August 2, 2025 • 19 mins
Several months ago, a discussion around sexism in the realm of table top gaming garnered a lot of attention. In this classic, we go over what happened, the ramifications and how things have changed since then (or not).
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and both the Stuff
I Never Told You production by Hurried You, and today's
classic is an honor of a recent Happy Hour Monday
mini that you did Samantha about board games. Oh yeah,
(00:27):
and you asked for board game request And I have
to say your listeners have come through, really have, Yes,
really really have, and we really really appreciate it. Keep
all of the recommendations coming. It's fantastic. I love just
like looking them up and hearing the interesting gameplay styles. Yes,
so we really do. I really do love hearing from
(00:47):
you about that. So in honor of that, I thought
we would bring back this episode we did that was
that was briefly mentioned in that discussion about sexism in
board games and how that it is changing. But you know,
there's always still work to begun. But a lot of
the games that you have recommended to as listeners are
(01:08):
from women, developers, are non binary developers, are marginalized developers.
So thank you. In the meantime, please enjoy this classic episode. Hey,
this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to stephon Never
Told You, a production of iHeartRadio, and we are coming
(01:38):
to the end of the year of the end of
twenty twenty three, if you're listening to this. Whenever you're
listening to this, and I was looking for some feminist games,
both video games and board games, and women developers of
these games for some potential topics and gifts maybe when
I ran across the story from May of twenty twenty three.
(01:59):
So this is a bit but I totally missed it,
and I bet a lot of you did too. I
think it's worth talking about because the accidental casual sexism
and the exchange is very telling, and I don't think
it's gone away, And in fact, I kind of have
some proof that it hasn't gone away because before you
(02:21):
came along, Samantha and I was co host list and
I had a lot of very kind people who were
very giving in their time come on to do topics.
Tracy B. Wilson of Steffi Miss and History Class came
on and talked about board game design. So you can
listen to that episode. But a lot of the things
we're talking about in that which was several years ago,
(02:43):
are still here, of course. And yeah, we also talked
to some women board game designers about their experience, so
you can check those out for more contexts, but yeah,
a lot hasn't changed. And so Samantha, I'm just gonna
tell you about this thing. I'm sure you're gonna have
some thought. Oh my gosh. Okay, So here's what happened.
(03:04):
Back in May twenty twenty three, Elizabeth Hargrave, who is
the designer of the tabletop game Wingspan, posted on social
media about some data around the demographics of the board
game industry, and she was pointing out that there weren't
enough games that were winning awards or even being nominated
that were being made by women. And so from a
(03:24):
chart about nominees from Shield de yais the biggest board
game awards in the whole industry since nineteen ninety nine,
five women. I saw four women four or five women
had been nominated compared to one hundred and three men,
and there had been no women nominated in the last
two years at that time. So Hargrave concluded that this
(03:45):
wasn't a problem with SDJ as these awards are called
for short, but with the pipeline of the whole thing,
like who makes a game, who pitches a game, and
whose game gets chosen by publishers. And she also said
that the numbers are overwhelmingly white men, usually like United
States European white men, and this restricts our game options,
(04:06):
which seems pretty clear. Well, the COO of Aldroach, which
is a big board game company, Ryan Dancy, responded directly
to her, and this is some of his response quote,
I have taken more than one thousand game pitches since
twenty sixteen. I would say less than ten percent of
(04:27):
these were from female designers. Effectively, none of them were
games AEG would publish. We did a call for submissions
from female designers. Specifically, we got one publishable design. There
have been a couple of pitches that came close, most
commonly where a female pitched with a male designer. There
is one team of two female designers that pitch great,
(04:50):
but their games are too light for us. I know
why we didn't proceed with those pitches, but they were
at least in the ballpark. Typically, when I am pitched
by a female, the game tends to fall into one
of several broad categories. It's a game about politics. In general,
we don't publish games about politics. It's a party game
in general, we don't publish party games. It's a pitch
(05:11):
from a designer very early in their design journey, and
the game isn't competitive enough in their modern market. It
usually is either too much like another game, are very generic,
or it's more of an idea than a game design
I've never been pitched a war game by a female.
I've never been pitched a two player fighting game by
a female. I've never been pitched a giant fighting robots
(05:33):
game by a female. I actually don't think there's much
of a market in those categories because there is so
much competition. But I wonder if a game designed by
a female would be orthogonal to the existing designer patterns
and produce something remarkable. I think there is a significant
gap between when someone decides to try and become a
(05:54):
game designer and when they produce their first publishable game.
Life in that gap consists of a lot of rejection
andative criticism. I wonder if that gap accounts for a
good part of the missing female design cohort. Females are
socialized in the less to avoid situations where they're subjected
to fairly harsh criticism of their abilities and creative ideas.
Males are socialized to take the punches and keep moving forward,
(06:17):
getting across the grap is how you turn someone into
a real game designer who gets paid for their work
and who makes designs that are attractive to publishers. So far,
we haven't seen much award consideration go to games that
exist almost entirely as crowdfunding projects. I know there are
many more females doing game design and production via crowd
(06:37):
funding who just don't connect with publishers. The nature of
the SDJ is that a crowd funding game is effectively
shut out from consideration. Okay, so there's a lot of
unpacking this. First, he is completely dismissing Hargrave's point and
(06:58):
kind of proving her point about how they're not being
enough women designers. He is not asking why women designers
only made up ten percent, but of seemingly blaming women
for not pitching more, but also he's blaming the content
of their pitches, which he turned down. He comes back
(07:19):
to reemphasize this point later, saying that women are more
likely to get crowdfunding and therefore don't make the connections
in the industry, but once again fails to give any
consideration as to why that is and why that maybe
they had to go to the crowd funding because they
kept getting turned down, right, mm hmmm, which brings us
(07:39):
to the second big issue here. He entirely, entirely dismisses
games women are typically pitching as to political or to
light like party games, which blows my mind. And then
he follows that up with how women don't pitch games
about war fighting or robots, which is comically gendered. It's hilarious.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Women don't do very specific, sir.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
It is very specific, and it's like kid level, like
it's hilarious, except he's making these decisions and then you're
like oh. And then he says he doesn't even think
they would be successful if they did pitch those games
because it's too competitive, which is wow. But yeah, this
(08:28):
is very similar to the conversations we've had around the
video game industry and how a lot of people are
trying to dismiss games that women play, like mobile games,
as less serious or not real games, even though there
is a huge proven market for them. People like these games,
women play games, and these games make money, Like, I
(08:50):
don't understand this, and then he basically says women can't
handle criticism, our rejection, while men are right, men are
able to take it. Keep going so women don't pitch.
Women aren't tough. I'm also interested in how you handle
rejecting women versus projecting men. But whatever. Right. As you
(09:13):
might imagine, he quickly came under a lot of fire
for those response because he did this publicly, to the
point he did apologize. He called it not his finest moment.
He outlined some steps that he and the company were
going to take to tackle the lack of diversity and
ask that we all hold him accountable. But as many
(09:34):
pointed out, the fact that he felt comfortable enough applying
to one of the few women in the industry who
is successful with his original message speaks volumes. Also, her
game Wingspan is not a game that falls under the
categories he outlined. It's a very interesting game, but she
succeeded with it, it's very popular. And then he sends
(09:58):
this response, and it is really important. During the pandemic
the tabletop gaming industry grew. I completely agree with Hargrave
about how this lack of diversity negatively impacts our game choices.
And if you go back and listen to that episode
I did with Tracy, we talk about the health benefits
of playing games. So yeah, and I do think a
(10:19):
lot of the times. The things that I love about
games designed by women, both tabletop and video games, is
the very thing he was so quick to dismiss. So
I love a good party game, but I also love
games that are different. I like games that mess with
how we traditionally view games. Are games that completely flip
what winning is. So the Path is one, which is
(10:41):
a video game where basically you have to not complete
your mission to win Destiny, which is like you're just
trying to make friends. It's lovely. It's such a lovely
game though you like have to sing and you make
songs together. It's lovely. I do really want to play
this game. Votes for Women, which I know a lot
(11:04):
of you have written in about and I've heard great
things about from Polygon. Quote without the context provided by
historical advisor and professor Rachel Michelle Gunter, game designer Tory
Brown and developer Keather Bertram's excellent work would not be
nearly as impactful and Tory Brown, because I was like,
are these both men? They're not Tory Brown?
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Okay I was confused for a second. Okay, Yeah, So
that's a board game that is.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
A board game, and it's supposed to be like a
lot of the big reviews say like this should be
in libraries because it's very educational and cool. People seem
to love it. It comes out in January, I think,
but I think it already came out, but then it's
sold out immediately, so their second run is in general.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Wow, we have so many games that we need to play,
Like you bought me all of those Christmas, all the
retro ones, and I don't think we've played a one.
We try to play one.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
But we had such a large.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Crab of people that it was almost impossible. Instead, we
just bread through cards. Eves was a part of that game. Nights.
We need, Yeah, we need to bring that back. I
still really do want to play with some of the men,
like stuff they don't want you to know, or stuff
you should know. It would be hilarious. Chuck I know
very little of him, but to have him play Madness.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
I mean, we were just so fun with Lauren from
Savor because I'm sure she would have some.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Words, Oh gosh, it would like I haven't played a
lot of those games. I don't think I played played well.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Obviously, I played every single one of them. We try
to bring out that babysitters one and it was so complicated.
I was like, how did I play this as a teenager?
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Don't?
Speaker 2 (13:00):
And I played it by myself for the most part.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Maybe that's why, Well I told you my story of
the cool kids. My mom invited who I viewed cool
kids from school when I was playing Polly Pocket by
myself to try to figure out the rules when they
walked in, and I mean, what have I done to
deserve such was.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
So fascinating, And because you know I'm all about my
phone games that there are so many revamps of these
phone games being board games, and you already know I
talked about one. I'm not going to mention because it's
too much, but yes, it is a play on capitalism.
We know this game made everyone get into fights and
(13:41):
probably was either thrown away and or put up for
a month at a time because the parents had had enough.
So there's the different variations of this game on the phone.
And the one I played is like very interactive in
community and very angry and mean, it's no longer Gebra.
It is now a person called KISSI Bear, And I'm like,
what the hell to se there?
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Your enemies? The list grows longer. Some of these people
I helped out and.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
All of a sudden they're attacking me. I'm like what anyway,
I'm not sorry. But my thought is I wonder because
this level of like playing by ourselves all these games
like this is to a whole new level. Of course, again,
the variation is different, but I wonder if there's like
a mal madness phone game where you can play by
yourself or again this type of game which I've played
(14:28):
by myself many times. I used to play a game
called Payday. Do you all remember this game? It was
like a calendar, it was a search. I do not
remember this game completely, and like it was one of
our favorite games because it was kind of like this
other game, the other big game, but like downskilled okay, interest,
(14:48):
But I wonder, like with the phone level, like where
we can see that this has nothing to do with
the women, but at what we does, because we talked
about the fact that the phone games, which are not
being considered as gaming, is the number one money maker
and if you are a part of this industry, it's
a smart way to go. But yeah, I wonder how
many of these games we can play by ourselves and
(15:09):
that have been fitted for mobile phone games.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
That's true. That's an interesting We should follow up on that.
And yeah, I do love a game. I love a
game you can play by yourself, but I also love
a game you can play with two people. Those are
kind of rare too.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Right there, I have been, and it's like the rarety
is anything beyond six people that much like you can't
find many of those unless you find like the large
party games such as Werewolf, which we've played many at times,
or the two player games are Chasing by yourself. Oh anyway,
(15:47):
but yeah, that's very interesting, and again, like this is
that same level of conversation of what is considered gaming,
who deserves the rights, and how much opportunity is there?
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Right? Absolutely, Yeah, it was just a very clear example
of like somebody missing the whole point.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I bet those games like Girl Talk and all that.
And again, I know this is dated, very sexist games,
but I'm sure they won awards because they were big sellers.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Ooh. I was honestly like, I was looking into this
and I wanted a Monday many so I stopped. But
I looked into the history of women playing board games,
and there's a rich history there. Why did you stop
women playing and designing board because that's a whole episode.
It is not a Monday. I was like, oh my gosh, okay,
(16:41):
because apparently at one time it was considered kind of
in the realm of domesticity women would make games because
they were supposed to be in charge of entertaining children.
But there was the other side of it too though,
that was the very political part where they were making
games like suffer jetto and so it was really interesting.
(17:04):
There's a lot to talk about.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
I wonder if it came into play with like gambling,
the men started taking over.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Oh, it could be. I go back to that the
cover of Battleship from the nineteen fifties that you and
I discussed when we went over these kind of very
gendered games where it was the men and the husband
presumably and his son playing battleship and in the background
(17:34):
the mom and daughter were doing dishes. And this was
the cover of the game.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Oh, I remember the one with the girl watching behind
the father or brother as the games happened, but it
was definitely the father and the son.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Right. It sort of became like, well, you should be
doing a house and we can play, or like maybe
you were not competitive enough to you're not tough enough
to handle loose or something.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Go play with your paper doll.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Get rested up. It's very bizarre, it's very strange. So
probably will be a full episode in the new year,
though that is a twenty four episode. But yes, that's
always listeners. If you have any recommendations for board games
or any thoughts about this, that would be great because
(18:24):
I was looking for, like, okay, these games. What are
these games I can play that are different, that are
made by women? Let us know. You can email us
a Steffani your mom Stuff at iHeartMedia dot com. You
can find us on Twitter at mom Stuff podcast or
Instagram and TikTok at Stuff I've Never Told You. If
we have a tea public store and a book gift
ideas or you get you your books. Thanks as always
(18:49):
to a super producer Christina or executive producer Maya and
your contributor Joey. Thank you and thanks to you for listening.
Stuff I'll Never Told You is production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcast from my Heart Radio, you can check
out the iHeartRadio Apple podcast, or we listen to your
favorite shows
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and both the Stuff
I Never Told You production by Hurried You, and today's
classic is an honor of a recent Happy Hour Monday
mini that you did Samantha about board games. Oh yeah,
(00:27):
and you asked for board game request And I have
to say your listeners have come through, really have, Yes,
really really have, and we really really appreciate it. Keep
all of the recommendations coming. It's fantastic. I love just
like looking them up and hearing the interesting gameplay styles. Yes,
so we really do. I really do love hearing from
(00:47):
you about that. So in honor of that, I thought
we would bring back this episode we did that was
that was briefly mentioned in that discussion about sexism in
board games and how that it is changing. But you know,
there's always still work to begun. But a lot of
the games that you have recommended to as listeners are
(01:08):
from women, developers, are non binary developers, are marginalized developers.
So thank you. In the meantime, please enjoy this classic episode. Hey,
this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to stephon Never
Told You, a production of iHeartRadio, and we are coming
(01:38):
to the end of the year of the end of
twenty twenty three, if you're listening to this. Whenever you're
listening to this, and I was looking for some feminist games,
both video games and board games, and women developers of
these games for some potential topics and gifts maybe when
I ran across the story from May of twenty twenty three.
(01:59):
So this is a bit but I totally missed it,
and I bet a lot of you did too. I
think it's worth talking about because the accidental casual sexism
and the exchange is very telling, and I don't think
it's gone away, And in fact, I kind of have
some proof that it hasn't gone away because before you
(02:21):
came along, Samantha and I was co host list and
I had a lot of very kind people who were
very giving in their time come on to do topics.
Tracy B. Wilson of Steffi Miss and History Class came
on and talked about board game design. So you can
listen to that episode. But a lot of the things
we're talking about in that which was several years ago,
(02:43):
are still here, of course. And yeah, we also talked
to some women board game designers about their experience, so
you can check those out for more contexts, but yeah,
a lot hasn't changed. And so Samantha, I'm just gonna
tell you about this thing. I'm sure you're gonna have
some thought. Oh my gosh. Okay, So here's what happened.
(03:04):
Back in May twenty twenty three, Elizabeth Hargrave, who is
the designer of the tabletop game Wingspan, posted on social
media about some data around the demographics of the board
game industry, and she was pointing out that there weren't
enough games that were winning awards or even being nominated
that were being made by women. And so from a
(03:24):
chart about nominees from Shield de yais the biggest board
game awards in the whole industry since nineteen ninety nine,
five women. I saw four women four or five women
had been nominated compared to one hundred and three men,
and there had been no women nominated in the last
two years at that time. So Hargrave concluded that this
(03:45):
wasn't a problem with SDJ as these awards are called
for short, but with the pipeline of the whole thing,
like who makes a game, who pitches a game, and
whose game gets chosen by publishers. And she also said
that the numbers are overwhelmingly white men, usually like United
States European white men, and this restricts our game options,
(04:06):
which seems pretty clear. Well, the COO of Aldroach, which
is a big board game company, Ryan Dancy, responded directly
to her, and this is some of his response quote,
I have taken more than one thousand game pitches since
twenty sixteen. I would say less than ten percent of
(04:27):
these were from female designers. Effectively, none of them were
games AEG would publish. We did a call for submissions
from female designers. Specifically, we got one publishable design. There
have been a couple of pitches that came close, most
commonly where a female pitched with a male designer. There
is one team of two female designers that pitch great,
(04:50):
but their games are too light for us. I know
why we didn't proceed with those pitches, but they were
at least in the ballpark. Typically, when I am pitched
by a female, the game tends to fall into one
of several broad categories. It's a game about politics. In general,
we don't publish games about politics. It's a party game
in general, we don't publish party games. It's a pitch
(05:11):
from a designer very early in their design journey, and
the game isn't competitive enough in their modern market. It
usually is either too much like another game, are very generic,
or it's more of an idea than a game design
I've never been pitched a war game by a female.
I've never been pitched a two player fighting game by
a female. I've never been pitched a giant fighting robots
(05:33):
game by a female. I actually don't think there's much
of a market in those categories because there is so
much competition. But I wonder if a game designed by
a female would be orthogonal to the existing designer patterns
and produce something remarkable. I think there is a significant
gap between when someone decides to try and become a
(05:54):
game designer and when they produce their first publishable game.
Life in that gap consists of a lot of rejection
andative criticism. I wonder if that gap accounts for a
good part of the missing female design cohort. Females are
socialized in the less to avoid situations where they're subjected
to fairly harsh criticism of their abilities and creative ideas.
Males are socialized to take the punches and keep moving forward,
(06:17):
getting across the grap is how you turn someone into
a real game designer who gets paid for their work
and who makes designs that are attractive to publishers. So far,
we haven't seen much award consideration go to games that
exist almost entirely as crowdfunding projects. I know there are
many more females doing game design and production via crowd
(06:37):
funding who just don't connect with publishers. The nature of
the SDJ is that a crowd funding game is effectively
shut out from consideration. Okay, so there's a lot of
unpacking this. First, he is completely dismissing Hargrave's point and
(06:58):
kind of proving her point about how they're not being
enough women designers. He is not asking why women designers
only made up ten percent, but of seemingly blaming women
for not pitching more, but also he's blaming the content
of their pitches, which he turned down. He comes back
(07:19):
to reemphasize this point later, saying that women are more
likely to get crowdfunding and therefore don't make the connections
in the industry, but once again fails to give any
consideration as to why that is and why that maybe
they had to go to the crowd funding because they
kept getting turned down, right, mm hmmm, which brings us
(07:39):
to the second big issue here. He entirely, entirely dismisses
games women are typically pitching as to political or to
light like party games, which blows my mind. And then
he follows that up with how women don't pitch games
about war fighting or robots, which is comically gendered. It's hilarious.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Women don't do very specific, sir.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
It is very specific, and it's like kid level, like
it's hilarious, except he's making these decisions and then you're
like oh. And then he says he doesn't even think
they would be successful if they did pitch those games
because it's too competitive, which is wow. But yeah, this
(08:28):
is very similar to the conversations we've had around the
video game industry and how a lot of people are
trying to dismiss games that women play, like mobile games,
as less serious or not real games, even though there
is a huge proven market for them. People like these games,
women play games, and these games make money, Like, I
(08:50):
don't understand this, and then he basically says women can't
handle criticism, our rejection, while men are right, men are
able to take it. Keep going so women don't pitch.
Women aren't tough. I'm also interested in how you handle
rejecting women versus projecting men. But whatever. Right. As you
(09:13):
might imagine, he quickly came under a lot of fire
for those response because he did this publicly, to the
point he did apologize. He called it not his finest moment.
He outlined some steps that he and the company were
going to take to tackle the lack of diversity and
ask that we all hold him accountable. But as many
(09:34):
pointed out, the fact that he felt comfortable enough applying
to one of the few women in the industry who
is successful with his original message speaks volumes. Also, her
game Wingspan is not a game that falls under the
categories he outlined. It's a very interesting game, but she
succeeded with it, it's very popular. And then he sends
(09:58):
this response, and it is really important. During the pandemic
the tabletop gaming industry grew. I completely agree with Hargrave
about how this lack of diversity negatively impacts our game choices.
And if you go back and listen to that episode
I did with Tracy, we talk about the health benefits
of playing games. So yeah, and I do think a
(10:19):
lot of the times. The things that I love about
games designed by women, both tabletop and video games, is
the very thing he was so quick to dismiss. So
I love a good party game, but I also love
games that are different. I like games that mess with
how we traditionally view games. Are games that completely flip
what winning is. So the Path is one, which is
(10:41):
a video game where basically you have to not complete
your mission to win Destiny, which is like you're just
trying to make friends. It's lovely. It's such a lovely
game though you like have to sing and you make
songs together. It's lovely. I do really want to play
this game. Votes for Women, which I know a lot
(11:04):
of you have written in about and I've heard great
things about from Polygon. Quote without the context provided by
historical advisor and professor Rachel Michelle Gunter, game designer Tory
Brown and developer Keather Bertram's excellent work would not be
nearly as impactful and Tory Brown, because I was like,
are these both men? They're not Tory Brown?
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Okay I was confused for a second. Okay, Yeah, So
that's a board game that is.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
A board game, and it's supposed to be like a
lot of the big reviews say like this should be
in libraries because it's very educational and cool. People seem
to love it. It comes out in January, I think,
but I think it already came out, but then it's
sold out immediately, so their second run is in general.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Wow, we have so many games that we need to play,
Like you bought me all of those Christmas, all the
retro ones, and I don't think we've played a one.
We try to play one.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
But we had such a large.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Crab of people that it was almost impossible. Instead, we
just bread through cards. Eves was a part of that game. Nights.
We need, Yeah, we need to bring that back. I
still really do want to play with some of the men,
like stuff they don't want you to know, or stuff
you should know. It would be hilarious. Chuck I know
very little of him, but to have him play Madness.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
I mean, we were just so fun with Lauren from
Savor because I'm sure she would have some.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Words, Oh gosh, it would like I haven't played a
lot of those games. I don't think I played played well.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Obviously, I played every single one of them. We try
to bring out that babysitters one and it was so complicated.
I was like, how did I play this as a teenager?
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Don't?
Speaker 2 (13:00):
And I played it by myself for the most part.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Maybe that's why, Well I told you my story of
the cool kids. My mom invited who I viewed cool
kids from school when I was playing Polly Pocket by
myself to try to figure out the rules when they
walked in, and I mean, what have I done to
deserve such was.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
So fascinating, And because you know I'm all about my
phone games that there are so many revamps of these
phone games being board games, and you already know I
talked about one. I'm not going to mention because it's
too much, but yes, it is a play on capitalism.
We know this game made everyone get into fights and
(13:41):
probably was either thrown away and or put up for
a month at a time because the parents had had enough.
So there's the different variations of this game on the phone.
And the one I played is like very interactive in
community and very angry and mean, it's no longer Gebra.
It is now a person called KISSI Bear, And I'm like,
what the hell to se there?
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Your enemies? The list grows longer. Some of these people
I helped out and.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
All of a sudden they're attacking me. I'm like what anyway,
I'm not sorry. But my thought is I wonder because
this level of like playing by ourselves all these games
like this is to a whole new level. Of course, again,
the variation is different, but I wonder if there's like
a mal madness phone game where you can play by
yourself or again this type of game which I've played
(14:28):
by myself many times. I used to play a game
called Payday. Do you all remember this game? It was
like a calendar, it was a search. I do not
remember this game completely, and like it was one of
our favorite games because it was kind of like this
other game, the other big game, but like downskilled okay, interest,
(14:48):
But I wonder, like with the phone level, like where
we can see that this has nothing to do with
the women, but at what we does, because we talked
about the fact that the phone games, which are not
being considered as gaming, is the number one money maker
and if you are a part of this industry, it's
a smart way to go. But yeah, I wonder how
many of these games we can play by ourselves and
(15:09):
that have been fitted for mobile phone games.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
That's true. That's an interesting We should follow up on that.
And yeah, I do love a game. I love a
game you can play by yourself, but I also love
a game you can play with two people. Those are
kind of rare too.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Right there, I have been, and it's like the rarety
is anything beyond six people that much like you can't
find many of those unless you find like the large
party games such as Werewolf, which we've played many at times,
or the two player games are Chasing by yourself. Oh anyway,
(15:47):
but yeah, that's very interesting, and again, like this is
that same level of conversation of what is considered gaming,
who deserves the rights, and how much opportunity is there?
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Right? Absolutely, Yeah, it was just a very clear example
of like somebody missing the whole point.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I bet those games like Girl Talk and all that.
And again, I know this is dated, very sexist games,
but I'm sure they won awards because they were big sellers.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Ooh. I was honestly like, I was looking into this
and I wanted a Monday many so I stopped. But
I looked into the history of women playing board games,
and there's a rich history there. Why did you stop
women playing and designing board because that's a whole episode.
It is not a Monday. I was like, oh my gosh, okay,
(16:41):
because apparently at one time it was considered kind of
in the realm of domesticity women would make games because
they were supposed to be in charge of entertaining children.
But there was the other side of it too though,
that was the very political part where they were making
games like suffer jetto and so it was really interesting.
(17:04):
There's a lot to talk about.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
I wonder if it came into play with like gambling,
the men started taking over.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Oh, it could be. I go back to that the
cover of Battleship from the nineteen fifties that you and
I discussed when we went over these kind of very
gendered games where it was the men and the husband
presumably and his son playing battleship and in the background
(17:34):
the mom and daughter were doing dishes. And this was
the cover of the game.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Oh, I remember the one with the girl watching behind
the father or brother as the games happened, but it
was definitely the father and the son.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Right. It sort of became like, well, you should be
doing a house and we can play, or like maybe
you were not competitive enough to you're not tough enough
to handle loose or something.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Go play with your paper doll.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Get rested up. It's very bizarre, it's very strange. So
probably will be a full episode in the new year,
though that is a twenty four episode. But yes, that's
always listeners. If you have any recommendations for board games
or any thoughts about this, that would be great because
(18:24):
I was looking for, like, okay, these games. What are
these games I can play that are different, that are
made by women? Let us know. You can email us
a Steffani your mom Stuff at iHeartMedia dot com. You
can find us on Twitter at mom Stuff podcast or
Instagram and TikTok at Stuff I've Never Told You. If
we have a tea public store and a book gift
ideas or you get you your books. Thanks as always
(18:49):
to a super producer Christina or executive producer Maya and
your contributor Joey. Thank you and thanks to you for listening.
Stuff I'll Never Told You is production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcast from my Heart Radio, you can check
out the iHeartRadio Apple podcast, or we listen to your
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