The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers by Darwinism
Introduction
Original SA post
Well, it being mentioned over in the images thread reminded me that I actually have a copy of The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers.
So you all get a treat and by treat I mean you get to be exposed to what James Desborough considers humor. It's not funny.
Without further ado, I give you:
The Introduction, or This Joke Is Already Getting Old
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The Female Gamer is a mystery. A mystery, wrapped inside an enigma, wrapped inside another mystery, put in a box with ' mystery ' written on it, and shipped second-class to Mysterious Island in the Sea Of Mystery.
I hate this man already. Also, women are hard to understand.
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They are, largely, an unknown quantity to the vast and overwhelming majority of gamers.
Just putting this in quotes. Because it's used nearly verbatim. On the next page . Also, women are rare.
It then goes on about how rare female gamers are and how, "The very nature of the Female Gamer may be so inhuman, so unknowable, so terrifying that it causes mental damage, hysteria, and sometimes drooling." Do you guys get it yet? Women, amirite?
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Gaming groups will sometimes swap tales and legends of Female Gamers, even of having them as girlfriends or wives, some groups claim to have Female Gamers among their number; some even go so far as to claim they have dated or married them themselves.
Hey guys, female gamers are rare.
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Females are an alien species not of this Earth, difficult to understand, impossible to please. This guide will at least give you a fighting chance of comprehending them and dealing with them should you be so unlucky as to encounter one in your travels.
Oh and hard to understand. These two jokes are repeated over and over and over and over and over and over throughout the book. There are no other jokes.
Oh! A disclaimer!
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None of this should be taken as offensive, though it probably will be. If you cannot see we are also taking the Mickey out of male gamers as much, if not more, than gamers of the female persuation then you need a humour transplant and a kick up your pert, well-rounded, tightly chain-mail-clad arse. Please accept that most gamers do not have issues with women, they have a subscription, a complete collection from issue one and fancy binders to keep them in.
If you are offended by it you are humorless and a woman. Got it.
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Female gamers are a completely unknown quantity to the vast and overwhelming majority of gamers, though matters have been ever so slowly changing in that regard. As these creatures become more populous in the gaming fraternity it behoves the male gamer to at least make an attempt understand this creature and to make preparations for their increasing invasion.
Oh look recycled jokes.
And, to wrap things up, another recycled joke heads the next section:
Female Gamers: An Enigma, Wrapped in a mystery, Wrapped in tight clothing.
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Here you will find a mass of information on this particular gamer subspecies, their strange physical peculiarities, their chosen habitats, the way their society works, why women almost always go to the toilet in pairs, where they get their wealth of gossip from and the answers to a great many other of the great feminine mysteries.
Stop making the same fucking joke.
This section is really boring aside from that, just two pages of, "Ha ha , it can't be misogyny if I say that I'm joking in the intro!"
Next time: The Historical Role of Female Gamers, or Oh Boy More
The art is also terrible and starts cropping up much more often in later sections. You'll all get to enjoy that as it comes because fuck if I am going out of my way to see it again. Also less walls of quotes in further updates; you've seen all the material Desborough has so unless it's exceptionally offensive I'll be skipping most of it.
The Historical Role of Female Gamers
Original SA post The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers, Part Two: The Historical Role of Female GamersSo, this chapter starts with stating that women have been involved since the start of the hobby, "though not always in a participatory capacity." Desborough really does like busting out with big words for no goddamn reason.
It starts with Prehistory:BG Before Game Creation of the Univers to Mid 1970s.
That's exactly how it appears; there's nothing stopping you from reading everything after the colon as one really stupid sentence. Formatting!
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This war gaming was not the hideously overpriced and omnipresent, spiky, kiddie-crack spectacle we see today in the sprawling temples to Mammon we call shopping centres.
Next up is In The Beginning: 0 AG (After Game) Mid 1974 AD.
Yeah, so D&D was the first and James coins the absolutely hilarious phrase Delvings and Dingoes so that... I dunno, he didn't want to say D&D?
And I know that I said I wouldn't quote as much BUT I LIED. I can't just summarize this shit, you have to experience with your own eyes.
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At this time the female involvement in what was to become 'the hobby' was pretty much limited to bringing tea and biscuits to the shed or the attic
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While the individual elements to attract the Female Gamer were now present in the games, literary references, getting into the role of the character and so on, the games were still mathematics and violence heavy. Two things considered to be off-putting to women and not female-friendly in any way.
Oh and women are dumb. I guess that makes three jokes.
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Nonetheless, a few brave women blazed a trail for those who came later, gamely going along with suggestions of hormonal and sexually-deprived gamers; playing half elf warrior women vixens or motherly clerics just so they could get to play in what was, even in its most primitive caveman form, a pretty enjoyable game.
Because only women feel the need to conform to social expectations. Heh. Women.
Fuck you, Desborough.
Next: The Witch Hunt: 10-26 AG 1974-1990 AD.
Blah blah the overhyped reactions to D&D. Yeah, sure. And then:
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Gamers began to get laid regularly and getting laid on a regular basis generally means girlfriends soon follow and a girlfriend wants to get into the same things as their boyfriend to understand them better and to participate in their life. So was born the gamer girlfriend into our lives. Often not truly understanding what was going on, often quitting and dumping the gamer when they realized it was not dangerous at all.
Heh. Women.
Oh god, almost done: A Female Invasion: 27-36 AG 1990-2000AD
And so apparently people only started wanting women in their games in the 1990s, and takes a half-hearted crack at nerds. They're pretty common in this book, which would almost make Desborough's disclaimer make sense if they weren't all incredibly halfassed and sandwiched between masses of misogyny. "Women are stupid, ha ha nerds smell, women are stupid," does not come out as you mocking nerds overall, James.
So! People started trying to make games specifically for girls and,
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The product of this research and painstaking attention to detail wa Bloodsucker: The Pretense , whic responsible for more roleplaying nookie than any other roleplaying game in existence. Gamers baskin the sexual afterglow salute those who brought the bloodsuckers onto our character sheets and dedicate their post-orgasmic cigarette to your names.
So, basically, women are only included in the hobby because sex. Also the typos there are due to really shitty formatting. There's space for more, and your mind fills in the gaps pretty well, but god knows we had to have this image:
The rest of this part can be boiled down into: trick chicks into the hobby so you can fuck them. 'Horsy' and 'husky' chicks into the physical side of LARPing, theater majors and hippies for the less beat-on-other-people-with-foam-swords bits.
And, lastly, A New Century: 37-39 AG 2001-2002AD
Even for Desborough it's a weak finish.
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And what does the dawning of the new age bring to our little gaming subculture? Massively Multiplayer Online Games and various other computer-based elements are getting people of all sorts into roleplaying, many of them claiming to be women from the safety of online anonymity.
Somewhere among the teeming sweaty mass of red necked denizens of Alabama trailer parks, hunched amorously over their computer terminals as they masturbate themselves into an early grave, are genuine women, all getting involved in roleplaying, though they do not realise it and probably would prefer not to think that what they're doing is in any way related to 'Delvings and Dingoes.'
And there you have it. The historical role of female gamers. Also, not until this review did I realize how incredibly clunky and overdone his goddamn writing style is. It was all to easy to groan along with it with a friend, now that I'm looking at this shit... holy fuck. And the typos are Desborough; some are formatting errors where an image is clipping off some words/letters, but more than enough are pure Desborough. Granted, I wouldn't show this to an editor, either.
Next time: Female Gamer Physiology, or Ha Ha Girls Have Vaginas
Female Gamer Physiology
Original SA post The Slayer's Guide to Female Gamers, Part Three: Female Gamer PhysiologyOverview
And now we start delving into the especially offensive bits. In classic Desborough style it's supposedly mocking male gamers. Let's see how!
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There are many wild tales circulated among groups of adventurers. Some even claim there are more kinds of women than the 'princess' (there to be rescued) and the 'wench' (there to be wenched).
Like many of the 'jokes' in this steaming pile, it's sort of a jab at male gamers thinking that there are only two types of women. But the overall tone of the book doesn't make it seem that way at all.
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It is said that once every moon they turn into ravening beasts akin to werewolves, only mollified by an offering of expensive ice cream and a 'chick flick'.
Because it's immediately followed with this .
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Female Gamers vary in height and weight within a similar range as normal humans.
And this .
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Extensive research found that depictions of women in all fantasy books and roleplaying game manuals were universally attractive, half naked and with sizeable mammary glands unseen outside of the depictions thus far. Comparing these wonderfully detailed and delicious depictions with females from real life, and within gaming groups, forced the researchers to the sad and weary conclusion that Female Gamers are not actually women after all, but a completely separate sub-species of feminine demihuman, rather like halflings.
And this
Also Jesus fucking Christ his writing style bugs me so much. The man fucking LOVES stringing together sentences to unholy lengths with commas.
Oh look, a footnote about the halfling comment I bet it will be tastef-
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Perhaps they are halflings! The more common plumpness, the ability to cook, the feeling that they are always hiding something from you, the inherent tendency to thievery and to draining the resources of the groups they are attached to. Yes, it all makes sense!
...Fuck you, Desborough.
And this is just the intro. We're one page deep, friends. This section is thirteen pages long.
Physiology
This section begins with:
This is basically the least offensive image in the book. Yeah.
It starts off again with, "Heh, women don't look like Achilleos or Royo paintings!" Thanks for repeating that joke. And then it repeats it again. And again.
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Much shorter than the scholars Achilleos or Royo would have you believe, and much more covered in opaque clothing. Their hair is seen to be rarely perfect, often frizzy, ratty, or greasy and they often wear spectacles, and not in a 'wear them because it is cute' fashion.
There are several theories to account for the worrying and distinct dissonance between the glorious vision of the scholars and the stark and depressing reality of the actual Female Gamer bearing little resemblance to Zenda: Valkyrie Princess.
That's pretty much it for this section. It just makes the same jokes we've seen before about women being strange, inscrutable beasts. It also makes note of the foot-padding thing from earlier, which you would think should've been in the physiology section instead of the overview, but no the editor, that the credits tell me was Paul Tucker, must've been asleep.
And with that, we're off to:
Mating Practices
This section delves a bit deeper into the whole nerds-are-dumb-heh joke which is the only joke in the book directed against men, but in that way that's obviously meant to imply, "Heh, nerds are really stupid, but not the nerds reading this, obviously, those other nerds."
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Orthodox study would appear to indicate that attracting a mate merely requires the exchange of large amounts of coin from one hand to the other, or the convenient slaying of a dragon.
Brave individuals were chosen by straws to test out these methods of courting on a carefully chosen sample of gamer chicks and in each case reported blackouts preceded by a sharp wooshing sound and a scream of ' Pig '. Donations for their rehabilitation can be sent via the publisher to ' Cerebus House: Home for Gamers Too Stupid and Misogynistic to Breed '.
Ha ha! You see, Desborough is totally not misogynistic because he makes fun of misogynistic people once or twice! I mean, sure, 90% of this book is 'joking' about offensive feminine stereotypes but there's at least 5% that's 'joking' about offensive male stereotypes!
Fuck you, Desborough.
Also, 'non-gaming' women are attracted to money, power, and a toned physique, which translates to:
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Money = Material wealth = Gaming book collection
Power = Authority over others = Being the regular Games Master
Physique = Honed quality = Sharp intellect.
Therefore, the ultimate 'gamer chick horn dog passion magnet' should be a devastatingly intelligent Games Master, with a massive game collection containing many rare and out of print books.
There is an actual self-depreciating joke in there and then it's ruined because Desborough is incapable of being self-depreciating without casual misogyny.
More jokes along the same fillow, and then the section ends strong with:
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Since those latched onto by these female creatures often manifest gratuitously changed behaviour, and unexplained absences from gaming sessions with weak excuses such as ' Its Valentines Day ' or ' I'm meeting her parents ', it is reasoned that the female deposits her eggs within the male using some manner of spiky ovipositor. Once there, they latch onto the nervous system, causing changes in behaviour, making the male far more susceptible to the female's extensive mind control powers.
Some of these poor gamers disappear from the scene entirely, making weak excuses such as ' marriage ', ' growing up ' or ' babies '. These are obviously cover stories manufactured by the 'Female Conspiracy' to deflect suspicion from the true cause of their disappearance - a fatal overdose of lace doilies and shoe sales.
Fucking hell.
Tune in next time for: Female Gamer Physiology 2: Sixth Sense or, Misogyny HOOOOO