Anthropology of Gamers Through Reading Threads About Girls

One day, I plan to write an academic paper categorising RPG nerds into separate categories based on their responses to threads about "Girls and Gaming".

We'll start with this one.

The Earnest Worrier

This topic evolved from a conversation with a woman in my gaming group, who obviously games, and with my wife, who doesn't. The gamer girl population increases every year. In many avenues, females can actually outnumber males. While this is good news, the bad news is how little this is actually changing the games themselves. At a BlizzCon panel discussion an female querist was booed for suggesting that maybe the female characters should be able to wear clothes.  

But the problem goes way deeper than that. Even within RPGs where female gamers are not only accepted but delightfully encouraged, the roles they prefer are often within healer, support, or diplomatic archetypes (again, major generalization, but largely true nonetheless). Wish fulfillment seems to be the more desired form of escapism as opposed to power fantasy or strategic simulation.

This gamer likes girls. And he's a nice guy. Look - he's even married! That proves that he likes girls and is a nice guy! Being a nice guy, he is concerned about what we, as earnest, concerned, nice guys, can do to make gaming a friendlier place for girls to be. To further boost his nice guy credentials, he describes fretting about a poor female querist being booed by horrid chauvinists - his brow, it was furrowed; his arms, they were folded; his head, it was shaken; the tuts, they were tutted. "What can we do," he asked himself, "to make female gamers more delightfully encouraged?"

[I googled "querist". Apparently it's somebody who "makes inquiries".]

No Seriously, Some of My Best Friends Are Women

Monsterhearts is another good example or a game that has evolved far outside the war-game vein; there is /violence/, but not /combat/. It also handles emotion and melodrama VERY well. And it appeals to a bunch of fringe-gamer and even non-gamer women I know. 

Typically it's methodical step-by-step combat that turns off the women gamers I know, not the violence itself. When it comes time to get dirty/bloody the female gamers I know are willing to go to levels the guys are sometimes surprised at. Honestly the step-by-step combat thing turns off a lot of new-to-the-hobby guys too; it's really the people who grew up with it that seem to like it.

"The women I know. Keep saying it, and it becomes true. I know some women."

God, My Girlfriend is One Lucky Lady Being in a Relationship With Somebody Who Does Not Assume Things

Anecdote time!

My girlfriend hates "story games bullshit" where we "talk about feelings" and would rather move her dragonborn barbarian 5 squares at a time towards the bloodiest, most granular rules-heavy combat she can find.

Non-ladies should not assume what all ladies like.

[What I know about women you could fit on the back of a postage stamp, but it includes the following: women don't think you're clever or funny if you use the phrase "Anecdote time!"]

Mr Maturity

[N]o group is homogeneous. There are big group of gamers and potential gamers out there that don't like traditional war-gamey games; this group includes both guys (me included) and gals. There is a group of female gamers that feel disfranchised by modern trad games. THESE GROUPS OVERLAP. Stereotypes can be bad, If you refuse to make ANY assumptions about groups (because we are all beautiful and unique snowflakes) you lose the ability to make any decisions about a market.

"God, I'm so mature and sensible it sometimes physically hurts," says Mr Maturity, wincing to prove it as he dispenses another gem of wisdom which nobody has ever even come close to considering before: you can't generalise, silly generaliser! A few weeks of business studies classes at college taught him more than anybody else could ever know about making decisions about markets; it also taught him to use ALL CAPS to make his points clear, succinct, and hard-hitting.

The Marxian

Can I just point out that there's a bit of irony present when hobbies (computer games and RPGs) that, 20 years ago, were viewed as bastions of sad outsider antisocial nerd culture have become socially acceptable to the point where they now represent an element of dominant culture and oppression.

"RPGs are just an outgrowth of masculine bourgeois ideologies, as Althusser would say," the Marxian begins. "Perhaps we should commence our analysis with the realisation that the species-being is only partially a biological construct?"

The Japanese Call this the "Herbivorous Male"

It also stands to reason that there are plenty of males out there that are into more emotional, non-combat oriented games. In my last game of World of Shadows, the two male players didn't fight anyone, despite constant opportunities to bust heads and shoot people. They were most interested in following their character's desires and daily lives. There was action, but no combat.

"They then removed their own testicles, because they no longer needed them."

If Only Everybody Was Norwegian

Those andogynic gender premises exists. We don't need to treat it as a hypothetical question. Lets look at the roleplaying game "markets" or game cultures that got a 50/50 gender mix. Like Larping in the Nordic countries. Hence, my example of Nordic larp. Therw ARE game markets that where the designers, and the costumer have a 50/50 gender balance. It not some hypothetical question. 
Look at the RPG cultures that already exists that have even gender balances. 

That's enough gamer anthropology through reading threads about girl gamers.

I don't have any answers

I'm not sure what spurred him on to writing it, but Zak S has a great post up on women in gaming. Go and read it.

Anyway, it got me thinking about discrimination law and gaming. There is a lot of discourse amongst both economists and lawyers on the value of anti-discrimination and affirmative action legislation and what real effects it has. I've heard the argument made by those of the pro-market persuasion that ultimately discrimination law doesn't have a great deal of an effect beyond what can be achieved by the market: if you as an employer deliberately restrict your own access to huge pools of potential talent because you are sexist, racist or homophonic, you will pretty much by definition end up losing out to other employers who don't restrict themselves and will thus have more talent to draw on. Ultimately you will have to rethink your attitudes if you wish to remain competitive. This fact, coupled with the financial implications of regulation, make discrimination law at best irrelevant and at worst a net negative.

Whether or not this is true is by-the-by (it presupposes that all employers will not adopt discriminatory hiring practices, and it also presupposes that you could possibly hold enough other factors constant to be able to discover whether it was true), it's an interesting thought. Think about the RPG industry, such as it is: the people who are traditionally less participatory in RPGs (women, but also non-nerdish men, older people in general, people from certain ethnic minorities within the Western world, and members of the non-English-speaking world to a certain degree) are a huge and largely untapped pool of game-creating talent. Are we persuaded that game systems, gaming movements, or gaming companies which, for whatever reason, appeal to this largely untapped pool, are more likely to succeed in the long run than those that do not? Will we see a Darwinian process by which those systems/movements/companies which tend to remain the province of the nerdish male decline in comparison with those which extend beyond it?

[NB: I'm not saying anything about actual discrimination in the gaming industry here. When I compare those systems/companies which appeal to wider audiences to those which appeal mostly to nerdish men, I'm not talking about anything purposive - I'm talking about the way things appear on a prima facie level.]

I don't think it's a clear-cut case, because I think it's possible to construct the argument that the RPG industry is about niche marketing, and systems/movements/companies which either identify a certain niche or come to be associated with a certain niche can achieve greater success than those intended to have broader cross-market appeal. 

Anyway, discuss. What are you looking at me for? I don't have any answers.

Women

Okay, so I've done race in two recent entries. Now it's time to turn my hand to women in gaming. This post is mainly inspired by this rpg.net thread, about female berzerkers.

First things first, the whole fighting-woman cliche (you know the one - ripped, nubile young female, leanly muscular, hyper-sexualised, probably bisexual, and yet of course uber-sexy) has totally passed me by. It's one of those fantasy/sci-fi tropes that I just Do Not Get. (Like elves. And vulcans.) Now don't get me wrong - I yield to no man in my liking of nubile young women. In fact, in my liking of women full stop. But I'm old fashioned enough to like my women to be women, thankyouverymuch, not simulacra of men. The idea that such female characters somehow strike a blow against sexism is utterly laughable to me, given that they do exactly what feminism was supposed to fight against (see women as objects - in this case sex objects).

At this point I expect some snarky reader somewhere is thinking "I bet he's just so insecure in his own masculinity that he feels challenged by such female characters." To that I can only say: Damn straight. I don't like my masculinity being threatened, especially not by women. Having it threatened by other men is bad enough! Why any man would fantasize about a woman stronger, fitter and faster than them is utterly beyond me. And at the same time, why any woman would want a man who was weaker, less fit and slower than them is also completely mind-boggling to me in the same way that, say, foot-fetishism is. Well, I never pretended this post was going to be objective!

But be that as it may, and like it or not, some people like to play tough-girl women in games. To this I say, great, go for it, if that's what you want to do, but let's be realistic about it. Tough-girl women are NOT likely to look like this:



She ain't hurting anybody. No, tough-girl women in the real world mostly look like this:


And I would argue that if were are interested in striking blows against sexism, we should be depicting more East German shot putter-type women both in our play and in our art. Because doing so would send out the clear and simple message that we all (claim) to believe in: It doesn't matter what a woman looks like. Which is the opposite message to what role playing games mostly send out today.