[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Very nice! Where are the not-marines? 🙂

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Funny you should say that, William. I was at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Puerto Rico in November, and we had a GREAT panel on women in gaming. The room was packed with young women and a handful of young men, all of them gamers and it was five university lectures in a row on the topic.

It all depends on what you are interested in. As Gamergate showed, a lot of young people don’t find the topic of gender and gaming boring at all.

Very much to the contrary, in fact.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Dear Rod,

What we have are complicated feedback loops between biology, environment and behavior. Saying men and women have different biochemistries is one thing. Claiming that said biochemistry actually causes a given behavior is another thing. Women and men process information differently? Great. How does this lead to behaviorial differences? That needs to be shown in a causal chain, not simply presumed.

There is nothing in these biochemical differences that necessarily means that women can’t or won’t play wargames.

But it I like the fact that you bring up pregnancy as a supposed stable, cross-cultural female behavior. Women’s behaviors during pregnancy vary radically from culture to culture and throughout history. So yes, women get pregnant and men don’t. What pregnancy means in terms of women’s behavior, however, changes quite radically. If it was all predetermined by chemicals — with no cultural or environmental inputs — we wouldn’t see that.

And both men and women can and do play games. The kinds of games they like are culturally determined, not chemically determined.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Can’t discuss complex topics in 144 characters, Ivan. 😀

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

All I know is that yesterday, a good forty percent of the people around my table were young women, aged 19-25. And they showed every bit as much interest as the young men.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Dear Rod,

Yes, there is no doubt that behavior and biochemistry are linked. What there is some doubt about is causality.

People tend to say “chemicals cause behavior”. But in many instances, environment and behavior cause chemicals. Testosterone, for example, notoriously fluctuates in accordance with environmental cues.

So no, the idea that women act according to their biology and that this biology and behavior is radically different from men’s is not at all well established. And I can point to literally thousands of times when biodeterminist essentialism with regards to sex/gender has been proven wrong. That is why it’s not a good horse to bet on.

Chemistry, social learning, and behaviors create very complex feedback loops among human beings and showing that biochemistry is different is not the same thing as saying, for example, that women hare biologically predetermined to do this or that.

This is not a value judgement, it is simply what has been observed over and over again in countless experiments for at least two centuries.

Would you like to provide a link to peer-reviewed research to that effect? I’d love to see it. 200 years old…? You’ll note the one peer reviewed paper you linked to explicitly does not make that sort of claim. But I would LOVE to see one form of human female behavior that has reliably, transculturally, remained stable over the last 200 years. If you can show me a peer-reviewed paper demonstrating that, I will bless you!

There is no explicit or implied value judgement being made by scientists, they are simply following where the science leads them and reporting the results of experiments.

Actually, scientists make value-based judgements all the time. As an example, check out the conflicts between those who hold up chimps as a good example of human base primate behaviors and those who prefer the bonobo.

“Biology affects behavior” is an entirely different precept from “biology controls behavior”. When you can reliably show cross-cultural behavioral permanencies among men or women over long term periods then you are on to something. It’s pretty well proven, for example, that men tend to be more physically violent than women. But the range of violent behaviors is so wide, cross culturally, that there’s really not much that can really be said there. While Swedish men murder more than Swedish women and Brazilian men murder more than Brazilian women, Brazilian women murder more often than Swedish men. Apparently, despite these biochemical differences then, female/male behaviors are flexible enough to mimic each other, depending on the cultural and environmental scenario.

And when it comes to things like games… Again, Rob, this is an empirical fact: futebol is a man’s sport in Brazil and a women’s sport in the U.S. and I’ve heard all sorts of socio-biological nonsense, on both sides, that supposedly explains this, but which only apparently “works’ because said social biologists don’t bother to actually make cross-cultural comparisons. In other words, because they willfully blind themselves to results that don’t support their theories.

So again, while I accept the idea that, biologically speaking, one sex or another might have more of a general tendency towards a given behavior, time and again it has been shown, empirically, that culture molds these tendencies to the point where they can effectively disappear. Both male and female POTENTIAL behaviors are pretty much congruent and both are contingent on culture far more than they are on biology.

If you dispute that, again, it should be easy to show: show a long term, cultural constant in women’s or men’s behavior.

In the context of the current discussion, what this means is that there is plenty of potential room for women in gaming and most of the barriers there are cultural in nature and not biological or biochemical. Yes, perhaps there always will be more men wargaming than women. But there’s a HUGE difference between, say, even a 20/80% gender split and today’s probable 1/99% gender split. And making gaming a better environment for different kinds of people in no way necessarily involves stepping on men’s putative rights.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

And jeez, Bandit. OF COURSE girls like tanks….!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA5IFJqjXiQ

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

I once commented that if RPGs gave as much shift to romance and drama and even sex as they did to where, exactly, each sword strike falls, they’d be enormously more appealing to most people.

Vampire proved that in spades.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Ivan, regarding White Wolf’s Vampire, I think it’s an excellent example of what I am talking about.

I know the old WW crowd pretty well. They were a very diverse group, right from the start, even before they were White Wolf in the Lion Rampart days. Women were part of the game writing and creation process and a transwoman was notoriously one of the big movers and shakers in the early company (she later went on to help found Wizards of the Coast, by the way).

In the RPG field, Vampire was seen as a revolutionary gaming system. It really put the last nail in TSR’s coffin and changed role-playing massively. Very much for the better.

There is no doubt in my mind that a large part of this was due to the fact that it was created by a band of people who were much different from your usual gaming nerds. They opened up the hobby, massively, giving it a credibility it had never had before. And they didn’t have to step on anyone’s rights to do it. They simply did something that in retrospect was an obviously winning move: they made games that attracted adults of both sexes and all orientations and genders. They did it by being inclusive and thus having insights and innovations other companies didn’t have.

At the same time, the Word According to TSR was that gaming was for boys and the only way to increase market share was to dumb it down to attract pre-pubescent boys. Do you all remember Dragon Strike, with it’s “revolutionary” how-to-play VHS tape? That, according to our account managers in Lake Geneva, was going to be the game that made us all rich by opening up D&D to the 9 year old penis-waver set.

White Wolf just MASSACRED TSR going the exact opposite direction. And they did it by including women, gays, trans-, black, latino and etc. people in all parts of game creation and testing.

Diversity makes a better product, folks. It’s been proven time and again.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

I have been told that I can come off as patronizing, so please understand that I am doing my best not to act this way here. But the fact that I disagree with some of the points above, when combined with the fact that I am an anthropologist who specializes in gender studies, gives me a different perspective on some of this.

I disagree with what some people call the “interplanetary view of sex/gender relations” (i.e., men are from Mars, women from Venus). While there are definite differences between the sexes, they are relatively small. Nothing is more similar to a human woman than a human man, after all. And every single “golden barrier” that people have ascribed as existing between the genders has been shot down, over time.

So when I see people saying things like “men and women are different down to the biochemical level”, my very first thought is “Gee, sounds an awful lot like those theories from the 1900s that women can’t [vote, go to college, run a corporation] because the expenditures of mental energy will wither their wombs and destroy their nature calling as mothers”.

I have quite a lot of practical experience with women in gaming, too, being one of a very small number of people who introduced modern gaming to Brazil back in the 1990s. (Disclosure: I worked as Devir Livraria’s foreign imports and game outreach manager from 1992 to 2000.) Where and when I grew up (Wisconsin in the 1970s), gaming was very much a male thing. Sure, you’d have the odd female gamer — generally an RPGer — who followed her boyfriend into the hobby, but women were very much in the minority.

In Sao Paulo in Brazil in the 1990s, however, we had something close to gender parity pretty much from the get go. Women were 30-40% of the people around the gaming table. So what was going on here? Do Brazilian women have some sort of genetic mutation which makes them like games more than American women?

No. The simple fact of the matter is that Devir did its best to recruit girls from the get go. We hired female dungeon masters to run in-store games and teach women to paint. Most of the male game masters did what they could to ensure that women had space around the table. This wasn’t a “zero sum game” where we had to restrict male freedoms: we simply made it clear that women were welcome, gave them some power right from the start and did our best to squelch the sort of bullshit that makes women uncomfortable.

And what did that mean? Censorship? No. It meant, for example, getting on the
Lads’ cases to not, say, piss all over the store’s communal bathroom, for example, or calling them out when they made the sort of DELIBERATE comments meant to undermine the girls’ presence at the table.

It’s one thing to handicap male rights in order to give “women a chance”. In my experience, you don’t need to do that. What you do need to do, however, is squelch some male bullshit whose only purpose is to make women give up and turn away. Undue harassment in other words.

We just made it very clear that gaming is not futebol. It is for both sexes, all the time. That was enough. Futebol is too, but try to convince your average Brazilian of THAT. But there you have it: futebol is a real man’s sport and I have heard hundreds of Brazilian men make the same sort of “just so” arguments regarding genetics and molecular biology regarding futebol that I’m seeing above regarding gaming.

Meanwhile, soccer is a sport dominated by WOMEN in the U.S., one that A,erican men apparently have great difficulties mastering. In fact, I am constantly puzzled as to why the U.S. Doesn’t send its WOMEN’s team to the World Cup. I believe they’d give us more of a run for the money than the men.

So much for how gender preferences are biologically determined.

Now, that said, yes, gaming is STILL more male than female in Brazil, often much more so. But my experiences with Devir taught me that no, including women is not a “zero sum game”, where men’s freedoms must be trampled upon and standards lowered so that the lil’ ladies can have their day. Unless you consider being a jerk in order to deliberately discourage women a “freedom”.

Of course, it also helps to have gaming formats that are more likely to appeal to women. World of Darkness came out in the 1990s and was a HUGE and immediate hit among the XX crowd. But the women were also doing fine with the ultra-cerebral, ultra-nerdy GURPS before that, too. It has more to do with what stories one tells than anything else. I think deep intrigue and politics appeals to more women than sword fighting, although, of course, there’s huge individual variances there.

But dude: women are more cooperative and favor reconciliation? No, not really. Women tend to resort to symbolic forms of violence more than direct physical violence, perhaps, but Mean Girls on a rampage are a sight to behold and many big, tough he-men types are, in fact, extremely scared of the female tongue. And if you want to talk evolutionary biology, female bonobos are notorious for banding together and expelling physically violent males from the group. If you really want to talk about how male prejudices skew our views, we should contemplate why a male punching someone is understood to be “violent aggression” but females ostracizing someone is considered to be… What? Cooperation and reconciliation?

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Today I had an interesting experience.

I took my 3mm Napoleonics set up to school as part of our “Arts and Humanities” forum. The kids loved it and immediately grasped what it was about — including several of the young women — because they’d played Age of Empire. They knew what skirmishers were, why you form squares against cavalry, why artillery destroys squares, etc.

I was shocked and a bit humbled. Normally when I do things like this, I have to explain from the bottom up. Today, I just had to show them some photos of HG Wells pushing soldiers through his garden and explain that Age of Empires was really a computerized version of miniatures gaming.

They were all interested and wanted to play a game. They had no idea that this sort of “old school” Age of Empires existed.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Vallejo white pumice is good to have for many reasons, so I am sure you’ll find a use for it. If you DO want rough looking bits on your bases, for example, it works a treat. But keep the Vallejo earth in mind.

I have had permanently tacky spray coats, too. I think atmospherics might have something to do with it. I have painted right over them, however, with no ill effects. It seems to hold the paint just as well. I think your hypothesis about the simple green is right, however.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

I’ve used Vallejo White Pumice on three millimeter and take my advice: don’t use it. It is way too gritty. It looks heavier and noiser than sand fill. So unless you want your infantry stumbling around through a boulder field, you need something much smoother as filler.

I now use Vallejo Earth for this sort of thing. It is quite smooth, but easily textured.

However, I’ve found that just flocking the bases is good enough — even with Magister Millitum’s heavy-duty 2mm thick bases (which I will soon be showcasing here). The trick is to glue up to the base but not on the miniature’s base. Sometimes you have to lay a thin thread of glue a second time between the base and the miniature base, and lay down a second layer of flocking. It’s still way less time consuming than trying to level out the bases with gell or Vallejo spoo, and it looks just as good, especially at distances greater than 10 cm.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Almost makes me want to 40k epic in 3mm. And I have sworn a sacred vow to never game in a GW universe again…

But I guess I could sell off all my old 6mm epic stuff (of which I have boatloads — first edition, too) and buy 3mm stuff.

Looking forward to seeing how the marines come out.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Just make sure you paint a lot of pigeon shit on his shoulders.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

1/900 works great with 1/600. Terrain always looks better a scale or so smaller than the figs.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

javelin98 wrote:

You could take some sand paper, cut it into squares to match your base sizes, then bend it up a bit to create some creases and whatnot. Glue the square to your base, dab a few dots of white glue on it, and dust it with some flock. Then mount the figs onto it and you’ve got yourself a sandy base without having to use any actual sand.

It’s probably less work to just dab on the glue and toss it into some very fine grit.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

I used to try to level out infantry bases with resin or plaster, but I gave it up as far too much work for far too little pay back. Paint the area around the infantry’s feet black or earth colored and flock around but not on top of the figure bases and you’ll only notice the difference very close up.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

For basing – and seeing how it is sci-fi — maybe go for maximum contrast? Use Marcin’s tecnique, but make the ground color a reddish-orange to high contrast with the blue, flocking small batches with yellow turf?

That landraider is almost enough to get me back into WH epic. It is really great!

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

As long as it’s just a fag you’re smoking this time, Mac

Wait. Wha…?

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Need a ground game, too. 😀 Is the space game an off-shoot of your much talked about carrier battle system?

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

There’s a reason Dick Van Dyke’s name has been re-appropriated by transformationists as Dyke Von Dick. And it ain’t his Cockney accent, Mahry Pohppins. 😉

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Very nice, Sam! I’m at the point where I’ll basically buy rules from you sight unseen, but I still appreciate these updates.

Now when do we get a sci-fi system from you? 😉

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Let us know how the conversion works. I have been eyeing Planetfall, myself, but I’m happy to let the rich imperialist Canadians take the first risks in this endeavor… 😉

You don’t want the titans to be TOO big or they will simply visually overwhelm everything else. Take my word on it: 40mm is about what you need for a titan at 3mm scale.

That said, if you have 3-4 40mm tall titans on the board, you can stick in 1 60mm tall titan, as the eye will scale up from smallest to largest.

Visually speaking, that’s what you need to do: have a set of figures that flow from the smallest to the largest in a believable fashion. So 3mm infantry, 10mm walkers, 15mm mecha, 40mm titans, 60 mm mega titan.

That would probably work, given a paint job and design styles that visually tie everything together. Again, the smallest stuff needs to be the brightest, too.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Oh, yes. Thank you.

[smokes a cigarette]

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Well, they could work as scout titans. Smallish scout titans, but…

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

You can see some of those painted up for 3mm here: http://godstruescale.tumblr.com

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Yeah. Unfortunately, they’ll be far too big. However, you could have one as an Emp’rah Class Titan, I suppose.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

I am waiting for my Dystopian Wars defense installation pack, myself.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Now all we need to do is get Marcin to release some quar in 3mm….

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Like a fish doesn’t need a bicycle. Unless she’s Danish.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Maybe Offa was just responding to the radfem pressures of his day. “A path of one’s own” and all that.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Next thing, you’ll be claiming that “gay” means “happy”, Guy. 🙂

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

I think that one flew over your head there, Patrice. 🙂 It was a joke, not an accusation. No stress! It might help to explain that I routinely deal with people who say s*** like this seriously.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

See? Now this is just sexist, homophobic clap-trap.

“No help came at all”?

Well, what about that desperate dyke that was helping him “bend them back”?

This fits perfectly in with that recent news item about the supposed prevalence of Viking fighting women, too…

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Check it out, Mat! A new Infinity miniature that would make a kickass Eldar Titan in 3mm: Fraacta Droptroops:

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

My only problem with the Paerydyn is that I think the gun is far too small. It ends up not being differentiated enough from the good ol’ Cheesewheel.

I think I’ll mod mine with a bit of a paperclip for a bow gun. Give them something that could conceivably take out a Crusader tractor.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

So that’s a Soviet 203mm howitzer, right? Damn, that fits in perfectly!

Sigh.

Well, that’s 220 USD burnt the next time I’m up to the States. 🙁

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

The correct word is “dike”. “Dyke” means, er, something else.

…and here I was sooooo psyched when I clicked on this post!

Dictionaries tell me that both spellings… and meanings… are correct. …and can be understood? …in many ways?

 

Well, let’s put it this way: “sticking a finger in a dike” is something a Dutch boy might do to prevent a flood. “Sticking a finger in a dyke” is generally considered to be something that’s not safe for work.

But if anyone does want to do a dyke-related skirmish, might I suggest these figures here?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/loudnraging/raging-heroes-the-toughest-girls-of-the-galaxy

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

This is the SAM warning marker that I always wanted to make for a minis version of Downtown…

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

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