By day, Ashleigh McEwan is an accounts director at an advertising agency. By night, the 34-year-old Torontonian battles ogres, demogorgons and dragons.

For the past four years, she, her brother and a few friends would sit around a table armed with dice and their imaginations and play role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons (DnD). Last month, she gathered a few female friends to launch an all-women’s game — or campaign, as players call them.

She’s hardly alone. The 44-year-old Dungeons and Dragons brand had its best year in 2017, and 2018 is poised to be even better. Between 10 and 15 million people play the game globally, according to publisher Wizards of the Coast. While much of that growth stems from the prominence of DnD in shows like Stranger Things and a growing group of A-list stars – like Vin Diesel – who love to role play, at least part of that surge can be attributed to women. Today, one in three, or 39 per cent, of players are female, up from 20 per cent in 2012.

Part of that growth comes from the visibility of female players in online streaming services like Twitch and YouTube, says Benjamin Woo, assistant professor in the school of journalism and communications at Carleton University, and author of Get a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture.

As it becomes more common to watch campaigns unfold online (on camera, the host — called the dungeon master — builds out the story narrative and the players think up how to respond, rolling 20-sided die to determine their success or failure), channels like Girls Guts Glory or MissClicks put women front and centre, and showcase that the game can be welcoming to ladies. “(As a woman) it used to be you had to be invited in by someone and there was this secret society, a boy’s club aura (to the game),” Woo says. “Now, there’s representation on screen.”

Wizards has also tried to make the game more inclusive by ditching the stereotypical scantily clad female depictions.

 

Article plucked from:

https://www.thestar.com/life/2018/11/29/how-women-are-taking-on-the-world-of-dungeons-and-dragons.html