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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1887769" data-attributes="member: 7240">Woodelf, thanks so much for your response to my observations/theory. Your story is quite fascinating and has added to my understanding of the interactions between gender and gaming. First of all, I want to emphasize how refreshing I find it when an ENWorlder clearly distinguishes between generalizations and universal truths. Whole threads have been squandered responding to people who don't get the difference.I think what your account is getting at is a culture that is invisible to many gamers. In my view, the people often most committed to the hobby are, paradoxically, the people who have been, for lack of a more precise term, forced into it. For many of us, gaming was a community based around disability. If one was a geek and lacked the social skills to associate with non-geeks, one was, by necessity, living within geek culture. Geek passtimes tended to involve rituals or practices that provided additional social structure for people who lacked the social intuition necessary to get by in mainstream culture. RPGs were one of the best ways to add structure to social interactions. Other common geek behaviours fitted into this too: memorization of common texts like Monty Python or Star Trek meant that when conversation ceased functioning, people could switch into prerehearsed verbal interactions. Finally, the antecedents to forums like this, BBS's were a prefect place where people could interact is less complex and stressful ways.I think that existing in parallel to this culture is one that chooses RPGs simply because they are fun. The best groups I have been in have been those that are a mix of conscripts like me and subscribers like you. But I think our hobby has always been primarily defined by those forced into it because, for us, RPGs are part of a narrower range of possible social options. And so we commit to them more strongly -- and they become a more important part of our identities Your statements here suggest to me that your circle of gamers were pretty socially functional people. Although you may comprise a large chunk of our hobby and, one day, maybe even a majority, you are likely to continue to be under-represented in the gaming community. Possibly less than half. But I imagine that if these people you correctly point out were not inviting women had actually tried to, I don't expect that there success rate would have been very good. In fact, I would anticipate that it would have been abysmal. I picture sweaty, trembling red-faced incoherence. Ironic yes. Explicable yes. My longest-term gaming associate (1985-2004) really loves D20 -- likes the system better than any other he has played. His particular reason is the extremely heavy codification of outcomes. My friend loves D&D 3.5 because it is fairer than the real world. He perceives the world as menacing, arbitrary and amoral; and his ideas of escapism all focus on retreating to a universe where things are predictable and fair. (Because of his insights into the inherent unfairness of the world, he is the greatest Paranoia GM in the world but has shown little interest in playing it.) As I was saying above, many people are attracted to gaming because it imposes a fairness and predictability on human interactions. Related to this is the also-powerful motive that people play RPGs to feel powerful. For many geeky adolescents, RPGs are an escape from their daily experience of social powerlessness and seemingly incomprehensible human interactions. For such people, introducing an attractive member of the opposite sex into gaming would rob it of many of the characterstics that attracted them to it. Such an introduction would evoke the feelings of fear, confusion, injustice and powerlessness that they gamed to escape. I think our culture tends to view obsessive behaviour by men as a positive thing and such behaviour by women as pathological. Women who take their calling seriously usually face more criticism of neglecting family and social relationships than do men.</blockquote>

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