roleplaying games

Jessica Price works as a project manager at tabletop roleplaying game publisher Paizo Publishing—a progressive company with a female CEO. But Jessica’s career reaches across jobs and companies. In the worlds of video and tabletop games, her experiences have run from sexual harassment to seeing real and positive industry change.

Who do you find it difficult to get respect from in the gaming industry? Or has your experience been largely free of sexism?

It's rough sometimes.

Some of it's unintentional. Male programmers will be shocked by the idea of making the default avatar female for a game intended primarily for female audiences. Marketers will think that making a console pink will magically fix its branding problems with women. Studios making games intended for kids and moms will refuse to give a successful female game designer an interview because she's never done a first-person shooter. And regardless of your actual job title, new male employees will assume you're the receptionist, ask you to clean up the kitchen or conference room after them, and believe your ideas came from your male coworkers.

But some of it's very intentional. I've had every inch of my anatomy commented on by coworkers. I've had marketing guys propose that our marketing should consist of me putting on a low-cut top and talking about our product. I've had people insist that I must have slept with someone to get into the industry. I've had guys I disagreed with in meetings suggest that it's because I'm on the rag.

Liz Bauman is the creator and moderator of the Twitter community #rpgchat, and co-writer of the blog Character Generation, with Lyndsay Peters. She’s also the woman behind the first publishing endeavor for The Illuminerdy, Adventure Begins at Bedtime.

How does being a wife and mother influence your engagement with the hobby, and the gaming community?

Early on in my time in the gaming community (and early on in my marriage), being a wife meant I was constantly on the defensive. I needed everyone to know that I was a gamer, not the WIFE of a gamer. I wasn't gaming because it was something my husband did. I wasn't gaming to be the weird nag of a wife who wouldn't let her husband have his own hobbies. I gamed because I loved it. 

But, no matter how hard I tried, I'd have some dude come up to be at a convention and ask me point blank, "Did you write these characters? Or did your husband?" To this day, I'm never sure if those guys were actually asking me if I actually wrote my characters, or if they just trying to have me confirm that I was, in fact married. But it created an inherent self-consciousness about my identity as a gamer and drove me, in many ways, to separate myself from my husband to prove that I was, in fact a gamer. 

As for being a mother? It makes gaming so much more amazing. There's nothing like spending time with a child to ignite your sense of wonder. 

 

Manda Collis is a manager of the Roleplay Hub Network, where she spends her time helping build a community of online roleplaying gamers. She's also an ISBN Manager for Evil Hat Productions and a freelance writer. Keeping up with the challenges of her various roles is a real-life dose of making tough decisions between rocking your character class or branching into multiclassing. I talked to her about the challenges and rewards of being fully immersed in the gaming community. 

When have you been distinctly aware of gender or sexuality while gaming? 

MANDA COLLIS: Interestingly enough, I tend to play male characters during tabletop games! One of my favorite characters is a total dude-bro who is nearly an airhead and looks like he belongs on the cover of a romance novel. While I'm playing that character it's not so much that I'm aware of gender or sexuality, but I know that by playing a stereotype I'm making others aware of it. I've had quite a few guys at the gaming table comment to me after a session that they understand how girls must feel after seeing me play this completely ridiculous character!

If you make roleplaying games, you’re creating something for people to play. To engage with, experience, and share. But something I hear frequently from women in the gaming industry is their discomfort with self-promotion. I understand that, but it’s a discomfort we have to leave behind—as women and as professionals. If you’re uncomfortable with putting yourself out there, this is an important thing to discuss with yourself and with peers who are good at it.

"There's still the sense that publicity is kind of the new kid on the block. It's really not well-respected in any business, which is too bad, but in publishing and gaming, it's definitely the bottom of the heap. "

Every time I want to quit gaming—writing games, playing games, writing about them—my friends are there to remind me that bullshit does not last forever.

"One thing I’ve noticed in particular is that randomly assigning gender to characters in examples can lead to unintended apparent biases. Even if you’re alternating, you can end up accidentally playing into some negative stereotypes. Simply making sure you have an equal number of hes and shes isn’t enough. It’s important to be conscious of the decisions that you’re making."

This two part conversation with Valentine covers what she’s working on now, and how she works as an editor to assist authors in crafting books with inclusive language. As the number of women both creating and playing tabletop games continues to increase, thoughtful approaches to gender in games texts will also continue to be part of the ongoing conversation of making gaming a more inclusive hobby.

I find Fiasco fascinating because the game experience is built heavily on the people at the table and what they bring to it.

Of all the sexism-related problems we have in games, the low visibility of the women working in games steadily feeds into all of them them. And it starts with coverage.