opinions of "Asterids parlor"

[roguerouge]

Care to elaborate? To me his questions sound reasonable and logical.

Not claiming to read Krissbeth's mind, but I'm guessing it's this section:

"Now maybe its just the half dozen threads i have read on there but it makes me wonder, are most players this whiny and PC? Are most newbies really looking this hard for anything to be offended over? And to any female gamers, do you really want to be treated this differently then guy gamers are treated?"

How would you take it if some random person started making unfounded generalizations based on 6 threads on some forum without citing any specifics or making any links? Would it make you tetchy if they followed it up with a rousing round of "Why can't we all just get along?"

 

[Dire Bare]

Now i am gonna preface this so i dont seem like a jerk right off. I have been gaming and GMing for years, but i am not super old (25 lol) and half my group is females and allways has been.

In my experiance female gamers and newby girls have by far felt the most comfortable in games when they are treated just like everyone else. No guys going out of thier way to be rude, and no PC (political correctness in this case) coddling either.

I have tried both ways, being nuetral and being coddling, (not in my nature to be a jerk for no reason) and inevitably when i tried to go out of my way to treat a girl gamer in the way that my admittedly very male, and very akward in this department brain says a girl should be treated she gets bored or tells me not to treat her special and just DM like i normally would, then i do and everyone has fun.

But recently i have been looking at the WOTC forums for 4e stuff and stumbled onto this section. Now maybe its just the half dozen threads i have read on there but it makes me wonder, are most players this whiny and PC? Are most newbies really looking this hard for anything to be offended over? And to any female gamers, do you really want to be treated this differently then guy gamers are treated?

this just seems like a huge step backward from making groups work together. Anytime you start separating people, by race, or gender or religion you start breaking them apart into groups and making them adversarial. So if this step is designed to make people work start being nice, its just plain dumb. And if its just market research by WoTC its not just dumb and divisive its offensive to me as a male because it seems from the tone of the "parlor" that guys dont know how to act around women.

I guess i am looking for others opinions on this and after reading a page or two of the topics if this actualy adds anything to gaming or just leads to more divisive infighting at a time when the new edition allready has the community eating each other alive?

Not to be rude or anything man, but your post IS EXACTLY the reason why the forum in question exists.

 

[Castellan]

Wow... I totally need to read titles better. I read the whole original post wondering, "What does this have to do with shooting rocks in space?"

 

[theredrobedwizard]

I asked my girlfriend to browse through the afore mentioned forum in response to this thread.

Some of her comments, take them as you will.

"Wait... You mean there are gamer girls that care about things besides killing things and taking their stuff?"

"Not *one* of these threads is about character builds! What the crap? How are these girls supposed to learn about Building the Best Bard or How to Get the Most Out of Your Class Features?"

"If I was looking for a place to prove unrealistic gamer girl stereotypes right, this would be it."

The rest of her comments were a bit, shall we say, excessively impolite towards what she likes to call 'Vampire players'. I'd post them, but they were rather not-so-much Eric's Grandma friendly.

-TRRW

 

[krissbeth]

Roguerouge is good at reading my mind.

Not to be rude or anything man, but your post IS EXACTLY the reason why the forum in question exists.

YES.

I read the Confessions of a Part Time Sorceress book too. I didn't like it. However, I know why it exists.

Unless one knows the experience of a woman in a man's world, one will NEVER fully understand why this forum exists. Being in a minority and then being told that we should just IGNORE our differences and deal with it -- that's just appalling. To be told that we ought to blend with the assumed majority. We are NOT men and a lot of us don't wish to experience the game the same as men. It's our differences that make us, and some of us accept that.

This is the exact same thing that anti-feminists say and it really, REALLY irks me to my core. Saying that feminists and the female experience are irrelevant. You assume women to be "the second sex" and that the male experience is the default.

So long as one assumes the male experience as the default gaming experience, Astrid's Parlor needs to exist. It's a community. Women sometimes NEED that community of sisterhood. It supports us in a society where we are the minority and considered seconds. This is why so many women thrive in single-sex educational environments.

And the OP's post just confirms this.

 

[theredrobedwizard]

So long as one assumes the male experience as the default gaming experience, Astrid's Parlor needs to exist. It's a community. Women sometimes NEED that community of sisterhood. It supports us in a society where we are the minority and considered seconds. This is why so many women thrive in single-sex educational environments.

And the OP's post just confirms this.

[tangent]As a counter point, why is there an all female gym chain (Curves) and yet, if a man (or group of men) were to make a similar all male gym chain it'd be boycotted in a second by all manner of upset people who want to be included? Maybe *I* want an easy, 30 minute workout in a non-threatening environment where I'm not looked upon as a piece of meat.[/tangent]

Point is, the only problem with Astrid's Parlor is that it looks to me like a tree house club with a big "NO BOYS ALLOWED" sign outside. It seems immature. As the above argument about Curves; maybe I want a place where I can talk about roleplay issues with my fellow gamer boys without having to worry about being judged by gamer girls.

How offended would the gamer girls out there be if there were a section of the Wizards Forums called Tordek's Den as a corollary to Astrid's Parlor which explicitly said that it was a place for gamer boys to talk about gamer boy things "NO GIRLS ALLOWED"? I believe that Wizards would receive far more angry emails about Tordek's Den than they do about Astrid's Parlor, even in a forum where both were equally accessible.

Think about it this way, dudes:

We live in a male-centric society for the most part, right? And D&D is generally a game enjoyed mostly by dudes. So if you're a lady playing with some dudes, and something comes up that bothers you, or is an issue in anyway, you'll probably be unlikely to bring it up. Or you'd just let it slide or something like that. The point of having a forum like that is so that you can have a place where you're comfortable bringing up issues that you hadn't mentioned to anyone because you might not have felt it was the place, or even worth mentioning in that environment.

I don't think the point is to say, "Hey women! Shun all those men and come over here and talk about how D&D hates women!" or anything like that. The point is to have a place where female players can mention things that they would be unlikely to mention some place else. Not that everything that'll come up would be big deal or anything like that, but just to have a place where anything could at least get said.

So are they going to start specific sub-forums for every supposed non-majority gamer group? If the "average" gamer is a straight white male between the ages of 24 and 35, are they going to make a forum for sub-24 gamers? One for gay gamers? One for non-white gamers (which would bring up various sub-sub forums like arabic gamers, black gamers, hispanic gamers, etc)? One for post-34 gamers? One for left-handed albino eskimo lesbian gamers? Will they eventually rename the General forum at such a place "Straight White Males Between 24 and 35 Gaming Forum"? No, because then there'd be an uproar.

Maybe it's just my nature to question everything, but I really don't get it. What issues would one not be comfortable bringing up anywhere? Seriously, I want to know what's so taboo and/or intimidating that it can't be brought up. I'm trying to understand.

-TRRW

 

[JustKim]

A cursory look at Astrid's Parlor does not at all suggest it's exclusive to women gamers, just that discussion should be central to women gamers. In this way it's meant to attract disconnected women gamers and encourage a community where there is otherwise none.

 

[Elf Witch]

[tangent]As a counter point, why is there an all female gym chain (Curves) and yet, if a man (or group of men) were to make a similar all male gym chain it'd be boycotted in a second by all manner of upset people who want to be included? Maybe *I* want an easy, 30 minute workout in a non-threatening environment where I'm not looked upon as a piece of meat.[/tangent]

Point is, the only problem with Astrid's Parlor is that it looks to me like a tree house club with a big "NO BOYS ALLOWED" sign outside. It seems immature. As the above argument about Curves; maybe I want a place where I can talk about roleplay issues with my fellow gamer boys without having to worry about being judged by gamer girls.

How offended would the gamer girls out there be if there were a section of the Wizards Forums called Tordek's Den as a corollary to Astrid's Parlor which explicitly said that it was a place for gamer boys to talk about gamer boy things "NO GIRLS ALLOWED"? I believe that Wizards would receive far more angry emails about Tordek's Den than they do about Astrid's Parlor, even in a forum where both were equally accessible.



So are they going to start specific sub-forums for every supposed non-majority gamer group? If the "average" gamer is a straight white male between the ages of 24 and 35, are they going to make a forum for sub-24 gamers? One for gay gamers? One for non-white gamers (which would bring up various sub-sub forums like arabic gamers, black gamers, hispanic gamers, etc)? One for post-34 gamers? One for left-handed albino eskimo lesbian gamers? Will they eventually rename the General forum at such a place "Straight White Males Between 24 and 35 Gaming Forum"? No, because then there'd be an uproar.

Maybe it's just my nature to question everything, but I really don't get it. What issues would one not be comfortable bringing up anywhere? Seriously, I want to know what's so taboo and/or intimidating that it can't be brought up. I'm trying to understand.

-TRRW

First of all there are as many posters that are male on Astrids Palor as there are female . Males are allowed to post the forum is open to everyone.

Thr forum is supposed to be about talking about things that bother female gamers it is supposed to be a place that a female or male gamer who wants to help make a female gamer feel more comfortable can come and post for advice.

It fails to provide any of this. Why well afer being a member of the forum several months I just gave up. Because you have a bunch of guys several who are very vocal about their dislike of the forum and there dislike of what they call femnazis that turn almost ever frakking thread into an arguemnt about the pros and cons of feminism.

Talk about a pregnant PC and you will get these posters telling you that your PC has to take all kinds of minuses and no decent mother to be would risk her baby so her alignment should shift. When you mention hand waving things away like you do other things they get pissy.

If you talk about world building and you mention that in your city all the guards are female and all the wizards are male. You get quoted how unrealistic that is because woman become mothers and quit their jobs and there would not be enough females to man the guard.

And my favorite the chain mail bikini. Females posters post that they really don't like them in their gaming books because they don't look like what a smart female adventurer would wear. They would like to see females pictured in better armor and adventuring clothes.

How hard it is to find decent minitures of female adventurers dressed in appropriate armor.

And these guys go crazy about how unfair it to take all cheesecake out of fantasy artwork. No matter how many times you tell them no we are not talking about all fantasy artwork and we don't have a problem with sexy drawings of succubus and tavern wenches but we would just like to see female PCs fighters dressed in armor that covers their vital organs.

They cry that if WOTC would do this they would be pandering to females and that is just not fair.

I finally gave up because my blood pressure could not deal with this on a daily bases.

Most of my gaming experience has been wonderful I play with wonderful guys. Though sometimes there has been some issues that I would have liked to have been able to talk to to other female gamers about.

I have dealt with male DMs who penalize female characters with caps on strength , Con and even dex. I had DMs forbid fighting classes to female characters. Thankfully most of that crap happened back in the early days of gaming.

I have had issues with Male DMs who don't take female gamers as seriously as male gamers. Sometimes it is very subtle amd they don't even realize they are doing it until you say something.

I have had to deal with guys who hit on you, jealousy of non playing girl friends and spouses and catty back stabbing female players. It would be nice to be able to go to a forum that is designed for female gamers and talk about these things. Not that you could not chat about things like that here but one would hope that on a forum designed for female gamers would have a larger female to male population.

As for the book. I read and thought it was funny. I also thought it was a good book for novice female gamers who are not already fantasy or comic book fans. Who are not into geeky things but are more girly and more mainstream girly.

I gave the book to a friend for Xmas who is not into geeky things but wanted to know about gaming and why I and her boyfriend enjoy it and was showing interest in maybe trying it.

 

[ssampier]

I don't have much experience with women gamers. I do talk with women, frequently. The one thing I do know is women are different. Really. Trying to pigeon-hole people is never fun.

I'm black, a Roman Catholic, a metalhead & a gamer who lives in Texas- I'm never in the majority.

IME, a safe harbor can be quite comforting to those within it, and it can provide an environment to discuss what would otherwise never be.

However, it doesn't lead to deeper understanding between those within and without, and at worst, can actually lead to alienation. One of the reasons I didn't attend a HBCU (Historically Black College or University) when I had the option- for free!- was that many of them have become so insular that larger and larger portions of the graduates are preaching the virtues of self-segregation as a cure for social ills like racism.

I'm a Catholic (now lapse) living in Utah. How ya doing? Granted, as a white boy, I can't claim what it's like to be black and of the Catholic faith in Texas. I do know what it feels like to be excluded.

I do agree about safe-houses. It's really easy to just wall-yourself up with people who share you race, religion, and/or viewpoint on life.

 

[krissbeth]

Maybe it's just my nature to question everything, but I really don't get it. What issues would one not be comfortable bringing up anywhere? Seriously, I want to know what's so taboo and/or intimidating that it can't be brought up. I'm trying to understand.

You're comparing the female experience to the male experience by assuming that men are the norm. Black, White, Asian, Purple, Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish, Queer, Straight... Women are women are women. And they will not be men and our issues will never be solved if you assume that women need to measure up to men because you think the male experience is the yardstick of life.

As soon as a woman starts talking about women's issues with, oh, say, gaming, and then a mob of men start throwing out words like "feminazi," "man-hater," and gods-forbid "dyke," then they continue to push that THEY, the men, are the primary model of gamerhood and anything else is wroooong. Clearly if a woman's p.o.v. deviates from this norm then she must be punished. What I see is threatened manhood. When they start dictating how women should perceive their experiences, gaming or otherwise, they are being oppressive.

There's nothing more annoying than the disenfranchised being told that they shouldn't feel disenfranchised.

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Oh, and...
*cheers Elf Witch*