Girls Play [Insert Game]?
by Daniel Henson
On my drive to class yesterday evening, I heard a story on NPR about the increasing number of women playing online fantasy football. The story itself didn’t really interest me that much, as I’m neither much of a football “fan” myself nor does fantasy football particularly appeal to me, but the amusing correlation of this to that of women gamers was just too perfect. Here’s a link to the story in both audio and print form. If you can, I urge you to listen to it rather than read it, as the print version is condensed from the audio story. Fantasy Football: Increasingly a Woman’s Game.
Now, we’re all mature, astute members of the gaming community, right? We know that there are many, many female gamers out there. Some of us are lucky enough to have one of them for a S.O.! We’re probably even so erudite as to have previously assumed that women played fantasy football. Even so, I know that most folks in the gaming culture (especially we that spend any time on the Internet) have had these conversations at least once.
The first conversation goes like this:
“There aren’t any/many female gamers. I’ve never had one in my game.”
“No way, there are tons of female gamers. I am one / have had one/several in my gaming groups.”
“Oh, wow. I’ve never met a female gamer.”
“Yeah, they’re everywhere. Tons of girls play roleplaying games now.”
Granted, this one is falling in frequency, especially among gamers that spend time online. Females are, at least in my experience, fairly well represented across the board in the RPG community these days. I still talk to the occasional female gamer that feels a bit like she’s in a boy’s club environment, but generally speaking, most female gamers I know are “just gamers.” They identify no more as “female gamers” than I do as a “male gamer.” This is true even in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where gamer shame is actually still fairly prevalent. But even so, this conversation still happens with enough frequency that we’ve all heard it at least once in some form or another.
Then, there’s the story of the guy who got his girlfriend or wife to play RPGs. (Yes, the opposite is also true, but to compare it more directly with the story I linked I’m using this particular direction.) There’s the “girlfriend gamer.” There’s the girl you found that already games. There’s the wife that once she sat in on one of your games, she realized she genuinely liked it and now she’s a “full fledged gamer.” We’ve all heard or had this one, at least those of us that have seen enough seasons that this is a concern for us.
So there you go. It’s not only in roleplaying game circles that some guys are still amazed that women, well, do stuff.
I find myself wondering if there’s more chauvinism in the sports world when it comes to this than there is in gaming, but sadly, I’ve also known a few (thankfully very few) male gamers that treat women in the hobby with a degree of disdain, so I suppose there’s progress to be made in any hobby.
I’ve seen some chauvinism in the gaming world, but more than that, I see women just getting treated differently. Sometimes there’s an absurdly overblown, chivalrous attitude where they’re put on a pedestal. Sometimes there’s kid-gloving in everything from game encounters to table jokes for fear of hurting the “fragile flower.” And, more often than either of those, there’s drooling and advances, since they’re still a minority in the hobby.
While Karla isn’t an uber-geek and doesn’t play a lot of RPGs, I’m glad to at least be married to someone with some geeky interests. It’s knocked a lot of silliness out of my head and helped me treat female gamers like…you know…regular human beings.
As an example of the behavior Dan is referring to, in my previous gaming group, for some reason, the characters of the male players were chronically wounded. Every encounter, they’d get hits. The characters of the two female players were quite often making daring (or even foolish, sometimes without thinking about it, sometimes for RPG-reasons) decisions and would never get any damage (with one exception very early on).
We all did our characters separately, but after seeing the sheets of all players, there was this strange air of making the characters of the female players weaker. This was rationalized by the fact that the two players had less RPG-experience, but I did not see that as a good enough reason. Anyhow, male players started out with clearly more experienced characters.
Also, never mind what the characters of the female players looked (other one had pretty good score in the appearance trait, whatever it was known as, other had mediocre – at best), the GM assumed they were pretty and looked pretty much like idealized versions of their players.
I’d also like to note that the advances don’t go just into one direction. I dated one of the female players in that group for about 7 months after she asked me out. At one point she asked if I had dated the other female in the group, which I hadn’t but I’m guessing there had been clues about interest… and I wasn’t interested.
My mom was a gamer. My godmother is a gamer. All of my girlfriends have been gamers. My best friend is a girl gamer. Most of our old college group were girls. I’ve never noticed this derth of girl gamers.
Which is really odd. Cuz there is a general lack of gamers period down here (actually I am learning that most of them are simply closeted, and embarassed to respond to a posting.)
I’m one of the lucky ones with the wife who joined up after sitting around watching us. Sure we had to entice her with a unicorn mount for her paladin, but that’s beside the point. Now, she plays, and she has even been the driving force behind going outside our first gaming group to meet more gamers and play more.
Not just that, but the first full game I played when I got back into RPGs in the last couple of years had a 1:1 gender proportion (5 players and 1 GM).
Now, more recently, I’ve had the experience of the tag-along spouse who really doesn’t want to play. Not only does she ruin the games she plays in, but she ruins the games she’s not playing in. Either by being there and disrupting the game or by constantly texting her husband while we’re playing. She’s basically killed two games in the past month because she nags her husband.
Now, as for kid gloves with the women, I believe my wife has had more characters killed by me than any of my other player. She tends to be somewhat reckless with characters. Thankfully she understands and has fun (at least the next morning she understands, that night…).
i always find these discussions fascinating, because in my gaming group that a buddy introduced me to, girls have always been equal, and now actually outnumber the guys. but i completely inderstand the dynamic. it is possible to meet up with girl gamers though, a lot more are open to the idea of rpg’s than you might think, i think a lot of trouble in finding the female gamers comes more from guys not being confident enough to approach them than them not being there. remember, just like gamer guys are stereotyped, so are the women. you never know where a gamer is till you look
I fiance was the “girlfriend gamer” for about five minutes. Once she understood the idea and the fact that she could be anything the chew through the bit to get going and I found myself inundated with request her and some of our other friends (all female) to run games.
Though I have seen the chauvinism in the gaming community I have never seen it around the table. I’ve also never seen the “GM’s girlfriend” symptom in effect. I’m probably guilty of the opposite,where I’m harder on her characters than others.
As far as girl gamers on the rise, I recently found out while doing research for a term paper, that 40% percent of all video game players are women and so I see no reason for those numbers not to have carried over.
I actually started playing fantasy football w/ my husband about 6 years ago – we’ve done it every year in at least 2 leagues and even though I still aren’t that good with the specifics of the game – playing it has allowed me to get excited about football in general and given me a new perspective. Previous I’d watch the Eagles game and that’d be it…my husband would spend the rest of the day flipping from game to game and I never quite understood why. Once I started playing FF I was excited to watch the rest of the games to see how all my guys were doing. I faired pretty well, getting in the top spots and the icing on the cake was the year I got a first round pick, LT and won the league…but this year I didn’t fair so well. We switched from yahoo to espn and that factored in a bit as I rely rather heavily on predictions and espn’s are whacked.
As for gaming…I’m lucky enough that I don’t really encounter ‘scumbags’ when gaming anymore…but I’ve met my fair share over the years and know of many people today that still get harassed. As I get older it becomes less of a nuisance and more of a concern, some of the things people say/do is absolutely appalling, disgusting and concerning. I have 2 boys but if they were girls I’d be concerned about their safety as they encountered other people when gaming. I think the “40%” numbers that came out are heavily solo based games – in multiplayer games you’ll still find that the true numbers are more like 10-15% and even less in FPSs. I met my husband through gaming, so although he got me into WoW I was a gamer long before we ever met. If it wasn’t for work, kids and life in general I’d still be gaming 24/7…I did have to do a bit of reprioritizing so my gaming has been on the decline.