So it's 1985, and the Toys "R" Us Christmas catalog has just shown up to your house.
One thing you might notice if you're paying a lot of attention is that the Toys "R" Us catalog
has a boy section and a girl section and the Nintendo Entertainment System,
the hit gaming system of 1985 is firmly located in the boys' section.
My name is Amanda Cody and I'm an assistant professor of Media Studies and Games Studies
in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon.
I bring this story up not to blame Toys "R" Us for gendering video game culture,
but to point out that there are a lot of different factors that resulted in games coming to be seen
as a technology more for boys than for girls.
For instance, videogame arcades were often spaces that were more available to boys than to girls
because they were public spaces and ones about which parents had a lot of concerns.
Based on how we gender children, we tend to let boys get away with more adventurous
or perceived dangerous things than we let girls get away with.
Another factor comes from parenting.
Parents tend to buy computing technology for boys more often than they do for girls.
There's also a really big difference in how parents approach technology when their children are playing.
For instance, say you have a boy child and a girl child
and both of them have run into a part in a game or a computer program that they don't understand.
The parents of that boy child are a lot more likely to turn to him and say,
"Just keep trying. You'll figure it out."
Because they assume boys have a natural affinity for computers and technology.
When parents turn to their girl child who's having the exact same problem in the exact same program,
they're a lot more likely to take over the controls and show her how to do it.
This different level of encouragement for boys to use technology and for girls to gain help with technology
helps lead to what we refer to as the pipeline problem in STEM fields –
science, technology, engineering and math.
Where we see that when children are young, boys and girls have equal levels of interest in these different fields.
But as they get older, girls drop out at a much higher rate than boys do,
in part because they lack this early encouragement.
Because video games have such a long history as a masculinized technology,
when female players enter into videogame cultures and communities,
they're often excluded in a lot of different ways.
In the worst-case scenario, women are often overtly harassed or excluded from game spaces,
being told things like, "go back to the kitchen and make me a sandwich" rather than being included as regular gamers.
So the question then becomes – how do we address this?
How do we make video gaming spaces more inclusive and more available to different types of players?
I interviewed female gamers in 2012 and 2013 and found a lot of them were playing videogames.
They were deeply invested, but they were also struggling with how to be included.
When I interviewed them again in 2017 and 2018, many of them had actually left video game spaces entirely.
And in a surprising twist, started playing Dungeons and Dragons.
I had no idea what about Dungeons and Dragons was drawing these women in.
So I set out on a quest of my very own to address it.
One of the reasons I was so surprised by this trend is because
Dungeons and Dragons specifically has a long history of itself being exclusionary.
Early studies of Dungeons and Dragons players or guidebooks, for instance,
found that male characters were actually given better stats than female characters.
And when people studied the culture of gameplay around Dungeons and Dragons,
they found that male players tended to dominate the spaces.
So in trying to figure out what had changed about Dungeons and Dragons to make so many female gamers turned to it.
I analyzed the history of the game.
And one key change that I found is that the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons really signaled inclusively
a lot more strongly than previous iterations.
For instance, the old requirement that female characters stats were lower than male character stats was gone.
Instead, all characters of all genders were treated equally.
And I say all genders and not male and female,
because the newest edition of Dungeons and Dragons allows players to choose a non-binary gender,
encourages players to embody LGBTQ identities as they desire,
and actually even represents the default illustration of a human character as a black woman.
All of these are deeply unusual for Dungeons and Dragons' history and the history of games in general.
Dungeons and Dragons itself has also become much more popular
and much more culturally relevant due to a lot of different factors.
For instance, Dungeons and Dragons is heavily featured on the hit Netflix series Stranger Things.
All of these factors helped make Dungeons and Dragons much more accessible for a wide array of players.
But they didn't fully account for why female gamers specifically turned to this game more and more.
One reason that female gamers turned to Dungeons Dragons over the video games they had played previously
is because video games come with a lot of negativity.
As a result, many of them turned to Dungeons and Dragons over video games
because Dungeons and Dragons meant that they were playing with a group of people they knew in person.
One of the reasons why video gaming sees so much harassment
is because video gaming tends to take place online.
And when you're online, you have the ability to hide behind a screen name.
In many ways, you're anonymous.
And when you're talking to a faceless person you don't know, it's a lot easier to be negative about it.
So the final question then is, why is all of this important?
Why does it matter that female gamers are turning to Dungeons and Dragons over video games?
Well, in part, it matters because it points to a blind spot in the field of video game studies.
The fact that so many women are turning to Dungeons and Dragons
suggests to us that maybe we need to pay a little bit more attention to analog games.
Everything from Settler's of Catan to Dungeons and Dragons and back again,
has the potential to offer new understandings for who game audiences are or who game audiences can be.
This is also important because it shows how changing the culture of a game has wide-reaching impacts.
Dungeons and Dragons had a very strong, exclusionary history.
However, by changing the rules in the fifth edition,
making gameplay itself more accessible
and then also signaling inclusively through how one can define a character,
Dungeons and Dragons has opened up a lot of new possibilities for players.
Game companies themselves should also be interested in these results.
Dungeons and Dragons has sold many more copies of the fifth edition than of the previous editions.
On top of that, when we look at video games themselves,
some research done by Nick Yee shows that games that signal inclusivity by, for instance,
letting players choose a male character or a female character,
or by featuring LGBT characters within a storyline, actually outsell other games of the same genre.
This shows that there are a lot of gamers out there who are looking for diverse stories,
who are looking to play through a lot of different experiences.
And of course, who are looking for characters like them and storylines.
So if a video game company wants to sell more copies of their game,
it would be beneficial for them to include more types of characters.
Returning to that girl who wants to get into STEM fields
but finds that these and computers and games are marked as not for her.
There is hope.
Many women who face those barriers still made it into game spaces and still manage those game spaces all the time.
If we want to make sure that more than a few make it through, we need to encourage more cultural change.
– and turning to the lessons of Dungeons and Dragons is one way to go about doing that.
