Speaking from Authority
December 2007 Issue
Features
- From the Editors
- Craft Check: Gamer Cake
- Gaming in the Media: Cyber-Stupidity: Jade Raymond Edition
- Market to Me: Female Protagonists
Interviews
Articles
- Gender & Live-Action Role Play: Identity Crisis
Author: Samara Hayley Steele
- Naked and Terrified
Author: Elizabeth McDonald and Karen Healey
- “My Mom Likes Your Game”
Author: Mara Poulsen
- Speaking from Authority
Author: Richard Pilbeam
In this ongoing series, Samara shares her experiences as a female LARPer in a male-dominated LARP Organization.
Elizabeth and Karen dialogue on a set of miniatures called “Hot Chicks 3.1: Naked Distress”.
Mara looks at the casual gaming industry and what it means for female gamers.
Richard discusses the default "he" and what it says about sexism in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
Gamer Stories
Reviews
In his turn, a player may move all or some of his units up to their maximum move distance. Once a unit has completed all of its movement, the player selects another unit and moves that one, and so on, until the player has moved all of the units he wishes to move.
- Warhammer 40,000 4th Edition Rulebook, page 15
You can [use gender neutral pronouns to refer to players], but the book doesn’t… It specifically says ‘his’. I mentioned it once to a female opponent, and she called me a sexist pig. Until I pointed it out in the book.
- Thoth62, discussing the finer points of said rulebook on Warseer.com
You can bet your life her face was red, since everyone knows your behaviour ceases to be in any way questionable if there’s a precedent in a book about space elves. And what a book it is! It’s thicker than some dictionaries, it’s hardcover, it’s got a really big skull on the front, it’s written in a style that makes The Eye of Argon look restrained and tasteful, and, yes, it assumes everybody who picks it up is going to be male. True, I could be describing any number of tabletop gaming rulebooks, sourcebooks or expansions, but Warhammer 40,000’s status as a competitive wargame means that the player is expected to treat the rulebook as the ultimate, unquestionable authority on the game itself. This is why the language used is important.
Wargames, while often bracketed together with tabletop role playing games, are more analogous to competitive video games. The goal is to beat your opponent by learning how best to exploit the mechanics of the game’s world to your advantage, while role-playing games have more to do with exploration, immersion or narrative. While some wargame players –myself included– will occasionally include an element of role playing in their games, such as developing a personality for their army and having them behave accordingly even when it is tactically unwise (for example, refusing to utilize cover because they believe their soldiers would consider it cowardly), this is not the primary goal of the game: the primary goal is competition with your opponent. The other key difference is that, while a campaign in a role playing game will involve the same group of players and player characters over multiple, connected games, a mainstream wargame like Warhammer 40,000 is designed for a series of relatively short one-off games against anybody in the general vicinity who happens to own a copy. In order to ensure that competition is fair, it is therefore expected that both players will be following the exact same set of rules to the letter, and that any expansions being used will have been designed or approved by the authors of the original rulebook. There is, assuming the designers did their job properly, no neutral party required to run the game world from behind the scenes or to make judgment calls in situations which aren’t covered by the rules. If it’s in the rulebook, then it’s in the game, and if it’s not in the rulebook, then it’s not in the game, and you’re only going to see an exception to this if you’re on very friendly terms with your opponent. Because the rulebook is absolutely integral to how the game is played, and, by extension, the sub-culture which develops around the game, the fact that we still have yet to see any hint of gender-inclusive design in even the most recent edition of the rulebook (published 2004) is a cause for concern, and should be acknowledged as one of the primary barriers facing female players.
[T]he use of ‘his’ does not preclude women from playing Warhammer, and it is among the least of factors keeping them from doing so. Unless they are a femi-nazi, in which case, I don’t feel like playing them because they ruin my language.
- Imperialis_Dominatus, same thread, some time later
The exclusive use of masculine pronouns does not, of course, literally preclude women from playing, and our pal Imperialis_Dominatus rightfully points out that there are other factors at work. His post is a perfect example of these factors, in fact, which is presumably why he doesn’t feel the need to explain what they actually are. In a mere two sentences, we have condescension, dismissiveness, an attempt to silence the discussion by moving the goalposts, pedantry, and the word “feminazi.” But he misses the single most relevant point to this discussion: The behaviour he demonstrates, while simply common-or-garden geekboy sexism that’s got no direct relationship to the rulebook’s use of masculine pronouns, is nevertheless something he considers to be justified because of the rulebook’s use of masculine pronouns. If female gamers are unhappy with the default assumption that all players are male, then, well, tough for them; it’s right there in the rulebook, end of discussion. And it’s got nothing to do with my innate sexism, goodness, no. It’s just…the rules.
No doubt certain male gamers would have been hostile towards the concept of women in gaming well before picking up the Warhammer 40,000 rulebook, but would they have felt so sure that women didn’t belong, and been so open about it, had the book acknowledged female gamers?
Not only does the language used ignore women, but also women are never depicted playing the game. In fact, the only mention of any women being involved with the game at all occurs in the modeling and painting guide, where several of the credited designers and painters are women. Even then, they are present only as modelers and painters; they aren’t depicted playing the game, and, in fact, aren’t depicted at all, save for their names alongside their work. If the game’s central text, the one book that’s going to be cited and discussed more than any other, completely and utterly denies that female gamers even exist, then any prejudices against female gamers held by the overwhelmingly male fanbase will simply be reinforced.
When Dungeons & Dragons was re-inventing itself in the early 2000’s, the designers made a point of depicting female gamers in their material. My friends and I laughed at it. We said we were laughing because it was tokenistic, politically correct and stupid, but, in truth, we were as nervous and scared as–as if a woman had actually joined our group, basically. We didn’t become totally accommodating of female gamers overnight, some of us didn’t become remotely accommodating at all, and we never had a woman join the group before it disbanded. But from that point on, it wasn’t wholly safe for our mindset anymore, and we were forced to adjust our thinking, even if we didn’t want to admit it at the time. The representation of gamers in the material was still overwhelmingly male, but there was no longer a guarantee that, when we picked up a book, it would validate our sexism and reassure us that gaming was a big boys’ club after all. Women gamers went from total invisibility to the elephant in the room, which was far from an ideal situation, but at least it was an improvement.
Warhammer 40,000 doesn’t ask this of its players. If you’re a male gamer, and you pick up the core rulebook of a mainstream game which assumes that everybody who ever plays it is going to be male and only vaguely alludes to the fact women exist, then what have you learned today? This isn’t F.A.T.A.L. or a third-party Dungeons & Dragons expansion set, it’s the most popular and accessible sci-fi / fantasy wargame in the world, with its own specialty stores, novels, video games, conventions, tournaments and magazine. The lack of gender-inclusive design in something that exists on this scale, in 2007, is troubling.
SPACE MARINE DUDE
The Dude gets the especially cool lines and designer purity seals. If there was ever a female lead in a Space Marine movie, then the Dude would be the one who rescues her all the time. When you go to the movie, the actor playing the Dude is the reason your girlfriend might go with you, without you having to waste a good painting day shopping with her for shoes in compensation.- White Dwarf magazine (Australian edition), issue 301, page 76
Even taking into account its informal, comedic tone, the fact that something like this was published in the game’s official magazine supplement is revealing, especially considering the writer had himself previously worked on official Warhammer 40,000 books. The internalized belief that all gamers are male (and heterosexual) is so prevalent that, even in an official product, they’ve no qualms about publishing something that openly alienates any other demographic. Then again, he’s also assuming the readers have girlfriends, so it could all just be an elaborate joke. Even aside from the sweeping assumptions he makes about the audience, the hypothetical movie he creates, based on the game, is itself openly sexist: There isn’t a female lead, but if there was, she’d end up being rescued by this guy “all the time.” True, a movie where all the main characters belong to an exclusively male monastic order of space paladins probably wouldn’t have a female lead, but in that case, why create an imaginary one just to point out that she’s pathologically helpless and needs a man to keep rescuing her? If this were a company who took female gamers into consideration, would a piece like this have even been submitted, let alone published?
The greatest irony in all this is that Warhammer 40,000, unlike many other sci-fi / fantasy games, does not feel the need to sexualize and objectify every single female character in the game. While the ubiquitous Battle Swimsuit makes a few appearances, along with some truly astonishing armored breast cups, the designers are also unafraid to depict old women, fat women, scarred women, muscular women and utterly inhuman women. While the new Dungeons & Dragons books may have made our group consider the existence of female gamers, they still insisted on pandering to the male gaze, the most egregious example being Lidda the Halfling, whose design ignored everything we’d previously learned about Halflings in order to make her look like a 4’ Lara Croft knock-off. Warhammer 40,000, on the other hand, gives us female characters who are designed to look like they belong in the same universe as the male ones, in terms of both their appearance and their overall depiction. They are active, aggressive, and physical, rather than passive, submissive, and non-threatening. In defiance of all the paranoid castration fantasy genre conventions, there’s even an exclusively female army with a motivation that doesn’t revolve around hating men. Male characters vastly outnumber female ones, but this is gradually changing, and the portrayal of what female characters there are is unusually strong for a mainstream fantasy / sci-fi universe. But if the designers care enough about their fictional women not to undermine them, why can’t they treat the real ones in their audience the same way?
