kyonshi
2024-07-09 08:52:48 UTC
Source:
https://www.enworld.org/threads/d-d-historian-benn-riggs-on-gary-gygax-sexism.705192/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
D&D Historian Benn Riggs On Gary Gygax & Sexism
Thread starter Morrus Start date Yesterday at 11:42 PM
D&D historian Ben Riggs delved into the facts.
The recent book The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977
talks about the early years of D&D. In the book, authors Jon Peterson
and Jason Tondro talk about the way the game, and its writers,
approached certain issues. Not surprisingly, this revelation received
aggressive "pushback" on social media because, well, that sort of thing
does--in fact, one designer who worked with Gygax at the time labelled
it "slanderous".
D&D historian Ben Riggs--author of Slaying the Dragon--delved into the
facts. Note that the below was posted on Twitter, in that format, not as
an article.
D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to
Preserving his Legacy.
The internet has been rending its clothes and gnashing its teeth over
the introduction to an instant classic of TTRPG history, The Making of
Original D&D 1970-1977. Published by Wizards of the Coast, it details
the earliest days of D&D’s creation using amazing primary source materials.
Why then has the response been outrage from various corners of the
internet? Well authors Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro mention that early
D&D made light of slavery, disparaged women, and gave Hindu deities hit
points. They also repeated Wizard’s disclaimer for legacy content which
states:"These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This
content is presented as it was originally created, because to do
otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed."
In response to this, an army of grognards swarmed social media to bite
their shields and bellow. Early D&D author Rob Kuntz described Peterson
and Tondro’s work as “slanderous.” On his Castle Oldskull blog, Kent
David Kelly called it “disparagement.” These critics are accusing
Peterson and Tondro of dishonesty. Lying, not to put too fine a point on
it.So, are they lying? Are they making stuff up about Gary Gygax and
early D&D?
Well, let's look at a specific example of what Peterson and Tondro
describe as “misogyny “ from 1975's Greyhawk. Greyhawk was the first
supplement ever produced for D&D. Written by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz,
the same Rob Kuntz who claimed slander above, it was a crucial text in
the history of the game. For example, it debuted the thief character
class. It also gave the game new dragons, among them the King of Lawful
Dragons and the Queen of Chaotic Dragons. The male dragon is good, and
female dragon is evil. (See Appendix 1 below for more.)
GR9iKUjWsAAete8.jpeg
It is a repetition of the old trope that male power is inherently good,
and female power is inherently evil. (Consider the connotations of the
words witch and wizard, with witches being evil by definition, for
another example.)
Now so-called defenders of Gygax and Kuntz will say that my reading of
the above text makes me a fool who wouldn’t know dragon’s breath from a
virtue signal. I am ruining D&D with my woke wokeness. Gygax and Kuntz
were just building a fun game, and decades later, Peterson and Tondro
come along to crap on their work by screeching about misogyny.
(I would also point out that as we are all white men of a certain age
talking about misogyny, the worst we can expect is to be flamed online.
Women often doing the same thing get rape or death threats.)
Critics of their work would say that Peterson and Tondro are reading
politics into D&D. Except that when we return to the Greyhawk text, we
see that it was actually Gygax and Kuntz who put “politics” into D&D.
The text itself comments on the fact that the lawful dragon is male, and
the chaotic one is female. Gygax and Kuntz wrote: “Women’s lib may make
whatever they wish from the foregoing.”
GR9iGsAW0AAmAOw.jpeg
The intent is clear. The female is a realm of chaos and evil, so of
course they made their chaotic evil dragon a queen.
Yes, Gygax and Kuntz are making a game, but it is a game whose
co-creator explicitly wrote into the rules that feminine power—perhaps
even female equality—is by nature evil. There is little room for any
other interpretation.
The so-called defenders of Gygax may now say that he was a man of his
time, he didn’t know better, or some such. If only someone had told him
women were people too in 1975! Well, Gygax was criticized for this fact
of D&D at the time. And he left us his response.
Writing in EUROPA, a European fanzine, Gygax said:“I have been accused
of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D
isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female
role, more non-gendered names, and so forth."
GR9iyo3XwAAQCtk.jpeg
"I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in
the ‘Raping and Pillaging[’] section, in the ‘Whores and Tavern Wenches’
chapter, the special magical part dealing with ‘Hags and Crones’...and
thought perhaps of adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls,
and Going Viking’. Damn right I am sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if
women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower
in the men’s locker room."
"They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care.
I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair
sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.”
So just to summarize here, Gygax wrote misogyny into the D&D rules. When
this was raised with him as an issue at the time, his response was to
offer to put rules on rape and sex slavery into D&D.
The outrage online directed at Peterson and Tondro is not only entirely
misplaced and disproportional, and perhaps even dishonest in certain
cases...
Part 2: D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to
Preserving his Legacy....it is also directly harming the legacies of
Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz and the entire first generation of genius game
designers our online army of outraged grognards purport to defend.
How? Let me show you.The D&D player base is getting more diverse in
every measurable way, including age, gender, sexual orientation, and
race. To cite a few statistics, 81% of D&D players are Millenials or Gen
Z, and 39% are women. This diversity is incredible, and not because the
diversity is some blessed goal unto itself. Rather, the increasing
diversity of D&D proves the vigor of the TTRPG medium. Like Japanese rap
music or Soviet science fiction, the transportation of a medium across
cultures, nations, and genders proves that it is an important method for
exploring the human condition. And while TTRPGs are a game, they are
also clearly an important method for exploring the human condition. The
fact the TTRPG fanbase is no longer solely middle-aged Midwestern cis
men of middle European descent...
...the fact that non-binary blerds and Indigenous trans women and fat
Polish-American geeks like me and people from every bed of the human
vegetable garden ...
find meaning in a game created by two white guys from the Midwest is
proof that Gygax and Arneson were geniuses who heaved human civilization
forward, even if only by a few feet.
So, as a community, how do we deal with the ugly prejudices of our
hobby’s co-creator who also baked them into the game we love? We could
pretend there is no problem at all, and say that anyone who mentions the
problem is a liar. There is no misogyny to see. There is no **** and
there is no stink, and anyone who says there is naughty word on your
sneakers is lying and is just trying to embarrass you.
I wonder how that will go? Will all these new D&D fans decide that maybe
D&D isn’t for them? They know the stink of misogyny, just like they know
**** when they smell it. To say it isn’t there is an insult to their
intelligence. If they left the hobby over this, it would leave our
community smaller, poorer, and suggest that the great work of Gygax,
Arneson, Kuntz, and the other early luminaries on D&D was perhaps not so
great after all…
We could take the route of Disney and Song of the South. Wizards could
remove all the PDFs of early D&D from DriveThruRPG. They could refuse to
ever reprint this material again. Hide it. Bury it. Erase it all with
copyright law and lawyers. Yet no matter how deeply you bury the past,
it always tends to come back up to the surface again. Heck, there are
whole podcast series about that. And what will all these new D&D fans
think when they realize that a corporation tried to hide its own
mistakes from them?
Again, maybe they decide D&D isn’t the game for them. Or maybe when
someone tells you there is **** on your shoe, you say thanks, clean it
off, and move on.
We honor the old books, but when they tell a reader they are a lesser
human being, we should acknowledge that is not the D&D of 2024.
Something like...
“Hey reader, we see you in all your wondrous multiplicity of
possibility, and if we were publishing this today, it wouldn’t contain
messages and themes telling some of you that you are less than others.
So we just want to warn you. That stuff’s in there.”
Y’know, something like that legacy content warning they put on all those
old PDFs on DriveThruRPG. And when we see something bigoted in old D&D,
we talk about it. It lets the new, broad, and deep tribe of D&D know
that we do not want bigotry in D&D today. Talking about it welcomes the
entire human family into the hobby.To do anything less is to damn D&D to
darkness. It hobbles its growth, gates its community, denies the world
the joy of the game, and denies its creators their due. D&D’s creators
were visionary game designers. They were also people, and people are
kinda ****** up. So a necessary step in making D&D the sort of cultural
pillar that it deserves to be is to name its bigotries and prejudices
when you see them. Failure to do so hurts the game by shrinking our
community and therefore shrinking the legacy of its creators.
Appendix 1: Yeah, I know Chaos isn’t the same as Evil in OD&D.
But I would also point out as nerdily as possible that on pg. 9 of Book
1 of OD&D, under “Character Alignment, Including Various Monsters and
Creatures,” Evil High Priests are included under the “Chaos” heading,
along with the undead. So I would put to you that Gygax did see a
relationship between Evil and Chaos at the time.
https://www.enworld.org/threads/d-d-historian-benn-riggs-on-gary-gygax-sexism.705192/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
D&D Historian Benn Riggs On Gary Gygax & Sexism
Thread starter Morrus Start date Yesterday at 11:42 PM
D&D historian Ben Riggs delved into the facts.
The recent book The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977
talks about the early years of D&D. In the book, authors Jon Peterson
and Jason Tondro talk about the way the game, and its writers,
approached certain issues. Not surprisingly, this revelation received
aggressive "pushback" on social media because, well, that sort of thing
does--in fact, one designer who worked with Gygax at the time labelled
it "slanderous".
D&D historian Ben Riggs--author of Slaying the Dragon--delved into the
facts. Note that the below was posted on Twitter, in that format, not as
an article.
D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to
Preserving his Legacy.
The internet has been rending its clothes and gnashing its teeth over
the introduction to an instant classic of TTRPG history, The Making of
Original D&D 1970-1977. Published by Wizards of the Coast, it details
the earliest days of D&D’s creation using amazing primary source materials.
Why then has the response been outrage from various corners of the
internet? Well authors Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro mention that early
D&D made light of slavery, disparaged women, and gave Hindu deities hit
points. They also repeated Wizard’s disclaimer for legacy content which
states:"These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This
content is presented as it was originally created, because to do
otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed."
In response to this, an army of grognards swarmed social media to bite
their shields and bellow. Early D&D author Rob Kuntz described Peterson
and Tondro’s work as “slanderous.” On his Castle Oldskull blog, Kent
David Kelly called it “disparagement.” These critics are accusing
Peterson and Tondro of dishonesty. Lying, not to put too fine a point on
it.So, are they lying? Are they making stuff up about Gary Gygax and
early D&D?
Well, let's look at a specific example of what Peterson and Tondro
describe as “misogyny “ from 1975's Greyhawk. Greyhawk was the first
supplement ever produced for D&D. Written by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz,
the same Rob Kuntz who claimed slander above, it was a crucial text in
the history of the game. For example, it debuted the thief character
class. It also gave the game new dragons, among them the King of Lawful
Dragons and the Queen of Chaotic Dragons. The male dragon is good, and
female dragon is evil. (See Appendix 1 below for more.)
GR9iKUjWsAAete8.jpeg
It is a repetition of the old trope that male power is inherently good,
and female power is inherently evil. (Consider the connotations of the
words witch and wizard, with witches being evil by definition, for
another example.)
Now so-called defenders of Gygax and Kuntz will say that my reading of
the above text makes me a fool who wouldn’t know dragon’s breath from a
virtue signal. I am ruining D&D with my woke wokeness. Gygax and Kuntz
were just building a fun game, and decades later, Peterson and Tondro
come along to crap on their work by screeching about misogyny.
(I would also point out that as we are all white men of a certain age
talking about misogyny, the worst we can expect is to be flamed online.
Women often doing the same thing get rape or death threats.)
Critics of their work would say that Peterson and Tondro are reading
politics into D&D. Except that when we return to the Greyhawk text, we
see that it was actually Gygax and Kuntz who put “politics” into D&D.
The text itself comments on the fact that the lawful dragon is male, and
the chaotic one is female. Gygax and Kuntz wrote: “Women’s lib may make
whatever they wish from the foregoing.”
GR9iGsAW0AAmAOw.jpeg
The intent is clear. The female is a realm of chaos and evil, so of
course they made their chaotic evil dragon a queen.
Yes, Gygax and Kuntz are making a game, but it is a game whose
co-creator explicitly wrote into the rules that feminine power—perhaps
even female equality—is by nature evil. There is little room for any
other interpretation.
The so-called defenders of Gygax may now say that he was a man of his
time, he didn’t know better, or some such. If only someone had told him
women were people too in 1975! Well, Gygax was criticized for this fact
of D&D at the time. And he left us his response.
Writing in EUROPA, a European fanzine, Gygax said:“I have been accused
of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D
isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female
role, more non-gendered names, and so forth."
GR9iyo3XwAAQCtk.jpeg
"I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in
the ‘Raping and Pillaging[’] section, in the ‘Whores and Tavern Wenches’
chapter, the special magical part dealing with ‘Hags and Crones’...and
thought perhaps of adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls,
and Going Viking’. Damn right I am sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if
women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower
in the men’s locker room."
"They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care.
I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair
sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.”
So just to summarize here, Gygax wrote misogyny into the D&D rules. When
this was raised with him as an issue at the time, his response was to
offer to put rules on rape and sex slavery into D&D.
The outrage online directed at Peterson and Tondro is not only entirely
misplaced and disproportional, and perhaps even dishonest in certain
cases...
Part 2: D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to
Preserving his Legacy....it is also directly harming the legacies of
Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz and the entire first generation of genius game
designers our online army of outraged grognards purport to defend.
How? Let me show you.The D&D player base is getting more diverse in
every measurable way, including age, gender, sexual orientation, and
race. To cite a few statistics, 81% of D&D players are Millenials or Gen
Z, and 39% are women. This diversity is incredible, and not because the
diversity is some blessed goal unto itself. Rather, the increasing
diversity of D&D proves the vigor of the TTRPG medium. Like Japanese rap
music or Soviet science fiction, the transportation of a medium across
cultures, nations, and genders proves that it is an important method for
exploring the human condition. And while TTRPGs are a game, they are
also clearly an important method for exploring the human condition. The
fact the TTRPG fanbase is no longer solely middle-aged Midwestern cis
men of middle European descent...
...the fact that non-binary blerds and Indigenous trans women and fat
Polish-American geeks like me and people from every bed of the human
vegetable garden ...
find meaning in a game created by two white guys from the Midwest is
proof that Gygax and Arneson were geniuses who heaved human civilization
forward, even if only by a few feet.
So, as a community, how do we deal with the ugly prejudices of our
hobby’s co-creator who also baked them into the game we love? We could
pretend there is no problem at all, and say that anyone who mentions the
problem is a liar. There is no misogyny to see. There is no **** and
there is no stink, and anyone who says there is naughty word on your
sneakers is lying and is just trying to embarrass you.
I wonder how that will go? Will all these new D&D fans decide that maybe
D&D isn’t for them? They know the stink of misogyny, just like they know
**** when they smell it. To say it isn’t there is an insult to their
intelligence. If they left the hobby over this, it would leave our
community smaller, poorer, and suggest that the great work of Gygax,
Arneson, Kuntz, and the other early luminaries on D&D was perhaps not so
great after all…
We could take the route of Disney and Song of the South. Wizards could
remove all the PDFs of early D&D from DriveThruRPG. They could refuse to
ever reprint this material again. Hide it. Bury it. Erase it all with
copyright law and lawyers. Yet no matter how deeply you bury the past,
it always tends to come back up to the surface again. Heck, there are
whole podcast series about that. And what will all these new D&D fans
think when they realize that a corporation tried to hide its own
mistakes from them?
Again, maybe they decide D&D isn’t the game for them. Or maybe when
someone tells you there is **** on your shoe, you say thanks, clean it
off, and move on.
We honor the old books, but when they tell a reader they are a lesser
human being, we should acknowledge that is not the D&D of 2024.
Something like...
“Hey reader, we see you in all your wondrous multiplicity of
possibility, and if we were publishing this today, it wouldn’t contain
messages and themes telling some of you that you are less than others.
So we just want to warn you. That stuff’s in there.”
Y’know, something like that legacy content warning they put on all those
old PDFs on DriveThruRPG. And when we see something bigoted in old D&D,
we talk about it. It lets the new, broad, and deep tribe of D&D know
that we do not want bigotry in D&D today. Talking about it welcomes the
entire human family into the hobby.To do anything less is to damn D&D to
darkness. It hobbles its growth, gates its community, denies the world
the joy of the game, and denies its creators their due. D&D’s creators
were visionary game designers. They were also people, and people are
kinda ****** up. So a necessary step in making D&D the sort of cultural
pillar that it deserves to be is to name its bigotries and prejudices
when you see them. Failure to do so hurts the game by shrinking our
community and therefore shrinking the legacy of its creators.
Appendix 1: Yeah, I know Chaos isn’t the same as Evil in OD&D.
But I would also point out as nerdily as possible that on pg. 9 of Book
1 of OD&D, under “Character Alignment, Including Various Monsters and
Creatures,” Evil High Priests are included under the “Chaos” heading,
along with the undead. So I would put to you that Gygax did see a
relationship between Evil and Chaos at the time.