Where Did All The Girls Go?

[nedjer]

[No message]

 

[Dannager]

I'm convinced that our focus needs to be on adding more cool players to the hobby, than on any particular gender. D&D, like any hobby, needs new blood on a constant basis. Women are great, but quite honestly D&D does not require a certain male/female ratio to keep on trucking. It just needs people, preferably people who enjoy the game and make it fun for others to enjoy. I can't wait for the day when threads like this - the sort that tries to develop a strategy for recruiting a certain gender - no longer need to exist. When I'm at the game table, I'm less concerned about how many male players I have versus how many female players I have. What I'm really concerned about is how many good players I have.

 

[Dausuul]

Nedjer - for some reason your post seems to be un-quotable. Anyway...

You cite a whole bunch of studies there, but so far as I can tell, none of them has anything to do with tabletop RPGs except in an extremely tangential way. Your points in the essay go light-years beyond what your cited evidence supports.

If you want to talk about where all the female gamers went (or didn't go), how about some studies on, y'know, female gamers? Or on women in society at large and their attitudes toward and knowledge of RPGs, compared with those of men?

 

[nedjer]

I'm convinced that our focus needs to be on adding more cool players to the hobby, than on any particular gender. D&D, like any hobby, needs new blood on a constant basis. Women are great, but quite honestly D&D does not require a certain male/female ratio to keep on trucking. It just needs people, preferably people who enjoy the game and make it fun for others to enjoy. I can't wait for the day when threads like this - the sort that tries to develop a strategy for recruiting a certain gender - no longer need to exist. When I'm at the game table, I'm less concerned about how many male players I have versus how many female players I have. What I'm really concerned about is how many good players I have.

I've posted plenty here on broadening the appeal of RPGs and the same principles apply. On this occasion the question I was set was to look at girls in particular, rather than all players or even women players.

Take earlier posts here and at Thistle Games together and the overall recipe is the same throughout. Kids love open-ended, imaginative, shared play and part of that is the range of 'skills' they use in- and out-game. Roleplaying games focused on that can be made to appeal to all kids, while character-based wargames can't, because the range of 'skills' isn't considered as much fun by nearly as many kids.

 

[nedjer]

Nedjer - for some reason your post seems to be un-quotable. Anyway...

You cite a whole bunch of studies there, but so far as I can tell, none of them has anything to do with tabletop RPGs except in an extremely tangential way. Your points in the essay go light-years beyond what your cited evidence supports.

If you want to talk about where all the female gamers went (or didn't go), how about some studies on, y'know, female gamers? Or on women in society at large and their attitudes toward and knowledge of RPGs, compared with those of men?

It's the opposite of tangential. It's systemic. You take all the data sets at different levels of observation and merge the data. If, for example, several valid, reliable studies of conflict amongst children show, as they do, that girls' childhood roleplaying consistently demonstrates less direct conflict than boys' roleplaying, it is possible to propose that this will apply in other similar contexts.

The videogame industry does stacks of research on games. Can all of that shed no light at all on roleplaying games? Academics do loads of research on teaching through roleplaying - what could be more relevant to parents interested in shared roleplaying in the home? Psychologists identify patterns in human behaviours which operate across all of our social activities . . .

 

[Dausuul]

It's the opposite of tangential. It's systemic. You take all the data sets at different levels of observation and merge the data. If, for example, several valid, reliable studies of conflict amongst children show, as they do, that girls' childhood roleplaying consistently demonstrates less direct conflict than boys' roleplaying, it is possible to propose that this will apply in other similar contexts.

Sure. It is possible to propose a lot of things. Proposition is not proof. Based purely on the studies you've cited, you're at the stage of "Here's some interesting data in a distantly related field, which leads in an interesting direction." That's a good place to start, but it's a long way from establishing your proposition.

The videogame industry does stacks of research on games. Can all of that shed no light at all on roleplaying games? Academics do loads of research on teaching through roleplaying - what could be more relevant to parents interested in shared roleplaying in the home? Psychologists identify patterns in human behaviours which operate across all of our social activities . . .

I can't read the text of most of the studies you linked to, since I'm not a student and my guest account doesn't have access. That said, reviewing the titles, I see exactly one which mentions video games in any way, shape, or form; and none whatsoever that mentions tabletop RPGs. And the one that mentions video games does not appear to bear much relation.

Yes, the videogame industry does stacks of research. But since you have not cited or linked to any of that research (with the exception of one bar graph about the frequency of saving-the-princess plots), I fail to see the relevance.

I fully support the suggestion that we ought to base our discussion on hard scientific evidence; but until someone provides hard scientific evidence, we'll have to continue as we are.

 

[MortonStromgal]

The first time you see an RPG that actually appeals to women is Vampire - and it was riding the Anne Rice wave of horror readers. Vampires have HUGE appeal to women readers.

1000x this

If someone made an RPG outta Twilight there would be a new flux of female gamers again.

[edit]
It doesn't have to be Twilight just whatever fiction/tv 10-15 yr old girls are currently reading/watching. Ride the coat tails of popularity.

 

[pawsplay]

Girls generally have more social skills at a younger age than boys.

Untrue. Some studies have found differences, but it's just not true that girls have been shown to be better at socializing. For instance, boys are usually much more competent at integrating into games with other boys.

They also tend to be involved in more elaborate pre-school roleplaying than most boys.

I'm not quite sure what this means. I know that virtually every boy I've ever met has pretended to be someone, whether that's Batman, a ninja turtle, "daddy," or Wonder Woman. Color me skeptical.

As girls get older many enjoy videogame RPGs, puzzle games and ARGs. They also take part in fantasy gaming ’spin-offs’, such as writing fan fiction, visiting videogame forums and drawing fantasy art. However, very few female gamers seem to become involved in tabletop RPGs and even fewer go on to run games.

What do you mean by "very few?" The last research I saw suggested there was a greater percentage of women playing D&D than men in professional nursing. And I've known quite a few male RNs.

Many, predominantly male, tabletop RPG players express surprise at the low number of teenage and adult female players.

Oh? In my experience... older and more sophisticated groups are quite likely to have one or more female players, sometimes even half the group or more. It is my suspicion that younger groups reflect greater sexual segregation, as an outgrowth of adolescent self-segregation by sex. Fewer female players may simply reflect fewer opportunities to play.

Apart from the very young, mired in a mix of schoolyard stereotypes and unfinished socialization, and the rather old, emerging from the dark days of the 1970s, I think there is an entire generation of fairly well integrated gamers, among whom female players are a minority but certainly not a rarity. It appears to me that many gamers of my generation enter into geek-geek marriages, and playing RPGs together is fairly common.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

There are three easy steps to getting more girls into gaming

1) Don't be a creep, make sure your group isn't made of creeps. Potentially the hardest step! We all know someone in the local gaming community that we do not want to associate ourselves with. Unfortunately, we still do. That's the catch - it takes just one creephat to inflict the stigma on everyone around. Cruel as this may sound, distance your game from the creepers - or better yet, confront the guy and flat out say, "Look, you need to cut back on the <whatever> comments, ok?" Don't just quietly hope problems with magically disappear on their own. Who we associate ourselves with is how we're seen, and if you don't want to associate with someone, then don't.

2) Don't be a creep, stop thinking of them in terms of gender. Don't whinge that all the scaaaaaaaaaary numbers are going to frighten the innocent and pure damsels you wish to bring into the fold, because oh my god that's so freaking creepy. When you try to build your idea around "Well they're girls, so, you know, they're different," guess what? That's creepy. Imagine yourself trying to explain that to the person in general. "We need to treat you differently because of your genetalia." Can you think of a way of saying it that isn't creepy?

3) Ask them. Human beings are individuals, regardless of ethnicity, gender, sex, religion, culture, race, etc, etc, etc. Women do not have one massive hivemind. Ask individuals what they like - you know, the same thing you'd (hopefully) do for new male gamers. And that's perhaps the most hilarious(ly depressing) thing; people at times whinge about how women just want to talk and roleplay out and never have combat, but I guran-damn-tee you that your male players want to do that stuff too. We dudes don't just want all hack and slash all the time! In fact, no small number of male gamers simply aren't into a lot of combat at all!

So why is number 1 the hardest? Because gaming itself has built the stigma around itself willfully. Chainmail bikinis, damsels in distress, crude pinup art, etc, etc. People love to point at loincloth barbarians to claim it's even, but it's not. Men in fantasy art are traditionally hyper-masculanized. Their strength and power is accentuated. Rippling biceps and stanecs of authority and whatnot. Women in fantasy art are traditionally hypersexualised. Plush, open lips, Swelling breasts, swayed back, you know the drill. Imagine if Conan was drawn in such a way - it would be ridiculous! The same problem hits video games. People look at female gamers and say "Well they play the Sims, clearly that's the only type of game they like," and then ignore that every other game has you playing a big buff manly macho space marine who runs around and waves their dinglybits at aliens nonstop. The Sims lets a character at least be female. is it no surprise that one of the more popular genres with female gamers lies in RPGs, especially western RPGs where you can create your own character?

Claiming that only guys play games is a self fulfilling tragedy. The more you believe it, the more you, consciously or unconsciously, build games to target only men, which draw in mostly just guys, which only fuels the belief. Let's not forget the hilarious sales flop from TSR that was the Heartquest books.

Now, it's not all gaming's fault. Certainly the hypersexualization in society as well as the still existing cultural norms that force gender roles are a problem. But dammit all, we were born as the sub-culture for people who didn't fit in - isn't it our job to fight against the norm we dislike so much?

You want to bring more women into gaming? Start accepting them. Stop seeing them as "girl games" and see them as "gamers."

Personally, I'm waiting for the topic on how to bring more men into different types of gaming. Oh, wait, even better - how to bring more transgendered people into gaming. Now that one will be fun!

 

[pawsplay]

It may be more weight than this discussion can bear, but I wonder how the OP would fly if it were about a lack of racial representation in gamer demographics. "Blacks don't like big maths," etc etc.