No women allowed?

A friend of mine posted a link to this article earlier, and boy does it make me want to kill something. (Though, according to some people quoted in that post, I’d rather be playing with babies and gossiping with the neighbours.)

It really comes as no surprise that gender bias is still alive and well in the nerd world, but there’s really no excuse for it. I cringe at the idea that some guys think all we female gamers are good for are acting as healers or filling an empty raid slot.

All of this reminds me of yet another discussion I read on a message board where a guy was asking how to make a D&D game that appealed to women. (He was bringing in not one, but TWO girls and wanted to make sure they didn’t get scared away.) A lot of the advice given was essentially that he should dumb it down and that the encounter mechanics would be too confusing for us poor little ladies to comprehend. Yeah, screw you people.

It’s true that a lot of women who do game tend to utilize more casual systems such as the DS and the Wii. I suppose both could be seen as a little less intimidating, but I also think it could be considered the “gateway drug” of gaming were the other systems made a little more gender neutral. There’s no denying that the 360 and PS3 marketing is targeted towards men as are the games available. I’m not suggesting that either the system or the games should be dumbed down, but it would be nice to see a wider array of non-boobified titles available that aren’t things like “Cooking Can Be Fun!” or “Super Animal Fun Time”. (Don’t Google those, I made them up.)

I know I’m in the minority of women who favour the 360 as their gaming system of choice. I’m also not one to be bothered or intimidated by bouncing, bosom-laden fantasy chicks romping across the game screen. (I was the one that picked out the pinup calendar in our computer room that my husband gets blamed for.) However, I can see how these sorts of games might count as a pretty big deterrent to other women.

A large part of the problem (as has been pointed out numerous times across the interweb) is not only caused by men, but by other women. As I noted in an earlier blog post, some girls think that other girls that game are aberrations. They have been given the mindset that games are not for them. It’s a lot like the idea that power-tools are for men and we women-folk are too petite and helpless to do so much as change a light bulb. Better stick to baking.

We have not evolved as much over the decades as we would like to think.

Unfortunately, there’s no one all-encompassing fix for this. Marketing needs to change and perceptions need to change; neither of these tasks can be accomplished easily. If game companies want to invite women to the table they need to do some more strategizing. If men want women to game, they need to be a little more inviting and less patronizing. If women want to game, they need to jump in there, flip everyone the bird, and show them how it’s done. Trust me guys, we can kick your ass.

Lately I have been experiencing what can only be described as D&D withdrawals. (For you newbs, D&D means Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, THAT Dungeons and Dragons.) While I still have games like WoW to console me, nothing quite compares to a good days worth of fantasy role play.

I finally got to play D&D for the first time last year. I’ve always been curious about it, but sadly the guys at my highschool were into playing Magic: The Gathering. The group I play with now has seen the game evolve through several editions, but my induction into the game has been solely through the 4th Edition.

D&D is unlike anything I’ve ever played before. There are rules, but they can be fairly flexible (depending on your DM). The game is truly what you and your group make it. Even a DM with a clear sense of where they want things to go can end up surprised by the ingenuity (and sometimes sheer stupidity) of the players. For instance, one evening our characters wound up in an unexpected bar fight resulting in one being thrown in the slammer to sober up. Let’s see that happen in a game of WoW.

Another amazing thing is the versatility of the characters. I’m fortunate not to play with a bunch of folks who feel the need to make the darkest anti-hero named Raven Darkthwain or some such, but they have definitely gotten creative. As of now we actually play two alternating campaigns and everyone has two very different characters. I swap back and forth between playing a sullen and sarcastic shifter ranger class, and a perky and well-intentioned gnome bard.

I think another reason D&D appeals to me is because it hearkens back to when I was growing up and playing board games with my family. Videogames and TV are all fine and dandy, but they tend to lack some of the social interaction I enjoy. D&D allows me to hang out with my friends and geek out; two of my most favourite things. It also lets me open up my imagination and be creative.

If you’ve made it this far into my post, there’s still a good chance you think all D&D players are like this:

Quite frankly, in some ways we are. But if you ever get a chance to join a game, I urge that you give it a go. You might be surprised with how much fun it can be.

There is an app on the iPhone called Distant Shore. The whole idea of Distant Shore is that you can send out a message in a bottle and it will be received by some random individual who also has the app. One night, after a particularly good D&D session, I sent out this note:

“Do you play D&D?”

The reply I received was not what I’d expected. It said:

“Dungeons and dragons??! No I’m female.”

I found myself momentarily baffled by this response. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t play D&D, it was that the reason they cited for this was that they were female.

I can’t honestly say that this was my first encounter with gender stereotypes in the world of geek, but it’s one of the few I’ve gotten from someone of my own sex. Maybe this is because most of the female company I keep consists of other girl geeks. I just wonder what is it that keeps so many women away from the nerdy vices out there? Is it all down to stereotype? Are they genuinely disinterested in things like gaming, comic books, sci-fi, etc?

In a lot of ways I feel that I have unusual interests for a female. I love monsters and horror, I play D&D as well as WoW, I’ll quote movie lines with the best of them, I read comics, I own multiple gaming system including a XBox and PS3, and I love geeky technology. Doing these things doesn’t make me feel like less of a woman. I put on my makeup every morning, I attempt to dress myself as something other than a hobo, and to top it all off I model. Sometimes I feel as though people believe the above things cannot coexist.

When I mention that I play [insert geeky activity here] I often get replies like “Really?” along with a surprised expression. I recall waiting in line for a Jonathan Coulton concert last year and mentioning something about WoW to one of my friends. I heard an intake of breath behind me and turned to see two young guys (both the epitome of the geek stereotype) looking at me in wonder. One of them asked in astonishment “You play World of Warcraft?”. You’d have thought I’d spouted a third breast or something.

In one of my previous jobs I got chatting with a male coworker about videogames and by the time I got to talking about my preference for turn-based combat in some cases. He got down on one knee and asked if he could propose to me right then and there.

I’ve also been in situations while playing MMORPGs (for the straights, that’s Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) where someone would not take me at my word that I was actually a female playing a female character. I was all “WTF? STFU n00b!”. Okay, not really. I was genuinely irritated on some level though.

All of these experiences lead me to wonder just how many girl geeks are out there. Are we really so rare that we should receive some amount of awe and bewilderment when we are discovered? Is it something about me in particular that would make someone think I couldn’t possibly fit in the classifications of geek, nerd, or anything else of that sort? What is the answer? Maybe I’ll never figure it out.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go plan my character for a new Eberron campaign.