Today there are women marching and protesting on the streets. Posts like that are why these marches are still needed. I can’t imagine just how frustrated Kate has to be to constantly have people question her qualifications because she’s a woman, or because she’s beautiful. It would drive me to road rage levels myself if I had to deal with that.
And regarding the posts about her experience. There’s a lot of speculation going on by people who have never been part of a design team (in any co text, not just rpgs). I am a systems analyst for my day job, and I’ve also happened to designed several games.
I’m telling you, in no uncertain terms, that skill sets and processes from designing a software enhancement are transferable to designing RPGs. You identify the project. You identify the scope. You gather requirements. You build test cases and wire frames. The developers do mock ups. The testers write scripts for as many possible scenarios as they can test. Then they test them. Defects or processes not working as the client intends are sent back the devs. Finally the project gets sign off and then implementation.
Looking at her experience with GW2, I am 95% certain she has been involved in these types of processes.
So can we stop second guessing her ability? Especially if you’ve never done anything like this yourself?
I find it incredibly irritating. Armchair designers who love to complain about others often on processes they don’t understand while refusing to put their money where their mouth is.
Here is the deal when you put woman or minorities right into your requirements list you automatically made her gender an issue, that is NOT on any poster here, it is on WotC for taking the sloppy lazy approach to diversity.
Look for the sake of honesty I'm MRA and antifeminist, but I've voted for women, supported women to be both Prime Minister and Premier in the province I live in, am pre-choice, and where the pink ribbon when I don't misplace it. And I like organic diversity.
While it looks bad that she doesn't fit the prerequisites as dictated by WotC, something they could have made a preference and not a prequiste if it wasn't a deal breaker.
My critisms are for WotC, not her at all, she seems creative, imaginative, and a bunch of wonderful other personality traits that certainly are assets.
My issue is how WotC approached this thing, they brought this on themselves, putting in a diversity requirement, and then picking one who has no experience in TTRPGS design, heck her CRPG experience is in UIs, not story building, after they made it clear that was an important requirement looks bad, especially since it's far from unheard of for under qualified women to get jobs to boost artificial gender targets. It happened at Marvel Comics and it was a disaster (diversity and comics is great for more info on that) among admittedly many other choices.
And not liking this doesn't make make anyone sexist, heck it's not even an attack on Kate Welsh, it wasn't her call to make, and I'm absolutely giving her a chance to be awesome and wow me.
And honestly I think while her gender was an asset I think her relative fame via aquistions inc., and her connections at WotC.
And while her experience video game and web page design might utilities similar skills as TTRPG design, it gives us real TTRPG writing to look at and say wow, that's awesome or bad, is an issue.
Again I have nothing against Kate Walsh and wish her the best, but how WotC went about this was rotten, they brought this done upon themselves and yelling sexism at critics is a cope out.
And before you shout you're against women in the industry, because SJWs are predictable that way, some of my favourite game designers and D&D authors are women, Erin M. Evans, Rose Baily, Meghan Fitzgerald, , Elaine Cunningham, and many others. This is one of the reasons qoutas are bad for the people it's suppose to help, it leaves this question mark over their careers, did this person earn it or was it given to them in the same of diversity (which damages the idea of diversity because it gets associated with poor quality stuff, which is really unfortunate). It also sets people up for the glass cliff.
Now Kate seems to have a really strong passion for D&D and a positive attitude, and she likes FR, so again I'm very hopeful until proven otherwise.
PS the marches are silly, women have massive advantages over men in most societies, legal, instinctual, cultural, from divorce courts sexism against men, women get less pension time for the exact same crime, women are less likely to die of suicide, die in the work place, less likely to be homeless, in some states men are excluded from the protection of laws against rape, and all a woman needs to do to destroy a man's career is make an accusation over twitter. Oh and in most countries with a draft women don't get drafted, aka forced military slavery. There are no government funded Domestic Violence shelters for me in most places, but tons for female victims of domestic, even the at the lowest men make up 33% of domestic violence victims. Seriously watch the red pill documentary, you can find it on YouTube (for a cost), Google Play, and Hulu.
