Hussar
Legend
My first thought when someone brings up a lack of females in playing RPGs is: So?
I've got no problem with women being in my RPG group/game. But if women, in general, aren't as intereted in RPGs, so what?
Does anyone care that there aren't many men quilters, scrapbookers, Twilight fans, etc.?
If a woman wants in on my game (and I've had some in my games), I'm all like, "Great, we play Thursday nights. Come on in."
But if I look around my table and see just six guys sitting there, I don't think, "Gee, something's missing."
Bullgrit
Honestly, I think the best answer to that is, it matters if you want the hobby to grow. If you're perfectly content with the state of the hobby as it is, then sure, we don't need to expand into new demographics. However, if you would like to see the hobby grow, continuing to focus on the 15-25 male demographic isn't likely going to work. That demographic is pretty much sewn up.
So, how do you grow the hobby? Well, a pretty good way would be to double the player base by getting a 50:50 gender split instead of the 9:1 we have right now.
I can't recall a gaming group that didn't have at least one, usually two or more females in recent times. Sure 25 years ago it was different, but now... many women play in my gaming groups. I had a 4E home game that was 4 females and 2 males.
This matches my experience as well. Pretty much every group I've played with over the years has had one or two women in it. Usually 1. But, yeah, definitely a very small minority.
ProfC said:You want to bring more women into gaming? Start accepting them. Stop seeing them as "girl games" and see them as "gamers."
I pretty much agree with everything else you said, but, I do question this. How do you design a game that is gender neutral? Do we really want to do that, and would it actually attract female gamers? Or, could we instead expand current design to include strong female roles and whatnot in order to attract female gamers?
Is simply treating women as androgynous enough to make the game appealing?