[Magic: the Gathering] How It Gets Better
This is, at least in some part, a response to Geordie Tait’s To My Someday Daughter, an article on Star City Games that addresses misogyny in gaming.)
How It Gets Better
by Sean McKeown
You don’t have to do anything more than look around the room to see that there is a problem. And yet, so many of us for so long have not seen the problem: not seen, because it is easier to take something as a matter of fact and ‘the way the world is’ than to challenge yourself to change your world for the better.
Was Magic always this bereft of gender equality? Undoubtedly. Gaming culture, as well as ‘intellectual’ culture, has had a largely male-driven culture since before I was born. This is the world we have inherited from our forebears; this does not, however, have to be the world we choose to live in. But change is hard, and requires not just an awareness that something is wrong but an awareness of how that has been allowed into your life.
I wish I could tell you it was just Magic players. I’d settle for just gamers. But the fact of the matter seems to be that to find gender inequality still in this day and age, you don’t have to have colorful cardboard or a plastic controller in your hand, and not just because of the Xbox Kinect. Male-centric behavior is unfortunately predominant in almost every intellectual pursuit, be it recreational, educational, or professional.
I went to an engineering school for two years as part of my college program. I started at a large school with a wide variety of interests - NYU, where most certainly there was a fairly even gender balance and you could find men and women chasing intellectual pursuits from a bachelors in liberal arts to doctorates in computer science. Sure, the more purely scientific or mathematic the classes got, the more likely you were to find an uneven distribution of males and females, but it wasn’t a big skew - 60/40, instead of 50/50. Then, I crossed the Hudson River to go to a small engineering school in Hoboken, along with most of my classmates from the NYU engineering program who stuck with it throughout.
Half of the women at that engineering school came from our program. That’s almost certainly an exaggeration due to small sample size, but in every class, the gender ratio was more like 80/20 or 75/25, and most of the women in the classes I was taking, I’d known for several years as part of my engineering program. Was there a reason for this? Was I smart enough at the time to understand the reason? Yes, and no, in that order.
Cross over to the other side of graduation and it gets even more shocking. The year I graduated, getting a degree in chemical engineering, three women graduated from that school with the same degree as I was getting, and I knew all of them from my program. The other thirty or so men getting the same degree, I knew a handful from the program and never bothered to get to know the rest. But that’s 90/10, leaving academia for employment in the same field I was looking to go into, and things haven’t gotten better since.
Maybe just not a lot of women wanted to be engineers. But I don’t think it was because women are any less capable of taking the same classes as I was, or less inclined to find science interesting. Much more likely is the simple calculus of what it would take to put themselves into that field, versus the kind of opposition they would have to face within that field, disincentivized them from seeking that pursuit in the first place. It certainly wasn’t because I was so much smarter than them - my report card from those years will attest that I certainly wasn’t shooting for above average, after all.
Here on StarCityGames.com, this gender inequality within the game was drawn more starkly into the light by Geordie Tait’s To My Someday Daughter. My only criticism, were I to claim one, is that it does not go far enough: to go past showing the problem and begin feeling it, to bring things forward past the tipping point where his hypothetical daughter would have to learn to struggle on in a misogynistic atmosphere such as we find ourselves living in and to a future where, frankly, it gets better.
I love a gamer. Her name is Jen, and she doesn’t play cards, but she has proven quite adept with a controller in her hands, and many a night has been spent together in enjoyable company as she played through video games like Mass Effect 2 (in the role of the female Commander Shepard, obviously). Role-playing games, Grand Theft Auto-style games, combat shooters, you name it, she’s played it. We have battled in Mortal Kombat, as well as everything else. It’s not really my thing, but it doesn’t have to be entirely, just enough of my thing to make the time spent together enjoyable. It’s enough of my thing that for ‘my turn’ to play through a game, I bopped my way through Mega Man 9, relying on the fact that when last I considered myself adept at video games I was good at the Mega Man games, and skills like that may tarnish but never completely disappear. Ask any of us who played video games in the 90’s what the Konami Code is, and they may not have thought of it for a decade, but they will know.
Gaming, even video gaming, is still not quite a female-oriented culture. For every game like Epic Mickey or Portal that might be seen to apply evenly across the genders, there are many and more that capitalize on what is perceived to be a male-dominated audience, as Geordie mentioned when he introduced his wife to his favorite Japanese RPGs or as can be the only possible explanation for the existence of Leisure Suit Larry. But once you connect to the Internet and it becomes not what you do at home but what you do with other people, a shocking effect occurs: it’s raining men.
Let me tell you about another gamer I loved, a story that ended less-well. There were a lot of things wrong with this relationship, as I probably should have caught immediately when after we had been dating for two weeks she found herself evicted from her apartment and came to live with me. It was sudden, yes, but instead of taking it as a warning sign I took it as an opportunity to see her more often, going from long-distance relationship (about a six hours’ drive) to immediate and quite intense intimacy, given that the bedroom I lived in at the apartment I was sharing with three other people was roughly a ten-by-ten square. I’ve worked in bigger cubicles than that, and it’s not a lot of place for two people to live in. But what ultimately drove us apart? World of Warcraft.
Before it drove us apart, I was a World of Warcraft widower. As far as I could tell from the Internet, I was the only one. There were scores and scores of World of Warcraft widows - I even joined a LiveJournal community for them, and then amusingly decided to start my own somewhat more humorous one when I tried to be a little more positive and laugh about the entire experience. To stay sane and stay with her, I wrote letters to the video game, asking if it would be so kind as to disgorge my girlfriend for a few hours every once in a while. But before she immersed herself fully into the World of Warcraft, I remember those timid first steps. She picked a male character, because she wanted to be taken seriously. She picked a hard-sounding name with lots of C’s and K’s for those sharp inflections, because she wanted to get her gender identity out there right up front. She wanted to be a tough guy because she didn’t think she’d be able to get into a raiding guild otherwise, and she knew to play the game past its starting levels she wouldn’t be able to go it alone.
You can guess what happened, I’m sure. Being the only woman there and having to masquerade as a man, when every ‘female’ she encountered was actually a man who just liked watching his female character run around in skimpy clothing with too-big breasts bouncing as she fought, it was eroding to her. Negativity towards women was inherent, automatic, and unchallenged. A raiding guild existed for women, but she didn’t want to join it; she’d have to change servers, and while you could do that, she didn’t think the all-women raiding guild would be as good as the other guilds, so she preferred to continue on as she was as just another one of the guys.
Eventually, she got outed. It was inevitable; the guild she joined used Ventrilo, sort of an audio-only Skype for team chats while they were raiding, and so it became apparent right away that she would have to tell them she was female before she could join in that way, and she deferred the decision for a few weeks under the guise of ‘having to get the hardware’ and continued on as the only one not using Ventrilo until finally one of the guys in the group offered something simple to the only guy not playing: “Dude, if it’s just a problem of the $20 a year subscription, we’ll pay for it for you, just get a headset.” Gamer generosity at its finest: everyone else was using it and found they had a better game because of it, and she... I’m sorry, I mean he... was the only one left out. They wanted him to join fully, and so she had to disclose.
It went about as well as you could expect, I guess. A lot of people were surprised and shocked - by the time they found out that she was a girl who couldn’t play, as they would have assumed if they knew from the start, she was already over Level 40 and a serious organizer in the guild, worked into a second-tier leadership support position that helped with organizing when raids were going to happen. They just happened to know her as Nick, not ‘Nicole.’ And of course, once the shock and surprise quieted down, the first question that was asked was whether she was hot. The second question was whether she had a boyfriend already, and I guess it goes to show their priorities were in some sort of order that they checked to make sure the girl was attractive before deciding to see if they were available.
Does any of this sound familiar? I hope so. Look around the room the next time you go to a Magic tournament with a hundred players or more. Count the women. If you go over needing both hands and have to take your shoes and socks off to start counting on toes, it is a very good distribution indeed. Almost 90/10 or 80/20. Women are playing, we must have gender equality! But it doesn’t have to be this way, and there is nothing naturally causing things to skew this way. Only unnaturally. Choices we make, consciously or otherwise, and choices we can make differently in the future.
There are two possible reasons that you don’t see more women playing Magic. The first is that they are somehow ill-suited to it, that it is not a ‘female interest’. My girlfriend likes getting to pull a Fatality on me in the new Mortal Kombat game, though, so somehow I doubt that’s it, speaking broadly about a gender as a whole instead of a wide spectrum of individuals who just happen to have two X chromosomes. The other is, by Occam’s razor, the simpler and thus truer hypothesis: that this world we occupy is such because we have created it so. Did Richard Garfield have the inception to create Magic as a world where men played but women did not? No, such does not seem to be the case, in fact I highly doubt the idea crossed his mind: “this would be such a success if only men liked it!” is nowhere near the thought process of “this thing I have invented is AWESOME!” that drove the early history of Magic. What drove that, then, I suspect is not Wizards of the Coast but the Duelist’s Conclave International, or ‘the DCI’. Without competition, a game is just a game. But with competition... with ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ or even just ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ as you’ll see when you look at the same broad stroke of nerdy people in another walk of life... suddenly there was something to strive for, to prove oneself at, and there is every indication that one gender seeks acknowledgement through competition more actively than the other does.
This is said not to belittle women, but to belittle men.
Self-confidence is a difficult value to obtain. Last year I wrote a long and rambling tale on the subject, which you can find here, though I still wish I had found a better name for it than the one I chose that accidentally stuck because I loved the article but didn’t know what to stick on the title line, and what was placed there as a throwaway became permanent. Self-confidence in males I can at least claim to have knowledge of; self-confidence in females I have only the outsider’s perspective on, though not for lack of trying. In males, at least, we tend to take self-confidence not as an automatic but as a journey; something we do not possess at first, and are trying to learn and understand so that we may possess it in the future. For me, that was a trip down life lacking confidence because I had it beaten out of me as a child, for having the ill luck at an early age of showing some slight sign of intelligence that stuck my head up only slightly from the crowd, a head which was summarily pounded back into line by a series of schoolyard bullies until I no longer thought myself better than anyone else.
I remember the names of all of my bullies. The fights that I was unfortunately involved in were rather epic: once, in order to escape three bullies in high school who were pounding the snot out of me, I climbed a drainpipe up two stories to sit on the cafeteria roof until the principal came and hauled me down into detention for it. Detention may have sucked, but not as badly as getting on the bus with those three would have, and those seemed the only two options at the time (and at least they couldn’t climb the drainpipe, too). Over a decade of being bullied, one of my bullies was a girl, and every single other one of them was a guy. What I don’t remember, and wish I do, is the names of the people I bullied in turn.
Because I was the runt of the litter - when your birthday is the end of December in a school system that bases which students can be brought into which year of class based on birth during a calendar year, that’s just statistics working against you - I wasn’t really able to do very much about it. My bullies were a year older anyway, for the most part, or the boys who were close enough to it not because of a grade difference but because their birthdays were January and February to my December. I would never have strength as my advantage, so I self-selected for smarts: learn how to avoid the fights with laughter, learn how to hit back smarter instead of harder, learn why they were doing what they were doing so that I could deny them what they wanted and they might turn to easier meat. It sort of worked, I guess, but smart as I was, I failed to stop the cycle of violence there. I turned around and bullied those younger than myself, repeating the cycle of violence and torment that had so brutalized my psyche at that young age. Whatever they were trying to get out of me, I guess I must have figured I could get back from these other kids instead. Things don’t really work that way, but kids are stupid, and I was no exception to the rule.
Cycles have a way of perpetuating themselves, and in Magic it is no different. Geordie hits a nerve when he notes that Magic is played by males who have terrible opinions about women. But it’s not just Magic, it’s the culture of people which happens to include a sub-group that is called ‘Magic players,’ the nerdy intellectualist. Step outside of the realm of cardboard and pixels for a moment to a different ‘scandal,’ not that of Alyssa Bereznak belittling Jon Finkel as a potential romantic pursuit in three quick strikes for playing Magic, but of Rebecca Watson, a female speaker at a Skeptic’s convention. Like Magic players, ‘Skeptics’ skew to the nerdy intellectual, and like Magic this means the culture of the group skews unfortunately male.
It was such a little thing. Watson, a speaker at a European convention last June, spoke at the convention about feminism. No problem, right? Not really, no. While the audience was predominantly male, the ‘scandal’ (so-called) was not her presentation itself but something that followed afterward. Called ‘Elevatorgate,’ it followed from her mentioning in a video blog post afterward something that was not a big deal but which she wished hadn’t happened. After hanging out and talking at the bar with her fellow convention-goers until four in the morning, she was followed somewhat creepily into the elevator by a man as she left the bar, and invited back up to his room to ‘discuss things further.’ To her it was just sort of a joke: ‘guys, don’t do that.’ Not a big deal, but considering she’d just presented about feminism and gender equality, maybe it would have been nice for her to feel like she had been heard. She was, of course, vehemently criticized, including earning a response on the matter by Richard Dawkins, possibly the figurehead of the rational-thinker movement, or at least the first person the religious right burns in effigy first when they get angry over the movement’s apparent opposition to their way of life.
“The man in the elevator didn't physically touch her, didn't attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn't even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that....Rebecca's feeling that the man's proposition was 'creepy' was her own interpretation of his behavior, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum.”
We as a culture tend to be those who were bullied. Sometimes with fists, but far more often with words. Just words. The negative opinions of others can be the death of self-confidence, if they are only expressed loudly enough and frequently enough, and it was only when I learned to move beyond my past that I began to understand that I had taken these negative opinions that others had of me and made them a part of myself.
Rebecca Watson and Alyssa Bereznak have very little in common, I expect. However, having been the one thing in common in numerous failed relationships, at one point I had to stop and wonder whether I was not the common trend in all of these... and whether that was something that could change. In Things I’ve Learned From Magic Cards Who’ve Dumped Me, I go into considerable detail about how I learned self-confidence and how that changed everything in my life. One story not told there, however, which has immediate relevance, comes from my forays into online dating.
Let’s back up two years, to the summer before I met Jen. She and I have just passed the two year anniversary now, and considering I’ve never had a two-year anniversary before I’m happy to call what we have found together a success in online dating. Success isn’t as interesting as failure, though, and it’s a failure of mine I think you’ll learn more from. Before I met Jen, I met another woman, and having learned at least something from Alyssa Bereznak’s mistakes I shall not name names. Said woman had presumably compatible overlaps that led me to an expression of interest, but in the ‘it seems we might have things in common, perhaps we should consider meeting at some point’ kind of way, not a date, quite explicitly not a date. She mentioned a meeting I might find interesting given our stated mutual intellectual interests, and I agreed I would find it interesting, signed up, and said “perhaps I will meet you there.”
Did I think this was creepy? No, and I don’t think many others would. But I forgot whose mask I was wearing - not my own face, but that of an anonymous male over the Internet. You may think you are a harmless individual, cute and cuddly if only a woman would get to know you, but for all she knows of you at that point is that your screen-name is not actually XxSerialKillerxX. Some deference to this fact would have been in order, but this was my first time trying online dating, and I didn’t really know how it worked. It offered a chat function, and after a few messages were exchanged, such seemed not unreasonable. In fact, she offered me her Facebook page as well, and seemed content to chat with me there, but what I didn’t know was that she just wasn’t that into me, and my misconstruing this as possibly a sign of interest was somewhat poor form on my part. I thought I was just being friendly; she thought I was being overbearing, and by the time the meeting came around she had demurred from the idea of joining me at it and meeting me there, and simply did not bother to tell me. I had exhibited poor judgment for an anonymous male on the Internet, enjoyed the presentation because it was something that was in fact quite aligned with my interests, and said hi after it was over for about five minutes. She introduced me to all of her friends, after which it was clear she had to go home and was not in fact going to be sticking around to chat with me more; I tripped on my feet some more and did not get the signal being blatantly broadcast at my forehead, and offered her a ride home if she’d like, that being just enough to reveal that perhaps my screen-name was SerialKiller1979 and if it wasn’t, I sure was exhibiting bad judgment that otherwise precluded any consideration of wanting to get to know me better.
Strike one, strike two, strike three.
Did I think she was superficial? A terrible person? A b*tch? No. I thankfully am at this point somewhat more mature than I was in my youth, and took the input that I was given (‘it seems like you screwed up here’) and extracted from it very quickly the lesson (‘anonymous men on the Internet are not seen as “safe” to individual women’). I picked the lesson up so quickly that I used it to my benefit, showing considerably more savvy in that regards with the girl I now have the pleasure of saying is my girlfriend, but with whom I realized that a slow and patient building of trust would be required until it was my own face I was wearing, not the mask of an anonymous male on the Internet. I expressed much better judgment because I was able to reverse the situation, get to the essence of what was actually going on, learn from the experience, and overcome the inherent difficulties with the online-dating medium. I now saw I needed to earn trust instead of expect it.
In reading further into the Rebecca Watson ‘Elevatorgate’ scandal, never mind the Alyssa Bereznak ‘Finkeldate’ scandal, I came across a simple statement by Nick Smyth on his blog Yeah, OK, But Still. Extracting just the key point, he said the following:
“[Regarding Richard Dawkins’s reply,] Put simply, his failure is the same and the elevator-man's failure: one of imaginative empathy. In order to see why the propositioning was ethically problematic, you have to put yourself in the woman's perspective. You have to think first about the lifetime of sexualization and objectification she has endured. You have to think about the fact that she is trying to operate in a field that is vastly male-dominated. You have to consider what her state of mind was immediately after giving a talk on sexism and objectification. And, then, you have to consider what it's like to live in a world where fear of sexual assault constantly hangs over you like a sword you can't see.”
Remember if you will my poor dating experience on a non-date where I met someone I had hoped might prove interesting, and failed to grasp the fact that only one of the two of us knew me to be ‘safe’. Dispute if you will that any particular male may behave in a certain fashion, but taken as an aggregate on the part of many males rather than the individual, sadly these threats do not continue to stay at zero.
I learned that my behavior needed to change, and challenged my precepts at the fundamental level. Even moreso than the philosophical subject being debated and discussed at the meeting I attended, this caused me to check my precepts for error, and found in myself the irrational: opinions about the interactions between women and men that did not reflect reality, and which like all inherent biases I then sought to root out once identified. For as a gamer, I have been in the others’ shoes; Anne Forsythe’s article The Other Women of Magic is exactly how I felt about World of Warcraft, and a barrier within myself that I turned around to notice was affecting my relationships as far as my playing Magic was concerned. Ultimately, I walked away from the girl when she fell into the World of Warcraft so fully that she stopped going to work for a full week without bothering to call out, got fired, and instead of looking for another job just raided fourteen to sixteen hours a day for a month. Our sleep schedules no longer overlapped because her raiding guild was from the West Coast, which meant that she was going to bed around six in the morning and I was getting up to eight to get to work. Not ideal, but not a problem, until you factor in that our decision for where we moved to at the time was predicated on her driving me to work on her way to her own job, and now instead of getting driven to work I was being told to screw off and get myself there because she had only gotten two hours of sleep. Only one of the two of us had a license, though, so this was something of a jerk move on her part.
The same kind of poor decision making that was being imposed on me by my then-fiancee the Level 40 Rogue on World of Warcraft is the same kind of poor decision making Alyssa Bereznak dismissed so readily with her three strikes, but that’s not making an apology for her. Jon Finkel is an awesome human being, as his attitude and actions throughout well show. But never again will I date anyone who plays World of Warcraft or has so deeply absorptive hobbies that they just fall into them at the exclusion of everything else in their life, myself included, so I guess you could say I understand. More important and to the point is the fact that the same deeply toxic male-domineered and sexist environment as she played in on World of Warcraft is the same one we ask women to inhabit as Magic players, the same one that saw so few women seek degrees in engineering and the hard sciences when I was in college, and the same one Rebecca Watson sought to expose to daylight with her video blog.
Look around the room. How many women do you see? Don’t you think there is a reason for that, and if so, what is it?
It’s not that they don’t put enough angels or unicorns on the cards. Hey look, kittens with wings! Tell me that is not the cutest thing you have ever seen on a Magic card. It’s not that women are any less smart than men are - when it comes to playing cards and finding the correct decision we’re just brains in a jar anyway, it doesn’t matter what exists below the neck. Tell my girlfriend she’s any less aggressive than a boy would be because she has two X chromosomes, and she’ll pull a Fatality on you just to watch you die. Tell your friends that you can’t believe you just got beat by a girl, and you are not just a passive but an active part of the problem.
In fourth grade, I got beat by a girl. She didn’t have cards in her hand. I wasn’t embarrassed, I just didn’t know why she was hitting me in the first place. And the cycle of gender abuse that we as a culture quietly accepts has to be interrupted, if it is to get better. A critical part of that is awareness: when one becomes aware that something is skewed, that something is wrong, you can’t just go back to the same patterns you used to follow and give it no further thought. We live in the world we choose to live in, and when those choices are made consciously instead of unconsciously we tend to find ourselves living better lives and in better worlds. So consider Geordie’s letter your wake-up call, and don’t consider this to be ‘just a Magic problem’ at that: this is something endemic to our culture, and on a far wider scale than just gaming. And to Geordie’s hypothetical daughter, I say this: It gets better.
How, though, is the question you must inevitably ask. Go to a Magic tournament and maybe you’ll notice a slight uptick in the number of women there. What was five percent is now ten percent; that’s a doubling of the number of women playing Magic, but still a shockingly out of order gender skew. But it’s not all gaming: video games that do not involve online play have a much more even player base across the two genders, and as nerdy a hobby as live-action role-playing tends to enjoy a much more nearly 50/50 basis... which is probably why I’ve dated so many live-action roleplayers and only one Magic player. So it is not the game itself, it is the way we play it.
So far, my experiences with Commander have been more normal as far as gender balances goes, and it is my hope that there will be more releases like this summer’s Commander decks and a greater focus on lower tiers of Magic than the Pro Tour that do not suffer from the same excesses of cutthroat competitiveness. The negative incentives that cause women to come play Magic and then, having done so, put the cards down and think better of it if that is how they are going to be treated... those are the problem. And then there is of course Duel of the Planeswalkers and Magic Online, two ways to play Magic without one’s gender coming into question. I, for one, don’t remember the last time my opponent on MTGO asked me if I was a girl, so much like in the World of Warcraft I expect there is a much less divisive gender gap, just one that happens to also be invisible. After all, unlike World of Warcraft your ‘avatar’ does not have any presumption to correspond with your real-life gender; if you picked the Serra Angel avatar it says nothing in comparison to your failure to choose the Prodigal Sorcerer, Birds of Paradise, Flametongue Kavu, or Stalking Tiger avatars.
Without the oppressive culture we have somehow cultivated and grown around ourselves, I would expect the gender equality of these electronic gaming mediums to grow more evenly over time; without the negative experience of stepping into a shop and seeing only boys there playing cards, without the face-to-face experience that causes one’s identity to even come up, a more true expression of interest in the game across the two genders will only grow over time as these continue forward into our future. More active roles need to be taken face-to-face, as well, by those of us who make ourselves visible and try to lead the community, or even just by the person everybody looks up to at their local card shop.
To change a culture, and the perceptions that come with it, takes time. Magic is, with the release of Innestrad, hitting while the iron is hot when it comes to bringing in elements that are recent trends in popular culture; no, we won’t be playing Twilight: the Gathering, but with a trend for recent movies and shows about werewolves and vampires it’s only smart to fold some of that which Magic already possesses more noticeably into the game. The more Magic resembles the outside world, the more the people in the room at a Magic tournament will resemble the outside world as well, an outside world that has a pretty even divide between the genders. But to really draw women into the game, we aren’t just going to have to change the men, though let me tell you - men, we have to change. To draw women into the game, they need to be able to see something of themselves in it if they are to be interested, and just like Magic is currently striking a pop-culture vein by highlighting horror themes in Innestrad, so too should we be capitalizing on The Hermione Granger Effect.
We now have a decade of girls and young women who have read Harry Potter, and thanks to J.K. Rowling’s excellent use of not just male protagonists but a very smart and likable female protagonist, some of these girls probably have an interest in ‘wizarding,’ which to some degree or another is kind of what we do on weekends and at FNM. We also have a decade of boys and young men who have read Harry Potter, and who will hopefully not have the preconceived notions that women make poor spellcasters unless we ourselves teach it to them. Without Hermione Granger there is no success at the end of the tale of Harry Potter, and there are plenty of other powerful female characters both good and evil that brings a much more normative gender bias to the future generation of Magic players.
How, then, to draw more deeply upon this? You can’t just make the block after Innestrad be Hogwarts: The Quiddiching, after all. But if you look at the culture we presently inhabit and think back fifteen years or so, I suspect you will find an answer of sorts. We presently live in a culture where superhero movies are the new ‘in’ thing. Batman, Iron Man, Captain America, Spider-Man, the X-Men... these are all things we have seen in comic book form since the 1940’s and which was largely relegated to childhood and ‘nerds,’ with the line between them drawn roughly at age twelve when a boy was asked by his father to put his comic books down unless he wanted to be a nerd. An immense amount of negativity followed the comic book around and drove it into its own niche subculture, immediately recognizable in the form of The Simpsons’ Comic Shop Guy.
And then something changed. There were the Tim Burton Batman movies in the 90’s, and the Superman movies in the 80’s, but these still weren’t mainstream yet, they were the exception to the rule instead of the new normal. But think back to ten years before we saw the launching of the massively-successful X-Men movies, and the revitalization of the Batman movies with Batman Begins, and you’ll see X-Men: The Animated Series and Batman: The Animated Series. Comic-book culture captured the hearts and minds of children before they grew old enough to be told not to like it anymore unless they wanted to be a nerd, before it became ‘uncool,’ and now the next summer blockbuster is yet another comic book drawing upon forty-year-old source material to bring you a two hour popcorn experience. Some day, yes, they may even bring us the summer blockbuster that is Rom: Spaceknight.
How is it that we do not have Magic: the Animated Series? Take the visual style from the Jace versus Chandra box set, re-envisioning those two planeswalkers in an animated style, and present it to the same children who already watch Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh and all those other card games that are tied to cartoon products. You can’t possibly think Yu-Gi-Oh is as successful as it is because it is a good card game, not with five minutes to explain how it works. New card games are commissioned into existence to synch up with existing or proposed TV cartoons... isn’t it amazing that there is no Magic: the Gathering cartoon that we can show children and which will grow interest in the game not today but five and ten years down the line? Would Geordie’s hypothetical daughter learn to love to play Magic by watching Magic: the Animated Series, and learn to see herself within the game through the lens of a powerful and interesting female protagonist like Chandra Nalaar?
I would quit my job tomorrow and move to Seattle to go write a Magic cartoon for children, if they said the word. One that helps to teach the next generation of planeswalkers that girls are every bit as good as guys, at that... it’s important that such a thing be done right, if it is to be done, after all.
But for today, instead of a future tomorrow, there is still something you can do. You can challenge bias and misogyny when you hear it, call people out of their comfort zone when you hear them repeating the same woman-bashing lines you’ll hear at event after event, and not just ‘I got beat by a girl.’ Positive attitudes towards women beget more positivity, while negative attitudes towards women beget more negativity. When I first met Alex Bertoncini, he was a cheater. No, not with cards in his hand. But in relationships? Absolutely. The kind of guy who wakes up in the morning, writes a semi-romantic text message like ‘hey baby, I was dreaming about you last night, you want to do something later...’ and then mass-sends it to five women in his cell phone’s address book. There was an amusing anecdote about how angry he got when he found out that his girlfriend (upon whom he had most certainly been cheating) turned around and cheated on him, and he learned how it felt when that shoe was on the other foot. He just happened to also be broke and lost his wallet at the Pro Tour in Puerto Rico the week before, and so he required a little bit of mercy or at least a little help to get back home from that weekend’s SCG Open.
I gave him the mercy he required; I’m not the kind of guy who is going to let someone suffer terrible calamity when he can do something about it. I am also, however, not the kind of guy to pass on the opportunity to give him a whole heaping of free advice how to make things better so that they don’t repeat their mistakes, and that was one hell of an expensive ‘free’ ride home for Alex. It cost him zero dollars, but he was stuck in a car with me for four hours trying to explain to him that he was holding within his mind a double standard, something that said it was okay when he did it but wrong when she did it, and which as we dug further turned out to be a lot of negativity about women in a lot of different ways. He was gaming the system with his ‘Nice Guy’ attempts masking his ‘Player’ ways, but seeing a lot of my own wayward youth in his mistakes I jammed four hours of brow-beating at him as we drove back to New York, and I’d like to think at least a little bit of it stuck. Slowly but surely, one person correcting another and trying to break through the barriers of ignorance and willful blindness at a time, a difference can be made.
And so I say this: it gets better. But it could get better faster, if only we helped, and to do that... we need to wake up and realize that the roomful of people we see at a Magic event is not a random sampling of people, and cut it out. To those of us who have played through the stupidity of our own youths, like myself and Geordie, there are lessons to be passed on to the younger members of our community, and the more we advocate for change and seek to foster a more even and rational keel to things like gender and racial bias, the better things will be for us all. We will live better lives, be better people, and have a better game still waiting for our hypothetical daughters when they get old enough to play. Maybe we will have them, and maybe we will not... but whether we do or not, do it for Bella.
We are at a tipping point: we have been called to notice that there is something fundamentally wrong about the culture that surrounds this game we all know and love, and we can move forward if we want. Awareness is the first step in fixing a mistake, and we have to be aware: even if it’s just as simple as admitting there is a problem, and that even if we aren’t part of it, we can be a part of the solution. It would probably shock you to see some of the horrific things that have been deleted from the forums of Ashley Morway’s Taking Valakut To The Top 4 Of The Boston PTQ since it was first posted six weeks ago, just because she’s a girl. But that wasn’t ten years ago or when Ice Age came out, that was six weeks ago.
Change your perceptions. Change your behavior. And if that’s not enough, change what you are willing to accept from those around you, and change will come. It gets better, but not without help.
How It Gets Better
by Sean McKeown
You don’t have to do anything more than look around the room to see that there is a problem. And yet, so many of us for so long have not seen the problem: not seen, because it is easier to take something as a matter of fact and ‘the way the world is’ than to challenge yourself to change your world for the better.
Was Magic always this bereft of gender equality? Undoubtedly. Gaming culture, as well as ‘intellectual’ culture, has had a largely male-driven culture since before I was born. This is the world we have inherited from our forebears; this does not, however, have to be the world we choose to live in. But change is hard, and requires not just an awareness that something is wrong but an awareness of how that has been allowed into your life.
I wish I could tell you it was just Magic players. I’d settle for just gamers. But the fact of the matter seems to be that to find gender inequality still in this day and age, you don’t have to have colorful cardboard or a plastic controller in your hand, and not just because of the Xbox Kinect. Male-centric behavior is unfortunately predominant in almost every intellectual pursuit, be it recreational, educational, or professional.
I went to an engineering school for two years as part of my college program. I started at a large school with a wide variety of interests - NYU, where most certainly there was a fairly even gender balance and you could find men and women chasing intellectual pursuits from a bachelors in liberal arts to doctorates in computer science. Sure, the more purely scientific or mathematic the classes got, the more likely you were to find an uneven distribution of males and females, but it wasn’t a big skew - 60/40, instead of 50/50. Then, I crossed the Hudson River to go to a small engineering school in Hoboken, along with most of my classmates from the NYU engineering program who stuck with it throughout.
Half of the women at that engineering school came from our program. That’s almost certainly an exaggeration due to small sample size, but in every class, the gender ratio was more like 80/20 or 75/25, and most of the women in the classes I was taking, I’d known for several years as part of my engineering program. Was there a reason for this? Was I smart enough at the time to understand the reason? Yes, and no, in that order.
Cross over to the other side of graduation and it gets even more shocking. The year I graduated, getting a degree in chemical engineering, three women graduated from that school with the same degree as I was getting, and I knew all of them from my program. The other thirty or so men getting the same degree, I knew a handful from the program and never bothered to get to know the rest. But that’s 90/10, leaving academia for employment in the same field I was looking to go into, and things haven’t gotten better since.
Maybe just not a lot of women wanted to be engineers. But I don’t think it was because women are any less capable of taking the same classes as I was, or less inclined to find science interesting. Much more likely is the simple calculus of what it would take to put themselves into that field, versus the kind of opposition they would have to face within that field, disincentivized them from seeking that pursuit in the first place. It certainly wasn’t because I was so much smarter than them - my report card from those years will attest that I certainly wasn’t shooting for above average, after all.
Here on StarCityGames.com, this gender inequality within the game was drawn more starkly into the light by Geordie Tait’s To My Someday Daughter. My only criticism, were I to claim one, is that it does not go far enough: to go past showing the problem and begin feeling it, to bring things forward past the tipping point where his hypothetical daughter would have to learn to struggle on in a misogynistic atmosphere such as we find ourselves living in and to a future where, frankly, it gets better.
I love a gamer. Her name is Jen, and she doesn’t play cards, but she has proven quite adept with a controller in her hands, and many a night has been spent together in enjoyable company as she played through video games like Mass Effect 2 (in the role of the female Commander Shepard, obviously). Role-playing games, Grand Theft Auto-style games, combat shooters, you name it, she’s played it. We have battled in Mortal Kombat, as well as everything else. It’s not really my thing, but it doesn’t have to be entirely, just enough of my thing to make the time spent together enjoyable. It’s enough of my thing that for ‘my turn’ to play through a game, I bopped my way through Mega Man 9, relying on the fact that when last I considered myself adept at video games I was good at the Mega Man games, and skills like that may tarnish but never completely disappear. Ask any of us who played video games in the 90’s what the Konami Code is, and they may not have thought of it for a decade, but they will know.
Gaming, even video gaming, is still not quite a female-oriented culture. For every game like Epic Mickey or Portal that might be seen to apply evenly across the genders, there are many and more that capitalize on what is perceived to be a male-dominated audience, as Geordie mentioned when he introduced his wife to his favorite Japanese RPGs or as can be the only possible explanation for the existence of Leisure Suit Larry. But once you connect to the Internet and it becomes not what you do at home but what you do with other people, a shocking effect occurs: it’s raining men.
Let me tell you about another gamer I loved, a story that ended less-well. There were a lot of things wrong with this relationship, as I probably should have caught immediately when after we had been dating for two weeks she found herself evicted from her apartment and came to live with me. It was sudden, yes, but instead of taking it as a warning sign I took it as an opportunity to see her more often, going from long-distance relationship (about a six hours’ drive) to immediate and quite intense intimacy, given that the bedroom I lived in at the apartment I was sharing with three other people was roughly a ten-by-ten square. I’ve worked in bigger cubicles than that, and it’s not a lot of place for two people to live in. But what ultimately drove us apart? World of Warcraft.
Before it drove us apart, I was a World of Warcraft widower. As far as I could tell from the Internet, I was the only one. There were scores and scores of World of Warcraft widows - I even joined a LiveJournal community for them, and then amusingly decided to start my own somewhat more humorous one when I tried to be a little more positive and laugh about the entire experience. To stay sane and stay with her, I wrote letters to the video game, asking if it would be so kind as to disgorge my girlfriend for a few hours every once in a while. But before she immersed herself fully into the World of Warcraft, I remember those timid first steps. She picked a male character, because she wanted to be taken seriously. She picked a hard-sounding name with lots of C’s and K’s for those sharp inflections, because she wanted to get her gender identity out there right up front. She wanted to be a tough guy because she didn’t think she’d be able to get into a raiding guild otherwise, and she knew to play the game past its starting levels she wouldn’t be able to go it alone.
You can guess what happened, I’m sure. Being the only woman there and having to masquerade as a man, when every ‘female’ she encountered was actually a man who just liked watching his female character run around in skimpy clothing with too-big breasts bouncing as she fought, it was eroding to her. Negativity towards women was inherent, automatic, and unchallenged. A raiding guild existed for women, but she didn’t want to join it; she’d have to change servers, and while you could do that, she didn’t think the all-women raiding guild would be as good as the other guilds, so she preferred to continue on as she was as just another one of the guys.
Eventually, she got outed. It was inevitable; the guild she joined used Ventrilo, sort of an audio-only Skype for team chats while they were raiding, and so it became apparent right away that she would have to tell them she was female before she could join in that way, and she deferred the decision for a few weeks under the guise of ‘having to get the hardware’ and continued on as the only one not using Ventrilo until finally one of the guys in the group offered something simple to the only guy not playing: “Dude, if it’s just a problem of the $20 a year subscription, we’ll pay for it for you, just get a headset.” Gamer generosity at its finest: everyone else was using it and found they had a better game because of it, and she... I’m sorry, I mean he... was the only one left out. They wanted him to join fully, and so she had to disclose.
It went about as well as you could expect, I guess. A lot of people were surprised and shocked - by the time they found out that she was a girl who couldn’t play, as they would have assumed if they knew from the start, she was already over Level 40 and a serious organizer in the guild, worked into a second-tier leadership support position that helped with organizing when raids were going to happen. They just happened to know her as Nick, not ‘Nicole.’ And of course, once the shock and surprise quieted down, the first question that was asked was whether she was hot. The second question was whether she had a boyfriend already, and I guess it goes to show their priorities were in some sort of order that they checked to make sure the girl was attractive before deciding to see if they were available.
Does any of this sound familiar? I hope so. Look around the room the next time you go to a Magic tournament with a hundred players or more. Count the women. If you go over needing both hands and have to take your shoes and socks off to start counting on toes, it is a very good distribution indeed. Almost 90/10 or 80/20. Women are playing, we must have gender equality! But it doesn’t have to be this way, and there is nothing naturally causing things to skew this way. Only unnaturally. Choices we make, consciously or otherwise, and choices we can make differently in the future.
There are two possible reasons that you don’t see more women playing Magic. The first is that they are somehow ill-suited to it, that it is not a ‘female interest’. My girlfriend likes getting to pull a Fatality on me in the new Mortal Kombat game, though, so somehow I doubt that’s it, speaking broadly about a gender as a whole instead of a wide spectrum of individuals who just happen to have two X chromosomes. The other is, by Occam’s razor, the simpler and thus truer hypothesis: that this world we occupy is such because we have created it so. Did Richard Garfield have the inception to create Magic as a world where men played but women did not? No, such does not seem to be the case, in fact I highly doubt the idea crossed his mind: “this would be such a success if only men liked it!” is nowhere near the thought process of “this thing I have invented is AWESOME!” that drove the early history of Magic. What drove that, then, I suspect is not Wizards of the Coast but the Duelist’s Conclave International, or ‘the DCI’. Without competition, a game is just a game. But with competition... with ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ or even just ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ as you’ll see when you look at the same broad stroke of nerdy people in another walk of life... suddenly there was something to strive for, to prove oneself at, and there is every indication that one gender seeks acknowledgement through competition more actively than the other does.
This is said not to belittle women, but to belittle men.
Self-confidence is a difficult value to obtain. Last year I wrote a long and rambling tale on the subject, which you can find here, though I still wish I had found a better name for it than the one I chose that accidentally stuck because I loved the article but didn’t know what to stick on the title line, and what was placed there as a throwaway became permanent. Self-confidence in males I can at least claim to have knowledge of; self-confidence in females I have only the outsider’s perspective on, though not for lack of trying. In males, at least, we tend to take self-confidence not as an automatic but as a journey; something we do not possess at first, and are trying to learn and understand so that we may possess it in the future. For me, that was a trip down life lacking confidence because I had it beaten out of me as a child, for having the ill luck at an early age of showing some slight sign of intelligence that stuck my head up only slightly from the crowd, a head which was summarily pounded back into line by a series of schoolyard bullies until I no longer thought myself better than anyone else.
I remember the names of all of my bullies. The fights that I was unfortunately involved in were rather epic: once, in order to escape three bullies in high school who were pounding the snot out of me, I climbed a drainpipe up two stories to sit on the cafeteria roof until the principal came and hauled me down into detention for it. Detention may have sucked, but not as badly as getting on the bus with those three would have, and those seemed the only two options at the time (and at least they couldn’t climb the drainpipe, too). Over a decade of being bullied, one of my bullies was a girl, and every single other one of them was a guy. What I don’t remember, and wish I do, is the names of the people I bullied in turn.
Because I was the runt of the litter - when your birthday is the end of December in a school system that bases which students can be brought into which year of class based on birth during a calendar year, that’s just statistics working against you - I wasn’t really able to do very much about it. My bullies were a year older anyway, for the most part, or the boys who were close enough to it not because of a grade difference but because their birthdays were January and February to my December. I would never have strength as my advantage, so I self-selected for smarts: learn how to avoid the fights with laughter, learn how to hit back smarter instead of harder, learn why they were doing what they were doing so that I could deny them what they wanted and they might turn to easier meat. It sort of worked, I guess, but smart as I was, I failed to stop the cycle of violence there. I turned around and bullied those younger than myself, repeating the cycle of violence and torment that had so brutalized my psyche at that young age. Whatever they were trying to get out of me, I guess I must have figured I could get back from these other kids instead. Things don’t really work that way, but kids are stupid, and I was no exception to the rule.
Cycles have a way of perpetuating themselves, and in Magic it is no different. Geordie hits a nerve when he notes that Magic is played by males who have terrible opinions about women. But it’s not just Magic, it’s the culture of people which happens to include a sub-group that is called ‘Magic players,’ the nerdy intellectualist. Step outside of the realm of cardboard and pixels for a moment to a different ‘scandal,’ not that of Alyssa Bereznak belittling Jon Finkel as a potential romantic pursuit in three quick strikes for playing Magic, but of Rebecca Watson, a female speaker at a Skeptic’s convention. Like Magic players, ‘Skeptics’ skew to the nerdy intellectual, and like Magic this means the culture of the group skews unfortunately male.
It was such a little thing. Watson, a speaker at a European convention last June, spoke at the convention about feminism. No problem, right? Not really, no. While the audience was predominantly male, the ‘scandal’ (so-called) was not her presentation itself but something that followed afterward. Called ‘Elevatorgate,’ it followed from her mentioning in a video blog post afterward something that was not a big deal but which she wished hadn’t happened. After hanging out and talking at the bar with her fellow convention-goers until four in the morning, she was followed somewhat creepily into the elevator by a man as she left the bar, and invited back up to his room to ‘discuss things further.’ To her it was just sort of a joke: ‘guys, don’t do that.’ Not a big deal, but considering she’d just presented about feminism and gender equality, maybe it would have been nice for her to feel like she had been heard. She was, of course, vehemently criticized, including earning a response on the matter by Richard Dawkins, possibly the figurehead of the rational-thinker movement, or at least the first person the religious right burns in effigy first when they get angry over the movement’s apparent opposition to their way of life.
“The man in the elevator didn't physically touch her, didn't attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn't even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that....Rebecca's feeling that the man's proposition was 'creepy' was her own interpretation of his behavior, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum.”
We as a culture tend to be those who were bullied. Sometimes with fists, but far more often with words. Just words. The negative opinions of others can be the death of self-confidence, if they are only expressed loudly enough and frequently enough, and it was only when I learned to move beyond my past that I began to understand that I had taken these negative opinions that others had of me and made them a part of myself.
Rebecca Watson and Alyssa Bereznak have very little in common, I expect. However, having been the one thing in common in numerous failed relationships, at one point I had to stop and wonder whether I was not the common trend in all of these... and whether that was something that could change. In Things I’ve Learned From Magic Cards Who’ve Dumped Me, I go into considerable detail about how I learned self-confidence and how that changed everything in my life. One story not told there, however, which has immediate relevance, comes from my forays into online dating.
Let’s back up two years, to the summer before I met Jen. She and I have just passed the two year anniversary now, and considering I’ve never had a two-year anniversary before I’m happy to call what we have found together a success in online dating. Success isn’t as interesting as failure, though, and it’s a failure of mine I think you’ll learn more from. Before I met Jen, I met another woman, and having learned at least something from Alyssa Bereznak’s mistakes I shall not name names. Said woman had presumably compatible overlaps that led me to an expression of interest, but in the ‘it seems we might have things in common, perhaps we should consider meeting at some point’ kind of way, not a date, quite explicitly not a date. She mentioned a meeting I might find interesting given our stated mutual intellectual interests, and I agreed I would find it interesting, signed up, and said “perhaps I will meet you there.”
Did I think this was creepy? No, and I don’t think many others would. But I forgot whose mask I was wearing - not my own face, but that of an anonymous male over the Internet. You may think you are a harmless individual, cute and cuddly if only a woman would get to know you, but for all she knows of you at that point is that your screen-name is not actually XxSerialKillerxX. Some deference to this fact would have been in order, but this was my first time trying online dating, and I didn’t really know how it worked. It offered a chat function, and after a few messages were exchanged, such seemed not unreasonable. In fact, she offered me her Facebook page as well, and seemed content to chat with me there, but what I didn’t know was that she just wasn’t that into me, and my misconstruing this as possibly a sign of interest was somewhat poor form on my part. I thought I was just being friendly; she thought I was being overbearing, and by the time the meeting came around she had demurred from the idea of joining me at it and meeting me there, and simply did not bother to tell me. I had exhibited poor judgment for an anonymous male on the Internet, enjoyed the presentation because it was something that was in fact quite aligned with my interests, and said hi after it was over for about five minutes. She introduced me to all of her friends, after which it was clear she had to go home and was not in fact going to be sticking around to chat with me more; I tripped on my feet some more and did not get the signal being blatantly broadcast at my forehead, and offered her a ride home if she’d like, that being just enough to reveal that perhaps my screen-name was SerialKiller1979 and if it wasn’t, I sure was exhibiting bad judgment that otherwise precluded any consideration of wanting to get to know me better.
Strike one, strike two, strike three.
Did I think she was superficial? A terrible person? A b*tch? No. I thankfully am at this point somewhat more mature than I was in my youth, and took the input that I was given (‘it seems like you screwed up here’) and extracted from it very quickly the lesson (‘anonymous men on the Internet are not seen as “safe” to individual women’). I picked the lesson up so quickly that I used it to my benefit, showing considerably more savvy in that regards with the girl I now have the pleasure of saying is my girlfriend, but with whom I realized that a slow and patient building of trust would be required until it was my own face I was wearing, not the mask of an anonymous male on the Internet. I expressed much better judgment because I was able to reverse the situation, get to the essence of what was actually going on, learn from the experience, and overcome the inherent difficulties with the online-dating medium. I now saw I needed to earn trust instead of expect it.
In reading further into the Rebecca Watson ‘Elevatorgate’ scandal, never mind the Alyssa Bereznak ‘Finkeldate’ scandal, I came across a simple statement by Nick Smyth on his blog Yeah, OK, But Still. Extracting just the key point, he said the following:
“[Regarding Richard Dawkins’s reply,] Put simply, his failure is the same and the elevator-man's failure: one of imaginative empathy. In order to see why the propositioning was ethically problematic, you have to put yourself in the woman's perspective. You have to think first about the lifetime of sexualization and objectification she has endured. You have to think about the fact that she is trying to operate in a field that is vastly male-dominated. You have to consider what her state of mind was immediately after giving a talk on sexism and objectification. And, then, you have to consider what it's like to live in a world where fear of sexual assault constantly hangs over you like a sword you can't see.”
Remember if you will my poor dating experience on a non-date where I met someone I had hoped might prove interesting, and failed to grasp the fact that only one of the two of us knew me to be ‘safe’. Dispute if you will that any particular male may behave in a certain fashion, but taken as an aggregate on the part of many males rather than the individual, sadly these threats do not continue to stay at zero.
I learned that my behavior needed to change, and challenged my precepts at the fundamental level. Even moreso than the philosophical subject being debated and discussed at the meeting I attended, this caused me to check my precepts for error, and found in myself the irrational: opinions about the interactions between women and men that did not reflect reality, and which like all inherent biases I then sought to root out once identified. For as a gamer, I have been in the others’ shoes; Anne Forsythe’s article The Other Women of Magic is exactly how I felt about World of Warcraft, and a barrier within myself that I turned around to notice was affecting my relationships as far as my playing Magic was concerned. Ultimately, I walked away from the girl when she fell into the World of Warcraft so fully that she stopped going to work for a full week without bothering to call out, got fired, and instead of looking for another job just raided fourteen to sixteen hours a day for a month. Our sleep schedules no longer overlapped because her raiding guild was from the West Coast, which meant that she was going to bed around six in the morning and I was getting up to eight to get to work. Not ideal, but not a problem, until you factor in that our decision for where we moved to at the time was predicated on her driving me to work on her way to her own job, and now instead of getting driven to work I was being told to screw off and get myself there because she had only gotten two hours of sleep. Only one of the two of us had a license, though, so this was something of a jerk move on her part.
The same kind of poor decision making that was being imposed on me by my then-fiancee the Level 40 Rogue on World of Warcraft is the same kind of poor decision making Alyssa Bereznak dismissed so readily with her three strikes, but that’s not making an apology for her. Jon Finkel is an awesome human being, as his attitude and actions throughout well show. But never again will I date anyone who plays World of Warcraft or has so deeply absorptive hobbies that they just fall into them at the exclusion of everything else in their life, myself included, so I guess you could say I understand. More important and to the point is the fact that the same deeply toxic male-domineered and sexist environment as she played in on World of Warcraft is the same one we ask women to inhabit as Magic players, the same one that saw so few women seek degrees in engineering and the hard sciences when I was in college, and the same one Rebecca Watson sought to expose to daylight with her video blog.
Look around the room. How many women do you see? Don’t you think there is a reason for that, and if so, what is it?
It’s not that they don’t put enough angels or unicorns on the cards. Hey look, kittens with wings! Tell me that is not the cutest thing you have ever seen on a Magic card. It’s not that women are any less smart than men are - when it comes to playing cards and finding the correct decision we’re just brains in a jar anyway, it doesn’t matter what exists below the neck. Tell my girlfriend she’s any less aggressive than a boy would be because she has two X chromosomes, and she’ll pull a Fatality on you just to watch you die. Tell your friends that you can’t believe you just got beat by a girl, and you are not just a passive but an active part of the problem.
In fourth grade, I got beat by a girl. She didn’t have cards in her hand. I wasn’t embarrassed, I just didn’t know why she was hitting me in the first place. And the cycle of gender abuse that we as a culture quietly accepts has to be interrupted, if it is to get better. A critical part of that is awareness: when one becomes aware that something is skewed, that something is wrong, you can’t just go back to the same patterns you used to follow and give it no further thought. We live in the world we choose to live in, and when those choices are made consciously instead of unconsciously we tend to find ourselves living better lives and in better worlds. So consider Geordie’s letter your wake-up call, and don’t consider this to be ‘just a Magic problem’ at that: this is something endemic to our culture, and on a far wider scale than just gaming. And to Geordie’s hypothetical daughter, I say this: It gets better.
How, though, is the question you must inevitably ask. Go to a Magic tournament and maybe you’ll notice a slight uptick in the number of women there. What was five percent is now ten percent; that’s a doubling of the number of women playing Magic, but still a shockingly out of order gender skew. But it’s not all gaming: video games that do not involve online play have a much more even player base across the two genders, and as nerdy a hobby as live-action role-playing tends to enjoy a much more nearly 50/50 basis... which is probably why I’ve dated so many live-action roleplayers and only one Magic player. So it is not the game itself, it is the way we play it.
So far, my experiences with Commander have been more normal as far as gender balances goes, and it is my hope that there will be more releases like this summer’s Commander decks and a greater focus on lower tiers of Magic than the Pro Tour that do not suffer from the same excesses of cutthroat competitiveness. The negative incentives that cause women to come play Magic and then, having done so, put the cards down and think better of it if that is how they are going to be treated... those are the problem. And then there is of course Duel of the Planeswalkers and Magic Online, two ways to play Magic without one’s gender coming into question. I, for one, don’t remember the last time my opponent on MTGO asked me if I was a girl, so much like in the World of Warcraft I expect there is a much less divisive gender gap, just one that happens to also be invisible. After all, unlike World of Warcraft your ‘avatar’ does not have any presumption to correspond with your real-life gender; if you picked the Serra Angel avatar it says nothing in comparison to your failure to choose the Prodigal Sorcerer, Birds of Paradise, Flametongue Kavu, or Stalking Tiger avatars.
Without the oppressive culture we have somehow cultivated and grown around ourselves, I would expect the gender equality of these electronic gaming mediums to grow more evenly over time; without the negative experience of stepping into a shop and seeing only boys there playing cards, without the face-to-face experience that causes one’s identity to even come up, a more true expression of interest in the game across the two genders will only grow over time as these continue forward into our future. More active roles need to be taken face-to-face, as well, by those of us who make ourselves visible and try to lead the community, or even just by the person everybody looks up to at their local card shop.
To change a culture, and the perceptions that come with it, takes time. Magic is, with the release of Innestrad, hitting while the iron is hot when it comes to bringing in elements that are recent trends in popular culture; no, we won’t be playing Twilight: the Gathering, but with a trend for recent movies and shows about werewolves and vampires it’s only smart to fold some of that which Magic already possesses more noticeably into the game. The more Magic resembles the outside world, the more the people in the room at a Magic tournament will resemble the outside world as well, an outside world that has a pretty even divide between the genders. But to really draw women into the game, we aren’t just going to have to change the men, though let me tell you - men, we have to change. To draw women into the game, they need to be able to see something of themselves in it if they are to be interested, and just like Magic is currently striking a pop-culture vein by highlighting horror themes in Innestrad, so too should we be capitalizing on The Hermione Granger Effect.
We now have a decade of girls and young women who have read Harry Potter, and thanks to J.K. Rowling’s excellent use of not just male protagonists but a very smart and likable female protagonist, some of these girls probably have an interest in ‘wizarding,’ which to some degree or another is kind of what we do on weekends and at FNM. We also have a decade of boys and young men who have read Harry Potter, and who will hopefully not have the preconceived notions that women make poor spellcasters unless we ourselves teach it to them. Without Hermione Granger there is no success at the end of the tale of Harry Potter, and there are plenty of other powerful female characters both good and evil that brings a much more normative gender bias to the future generation of Magic players.
How, then, to draw more deeply upon this? You can’t just make the block after Innestrad be Hogwarts: The Quiddiching, after all. But if you look at the culture we presently inhabit and think back fifteen years or so, I suspect you will find an answer of sorts. We presently live in a culture where superhero movies are the new ‘in’ thing. Batman, Iron Man, Captain America, Spider-Man, the X-Men... these are all things we have seen in comic book form since the 1940’s and which was largely relegated to childhood and ‘nerds,’ with the line between them drawn roughly at age twelve when a boy was asked by his father to put his comic books down unless he wanted to be a nerd. An immense amount of negativity followed the comic book around and drove it into its own niche subculture, immediately recognizable in the form of The Simpsons’ Comic Shop Guy.
And then something changed. There were the Tim Burton Batman movies in the 90’s, and the Superman movies in the 80’s, but these still weren’t mainstream yet, they were the exception to the rule instead of the new normal. But think back to ten years before we saw the launching of the massively-successful X-Men movies, and the revitalization of the Batman movies with Batman Begins, and you’ll see X-Men: The Animated Series and Batman: The Animated Series. Comic-book culture captured the hearts and minds of children before they grew old enough to be told not to like it anymore unless they wanted to be a nerd, before it became ‘uncool,’ and now the next summer blockbuster is yet another comic book drawing upon forty-year-old source material to bring you a two hour popcorn experience. Some day, yes, they may even bring us the summer blockbuster that is Rom: Spaceknight.
How is it that we do not have Magic: the Animated Series? Take the visual style from the Jace versus Chandra box set, re-envisioning those two planeswalkers in an animated style, and present it to the same children who already watch Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh and all those other card games that are tied to cartoon products. You can’t possibly think Yu-Gi-Oh is as successful as it is because it is a good card game, not with five minutes to explain how it works. New card games are commissioned into existence to synch up with existing or proposed TV cartoons... isn’t it amazing that there is no Magic: the Gathering cartoon that we can show children and which will grow interest in the game not today but five and ten years down the line? Would Geordie’s hypothetical daughter learn to love to play Magic by watching Magic: the Animated Series, and learn to see herself within the game through the lens of a powerful and interesting female protagonist like Chandra Nalaar?
I would quit my job tomorrow and move to Seattle to go write a Magic cartoon for children, if they said the word. One that helps to teach the next generation of planeswalkers that girls are every bit as good as guys, at that... it’s important that such a thing be done right, if it is to be done, after all.
But for today, instead of a future tomorrow, there is still something you can do. You can challenge bias and misogyny when you hear it, call people out of their comfort zone when you hear them repeating the same woman-bashing lines you’ll hear at event after event, and not just ‘I got beat by a girl.’ Positive attitudes towards women beget more positivity, while negative attitudes towards women beget more negativity. When I first met Alex Bertoncini, he was a cheater. No, not with cards in his hand. But in relationships? Absolutely. The kind of guy who wakes up in the morning, writes a semi-romantic text message like ‘hey baby, I was dreaming about you last night, you want to do something later...’ and then mass-sends it to five women in his cell phone’s address book. There was an amusing anecdote about how angry he got when he found out that his girlfriend (upon whom he had most certainly been cheating) turned around and cheated on him, and he learned how it felt when that shoe was on the other foot. He just happened to also be broke and lost his wallet at the Pro Tour in Puerto Rico the week before, and so he required a little bit of mercy or at least a little help to get back home from that weekend’s SCG Open.
I gave him the mercy he required; I’m not the kind of guy who is going to let someone suffer terrible calamity when he can do something about it. I am also, however, not the kind of guy to pass on the opportunity to give him a whole heaping of free advice how to make things better so that they don’t repeat their mistakes, and that was one hell of an expensive ‘free’ ride home for Alex. It cost him zero dollars, but he was stuck in a car with me for four hours trying to explain to him that he was holding within his mind a double standard, something that said it was okay when he did it but wrong when she did it, and which as we dug further turned out to be a lot of negativity about women in a lot of different ways. He was gaming the system with his ‘Nice Guy’ attempts masking his ‘Player’ ways, but seeing a lot of my own wayward youth in his mistakes I jammed four hours of brow-beating at him as we drove back to New York, and I’d like to think at least a little bit of it stuck. Slowly but surely, one person correcting another and trying to break through the barriers of ignorance and willful blindness at a time, a difference can be made.
And so I say this: it gets better. But it could get better faster, if only we helped, and to do that... we need to wake up and realize that the roomful of people we see at a Magic event is not a random sampling of people, and cut it out. To those of us who have played through the stupidity of our own youths, like myself and Geordie, there are lessons to be passed on to the younger members of our community, and the more we advocate for change and seek to foster a more even and rational keel to things like gender and racial bias, the better things will be for us all. We will live better lives, be better people, and have a better game still waiting for our hypothetical daughters when they get old enough to play. Maybe we will have them, and maybe we will not... but whether we do or not, do it for Bella.
We are at a tipping point: we have been called to notice that there is something fundamentally wrong about the culture that surrounds this game we all know and love, and we can move forward if we want. Awareness is the first step in fixing a mistake, and we have to be aware: even if it’s just as simple as admitting there is a problem, and that even if we aren’t part of it, we can be a part of the solution. It would probably shock you to see some of the horrific things that have been deleted from the forums of Ashley Morway’s Taking Valakut To The Top 4 Of The Boston PTQ since it was first posted six weeks ago, just because she’s a girl. But that wasn’t ten years ago or when Ice Age came out, that was six weeks ago.
Change your perceptions. Change your behavior. And if that’s not enough, change what you are willing to accept from those around you, and change will come. It gets better, but not without help.