Stacie GmrGrl
Adventurer
I agree
There are two known genders and about 6 billion plus individuals so yeah you are correct.
Girl Power!
- Thread starter Summer-Knight925
- Start date
I agree
There are two known genders and about 6 billion plus individuals so yeah you are correct.
Stacie GmrGrl
Adventurer
Seems like you and your friends have the 4 iconic characters pretty well covered.
I like playing support type characters in d20 games or 4e.
Mathew_Freeman
Adventurer
Seconded. I ran a game for an all-female group recently that were all new players and didn't really notice any difference in playstyle that I could attribute to gender.
The types of players as laid out by Robin Laws were pretty much all in evidence as usual.
Good luck with your experiment and I hope it works out for you.
Aberzanzorax
Hero
I have to say, this would be incredibly unscientific with "a group". I take methodological issue with:
1. The construct of "masculine challenges". How is that defined?
2. A lack of control group. I think it'd be important to have 3 groups: all female, all male, and mixed. (Studies have shown strong differences in behaviors of both genders in mixed groups rather than homogeneous groups).
3. A small "N". I think you'd be testing the personalities of these few females if you did have but one single group.
4. A well designed study would also include "feminine challenges" to counterbalance "masculine challenges".
5. To understand "masculine and feminine challenges", one would need to read the latest on gender research. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the earlier findings were pretty flawed (boys are not better than girls at math, for example, nor are they more aggressive overall -mayyyybe more violent, but not more aggressive).
6. Coming off of point 5., if designing this, it might be more appropriate to develop "challenges of various types, assessing different constructs"...so rather than "masculine" or "feminine" have constructs in game that assess "time limited problem solving" or "multi modal problem solving" etc. Then use statistical analysis to determine if there is a gender factor.
Just as an aside, most of the research shows that individuals are not very different dependent upon gender, but that social situations often call for "expected" gender differences to be expressed.
An additional factor in roleplaying games that would confabulate this study would be whether the players were playing characters of their own gender, the other gender, or a group with a mix of their own versus the other gender. I could imagine imposed stereotypes shaping how the "character" responds to a situation, rather than the "player" responding to a situation.
Even with the above, avoiding the question of "what gender is the character"... often (and especially for newbs to rpgs) characters are cliches or sterotypes. If I'm playing my very first elvish archer, I might be playing Legolarias...who just responds to situations as I would imagine Legolas might. I honestly think that'd be a much larger factor than the gender of the character or the gender of the player.
There's a lot to think about, and I don't see a viable study being done without a lot of research being done to carefully design the study as well as a lot of time and effort running numerous games with a large number of people.
EDIT: To further confabulate this, if you're selecting a group of your female friends, that's pretty clearly a "non-random" group - this will say little about "women as a whole" and much more about "your friends". Also, rereading your OP, and I'm trying to say this gently...I don't mean to cast blame...there's some bias evident. By this, I mean that your study is defining "masculine challenges" and your very hypothesis based upons societal conceptions (and misconceptions). "Will girls act girly?" seems to be the question, with they hypothesis being "yes". It doesn't seem to draw upon what is "girly" from literature (i.e. actual gender differences) so much as what marketing has tossed out there.
One additional confabulation that occurred to me: the gender of the DM, and in your case, the fact that the DM has a previously established relationship with the subjects.
It might be an interesting blog. I don't think it's offensive. But a scientific study? I'd ask you to be cautious in framing it that way (with the intimation that one might be able to extrapolate results to a larger population). An interesting project, yes. Scientific method? Maybe not so much.
1. The construct of "masculine challenges". How is that defined?
2. A lack of control group. I think it'd be important to have 3 groups: all female, all male, and mixed. (Studies have shown strong differences in behaviors of both genders in mixed groups rather than homogeneous groups).
3. A small "N". I think you'd be testing the personalities of these few females if you did have but one single group.
4. A well designed study would also include "feminine challenges" to counterbalance "masculine challenges".
5. To understand "masculine and feminine challenges", one would need to read the latest on gender research. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the earlier findings were pretty flawed (boys are not better than girls at math, for example, nor are they more aggressive overall -mayyyybe more violent, but not more aggressive).
6. Coming off of point 5., if designing this, it might be more appropriate to develop "challenges of various types, assessing different constructs"...so rather than "masculine" or "feminine" have constructs in game that assess "time limited problem solving" or "multi modal problem solving" etc. Then use statistical analysis to determine if there is a gender factor.
Just as an aside, most of the research shows that individuals are not very different dependent upon gender, but that social situations often call for "expected" gender differences to be expressed.
An additional factor in roleplaying games that would confabulate this study would be whether the players were playing characters of their own gender, the other gender, or a group with a mix of their own versus the other gender. I could imagine imposed stereotypes shaping how the "character" responds to a situation, rather than the "player" responding to a situation.
Even with the above, avoiding the question of "what gender is the character"... often (and especially for newbs to rpgs) characters are cliches or sterotypes. If I'm playing my very first elvish archer, I might be playing Legolarias...who just responds to situations as I would imagine Legolas might. I honestly think that'd be a much larger factor than the gender of the character or the gender of the player.
There's a lot to think about, and I don't see a viable study being done without a lot of research being done to carefully design the study as well as a lot of time and effort running numerous games with a large number of people.
EDIT: To further confabulate this, if you're selecting a group of your female friends, that's pretty clearly a "non-random" group - this will say little about "women as a whole" and much more about "your friends". Also, rereading your OP, and I'm trying to say this gently...I don't mean to cast blame...there's some bias evident. By this, I mean that your study is defining "masculine challenges" and your very hypothesis based upons societal conceptions (and misconceptions). "Will girls act girly?" seems to be the question, with they hypothesis being "yes". It doesn't seem to draw upon what is "girly" from literature (i.e. actual gender differences) so much as what marketing has tossed out there.
One additional confabulation that occurred to me: the gender of the DM, and in your case, the fact that the DM has a previously established relationship with the subjects.
It might be an interesting blog. I don't think it's offensive. But a scientific study? I'd ask you to be cautious in framing it that way (with the intimation that one might be able to extrapolate results to a larger population). An interesting project, yes. Scientific method? Maybe not so much.
Last edited:
SnowleopardVK
First Post
^To be fair, getting large numbers of participants and repeating tests many times is hard to do for a single person, and would take a ridiculous amount of time considering it's about a tabletop RPG.
I'd just think of it as being the closest to a scientific study that a non-professional (I assume) with limited resources and time can manage.
I'd just think of it as being the closest to a scientific study that a non-professional (I assume) with limited resources and time can manage.
Aberzanzorax
Hero
Oh, I agree. What my list hits is more on the lines of a "for publication in an academic journal" or even "dissertation for doctoral status".
And I do agree, there's some work that can be done on a smaller level.
However, I think it's really unfair to call this "the closest to a scientific study" of anything. It's simply, to be blunt, unscientific. It's interesting, to be sure. Let me put it this way: I don't discourage the project at all. It would be a fun blog to read (the OP of the thread was interesting to comment on). However, absolutely no extrapolation beyond the actual subjects of the event should be done. This will not tell us anything about a larger population in any reliable way. In fact, it will not even give us information that we could use to extrapolate about the subjects themselves (how they might behave in different rpg scenarios, with different characters, in non-rpg venues, etc).
I only comment on this because gender is somewhat of a touchy issue (as is any classification of people)...and it's far too easy to design an "experiment" to test gender differences, only to confirm one's own personal stereotypes (without ever meaning to do that).
If this were an experiment of "are players of wizards able to step out of the box and play fighters? Do they still approach conflicts as wizards?" I'd be much less cautious about people taking it as more "scientific" than it is.
Agreed. Two groups of players (one, really, as the other is a control) is a tiny sample set. The statistics, to be blunt, would stink. And, as you go on to mention, one would have to be incredibly careful in designing the challenges or adventures, and the presentation of same, to not lead the players to one style or another.
WhimsyTheFae
Explorer
I would also add that changing just one player in the group could drastically change how the other players act. Especially if you replace one dominating personality with another.
Stacie GmrGrl
Adventurer
I could also see the experiment working with those three groups, and repeating the games with a female DM, and see how the players react. There might be no differences, but I have known some people to act differently when playing with different kind of DMs.
Eric Tolle
First Post
I'd say any results from this would fall under the category of "anecdote“ not "evidence".
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