Quote from: beejazz;469252Not what I've seen in the female fans of Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft. Lots of killing, levelling, and looting there (or at least lots of patience for killing, levelling, and looting if you're going to argue that this isn't what attracts a greater percentage of women to the game).

so % of WoW players that are female -
According to a 2005 studies, 84 percent of "World of Warcraft" players are male, and 16 percent are female. The average player's age is 28, and female players tend to be a few years older than male players. Regardless of their gender, players spend an average of 21 to 22 hours a week playing the game [source: Yee, WoW Demographics]. Of course, these statistics may have shifted since Yee collected his data. You can learn more about Yee's research at The Daedalus Project.

So like I said there are outliers and I suspect more women are involved in guilds and interacting as a % than their male counterparts.....

And that 16% accounts for more people than everyone combined  involved in tabletop rpg's.

Quote from: jibbajibba;469258so % of WoW players that are female -
According to a 2005 studies, 84 percent of "World of Warcraft" players are male, and 16 percent are female. The average player's age is 28, and female players tend to be a few years older than male players. Regardless of their gender, players spend an average of 21 to 22 hours a week playing the game [source: Yee, WoW Demographics]. Of course, these statistics may have shifted since Yee collected his data. You can learn more about Yee's research at The Daedalus Project.

So like I said there are outliers and I suspect more women are involved in guilds and interacting as a % than their male counterparts.....

It's likely that the female videogamers I know are outliers if most female gamers are over 28 (I'm in college, and it's through college and old high school friends that I know most of my gaming friends). So I guess take all this with a grain of salt.

Still, I think saying that social interaction is the draw and that not committing space to it in books is the problem would lead to more social rules, while I think one of the main things turning women off of pnp rpgs is the same thing that turns everyone else off 'em: time investment.

CRPGs are faster and easier to play, can fill boring hours in the manner of TV, can occasionally be social* (in the form of actual human interaction, while the gameplay is still geared towards kill, level, loot), and don't have the difficulty of scheduling and running them.

*I don't even think this is the primary draw, as in this sense, paper and pencil has the advantage.

Quote from: danbuter;469261And that 16% accounts for more people than everyone combined  involved in tabletop rpg's.

Prolly true on that one.

Quote from: danbuter;469261And that 16% accounts for more people than everyone combined  involved in tabletop rpg's.

Actually, not. At my convention games ladies consistently show up to represent, and 1 in 6 represents with the traditional RPG's... If I run a Fudge game, Spycraft, or BSG, the numbers are even better, and with Supers games, almost 50% are female.

My home games run about 30% ladies, and my game design workshops have more females than males attend and participate. The young ladies seem to get more done too, at least towards completing games... The majority of the guys quit before they finish designing a game or RPG.

To add a note of sexism that I feel is totally misisng from this thread.

How may hot girls play RPGs?

Now I have has some hot girls pretend to be interested but it's just the same as them pretending they have always been Orient supporters or love to listen to Early 80s German Synth Pop but once they have their wicked way with you the truth will out.

So excluding partners as that woudl be mean, how many hot gamer chicks do you know? How many if you exclude Vampire Larps ?

Now to balance up the scales I have to say I am constantly amazed how ugly male gamers are as a group. Does gaming make them ugly or does the hobby attract ugly people or is it just a case that gamers spend a lot of time in dark basements eating cheetos so they move towards fat, pale and isipid which makes them appear superficially unattractive?

Quote from: beejazz;469250What?

one of those "conflicts" needs to be "violence" ^^ Good catch.

The hobby is really not such a monolothic thing.  I don't think you can say the 'hobby is sexist' in any particularly meaningful way.  

You might be able to say there's lots of sexism in the hobby, but I suspect that the vast majority of people playing games are still doing so in home games with little contact with other games, I'm not how sure we could really say.  (And furthermore, if there is sexism in these contexts, there's precious little the publisher of a new game can do to reach it.)

You could talk about convention culture, but that's not really the hobby (and would likely be different depending on cultural context anyway.)

I also find that female gamers are, on average, considerably more interested in in-game relationships than in-game violence, etc. But I don't see RPGs on the whole as being sexist, just because there's apparently something of a mismatch there. And I'm pretty sure the women I've gamed with haven't seen them that way either.

ENWorld and RPG.net are the worst places on the Internet.

RPGs are largely by boys for boys and I'm sure it shows. But as long as genuinely offensive misogyny is rooted out, I don't see it as a very big deal. As far as I know, knitting forums aren't wringing their hands about how to be more inclusive of men.

Quote from: jibbajibba;469265Now to balance up the scales I have to say I am constantly amazed how ugly male gamers are as a group. Does gaming make them ugly or does the hobby attract ugly people or is it just a case that gamers spend a lot of time in dark basements eating cheetos so they move towards fat, pale and isipid which makes them appear superficially unattractive?

I suspect that as a general rule, it's a hobby that attracts more readers than runners.

The hobby as a whole is not sexist, but particular works within it and some individuals in it are, and there are few if any direct consequences for being so most of the time.

Its nowhere near as sexist as it used to be, purely because there's a lot more second-generation gamers coming through who happen to be female.

There's still a lot of Beavis-and-Butthead types out there sadly.

Gah not here too. A thread about how supers derive their powers from the mythos, awesome. Seven seperate threads over on the big purple over the space of a day (culminating in the enrichment of the now sitebanned soon to be author by about three grand), gives me stomach pains.

Look, it's this simple. The hobby was and still is dominated by D&D, taking most of its inspiration from the LotR, which is pretty much medieval, as in that time period when women didn't usually feature largely. On top of that earlier RPGs were mostly targeted at young male audiences, since they were the only ones who were buying. This is why when women did make an appearance, they often had excessive boobage.

No conspiracy, no stereotyping, just economics meeting hormones.

Since then there have been swathes of rpgs, including some pretty mainstream ones, which have been very even handed gender wise. Maybe that's the target market growing up, maybe that's society growing up. Who knows.

Gamers are usually, in my experience, a fairly normal mix of people. You get some dicks and you get mostly average sorts and a few rare gems. Just like in everything else. Pontificating in some sort of extended angry navel gazing is neither realistic nor fun, its a platform for an agenda. Maybe it's a righteous agenda, maybe there are real problems in some parts of the world, but we play for fun.

So go play.