ABSTRACT
Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons (and therefore the creepy old grandfather of all role-playing games and much of the video game industry), once famously said “Gaming in general is a male thing …. everyone who’s tried to design a game to interest a large female audience has failed.” 1 For many years, even as games like The Sims broke all sales records and drew a 60% female audience, 2 Gygax’s attitude was common in the video game industry, with game designers assuming that girls just “didn’t like” combat or rules or vigorous system design and were therefore unsuited to design games.
