounce of consideration from their own sorry selves.