D&D Historian Benn Riggs On Gary Gygax & Sexism

Doctor Futurity · Jul 10, 2024

TiQuinn said:
There’s also this wonderful account from Lee Gold on DM David Hartlage’s blog:

After Lee finished writing Land of the Rising Sun for Fantasy Games Unlimited, she met publisher Scott Bizar at a local convention to sign the contract. She recalls discussing the game’s credits.

“Do you want to say this game is written by yourself and your husband Barry?” Bizar asked.

“No,” I said. “Barry didn’t write any bit of it. He did the indexing, and I gave him full credit for that. I wrote all of the game. Just say the game is by Lee Gold.”

“Most female writers say they wrote a game with their husbands,” said Bizar.

“I don’t care what other people do,” I said. “Just say the game is by Lee Gold.” And so Land of the Rising Sun came out as written by Lee Gold.

Her one personal encounter with Gary Gygax revealed a similar bias. Early on, Lee sent copies of A&E to TSR. After a couple of months, she received a phone call, which she recounts.

“This is Gary Gygax,” said the voice, “and I’d like to speak to Lee Gold.”

“I’m Lee Gold,” I said. “I gather you got the copies of A&E I sent you.”

“You’re a woman!” he said.

“That’s right,” I said, and I told him how much we all loved playing D&D and how grateful we were to him for writing it.

“You’re a woman,” he said. “I wrote some bad things about women wargamers once.”

“You don’t need to feel embarrassed,” I said. “I haven’t read them.”

“You’re a woman,” he said.

We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, so I told him goodbye and hung up.

Despite her design credits, Alarums & Excursions rates as Lee Gold’s most stunning achievement. Since 1975, she has sent the APA monthly with only two lapses: one during her stay in Japan and a second scheduled for health reasons. Today though, many subscribers take their copies through email.

Link:

Meet the Woman Who by 1976 Was the Most Important Gamer in Roleplaying After Gary

In 1976, after Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, the most important person in roleplaying games was a Los Angeles woman named Lee Gold. She still contributes to the hobby and still runs…

dmdavid.com

People seem to forget (and I include people my age who were alive back then) that most women who wrote in science fiction and fantasy genres had to abbreviate or even change their names. Go find a book by C.L. Moore that identified her as Catherine Lucille, or locate A.C. Crispin somewhere identified as Ann Carol. Some authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin were given the respect of their full name on books, but it was mostly fantasy....science fiction editors may have held some burden of responsibility for the bias, but the truth was they were reacting to the perception that the readership itself was more likely to put down a book by a female author than to read it, so they engaged in the habit of using initials for the author's name, or picking a name that wasn't obviously feminine (Jo Clayton comes to mind).

I was born in 1971, so I was fortunate enough to be Gen X and I think for many of us it was the first generation that was growing up in a world where women's rights were being taken more seriously, where segregation was suddenly over, at least in a legal sense. For me its is bizarre to realize that I was born essentially just a few years after all of this went down, but it meant I had more of a clean slate....but there were still plenty of authors out there, such as Gygax, with their opinions and it was (for the time) a thing you just sort of observed or read and tolerated, like going to Thanksgiving and accepting your uncles were all weirdos. But even I, as a teenager, assumed from the zeitgeist of the era that maybe women wrote for women and men wrote for men. I especially like citing reading Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffery and Andre Norton as disabusing me of that notion....but when I was 10-12 and read stuff written by Gygax that had implied misogyny in it, I had no context for whether it was right or wrong at that time, outside of my mother who was thankfully a rather good feminist. I can only imagine plenty of other gamers who did not have strong female role models in their life, coupled with nonsense such as Gygax wrote plus the prevailing attitude of masculine dominance of the time, would have a much harder time de-assimilating such noise. These are the guys I think who have an issue with Gygax being critiqued because, of course, at some level it becomes a critique of their own lack of self introspection.

payn · Jul 10, 2024

Charlaquin said:
The people targeted as “whales” are generally treated very much like marks/rubes by those companies. It’s also just kind of a dehumanizing term, like, literally referring to people by the name of an animal. Moreover, whenever someone says “I belong to the group that term is being used to describe, and that term is an insult to me,” the term is an insult. Doesn’t matter if it was originally intended as an insult or not, the way it has been used has been hurtful to the group it’s used to refer to, and if you don’t want to hurt those people, you should probably stop using that word to refer to them.

It's a question becasue im trying to understand.

Whizbang Dustyboots · Jul 10, 2024

Clint_L said:
Calling someone a whale is an insult. Period. It’s the same as calling them a sucker, a mark, etc. Unless you are referring to their weight. Which is a different insult.

As I said, none of that was intended.

I have gone back and changed the original post.

Zardnaar · Jul 10, 2024

Doctor Futurity said:
People seem to forget (and I include people my age who were alive back then) that most women who wrote in science fiction and fantasy genres had to abbreviate or even change their names. Go find a book by C.L. Moore that identified her as Catherine Lucille, or locate A.C. Crispin somewhere identified as Ann Carol. Some authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin were given the respect of their full name on books, but it was mostly fantasy....science fiction editors may have held some burden of responsibility for the bias, but the truth was they were reacting to the perception that the readership itself was more likely to put down a book by a female author than to read it, so they engaged in the habit of using initials for the author's name, or picking a name that wasn't obviously feminine (Jo Clayton comes to mind).

I was born in 1971, so I was fortunate enough to be Gen X and I think for many of us it was the first generation that was growing up in a world where women's rights were being taken more seriously, where segregation was suddenly over, at least in a legal sense. For me its is bizarre to realize that I was born essentially just a few years after all of this went down, but it meant I had more of a clean slate....but there were still plenty of authors out there, such as Gygax, with their opinions and it was (for the time) a thing you just sort of observed or read and tolerated, like going to Thanksgiving and accepting your uncles were all weirdos. But even I, as a teenager, assumed from the zeitgeist of the era that maybe women wrote for women and men wrote for men. I especially like citing reading Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffery and Andre Norton as disabusing me of that notion....but when I was 10-12 and read stuff written by Gygax that had implied misogyny in it, I had no context for whether it was right or wrong at that time, outside of my mother who was thankfully a rather good feminist. I can only imagine plenty of other gamers who did not have strong female role models in their life, coupled with nonsense such as Gygax wrote plus the prevailing attitude of masculine dominance of the time, would have a much harder time de-assimilating such noise. These are the guys I think who have an issue with Gygax being critiqued because, of course, at some level it becomes a critique of their own lack of self introspection.

AC Crispin was female?

Only read some Star Wars books written by them. They were some of the better ones.

Just checked Han Solo Trilogy.

jayoungr · Jul 10, 2024

Doctor Futurity said:
People seem to forget (and I include people my age who were alive back then) that most women who wrote in science fiction and fantasy genres had to abbreviate or even change their names.

First, exactly what era are you talking about?

Second, I think you need to separate science fiction and fantasy. Fantasy has always been full of female authors writing successfully under female names at least since the 1960s, which is when the genre really started to take off. In addition to Ursula LeGuin and Anne McCaffrey, whom you've already mentioned, I can think off the top of my head of Madeleine L'Engle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Diana Wynne Jones, Patricia McKillip, Tamora Pierce, and Mercedes Lackey. They all had successful writing careers in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, I'd say fantasy was one of the easier genres for women to get published in at that time.

In science fiction, the numbers of women writing under female names are smaller, but you still had people like Diane Duane and Diane Carey (writing Star Trek novels). Some of the successful female fantasy writers, like Anne McCaffrey, also wrote science fiction under their own names. And Andre Norton, despite using a male pen name, didn't make her identity particularly secret. I remember reading editions of her YA books from 70s/80s, checking the “About the Author” section, and seeing female pronouns used for her. At the time, I just assumed that “Andre” could be a unisex name.

TiQuinn · Jul 10, 2024

jayoungr said:
Well, of course. No generation is a monolith. But there are trends. By and large, people who came of age before the 1960s were (are) more likely to be kinda sexist by today's standards than those who grew up during and after that era.

I don’t know if Gary Gygax was just “kinda sexist.” I think he was “really sexist.”

jayoungr · Jul 10, 2024

TiQuinn said:
I don’t know if Gary Gygax was just “kinda sexist.” I think he was “really sexist.”

And I think he sounds "really sexist" by today's standards, but he wasn't that much of an outlier in the mid-1970s. It was a lot more socially acceptable at the time for people who held those ideas to express them--even though yes, there would also be people who would push back against them. Nowadays, there would be more social pressure not to be open about those thoughts even if you hold them (and we all know there are people who do).

Chaosmancer · Jul 10, 2024

lynnfredricks said:
A "visceral, inexplicable need to pass judgement" is one among several, but yes - as it is a rather common feature among recent history commentators, and in line with what (sorry, can't remember who posted it, but its back in this thread) the notion that all history writing is political speech.

"...put into context" and direct readers to your own judgements rather than allowing them to make up their own minds.

There's a fine line between directing the attention of someone and feeding them your own opinion, and good historians are very careful about that.

"...Gary held some incredibly regressive beliefs, even for his time." That's hard to say. The quotes I have read, read more like a rather pedestrian average for his age, and his time.

You know, I'm starting to get really annoyed with this idea that these two authors wanted to pass judgement and destroy Gary Gygax and hate old DnD. I did not want to open my copy of this book yet, I was not ready to read this book yet, but the sure amount of misinformation I knew was present was driving me up the wall.

So, here it is. Typed up in its entirety from my copy, the Preface from Jason Tondro followed by the Foreword from Jon Peterson. Let us stop going by what other people claim, and look right at the source of this outrage.

It's difficult to overstate the impact of Dungeons and Dragons on games and gaming. Modern video games - their classes, levels and hit points - are D&D's direct descendants, using language, tropes, and mechanics first created by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. Science Fiction and fantasy wargames likewise descend directly from some of the materials included in this book. The influence of D&D is not limited to gamers; people who've never played D&D brag about leveling up or choose their alignment from a meme depicting a nine-panel grid. D&D is a part of American culture and resonates deeply with audiences from around the globe.

Perhaps more important than D&D's worldwide influence is its role in the lives of the millions of people who play the game. DUNGEONS & DRAGONS brings people together. It encourages players to adopt the perspective of someone other than themselves and cooperate towards a shared goal.

In a time when humanity has been wracked by a global pandemic and forced to isolate, when children have beenm unable to got to school and friends unable to share a meal, D&D reminded us to never split the party. And as we have - in halting steps and at varying comfort levels - emerged from COVID, roleplaying games have shown us a way to rebuild relationships and alleviate loneliness.

The history of D&D is, therefore, worth knowing. Many authors have attempted to chronicle its history, and many of those texts provide valuable insight. This book takes a different approach. It presents the documents that made up D&D in its earliest form so that you, the reader, can see the origins of D&D for yourself. It begins with early writings by Gygax and Arneson, including Gygax's Chainmail rules and selections from Arneson's Blackmoor campaign.

This book also includes something never before published: the original draft of Dungeons & Dragons that Gygax crafted on his home typewriter, with his and Arneson's annotations and corrections. This draft led to the 1974 publication of the first edition of D&D, which is reprinted here in its entirety.

Finally, the three most important suplements to the first edition of the game - Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry - appear here, as do numerous articles and expansions written by fans, many of which were incorporated into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the years after 1977.

With a few noted exceptions, every page reproduced in this book is from a first printing with no attempt to correct the original pages. Street addresses and phone numbers have been redacted. The early rules for D&D are important and incredibly influential, but they're also confusing and even contradictory; that's how we have left them. We don't encourage you to try to play 1974 D&D from these pages! (If you want to try, Wizards of the Coast has edited and republished the original Dungeons & Dragons "white box" in both physical and digital formats. These reprints incorporate errata from later printings of the game.)

This book presents D&D as it was first imagined, warts and all. What sort of warts are we talking about? One example is including creatures from other intellectual properties, such as J.R.R Tolkien's Middle-earth, without permission; in later printings of D&D, balrogs, hobbits, and ents were renamed balors, halflings, and treants to avoid these copyright issues.

Some language in the first iteration of D&D presents a moral quandry. The documents reproduced in this book include many pages of charts and tables alongside lists of monsters, spells, and magic items. But that game content also includes a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory language, words that are casually hurtful to anyone with a physical or mental disability, or who happens to be old, fat, not conventionally attractive, indigenous, Black or a woman.

Some people have charitably ascribed this language to authors working from bad assumptions. In the 1970's, historical wargamers in America were predominantly white, middle-class men; it isn't surprising that they would dub a class of soldiers the "fighting-man". But when in the pages of Greyhawk, the description of the Queen of Chaotic Dragons includes a dig at "Women's Lib" the misogyny is revealed as a concious choice. It's an unfortuanate fact that women seldom appear in original D&D, and when they do, they're usually portrayed disrespectfully. Slavery appears in original D&D not as a human tragedy that devastated generations over centuries, but as a simply commercial transaction. The cultural appropriation of original D&D ranges from the bewildering (like naming every 6th-level cleric a "lama") to the staggering; Gods, Demigods, and Heroes (not reprinted in this book) includes game statistics for sacred figures revered by more than a billion people around the world. Were players expected to fight Vishnu, one of the principle deities of Hinduism, kill him, and loot his "plus 3 sword of demon slaying"?

Despite these shortcomings, D&D has always been a game about people choosing to be someone unlike themselves and collaborating with strangers who become friends. It has slowly become more inclusive, and as the player base has become more diverse, the pool of creators who make the game has expanded to include people with a broader range of idenities and backgrounds. As these new creators make the game more welcoming, the game has attracted new fans who, in turn, continue to make the game more inclusive. The future of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, here at its fiftieth anniversary, is bright.

And it all started with the pages that follow.

And now, I am glad I am doing this. While I am certain many people will be offended by the three paragraphs out of eleven that discuss the issue, this also highlighted something very useful. Not once in the entire Preface did he name names. He mentions that Gygax and Arneson wrote the original stuff, but when discussing the first printing he doesn't say "and Gygax said" or "and Gygax was" or anything of the sort. He says the material existed and the total part talking about sexism is THREE SENTENCES.

But that was enough to spark calls of lying and conspiracies.

In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Dungeons & Dragons (1974), this omnibus gives the complete text of the original game and its first three supplements, with supporting material from before and after its release that sheds light on D&D's development, evolution, and reception. Focusing on the years 1970 - 1977, it provides both a definitive edition of the earliest incarnation of D&D and indications of how it came to be what it is. Beyond published products, this book reproduces drafts, correspondence, magazine articles, and related ephemera.

No book published today could hope to give a complete picture of the making of D&D. For reasons of space and copyright, not everything can be included. And for many early parts of this story, there is but fragementary evidence. The commentary in this book is intended to be an account that will stand regardless of anything that might come to light in the future.

When we examine the development of D&D in the crucial period of 1972-1973, we must inevtiably contend with the respective contributions of the game's coauthors, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Following a bitter public dispute that began in 1977 over credit and royalties, both authors made contradictory public statements about who did what. It has long been my position that the contributions of both cocreators were indespensable - that the game would not have appeared, let along survived for half a century, without the works and ideas of both Gygac and Arnseson.

But that said, the original designers of D&D were themselves participants in broader communities in wargaming and science-fiction fandom, and the game owes much of its shaoe to the web of influences that surrounded them. Gygax and Arneson socialized many of their ideas in fan magazines, or fanzines, some of which are reproduced here.

Fanzines are notoriously difficult for researchers to work with: they are often poorly printed, are full of significant typos, and have problems with dating and attribution. They may therefore be difficult to parse, but fanzines and other such ephemera are presented here in their original form, with some digital cleanup to remove blemishes and other artifacts.

Much of the immediate context of D&D began with the Castles & Crusades Society, a medieval wargaming club to which Gygax and Arneson both belonged. In the pages of the club fanzine Domesday Book, Gygax first published material he later compiled in Chainmail (1971). As the draft foreword to Dungeons & Dragons related, the Society's "Great Kingdom" setting encompassed the territory known as Blackmoor, the site of Arneson's seminal fantasy campaign. While there is no small controversy about the details, it is safe to follow the foreword and say that "from the Chainmail Fantasy Rules [Arneson] drew an expanded set of rules for battles and the campaign." for Blackmoor, which Gygax further developed into the first draft of Dungeons & Dragons.

Readers may note that more material of Gygax's is reproduced in this volume than of Arneson's. Gygax was quite a prolific writer and neccessarily left a longer paper trail of his activities in the original D&D period. The collaboration between the pair of them was not entirely a happy one even before Dungeons & Dragons was published, and assessing which one of them contributed a given idea can be challenging. Certain early documents relating to Blackmoor were published by Judges Guild in The First Fantasy Campaign (1977), though it also anthologizes material created after the 1974 publication fo the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set with little signposting to date the age of respective passages. THose documents aren't included here, though this book summarizes their contents where neccessary.

It is my privilege to help make this rare early material available to gamers interested in the history of D&D. The degree to which the original system is playable today depends heavily on the impetus and imagination of the players; in the mid-1970's early adopters had to fill in plenty of gaps and make rulings on the spot to create a coherent play expeirence. Thus any attempt to identify a single "original" play style for these rules can only ever be one interpretation. As Chainmail puts it "these rules may be treated as guidelines around which you form a game that suits you."

Note that the "Rules for Fantastical Medieval Wargames Campaigns" that make up original D&D were created by and sold to a wargaming community that was almost esclusively white, middle-class men. The rules compiled here offer little by the way of roles for other players, nor indeed for anyone who wouldn't easily identify with a pulp sword-and-sorcery hero. Especially before 1974, the rules made light of slavery, in addition to including other harmful content. To reiterate the disclaimer Wizards of the Coast includes on legacy D&D content, "these depictinos were wrong then and are wrong today. The content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these pejudices never existed."

I'd like to thank a few people who helped me parse and understand this material in various ways, including Bill Meinhardt, Mike Mornard, Dave Megarry, Dave Wesley, Bill Hoyt, Mike Carr, Frank Mentzer, Dan Boggs, and - ever so long ago now - Dave Arneson. I'd also like to thank the team at Wizards, including Judy Bauer, Janica Carter, Matt Cole, Kate Irwin, Bob Jordan, and Jason Tondro.

And there is that. Only a single paragraph that talks about a controversy OTHER than Gygax and Arneson fighting over DnD. IT doesn't mention women AT ALL, doesn't call anyone out, and actually specifically focuses on the "Rules for Fantastical Medieval Wargames Campaigns" and material from before DnD was published!

So, here we have a really interesting scenario. I'm not on Twitter, but supposedly a whole lot of people hated these two writers for calling Gygax sexist.... which they didn't even do. They said sexism was in the early game, along with bad depictions of slavery, slurs against a wide variety of people, and general tone deafness for the modern day... which amusingly enough, no one has ever denied is in the early game.

The judgement? The hatred? The vitriol? The condemnations? None of it is here. Riggs might have done some of that, but he was reacting to people who were blasting these two authors for these words. None of which should have even raised an eyebrow from someone even loosely aware of the game's history.

TiQuinn · Jul 10, 2024

jayoungr said:
And I think he sounds "really sexist" by today's standards, but he wasn't that much of an outlier in the mid-1970s. It was a lot more socially acceptable at the time for people who held those ideas to express them--even though yes, there would also be people who would push back against them. Nowadays, there would be more social pressure not to be open about those thoughts even if you hold them (and we all know there are people who do).

Except he published this crap. That’s what I don’t think folks are quite grokking. This wasn’t “guy at the bar making comments about his wife’s cooking” stuff.

This was “I have a bit of a bone to pick and I’m going to publish it for everyone to see, and oh btw, I know I’m right because I read a book about biological determinism once” stuff.

Doctor Futurity · Jul 10, 2024

jayoungr said:
First, exactly what era are you talking about?

Second, I think you need to separate science fiction and fantasy. Fantasy has always been full of female authors writing successfully under female names at least since the 1960s, which is when the genre really started to take off. In addition to Ursula LeGuin, whom you've already mentioned, I can think off the top of my head of Madeleine L'Engle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Diana Wynne Jones, Patricia McKillip, Anne McCaffrey, Tamora Pierce, and Mercedes Lackey. They all had successful writing careers in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, I'd say fantasy was one of the easier genres for women to get published in at that time.

In science fiction, the numbers of women writing under female names are smaller, but you still had people like Diane Duane and Diane Carey (writing Star Trek novels). Some of the successful female fantasy writers, like Anne McCaffrey, also wrote science fiction under their own names. And Andre Norton, despite using a male pen name, didn't make her identity particularly secret. I remember reading editions of her YA books from 70s/80s, checking the “About the Author” section, and seeing female pronouns used for her. At the time, I just assumed that “Andre” could be a unisex name.

Well, I did state that fantasy fiction was allowing more women (e.g. le Guin) to use their full names without issue. Likewise, my point was that the 70's was the turning point for a lot of this....but the fact that it was still prevalent is indisputable. If it wasn't we wouldn't be having this conversation about certain attitudes of a certain author at the time. Likewise, yes, the field was getting more women authors which was great. But the reality was pretty clear: if you were breaking in to the field, and wanted to boost sales, it was often better to obscure that you were a woman to avoid a stigmatism from the general readership. That said....things were changing, yes. I remember meeting Lee Gold in the mid eighties at a convention (I had been subbing to A&E for a while, and was in the fanzine scene myself) and it was a real delight to meet her, but the story that sparked my response felt unfortunately true to me which is why I wanted to comment.

Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to imply it was all bad; it wasn't, and this was the time we saw an explosion of women in science fiction and fantasy, and the era where more acceptance built out. But I am not going to ignore that I lived through that area and saw plenty of men express disdain at the idea of female authors. Ironically I did not see gamers expressing that feeling, because we were all second-wave RPGers, the kids who were teens in the 80s, and either know of some girls who played (I often ran games for my sister and her friends, for example) or wished girls would consider playing....but most girls (ime) in high school and going in to college that I and my friends of the time knew had their own social pressures and expectations imposed on them, and D&D was considered a distinctly nerdy hobby for boys, not something girls would get involved with. The girls who got into it were also part of the geek/nerd subclass of the day, and were welcomed by everyone I knew, because the only time we ever saw any of the older, usually heavily bearded grognard class of gamer was at conventions.

I guess what that tells me, as I think about it, was that another reason you could have a real schism in how older gamers in some groups feel about this article is not because they are defending Gygax's bad behavior, but because back in that era they were the kids who saw Gygax as more like an unassailable mentor/hero who produced the hobby which honestly saved nerds everywhere from being purely ostracized by pop culture. What's sad is if those guys grew up assimilating those poor attitudes, or feeling like they are defensible positions....which was my point, I guess.

EDIT: Worth noting I doubt most kids playing in the 80's ever read any of the material where Gygax really goes off the deep end. Most people had limited resources and it was not typical to know much of anything about what was going on with people in the hobby, because of course it was the pre-internet era. I, as an example, was the only one in my entire county I knew of who had Dragon Magazine and White Dwarf subscriptions. Heck, I wrote, published and subbed to multiple fanzines and I don't recall anyone talking about this stuff (except maybe the T&T crowd which mostly liked bashing the D&D crowd!)

D&D Historian Benn Riggs On Gary Gygax & Sexism

Doctor Futurity

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Meet the Woman Who by 1976 Was the Most Important Gamer in Roleplaying After Gary

payn

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Whizbang Dustyboots

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Zardnaar

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jayoungr

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TiQuinn

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Chaosmancer

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