Most attractive setting for female players

[AnyaTheBlue]

Agree here.  I just think it's just hard to totally divorce the setting from the games, i.e. consider the role of female charachters in tolkien{not encouraging}.
(snip)
I guess my point is that if women taught to fill traditional roles(homemaker), these values are not compatable traditional RPGS(kill monsters, take their stuff).
(snip)
Or to put it another way, since men were encouraged to avoid these values, and
men made most games, their wern't games that fit them.

Damion,

I'm really not trying to pick on you, but here's what I think and what I've observed.

First, in Tolkein, yeah, there aren't any women in the Fellowship, and there are only a handful of 'named' characters at all.  But consider them.

Arwen is pretty cool (even if Tolkien relegates her to the appendix for the most part).  Galadriel is absolutely keen -- she's more or less implied to be the most powerful of the elves.  And Eowyn is just plain unbeatable -- she and Merry are true heroes, slaying the King of the Nazgul, a feat of arms pretty much nobody else in the book duplicates, except for Gandalf's (off screen) fight with the Balrog.

Not too shabby, really, for being pretty unrepresented...

Second, about 'traditional roles'.  I agree completely.  Women who are taught and accept the 'Suzie Homemaker' role are probably not going to be interested in a rousing game of D&D.  Just like that guy who is the Football Team's tight end isn't going to be interested in a rousing game of D&D, either.

Most of the guys I know who play RPGs reject or vary from what I would consider stereotypical traditional gender roles in their thinking, attitudes, or whatever.  Women who game, likewise.  There are just as many oddball women as there are men.  They're just somewhat invisible to most guys, as the oddball guys are invisible to most women.  We don't all accept our 'cultural programming' any better than you all do.

Thirdly, think about this.  I started freeform larping when I was about 4.  It was heavily Simulationist game-play, with occasional strong Narrativist undercurrents, Gamism bringing up the rear.  Sometimes we used miniatures.  We didn't use these terms or call it Larping, of course.  We called it 'playing house', or 'playing dolls/barbie'.  Same core basic activity as a freeform Larp, though.

Likewise, my little brother started Larping about 4, too.  His gameplay was heavily Gamist in focus, with a balance of Simulationist and Narrative adjuncts.  Sometimes he used miniatures, too.  This was generally called either "playing 'guns'/'war'/'cops&robbers'/'cowboys&indians'/'Star Wars-'Rebels vs. Empire'/'Superfriends'" (all the same game) or "playing star wars figures".

Since there were only three of us girls in the neighborhood (well, five, but Kristin and Heather were a couple blocks away, too far away to play with us for the most part), we frequently ended up playing with the boys.  When we all Larped together, things drifted in one of two ways.

First, no miniatures, unless we were playing with hotwheel/matchbox cars, tonka trucks, or Fisher-Price people, but that was all pretty rare.

If we convinced the boys to play 'house', play stayed pretty focussed on Sim/Nar, with the boys usually focussing on the Sim aspects -- mowing the lawn, 'fixing' the house, going to work.  Focus doesn't mean ignored, though.  If we had two houses, the guys might compete over who had the neatest house floorplan, or the better job.  We would compete on who had the better baby or the neater house or who was a better mom.  The guys would rarely initiate Nar-based play in the house scenario -- 'Mom' usually ruled the roost -- but they would react to it just fine, and carry out their role.

If the guys convinced us to Larp with them (far more common, as they outnumbered us), it was usually either Superfriends (where I got to be Wonder Woman or Batgirl, usually -- this was the 70s -- and Becky usually got stuck playing Robin, which she didn't like), or it was Star Wars (but then we had to fight over being Leia or a Robot.  I got stuck being R2-D2 a lot and couldn't talk).  Play got to be fairly mixed here, too, but it tended to be Gamist/Nar/Sim three-way (if that makes sense) -- the Girls focussed on the Nar/Sim/Gamist bits, the guys on the Gamist/Sim/Nar bits -- Sim tended to be the overlap.  It's not that the guys didn't have any Nar bits, but their Nar bits tended not to overlap with our Nar bits -- the stories were different.  And it's not that we didn't have Gamist bits, it's just that the focus was in general different, and more a reflection of the uneasy truce involving playing together -- the social contract, if you will.  We could play together, but we couldn't like it too much or interact too much.  Them's the rules!

Now, this is a GENERAL pattern.  There were times when we girls were just as gamist as the guys in Superfriends.  Wonder Woman could 'compete' pretty well with Spiderman and Superman (yeah, yeah, Spiderman wasn't in the Superfriends -- bite me! =) ).  And there were bits where the guys were very Nar focussed (in guns/war when Darrin's brother was 'shot', for example).

The gender culture encouraged a particular balance, but it shifted pretty fluidly from moment to moment in everybody's play, and nobody didn't partake of one sort of play or another.

There's no built in reason that women prefer one mode over another any more than there is for guys to prefer one to another.  The culture puts a spin on them, sure, but eventually we make conscious choices around all this.

Whew.

Sorry this got to be so long.  And here I said I was going to get down off my soapbox =)  So much for that idea!

[AnyaTheBlue]

In no way have you come off as any sort of "strident harriden."  You have, in fact, been a veritable model of restraint and patience.  I admire you for sticking it out on this one, and doing it so well.
(snip)
You're going to get the kind of people who feel comfortable with *you.*  It doesn't get any more simple than that.

Christopher,

Thanks!  (But c'mon.  Surely I must project a 'spinster aunt' vibe, right?  You can be honest...  =) )

As for your last point -- I couldn't possibly agree more.  I'm incapable of saying something like that in less than three or four paragraphs, though...

[Ben Lehman]

Thanks!  (But c'mon.  Surely I must project a 'spinster aunt' vibe, right?  You can be honest...  =) )

BL>  As someone who has been lurking this thread, you come off to me as one cool chickie.  But I was always a sucker for intellectual, outspoken gamer girls.

yrs--
--Ben

[xechnao]

Julie,

I don't intend to read it either. Anyway to answer, I don't want to make a rpg targeted for women only. I just want to make an rpg that wouldn't be hindered to be enjoyed by women as part of their interest. This thought is provoked by the fact that 80% of people that play d&d are male.
I also agree that an interesting and appealing game can be a lot more than setting. In this thread I thought to be asking about the setting part.


jdagna,

if it was to ask them only about the setting then why get to groups? This would do it more complicated. I could ask 1,000 female rpg-players their preferences and then see out if there were any interesting results. In fact I was wondering if I could make a poll over here. Ladies could vote their preferences giving a vote for every type of setting they like most. I would include thirteen different settings (action, sci-fi, hard-science, cyberpunk, conspiracy, horror, alternate reality, time travel, historical, fantasy, superhero, post holocaust , humour) and four votes of preference(to chose the four most prefered between thirteen) for each that votes (imprtant about the poll: one may not vote same choice more than once but won't have to exhaust all four votes- minimum of voting should remain to one vote).
Thus we could see if some choices would present intersting differentiations(higher or lower ratings) among the others.
I guess this need also be a question to the administrators of this board.

[Christopher Kubasik]

(But c'mon.  Surely I must project a 'spinster aunt' vibe, right?  You can be honest...  =) )

Um. No.

What Ben said.

Christopher

[Bankuei]

Hi folks,

I think that genre plays a small part in the gender balance of gamers.  I'd attribute it more to a self fulfilling stereotype about "who gamers are" plus the "geek's shame" bit that further makes it gender unbalanced, rather than simply genre content.

Chris

[Jonathan Walton]

What Ben & Chris said.  By the way, Dana, I was wondering about your sig...

Is it required for one to have a vagina in order to join the Estrogen Brigade?  I mean, I do have some estrogen, after all.  And my favorite game designer is Rebecca Sean Borgstrom.  And I go to a college where Women's Rugby is more popular than Men's Football.

Silly XY chromosomes! Off to gene-therepy!

[AnyaTheBlue]

Is it required for one to have a vagina in order to join the Estrogen Brigade?
(snip)
Silly XY chromosomes! Off to gene-therepy!

I was going to try and let things settle in this thread, but this must be replied to =)

Of course you don't need a vagina!  Actually, membership is by self-proclimation.  Only you can know if you are a member or not.  At least, if I get to make up the rules, membership is a voluntary Social Contract. :)

[Christopher Weeks]

In general, I'm in the "what she said" camp and I didn't think I had anything to add.  But this bit caught my notice:

What's offensive...is that you _seem_ to be trying to make such a judgement about liking or disliking something, or being good or bad at something, being a quality that belongs to Women as a group.  That is something I find wrong-headed, particularly when the implication is that women _as a group_ are generally or largely worse at something than men _as a group_.  Because it isn't so, and it's patronizing and chauvinistic to think so.

Are you declaring flatly that there are no noteworthy differences in the capabilities of men and women _as groups_ in general?  Or am I missing something?  

In the trivial case, men are better at getting jars open with no tool.  They just are.  Men bear superior upper body strength.  The much harder analysis is one of cognitive styles and abilities.

I tend to believe that men and women do think differently in some ways and that those differences are important to understand and address.  Business, education, parenting, coupling, and maybe just all facets of life stand to gain by understanding those differences.  Why wouldn't game producers have a similar interest?

Chris (who finds X mildly offensive, but not because of the mere notion of such differences)

[AnyaTheBlue]

Christopher,

Sorry, I wasn't being as clear as I could have been.

Sure, there are differences between men and women, just as there differences between New Yorkers and Midwesterners, Northerners and Southerners, African-Americans and Caucasians, Brits and Scots, Catholics and Protestants, etc, etc, etc.

I think Monty Python said it best:

   Dennis: What I object to is you automatically treat me like an inferior.
   Arthur: Well I am king.
   Dennis: Oh, king eh? Very nice! And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.

Things today, and people today, are far more conscious and aware of casual prejudices than they were a generation or two ago.  But they haven't entirely disappeared.  There's still an awful lot of reasoning and justification of actions based on 'obvious facts' and stereotypes.  In many cases the people doing it aren't aware that they are doing it.  In many other cases, the people doing it know it's not 'politically correct/socially acceptable' to make their reasoning explicit, but they still believe it's true.

What was getting my hackles up was the combination of "All/Most Women Are This Way" and an implication that "That Way is generally not as good as the way All/Most Men are", all bundled up with the apparent attitude that "Women" can be quantified distinctly from "people" (basically, a de-protagonization of us, to use Forge jargon).

As a class, men have more upper body strength than women as a class -- this is a more or less verifiable fact.  But you can't use that to draw a universally correct conclusions about the comparisons between any given woman and any given man -- a doughy male computer programmer may well have less upper body strength than a female triathelete.

With physical things like strength you can make reliable repeatable measurements.  With cognitive abilities, as you note, things get a lot muddier, and it's just irritating when people reason from the general to the specific and don't take the time to differentiate their subject at all beyond the general category they fall into (ie -- I'm a woman, I'm a computer programmer, I like comic books, SF, and RPGs, and my college degree is in physics & math -- and yet, guys assume I don't understand cars, science, or technology.  Bah!).

Yes, people fall into groups and those groups have trends based on biology, culture, and so forth.  But when you treat a person based on the general qualities of one of the groups they fall into in preference to treating them based on the person they actually are, well, that's discrimination.

Who, me?  Bitter?  =)

[John Kim]

In the trivial case, men are better at getting jars open with no tool.  They just are.  Men bear superior upper body strength.  The much harder analysis is one of cognitive styles and abilities.

I tend to believe that men and women do think differently in some ways and that those differences are important to understand and address.  Business, education, parenting, coupling, and maybe just all facets of life stand to gain by understanding those differences.  Why wouldn't game producers have a similar interest?

Well, but how do you propose to get such understanding?  It can be interesting to compare experiences, but the frequent pitfall is when people claim to understand the true difference based on anecdote or even statistical data.  For example, girls perform better than boys in school these days.  This has been shown pretty broadly in modern data for the U.S., Canada, and Europe.  However, people draw some pretty disparate conclusions based on this.  

I think Anya took offense at drawing conclusions like "girls are smarter than boys" (based on education statistics) or "girls don't like complex rules" (based on gaming anecdotes).  I think understanding differences on a genetic level, particularly for cognitive differences, isn't really known.

[xechnao]

AnyaTheBlue,


For info only, there is an rpg game that actually endorses different stats for males and females about physical abilities. Millenium's End gives males +1 str and females +1 costitution. You could also answer if you like if you do find this anoying as a rule and why?

What I want to repeat is this:
You see, differences is one thing and social rights discrimination is another. They don't need to coincide. People should accept and aknowledge differences but without linking them to the idea of a discrimination on social rights. Should you accept this or not?
People also have common points. This means that one can address something in regards of people groups without necessarilly offending social rights. Should this makes you unhappy?

[damion]

AnyaTheBlue,

                   Ok. My fiance's a radical femminist, and she tells me about this sort of stuff alot,
however she doesn't like gaming(She's a mega Simulationist).
However it is appears that I'm combining knowlege and experiance incorrectly, for which I apologize. Thanks for the insight.

What was getting my hackles up was the combination of "All/Most Women Are This Way" and an implication that "That Way is generally not as good as the way All/Most Men are", all bundled up with the apparent attitude that "Women" can be quantified distinctly from "people" (basically, a de-protagonization of us, to use Forge jargon).

Wow, if you thought I was implying anything vaguely like that, that would explain any stridentness. I wasn' trying to say anything like that, I very sorry if it came out that way.

xechnao

You see, differences is one thing and social rights discrimination is another. They don't need to coincide. People should accept and aknowledge differences but without linking them to the idea of a discrimination on social rights. Should you accept this or not?

This is true, but you have to be carefull.  Thus we have seperate mens/womens sports for professionals(everyone is operating at peak capacity, so a difference shows up) but coed for lower ranks (the differnces between individuals affect performance much more).
For things like cognative differences,  there is much less evidence of any clear difference, and if group X does better than group Y in school, does that indicate a cognitive difference or a  
problem with the school? Personally, I think it's fairer to assume the second, at least until more investigation is done.

-Estrogen Brigade Mascot

[AnyaTheBlue]

Wow, if you thought I was implying anything vaguely like that, that would explain any stridentness. I wasn' trying to say anything like that, I very sorry if it came out that way.

"Curse this metal body!  They're dying Artoo!"

My turn to apologize, Damion.  I wasn't implying that I took your post that way.  The mini-rant there was describing how I was taking Xechnao's posts.  I think you were mostly right, I was just trying to clarify the slight misconception or misstatement I thought you were making or defending.

And I probably went overboard.  Your statements weren't offensive to me, I just thought they were (very slightly) mistaken.

Estrogen Brigade Mascot

Dang.  Should we mandate a costume?

[AnyaTheBlue]

For info only, there is an rpg game that actually endorses different stats for males and females about physical abilities. Millenium's End gives males +1 str and females +1 costitution. You could also answer if you like if you do find this anoying as a rule and why?

Actually, the situation is far more widespread than just Millenium's End.

AD&D1e had some modifiers (that we ignored) for male vs. female stats, too (at least for humans).  Gurps has seperate 'height/weight' tables.

For the most part I find these annoying, and I just ignore them.  I generally don't care how tall my character is, and I just drop gender modifiers of this sort.  Stat mods are actively irritating, the other stuff just seems like Simming stuff that isn't really that important to the game.  Sort of like Greg Stafford's 'Misapplied Worship' in Glorantha:  you can do it, but what is it really getting you?

What is your goal in Simulating these real or perceived gender differences?  How and why does it make the game more fun?  Is it 'really real', is it based on a bias or misconception, or is it wish-fulfillment?

What I want to repeat is this:
You see, differences is one thing and social rights discrimination is another. They don't need to coincide. People should accept and aknowledge differences but without linking them to the idea of a discrimination on social rights. Should you accept this or not?
People also have common points. This means that one can address something in regards of people groups without necessarilly offending social rights. Should this makes you unhappy?

If I'm reading you correctly, then I think I disagree with you.  Yes, people are different.  And yes, acknowledging differences is not necessarily social rights discrimination.  But it does depend.  If you are setting up classifications, and you find that there exists a, for example, 20%/80% split, and you treat everybody as if they are in the 80% group, well, the 20% of exceptions are being discriminated against unfairly.

Don't base your actions on a trend.  Base your actions on the specifics of the person.

I'll try an example that will hopefully clarify where I'm coming from.

You have five apples, and five oranges.  There are five people in front of you, and you have a survey that says only one in five people like oranges, so you give all five apples, since most people like apples.  If one of them asks for an orange, you say "Sorry, most people like apples."

So, your survey can be 'true' -- one in five likes oranges -- but that survey doesn't tell you anything about these five specific people.  Maybe these particular five people are actually the charter members of the Orange Appreciation Society, all of whom grow oranges at home, work in the orange production industry, and in fact are allergic to apples.

Just because some broad category of people can be statistically subdivided doesn't tell you if a particular subset of that  broad category falls into a particular statistical subdivision.

To put it another way, statistics are no match for actual communication and dialog.