What are you reading in 2025?

[Steampunkette]

@Steampunkette @Ruin Explorer @Clint_L @Voadam

I got sucked into revisiting this thread from last year today, and remembered that we had a general discussion about how uncommon sexual assault was in our gaming experiences, compared to what the article reported from Fine's book. That reminded me that I did note this surprising and depressing observation when I read Shared Fantasy this year. Just verifying now that I've read that. Fine did report it being very commonplace in his field observations, to the extent that one reason some of the boys and men he gamed with objected to women and girls attending games was that they felt a social pressure to tone down the subject matter if women were present.

Yyyyyyyyyyup.

 

[gban007]

Well, after my earlier confusion, have now read a Memory called Empire as well. Not as heavy as Fifth Season in terms of themes and events, but very engrossing and harder to put down. Raced through it, but very strong book with its own questions and reflections on different cultures and what an empire is like. I found the ending a bit melancholy but definitely want to read the sequel.

Outside of that, continuing a bit of a Stephen King read following the Stand, have reread Carrie - another good read, though tough at times especially having read the forward around the inspirations for it - and planning to reread IT soon.

Also recently read Galactic Front by MD Cooper - latest book in long running series, though been a bit of a gap since the prior entry. Great to be back reading around characters I have gotten to know and love, and contains it usual amount of tension, mystery and action.

 

[Retros_x]

I'm also reminded of George Lucas' dialogue. Some of those sentences required actors to work really hard to try to make it sound natural.

Or the actors just changing it. If I recall correctly Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher famously dunked on Lucas' writing and changed a lot of dialogue "Thats not how people talk, George"

 

[Mannahnin]

Yeah, I expect there were examples of it and that he found multiple instances of it in his interviews and observations.

I still find it a jump to the Danielson reported conclusion that sexual violence was often integral to the gaming.

"Men in private gaming groups often expressed an explicit and violent male chauvinism. Fine detailed the violent actions verbally role-played by gamers through their fictional characters but says that violent role-playing does not indicate violent real-world behavior and may even have therapeutic value by providing an outlet for aggression. This type of role-playing meant that sexual violence and misogyny often (but not always) became integral to the gaming, and Fine himself observed the frequent use of rape and violence against female nonplayer characters encountered during gaming sessions, as well as sexist jokes."

I guess it comes down to how "often" is understood or how broadly misogyny is defined or how much it is misogyny versus sexual violence. Is often taken as unfortunately high given the subject, or does it mean majority?

I see roleplaying violence as common then and now and can easily see considering it integral to the gaming as it is a big part of the default game play, the game mechanics, and the baseline action fantasy. It synchs up with expectations easily.

Sexual violence, and not just as a background element but the frequent active rape of NPCs during game sessions to the point that it is considered integral to the gaming just seems counter to both my experience of all male gaming in the 80s and what seems reasonable to expect. I could see some making that a regular big thing for them in their games and push it regularly, but that seems like it would be niche at best. Like the Gor subgroup of fantasy fans as opposed to the Lord of the Rings baseline. I can see it existing and existing a bunch, but having it be considered the integral baseline seems off.

I agree that as a younger gamer coming into RPGs in the 80s, sexual violence appearing in games I was involved with was very much the exception, and fellow adolescent players who thought it appropriate fare made me and by brother (my main early gaming buddy) distinctly uncomfortable.

One of the observations I had of Shared Fantasy, which Danielson was referring to, was that SA/SV seemed much more commonplace and acceptable than I would have expected, in the groups Fine played with in the Twin Cities area in the period he studied, which was IIRC roughly '76-'80. So when I came back across our posts from last December it occurred to me that either A) this was a regional thing, and the early game groups Fine played with (including MAR Barker's circle and the club in Minneapolis which was tangential to Arneson's immediate circle) were aberrant exceptions, or B) there was already a significant cultural shift in this regard between the latter half of the 70s and our own young game experiences in the 80s. Maybe some combination of the two.

Reading Danielson's comments in Steampunkette's OP in that thread after having actually read Shared Fantasy myself, I didn't feel like Danielson was exaggerating much or misrepresenting. I'm not certain that it was "integral" to the same extent that you've (reasonably, IMO) described violence in general as being, but it seems to have been shockingly (from my perspective) pervasive and accepted.

We know that Arneson included riding birds in his campaigns as a reference to Tarns from Gor, and apparently the Gor books were influential in his gaming circles. So yes, maybe that was part of it.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Yeah, I expect there were examples of it and that he found multiple instances of it in his interviews and observations.

I still find it a jump to the Danielson reported conclusion that sexual violence was often integral to the gaming.

"Men in private gaming groups often expressed an explicit and violent male chauvinism. Fine detailed the violent actions verbally role-played by gamers through their fictional characters but says that violent role-playing does not indicate violent real-world behavior and may even have therapeutic value by providing an outlet for aggression. This type of role-playing meant that sexual violence and misogyny often (but not always) became integral to the gaming, and Fine himself observed the frequent use of rape and violence against female nonplayer characters encountered during gaming sessions, as well as sexist jokes."

I guess it comes down to how "often" is understood or how broadly misogyny is defined or how much it is misogyny versus sexual violence. Is often taken as unfortunately high given the subject, or does it mean majority?

I see roleplaying violence as common then and now and can easily see considering it integral to the gaming as it is a big part of the default game play, the game mechanics, and the baseline action fantasy. It synchs up with expectations easily.

Sexual violence, and not just as a background element but the frequent active rape of NPCs during game sessions to the point that it is considered integral to the gaming just seems counter to both my experience of all male gaming in the 80s and what seems reasonable to expect. I could see some making that a regular big thing for them in their games and push it regularly, but that seems like it would be niche at best. Like the Gor subgroup of fantasy fans as opposed to the Lord of the Rings baseline. I can see it existing and existing a bunch, but having it be considered the integral baseline seems off.

Looking at people I gamed with back in the day, that sort of grossness was around. I wouldn't say that it was integral, but there were some players and some DMs that it seemed like were always bringing those elements to the game.

Yeah, there’s a lot of toxic masculine “someone else made me do it” self-pitying and blaming others in the monster’s narrative. This is pointed out in some derived works such as The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss. One of that novel’s protagonists is the Bride of Frankenstein and she has a lot to take the monster to task for when she finally finds him.

(The Bride in question is the reanimated Justine Moritz, a maidservant whom the monster frames for the murder of Victor's brother William, so she has very good reason to dislike him.)

Both Frankenstein and the Creature have a whole lot of shirking responsibility for their actions. Frankenstein in creating life, the Creature in taking it.

Or the actors just changing it. If I recall correctly Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher famously dunked on Lucas' writing and changed a lot of dialogue "Thats not how people talk, George"

For as many iconic quotes as there are in Star Wars, there are also plenty of examples of clunky (maclunkey?) dialogue.

 

[Umbran]

So when I came back across our posts from last December it occurred to me that either A) this was a regional thing, and the early game groups Fine played with (including MAR Barker's circle and the club in Minneapolis which was tangential to Arneson's immediate circle) were aberrant exceptions, or B) there was already a significant cultural shift in this regard between the latter half of the 70s and our own young game experiences in the 80s. Maybe some combination of the two.

Always consider statistical effects - in this case, our personal gaming experiences, and the reporting you'd see on EN World, are probably going to have been subject to a heavy selection bias.

Like, I was a nerd, but a "good kid" when I started playing in the 80s. Other boys who talked like that about women made me distinctly uncomfortable, and I avoided them. I certainly wouldn't sit around playing games with them for hours on end. I effectively curated my gaming experience in that way, to exclude sexual violence in play.

But that actually implies that folks with other attitudes would be doing the exact same thing - effectively curating themselves into groups that did play in that way. And those two bubbles would not cross too often.

And then, on top of that, EN World has rules of behavior that are not terribly welcoming of folks who suggest such stuff in play. We should expect an over-representation for less-misogynistic play on this site. We might naively take that to mean that sexual violence in play were aberrations, or had ceased due to cultural shifts, when it is perhaps more likely that this site filters against their being represented here.

 

[Mannahnin]

Always consider statistical effects - in this case, our personal gaming experiences, and the reporting you'd see on EN World, are probably going to have been subject to a heavy selection bias.

Like, I was a nerd, but a "good kid" when I started playing in the 80s. Other boys who talked like that about women made me distinctly uncomfortable, and I avoided them. I certainly wouldn't sit around playing games with them for hours on end. I effectively curated my gaming experience in that way, to exclude sexual violence in play.

But that actually implies that folks with other attitudes would be doing the exact same thing - effectively curating themselves into groups that did play in that way. And those two bubbles would not cross too often.

And then, on top of that, EN World has rules of behavior that are not terribly welcoming of folks who suggest such stuff in play. We should expect an over-representation for less-misogynistic play on this site. We might naively take that to mean that sexual violence in play were aberrations, or had ceased due to cultural shifts, when it is perhaps more likely that this site filters against their being represented here.

Certainly, although Danielson was also talking about a period predating the site by a couple of decades, and our present discussion by more than forty years.

Selection bias certainly could be a factor between my, Ruin Explorer's, and Voadam's experiences vs what Fine observed 5-10 years earlier. Though maybe less so in the days when one's available gaming/gaming discussion options were so much more geographically linked and limited. But fair point that, having been people who'd find it discomfiting or appalling back then, we're more likely to have wound up among the regulars here.

 

[Umbran]

Certainly, although Danielson was also talking about a period predating the site by a couple of decades, and our present discussion by more than forty years.

Yeah, but filtering effects carry across the years.

We don't have great statistics from back in the 70s. But, what we can find doesn't support the idea of dramatic culture-wide changes. The Bureau of Justice National Crime Survey, for example, shows that the victimization rate for rape remained largely unchanged from 1973 through 1980. This does not suggest a cultural sea-change on sexual violence between the time the author was talking about, and the time I started playing in 1982. And there's noting about the game that would cause such a filtering.

Curating your own experiences is not all that difficult. But changing culture broadly is - you'd need to be able to point to more than a few personal experiences to support the idea that somehow the world changed after the experiences of the author.

Especially when women speak of personally experiencing sexism in the gaming world prominently through the 80s and 90s? You want us to buy that, "Yeah, gaming was clearly sexist, but sexual violence depicted in play severely decreased, for no particular reason"?

 

[Mannahnin]

Yeah, but filtering effects carry across the years.

Agreed, and I expanded on that in an immediate edit.

We don't have great statistics from back in the 70s. But, what we can find doesn't support the idea of dramatic culture-wide changes. The Bureau of Justice National Crime Survey, for example, shows that the victimization rate for rape remained largely unchanged from 1973 through 1980. This does not suggest a cultural sea-change on sexual violence between the time the author was talking about, and the time I started playing in 1982. And there's noting about the game that would cause such a filtering.

Eh. Sexual violence as perpetrated is not quite the same thing as how common or accepted the presentation of it in media is. James Bond novels were still common and uncontroversial light reading when I was a kid. Fictional heroes (not just villains) "having their way" with protesting women was still pretty mainstream in some material. My observations of TV, movies and printed media definitely included some shifting from the 70s to 80s. And more into the 90s. We know there were substantial changes in some related cultural mores around that period. For example, the suicide rate among married women dropping once no-fault divorce came in (in most US states between '71-'77, though with outliers).

As far as nothing about the game, well, there wasn't really sexual violence in the books, but there were certainly more tangible signs of sexism and misogyny which faded substantially between '74 and the mid 80s. Whether the semi-nude pinup style women in the OD&D books, the seduction abilities Lakofka suggested for female characters in a Dragon article, Gygax declaring himself a proud sexist in a wargaming periodical, or the editors of Dragon condescending to and brushing off complaints from women readers in that period. By the Satanic Panic years you had TSR adopting a much more kid-centered editorial policy, which, while it still didn't much crimp, say, Clyde Caldwell's quasi-pinup portrayals of women, did mean that female characters were definitely not put in SA-style situations.

Curating your own experiences is not all that difficult. But changing culture broadly is - you'd need to be able to point to more than a few personal experiences to support the idea that somehow the world changed after the experiences of the author.

Especially when women speak of personally experiencing sexism in the gaming world prominently through the 80s and 90s? You want us to buy that, "Yeah, gaming was clearly sexist, but sexual violence depicted in play severely decreased, for no particular reason"?

No, that definitely wasn't my intended point or I believe that of anyone in the prior discussion. Sexism and misbehavior toward female gamers was far too common for decades after Fine's observations.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It's always tempting with vampire books to yell "ah ha, you're inspired by Vampire: The Masquerade!" (Which ignores, of course, that Vampire: The Masquerade intentionally tried to cover as many vampire tropes as possible, meaning that a lot of times, the novelists might just be inspired by the OG influences.)

But with Lucy Undying -- which is still great, with the tension really ratcheting up about halfway through -- I'm wondering if the author might have, instead, read/played Thousand Year Old Vampire, which has many of the same themes about memory loss and which isn't, to my knowledge, something that's generally a part of vampire lore. The novel's three intertwined narratives also jump around in time and space in the same way a game of TYOV does.

And the author, who's previously written Buffy novels and other licensed works, is generally geek-adjacent. But she maintains a very minimal social media presence and I don't see any indication that she's a gamer.

In any case, good book. Still reading it, but it's a strong recommendation at the moment. (I also strongly recommend TYOV, which is amazing.)