Over on Livejournal, Madeline has posted a really long discussion on specific things to do to better include women in gaming, in which she draws parallels between a study of gender inequality in British physics departments and the world of gaming. There’s lots of good stuff in there, though I did get snagged here and there on some of the generalizations.
I also wished that she hadn’t chosen to use Story Games as her example of a board community, since I’ve found it to be a unique and odd place to which several of her suggestions can’t actually be applied (for example, most anything involving diversity among mods, since Andy is the one and only). I get that much of the recent commentary on inclusiveness got started because of a thread there, but I still don’t think it was the best choice for an example.
On the substance of the issue though, I agree with the overall goal of trying to make gaming more inclusive of women (and lots of other folks). It seems kind of obvious. At the same time, I can see why people might reflexively defend a community they’re a part of when it gets accused of not being welcoming enough, and there were unhelpful comments on both sides of the debate in various parts of the internets. Let’s hope that the reasonable people can have a discussion that actually gets us somewhere.
And no, I hadn’t really intended to end up with what is in large part a “me too” post, but I decided I didn’t want to get involved in debating certain people either.
