The Gender Genie

[Valamir]

I'm not sure I'm explaining this well. Am I making sense?

Perfectly, which is why I said its too crude to have an immediate practical application at this point.  

Take out the "however" in the second sentence and you've basically expanded on exactly how I see it.

[jrs]

After all, if people write differently, they likely communicate differently.  And if they communicate differently then the thought processes behind that communcation are likely different, and if those differences are consistantly identifiable then it would seem to me to offer some interesting insight into the way people think.

Ralph,

I expect that you would be interested in the first article that Mark references above, "Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts".  It describes prior research where gender differences in speech and other inter-active communications have been indentified.  And that some have posited that formal writing where there is an unseen audience should reduce or eliminate those differences.  The authors research indicates the contrary, that is, gender differences in relaying information does persist in written form.

Julie

[Matt Wilson]

My sense of the frustration with Gender Genie is its inherent fallibility as a quantitatively-based survey measure to predict individual responses.  It feels a little like the frustration qualitative researchers have with quantitative research.

So what sorts of qualitative research have been done on game writing?  I have to admit I did not go read those two gender articles - are they qualitative?  And can the Forge serve as a qualitative research tool?  Perhaps a section devoted to in-depth exploration of individuals' experiences - not looking for theoretical predicability (as often happens in the Actual Play forums), but for general understanding?

Hey Meredith:

Can you explain what you mean by qualitative and quantitative research?

[Meredith]

Sure - I'm responding to AnyaTheBlue's and others' frustration about the true inability of the world of generalizable quantitative research to really tell us anything meaningful about individuals.  That world involving observable differences, correlations and spurious relationships is great for trying to get at trends, but anything deeper than that and we're at a loss.

I was wondering if it might be more (or at least equally) useful to do some qualitative work on the subject - that which examines the how and what as compared with quantitative's why.  Qualitative work looks to explore things in depth through such means as interviews, field work, etc.  I find the way to get at really knowing something involves using both.

[Valamir]

Ralph,

I expect that you would be interested in the first article that Mark references above, "Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts".  It describes prior research where gender differences in speech and other inter-active communications have been indentified.  And that some have posited that formal writing where there is an unseen audience should reduce or eliminate those differences.  The authors research indicates the contrary, that is, gender differences in relaying information does persist in written form.

Julie

Hey Julie,

Overall I found that article to be pretty interesting.  The one problem i had with it is that it doesn't really seem to address the initial premise; which was, as you note, that formal writing would reduce or eliminate the differences.  Instead the article primarily identifies that the difference do exist...but don't directly address the issue of reduction.

For instance the study used both fiction and non fiction and found that women use more pronouns overall.  But that non fiction uses less pronouns in general than fiction.  

Non fiction writing is almost always more "formal" than fiction writing, and in non fiction we see both males and females using fewer personal pronouns.  This would seem to indicate to me that the initial premise the article sought to disprove, is actually correct.  That formal writing does reduce the differences.

I also could not tell if the study included what I would consider the most formal writing of all, that written for technical journals.  A non fiction piece on a new heart procedure found in a medical journal is going to be alot more formally written than the same topic written for Popular Science.

It stands to reason to me that at that level of formalized writing that the differences largely do go away; if only for no other reason than writing for such journals is expected to adhere to a strict standard, and that standard evolved over many years in areas long dominated by men.  I would expect that women writing for a technical medical journal have learned to write like "men" regardless of what their own personal writing might look like.

I couldn't tell if any of the corpus used in the study were drawn from this category or not.  Certainly they did not distinguish them seperately.

[Rich Forest]

As Julie has emphasized, it's difficult to really assess the effect of a change in writing style on who will want to read the text.  That, I think, is the next question, although it's one that we may be unable to answer here.  Do women prefer to read texts with the features that are common in texts written by women?  If the answer to this question is, "yes," then we can go about considering how to adapt our writing to fit this goal, if indeed our goal is to write a text that will be generally more appealing to a female audience.  Of course, as Julie also pointed out, there are so many other factors influencing our interest in a game that we would also have to consider how important these male/female traits of writing style are to making the game appealing.  And who is the target audience?  I think your set of questions, Mark, are good at addressing this part of the issue, but of course, it seems we don't have enough info to get to them.

And that is one thing I see everyone agreeing on here, I think: we don't seem to have the right information to apply confidently to RPG design.  I suppose as an experiment someone could write a game with a female audience in mind and see how it affected not only their own grammatical choices, but also other choices.  In fact, I think Jonathon Walton has addressed this question before we even asked it, in a way, in the design of Ever After, judging from his comments in Men are from Universalis.  His example actually reflects choices he made to target his play group, which happens to be predominately female.  Of course, a purely experimental design attempting to write for a female audience might just end up telling us more about the author's ideas about what women want from a game than what they actually want.  It might be useful to look at what games have been most popular with female gamers, and think about what has made it so.  Obviously, there hasn't been much in the way of academic study of much of anything in our little hobby, so it's unlikely that we'll find any studies at all, let alone qualitative studies of gender in gaming.  Not that it couldn't be done.  Just that not much has been.    

As for RPGs with a female audience, what RPG is most famous for bringing more women into the hobby?  Am I wrong in thinking that it's Vampire: The Masquerade?  Is it the language?  Is it the concept?  Is it a lot of things working together, that would be hard to parse out?  (Probably).  

By the way, Ralph, I found some of the info you were wondering about.  The authors of the article list their sources for both articles on this page.  They did include scientific writing, and Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal English Texts gives this overview:

For each genre we used precisely the same number of male- and female -authored documents (Fiction: 123 male documents, 123 female documents; Nonfiction: 179 each, including Nat. Science: 2 documents each; Appl. Science: 13; Soc. Science: 60; World Affairs: 34 Commerce: 4; Arts: 31; Belief/Thought: 18; Leisure: 17).

They're probably using the document categories of the BNC (British National Corpus), which is their source corpus.  It's one of the big general corpora as far as corpus based linguistics goes (100 million words or so).  It's broken down into sub-corpora, and the categories you see there are probably the sub-corpora categories.

Rich

[Mark Johnson]

I have not found any research, quantitative or qualitative on the effects of text type and reader reaction.  Even if RPG texts presented a barrier to entry to RPGs to ANY group, any representative of that group who was at the Forge would be by definition unrepresentative for our intents and purposes.

RPG texts are of course not necessarily the point of entry into gaming anyway.  Everyone that I have tried to introduce to gaming (whether successful or not) has been through learn-as-you-play not "here is the book, come back after you have mastered it."

Better terms than "masculine" and "feminine" or "objective" and "subjective" might be "authoritative" and "facilitative."   This of course implies a great deal more than simple word choice; it also implies fundamental differences in the purpose of the text to begin with.  

Honestly, this is probably not an issue that most game designers (especially independent ones) need to put to much time into considering unless they are 1) targeting the game towards women, 2) it is a mainstream game with financial backing that is intended to reach both genders, 3) it is tied to a commercial property with a considerable female fan base or 4) you are writing a Concept Game to make comentary on the place of gender in RPGs or in RPG texts.

I may develop the ideas of "authoritative" and "facilitative" text as time goes on.  Obviously, most games include both types of text; however the importance and implemntations of these two styles are where some of the true art resides in crafting RPG text.

[Valamir]

By the way, Ralph, I found some of the info you were wondering about.  The authors of the article list their sources for both articles on this page.  They did include scientific writing, and Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal English Texts gives this overview:

For each genre we used precisely the same number of male- and female -authored documents (Fiction: 123 male documents, 123 female documents; Nonfiction: 179 each, including Nat. Science: 2 documents each; Appl. Science: 13; Soc. Science: 60; World Affairs: 34 Commerce: 4; Arts: 31; Belief/Thought: 18; Leisure: 17).

They're probably using the document categories of the BNC (British National Corpus), which is their source corpus.  It's one of the big general corpora as far as corpus based linguistics goes (100 million words or so).  It's broken down into sub-corpora, and the categories you see there are probably the sub-corpora categories.

Rich

Thanks Rich.  I did see that passage.  What I can't tell from that is whether the 13 articles on Applied Science were from the popular press or from the technical press.   IIRC you are right about the corpus being the BNC, which I'm not familiar with to know what's actually included.

[Rich Forest]

Hi Ralph,

I see what you were asking now--it went right past me that you were focusing on the differences between real technical and popular "technical" articles.  I suspect it's real technical, from my experience with linguistic corpora.  Linguists have a tendency to study technical writing over more popular forms--writing in academic journals is very heavily studied, for example, in comparison to a lot of other types.

Rich

[Sonja]

I am a female gamer.

I would say in my experience what blocks many creative and intelligent girls from gaming is the complexity of rules administration. When I play an RPG, I am more interested in the flow, the mood, the interaction, the story, the dynamics.

I don't care about +1 and THAC0 and all those administrative and mathematical slow-downs. I think it's important to have character sheets, and a basic die system to know if your actions succeed or fail, but It's often the "system" that will scare me away from a game, if it is unnecessarily complex and has too many things to keep track of.

Peace,

Sonja
www.kisa.ca