Success Quote by Gary Gygax

Gygax is doing a familiar rhetorical two-step: he denies an active exclusion while still naturalizing the outcome. “It isn’t that gaming is designed to exclude women” functions like a preemptive alibi, clearing the industry of intent so the rest of the claim can land as “just realism.” Then he swaps culture for biology. The supposed evidence - “everybody… has failed” - treats a historically narrow set of products, marketing assumptions, and gatekept communities as a universal experiment that’s already been run to completion.

The subtext is older than tabletop RPGs: if women aren’t showing up, it must be because they don’t want what men want, and if they don’t want it, it must be how their minds work. That framing does real work. It shifts responsibility away from creators and communities (who gets invited, who gets listened to, what kinds of stories are rewarded, what counts as “real” play) and into a vague, unfalsifiable “different thinking processes.” It also smuggles in a power move: the male audience becomes the default human, while women are a special market category that must be “interested” through bespoke design.

Context matters. Gygax helped codify a hobby that, in the 1970s and 80s, was marketed through comic shops, war-gaming circles, and nerd masculinity - spaces that often policed belonging. His claim reads less like a neutral observation than a defense of a clubhouse at the moment it’s being questioned. The irony is that “failure” often meant refusing to broaden what gaming could be, not discovering some immutable limit of women’s imagination.