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.
Chicks add class to the table.
ReplyDeleteThey needed more people to play and buy their game, nothing out of the ordinary. When you want more consumers you tend to shoot everywhere.
ReplyDeleteAnd 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.
ReplyDelete