Sexism in Table-Top Gaming: My Thoughts On It, and What We Can Do About It

[Umbran]

I would consider an attempt to physically block access to a booth in the dealer hall to be worse than the offensive material in the booth itself.

In addition, it is usually illegal. If the business is not actually breaking the law, denying public access can get you arrested.

 

[Dioltach]

I must say, of all the difficulties I've experienced among my gaming groups, sexism has not featured, beyond the occasional obvious joke that will be met with and matched by similar comments from the women in my groups. Most of the banter touches on other subjects, though, and that's what it is: banter. I only play with friends, and we joke around. I'm pretty sure that anyone who is sexist -- or who discriminates on any other grounds -- would quickly find themself dropped from the group and most likely from any other form of contact.

 

[Salamandyr]

There are so many problematic points made in the opening piece that I don't really know where to begin. But I guess the most egregious one to start out with is...

You have every right to decide what you like, are interested in, and what your boundaries are. You have zero right to decide what those boundaries are for other people. You call out Cthulhutech for having material you personally find objectionable. I'm with you that far. I get that it's a game you might not want to play. I've never played it myself either...I'm more of a heroic fantasy roleplayer than a horror roleplayer.

Where you go too far is your insistence that, because rape and sexual assaults are something you cannot handle comfortably in a game, that means that no one else should be able to deal with those in a game scenario either. Uh-uh. Flag on the play. Go back ten yards.

Really, think about this. You call them out for having a scenario where Nazis have a device for sexual torture. Keep in mind, that in real life, Nazis murdered 6 million people! They tortured people, sexually and otherwise. And, you're talking about a game involving eldritch horrors that can literally make your brain explode!

Like I said, I personally prefer heroic games where the good guys (PC's) manage to stop the bad guys in the nick of time, so the really horrible stuff is only about to happen and never does. But that ain't any game with the word Cthulhu in the title. That's a clear signal that bad stuff is going to happen and your PC might make it out alive, but definitely not whole.

If you don't like that material (and it's not my cup of tea either) you are perfectly free not to buy it. That's the free market. If there aren't enough people who want that material, they'll quit making it. But if there are, you and I should have no right to stop them, or criticize them.

Not everything has to be for you.

 

[Umbran]

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, summarizing Voltaire.

There is a fine line between telling someone they shouldn't say a thing, and insisting that they may not say a thing or acting to prevent them from speaking.

It is important to register our disagreement, but attempts to outright silence opposition are ethically problematic. On EN World, we have a prior agreement with every user that they have to keep speech in-bounds. But that does not generalize to the world at large.

 

[Libertad]

This hits on something very important in such discussions.

Dismissing folks for some perceived personal flaw is ad hominem. You know: logical fallacy, rhetorical weak sauce, and all that. You can't just go lump "a lot of" people together and shuffle their opinions off into a corner as a class. Either they have a point, or they don't, but you need to actually counter their points, rather than dismiss many (really, effectively all) folks who have the same opinion or behavior because in your personal estimation they all come from a common, invalid source.

If they're wrong, you can demonstrate that without the stereotyping.

Except that the feminists I'm referring to I mostly met in RL. And they were usually my age or even older.

Sorry about that. It's just that I've experienced a lot of folks take the worst examples (like Andrea Dworkin and the SCUM Manifesto) as the face of feminism while disregarding the others (such as Gloria Steinem and bell hooks). Which unfortunately does contribute to negative perception of feminism.

I'm definitely glad I'm in Germany because if people gather to protest at a fair something will usually happen to get rid of the cause, not those protesting. Unless the people protesting have nothing to do with the usual fair-goers and have only come to protest.

1.) Taking advantage of drugged people is a problem hard to tackle. I remember one case among my then-friends where the girl claimed rape and the young man was claiming she was setting him up because he (equally drunk) was absolutely sure it was all normal sex, and one case where the not drunk boy read the girl's signals totally wrong.

In games, this situation sometimes comes up in the standard tavern setting. I don't remember details but the elf tried to get the human barmaid drunk enough to get her to his room in one of my games a while ago. The paladin of the group stopped him ingame, and the elf claimed that this was were half-elves came from. This was all totally in character, however I had the clear impression that one player wasn't happy about it. When asked after the game he claimed it was fine, though, probably not wanting to be seen as a wuss or something. I solved the constant skirt chasing of the elf by making the country they were in very strict regarding sexual conduct but it continued to be an issue here and there.

"My char would totally do that" - how often do we hear this when relating to sexually inappropriate behavior? I now usually ask for a description of the char's behavior tendencies beforehand to disallow chars which overly play on their sexuality, but sometimes it just happens during char development.

If anyone ever would get with the "get over it" routine in regards to any sort of violence they'd likely be gone from my table. But then I am really trying to keep violence low as much as possible, big battle scenes excluded.

2.) One of my campaigns needed to stay away from mentioning children in trouble btw, because one player had been abused as a kid. Best thing really is to know your players well, and with strangers at convention games and such I think it is best to play adventures where such situations do not arise - or make it very clear in the game description what the storyline is.

1.) I do not know much about the situation, but that is definitely a problem of why it's so hard to deal with. Intoxication is problematic because it impairs communication and makes it that much harder to reaffirm or withdraw consent.

Edit In regards to misreading signals, well that can be closer to rape when the aggressor is not drunk. It's imperative to know that the person you're having sex with is giving enthusiastic consent.

But I do not entirely know of your situations and what happened in them, so I can't make a definite judgment. But there are many cases where clearly intoxicated women are unable to say no or fight back, and sexual predators take advantage of this.

2.) Agreed. Particularly with strangers, we do not know what they went through, so it's best to err on the side of caution.

This is one of those internet problems to me that I've never seen at the gaming table. I'm sure it exists and I'm sure there are problems at conventions but it is hard to fix a problem that I never see. The important thing is if you are at a game and it gets uncomfortable to speak out. It doesn't have to be just sexism either, the violence of some players can bother people, the tone of the game can bother people, there are many reasons.

One of the biggest problems though is the internet. There are plenty of people being offensive here because they can with zero consequences. I don't think you can fix that in a way that would not cause a lot of other issues.

The best one can do Internet-wise is the use of forum rules, IP bans of troublemakers, other users criticizing said content when it does arise, etc. Various message boards have ways of cutting down racist/sexist/homophobic/etc statements this way.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, summarizing Voltaire.

There is a fine line between telling someone they shouldn't say a thing, and insisting that they may not say a thing or acting to prevent them from speaking.

It is important to register our disagreement, but attempts to outright silence opposition are ethically problematic. On EN World, we have a prior agreement with every user that they have to keep speech in-bounds. But that does not generalize to the world at large.

The US point of view is that the government restricting speech otherwise will just cause things to go 'underground.' Which is true, in a way. Still, socially unacceptable viewpoints while legal are still pushed down because the believer doesn't want people to yell at them. Or, you get cases where they coat their problematic viewpoints in things which sound more worthy.

In regards to behavior/speech which can make women and minorities feel unwelcome, social disapproval and criticism are valid for this.

There are so many problematic points made in the opening piece that I don't really know where to begin. But I guess the most egregious one to start out with is...

You have every right to decide what you like, are interested in, and what your boundaries are. You have zero right to decide what those boundaries are for other people. You call out Cthulhutech for having material you personally find objectionable. I'm with you that far. I get that it's a game you might not want to play. I've never played it myself either...I'm more of a heroic fantasy roleplayer than a horror roleplayer.

1.) Where you go too far is your insistence that, because rape and sexual assaults are something you cannot handle comfortably in a game, that means that no one else should be able to deal with those in a game scenario either. Uh-uh. Flag on the play. Go back ten yards.

2.) Really, think about this. You call them out for having a scenario where Nazis have a device for sexual torture. Keep in mind, that in real life, Nazis murdered 6 million people! They tortured people, sexually and otherwise. And, you're talking about a game involving eldritch horrors that can literally make your brain explode!

Like I said, I personally prefer heroic games where the good guys (PC's) manage to stop the bad guys in the nick of time, so the really horrible stuff is only about to happen and never does. But that ain't any game with the word Cthulhu in the title. That's a clear signal that bad stuff is going to happen and your PC might make it out alive, but definitely not whole.

3.) If you don't like that material (and it's not my cup of tea either) you are perfectly free not to buy it. That's the free market. If there aren't enough people who want that material, they'll quit making it. But if there are, you and I should have no right to stop them, or criticize them.

Not everything has to be for you.

1.) I never said that rape should be excluded from media, rather I object to poor handling of it.

2.) CthulhuTech handles sexual assault with little to none of the nuance and sensitivity. The authors usually frame it in the sense of fetish material or just for shock value, and this content only became more prominent as the line went on.

3.) There's nothing wrong with criticizing game designers for products they're selling. Lots of people bought CthulhuTech without knowing that things would get this way. And they have a right to voice their displeasure and tell other gamers what they don't like about the game.

 

[Salamandyr]

1.) I never said that rape should be excluded from media, rather I object to poor handling of it.

OK. That's not the sense I get from your piece. I get no sense that you have aesthetic objections to depictions of rape in media, only moral ones. Perhaps you should consider taking that part out and not calling it "sexist" then, since that term is a profoundly moral attack and amounts, in modern parlance, to a call for the offender to be silenced, if not outright charged with criminality.

If your objection is to bad art, then we don't disagree. But perception of bad art is subjective, and even bad art sometimes finds an audience.

2.) CthulhuTech handles sexual assault with little to none of the nuance and sensitivity of real-world atrocities. The authors usually frame it in the sense of fetish material or just for shock value, and this content only became more prominent as the line went on.

And since they are doing so in an imaginary medium, who cares? Granted, it's not for everyone. You're pretty clear that you don't like it. It's not my thing either. But if it finds an audience who does like it, and can pay enough money to support it, they aren't hurting anyone.

3.) There's nothing wrong with criticizing game designers for products they're selling. Lots of people bought CthulhuTech without knowing that things would get this way. And they have a right to voice their displeasure and tell other gamers what they don't like about the game.

They absolutely can. I just lit a fire under WOTC for their recent goblin & kobolds article. And if you can show enough consumers who would buy their product, if only the got rid of the material you find objectionable, then you might get them to remove the material. All you have to show is there ismore money to be made without that material than they make currently selling to customers who desire that material.

It sounds, and maybe I'm wrong, but it sounds, like you're saying "the people who want that material are bad people, so they shouldn't get what they want, and you should make your product the way I say, even though you will lose money and customers, because I represent the good people."

That sounds like entitlement to me.

 

[Morrus]

And since they are doing so in an imaginary medium, who cares? Granted, it's not for everyone. You're pretty clear that you don't like it. It's not my thing either. But if it finds an audience who does like it, and can pay enough money to support it, they aren't hurting anyone.

You phrase that as a statement and conclusion, but that last bit - "they aren't hurting anyone" - is the debate, isn't it? That's the question, not the conclusion. That's what it's all about. I don't feel there's much interesting conversational mileage in "yes they are", "no they aren't"; so this debate should be about why they are or why they aren't hurting anybody by producing such material.

I say that not having seen the material, of course.

That sounds like entitlement to me.

Yes. "Entitlement" is perfectly appropriate when it's refering to things everyone should be entitled to. A basic level of respect is one of those things.

"the people who want that material are bad people, so they shouldn't get what they want, and you should make your product the way I say, even though you will lose money and customers, because I represent the good people."

Are there exceptions to your strong stance on this? Because I can think of at least one very obvious one. And if agree there's one, then we agree there's potentially more than one; it's just a question of where we choose to put that "harm" line.

 

[Salamandyr]

You phrase that as a statement and conclusion, but that last bit - "they aren't hurting anyone" - is the debate, isn't it? That's the question, not the conclusion. That's what it's all about. I don't feel there's much interesting conversational mileage in "yes they are", "no they aren't"; so this debate should be about why they are or why they aren't hurting anybody by producing such material.

I say that not having seen the material, of course.

I have not seen the material either. But I object to the idea that engaging in fantasy role play has a negative effect on anyone except, possibly, the group participating. The very essence of freedom is to be free in your own mind. And the only way that freedom can exist is for others to let other be free. To insist not only on controlling anothers behavior but what someone else gets to think, is, to me, the worst sort of tyranny.

 

[Libertad]

The difference between personal fantasies and gaming products is that the latter is being sold to the general public and thus extends beyond one's home games.

Tabletop gaming is a collaborative effort, so what is personally fun for you may be deeply unfun for others. And many sensitive issues (depiction of real-world racism, rape, etc) hit too close to home for many gamers. It can hurt people in the sense of reliving traumatic memories, and lead to angry arguments when one or more players insist on their characters acting like misanthropic jackasses.

 

[Salamandyr]

That's not a valid difference. Each party has voluntarily chosen to participate. The fact that something is available in the marketplace doesn't affect you at all, unless you choose to participate.

And knowing something exists isn't participation.