D&D General The Human Side of D&D History - From Gary Gygax to Temple of Elemental Evil

[Sacrosanct]

Why would it have been up to Gary, alonge, to secure his family's well-being? Why wasn't Mary out in the workforce?

Even if you ignore the cultural pressure to keep her as a housewife, the laws of the time made it exceptionally hard for women to be in the workforce.

 

[CellarHeroes]

Even if you ignore the cultural pressure to keep her as a housewife, the laws of the time made it exceptionally hard for women to be in the workforce.

The laws sound pretty sexist to me. But, I guess, those were the times.
And now we've come 'round full-circle.

 

[mamba]

Obviously you dissaprove.

yes

He wouldn’t be the first artist or creative person to lose a job over a passion (not sure how accurate it is or not this is the cause of him losing the job but let’s concede it here for argument’s sake). And he would not be the first person to struggle with balancing life priorities like work and creative outlets.

he wouldn’t be, but I do not see how that makes it any better. It seems the ‘he is not the only one’ defense is being used here as well

He took what job he could, and he worked on a project that ended up paying the bills (you might dismiss it as not part of a master plan, but this is an incredibly difficult thing to do: it takes hard work, planning, seeing opportunities and taking them and talent).

and luck, most people who do the exact same thing remain anonymous and broke

Plus his children seem to have largely good things to say about the guy.

good for them, he certainly spent more time with then once things got better, and arguably they do not remember all that much from their first years on top of that.

I am not saying he did not love them, and some of it might be explained by him marrying young and being too immature still, but that does not mean he did not neglect his family over his gaming before D&D took off

Gary seems to have afforded his children a fairly good upbringing

once D&D took off he could, before that he was not exactly making that a priority over his hobby, and it could have easily gone the other direction where they stayed in poverty

 

[billd91]

Because I asked Mary and Heidi directly.

More accurately, when Heidi was asked, she said, "Mom, did this ever happen?" And Mary responded, "No, it didn't." I didn't actually ask Mary directly, I had asked Heidi. Maybe 2 years ago now? Can't keep track. Doesn't matter, because I've seen others ask her the same question since and the response was the same.

The question may have been garbled because Mary Jo herself says in the When We Were Wizards podcast that she didn't believe he was always playing games, was suspicious, and she went to confront him just a few blocks away when they lived in Chicago. As she puts it, she knocked on the door and there they were... playing games. It's right there in episode 1, about 15 minutes in.
She doesn't say anything about a basement, doesn't explicitly say she was suspicious of him having an affair (though exactly what else she'd have been suspicious of, I don't know? Drinking? Bringing in strippers?). And it may have been after they already had their second child, going by her comments. But the gist of the story, as she tells it, is a reasonable fit even if not all details are explicitly matched.

 

[mamba]

Why would it have been up to Gary, alonge, to secure his family's well-being? Why wasn't Mary out in the workforce?

because his wife had to raise 5 kids and was busy with ‘housework’ like fixing their clothes, canning fruit and making ends meet in general

She easily spent more time on the family well-being than Gary did

 

[Mannahnin]

There is one aspect of Gygax's words that I haven't seen mentioned that occurred to me:

We know the parts of OD&D books that are considered problematic, and his forum posts defending biological determinism. From these we know that Gygax realized fairly early on that D&D, in his experience, did not appeal to female gamers as much as it did to men.

So that puts a little more context to his1975 comments in EUROPA magazine: he knew that D&D did not appeal to women. He received feedback telling him what he could do to make it more appealing to women (more emphasis on the female role, more non-gendered names, etc...). So how did he react?

His defenders say he responded with sarcasm. Is this really a defense though? Women reached out to him to tell him how he could make D&D more appealing to them and he responds with sarcasm. A sarcastic response is not a joke - it is a way to tell your audience that you do not consider the triggering statement to be worthy of a serious answer - and this is directed towards people who are interested in the game.

( for the record, I view the first part of his comments to be sarcastic, but everything from "Damn right, I'm a sexist" is in deadly earnest. I can't envision using "damn right" for emphasis in a sarcastic manner - it screams real anger to me)

And then, years later, he talks about biological determinism, in which he comes right out to say, effectively, that women do not like to play games, except for the games they do like to play because those aren't really games. And he used an example of Lionel making pastel colored trains to appeal to girls as evidence that coding toys to girls doesn't work.

Can you really read Gygax's forum posts without seeing them as an " It's not me, it's you" response?

Gygax was told early on what he could do to make D&D more appealing to women in a way far more significant than coloring things pastel. Rather than using this as an opportunity to learn from his customers, he sarcasticly mocked their concerns and justified it by blaming everyone else, rather than consider that his game could be improved.

TSR era gamers were < 10% female. Currently, the numbers are around 40%. Maybe if Gygax had taken the criticisms seriously and made an effort to appeal to female gamers back in 1e AD&D and B/X, TSR would not have been in the dire financial straits of 1984-85 that led to the management shakeup.

But in 2005, he was still blaming women for having the wrong type of brain to enjoy D&D.

100%.

And the irony is that he seems to have stubbornly stuck his head in the sand about how the new game category he helped create and did the most to publicize and spread (RPGs) was MUCH more appealing to women than wargames had been.

Jon Peterson has documented (in his article The First Female Gamers, among other places), that D&D and its related games massively increased the population of women gamers. From 0.5% as surveyed by SPI's Strategy & Tactics magazine in '73-'74, to Gary's estimation in 1979 that at least 10% of D&D players were female. Twenty times the share.

Gary's there mocking and putting down women, while Lee Gold was publishing the biggest and most influential APA D&D zine. Her story about how stunned he was the first time they spoke on the phone and learned she was a woman is a classic.

By the time Gary made his comments on ENworld about being a biological determinist, in 2004, IIRC roughly 38% of D&D's surveyed players were women.

Why is any of this important for us pointing out that Gary was sexist in paragraph 2? See paragraph 1. I'm sure a lot of us would be perfectly fine with letting the subject go... if it weren't for the flare-ups from paragraph 1. People like Tondro and Peterson deserve to be defended from the slings and arrows of outrageous reactions and the inevitable sea-lioning and whataboutisms that accompany these debates rather than leave them isolated and unsupported.

Right. This fight happened in July and sprang up again now because some people wanted to "defend Gary" to the point of attacking and personally insulting honest and reasonable historians who didn't even name Gary. And when Riggs brought receipts to point out that the attackers didn't have a leg to stand on, they doubled down. Much as Gary did in 1975.

 

[Steampunkette]

To me, Gygax's story is a pretty classic one of a frustrated creative person struggling to find a way to express his passion, and finally succeeding against all odds. Made harder, in this case, because he and others had to basically invent a new medium to get their ideas out there. I think what they accomplished is amazing, and the guy certainly put the hours in.

Anyone who doesn't have to fight to pay their bills pretty much invariably turns to creating art.

I love that about humans. <3

If you don't think context is important, there's nothing more to say. Context is one of the most important things that there is in a conversation. People who want to willfully ignore context just want to win the internet and I'm not in the discussion for that.

This is the same dodge.

You're trying to say you're not defending Gygax's sexism while also directly minimizing Gygax's sexism.

Your reason for minimizing Gygax's sexism is "Other people argued he was a sexist and provided examples of him being a sexist and in fact out of line with other people in his own day and age" which is... y'know. Certainly a choice. We do, after all, have a nationwide poll where 15% of 77 million respondents over 18 didn't outright disagree with the rant Gygax sent to Europa Magazine and 85% directly disagreed with his overt sexism in that letter.

So, y'know, top 15% of sexism in the 1970s. Certainly not a top 200 achiever slapping every girl's butt and demanding female employees sleep with him or lose their jobs, of course, but still down there with rest of the rotting chaff -vastly- outnumbered by people who didn't agree with his sexism.

But you're still minimizing his sexism in the post that I quoted. Which goes directly against your statements that:

1) You didn't post that. (You did)
2) You're not trying to excuse his sexism (You're minimizing it)

The "Context" in this case is irrelevant because it doesn't refute or otherwise address these two issues at hand.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Why is any of this important for us pointing out that Gary was sexist in paragraph 2? See paragraph 1. I'm sure a lot of us would be perfectly fine with letting the subject go... if it weren't for the flare-ups from paragraph 1. People like Tondro and Peterson deserve to be defended from the slings and arrows of outrageous reactions and the inevitable sea-lioning and whataboutisms that accompany these debates rather than leave them isolated and unsupported.

Sure. And I really wish people would stop getting all worked up over those things. I think I made a post the other day directed at Tenkar's video, so my opinion on that is pretty clear

 

[Steampunkette]

100%.

And the irony is that he seems to have stubbornly stuck his head in the sand about how the new game category he helped create and did the most to publicize and spread (RPGs) was MUCH more appealing to women than wargames had been.

Jon Peterson has documented (in his article The First Female Gamers, among other places), that D&D and its related games massively increased the population of women gamers. From 0.5% as surveyed by SPI's Strategy & Tactics magazine in '73-'74, to Gary's estimation in 1979 that at least 10% of D&D players were female. Twenty times the share.

Gary's there mocking and putting down women, while Lee Gold was publishing the biggest and most influential APA D&D zine. Her story about how stunned he was the first time they spoke on the phone and learned she was a woman is a classic.

By the time Gary made his comments on ENworld about being a biological determinist, in 2004, IIRC roughly 38% of D&D's surveyed players were women.

For those who want context on the Lee Gold story!

 

[tetrasodium]

I have no idea how you think the stuff you posted helps with that in any form, or relates to a proto-satanic panic

All it shows is that Gary had a mighty high opinion of himself “Why do we [wargamers] constitute such a limited elite”… and then goes on to describe how the middle class and up supposedly are, which he clearly must consider himself a part of while only having a high school degree and barely making ends meet as a cobbler because his obsession with wargames got him fired from his white collar job… delusions of grandeur

Although it looks like he wrote something about a totally different topic about 50 pages earlier☆, that was not written by him. Also you did not answer or address any of the post 112 questions & problems about your own points about why your "Gygax was sexist" claims matters in relation to what he created. You obviously care deeply about making sure that everyone knows that "gygax was a sexist", but you undercut the credibility of your own message with all this twisting & evasion when prompted for specifics on how that was relevant to his creations. You haven't even risen to the level of showing so much as a tenuous"those people don't matter"→"uhh... thaco the clown is obviously a blast aimed at those people" level link between "gygax was sexist" & his work

☆ TSR had apparently released something called star probe, I did not read that section.