NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5167878" data-attributes="member: 4720">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.</blockquote>

Verification