I think the reason why the opinions here end up being pretty diverse (aside from variations in environment and other influences) is due to the fact that we are in the middle of social evolution when it comes to women and their roles in the technology sector as well as on the whole. Many are shaking off stereotypes that have been imposed upon them by society since they were born, while others were raised in environments that didn't even try to impose such strictures on their psyche in the first place.
There are a great many studies out there along the lines of differences in behavior of men and women, but few of them truly apply to a specific medium (like gaming) where anonymity has the power to remove so many personality-laden inhibitions. As more women become comfortable with the internet and embrace it as a conduit for exploration, entertainment, and knowledge, they realize that the rules don't apply to them there any more than it does to men. From there, the cyberssky is the limit. At that point, all permutations of human behavior are possible, and gender has less bearing on the circumstances. The only thing that colors your actions at that point is the psychological baggage you bring with you.
I've played the majority of MMOs and encountered a great many RL females since the first day of EQ's original release. I've also run into at least as many (and probably far more) manginas (men playing female toons). My wife also happens to be a gamer, and I have several other female gamer friends I've made over the years (and no, I will not set you up with one). I've run a couple of family-oriented guilds that fostered and supported safe harbor for couples with kids and women wanting to escape from potty-mouthed kiddie guilds full of rampant hormones personified (note that I'm not implying gender in that statement, either). Women from all walks of life with myriad personalities that liked men or women or both have been playing MMOs since the early days of the genre. They have been among you, and their numbers are rapidly growing.
The evolution (revolution? renaissance?) that is going on now is the growing number of women that have grown up around computers and are embracing them wholeheartedly, both as entertainment and as a career opportunity. Kids with parents that grew up in the days of the Atari 2600 are entering the scene en masse, and they will rock you. By 10 years from now, this issue will be so dead as to have never been born in the first place.
If there's any definitive difference between men and women gamers, it's one that transcends gaming and applies to all mediums. The closest thing I adhere to as a 'stereotype' for males versus females is what I call multi-threaded thinking. Both can be competitive, goal-oriented, and driven to excel. More often than not, though, women tend to be more capable of juggling multiple aspects of a given problem (or multiple problems at once). Conversely, men will usually narrow the scope of their concentration to one or two things and drive very hard to conquer or absorb all concepts within that scope to the exclusion of all else. There are always exceptions to every rule, of course, and I think even this may be slowly changing. But this is not gaming-specific, so I would have to say that men and women as gamers are no different in most aspects save those that carry over from RL. They are not limitations, only different ways of thinking. Women in the current scene may tend to be more interested in social interests or vanity or something else outside the mainstream perceptions of male gamers in some form based on what you see of their playstyles, but that is societal and environmental, and is subject to change over time. Nobody who breaks that mold takes much liking to being associated with it, either, because it's not what defines them and imposing that mold on them rankles.
I read a few responses back about how women seemed to inherently introduce drama to the culture of MMOs. This too may be another divergence regarding male versus female gamers, though it's harder to quantify. You can just as easily say that two strong male personalities can be at odds, though, and that probably happens just as frequently. The difference is how two male personalities conflict compared to that of two females. You could also say that male egos clash far more often, but it's more noteworthy when it happens between females because males are already conceptually enamored of femmes in their gaming world as it is and their 'cat fights' are more memorable. If you did an empirical study on this aspect, though, it may be that you could chalk this up to chemistry of personalities derived from the environment's affect on women as a whole, and is just another example of a mold that is not going to fit in 10 years. The internet is causing a revolution in society in a great number of ways, and this is just another example.
Those of you that don't think women gamers exist are probably playing MMOs that don't interest the majority of the current women gamer population. Games like (the original incarnation of) SWG and WoW definitely open up their doors to more playstyles, and as a result, more women based on their current interests and comfort levels with gaming. This too will change over time. Now is the transition.
I'll close with a small bite of food for thought. One of my first best friends when I was growing up was a tomboy. She and I played Way of The Exploding Fist back in 1983 (?, I think, don't remember the exact year for sure) for hours on end on my C-64, and she could seriously give me a run for my money. That was 22 years ago. One of the first girl gamers? I doubt it. I'm sure there were certainly at least a few that came before, but it's interesting in this context. Kelly, wherever ya are, I miss our sparring matches.
Staff Writers Laura Genender and Carolyn Koh go head-to-head this week to debate the issue of whether or not girls play MMORPGs differently than their male counterparts.
Carolyn: I think women game differently than men. Just like they develop differently, and do things differently in other aspects of life, they game differently. Different things / aspects of the game are more important to them than to men. This is especially true in an MMO which mimics in some basic manner, real life. Different things are important to women than men and therefore how they view the MMO world is different. Women enjoy the "fluff" in a game more than men do. Although both are goal oriented - xp and levels, the social aspect of a game is more important to women. Speaking from my perspective. I'm a competitive gamer although my time is limited. I find the most effective and efficient ways to gain xp and do it, but I will take an entire evening away from that xp leveling to hang out with friends in-game or obtain tokens across the game-world to exchange for a dress that does nothing besides look pretty on my character. You can read the full debate here.
Carolyn is absolutely right. My girlfriend plays some of the same games as me but what she like to do in-game and what I like to do are totally different. She was more concerned with what armor looked like rather than what its properties were.
See, that is me, too. ^_^ While guild mates were out grinding Jedi or some other profession in SWG, I was out shopping in all the player ran shops looking for just the right outfit for my dancer. LOL! I spent hours and hours just shopping. My husband use to go nuts in DAoC because I could spend hours just messing around with different dye combinations. Even now I refuse to play EQ2, because there is not enough clothing options in game for my Wizardess.
Oh and just because I hate grinding levels in MMORPG's(did it in more MMORPG's then I care for), doesn't mean I am not competative...just ask anyone that has played PS with me or BF2 - in games like that I can give as good as I get.
Originally posted by Hohbein only 3 women on the planet play MMORPG's, 2 of them weigh in excess of 900lbs, and the other is no longer technically female. the rest are men pretending to be women because a)they are just odd, or b) they know they can get shit loads of free stuff from idiots that think girls actually play mmo's.
You just think they don't exist because you've gotten burned by too many female gamers.
Not all female gamers put up a sign that says, "Hi, I'm actually a girl, here's my picture showing my genitals next to my birth certificate, 3 forms of identification, a picture of me playing this MMO while reading a newspaper with today's date, and my grandmother who is identifying me."
Get real. I don't ask you to prove you're male. I know more female MMO gamers IRL than male, and I know more D&D female gamers and DMs that are female. And that is coming from me, the female president of my university's RPG Group with almost 200 members.
Pwned.
Out of 200 members and the majority are female!? Thats a little hard to swallow unless you are intentionally recruiting females almost exclusively, or you are from someplace where girls outnumber guys 5 to 1.
meh, I find most female MMORPG players to be overweight hairdressers... or sombodies girlfriend. They fall under those to catagories... no more, no less.
after 6 or so years, I had to change it a little...
I'd just like to add some things, I know a couple of girls who play, and really they don't play play any differently than my male friends, each have their different styles, and some of my female friends play just like some of my male friends.
And since it was mentioned in the article, i play all female characters, but that's because I like the idea of strong female characters.
Originally posted by hodge12 Girls like cooking and cleaning. Ya can't just asume that all girls like to cook and clean. My wife hates to cook and clean and prefer me to do this stuff.... but I have to go to work so..... she ends up doing it any way. She also plays mmorpgs to and i play with her when work is low. But when she does play she's kinda loud mouthed and draws attention to herself ALOT! so it just really depends on the person and their personality
Sometimes they do sometimes they don't. WWIIOL has some raeally cool chicks playing One chick, Wolfie69 is in the Allied High Command. Her sone Wolfiejr also plays. Totally hilarious is the sig Wolfiejr has for posting in the WWIIOL forums.
See there is a guy named Willytee who does comics and he also makes sigs for some people. He made one for Wolfiejr that has his mom in uniform telling him to "march straight to your room and don't come out until that town is captured!"
She is pretty cool and does a good job. Listening to her on Team Speak though, you know you aren't playing with a guy. Her voice would be great for phone sex. She could make millions! LOL
I think girl gamers do best in open ended games where you dont have to shoot anything.
I know lots of RL girls play Eve, and plenty seem to enjoy it, because power comes from social skills and economic skills rather than only guns guns guns.
Lots of girls enjoy crafting/socializing/trading. Recruiters, miners, manufacturers, traders, and so forth.
And if they feel like shooting someone, theres plenty of that too
I'm a female gamer, currently playing Shadowbane on Vindication server. I've played WoW, GW, the short-lived Wish beta, and have my sights currently on Darkfall and Winter's Twilight.
I started in SB at release.. I played for the social/rp content. After getting my claws into a few decent pvp battles my ideas on what gaming was about changed drastically. I now have 3 accounts in SB and spend 98% of my active time either killing people or looking for people to kill. The other 2 % is required city management and the short amount of time it takes to set up an afk pl group.
While I have to agree that 'most' female gamers are more interested in social/non-pvp aspects of mmo's.. not all of us fall into that overused catagory.
Spill Group, a developer and operator of online gaming portals, has unveiled new findings that challenge the established view about the composition of the online gaming community. While younger people prefer action games and MMORG's (massive multiplayer online role-playing games), women aged between 20 and 34 prefer skill games that involve a combination of strategic insight and gaming ability. Women are increasingly opting for the play-for-real option, something that has traditionally been the preserve of men.
Women are joined by more mature men who are logging on to play games as a way to entertain themselves and combat stress, proving that online gaming is no longer limited to teenagers. The average gaming time is between 40-45 minutes and most users play on a daily basis.
Originally posted by Tidic So if you ask 5 girls and 5 guys on WoW PvP how they play the game, they are more likely to say the same thing since its largely only thing that offers progress and success.
This is a very good point. Games are, by their nature, largely competitve. Even if players are working together and cooperating to combat another force (i.e. NPCs) they are usually still competitive among their own ranks, comparing levels, gear, etc. Even if this were not the case, players are still competing against SOMETHING - that something just happens to be the NPC server instead of each other.
I have played a variety of MMOs in my time, and my behavior varies dependant on where I go and how I have chosen to progress. In Lineage 2 I'm a healer, and my goal to to keep my party alive while we kill anything that dares to breath within a 5 foot radius of us. In City of Villains I am a brute, and my goal is to draw as much aggro as I can, usually by means of smashing. In ATITD I grew flowers. In Guild Wars I camped the arenas.
And guess what? When I played City of Villains, I never met any botanists.
Laura "Taera" Genender Community Manager MMORPG.com
Originally posted by hodge12 Girls like cooking and cleaning.
Ya can't just asume that all girls like to cook and clean. My wife hates to cook and clean and prefer me to do this stuff....
And you still married her?
My bussiness is my own. You can't just judge people for who they are and what they do. I also know a lot of players that judge people on their gender, so they really have problems with women playing games, some guys to.
Comments
I think the reason why the opinions here end up being pretty diverse (aside from variations in environment and other influences) is due to the fact that we are in the middle of social evolution when it comes to women and their roles in the technology sector as well as on the whole. Many are shaking off stereotypes that have been imposed upon them by society since they were born, while others were raised in environments that didn't even try to impose such strictures on their psyche in the first place.
There are a great many studies out there along the lines of differences in behavior of men and women, but few of them truly apply to a specific medium (like gaming) where anonymity has the power to remove so many personality-laden inhibitions. As more women become comfortable with the internet and embrace it as a conduit for exploration, entertainment, and knowledge, they realize that the rules don't apply to them there any more than it does to men. From there, the cyberssky is the limit. At that point, all permutations of human behavior are possible, and gender has less bearing on the circumstances. The only thing that colors your actions at that point is the psychological baggage you bring with you.
I've played the majority of MMOs and encountered a great many RL females since the first day of EQ's original release. I've also run into at least as many (and probably far more) manginas (men playing female toons). My wife also happens to be a gamer, and I have several other female gamer friends I've made over the years (and no, I will not set you up with one). I've run a couple of family-oriented guilds that fostered and supported safe harbor for couples with kids and women wanting to escape from potty-mouthed kiddie guilds full of rampant hormones personified (note that I'm not implying gender in that statement, either). Women from all walks of life with myriad personalities that liked men or women or both have been playing MMOs since the early days of the genre. They have been among you, and their numbers are rapidly growing.
The evolution (revolution? renaissance?) that is going on now is the growing number of women that have grown up around computers and are embracing them wholeheartedly, both as entertainment and as a career opportunity. Kids with parents that grew up in the days of the Atari 2600 are entering the scene en masse, and they will rock you. By 10 years from now, this issue will be so dead as to have never been born in the first place.
If there's any definitive difference between men and women gamers, it's one that transcends gaming and applies to all mediums. The closest thing I adhere to as a 'stereotype' for males versus females is what I call multi-threaded thinking. Both can be competitive, goal-oriented, and driven to excel. More often than not, though, women tend to be more capable of juggling multiple aspects of a given problem (or multiple problems at once). Conversely, men will usually narrow the scope of their concentration to one or two things and drive very hard to conquer or absorb all concepts within that scope to the exclusion of all else. There are always exceptions to every rule, of course, and I think even this may be slowly changing. But this is not gaming-specific, so I would have to say that men and women as gamers are no different in most aspects save those that carry over from RL. They are not limitations, only different ways of thinking. Women in the current scene may tend to be more interested in social interests or vanity or something else outside the mainstream perceptions of male gamers in some form based on what you see of their playstyles, but that is societal and environmental, and is subject to change over time. Nobody who breaks that mold takes much liking to being associated with it, either, because it's not what defines them and imposing that mold on them rankles.
I read a few responses back about how women seemed to inherently introduce drama to the culture of MMOs. This too may be another divergence regarding male versus female gamers, though it's harder to quantify. You can just as easily say that two strong male personalities can be at odds, though, and that probably happens just as frequently. The difference is how two male personalities conflict compared to that of two females. You could also say that male egos clash far more often, but it's more noteworthy when it happens between females because males are already conceptually enamored of femmes in their gaming world as it is and their 'cat fights' are more memorable. If you did an empirical study on this aspect, though, it may be that you could chalk this up to chemistry of personalities derived from the environment's affect on women as a whole, and is just another example of a mold that is not going to fit in 10 years. The internet is causing a revolution in society in a great number of ways, and this is just another example.
Those of you that don't think women gamers exist are probably playing MMOs that don't interest the majority of the current women gamer population. Games like (the original incarnation of) SWG and WoW definitely open up their doors to more playstyles, and as a result, more women based on their current interests and comfort levels with gaming. This too will change over time. Now is the transition.
I'll close with a small bite of food for thought. One of my first best friends when I was growing up was a tomboy. She and I played Way of The Exploding Fist back in 1983 (?, I think, don't remember the exact year for sure) for hours on end on my C-64, and she could seriously give me a run for my money. That was 22 years ago. One of the first girl gamers? I doubt it. I'm sure there were certainly at least a few that came before, but it's interesting in this context. Kelly, wherever ya are, I miss our sparring matches.
To the idea that women introduce drama into MMORPGs I will only say this. "You zerged my cloudsong."
When people will pay others to play a game for them it might be a sign the game isn't all that fun.
Carolyn is absolutely right. My girlfriend plays some of the same games as me but what she like to do in-game and what I like to do are totally different. She was more concerned with what armor looked like rather than what its properties were.
See, that is me, too. ^_^ While guild mates were out grinding Jedi or some other profession in SWG, I was out shopping in all the player ran shops looking for just the right outfit for my dancer. LOL! I spent hours and hours just shopping. My husband use to go nuts in DAoC because I could spend hours just messing around with different dye combinations. Even now I refuse to play EQ2, because there is not enough clothing options in game for my Wizardess.
Oh and just because I hate grinding levels in MMORPG's(did it in more MMORPG's then I care for), doesn't mean I am not competative...just ask anyone that has played PS with me or BF2 - in games like that I can give as good as I get.
You just think they don't exist because you've gotten burned by too many female gamers.
Not all female gamers put up a sign that says, "Hi, I'm actually a girl, here's my picture showing my genitals next to my birth certificate, 3 forms of identification, a picture of me playing this MMO while reading a newspaper with today's date, and my grandmother who is identifying me."
Get real. I don't ask you to prove you're male. I know more female MMO gamers IRL than male, and I know more D&D female gamers and DMs that are female. And that is coming from me, the female president of my university's RPG Group with almost 200 members.
Pwned.
Out of 200 members and the majority are female!? Thats a little hard to swallow unless you are intentionally recruiting females almost exclusively, or you are from someplace where girls outnumber guys 5 to 1.
meh, I find most female MMORPG players to be overweight hairdressers... or sombodies girlfriend.
They fall under those to catagories... no more, no less.
after 6 or so years, I had to change it a little...
I'd just like to add some things, I know a couple of girls who play, and really they don't play play any differently than my male friends, each have their different styles, and some of my female friends play just like some of my male friends.
And since it was mentioned in the article, i play all female characters, but that's because I like the idea of strong female characters.
Sometimes they do sometimes they don't. WWIIOL has some raeally cool chicks playing One chick, Wolfie69 is in the Allied High Command. Her sone Wolfiejr also plays. Totally hilarious is the sig Wolfiejr has for posting in the WWIIOL forums.
See there is a guy named Willytee who does comics and he also makes sigs for some people. He made one for Wolfiejr that has his mom in uniform telling him to "march straight to your room and don't come out until that town is captured!"
She is pretty cool and does a good job. Listening to her on Team Speak though, you know you aren't playing with a guy. Her voice would be great for phone sex. She could make millions! LOL
And you still married her?
I think girl gamers do best in open ended games where you dont have to shoot anything.
I know lots of RL girls play Eve, and plenty seem to enjoy it, because power comes from social skills and economic skills rather than only guns guns guns.
Lots of girls enjoy crafting/socializing/trading. Recruiters, miners, manufacturers, traders, and so forth.
And if they feel like shooting someone, theres plenty of that too
I'm a female gamer, currently playing Shadowbane on Vindication server. I've played WoW, GW, the short-lived Wish beta, and have my sights currently on Darkfall and Winter's Twilight.
I started in SB at release.. I played for the social/rp content. After getting my claws into a few decent pvp battles my ideas on what gaming was about changed drastically. I now have 3 accounts in SB and spend 98% of my active time either killing people or looking for people to kill. The other 2 % is required city management and the short amount of time it takes to set up an afk pl group.
While I have to agree that 'most' female gamers are more interested in social/non-pvp aspects of mmo's.. not all of us fall into that overused catagory.
related snippet
Spill Group, a developer and operator of online gaming portals, has unveiled new findings that challenge the established view about the composition of the online gaming community. While younger people prefer action games and MMORG's (massive multiplayer online role-playing games), women aged between 20 and 34 prefer skill games that involve a combination of strategic insight and gaming ability. Women are increasingly opting for the play-for-real option, something that has traditionally been the preserve of men.
Women are joined by more mature men who are logging on to play games as a way to entertain themselves and combat stress, proving that online gaming is no longer limited to teenagers. The average gaming time is between 40-45 minutes and most users play on a daily basis.
http://www.megagames.com/news/html/pc/pc.shtml
Laura "Taera" Genender
Community Manager
MMORPG.com
And you still married her?
My bussiness is my own. You can't just judge people for who they are and what they do. I also know a lot of players that judge people on their gender, so they really have problems with women playing games, some guys to.