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April 15th, 2008
03:57 pm - On Gender Disparity in RPGs
There has been some recent controversy over gender and gaming, bringing up the spectre of evolutionary psychology again that I last talked about in 2006 commentary on an article by Chris Crawford.
Edit: I wrote more on my issues with evolutionary psychology in general in a post on my personal LJ.
( Details of posts behind the cut )
First of all, I'd like to explain why I am annoyed by this and what difference I think it makes. The evolutionary explanation is that the D&D gender disparity is "natural" for how RPGs are constructed. If that is accepted among the set of people that care about the gender disparity in RPGs, it has a couple effects.
1) In practical terms, it encourages focusing on ways to construe role-playing completely differently -- i.e. RPGs about completely different subjects, or very different storytelling-focused systems like Everway -- as opposed to addressing issues like having a woman with a straining bodice on the cover. I feel that presenting . For example, Werewolf: The Apocalypse is very much explicitly about taking risks and adventure for glory -- explicitly so. However, my experience is that it has been popular with women.
2) Presenting the difference as essential suggests that to make games appealing to women, they must be less appealing to men. I don't believe this is true. It is interesting that Tweet cites Finland as achieving gender parity, because it seems to me that in Finland -- not only is there more gender parity, but gaming in general is relatively more popular than in the U.S. I suspect that bringing more women into the hobby could make the hobby more popular with men.
3) It suggests that women tend to not be interested in competitive games such as trading card games, requiring more "story and personality". While I don't have any hard numbers on this, my experience is that more abstract boardgames and card games have more female participation than tabletop role-playing games and wargames.
I also take issue with the evolutionary logic used, similar to my issues with Chris Crawford's article. I think they're a bit of a side-track from the gaming issues, though, so I'm not going to detail them here. (cf. my evolutionary psychology post on my personal LJ.)
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