Friday, October 6, 2017

Vintage Ad: Why Women Don't Play Wargames


This late-1970s variant on one of the earliest Dungeons & Dragon advertisements repeats some conventional wisdom of the day about female participation in the gaming community. But as the text suggests, D&D had the potential to be "a game which women play and enjoy equally with men." Women did take up D&D in numbers very different from prior self-identified wargames, though their integration into the community faced its share of challenges.

This advertisement could be found in the wild as a full-page in Fantastic Stories magazine, June 1977. TSR then actively targeted not just gamers but fans of fantasy fiction--by some estimates, about a third of whom at the time were women.

3 comments:

  1. They needed more people to play and buy their game, nothing out of the ordinary. When you want more consumers you tend to shoot everywhere.

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  2. And yet many modern games choose not to advertise to women; thus, this is out of the ordinary and interesting enough to merit both a blog post and our comments.

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