Lord of the Hackers: lame NYT article

[PenguinKing]

That's nice, but the matter of "choice" is also irrelevant to the point you yourself were trying to make. Your contention was that female roleplayers were as a minority insigificant. Reality check: a minority has to be a hell of a lot smaller than one in five - or even one in ten, as I think my example illustrates - before it can be dismissed as insignificant.

(And the comparison between women who roleplay and women who don't is also inapt, because then you would be required to stack up roleplayers as a whole against non-roleplayers as a whole - which tells us nothing about the specific population makeup of the former. Keep your comparisons within the relevant populations, yes?)

- Sir Bob.

P.S. Nih!

 

[V-2]

OK, I'll try one more time, and then I'll give up.

%age of women in U.S. population = roughly 50 = not a minority

%age of women who play RPGs = roughly 20 = a minority

Definition of "minority" = a whole lot less than 50%

Q: Why just 20% women?
A: Depends on whom you ask--Turtle, her daughter, or Pladoh.

 

[PenguinKing]

You can lawyer definitions all you want - the term "minority" doesn't necessarily equate to "insignificant". You can establish that most women don't play RPGs - fine, no one is disputing that. The percentage of women who role-play is a minority.

However, most men don't play RPGs, either. Men who roleplay, as compared to the entire population, are a minority as well.

Hence, drawing a comparison to the general population doesn't get us anywhere.

Of course, when you say "%age of women who play RPGs", you might not mean what you're saying - that sentence says "the percentage of women who are roleplayers", but you might really mean "the percentage of roleplayers who are women". Operating on that assumption, we could make the statement "most roleplayers are not women" - which would be valid, on the face of it.

However, to conclude from that "most women aren't interested in roleplaying" is singularly meaningless in context - most everybody isn't interested in roleplaying, regardless of age, gender, etc.

- Sir Bob.

P.S. Nih!

 

[Pielorinho]

Re: rebutting Lord of the Hackers

What spurred me to write this rebuttal was a woman that was on dungeons
and dragons message board made a post that she would like some one
that was more eloquent with word then herself to rebut this article.

Setting the record straight

Just curious -- which woman was that?

(Not that I mind people getting my gender wrong -- happens all the time; but if you're going to decry someone's lack of research and misunderstanding of gender in our hobby, you may want to correct this pronoun. Unless, of course, you were making fun of me for getting her gender wrong in the first post, in which all bets are off )

Honestly, I don't think the article is terrible; I don't think it's really propagandistic. But I think she also doesn't really know what she's talking about when it comes to fantasy and its relationship to computers. In fact, I don't think she understands literary history worth a hill of beans.

While a lot of fantasy writing is binary (orcs bad, humans good), a lot is not (Ged problematic, Atuan problematic). And a lot of other literature contains binary concepts, as she puts it: The Bible, Norse mythology, many wartime news stories, cowboy movies, and even Oprah Book-of-the-Month-club selections. The good-vs-evil is a solid thread in our culture, not one that's promoted by programmers.

Lord of the Rings, remember, was also real popular among sixties peace activists, psychedelic artists, and other countercultural elements. Hardly folks you'd call binary thinkers.

In some ways, she's onto something: there is a correlation between computer programmers and fantasy buffs, and there's a correlation between computer programmers and males, and there's a correlation between fantasy buffs and gamers, and there's a correlation between gamers and males. But her thesis -- "[The computer] culture has a particular way of using the computer to think about the world, a binary perspective that is appealing but problematic" -- is, I believe, deeply flawed.

Next post, I'll tear apart some of her individual points.

Daniel

As someone pointed out, the computer error message is "Abort, Retry, Fail?"; I'm wondering if she wants to retry.

 

[Pielorinho]

Okay, blow by blow:

The personal computer movement of the 1970's and early 1980's was deeply immersed in Middle Earth and translated it into hugely popular (and enduring) role-playing games like "Dungeons and Dragons."

Cite please? I didn't realize that Gygax was part of the personal computer movement in the 1970's and 1980's.

These days computer programmers appropriate the standard Tolkien palette of elves, knights, wizards and dwarfs to build their online fantasy games.

Well, sure, some of them do. Others, like Doom or Civilization or Deus Ex or The Sims, don't. Does she claim that all these games have a binary worldview?

One online contributor theorizes that the rings, the central metaphor and driving force of the story — they empower and corrupt all who wear them — are "hardware-only" computers "with all their operating code permanently burned into their structure."

Oh, please. Another online contributor theorizes that the Rings are actually SUVs. Another online contributor theorizes that George Bush wears a ring. Another online contributor theorizes that the entire fellowship were gay hobbit-fetishists. What conclusions does she draw from these online contributions?

In "Dungeons and Dragons," for instance, character attributes like charisma or strength are assigned according to a point system. There is little room for psychological ambivalence or complex motivations in such a personality.

This is the one that really got me. There's plenty of room for psychological ambivalence and complex motivations in such a personality, as long as you don't think the numbers equal the personality.

Frodo, the hero of "The Lord of the Rings," is part of a fellowship, although it is more properly called a fraternity: in Tolkien's world, the men bond.

Nuh uh. A fellowship is a bunch of fellows. Perfectly proper terminology.

And the computer culture, by and large, is a world built by engineers for engineers, by men for men.

Nuh uh. Plenty of women use computers. Does she really think we're buying this?

My 10-year-old daughter has noticed the resemblance between "The Lord of the Rings" and computer games — in both substance and form. There are no girls in either, she says, because "girls don't do these kinds of adventures."

Look, it's not our fault that she's not raising her daughter right. My 8-year-old triplet cousins love Dungeons and Dragons; Jennifer and Maria are as into it as Patrick is. Is Ms. Turkell giving her daughter Barbie dolls and videos and play-makeup sets and junior baker ovens, and then not expecting the poor girl to pick up on social gender roles?

Middle Earth offers its own version of "sport death." In the movies or on the computer, life is danger and triumph, screen by screen.

Um, in literature, we call "sport death" "conflict." All stories have to have conflict, goes the traditional wisdom. Life in much literature is danger and triumph, chapter by chapter.

But the work of J. R. R. Tolkien captures a certain computational aesthetic that is reflected in the mass culture.

Interesting -- but again, it's wrong. Tolkien's Manichean (sp?) duality between good and evil may be really appealing right now, but it's bizarre to credit this duality to computers. Surely Tolkien isn't as big an influence in our popular culture and rhetoric as, oh, say, the Bible; is she writing an article about how computer culture embraced the Bible for its binary world view, and how computer culture is now infecting presidential speeches through the guise of the Bible?

The thing is, I love this kind of essay, in which the writer uses science or literature as a metaphor for society. It can be done really well.

Which is why it annoys me when someone does it so poorly.

Daniel

(PS: Redmage, the NYT has a fantastic editorial page, whose contributors regularly include such luminaries as Bhoutros Bhoutros Ghali, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Margaret Thatcher, and Bill Clinton. Even the letters column tends to be pretty high-powered. Unfortunately, unless you're a big name somewhere, you're not likely to be printed. If Col_Pladoh wrote a response, OTOH....)

 

[Mark]

I would furthermore respectfully submit that anyone who has a pH.D. but can't get simple, trivially-confirmable facts straight before writing an article for a major publication is a doink.

Hear, hear!

 

[ColonelHardisson]

(PS: Redmage, the NYT has a fantastic editorial page, whose contributors regularly include such luminaries as Bhoutros Bhoutros Ghali, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Margaret Thatcher, and Bill Clinton.

[singing] One of these things is not like the others; one of these things doesn't belong...[/singing]

 

[V-2]

Good one, Colonel H! ROFL!!! Ahhahaha... still laughing... whew... heeheehee...

 

[Kichwas]

2. The reason women are never featured in prominent roles in fantasy IS that the majority of writers (up until Marion Zimmer Bradley and Ursla(sp) LeGuin,) were men.

I have yet to read the article.

On this I just wanted to add my own theory:

I think it has to do with the time period that a lot of the classic works of sci fi and fantasy came out of.

This was a period when western soceity was fairly segregated along gender lines as well as racial.

Male writers of the times wrote women who acted like women of the times were supposed to act. And with the amount of personality depth that those men tended to be able to gain from what little social interaction they would tend to have with women.

Women writers where they existed had the same problems.

In fact in modern writing the problem of people who misrepresent the other gender is still the norm. Authors who get it right are the exception and stand out.

What differs now is that half or more of the writers of fantasy and sci fi are women. And since the 'sexual revolution' of the 60's and 70's men and women in the west have had more open contact. As such we have more experience to draw upon and men are more used to thinking of women as something other than 'domestic decoration'. So they are more likely to feature them in active roles in their stories.

It's not the genre's fault, it's not the author's fault.

Society of the times is to blame.

Now I'll go read the article and see if my comments are actually in context to this discussion.

 

[Kichwas]

Re: comments

please comment on my roast as you see fit.

It has a number of grammatical errors. Particularly in regards to the use and non use of plurals.

If you hadn't submitted it already I would have advised a good solid read through to find and correct errors. There's enough of them in there that it will make your point look weak and ill thought out. People put a lot of weight into grammer when they read an argument. Especially a letter calling someone to task; even if rightly so.