The Forge Archives

Salutations,

At the urging of my genius game designer spouse, I recently read Mr. Lehrich's article on RPGs as ritual.  I was inspired to post my own article to all of you for perusal.

Learning from the criticisms leveled at Mr. Lehrich's paper, let me make a few clarifications.

Bricoleur is the term used for someone who engages in bricollage.  That is, someone who uses available elements in new and innovative ways.  By Levi-Strass' own definition of bricollage, bricoleurs are not professionally trained in whatever discipline they happen to be dabbling.  Hence, they are hobbyist innovators.

Thematic Apperception Test Stories: In this study conducted by Carol Gilligan (cited in the bibliography), she showed pictures of various scenes (a man standing looking over a lake, a young woman being pushed by a young man on a tire swing out in the country, etc., etc.).  She asked people to look at the pictures and then make up a narrative about what the viewer thought was happening in the picture.  What Gilligan found was that men made up these weird, paranoid stories about how the men in the pictures had been jilted, would be jilted, had just killed their girlfriends ... or how the women in the pictures had just finished knifing their boyfriends before going off to nip lunch with his two-timing best friend.  I have to say, based on Gilligan's study, that you men are a bunch of strange, sad creatures.  No wonder we can't all get along.

I wrote this 4 years ago as a final paper for a class I was taking.  It overlaps Mr. Lehrich's article in a number of ways.  I am trained in ethnography (recording and interpreting people's thoughts and experiences about certain subjects, usually people from other cultures).  This paper is, I suppose, an ultimate anti-colonialist ethnography.  The subject interviewed is myself, though I don't detail the particulars of experience that brought me to many of the statements and conclusions.

I'm sure Mr. Lehrich will feel that this is "the most dubious sort of anecdotal data." *hee hee* It is the job of the ethnographer to get the insider's story.  I just happen to be the insider this time.  I am also ideologically opposed to Mr. Lehrich in that I am quite postmodern and believe that objectivity is a nice idea, but doesn't actually happen in the real world.  That just means we have to be aware of our biases and state clearly the position from which we are theorizing.

I think what follows could be useful both as a support and a critique of Mr. Lehrich's article.  I also think it will be useful for the game designers out there in understanding what it is about gaming that discourages women from playing.  Maybe it will only reinforce the stuff y'all already know and have talked about.

I look forward to your comments and critiques.

http://www.galileogames.com/RPGNeoPaganpaper.pdf

Cheers!

Krista White

P.S. (Hey, Vince!  Say hi to your wife and kids and rat drawing brother.  This article is simply the academic "proof" of the subject I brought up at WhatsisCon in NY last November.)

Krista,

First of all, one point of clarification from me:

QuoteI am also ideologically opposed to Mr. Lehrich in that I am quite postmodern and believe that objectivity is a nice idea, but doesn't actually happen in the real world.

I don't buy objectivity either, in the slightest.  But I do think that it is inappropriate to transform the recognition that objectivity is non-functional into an excuse for colonialism, i.e. for going out and telling the natives that they're stupid and "doing it wrong."  My only reason for keeping the spheres separate is to keep my constructive agendas from tainting my analyses.  I think you are careful about this as well; frankly, I don't think we have any ideological disagreement here.

And you can take your dubious anecdotal data and....  :)

Seriously, though, I quite liked the article, but it appeared to me to deal with RPG's primarily in their older, "traditional" mode.  That is, the foundation for description seems mostly based on things like D&D, although there are mentions of VtM as more likeable for women.  But these days there are a lot of quite different games that simply don't buy into a lot of the old assumptions, or at least claim not to, and by this model should be more approachable for women.  I'd love to see a longer, more detailed version that takes into account especially some of the developments in gaming that the GNS model 'round these parts calls "Narrativist."

Around here, you would I think also find a significant sample set of women with very broad experience of gaming, who might be able to give you insights that your necessarily constrained data-set can't provide.

Second, I do think you generalize Neopagans primarily from those who identify themselves as Wiccans or something of that sort; although this isn't popular among Wiccans, I think you have to take into account things like Chaos Magick, Satanism (as in the Church of Satan), and so forth, which would give a broader sense of the totality of the movement.  Have you read Tanya Luhrmann's book, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft?  You might also look at Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon.  Luhrmann is an anthropologist who did fieldwork among British Neopagans, while Hutton is an historian of a fairly classic social-history stripe.  Their work might deepen and enrich your arguments.  Wouter Hanegraaf's book (title I don't remember, but will find if you care) is also very good, and might help as well.

Essentially where this left me was wanting more.  In addition to a more detailed study, taking into account a broader range of both RPG's and Neopagans, I'd like to see a more intensive analysis of circle work and RPG play; I wonder whether this might not produce deeper comparative results.  This is something I'd consider doing myself, except that I don't have any first-hand data on circle work, and besides I'm not an ethnographer and don't really know what I'm doing there.  Someday, maybe....

A very minor note: I'm pretty sure Margot Adler spells her name with one "d."

On Adler more deeply, I believe there are much more recent editions of Drawing Down the Moon, and I wonder whether her data has remained constant for finding Feminism the #1 attraction or reason to get into Neopaganism.  What I've been reading seems to suggest that this may be shifting considerably, but it's been kind of a background interest for me so I'm not sure.  I think Hanegraaf has some stuff on this, though.

As I say, I quite like the article's general gist, but I think at this point it's a little sketchy in terms of especially its RPG data.  The Forge might provide a deeper sample set, if you're interested in further work in this area.

Thanks for posting the essay!

Chris Lehrich

Yes, this is very basic, not in depth at all.  At the time, I was simply racking by brain to try to come up with something that was suitable as a final paper for the semester.

I'm aware of Edwards' work.  I have a much wider experience with roleplaying than you realize.  I actually hate D&D as a system and a game world.  

The most useful bit about this article for the purposes of folks on the Forge would be, I think the section involving Carol Gilligan.  

The edition of _Drawing Down the Moon_  I used was the most recent version.  I never got the sense that she was going to repeat her survey - which would be incredibly useful.

I think from a statistical standpoint, Wiccan-type Neo-Pagans probably make up the majority.  My own inclination is to categorize Neo-Pagans into three groups: Revivalists (Wiccans, Asatruists, Greek Revivalists), Synchretists (those who practice more than one religion simultaneously) and We're-Really-Trying-to-Test-Social-Boundary-ists (including Satanists and, I assume, Chaos Magickists - don't know much abou the latter).

No, I agree, this is VERY limited, and I would expand it more if I weren't trying to hold down a job and study for comprehensive exams and still have a family all at the same time.

My understanding from my spouse's summaries is that most discussions of women in role playing on the Forge get bogged down in the details of stereotype and such - and fail to focus on why the hobby is so male dominated.  I think Gilligan is a place to start.  

As I said, the statistics in this are old - but that's because there aren't any new statistics to be had.  It would be useful to the hobby if folks who held cons started to do male/female headcounts at their events (at the very least).  

White Wolf's games are, I concur, more attractive to women because they are narrativist.  Yes, yes, I know people here object to that because it pigeonholes women into a "touchy-feely" roleplaying stereotype.  I like a good knock-down, drag-out with the supervillain occasionally.  BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT KEEPS ME COMING BACK FOR MORE.

I think what might lie behind many of the objections to saying women prefer narrativist gaming (connected to the ideas of relationships in my own paper) could be two things that YOUR paper touches upon:

Women aren't taken seriously as gamers by many: I recently had an archetypical experience with this, where the group (all male), was tested out by my husband, and when they all came to play at our house and I expressed intrest, they found it amusing AND did everything they could within and without game play to discourage my participation.

In this last instance, had it not been for the fact that my children need me, I would have happily gone to jail for assaulting each and every one of these assholes with my son's aluminum baseball bat.  By consensus, my husband and I did the sociall acceptable thing instead - we quit playing with them.  Besides, our gaming style is narrativist/simulationist in nature.  These guys were definitely firmly gamist.

"Get to the point, you old cow," you're saying to yourself.  Well, my point is, that I suspect that consciously or not, the women on this list fight the idea that women gravitate toward narrativist games because the game culture at large won't take them seriously if they don't exhibit a wide range of gaming styles.  I don't feel uncomfortable making a broad generalization like this because A. I'm a woman too, and all of the women I know who game are also more attracted to the narrativist style of gaming; and B. I'm past the point in my own feminism of having to try to prove that generalizations and stereotypes aren't synonymous.  


Let's ask all the women on this list, honestly, the following set of questions (I'll answer them, too, in the interest of forthright ethnography):

How were you introduced to role-playing games?  

I was introduced to the hobby by my best friend's brother's best friend. I loved it.  (BTW, the GM was definitely narrativist)  In fact, my best friend and her brother stopped playing long after I did.  I only stopped playing because I went out on a date with the GM, and I was too immature at the time to feel comfortable dating someone who was 3 or 4 years older than I was.  I was 12 or 13, give me a break.  When I wouldn't go out on a second date with him, I lost the only way I knew of playing D&D (the only game that existed at the time).  So my experience is almost a complete inversion of Fine's analysis.  (see my paper if you want to know who Gary Alan Fine is and what he was saying.  That's a not-so-sneaky way of trying to force you all to read my paper.)

What is it you like most about role playing?

I like to try on new identies.  I like to play characters who can do things I cannot, or who can do things I would like to be able to do.  I've had superheroines in Champions and the Marvel system.  I've played Scorpion Clan Courtiers in L5R.  I've played Harrowed gunslingers in Deadlands, I've played town blacksmiths in Burning Wheel, I've played epic Sirkan knights in the Legend of Yore.  I've played 5ft long space cockroaches in a space game adapted from Marvel.  I've been a lovestricken Torreador sculptress in Vampire.  I even played a male (WAY out of character for me, no pun intended) ex-Navy Seal vampire hunter in the White Wolf universe.  The point is, the characters I've loved the most have either been female archetypes of my ideal self, or cathartic outlets for things I'd been trying to work out psychologically (the space cockroach).


Here's the REAL point of this ethnographic exercise:  If all you ever played again were "dungeon crawls," (in whatever universe or system), where character interaction was always going to be kept at a minimun, would you still love role playing games?  Be honest, ladies.

Hell no.  In fact, I'm so far from the gamist side of the galaxy that I can't even stand to crunch the numbers anymore to make up characters.  All that character creation nonsense (we hates it forever) just gets in the way of my roleplaying.  I come up with a character concept and say to the GM "here's what I want to do."  The GM gives me a range of choices and I tell her what I want (are you strong, are you tough, are you really smart?).  I let other people deal with those annoying numbers.  I've got too much to do with my life to bother with an aspect of the hobby I find tiresome.  You want to know one of the reasons I think a lot of women like WW so much?  Because they can fill in little dots and they don't have to deal with crap that looks like a statistics class.  Statistics are for gamists and simulationists.  If the other folks I hang with want to do a "kill the monsters, grab the treasure" thing to blow off steam, I'll happily sit in the living room and socialize with them while I quilt and they play the game.  I have no interest in participating in purely gamist scenrios anymore, because they don't touch on what interests me: the relationships my character has with other characters and the social structure of the game universe.  Done waving my narrativist flag now.

Wow, I digressed a lot.  A fine talent I have.  Back to my paper - I wholeheartedly agree with the majority of your criticisms, Mr. Lehrich (right down to my embarassing mis-spelling of Margot Adler's name).  That paper is really just an introduction for a longer, more in-depth study.  But I think it could be useful if people were to take the bits they like and leave the rest.

Krista

Hi Krista,

I'm completely unstudied on ethnography and the like, so you may have to bear with me a little on this.  But I have some doubts and questions after reading your paper, some of which are for you and some for anyone.

When discussing the "goals or purposes" of the gamers and neo-pagans you assert that they're different, but the description of the goals makes them sound the same.  The key to my take on this is that "spiritual allegiance" is a leisure activity.  If you think that's incorrect, can you elaborate on why?  I'm not convinced that "attempt[ing] to forge a religious belief system" is actually a different thing than "act[ing] out fictional scenarios."  I mean, they have a distinctly similar feel to me.  Specifically, see this thread for a suggestion of how gaming helps one forge a moral belief system -- which isn't really so different, is it?

If I got the count right, there are three different points in which you assert rampant misogyny in role-playing games as an apparently obvious fact.  So what I'm wondering is this: Am I just completely oblivious?  Does everyone agree with the stance that gaming as a pastime and an idustry is overwhelmingly misogynistic?  And could I get a few examples of how this misogyny is expressed?

My summary of page five is that you think fat dorks game so they can pretend to be thin and popular and that's the same thing (somehow) as Gygax suggesting people game to explore exciting situations that are not otherwise available.  Is that what you meant?  The assertion that there is some deep psychological motivation going on behind gaming is at one point supported by the idea that the fun of gaming "does not account for the copious amounts of time and financial resources that gamers put into their hobby."  I wonder if you're not reading too much into this.  How do you analyze stamp collectors or dollhouse furniture craftspeople?  Gaming is the cheapest of my hobbies.  It also makes me wonder about the various comparisons you draw between neo-paganism and gamers and which of them simply apply to all social group interactive settings.  One in particular that you cite later in the paper is cultural construction.

When I was reading about the attraction of neo-paganism to women for the ability to become spiritual leaders, it occurred to me that it might be more important to women (generally) to have access to that role than it is to men, because of the differences in the role of group socialization between men and women (if you're willing to grant that such differences exist).  It seems particularly backward, if there's anything to this idea of mine, for religious institutions to be patriarchially governed.  I wonder why that hasn't reversed over time.

I'm uncertain of the meaning of internal v. external reality.  I'm specifically thinking of "Playing the role of priestesses in a religion which foceses on the femaleness of divinity is an empowering experience for women.  It allows them to integrate the internal reality of womanhood with the external reality of religion..."  What makes one internal and the other external?  And why isn't the same phenomenon experienced in role-playing games?

How is the sense of "spiritual power" different from the imagined power that RPGs focus on?

I'd be interested to hear the evidence that supports Gilligan's assertion that men find the "web of relationships" threatening and are thus not interested in neo-paganism.

Toward the end you note that "it seems that the very form each activity takes is tailor made for the sexes that dominate them."  I wonder what, if any, the causal relationship is.  Are they thay way because of the sexual predominance, or vice versa?

Chris

Hi,

Hmmm... an interesting article, and an interesting read.  Mainly because I know next to nothing about paganism.  I'd suggest that by directing the questions on this list only at women you're creating data, so...

QuoteHow were you introduced to role-playing games?

My cousin [male] bought me D&D for Christmas, and two of school friends [male] were also playing.

QuoteIf all you ever played again were "dungeon crawls," (in whatever universe or system), where character interaction was always going to be kept at a minimun, would you still love role playing games?

Hell no.

(I've skipped the second question because I'm not sure I have a point to go with the answer.)

My point is that men are in most cases brought into roleplaying by a web of relationships just as women are, and that many men would give exactly the same answer to the second question as you did.

The fact that more women are introduced into roleplaying by their boyfriends, than men by their girlfriends is a simple, natural consequence of the fact of that roleplaying is male dominated.

In the essay you quote:

QuoteNo women he encountered had come to gaming on their own; they began gaming because a boyfriend brought them in to it.

He clearly hasn't looked very far.  I know women who've come to gaming through: individual friends (both male and female), groups of friends, university societies, relatives and of course boyfriends.  And of course, men come through the similiar links.  (Though, I'm not sure I know examples of the last.)

QuoteWomen aren't taken seriously as gamers by many: I recently had an archetypical experience with this, where the group (all male), was tested out by my husband, and when they all came to play at our house and I expressed intrest, they found it amusing AND did everything they could within and without game play to discourage my participation.

Ouch.  I like to think that groups I have known are more welcoming and appreciative than this.  The main problem, imo, being the pirana effect - which seems to be an highly unfortuanate but natural effect in a male dominated group.  (I'm curious as to whether the reverse occurs in female dominated groups.)

Anyway, that's just one piece of your essay that seemed out of place to me.  I've only read it quickly so I hope I'm not taking things out of context too much.

Adam

I should have included this above...

Quote from: cthulahoops

QuoteNo women he encountered had come to gaming on their own; they began gaming because a boyfriend brought them in to it.

He clearly hasn't looked very far.  I know women who've come to gaming through: individual friends (both male and female), groups of friends, university societies, relatives and of course boyfriends.  And of course, men come through the similiar links.  (Though, I'm not sure I know examples of the last.)

I wasn't introduced to RPGs by a girlfriend, but I was by another female -- my mother.  In '79ish, my mom read about D&D on college campuses in the paper (might have been Parade magazine, but also might have been local).  She was interested and thought it would be good for us.  It was.

Chris

Krista,

Your points on Neopagans seem plausibile; I'm sorry to hear that Adler hasn't updated her data.

On the issue of women in gaming, however, I think we're talking past each other a bit.  For example:

Quote from: LibrisiaWhite Wolf's games are, I concur, more attractive to women because they are narrativist.  Yes, yes, I know people here object to that because it pigeonholes women into a "touchy-feely" roleplaying stereotype.  I like a good knock-down, drag-out with the supervillain occasionally.  BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT KEEPS ME COMING BACK FOR MORE.

I very much doubt that the remark about pigeonholing and so forth would arise here in that way.  Not because we're all super-sensitive, or something, either: it's just that (1) I think WW games are usually read as Sim, by the GNS model; (2) I do not think that Narrativism is usually read as "touchy-feely"; and (3) Narrativism has nothing to do with quantity of combat.  This is what I mean about your models being a little older, and why I'd be interested to see what would come of a reconsideration based on Forge data, female and otherwise.

Your experience of not being taken seriously because of your sex is, I think, not at all uncommon, as you say.  I too would be very interested in a deep exploration of why it happens, as well as why it's perceived as happening so often (not the same thing).  But I don't think this sort of parallel-block structuring of RPG styles and gender/sex styles is likely to work.  Just a guess, but I doubt it, and I think that this preliminary gesture to downplay data from Forge women --

QuoteI suspect that consciously or not, the women on this list fight the idea that women gravitate toward narrativist games because the game culture at large won't take them seriously if they don't exhibit a wide range of gaming styles.

-- is likely to skew your data pretty wildly.

For example:

QuoteA. I'm a woman too, and all of the women I know who game are also more attracted to the narrativist style of gaming;

By the GNS model, anyway, you and the women you know are at least equally attracted to Sim gaming, i.e. White Wolf.  It would be interesting to know why you mark WW as Nar, however.

In the interest of open-ended enthnography:

How were you introduced to role-playing games?  

My brother heard from male friends in elementary school that they were cool, and my mother bought us the AD&D Player's Handbook and DMG.  I loved it, my brother didn't, so my gaming was very irregular and low-key until I got to college.

What is it you like most about role playing?

Interacting with my friends in a way that seems to promote a lot of laughter, bizarre invention, and general weirdness; I particularly like doing this when I can also spend out-of-game time thinking about the game world and my character, imagining stories about them and so forth (not usually combat stories).

Here's the REAL point of this ethnographic exercise:  If all you ever played again were "dungeon crawls," (in whatever universe or system), where character interaction was always going to be kept at a minimun, would you still love role playing games?  Be honest, ladies.

Absolutely not.  I do like this sort of thing once in a while, but not often.

--

My point is that you now have 2 data points suggesting that the "REAL point" question is not going to produce the stereotyped data you expect.  I think that if you'd done these questions 15 years ago, however, the data would have come out a lot more like you expect.  Consequently I think an update would drastically change the basic premise of the argument.

And why do you keep calling me "Mr. Lehrich"?

Chris Lehrich

Greetings

I've been lurking here for some months now, too lazy to write. But since I as a "RPGirl" belong in the target group of this query, I feel obligated to come out of the closet. Besides, this works pretty well as an introduction, too. Two Giant Green Fruit Flies with one strike, or something..

Quote from: Librisia
How were you introduced to role-playing games?  

My parents bought an early version of MERP to my brother as his 13-year birthday present. I was 14 then. He started as a GM, and I was his first "guinea-pig". Awful hack'n'slash it was, we couldn't even figure out the rules properly, but the feeling was something magical. We were familiar with Tolkien's texts already, maybe that helped. And Middle-Earth is still my favourite genre. Systems come and go, however.

Maybe a point of interest: whereas our player group was heavily gamist, with strong simulation undercurrent, I managed to "sneak in" narration even as a player, and later as the GM. Sometimes others thought it great, sometimes not. Usually they thought it crazy, especially when I had a suicidal or uber-noble character. But couple of guys took notice, my brother f ex, and I felt our sessions were overall fairly "high quality" (whatever that means), considering the lack of experience.

QuoteWhat is it you like most about role playing?

Playing alter egoes of myself, playing characters utterly alien to my real self, playing in environments I find interesting (fantasy and middle-ages among others), acting, constructing stories without fully knowing what happens next, social and psychological simulationing/experimenting, painting mental pictures of various moods.. Secondary goals are puzzles, tactical challenges and action. Good story and good character above all! :)

I also think that most of these, if not all, go very well when GMing, too.

QuoteIf all you ever played again were "dungeon crawls," (in whatever universe or system), where character interaction was always going to be kept at a minimun, would you still love role playing games?

I think that would be the end of the "love affair" then. One night stands, maybe. Classic dungeon crawling is to me first and foremost a tactical exercise and action fun. It's okey, and I do it, but to me it is very primitive form of roleplaying. It doesn't give me enough.

One of the comments I found intriguing, in an odd way, was the contention that women are generally looked down upon in gaming groups, or not taken "seriously" as gamers.

I have to say this has never been my experience. When my wife first began playing (back before she was my wife), everyone quickly accepted her into the group. In fact, she quickly asked if she could GM a game, and her first session doing so was afterwards met with gushing praise; we all agreed that her GMing was superior. I note the game was also a very standard Gamist dungeon-crawl.

The first female in our high school gaming group was likewise respected by everyone in our group and quickly became one of the regulars, both in game play and outside it (our group tended to do things together outside of gaming).

I don't feel, and I know for a fact -- based on numerous statements made by both ladies in conversations later -- neither of these two feel or ever felt that they weren't taken seriously by the otherwise all-male gaming groups they joined.

Most recently, I was the second male in an otherwise all-female group for a number of years, and my own group held a larger female-to-male ratio (though it has evened out more in the past few years).

What I'm saying is that I'm rather surprised about the proposed regularity of this attitude towards women, as in almost twenty years of gaming I've never run into that behavior. Not that I am calling you a liar, Krista -- there are certainly things which might explain it -- I just find it strange that I've never encountered an apparently widespread phenomena in that time.

Quote from: Christopher WeeksIf I got the count right, there are three different points in which you assert rampant misogyny in role-playing games as an apparently obvious fact.  So what I'm wondering is this: Am I just completely oblivious?  Does everyone agree with the stance that gaming as a pastime and an idustry is overwhelmingly misogynistic?  And could I get a few examples of how this misogyny is expressed?

I'm not the original poster, but I can easily point to examples -- they are, as Krista says, rampant.  For example, "The Greenland Colony" was a D20 module by Avalanche Games nominated for the Origins award (along with two others in the same series), and widely recommended on the net as bringing D20 to sophisticated historical gaming.  I bought it (a rare buy of D&D material) because I thought it might be of some use for my Vinland campaign.  You can read my review of it at http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/reviews/greenlandsaga.html  

Of course, this is an egregious example which I immediately reacted to.  But you can find trends within related books.  For example, in The Lord of the Rings RPG from Decipher (cf. http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/lordoftherings/ ) not only are all of archetypes or sample characters male -- all of the sample players are male as well.  

When women are included in the game, they tend to follow negative patterns.  Picking a random game, off my shelf, I grabbed "Deadlands".  Out of 12 archetypes, three are female: "Buffalo Girl", "Pinkerton", and "Saloon Gal".  Let me compare for you the text of "Buffalo Girl" and "Gunslinger" (a similar male archetype):

QuoteBuffalo Girl
...
Hindrances: Big Britches -3 [Deadland's version of Overconfident],
Curious -3, Heroic -3, Intolerance -1: Feminine women
...
Yee-hah!  I'm the wildest thing this side o' the Pecos.  I'm a whip-crackin', butt-kickin', pistol-packin' gal o' the plains.
I've seen some ornery lookin' critters out here in the West, and I aim to rope me a few.  Maybe I'll catch one and sell it to a rodeo or one o' them newfangled zoos.  Or maybe I'll just stuff the durn varmint and mount it on my wall.
'Course, I don't actually have a wall.  The wide open prairie's the place for me.  
Quote: "Yee-hah! Outta my way, boys!"

QuoteGunslinger
...
Hindrances: Enemy -1: Someone's always out to prove he's faster than you, Heroic -3, Vengeful -3
...
I was brought here because I'm the best.  You draw that pistol, and I'll show you what I mean.
You think you're bad news?  I've seen things that would make you wet your pants.  Now put that gun away, kid.  And do it real slow like.  The only live gunslingers are jumpy gunslingers.
Walk away.  You don't have to prove anything.  And I've got enough notches on my pistol already.
Quote: "Are you going to skin that smokewagon or whistle Dixie?"

OK, so superficially these are both tough characters based on the same number of points.  But there are a ton of things to notice.  The male gunslinger emphasizes his past experience (notches on his pistol), while the female buffalo girl emphasizes what she intends to do and her overconfidence.  Note how the Buffalo Girl is intolerant of feminine women, and the text goes out of its way to point out that she is homeless -- denying her femininity.  Further, her quote emphasizes her pushiness and relation to men, rather than action on her own.  

I find this sort of thing constantly strewn throughout my RPG collection, and I generally avoid things which look misogynist.

Hi,

Just curious, I opened another book: Last Unicorn Games' "Star Trek Roleplaying Game" (the original series one).  There are 15 one-page sections of fiction: one at the start of each chapter.  In those, about a dozen Starfleet characters appear.  Of these, two are women.  I'll include the complete sample text where female Starfleet characters are mentioned.

The first is on page 25:

Quote...Open a channel, Lieutenant."
Lieutenant Danna complied, not without a certain nervousness.  First-contact situations were fraught with peril.  The six-inch scar on her left thigh was testament to that, a souvenir of the ship's first brush with the Matapedians.  Everything had worked out okay in the end, thanks to Captain [Achilles] Diamond's quick thinking.  Moments like this still made her edgy, though.

The second is on page 263:

Quote"Shall I open communications, sir?" Communications Officer Thursen's voice quavered slightly with the anticipation of announcing the arrival of the Yorktown.
"Wait until we're through the Ring, Lieutenant," Captain Foster advised. "It won't hurt us to get a little closer to our destination."
Thursen lowered her head to hide the slight flush that reddened her cheek.  She wondered if her eagerness to take a more active role in the approach made her seem even more of a new recruit than her shipmates.  She admired Lieutenant Vashenka's composure and Helmsman D'wara's complete concentration.  Sometimes she thought her graduation from the academy was a fluke.  She wondered if the others felt the same way.

Frankly, I think this text speaks for itself.  The male characters all have lots of heroic action beating aliens and so forth, while the females shiver with fright and nervousness when asked to open communication channels.

Quote from: clehrichAnd why do you keep calling me "Mr. Lehrich"?

... when it's probably -Dr.- Lehrich :-)  ... Seriously, though - we do tend to be on a first name basis around here.

John's examples are interesting, but it occurs to me that the clear sexism in them could be ascribed to accord with the source material rather than to the attitudes of the gamers (both Star Trek and Westerns are inherently sexist.)

However, I think that the consensus of opinion, and probably the truth, is that gaming used to be a substantially male-dominated passtime, with female players the exception, and has grown towards more even representation with time.

Further, the extent to which women weren't taken seriously in gaming probably precisely parallels the circumstances and extent to which they're not taken seriously in every other endeavour; this doesn't at all seem to be a gaming-specific social phenomenon.

Finally, while there are clear gender differences in preferred activities in every sort of leisure pursuit, I suspect, and others' experience tends to confirm, that the level of self-selection necessary to engaging in role-playing in the first place greatly overrides these differences.

- James

Quote from: james_westFurther, the extent to which women weren't taken seriously in gaming probably precisely parallels the circumstances and extent to which they're not taken seriously in every other endeavour; this doesn't at all seem to be a gaming-specific social phenomenon.

I don't know about that.  Obviously it's all anecdotal evidence, but my feeling is that an awful lot of female gamers do continue to put up with the "just the GM's girlfriend" thing in a way that isn't quite so strongly true in other spheres of life.  In high school and college, this might be kind of a continuation of what we might call the "geek effect": since it does seem as though most nerd-types (I include myself) were a little later to blossom in terms of having success with the opposite sex, and since most seem to be male, I would think that this discomfort might extend as projection, in that the male nerd's discomfort and lack of success with women would play out in male-nerd-dominated gaming as a sphere in which such a player is dominant and he can feel that he's better than the women around.  But that's cheap pop-psychology, based on weak anecdotal evidence.

I do think that the issue of sex and gender roles in RPG's is something that deserves serious analysis, longitudinally, but I'm not at all sure how one would go about doing this.  I made a little stab at a theoretical basis in my Ritual essay, and Krista's essay works on similar issues (but I think is a bit dated) from a different theoretical perspective.  Still, I do think this is an important question that ought to receive a good deal of closer attention.  I'd also like to see it addressed head-on in game design, but that's probably just me.

Chris Lehrich

P.S. "Dr." Lehrich always feels to me like you're talking about my dad, who's a medical doctor.  Chris will be fine, unless you take a class from me, in which case it depends on the institutional standards of decorum.

Howdy, All!

(Woo hoo!  I just figured out the quote thingie!)
Chris:

QuoteWhen discussing the "goals or purposes" of the gamers and neo-pagans you assert that they're different, but the description of the goals makes them sound the same.  The key to my take on this is that "spiritual allegiance" is a leisure activity.  If you think that's incorrect, can you elaborate on why?

Well, I think it has to do with your own personal involvement with religion.  I would guess from your question that you are a secular individual - meaning that you don't consider yourself a member of any religion and (I'm spitballing here), that you perhaps even think religion is kinda dumb in general.  

Religion, to those who practice it, is more than leisure.  It's not something I do with my spare time 'cause I'm bored or I think it's fun (You might imagine how much I DON'T want to go to mass some Sundays).  Unlike gaming, I could NOT walk away from religion, ever.  It's as much a part of my own makeup as my feminism or my other personality traits.  

Gaming can be a profound passtime - no doubt about it.  HOWEVER, there is more at stake when someone is involved with religion than with gaming.  I suppose the best analogy I could make is one concerning the love one has for one's spouse and the love one has for one's children.  I never thought I would be able to love anyone more than I loved my husband.  Then I had kids, and I was profoundly shocked at how much I didn't know about love before that.  For people who are open to and have religious experiences, religion is like the kids and gaming is like the husband.  Love having my husband around, makes my life more fun, better in so many ways.  But if I had to make a choice between walking away from him or my kids, there's no question that the hubby would go.  Does that make ANY sense to you?  I'm not sure I can quantify it more without about a week's worth of consideration.

Chris:

QuoteAm I just completely oblivious?  Does everyone agree with the stance that gaming as a pastime and an idustry is overwhelmingly misogynistic?  And could I get a few examples of how this misogyny is expressed?

Obviously, the answer here depends upon how you take the question.  Do I experience misogyny in the gaming groups I play with - yes, but on a VERY SUBTLE LEVEL.  This is not the kind of "we hate you" thing that went on the group I cited as an example in my second post.  These people are my friends, and I love them.  The stuff I'm talking about, for the most part, are the subtle things that women get exposed to every day that pass as "normal" in our culture.   Mr. Ki - I mean John's point is a particularly good example of the kind of thing I'm talking about.  And the fact that roleplaying bases itself on sexist genres (Star Trek, LotR, you name it), still doesn't excuse it.

Chris:

QuoteMy summary of page five is that you think fat dorks game so they can pretend to be thin and popular and that's the same thing (somehow) as Gygax suggesting people game to explore exciting situations that are not otherwise available.  Is that what you meant?  

A lot of people who game are fat dorks.  I'm one of them (both fat and a dork).  Are all gamers fat dorks?  No.  Are all gamers fat?  No.  Are all gamers dorks?  That depends on who you ask.  I would say, actually, that all gamers are geeks, but then I don't think being a geek is such a bad thing.  

Based on my "anecdotal data," *hee hee* I WOULD say that a great many gamers - myself included - are, to varying degrees, somewhat socially dysfunctional (wow, could I have qualified that any more carefully?).  I can't put my finger on the quality, but there is something ... well ... kinda geeky about almost - no, really, it's all of us.  

In speaking frankly with people I've gamed with for years, they have all admitted that being able to do those out-of-the-ordinary things and having desirable traits as a character makes them feel somehow better about themselves.  What it does, I think, is help us negotiate *what we don't like about ourselves* that is mirrored for us in mainstream culture.  So, the letter of your assumption is correct, but not the spirit.  I'm just being honest about what I see in myself and others.  I apologize for the offense it seemed to give.  That really wasn't my aim.

Chris:

QuoteWhen I was reading about the attraction of neo-paganism to women for the ability to become spiritual leaders, it occurred to me that it might be more important to women (generally) to have access to that role than it is to men, because of the differences in the role of group socialization between men and women (if you're willing to grant that such differences exist).  

I definitley agree that men and women are socialized differently.  The ideas "Man" and "Woman" are culturally constructed categories.  Can you clarify why you think it would be more important for women to want access to spirital leadership roles from a "nurture" standpoint?

Chris:

QuoteI'm uncertain of the meaning of internal v. external reality.  I'm specifically thinking of "Playing the role of priestesses in a religion which foceses on the femaleness of divinity is an empowering experience for women.  It allows them to integrate the internal reality of womanhood with the external reality of religion..."  What makes one internal and the other external?  And why isn't the same phenomenon experienced in role-playing games?

I think it is.  The "internal" reality is the way we think about ourselves - tied very closely in my usage with self-esteem.  The "external" experience of being female is a collage of all the cultural images we are given every day about what it means to be a woman and what we should want and feel, and how we SHOULD LOOK (I think this is the biggest pressure women face socially) and act.  I saw a great bumper sticker once that summed it all up: Feminsim is the radical notion that women are people.  PEOPLE.  People who can be depicted as powerful, adventurous and any other adjective you might want, rather than only ever being considered the frigid ghosts of Tolkien or the quivering, wet-thighed yeomen of John's last Star Trek example.  

Tell me this:  If it were Aragorn who faced the Witch King of Angmar in Jackson's movie, would we ever have seen him looking like he was going to pee his pants the way Eowin did?  No.  He would have had the same look of grim determination he did all through the other two movies.  Eowin had to look like she was going to barely be able to pull it off, no matter how much she said "I fear neither pain nor death" beforehand.  THAT is the external reality that constantly tells me that, because I have a vagina and breasts, I can never be as epic a hero as the people who have penises.  

Chris:

QuoteHow is the sense of "spiritual power" different from the imagined power that RPGs focus on?  

Because spirituality, for those who experience it, is so much ... MORE.  It's really a matter of degrees.  What if God were important to you, yet you felt left out of the spiritual experience because all of the "official" characteristics of God always left you thinking God was nothing like you at all?  Suddenly finding that God "looked" like you, too, would be one of the most uplifting experiences of your life.  

What I'm saying about gaming being able to help us negotiate the external and internal realities is the same as for religion, but to a much less intense degree.  There is part of everyone that is James Bond - otherwise the books and movies never would have been so popular.  What gaming does is let the James Bond *in you* come outand be recognized by others - which equalizes the external reality that you really are not James Bond.

Chris:

QuoteI'd be interested to hear the evidence that supports Gilligan's assertion that men find the "web of relationships" threatening and are thus not interested in neo-paganism.

Don't get me wrong: there are TONS of men in NeoPaganism.  It just seems to be a 60-40 split in favor of women.  Gilligan puts examples from the tests she gave in the book.  But she has also since said that her model was overly simplistic - Just as the article I posted is overly simplistic and broad.  I don't think, overall, that should I (or someone else) do more in-depth work, much of what I said in the article will be vindicated.  Of course I would say that, though, wouldn't I?

I don't think many men are interested in NeoPaganism for the same reasons women are.  In terms of gaming, what everyone seems to be saying is that the population of female gamers is greater than my initial 8-15%.  It may even be 60-40 (in favor of men) - though I think that's way generous.  Of course, I don't have any proof to back that up.  I'd LOVE to see someone give me that hard data and say "HA!  40% of women are gamers.  Take that!"  My personal experience lends me to believe that it's 15-20% AT MOST.  

Chris:

QuoteToward the end you note that "it seems that the very form each activity takes is tailor made for the sexes that dominate them."  I wonder what, if any, the causal relationship is.  Are they thay way because of the sexual predominance, or vice versa?

I think it's vice-versa.  And the calls for feminist game design in these discussions (and articles), tells me that, for many reasons, gaming will remain male dominated until things change.  

Adam (regarding Falk's thing about women coming into gaming through boyfriends)

QuoteHe clearly hasn't looked very far. I know women who've come to gaming through: individual friends (both male and female), groups of friends, university societies, relatives and of course boyfriends. And of course, men come through the similiar links. (Though, I'm not sure I know examples of the last.)

No.  And that is an excellent point.  Gaming is spread TOTALLY by word of mouth, which relies on webs of relationships.  However, whether or not women continue to game has a lot to do with the group dynamic and the kind of game that gets played.  Continuing participation in NeoPaganism depends upon the ... a lot I won't go into here because this is a gaming discussion.  :-)  But men come into the hobby MOSTLY thorugh other men.  Women come into the hobby MOSTLY thorugh men (no matter their relationships to them).  My own example is a direct inversion of Fine's own work (which, you should know, was done in 1982).  That is certainly a funciton of the hobby being male dominated.  So that's another point I would consider when re-writing the paper.

clehrich (since he doesn't want me to call him Mr. Lehrich and there's another chris I'm responding to here - THAT's why I tend to use last names)

QuoteI very much doubt that the remark about pigeonholing and so forth would arise here in that way. Not because we're all super-sensitive, or something, either: it's just that (1) I think WW games are usually read as Sim, by the GNS model; (2) I do not think that Narrativism is usually read as "touchy-feely"; and (3) Narrativism has nothing to do with quantity of combat. This is what I mean about your models being a little older, and why I'd be interested to see what would come of a reconsideration based on Forge data, female and otherwise.

I need to re-read the GNS model stuff about sims again, but I was not saying that combat can't be a part of narrativism.  It's just not a focus, and it usually has to do more with character motivations *and* (correct me if I'm wrong), is often fudged in favor of story (though it can make a GREAT part of the story when someone dies unexpectedly).  

Are you sure narrativism isn't read as touchy-feely?  People need to take it like a man when they can't climb that mountain or kill a bad guy, right?  Really - I'd like to hear everyone weigh in.  I'll come back to why I consider WW narrativist - I'm not sure I think simmulationist should be a category at all.

clehrich

QuoteBut I don't think this sort of parallel-block structuring of RPG styles and gender/sex styles is likely to work. Just a guess, but I doubt it, and I think that this preliminary gesture to downplay data from Forge women --Quote:
I suspect that consciously or not, the women on this list fight the idea that women gravitate toward narrativist games because the game culture at large won't take them seriously if they don't exhibit a wide range of gaming styles.
-- is likely to skew your data pretty wildly.

I'd LOVE to be proven wrong!  Get every gaming woman you know to answer my questions.  But ALSO look at the thread in the "Actual Play" forum called "Why Do We Do It?"  It tends to support my hypothesis about women's gaming preferences.  I'd be willing to bet that MOST gamist are men.  But hey, bring on the data, baby!

greyorm:

QuoteWhat I'm saying is that I'm rather surprised about the proposed regularity of this attitude towards women, as in almost twenty years of gaming I've never run into that behavior. Not that I am calling you a liar, Krista -- there are certainly things which might explain it -- I just find it strange that I've never encountered an apparently widespread phenomena in that time.

No, in the groups I've played with, I have had overwhelmingly good experiences, else I would not have continued to play.  I was taking this point from clehrich's article and using it to support my own work.  It struck a chord that led me to hypothesize that women might object to being called "narrativist" because they don't want people to think they can't "play like the boys."  So, please, continue to post things that prove this hypothesis wrong.  I just want to hear what everyone has to say.  It would be nice to be right, but I'd rather hear the stories.  Let me ask you this:  Have you ever witnessed a situation where women weren't taken seriously as gamers?  If so, please tell the story(ies) (this is an official add to my other three ethnographic questions).

James:

QuoteJohn's examples are interesting, but it occurs to me that the clear sexism in them could be ascribed to accord with the source material rather than to the attitudes of the gamers (both Star Trek and Westerns are inherently sexist.)

(Mr. West, is that really your name?  If so, cool!  And where in Colorado are you?  We moved to Way Darker NJ from Ft. Collins 6 years ago.)

Are there any examples of gaming genres that aren't sexist?  If not, that means that the hobby as a whole is sexist, though I don't think gamers hate or are out to kill women.  They simply don't realize how sexist the hobby is, or where that sexism lies, even within themselves.  This goes for some of my dearest friends as well.  If they knew how much the "internal reality" of women did not match the "external reality" that is constructed in gaming, I think they would be shocked (and hopefully ashamed).

That of course, begs the question, 'If gaming is so sexist, why do women game at all?'  For the same reason women still participate in the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) - because what they get out of it is rewarding enough to put up with what they don't like about it.  That doesn't mean they think it shouldn't change, however.  Please, women on the list, chime in to chastise or support.  :-)

clehrich:

Quotethis might be kind of a continuation of what we might call the "geek effect": since it does seem as though most nerd-types (I include myself) were a little later to blossom in terms of having success with the opposite sex, and since most seem to be male, I would think that this discomfort might extend as projection, in that the male nerd's discomfort and lack of success with women would play out in male-nerd-dominated gaming as a sphere in which such a player is dominant and he can feel that he's better than the women around.

Your "geek effect" hypothesis fits right in with another aspect of Gilligan's analysis and gaming: that the group of gamers is a safe place for men, and they can foist off their "web of relationships fear" on the game scenario, leaving them free to bond with the other men.  When women get brought into game situations where the men are insecure and hostile to the presence of women, it may be because the presence of a woman destroys the "male bonding sphere" and the larger web of relationships they distrust has now been brought back into the metagame situation.

Whew.  Thanks for the feedback, y'all!

Krista

Krista, as I read your questions and answers for the ladies, it appeared to me that you were somehow assuming that there was a baseline of male answers against which you could compare them--but I think that baseline is illusory. In any event, you need to distinguish "women who roleplay" from "women at the Forge who roleplay", in which case you would need a baseline of "men at the Forge" answers. After all, if (as is often suggested) there is a strong narrativist bias here, it would be seen in the women, but also in the men, and that would invalidate any suggestion that women generally were more narrativist than men, because it would demonstrate either that your questions produce narrativist answers from everyone or that the Forge is a self-selected group of narrativists.

Thus please permit me to answer your questions.

Quote from: Krista a.k.a. LibrisiaHow were you introduced to role-playing games?

My wife read about Dungeons & Dragons in a then-recent issue of Psychology Today. We were big Christian fantasy fans, particularly Tolkien and Lewis, also MacDonald, Williams, and others, and this sounded like a game that might let us create adventures that felt like the books we liked. I will note that we'd already tried the Lord of the Rings Bookcase Game and found it wanting (a strategic board game akin to a wargame in many ways). We had a gaming group consisting of ourselves and another couple with whom we played card games, board games, wargames, as well as the then cutting edge Atari video games (he worked for GTE, who made the chips, and there was an in-house black market in copies of new games). Someone found a copy of the blue box original edition basic set, and I was assigned to learn to play the game and teach everyone, so that made me the dungeon master.

Over the months that followed we moved to OAD&D, and also picked up games of Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World, Star Frontiers, and Traveler, but I was always the DM for D&D.

So I found out from my wife, and we started playing together with no one who had ever heard of the game before, two girls and two guys. The group grew and changed over the years, but almost everyone who played in that particular group came to us as a couple--one guy and one girl, together, either married (as we were) or seriously connected (as the other couple in our group). There was no particular pattern to which member of the couple hooked up with us--sometimes I'd mention it to a guy I knew, sometimes my wife mentioned it to a girl she knew, and always they came as couples. So I don't really have that experience of unbalanced gaming from the early days.

I did see an imbalance in a later group in the mid eighties, but it's easy to explain that. I was approached by a couple of young teenaged boys, maybe thirteen or fourteen, who wanted help learning to play D&D, and somehow I got roped into running it for them for the next several years. Being young teen boys, they were generally uncomfortable around girls and didn't invite girls to their weekly gaming session; we had a couple of them show up, always younger sisters of the boys playing (never girlfriends), and we picked up maybe three older guys (out of about thirty or forty players) who either were single or were connected to girls who weren't interested in gaming, so that group was strongly male in its orientation (although quite a few of the guys played female characters).

Quote from: For her second question, sheWhat is it you like most about role playing?

I'm like you; I love character interactions, trying new people, being someone different. In fact, one of the interesting things to me about Multiverser is that starting as myself I become a lot of different people doing different things--sort of discovering who I might be and who I could never be.

I also like discovering new things; I love the feeling that I'm finding out things about a strange world that others didn't find. I like tinkering, trying to see what a world is like and whether I can change it from inside.

Of course, I run more games than I play, so I also like creating all those strange places and watching others discover them.

I can play a good gamist game, and enjoy it thoroughly, but I don't like it when the challenge level gets too high, because I really don't like losing and have to recognize that the possibility of losing is the price of winning. So I only really like gamist games when I'm sure I can win.

Quote from: Finally sheIf all you ever played again were "dungeon crawls," (in whatever universe or system), where character interaction was always going to be kept at a minimun, would you still love role playing games?

No. I know few if any players who would--and perhaps even more to the point, whenever we do play so-called dungeon crawls, they're laced with much more.

In the last game, my eldest son had set up a scenario in which a group of orcs who had been quietly living in caves for generations were suddenly raiding elfish villages for no apparent reason. I came in on the second game session, playing a half-elf ranger/cleric who was an acquaintance of one of the other PCs. The party leader was a bloodthirsty fellow (the character, not the player) who just wanted to kill orcs, any excuse would do; but I started getting people asking why the orcs, after so many years of quiet, had become violent. Had the elves wronged them in some way? What was happening?

We went into their caves, and after a fight we took one alive and questioned him. The answer to the question was that there was someone behind the orcs, someone very powerful who was making them fight. With that information, we decided the orcs were innocent victims in this situation, and we needed to get past them to reach the true villain--but at least we could get some help from the orcs, who didn't like the situation any more than we did.

I don't play Doom or any first-person shooter; I'm not interested in whacking monsters (although I will play whack-a-mole once in a while). In a role playing game, that's mostly a mechanical exercise. I'm interested if there is some level of tactical involvement, strategic decisions that make a real difference in outcomes, but it will only hold my attention so long.

I am one of the most diverse role players I know; I play gamist, narrativist, and simulationist games all the time. However, dungeon crawls aren't even terribly interesting gamist pursuits, in most cases.

I should also mention that the last dungeon I designed that really grabbed people was not a gamist challenge but a simulationist exploration: it was filled with strange wonders to explore and try to understand, and not really a lot of monsters or challenges. People loved it, though. It kept surprising and intriguing them. Sure there were monsters, but part of the fun was in not knowing when you were safe and when you were threatened.

Dungeon crawls are beginner games. If I asked you whether you would ever read poetry again if Mother Goose was the only book of it you were allowed to read, or ever draw again if you were only allowed to use half inch thick kindergarten crayons in five colors, or ever do puzzles if six-piece wooden cutouts in frames were the only ones made, you'd probably say no. I would. If you can't advance beyond the beginner mode, anything gets dull. Sure, you can have fun in the beginner mode once in a while, but once you've outgrown it you're going to want more to hold your interest.

*****

On the female characters issue, yes, there were a lot of "males are better" ideas floating around in games; but that wasn't always the case. Just to grab a few fragments from D&D--

[*]Drow females were not only more potent than drow males, they were more potent than nearly any other player character race; were it not for the assassin out to get you caveat, they probably would have dominated play rather quickly in many games.[*]Several pantheons were headed by female or androgenous characters. Amaterasu Omikami is one of the few Lawful Good pantheon heads in the old Deities & Demigods book, and one of the more potent. Corellon Larethian, of the Elfish pantheon, is trans-gendered.[*]Probably the most powerful player character in any D&D game I ever ran was a female elfin fighter/magic-user played by a girl.[/list:u]

As an aside, it is official Roman Catholic doctrine that God incorporates within one self all that is male and all that is female; the division of man into male and female is a splitting of the one image of God, and the uniting of man and woman into "one flesh" is a restoration of that image in one creature. I don't have any citations handy, but this issue came up on the Christian Gamers Guild list a few months back, and someone contributed some solid references at that time. (I'm not Catholic.) That's more for your personal benefit than anything else.

Now here's a peculiar point. I was a nerd in high school, but I'd never heard of role playing games. In my last years of high school, I came to be very popular, particularly among female members of the freshman chorus, as I was one of the best musicians in the school so I was always impressive in that situation. I went to college with a great deal of confidence, and persuaded a lot of people that I was someone talented and respectable. I got out of college and wound up an on-air personality at a contemporary Christian radio station, with a lot of people who thought I was Someone. There was no nerd or geek stigma clinging to me at that point.

It was only after that that I even heard of role playing games, and I instantly fell in love with them. I had already proven myself and overcome all that negative stuff, quite publicly.

I think this has not been sufficiently explored. People see that the majority of role playing gamers are geeks, and they therefore include that we are attracted to such games because they enable us to overcome that geekiness in our own minds; but what if rather there is something about role playing games that appeals to people, which also tends to make them geeks?

Let me tell you a not-so-secret but oft-overlooked point about people. People like to do that at which they are good. I became an excellent musician because when I sang people noticed and praised me for my singing. I hated sports because, having suffered a terribly debilitating disease in my preschool days, I had no ability at them and people laughed at my futile efforts. If you are good at something, you will probably enjoy doing it; if you like to do it, you will do it more often; if you do it more often, you will get better at it.

Role playing games attract people who are good at the things that are useful for playing such games--imagination, intelligence, creativity, mathematical ability, tactical reasoning, spatial reasoning, relationship skills, these are some of the things that can be part of good roleplay. Obviously none of us excel at all of them (very few guys excel at relationship skills, and spatial reasoning seems to favor guys rather strongly, in general). Now, in junior high the things that make one "not a geek" among guys are generally athletic ability--something that's not particularly useful in role playing games. Thus RPGs would tend to select people who were good at the things RPGs favor, while attracting fewer of those who were good at athletic activities. Particularly in that age bracket, there is also a stigma in which "cool" people do not associate with "uncool" people, and thus those whose athletic abilities get them in with the "cool" crowd are less likely to hang around with those who are "uncool"--who already have a higher probability of being the ones involved in RPGs. So part of it is a who-your-friends-are thing, and part of it is a where-your-strengths-are thing.

We don't play RPGs because we're geeks; we are geeks and we play RPGs because of other factors that commonly lead to both.

Anyway, that's my inclination.

I apologize that I have not yet read your article; I'm really swamped at present, and have not yet read Chris' or even (hate to admit it) Ron's latest. And just to make my life difficult, my ISP went screwy for an hour tonight, so I've been stuck trying to get done here and get to bed for--well, too long.

What part of NJ are you in, and is there any chance you'll be at Ubercon in Secaucus end of the month? I'd love to meet people.

--M. J. Young