Wizards aiming younger audience

[Logan Shadowhand]

Think about what you just said. She's a managing editor - not anyone in marketing or game design or really anything to do with advertising or pushing the game at all.

In other words, she brought this to someone in the office's attention because she happens to work in the same building. This is most certainly not a marketing thing.

Not to belabor the point, but may I remind you that this is at tie-in with their line of novels for kids. Not to mention there is a lot of crossover as far as roles in WotC, designers write novels and novelists write adventures/sourcebooks. If you've followed ChattyDM at all, you'd know he pitched an idea about RPGs for kids to WotC. This is most definitely a calculated move by WotC, and a good one.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

bureaucratic crap
frikkin' communist!
"protect the children" knee-twitchery
all sorts of crap
elaborate and misplaced concern is a pile of crap
pure nonsense

Wow!

So, how about discussing his post? I know, i know: that´s not that widespread on internet message boards. It´s just that i hoped you would either fork a thread or expand on your points in this one instead of being offended and end it with blah. (Admittedly, it began with blah, but still...).

 

[Hussar]

Anyway, I think it's just as important to market RPGs to females as it is to kids; there're probably a lot of potential gamers in female cosplayers, anime/manga fans, fantasy/scifi fans, computer game fans. The problem is... publishers don't usually market the game outside the hobby circles. LARPing, on the other hand, is much more visible in mass media than pen-and-paper RPGs.

Now there's something I'd love to see. As much as people start to froth at the mouth about CRPG's and the like, at least MMO's, on average, get about a 50% gender split. Thirty years later and D&D can't break 25%. I think Vampire probably did so much business, not because it was stealing from D&D players, but because it actually brought in loads of female gamers.

I don't know what's needed to start bridging the gap, but, whatever it is, it's more than time to get it done.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Hussar, I think that most of that female MMO audience is responding to things that really don't generalize to D&D. There are social aspects to MMOs that do not map to D&D at all. It's like a social networking website with a game attached, and all the attendant social games come with it.

Female avatars get a lot of attention in MMOs. I deleted the only female character I ever rolled the third time I had some guy following me around in Stormwind making really suggestive /tells. I think this is why my wife prefers to play her Dwarves and Gnomes.

MMO's give female players more control without having to be confrontational. The mouthbreather who is following your avatar around making suggestive comments can go on /ignore and he can be reported to GMs for harassment without you having to deal with him at all. The creepy mouthbreather in the FLGS... it's one in a million gamers or store owners who will help out with that situation.

But there are specific demographic examples, as well.

A pretty large percentage of the MMO women I've met fall into some sort of den mother/mother hen category. They call everyone "Dear" or "Sweetie" and cultivate personal relationships with lots of the younger players that have a very Aunt-like vibe. Most of them are housewives or underemployed older women, but with the occasional younger woman who's just good at it. They are generally a force for good, socially. They can really generate some group cohesion and sometimes their approval/disapproval can push younger players to be more consistent when they make a commitment to guild activities. Occasionally, they also have leadership skills and make good guild or raid leaders. However, there's a Dark Side. If they get offended by someone they tend to mobilize an army against them. If that someone is in guild leadership, this causes the occasional coup d'etat in their guilds.

These women thrive on large guilds where they can build a hierarchy amongst themselves and all their "kids". There really are weird parallels to matriarchal primate troops. A 5-8 person D&D group doesn't provide the dynamic they need.

On the other hand, there's a small but noticeable percentage of female gamers in MMOs who use and abuse all that sexualized attention they get. Our WoW guild periodically had to deal with one of these moving in and wrapping half the single men in the guild (and no small percentage of the married ones) around their finger. Most of these women hated my wife, because she refused to play their game and was treated with an honest respect by the males in the guild because of her skills and leadership ability, not her ability to use a breathy voice on Ventrillo and remove blood from someone's brain.

Some of these exact same women have either dropped an atom bomb on D&D groups with that exact behavior or don't have the confidence to do those things in real life. They also can use logging in and manipulating men as a quick pick-me-up at the end of a rough day. That kind of instant validation beats the tar out of waiting for game day to manipulate men who know you for real and are therefore slightly harder to manipulate. Calling that platonic friend you keep on a string requires effort and a modicum of relationship maintenance. Logging in and having 10 of them instantly at your beckon call without having to do any real work is a nice immediate ego boost. Some of them really ratchet it up. They can get 20 virtual slaves if they've posted a pretty pic on the guild website. 30+ with a slutty pic.

There's usually a low level amount of that going on in every guild, but sometimes two pros end up in one guild at the same time and you end up with a war. If it wasn't so bad for group cohesion it would be hilarious.

Again, these social games often take precedence over the "actual" game for these women, and these social games require a substantially large number of players.

 

[OchreJelly]

Oh I know this isn't.. was just saying I'm surprised that they haven't done something like that. With stylized minis maybe a little more kid-friendly.

I love this little module and I'm going to try to run it for my niece Sarah this weekend.

Stylized minis like the TSR toys of old.

Does anyone remember these action figures and playsets? I used to have a few of these:

and

... ah that takes me back

Of course children have the new Heroscape set. Those games are pretty popular with kids right?

 

[mgbeach]

Stylized minis like the TSR toys of old.

Does anyone remember these action figures and playsets? I used to have a few of these:

and

... ah that takes me back

Of course children have the new Heroscape set. Those games are pretty popular with kids right?

Oh man I had never seen those! Fantastic stuff!

OH NO!! NOT... THE TARRASQUE CREATURE!! I hear it prowls on its hind legs!! (also known as the Kanga-Turtledog)

 

[Imaro]

I don't know. It sounds to me like you've got a set of rose-coloured glasses there, man. I was playing in '79 and '80, and I recall news reports treating the Egbert 'disappearance' as a joke. Granted , I was 13-14 years old and living in North Carolina, but every mention I heard was treated with a smirk; and Egbert himself was tagged as less of a 'genius' and more of a 'freak.'

The only people who considered D&D a 'game for geniuses' were people who were playing the game. The real 'cultural phenomenon' occurred after right-wingers and Christian fundamentalists started equating D&D with 'Satanism' and suicide. That was really as close as D&D has ever been to being considered "cool," and once the masses who bought it for its 'Dark Dungeons' aspect found out that it was just a bit of harmless fun, sales began to drop off. The fact is, there is, and has been, a negative social stigma attached to D&D among the mainstream, whether we like it or not, that has to be dealt with. Gamers were, and still are, considered 'geeks' by the mainstream. We have to accept that and get past it if we are to get past that stigma.

Regards,
Darrell

Ok, good... I thought I was mis-rememberring or something. The above is more in line with how I remember the perception of D&D when I played during the 80's. I was alsounder the impression that alot of it's popularity surge was because it was suddenly edgy and dark (remind anyone else of another rpg that would later come to rival D&D in popularity.),not because it was a "game for genuises".

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

The desire to look more hardcore than you are is the one constant in the universe, especially among young whelps.

 

[renau1g]

Especially amongst surburban kids...that's why rap albums sell so well. I remember reading that the most prolific consumer of hardcore rap was suburban white kids.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

We had to work harder to look hardcore. I chose metal rather than rap and considered this a great virtue. I was badass. The white kids listening to rap were poseurs.

Of course, D&D had already descended from hardcore to nerdy by the time I was in middle school, so the metal heads and stoners playing it had to do so circumspectly.