Topic: Huge digression - Note on ethnographic data
Started by: Librisia
Started on: 2/9/2004
Board: RPG Theory
On 2/9/2004 at 2:28pm, Librisia wrote:
Huge digression - Note on ethnographic data
I will respond to all of your post later, M.J., but I want to be clear about what ethnography isn't:
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.
Hey, no one needs a permit to answer the questions. I'm happy to hear all the stories. Just make sure that you tell me if you're male or female if you have a questionable pseudonym. :-)
Ethnographic data is not statistical data. There is no neccessity for a "baseline" when doing ethnograpy. The school of ethnography I'm trained in doesn't even pretend to want to be quantifiable. I want people's stories in response to my questions. What comes out of it from there is then interpreted. I will interpret it, others will interpret it, and we will get different results. That's because the REASON I'm interpreting it may be different than the reasons others may interpret it. Now, men are welcome to answer my questions so that those who want it can have a "baseline," but I could legitimately take only women's responses and do an "ethnography of what women on the Forge say about *blah* in roleplaying."
Even if I posted a list of ethnographic questions on the internet for anyone to answer, the data is not invalidated by a small sample. Ethnography is an attempt to fathom the mechanics of *a specific community* according to the experiences of its members and how those members understand their experiences. The community may have only two members and would still be perfectly acceptable as a basis of ethnographic data.
Your point that these questions are limited to the Forge is well taken. It's "narrativist" leanings are something I would need to point out in a formal ethnography. It would, in that case, be useful to put the "survey" up on the internet and see what we got.
More on your post later, M.J., especially with regards to Roman Catholicism (perhaps off list would make the most sense), since that is where I do my participant observation fieldwork (and I was confirmed last year). I will say this: institutions are like people - there's often a distinct difference in what official doctrine may *say,* but the truth is in the practice - and Christianity is unequivocably patriarchal. Check the way the Nicene Creed has been translated (read: interpreted).
Krista
"Figures don't lie, but liars figure."
- Samuel Clemens
On 2/9/2004 at 7:37pm, John Kim wrote:
Re: Huge digression - Note on ethnographic data
Librisia wrote: More on your post later, M.J., especially with regards to Roman Catholicism (perhaps off list would make the most sense), since that is where I do my participant observation fieldwork (and I was confirmed last year). I will say this: institutions are like people - there's often a distinct difference in what official doctrine may *say,* but the truth is in the practice - and Christianity is unequivocably patriarchal. Check the way the Nicene Creed has been translated (read: interpreted).
It's a good point. For example, the literal text of the gospels seems opposed to slavery, but slavery was supported by the church for many centuries. In the prior thread, I pointed to several instances of what I consider clear misogyny in the text of RPG books. james_west and chlehrich, I think, commented that this doesn't necessarily indicate attitude on the part of gamers who are playing. That is true, but it must be taken as part of a larger picture. There are many ways of looking at RPGs and RPG culture: like textual studies of RPG books, market trends, statistical data of gamers, and ethnographic studies of culture (or informal anecdotal knowledge of culture).
These all have advantages and disadvantages.
Useful statistical data is very hard to collect, and it doesn't say a whole lot about why. For example, the best data on RPGs that I know of comes from the Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary. It was a survey in 1999 where post cards were sent to over 20,000 homes -- and then around 1000 of the respondents had a longer followup survey. For example, it suggests around 19% of tabletop role-players are female -- and slight more (21%) of computer RPG and miniature wargames are female. But that doesn't say anything about why.
Market trends are similar. For example, we can see that D&D has remained the dominant RPG since it started, but that doesn't tell us why. Ethnographic studies can tell us about many individual cases of why, but this is hard to relate to the statistical and market trends. Textual studies can't tell us about the gamers themselves but they do show an influence not only on how gamers behave, but on who becomes a gamer.
At the same time, there are things which suggest themselves. For example, if my textual studies are indeed representative (and I think they are), then I think it does suggest a relation to the survey findings.
Forge Reference Links:
Topic 9678
On 2/9/2004 at 9:12pm, james_west wrote:
RE: Huge digression - Note on ethnographic data
I'd never seen this survey before; very interesting.
One thing that's going to distort the data; they excluded everyone over 35. I suspect, especially based on personal experience, that the proportion of females in gaming goes up the older you get; that may be why the overall number was still relatively low (20%) as of five years ago, but in the experience of the relatively older crowd I suspect we get around here, the number is much higher.
- James
On 2/9/2004 at 10:20pm, John Kim wrote:
RE: Huge digression - Note on ethnographic data
james_west wrote: I'd never seen this survey before; very interesting.
One thing that's going to distort the data; they excluded everyone over 35. I suspect, especially based on personal experience, that the proportion of females in gaming goes up the older you get; that may be why the overall number was still relatively low (20%) as of five years ago, but in the experience of the relatively older crowd I suspect we get around here, the number is much higher.
Hard to say. By "around here" do you mean The Forge? Are people generally over 35? I'm not, though I'm getting close. I did some statistics on the "Profiling" threads, available off my theory page, which I thought had interesting results. It would be interesting to do a demographic survey of Forgites as well -- something to ponder.
For what its worth, James Kittock did a web-based survey of players in a "D20 System Product Interest Market Research Report" which had 524 respondents. I have a copy, but it isn't licensed for redistribution and the original was taken down. (You can see the announcement here and the old page here.) In his sample of 524 respondents, he found about 13% were over 35, but only 9% overall were female.
On 2/9/2004 at 10:44pm, james_west wrote:
RE: Huge digression - Note on ethnographic data
Well, OK, I'm not over 35, either, but most of the female gamers I know are. Also, I strongly suspect that the mean age of the Forge is much higher than the mean age of normal gamers, and whether or not this is correlation or causation, have a much higher proportion of females in their groups than 20%.
The second study is very interesting because it tends to confirm a suspicion I had; that D20 players are both younger and more likely to be male.
- James
On 2/10/2004 at 12:33am, John Kim wrote:
RE: Huge digression - Note on ethnographic data
james_west wrote: The second study is very interesting because it tends to confirm a suspicion I had; that D20 players are both younger and more likely to be male.
Actually, you're right that they're more likely to be male (assuming Kittock's figures are accurate to D20), but actually it found the opposite with age. The numbers were:
Age Group Kittock WotCNow, of course, these aren't equivalent samples. Kittock got his survey respondents by posting at various online forums and sites, which could have all sorts of biases compared to mail survey (which will have its own biases). Perhaps younger kids are less likely to be in online forums?? But even in, say, just the 19-35 range Kittock found a much greater disparity than WotC (i.e. 63/18 > 34/25).
12-15 1% 23%
16-18 5% 18%
19-24 18% 25%
25-35 63% 34%
other 13%
On 2/10/2004 at 3:48am, M. J. Young wrote:
RE: Huge digression - Note on ethnographic data
Krista--
I apologize. Since everyone in the non-virtual world calls me Mark (or Mr. Young) and my book covers all read "M. Joseph Young", I forget that to uncounted people on the Internet I'm MJ (my own doing, fouled up something when trying to make it clearer). I'm a guy. I play a lot of female characters, and one of my protagonists in my books (my favorite, in fact) is female; oddly, when I ran the first chapter of her story through one of those "gender of author" programs it came out female (the male characters came out as written by a man), so maybe I think like a girl a lot more than some men, but I still count as male, and am father of my own in-house gaming group (all sons, I'm afraid, but for the recent added guest teenage girl).
I also tend to think that men and women are very different, but usually not in the ways people expect them to be different. But I haven't explored that idea in great depth, so I'm not prepared to say much more on it.
--M. J. Young