Female Gamers? Are there more of us now?

[CaptainCalico]

Female player and new GM

I have been playing for over 10 years now, and I admit that my then-boyfriend now-husband acted as my conduit for gaming i.e. I always wanted to game, but I was too shy (at the time) to just walk into the gaming store and start playing with a group of strangers. He eased my way into his long-time gaming group - and now I DM for them .

 

[Afrodyte]

This just makes me think of another topic that keeps being brought up here, about female gamers who play just because their signifigant other does, and then stop when they lose interest in the player. (Or the wife or girlfriend who plays because they want to 'keep an eye' on their guy when he's out with his friends...). I wonder how prevalent this is amongst female gamers. I doubt anyone on ENworld fits this category (otherwise they would likely not be on here). And how many gamer women started playing because of a guy they were dating and kept gaming up long after he was gone.

I may be an anomaly, but my interest in RPGs predates my interest in the opposite sex as romantic possibilities by at least a couple of years. I say interest and not playing because the guys my age whom I knew were playing at the time may not have had enough experience to understand that "just friends" can and often is a reality between people of the opposite sex. As an adult, this has improved, but only amongst other mature adult gamers. Strangely enough, my worst experiences had been with the SOs of fellow gamers who thought I had designs on their men. Ditto if one is the GM and the other a player in every game I am in with them. As a result, I have had to become much more selective about whom I game with and how close I allow myself to get to them.