RPG Gatekeeping is Bad, Mmkay?
Gatekeeping in the RPG hobby is toxic. RPGs have evolved since the 70’s, growing more diverse all the time. We can, and should, do better.
Tabletop roleplaying games have been a big part of my life since I was 8 years old. For anyone who doesn’t know, that was 1983, when the D&D cartoon ruled Saturday mornings and the Metzner red box was the main entry into the hobby. I loved roleplaying games then, and I love them now. But it is important to remember that gatekeeping is a toxic practice of excluding certain types of people from communities. And it ultimately harms rather than preserves the things we love about the hobby.
What Does RPG Gatekeeping Look Like?
Gatekeeping can take many forms, and sometimes, it can be difficult to recognize. Sometimes, it’s about insisting that fantasy tropes only pertain to certain demographics. And yes, the demands are usually rather light-skinned and patriarchal. Commenters often use “it’s not historical” as an excuse for this. Other times, it’s the gaming communities (both groups and stores) that made women feel extremely uncomfortable.
More recently, we’ve got comments celebrating anti-diversity from Ernie Gygax to RPGs that are poorly-disguised racist screeds. Honestly, this article was a bit tough to research given the absolute cesspool out there purporting to be RPGs when they’re actually about repugnant ideologies. There’s the shadow of Gamergate (and its nauseous talking points), RPG conventions welcoming harassers into their spaces, and just… there’s more of this garbage out there that I don’t care to enumerate.
The short version is this: if the RPG creators or community leaders use “woke” and “SJW” as pejoratives, you’d be best served to look elsewhere for fun. Honestly, this kind of behavior is right up there with shouting at retail employees in public and abusing waitstaff in a restaurant — it’s not cool and Edgelordy, it’s being an asshole. Also, those pricks who chant “get woke, go broke” clearly never saw the absolute mint raked in by the Avatar: Legends RPG.
The Changing Landscape of RPGs
The truth about why gatekeeping sucks is very simple: there’s value in fresh ideas. And the history of RPGs is full of adapting and incorporating new ideas and new viewpoints into the hobby. When RPGs started out in the late 70’s, they were met with grumbling that they were “replacing” the hobby of wargaming (which has not gone away by any means). There were many sea-changes starting in the 80’s, with the rise of simulationist games and branching out to many genres besides fantasy.
The 90’s brought us Magic: The Gathering, White Wolf’s storyteller systems, and the rise of a thriving and active LARP scene. Later still we gained the indie revolution, the OSR movement, and game-changers like the SRD and the growth of third-party publishing. Hell, I’m old enough to remember when anime was introduced to the western culture at large, and the huge influence it has had on artwork, pop culture, and storytelling tropes, including RPGs. (As a side note, make sure to check out the amazing work by Shannon Applecline’s Designers & Dragons series on RPG.net for more insight into the hobby’s rich and varied history)
I spent six months living in Germany, and I attended many of the local RPG conventions there. Something I noticed was trends that were also taking place here in America. More young people were present at the tables. More women were taking part than I had ever seen before… and especially, more women as gamemasters. There’s more diversity now than when I entered the hobby almost forty years ago. All of this equals more ideas, more new perspectives, and more innovation. More “coolness” in RPGs. I love the fact that I’ve been sharing gaming tables with more people of color, more women, and more people with different ideas of sexuality and gender than myself. A recent survey of D&D players from 2020 shows us that more young people and women are playing D&D than ever before.
Into the Future
The hobby will grow. It will change. It will become more diverse, not less. More representative, not less. These changes, despite angry nerds claiming otherwise, are good. Stagnation is death. If the hobby did not grow, did not change, and remained static as it was in the 80’s, we would have never seen new approaches like the amazing style of Mork Borg, the retro awesomeness that is Dungeon Crawl Classics, the elegant rules of D&D 5e, or wickedly cheeky genres like Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Who knows what the future holds when it comes to great innovations, astounding game settings, or themes and tropes that awaken us to new possibilities?
More voices, more visibility, and more viewpoints only add to the options available, they take nothing away. Promote voices and viewpoints that are traditionally overlooked and marginalized. It only leads to greater breadth and width, and more chances for additional great experiences to come along.
The RPG hobby has never, ever, stopped evolving. We, as RPG enthusiasts, need to remember that. I’ve literally watched it happen throughout my life. Everyone’s experience and preferences are their own. You can, if you like, continue to play the games that brought you joy when you were a kid. I definitely still love playing the games that were in the world in 1983. The difference is that I don’t hate and belittle the games that have come along after that point.
If there’s a closing thought I can leave you with, it’s this: there’s no place among us for hate and harassment. No Nazis in punk! And the correct amount of Nazism in RPGs is the same as the lead in your water – ZERO.
