Girls! In Our Games?!

I have to confess that I have no idea whatsoever where this whole “Girls aren’t real gamers” bullshit is coming from. I have theories, and I have suppositions, which I may well share at the end of this, but for now, I just want to offer up a corrective against the small but strident natterings of some of these chuckleheads online who love to speak in Trollish and yearn for the downfall of society so that John Norman’s vision of the planet Gor can finally come to pass. Side note to the chuckleheads: all of those multitude of fantasy paperbacks from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, you pick those books to inform your sub-culture? Part of your problem right there is that you have no taste.

Dragon Magazine Was Our Internet

It’s difficult to get teenagers, or even twenty year olds, to care about things that happened four decades ago. I get it. Forty years in the modern world might as well be a hundred, and the speed with which we develop continues to its inevitable terminal velocity. Talking about anything more nuanced and complicated than the music of the 1980s will send most Millennials screaming from the room.

But it’s interesting to me because—and this is a micro-example of the larger questions being posed to mass media today—our sources of information were extremely limited. We had three or four channels, if we were lucky: ABC, NBC, and CBS. There was also PBS, in case you needed help with your reading. And you probably did, because there was a lot more of it. Magazines and newspapers were still everywhere. What’s worse, you had to BUY them. With MONEY.