WotC-Fail - Girls & D&D

I generally stay away from bashing WotC and their generally moronic decisions, but this goes beyond the pale.

Republished from Kynn's LiveJournal:


As part of their inexplicable series about D&D and kids, Wizards of the Coast has posted an official tutorial about girls & gaming, which starts with a disclaimer:

I am a man.

Despite living a rich and fulfilling life, one thing I never got to be is a woman. Therefore, some readers are likely to ask, “What gives you the right, as a man, to talk about women?”

First of all, this article is not about women, but about children of the female persuasion. Children rarely write pedagogic articles (and thank goodness for that!) and so this ungrateful task falls upon my hairy adult shoulders. So while I may not be female, you, my hypothetical accuser, are not a child, hence we’re both in equal violation of authenticity.

[blah blah blah]

Lastly, and this is my main point, it’s all about fun and games. So please, for the aforementioned goodness’ sake, don’t take anything I write too seriously. My aim as I embarked on this monumental project was to help DMs avoid some of the pitfalls into which I had stumbled in the beginning of my career and to tell some amusing anecdotes while at it, not to expose all the intricacies of the human spirit.

This is the same guy who wrote the tutorial about punishing kids.


At the time of that article, Uri had a public Google buzz feed. He's taken it private now; I made a screencap at the time.


Let's take a look at the guy who Wizards of the Coast thinks is the correct person to write about girls in gaming:





This guy has ideas worth sharing about girls in gaming:





Here's the guy who Wizards.com features in their "D&D Kids: Girls at the Table" article, talking about the causes of domestic violence:





Annnnd here's Uri's idea of the perfect RPG, presumably for adults only and not for the immature:





Now, I'm not saying that Wizards of the Coast should be in the business of censuring any of their contributors for their personal views. Uri's odious views on domestic violence, on feminism, on rape shouldn't automatically disqualify him from writing for Hasbro.


But I'm just thinking that maybe, just maybe, Wizards of the Coast should have hired a female gamer to write the article -- I know plenty of them who could write well about the topic and not just regurgitate a bunch of tired gender stereotypes such as the character statistically [sic] most likely to be attractive to girls is a female eladrin ranger -- instead of an openly misogynist apologist for domestic violence.


Just sayin'.




PS: As you might expect, the article itself is shitty.


Update: This post originally contained a sentence that cast doubt on other people working at Wizards of the Coast. That was inappropriate and I apologize for writing it, and hereby retract it. The sentence was:
I'm sure there are plenty of men at WotC who might agree that women who are victims of violent abuse from their spouses deserved it for forcing their husbands to physically assault them.
I apologize to anyone I hurt by saying that.


Update 2: Wizards of the Coast has removed the post, and posted a statement on Twitter:

We've removed the article. The opinions of the author don't reflect the views of Wizards of the Coast.

Here is the Google cache of the post (hat tip yendi), and a very large screenshot of that cache (Google caches eventually expire).

---

There is just so much wrong with this...