A while back in Most attractive setting for female players, there was a little consideration of how to make RPG text more palatable to a larger range of people. I do not want a repeat of that thread, but I have continued to ponder the problem.

Recently, I came across the Gender Genie, an algorithm which separates "male" from "female" writing. The notion behind this is that there are a set of "male" and "female" words and constructions that can be analyzed to reveal the sex of the author of any particular work. There is more about the algorithm here.

Personally, I think the terms "objective" and "subjective" or "categorical" and "personal" would be preferable here. I find the idea of "male" and "female" writing (even if empirically valid across a statistical sample) anti-individualistic. And it sounds rather sexist as well. For the sake of clarity, I will try to reference their terms as well mine.

Not suprisingly, most RPG game text is overwhelmingly "male." This could be a reflection of the gender of the writers, the intended audience, tradition and function (by its nature instructive text is probably more "categorical" than "personal").

Is this anything that needs to be considered when crafting game text?

Has "male" game text been a barrier to female entry into the hobby?

If your target audience is largely female would you consider writing differently?

If you are a woman, do you find it necessary to adjust your writing to fit RPG text traditions?

What techniques can be used or have been used to broaden the appeal and readability of the game? Example: Restate major points in both "objective" and "subjective" styles with out being redundant.

If your game is about simulating "objective" reality (some Sim-types) is it better to use highly "objective" language and if it is fundamentally about relationships (some Narrativist games) do you adjust your language accordingly?

How have you creatively dealt with other gender based issues("he"/"she") in your writing as it pertains specifically to RPGs?

Ironically, the Gender Genie said the above post was

"Female Score: 621
Male Score: 547

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!"

Definitely to be taken with a grain of salt.

The important thing to remember is that Male/Female is not a gender split - it's a sexual one.

Therefore you might in some sense be able to split masculine from feminine prose but that may not tell you much more than any form of stylistic jusdgement.

That is: male/female is an objective classification of things; masculine/feminine is subjective: what one culture will judge to be a feminine trait, another might consider masculine (additionally different contexts within the same culture will render different judgments: e.g. 30-40 years ago, cooking is womens work, but most chefs were men).

Hi Mark,

As Ian has pointed out, the news article and the “Gender Genie” are conflating sex with gender (male/female vs. masculine/feminine). This is common, and perhaps to be expected, from popular versions of academic texts. Still, it’s important to remember that the researchers are most likely making a more careful assertion. I don’t have access to the original academic articles, but the titles of both articles refer to "gender," "genre," and "text" and really aren't making the strong assertions made by the program. So your concerns about the possible sexist implications of the program may be well-founded based on the "Gender Genie" webpage and the online news article, but remember that the original articles are probably a lot less troubling.

Now, on to your main questions:

Is this anything that needs to be considered when crafting game text?

Has "male" game text been a barrier to female entry into the hobby?

If your target audience is largely female would you consider writing differently?

If you are a woman, do you find it necessary to adjust your writing to fit RPG text traditions?

I certainly agree with Ian's point about "gender" usage. I wanted to maintain some continuity with the article and program hence the quotes around "male" and avoiding the term masculine since it was not one that they used. When using terms masculine/feminine I definitely would recommend using Ian's breakdown.

Rich, what a thoughtful and a tad overwhelming post. I just found the papers in question. I will get back to your points after I have absorbed these, since they do seem to have a lot of direct bearing on your points.

Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts

Automatically categorizing written texts by author gender

And a different iteration of the algorithm.

What techniques can be used or have been used to broaden the appeal and readability of the game?

Heh, what an interesting little algorithm. I just ran a few samples of my writing through the thing, and they ranged from 2:1 to 7:1 Male to Female.

Given the recent discussions about the "maleness" of the Universalis mechanics I'm forced to pause and say...hmmmmm

Just out of curiosity, I pumped in one of my blog entires and it spat out this:

Female Score: 347
Male Score: 758

So either I'm more guy than most guys (possible), or these theories on gender and language is a bunch of bunk. I tend to lean toward the latter.

Either your text is smooth, easy to read, full of active tense goodness, and decent verb usage, or your text is garbage. I wrote for a long long time about gender and gaming, and I know the gaming industry obsesses about the problem, but the fact is: most women don't like gaming, just like they don't like horror, or gore, and they won't like Kill Bill. _I_ like all those things, so it's a matter of taste, not a matter of "is my writing more male or more female."

Mark, you definitely do your homework. Now I’ll have to read those articles to make sure I don't fall behind when you return to the topic. I’m still curious about what (or perhaps whether) we can find here that may be useful to RPG writing. I’ll leave that job to you (see how I deftly avoid all the heavy lifting?).

Jason has a point, I think, as well. Get lots of people to read what you write and give you feedback. Listen to their feedback, and make further decisions about what changes you want to make (and what changes you don’t) based on that feedback. This is one of the wonderful effects of the indie game design board here at the Forge, of course, and I think doing it here and in real life is one practical approach to widening the appeal of your work.

And Emily, your point about women in gaming is well taken. Certainly, gaming is associated with a number of other fandoms that are also famously unpopular with women, and I suspect members of those fandoms obsess equally about widening the appeal of their hobby/interest to women. Frankly, many subcultures and fandoms in general seem to occasionally obsess about widening their appeal, period, and gaming is not unique in this regard. I’m also a fan of mixed martial arts, for example, and I lurk around MMA boards from time to time, and sure enough, there is regular talk about “widening the appeal of the sport.” So yeah, that's the way it is. And that's not only the way it is for us--that's the way it is for a lot of little fan groups. Still, I’m not sure that this means we should just sit back and accept it, necessarily. I’m not opposed to seeing folks try to figure out ways to widen the appeal of roleplaying, or mixed martial arts, or anything I’m interested in. Roleplaying is fun. Of course, I like the idea of more people sharing my interest in it. Even if it seems unlikely.

I have to disagree with you a bit on your final take on studies of gender and language, though, Emily. You’ve presented it as an either/or thing, “So either I'm more guy than most guys (possible), or these theories on gender and language is a bunch of bunk.” I don’t think it’s necessarily that extreme. There are other possibilities here as well. Firstly, the websites are using simplified versions of the algorithm. Secondly, the study doesn’t claim to have nailed down the differences between masculine and feminine usages of English—it only claims an 80% success rate, and it is to be expected that it doesn’t work in every case. One exception does not really prove anything, in and of itself. The goal of the study is primarily descriptive, regardless, and it is talking about tendencies of language use. We cannot make 100% predictions of many things in language, but we can describe tendencies. Keep in mind that there are more and less careful claims being made here, so the source is important. One of the big names in talking about gender and language is Deborah Tannen, and her work is often criticized by her colleagues as a bit “popular,” in the sense that she writes popular books and makes lots of money (so perhaps they’re a bit jealous), but also that she tends to draw her conclusions in rather broad strokes in said popular books. However, it’s important to note that this stuff is not just the result of people sitting around thinking about language and writing. It’s the result of studies of text, sometimes large corpora of text, and it’s descriptive. You may be uncomfortable with the idea that men and women in English speaking cultures tend to use language in some different ways, but that doesn’t make the work bunk. That said, I’m always leery of the website/news article versions of these kinds of work because they often simplify and generalize in ways that are unsupportable, so your skepticism is not entirely unfounded.

Hm, I suppose I’m ranging a bit widely from stuff that’s applicable to gaming, at this point, so I’ll let up and wait for a bit of clarification from Mark on where he wants to head with this.

Rich

The summaries of the studies that were published online did not horribly misrepresent them. Basically it said that women tend to write in a style more resembling fiction writing (use of dialogue, personal pronouns, emphasis on relationships) whether they are writing fiction or non-fiction. Conversely that men's writing tends to more resemble non-fiction (emphasis on classification, description, its). The authors assert that their readers felt that the women's writing tends to feel more "involved."

I still think that perhaps we call these two styles "objective" and "subjective" or somesuch and simply observe that (according to this study anyway) that men and women tend to favor one or the other. On the other hand, you brought up Deborah Tannen. In researching this topic I found an interesting story which goes somewhat against the survey but might be fruitful for our purposes.

Clive Thompson (fair use) wrote: Tannen once had a group of students analyze articles from men's and women's magazines, trying to see if they could guess which articles had appeared in which class of publication. It wasn't hard. In men's magazines, the sentences were always shorter, and the sentences in women's magazines had more ''feeling verbs,'' which would seem to bolster Koppel's findings. But here's the catch: The actual identity of the author didn't matter. When women wrote for men's magazines, they wrote in the ''male'' style. ''It clearly was performance,'' Tannen notes. ''It didn't matter whether the author was male or female. What mattered was whether the intended audience was male or female.''

Mark,

I am having difficulty with the presumption that a feminine writing style is necessarily more appealing to women. My understanding of the Gender Genie exercise is that it attempts to describe a style of writing and subsequently the gender of the writer, but says nothing about the preferences of the reader (Rich made this point above). Stating that a masculine writing style might "(subconsciously) repel the female reader" is a stretch.

To illustrate my point about preferences, I conducted my own little experiment. I selected a game that on my first reading elicited the reaction, "Must play now!" Since I have a play-test version on my computer, I dumped it into the Gender Genie algorithm. It's described as male writing. (No surprise, the author is male.) Honestly, I can't say that the writing style had an effect on my interest in the game--it could have been the mechanics or the setting or the fact that I knew someone else interested in playing. I can say that the writing style was not detrimental to my interest.

I also happen to think that an objective, non-fiction writing style, which the researchers describe as indicative of male writing, is more condusive to describing how to play a game.

Julie

Words: 204
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 192
Male Score: 538

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

And the Gender Genie is wrong.

I'll just second Julie's comments.

I ran some of my posts here on the Forge through the Gender Genie. If I said it was nonfiction, the GG identified me as Female. If I said it was a blog post, it identified me as Male. Um.

I think all it's doing is showing up a trend. It doesn't explain where that trend comes from. Cultural differences? Socialization differences? Biological differences? Socio-economic differences? You could probably find similar trends in people (of both sexes) taken from New York vs. people taken from L.A.

Trends are interesting, but they say nothing about individuals. For every trend, or 'majority statistic' there will be actual individuals who by definition do not fall into the majority. Or, to put it another way, yeah, you can maybe find something out about the aggregate behavior of women from something like this (women in US society, anyway). But it doesn't necessarily tell you anything particular about the behavior of, oh, Meg Ryan or Laura Bush. As individuals, they may or may not be in your 'majority'. So, really, how useful is this information?

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?

Interestingly I find the genie's precision to be pretty laudable. Assuming the self reported numbers can be trusted, a 75% success rate of an abbreviated version of an algorithm that's only expected to be 80% right is pretty darn good. If you could guess the stock market right 75% of the time you'd be a very rich person.

But the power of the algorithm is not so much in its predictive qualities (who really cares if you can guess the authors gender). But rather in highlighting differences in word useage patterns.

There are only really two coefficients being tested, gender and fiction vs non vs blog. One would have to really know how the algorithm was derived to identify common fallacies caused by data mining and other such things.

But it seems to me that a certain group of people use a certain collection of words more often than another group, and this can be demonstrated to be fairly consistant over time, that there's something interesting going on there. 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.

How is that relevant to RPGs...probably not very given the whole thing is still too crude to draw any sort of "if I write like this my game will be more accessible to women" conclusions from. But it does highlight a basic fact that word choices are significant.

Ralph,

Valamir wrote:
How is that relevant to RPGs...probably not very given the whole thing is still too crude to draw any sort of "if I write like this my game will be more accessible to women" conclusions from. But it does highlight a basic fact that word choices are significant.

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

Valamir wrote: 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.

Meredith wrote: 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?

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.

jrs wrote:
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

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).

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.

Rich Forest wrote: 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

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

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