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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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February 5th, 2008
10:26 pm - Revising "Gender Roles in RPG Texts"
There has been a fair amount of discussion about gender in RPGs regarding D&D 4th edition -- some on the WotC Gleemax board Astrid's Parlor, but also elsewhere.
On the amusing side, there was the controversy over whether female dragonborn (i.e. bipedal dragon-like creatures) should have human-like boobs. Badgerbag had an amusing post on that, "Boobs, butts, and platypi" and Metafilter post "But what about the platypi?".
On the slightly more serious side, there was some discussion of my study from several years ago Gender Roles in RPG Texts. In discussion of D&D 4th edition, I brought up the question of the characters used in rules examples -- in a thread first started back in November, "Do Female Example Characters Matter?"
There were some fair criticisms brought up. I had meant for a while to revise and/or extend that essay, but naturally other things came up. Since this was on a D&D forum, naturally my analysis of the 3.0 edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. My conclusion about that was that it made a notable effort to be inclusive of women, with two women among the four recurring example characters. However, I did cite that the women seemed markedly less effective. In the thread, I shortened it to the following summary. Totalling up all their actions within example combats within the Players Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, here is how the four example characters fared:Jozan (M): Casts three spells in combat, and hits twice (out of two attacks) for around 17 total damage
Tordek (M): Hits twice (out of two attacks) for 26 total damage
Mialee (F): Casts no spells and does no damage in combat
Lidda (F): Hits once (out of three attacks) for 3 total damage
Now, I consider this a pretty subtle effect -- many people might not consciously notice it. However, I think it does come across in the characters come across. Intriguingly, one poster complained that I should be paying attention to whether women were portrayed as "weaker, cattier, and less capable" -- yet considered whether they actually succeeded at anything irrelevant to how capable they were portrayed.
Another poster suggested that my choice of products to review was biased. He gave as a list of products that would lead to the opposite conclusion -- Space: 1889 (GDW), HarnManor (Columbia Games), The Way of the Unicorn (AEG), Delta Force (Task Force Games), Star Trek: the Next Generation (Last Unicorn) and Street Fighter (White Wolf). Interested in this, I went through the only one of those that I have at hand in my collection, Space:1889. My findings were: There are 19 rules examples using named characters, and none of them include women. There are also thirty-something examples without any names, where they use "he" for the generic pronoun throughout the book. There are five unnamed sample NPCs on page 39 of which one is female -- a maid.
There are also a great many characters mentioned as part of the background -- some real and some fictional. In particular, there is detailed background in Victorian Age section on pages 22-33, and the fictional Mars and Venus background sections (pages 148-200). There are also some characters and background scattered through the rest of the book. There are roughly 45 named characters by my count. With the exception of a special section on page 32, there are three women mentioned: Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth I (mentioned once), and Miss Jennie Jerome (mentioned once as the American wife of Lord Randolph Churchill). There is, however, a special section on page 32 entitled "Remarkable Woman" which describes seven women of the period.
Now, this is certainly more inclusive than some other games. It has a special section where it pointedly mentions women of the period. However, there is something off about the approach where women are mentioned in a special women's section rather than anywhere else in the book.
Now, I am sure that there are RPG books out there where women are portrayed more favorably. I will see about including some studies of these. However, I wouldn't want to deliberately seek out such works for the study. One poster did have the fair suggestion that I should study many of the key popular works (like GURPS, the HERO System, etc.). However, I only have so much time. Perhaps I will see about regularly adding a game or two to the set.
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October 12th, 2007
01:33 pm - More on D&D for Girls
So as a followup to my earlier post, "Cerise Magazine, September 2007 and 'D&D for Girls'".
Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress
I did read Shelly Mazzanoble's book, Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to the Dungeons & Dragons Game, now that it is actually out. Unfortunately, I lost my copy of it, so I'm not prepared to doing a long formal review. However, there were two reviews by others that I should mention.
Robyn Fleming gave a mixed but overall positive review of the book in the October 2007 Issue of Cerise -- which also has many other worthy articles. On the other hand, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) bluegargantua gave it a rather scathing review on his LJ -- though he did put in some caveats after his wife defended the book.
Personally, I'm somewhere in between. I did like descriptions of the play sessions, but the introductions about the game itself were painful to me. I realize that I am not the target market. Nevertheless, I am fairly sure that if I gave it to the 11-year-old I know interested in D&D that she would quickly become disgusted after reading about Mazzanoble having the DM make a character for her, since she was put off by the complex rules and math.
Judged solely as a gateway for girls to be introduced to the game (i.e. a guide to playing as billed), it seems quite limited to me. There is not much concrete information, and it is written to a narrow audience. On the other hand, I think it has something of a dual purpose. It is a sponsored marketing piece, not just to get new paying customers of D&D products, but to change the image of D&D players more broadly. It raises the visibility of not just female D&D players, but "girly-girls" (as Mazzanoble describes herself).
Astrid's Parlor
On a less mixed note, I am fairly pleased with how the new Wizards of the Coast forum Astrid's Parlor is turning out. It is named after Mazzanoble's original D&D character described in the book, and is intended for topics focused on or related to female gamers. There remain some detractors, but it is far more promising than my original Cerise article would have suggested.
Marketing Games to Girls: The Bigger Picture
I did note two recent articles on the topic of marketing games to girls, via the IRIS Network Forums. These deal with the computer/console game market primarily, but I think that could have an influence on the tabletop games industry -- at least in showing what is possible.
First is the UK Times Online article by Leo Lewis, Nintendo's women gamers could transform market. It is about the market in Japan, where the article reports, Japanese women have overtaken their male counterparts to become the biggest users of Nintendo's Wii and DS machines in a seismic shift that the company said would "transform the video games industry."
Second is the GameDailyBiz article by David Radd, "Game Marketers Increasingly Targeting Women". It focused on an interview with Maleea Barnett, former VP of Atari now working for NeoEdge Networks, a company that focuses on advertising-supported online video games. They study users to put in targetted ads, and their most recent press report notes that hottest trend in gaming is the market of women in her late 30s or early 40s who playing on an average PC -- as opposed to men in their 20s playing on expensive consoles.
Jane Austen Playing D&D?
On a related note about D&D marketing, I came across an interesting reference. I am almost finished with the Naomi Novik's terrific new novel, Empire of Ivory -- the fourth book in the Temeraire series. As I turned it over, I noticed the top quote on the back cover read:
"Enthralling reading--it's like Jane Austen playing Dungeons & Dragons with Eragon's Christopher Paolini."
It's attributed to a Time magazine review of the first Temeraire book, His Majesty's Dragon. What's intriguing is that a Time magazine reviewer was giving a favorable view of the book by comparing it to playing Dungeons & Dragons -- and further that the book publisher then decided that it was the best quote to sell the book with. There are plenty of people who find the quote offputting, but I guess not so many since it is apparently selling quite well. From a search on the web, I found what I guess is original article on the web, Lev Grossman's 5 Great New Books. The full mention is: A British naval captain boards a French warship (this being the Napoleonic era) and discovers a dragon's egg in the hold. This does not surprise him. In his reality, dragons are in common use by the military; popular breeds include Winchesters and Regal Coppers. But dragons bond at birth, and when the egg hatches at sea, our hero, Captain Laurence, must become the dragon's rider--which distresses him, since, as everyone knows, "no woman of sense and character would deliberately engage her affections on an aviator." Laurence's induction into the strange, insular world of 19th century dragon riders and his unfolding relationship with his highly intelligent mount, Temeraire, make enthralling reading--it's like Jane Austen playing Dungeons & Dragons with Eragon's Christopher Paolini.
I've liked Novik's series a lot, but trying to picture Jane Austen playing D&D just leaves me blank. Anyway, I just thought I'd share that bit.
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September 12th, 2007
03:37 pm - Cerise Magazine, September 2007 and "D&D for Girls"
The September 2007 Issue of Cerise has been out for over a week now. Cerise is a monthly webzine intended as a resource by and for women gamers.
There are a bunch of articles in this one of interest, including:
Related to that, I also have a news article of sorts there regarding Shelly Mazzanoble's new book, Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to the Dungeons & Dragons Game, and the controversy of a set of threads on the Dungeons & Dragons boards. The article is entitled
It's not my best work, written quickly after a specific request for an article on the topic in the IRIS Network forums. And in the three weeks since I wrote it, there is now a new sub-forum in D&D 4E boards called Astrid's Parlor. It doesn't have a fully defined mission statement yet, but at least it now has a set of posting guidelines.
The top-viewed topics include the designated thread for complaints about the forum ("The 'I Hate Astrid's Parlor' Thread") along with content like "Art of Females" ; "The Cult of the Chainmail Bikini" ; "The merits of emphasized roleplaying in attracting female gamers" ; "Pink Dice" ; "Are female gamers different?" ; and "Races that Appeal to Female Gamers". There is a fair amount of activity, and it shows some promise -- but it is clearly still dealing with the early stages of dealing with gender issues. Still, given what I first reported on in the article, I think the forum is a good sign.
A few other feminism-related links over the past several months, while I'm at it:
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June 12th, 2007
11:20 am - June 2007 issue of Cerise
The June 2007 Issue of Cerise is out -- with the theme of "The Making of a Gamer". This is a monthly webzine of the feminist gaming site, The IRIS Network. Similar to last month's premiere, this issue is mainly video game focused, but there are some general articles. Also, this is a call for people to submit RPG articles for the July issue.
Incidentally, there was apparently a bunch of discussion of Cerise after the first issue (May 2007). It was covered in Molten Boron's post "Kotaku Commenters Prove the Necessity of a Women's Gaming Magazine" -- about an announcement about Cerise for Kotaku in "Cerise, The Mag For Women Gamers".
A hilarious link I got from IRIS discussion was this link on "He, For One, Does Not Welcome Our New Wii Overlords" -- about a self-identified hard-core gamer, expressing his fears that the popularity of the Wii with women and other non-traditional-gamer-types, will undermine the development of hard-core games.
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May 3rd, 2007
09:11 am - Cerise Magazine, May 2007
Via ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) feminist_gamers, I noted Cerise: May 2007 and Call for Submissions. Cerise is a monthly "gaming magazine for women"(that covers video games, tabletop games, and live action role-playing). (For those like me who didn't recognize it, cerise is a shade of red that comes from the French word for cherry.)
In the first issue (May 2007), the articles focus on video games -- but that just means that we need people to submit tabletop RPG and larp articles for the June issue over the next two weeks (submissions are due by May 15).
There was an interesting article by Lindsey Galloway that studies the history of the girl's games movement following the breakout success of Barbie Fashion Designer in 1996. However, the efforts to create girl-targetted games foundered after that, which she analyzes is due to a stereotyped and exclusionary direction of the effort. It ties in my mind a bit to a discussion on Levi's Gamecraft forum -- The Micropress Trend and in particular the followup thread Micropress [split] that was kicked off by Mike Holmes comment "All the female gamers who are going to play are in now, you see... there's no untapped demographic left."
As far as demographics, I was reminded of a February interview with Ryan Dancey as Fear the Boot Interview Episode #1. He said that "Most people who play tabletop role-playing games were 18 years and older. We found that they were from middle to upper-middle class incomes. We found that they tended to live in suburban areas, as opposed to rural or urban areas. About 20% of them were women." His analysis was that hobby games thrived where people did not have easy access to other venues. i.e. In a city, people would tend to go out rather than play tabletop games at home.
I'd take what he says with a big grain of salt, but it's interesting to reflect on. I am doubtful that anything is going to change overnight, but I think there is room for the RPG demographic to change and expand.
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March 21st, 2007
02:51 pm - The IRIS Network
So there's a new gaming forum up. The IRIS Network is described as a feminist-oriented community for gamers. A post clarifies it as:
While I just described the forums as "feminist-oriented", this isn't a community just for feminists. It's for women of all walks of life who count gaming among their passions, men interested in networking with women gamers and perhaps learning more about inclusive game design in the process, and, really, anyone who has ever felt that they have been excluded from most games and/or gaming communities at large.
Via it, I found mr_orgue's seven-part postings of a gender analysis of Dragon magazine covers, starting with Part 1 (with each one linking to the next at the bottom).
I started a thread on Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to D&D -- a book from Wizards of the Coast slated for release in September already discussed in a Story Games thread.
I'd toss out some possible topics for discussion:
I've mentioned before vito_excalibur's excellent send-up of Wizard's comic-book drawing guide, where she reverses the drawing style and posing of men and women. However, I discovered to my chagrin that I hadn't actually posted about it here.
In jimboboz's post "Gender and writing differences", he cites some studies on differences between men and women's writing styles, and ponders their application to role-playing.
And there is Meera Barry's "Illegal Gods: The Role of Women", where she talks about art, characters, and pronoun use in her plan for her game Illegal Gods.
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March 7th, 2007
12:33 am - Prostitution in the 'Verse
So this weekend I played a one-shot game set in the Firefly/Serenity universe using the Spirit of the Century rules. This was partly a chance to play in Firefly/Serenity, which a number of people expressed interest in, and also a test run of the rules. We didn't end up testing the rules very much, though we learned the basics, but we had a lot of fun.
My concept for the one-shot was using a Companions Guild ship -- an armed scout with its own security which was going on missions of interest to the Guild. So I always thought that Companions were a wasted premise in Firefly. They were in principle a set up to explore issues of sexuality, but they were never really used. Thus, I made up a bunch of pregenerated characters for the Guild ship. A key idea for these was using real-world photos of people from the Old West -- an idea taken from Floyd C. Wesel's pregenerated characters for his Serenity RPG convention games, The Crew of The Symphony.
Madeline played Fannie Granger, the captain -- an older Companion who had given up active service and married, but whose husband died in the war.
Liz played Lilly Shepis, a journeyman Companion working as second to Fannie.
Cynthia played Pearl Hart -- originally an NCO of the security forces, but we rewrote her to be the commander since no one picked the commander.
Heather played Lalu Chang, the loud-mouthed engineer.
Bill played Galvin Holloway, a former officer who since the war has become a professional gambler.
Bob played Eliza Collins, the genius but still girly doctor.
I noted that there was no cross-gender play (Bob is a woman). I had made an extra male character, Kenne Black, who was to be the commander of the security forces. However, no one picked him and we wrote him out. There was an extra male character -- and indeed Liz usually plays a male character, but this time she went for Lilly. I've got a page with all the character sheets,
The Coronado and her Crew
The scenario was that they heard that a rich man had beaten up a Companion, and headed over to the planet, Newhall, to investigate. They found a complicated setup there -- the woman beaten up was not a Companion, but rather someone who had been kicked out of the Companion Training Grounds. However, they still wanted to set straight the issues on the planet there.
Bill commented that this seemed very much like "Whores in the Vineyard" to him -- the western theme plus the power of the PCs to come in and solve the planet's problems was indeed much like a Dogs scenario. I hadn't planned that intentionally, but it fit. (The mock title reminds me of Brand and Mo's Bitches in the Vineyard game, incidentally.)
So the NPCs I had were: Kira, the woman who was beaten; Terrence, the secretly retarded man who did it; Jordan, Terrence's rich brother who owns half the planet; Sheriff Wei Lau, the local constable; and Sheydra, acting head of the local Training Grounds.
At one point, Liz used her "Uncanny Hunch" stunt to hand me a note which contained her hunch -- "Kira is protecting Jordan in some way. She knows somthing about him and is in love with him." We ran out of time and so had to wrap up the game a little abruptly, but everyone was really into it.
Nearly all of this was in-character dialogue and simple skill rolls, so we didn't do much with the system. We only got to serious conflict near the end, and at that point we were trying to get through quickly. We did try earlier using the social conflict rules for Galvin's poker game with Jordan. However, we cut that short as we agreed that it just felt too slow. It only involved one PC, and there were no maneuvers or other choices in gambling as written.
Of course, the elephant in the room was that the whole adventure was centered on prostitution, which we often commented on. For example, Madeline commented at some point, "We have a brand to protect." There were a bunch of questions and discussion about what should be done about the Training Grounds, and what the local people's attitudes were.
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February 26th, 2007
04:06 pm - Women of the Century
So there was some recent controversy over Spirit of the Century, starting I think with peaseblossom's post on Friday about SotC entitled Pulp, gender, genre, which has garnered well over a hundred comments.
drivingblind responded in comments, then had his own summary That thread, where he "So at the heart of all the hullaballoo portion of things was how the art was done, and what sort of message the art conveyed. There was very little hullaballoo about the *text*, because pretty much most of what she said about the *text* of the book that was problematic was spot on correct. We *did* get the male to female ratios wrong, and we *did* somewhat accidentally let the list of character types stay male-centric. I mea culpa'd on that part, accepted it and noted it as something we're sorry about and need to work on, and then started swinging at the parts I didn't agree with... which was mostly about the darn art!"
Coincidentally, Brand Robins has posted on a very similar topic with some thoughts starting with illustrations of women for the Conan RPG, and about genre and sex more generally:
Why is that Woman on Her Hands and Knees?
A Question for the Ladies
But Brand, don't You Like Sex? (RANT)
the_tall_man had three posts in response:
Dirty, Filthy Sexist Propaganda (also a GameCraft thread)
Integrity, relevancy, openness, honesty, awareness, and provocation
Views on Genre
Now, by sheer coincidence, I just played Spirit of the Century for the first time this Thursday (game-mastered by Brian Isikoff as part of EndGame Oakland's Thursday Evening Role-playing). And I played a female character -- a woman reporter named Cat Sullivan -- modelled after Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday or Catherine Hepburn in Woman of the Year (whom I had mixed up at the time).
There were five other players. Karen played "Ginny Steel" (a tomboy mechanic, a variant on Sally Slick); Chris Bennett played "Master Kwan" (an oriental stage magician with a talent for disappearing); Sam Stephenson played "Genome Joe" (an over-the-top geek with bio-manipulation and quantum teleporting); Paul Strack played "Dr. Octavo" (another stage-magician type with sword-cane and knives); and Robert played "David Willingsworth" (an English blue-blood).
A lot of the players seemed to be interested in the character -- at least, I had a ton of suggestions for her Aspects. I eventually went with "Nose for News", "Quick Change", "First on the Scene", "I Know a Guy", "Just One More Thing", "Great Gams", "Let Me Check in My Purse", "In Over Her Head", and "Anything For The Story". The "Great Gams" Aspect was Karen's suggestion, which I immediately took up ("gams" is old slang for legs).
I think she got along fairly well. She didn't have any obvious combat schtick, and took back seat to a degree in a fight. I had given her a gun but only Average skill, and I never actually used it in the game since the more combative characters handled things. There was a bit when I went to distract some German guards while Ginny slipped into the engine room, where they assumed that she was slutty just for coming by to chat them up ("We've heard American women are like that"). Notably, it was plausible for them to think that, but it seemed strange for them to say that to her -- making it sound more like a commentary. The Russell/Hepburn fast-talking reporter type would hang out with men frequently. One line that stuck with me from the game: Dr. Octavo: There are things which Man was not meant to know.
Cat Sullivan: Exactly. That's why there are women.
The larger point, though, is that I think the pulp genre does have a fair amount of racism and sexism built into its tropes. I've commented earlier in my LJ on Fu Manchu and Orientalism. Now, Fred responded in comments about the racist/sexist side of pulp saying, "From my perspective, we put more than enough stuff about the ugly bits into the game. We didn't want the game to be *about* the ugly bits of the past -- that's a message that runs counter to the light, breezy fun vibe we wanted. So we hung a lantern on it, said it was there so you don't get ugly surprises if you go researching the materials. But to make it a big point of the game? No thanks, honestly. "
I think that if you want to have pulp without the racist and sexist bits, you have to re-think things to a fair degree. If you want to avoid the ugly bits of the genre, then you have to actively work to change it. I think the Spirit of the Century does make some effort by having characters like Sally Slick, but I don't think it does enough. As peaseblossom noted, it does do better than many if not most RPGs. For example, I discuss Deadlands in my essay Gender Roles in RPG Texts, which I criticized by its "sidebar" approach -- essentially doing the genre straight and then adding a sidebar about women.
You should ideally have character generation that treats gender and race as a core element rather than a sidebar. Fred acknowledges this, luckily. Having taken an interest in Spirit of the Century, I might look at doing some material for it that addresses the imbalance. Looking at my own work, I think of an old HERO System adventure from the early nineties I wrote, a pulp adventure in the South Seas called The Land Which Time Forgot. I had only mild nods in it -- one of the six PCs was a woman (though she was a tough "Rugged Explorer"), and two were Asian. I ponder updating some of this, both for my current sensibilities and the Spirit system.
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February 13th, 2007
03:24 pm - Women in Historical Campaigns
A few older links here on gender in RPGs, with a particular eye for historical campaigns. Last month, Peaseblossom on the 20' by 20' Room posted a some links (care of the 9th Carnival of Feminist SF/F), including discussion of sexism in historical RPGs compared to sexism in SF/F in general.
Specifically, simadrienne wrote "It's not discrimination, it's historical" (22 Dec 2006) in response to this thread in roleplayers. (She notably refers to this amusing strip from "Home on the Strange" by Ferrett Steinmetz and Veronica Pare.) On the side of SF/F in general, Peaseblossom pointed out Richard Pilbeam's post on Grind House, Sin City, Male Priviledge, ... (23 Dec 2006).
The historical is certainly on my mind at the moment since I'm preparing to GM a game set in the 19th century China/Korea. Thus, I am thinking some about how to deal with characters of both sexes.
Now, I'm not doing straight history, but rather an alternate history with fantasy elements based on Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels. The novels differ from historical gender roles -- traced to the divergent point of tamed dragons. The pilots of dragons are a non-traditional military role, and some dragons prefer female pilots over male. In England, only a small fraction of pilots are women. However, in Novik's China, military pilots are almost all female. In the novels, it was explained that being a pilot is the only military position open to women, and families required to send a member for military service preferred to send less-valued daughters rather than sons.
I'm not sure exactly what my approach will be in the game, but I thought I'd just toss out some of the ideas I come across. I should note that most (6 out of 8) of the players are women. I ran another historical campaign with roughly the same group (the Vinland Campaign) before which worked well.
Now, in principle women in 19th century Korea are more restricted than in my hypothetical Vinland based on pre-Christian Iceland of the historical sagas. If I were running a game where the PCs were members in good social standing, then I think having women PCs would be tricky. This is one of the reasons why I am planning instead on setting the game amidst the rebellious groups. The rebellious groups are set on breaking down the old order, and though they are quite different from each other, most give more rights to women (and not coincidentally recruit from women for support). The primary part is probably disaffected peasants, roughly proto-communists. There are also different groups as the outlawed Catholics, followers or refugees of the Chinese Taiping Rebellion (heretical Christians who professed complete equality), or students of the new Tonghak religion. It's also worth noting that the shamanic leaders in Korea are exclusively women.
Of course, there are still many more possibilities for women characters who are exceptions to the rule. For example, in the Vinland game it was unusual for women to be involved in war. However, one of the PCs was a woman set on vengeance who disguised herself as her brother in order to personally avenge her parents and brother who had died in exile. Women of unusual qualities, skills, or circumstances will differ from the norm -- and it is fairly common for PCs to differ from the norm.
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February 11th, 2007
12:05 am - Macho Women With Guns, Redux
So last time my Vinland/Buffy/Amber group met, we ran through a one-shot adventure of Macho Women With Guns -- the same scenario which I ran for the End Game Oakland January 2007 Mini-Con (cf. my Con Report on it).
The most obvious difference was that while the con game had only three players, for this I had seven players -- five women (Liz, Heather, Cyn, Lee, Bob) and two men (Bill and Eric). I only had six pregenerated characters (though in retrospect I did have the sample character from the book), but Liz and Lee decided to play twin Bat-winged Bimbos Fluffy and Muffy. As a beer-and-pretzels game, this went much much better than my con game. Having the con as a practice run helped, but mainly it was just that everyone got into the silly fun of shooting up sexist men. Cynthia in particular got into her role as Sister "Mad" Maxine, our obligatory Renegade Nun on Wheels who had taken a Vow of Violence.
For this game, I think the large size worked well. However, I can see that we'll have see how things work with a larger group in other games. Previously we had seven people total -- but Bob and Eric are both new, and Heather wasn't in the last campaign. I think the energy level can be good, we just have to figure out how to use it best. Also, there's a physical crowding issue in our living room, but that's easily solveable -- especially if the game doesn't involve a big hex-map in the middle.
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October 16th, 2006
12:11 am - Clarifying my last post...
Some clarification regarding the last post, "Gamer Gatherings, and Gender". I think it came across badly, because it started out as linking to some other threads, and I tossed in a mish-mash of other ideas as I wrote it.
The main original idea from that post is having a small gaming event similar to the BlogHer convention. Note that BlogHer is attended by men and has some male speakers -- I went there, for example. However, it is about the topic of women bloggers.
So a parallel event would be a minicon ("GameHer", perhaps) which had a focus on women in gaming. So it would strongly encourage games run by women, with some nods to women game designers as well. However, it could definitely be attended by men. I'm not sure if there's should be a hard-and-fast rule about men running games. I'm not sure if a bunch of guys running "Weapons of the Gods" or stuff from "Another Fine Mess" would be satisfying for this. For example, one rule could be that games run by men should have only women PCs. However, I'm not sure a hard rule would be needed or appropriate.
I think an ideal venue would be like 3DBcon -- which is a small area in a cafe with food, and a nice atmosphere.
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October 13th, 2006
11:56 pm - Gamer Gatherings, and Gender
So I met with some other people for a local gaming meetup thing last week -- mostly unified in interest in recent indie games. It went pretty well, and it got me thinking about social context and meeting other gamers. I'm thinking of writing out my history of gaming groups rather than gaming campaigns. Generally speaking, I think my most common start of a tabletop group is having two people as the core and then accreting others around that. Usually we would then move into having a core of three or four, and a less commited group of others around this. The other cases were joining a university club, or joining a pre-existing gaming group.
The idea of the Silicon Valley meetup seems more like what I experienced as the university club environment -- where you have a larger pool of 12-24 interested members, and then different groups split off from that to run individual games. This is unsurprising since many of the members are ex-Stanford.
One thing that was slightly disappointing to me was that the initial meetup was I think nine men and one woman. This is fairly common among gamers, I know. I am in three active gaming groups at the moment, and one is majority women but the other two are all-male. Still, I wonder about ways to change that. It seems like the circumstances are similar to those in the tech industry -- where there are a lot more men involved. In tech, this has motivated a few women-focused events like the BlogHer conference. There is some interesting discussion of inclusivity in tech events, like Chris Messina's post, "The Future of White Boy clubs". However, my impression is that BlogHer is a much more visible success than inclusivity at general tech events.
Regarding RPGs, a few weeks ago on Fair Game, Meg Baker wrote "Complex thoughts on a simple meeting", discussing her experiences with other women at GenCon 06. They talked about doing a women's meetup at the next GenCon. Given the proliferation of minicons like EndGame Mini-Con (Oct 21) and 3DBcon (Oct 22), it seems like there could be room for a similar women-focused event, that perhaps concentrated on female game designers and game-masters.
Are there issues with this other than logistical ones? If so, what are your opposing suggestions for inclusivity? I'll re-link to Madeline Ferwerda's excellent post, "Really long discussion on specific things to do to better include women in gaming" for some ideas. I expect there to be some issues, but I'm not great at predicting them. (For example, in the general theme of female players and social dynamics, peaseblossom had post about blaming female players, "How Much XP For a Blow Job", and which provoked some response.)
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April 23rd, 2006
07:18 am - More on Women in Gaming
Madeline has posted a Really long discussion on specific things to do to better include women in gaming. If you haven't already, you should read that.
I'd like to follow up briefly about my comment on feminism. As I said previously, "I think it's necessary to consider women before you can be feminist, but including women isn't by itself feminist. Actually feminist gaming would encourage non-normative statements about gender and gender roles. "
So, to me it would be great for games to be more inclusive of women -- but really, it's not like that by itself is an important feminist goal. Unlike (say) golf, there's no business networking or social status associated with role-playing. So getting more women into role-playing isn't going to directly address the inequalities of women in society. Simply having women at the table may shift the gaming subculture towards more awareness of women and gender roles; but only indirectly.
More fully feminist gaming would be for the act of gaming itself to raise awareness of gender roles and gender inequalities. The term "consciousness-raising" and consciousness-raising groups have dropped out of use since the seventies, but I think they still have importance. As an example within the RPG world, I was intrigued by Thomas Robertson's recent post "Educate me... feminism!". People are not universally aware of the terms and issues.
I think that games can raise consciousness, but to do that, they have to be about more than jockeying for status or creating a story that emulates what you see on television, in novels, or other media. What I find curious is the ideal of story that some people hold for games -- that making a good story is a fundamentally different goal than having an entertaining game. I don't see this. We see normative stories all the time on television and in books. I think it's interesting to compare the organization of games to early "Consciousness-raising Guidelines". They emphasize that it's important not to give each person their turn; to always express their own view; and to create an atmosphere for open expression. I think it would be interesting to create a parallel of this in gaming, and it's something I'll be pondering myself.
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April 18th, 2006
05:46 pm - Including Women Gamers
So, I recently noticed Matt Wilson's post of "A Feminist Gaming Manifesto" and (Manifesto, Part 2) (found via John Harper at Attacks of Opportunity). This I think followed from Vincent Bakers' "A problem for feminists/pro-feminists", which in turn fell out from a bunch of discussion of Macho-ness (starting I think with Tony Lower-Basch's "Are you Muy Macho?").
So Matt Wilson noted that the recent Forge Midwest gathering had 6 or 7 women out of 50 people. So I'm pondering this compared to other conventions I've been to recently. My local mainstream conventions (ConQuest and KublaCon) seem to have roughly 15% women. I'm preparing to go to Knutpunkt 2006, which I think has maybe fifty-something women out of 147 registered people (hard to tell with Finnish names). Last November I went to AmberCon NorthWest, which had 38 women out of 85 registered.
So, the question is, what drives this? I have a general essay on "Gender Disparity in RPGs", for example. However, it doesn't address the specific question about the differences among these communities. So there are fictional content differences, structural differences, and style differences.
Offhand, I'm not sure. Structurally, Amber games and most Forge games are more like mainstream tabletop games, though they have differences. They are generally played with a group of friends in a campaign. Forge games tend towards short but still multi-session campaigns. Larps, especially Scandanavian art larps, tend to be organized as events with a different social context. For example, the Parlor Larps series are always one-shots for 5 to 8 players. The relatively complex rules are a barrier to entry for traditional and to some degree Forge games. On the other hand, they also allow for more spread of ideas via publishing -- so I'm not sure of that.
In content, they're also pretty diverse. My Knutepunkt games last year were the most distant from traditional tabletop RPGs -- partying at a disco, a bunch of cats in a nightclub, a gameshow, and a group of child scouts lost in the woods. However, both Amber games and Forge games tend to have similar content to traditional tabletop. Amber is modern fantasy, while Forge games tend to follow common tabletop genres (Wild West, horror, superheroes, samurai, etc.).
So I think I go back to my hypothesis from the essay -- that there is no magic bullet in terms of structure or genre for the gender gap in RPGs. Rather, it is in the implementation. As Matt Wilson says in his manifesto: Consider both genders in your development. Too often, both writing and play of RPGs assume men and then belated handle women separately, via a sidebar or special handling.
However, this isn't even feminist, in my opinion. Matt Wilson's manifesto is more a "Include Women Gamers" manifesto, compared to the current default which is to largely ignore them. I think it's necessary to consider women before you can be feminist, but including women isn't by itself feminist. Actually feminist gaming would encourage non-normative statements about gender and gender roles. But that's another topic. It's a good and necessary first step to consider and include women.
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February 3rd, 2006
02:45 pm - Evolutionary Stupidity...
WTF?!?
So via feminist_gamers, I found an old Escapist article "Women in Games" by Chris Crawford (from last November). His article is an analysis of what women want in their games, and he decides to use evolutionary psychology. I am dumbfounded... Words do not express... Well, just read: In spelling, arithmetic, cooking or any of a thousand other skills, women and men are closely matched, but when it comes to social reasoning, the advantage women enjoy is greater than any other advantage they possess. Thus, women are highly motivated to exercise and develop their social reasoning skills.
We should therefore expect that modern women might well want to exploit this talent in their entertainment. And in fact that turns out to be the case. The classic female mass entertainments are the soap opera and the bodice-ripper.
...
All this leads to a suggestion for what might work for women in games: social reasoning. The ideal game for women, according to this simplified model, would be some sort of interactive soap opera or bodice ripper, presenting the player with complex social problems as she seeks the ideal mate. Contrast this with the kind of software currently being offered to women and you can see why so little progress has been made with this group. I think stupidities here are pretty fucking obvious, but let me rip into his logic for a bit.
1) The problem he addresses is largely false. Women do play computer games in large quantities -- perhaps under 50%, but over 40%. The latest data is BBC Report on UK gamers, but that confirms other findings such as the Interactive Digital Software Association surveys.
2) Evolutionary psychology is a particularly stupid field for his purposes. If you want to market computer games to women, you should take modern culture into account rather than trying to design games to appeal to the innate genetics of paleolithic gatherers. In other words, use real psychology. There is no need to delve into what is genetically essential versus culturally-determined, and doing so simply muddles the point. I might suggest he look at real modern data, as well as actually talking to some women who aren't grunting and gathering nuts while they nurse their babies.
3) The evolutionary logic for Crawford's claims is extremely thin. Like many, he postulates that men's brains are evolved as hunters while women's are evolved as mothers and gatherers. However, hominids in general are not evolved as hunters. We are primarily gatherers. Hunting for our branch came late in the game, well after our development of tool use. Homo Habilis did not hunt at all -- they used tools for digging, gathering, and hacking at carrion. So it is only for a period between Paleolithic and Neolithic that hunting is an important issue at all. While there was some evolution during that time, the division not nearly as primal as he makes it out to be.
Even after the advent of hunting, hunted meat is not generally the dominant food source. Estimates of meat in the paleolithic diet vary from 35% to 65% -- but that is including more gathered sources such as fishing as well as hunted meat. Say I put it at roughly 50%. This means that gatherers are just as much the providers as hunters. Note that the size ratio of males to females decreases with the evolution from the earlier australopithecines and Homo Habilis to meat-eating Homo Erectus and Homo Sapiens. That is, men and women became more alike in size as we shifted to meat-eating. So rather than increasing the difference between the sexes, the shift to hunting appears to have made them more similar.
In short, I think his picture of evolution owes more to Fred Flintstone than real anthropology. Now, I'm willing to buy some issues of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionarily, females have a high investment for reproduction -- this is true across nearly all mammals. So male reproduction is limited more by their access to fertile females, whereas female reproduction is limited more by access to the resources to nourish their offspring. Testosterone levels do seem to correspond to greater muscle, aggressiveness, and violence. However, his claims about hunting and first-person shooters are based on preconceptions and vague rambling rather than reality.
4) Even given the evolutionary claims, the jump he makes to bodice-rippers and soap operas is ridiculous. Both men and women are social animals and depend strongly on developed relationships. What's interesting to me is that absent his moronic preconceptions, actual evolutionary logic makes one good prediction here. If we accept that post-Homo-Erectus, males have developed as hunters and women as gatherers -- then the obvious idea for women is to make a gathering game. And indeed, last time I was over at a friend's house, I found both her daughters competing away at playing Katamari, a gathering game that is now enormously popular.
5) The proposed solution assumes it as if marketing to women requires a fundamental shift in game play and activities. This is largely ignoring an elephant in the room. If you want adventure computer games that appeal to women, then don't design them with only a handful the female characters, all of whom are heaving-bosomed and bikini-clad. I don't play computer games much, but whenever I look at it, I find them filled with culturally-male content. It doesn't surprise me much that women don't go for that.
Argh. Next up, the less over-the-top stupid but still frustrating article from the most recent issue of the Escapist, Chris Dahlen's "I enjoy playing a Girl".
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June 1st, 2005
07:59 pm - Gender Disparity essay
The second essay I've just added to my website is
Gender Disparity in RPGs
It's an attempt at sort of a survey article which collects together a little data and a lot of speculation on the phenomenon of gender disparity in RPGs (meaning mostly tabletop RPGs). I'd welcome comments on it.
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May 18th, 2005
02:32 pm - Romantic Fantasy
So I am at work on a review of the game Blue Rose, by Jeremy Crawford, Dawn Elliot, Steve Kenson, and John Snead. I have been investigating it since playing it at 3DBCon three weeks ago. On my RPG pages, I have a Convention Report on 3DBCon and now fledgling Blue Rose Notes.
What makes it unusual is the tone of the genre. In most respects, it is fairly traditional fantasy. There aren't elves and dwarves per se, but there are the typical varieties of monsters, polytheistic gods, magic spells, and so forth. On the other hand, in the playtest game I played a hyperactive intelligent horse named "Swift Nose" (irony at work there). True to form, he impulsively would butt in on whatever was closest. He was psychically bonded with a nomad outcast named "Dawn Flight" (more irony). I am now deep in Tamora Pierce's "Protector of the Small" trilogy, and Swift Nose fits in pretty well with Kel's ill-tempered horse Peachblossom (also with the ironic name).
Anyhow, I am pleased with the shifting genre, and would like to see more of it. I have been a fan of the Buffy RPG by C.J. Carella, despite its hideous organization. And I hear that Margaret Weis is developing a Serenity RPG, using a variant of the system developed for the earlier (pre-D20) Sovereign Stone RPG (cf. my Review of Sovereign Stone).
I think it exposes by contrast the heavily masculine tone of most RPGs. Emma Wieslander talked about this in her article for the Beyond Role and Play book, entitled "Positive Power Drama". She felt that there was an overwhelming emphasis on competitiveness and violence in games. For the most part, this remains true in the indie crowd of games -- i.e. Sorcerer, The Riddle of Steel, My Life With Master, and Dogs in the Vineyard are still all very violent games. They emphasize interpersonal conflict -- where there is a zero sum and one person has to win for the other to lose. While there are a handful of bad guys in "Protector of the Small", overwhelmingly it is about growing up on both sides -- i.e. her overcoming people's prejudices rather than the people, and as well her learning and growing from her experiences. It seems to me that the indie emphasis on interpersonal conflict often hampers this rather than helping it. On the other hand, the nods toward it in Buffy and Blue Rose are pretty slight but arguably there. For example, Buffy mildly deemphasizes conflict by making all rolls into player rolls against a fixed number rather than a contest. Blue Rose eliminates the D20 experience system -- everyone just goes up a level when the Narrator chooses, so there's no chasing or competing for XP.
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