FngKestrel

Excellent article about one woman's interaction with people on the internet. In fact, the entire issue of the escapist this month is dedicated to women and gaming. Go read it. Now.

From the Escapist magazine: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/17/27

liquidlight

LOL Now THAT is a great article. . . I happen to play WoW and there are several women in my guild, though to be honest I'm a Night Elf fan and haven't really played Horde so perhaps it's different, but I've seen the kinds of interactions that she describes I have to admit though, now I've got a craving to see her picture!

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hambone

All I know is that any girl out there would mop the floor with me, since I have never played WoW.

Great article too.

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BigBen

Excellent article.

How many times a day am I asked "Are there really women in the Army?"

How frustrating it must be.


I still don't know what sex some of the TFP members are here, and I have to stop occasionally and check myself. It doesn't matter what gender you are, Ben, get over yourself.

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Leto

wow. no pun intended. but I've been in the IT business for decades (well since the mid '80's anyways). I always thought that I had a healthy gaming attitude. But I must admit I am a total newbie with almost everything in this article. Hord? WoW?

So if I did meet up with this girl online, she would mop me up too. But it serves to re-inforce how big the interweb world is. There aren't enough hours in the day...

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Coppertop

GIS Whitney Butts.

FngKestrel

Click on the escapist link to see her.

MooseMan3000

Well, statistically speaking, girls don't exist on the internet. In guilds of hundreds, when 2 members of the entire guild are female, that's just not statistically significant.

Really, though, I have seen this sort of reactions lots and lots of times, but the people that react this way are people who don't know how to interact with any humans at all, not just girls. They're pubescent boys addicted to computer games. For the record, they fall somewhere between Drunken Belligerent Homeless Dudes and Wolverines in the heirarchy of social skills.

I understand why girls would feel that there's an overwhelming majority of internet nerds who are simply unwilling to accept them, but they disregard the fact that a majority of people on the internet are total fuckwads. I have to sift through the same steaming pile of bullshit they do, just instead of a whore I get called a fag.

And as an aside, she's pretty hot.

stevie667

Lol, amusing schnizzle.

Where i'm standing, there are considerably more 12-15yr old boys on 'teh roxxor intarweb selekta' than any other demographic, and as we all know, girls don't yet exist to these things.

So, the moral of the story is, tell them your a girl once you've given them a sound pasting, that way their winging will be even better.

Or something.

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FngKestrel

Pragma

I've got several female friends who play WoW -- I'll have to see their reactions to this article, and to telling them that they're figments of my imagination

That said, there's a lot of capacity for trickery on the internet - men pretending to be women, women pretending to be men, or even more complex relationships. A person's gender really doesn't matter when talking online, unless (I would imagine) you're trying to have a conversation on really gender-specific stuff (like how men aren't allowed in the Ladies' Lounge). And at that level, it should be easy to figure out who's a real woman and who's faking. In games, I highly doubt it's important.

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NeverBorn

Its good to see someone write an article on it, shed some light.

~Lucian~

Tell me about it.. I've pretty much given up on the majority of mainstream internet folk. They're either giggly 14 year old 'lol' girls or stuck up little adolescent boys, who say you're a "noob" if you have less kills than deaths in counterstrike. To which I say "Fuck you, at least I've got a job and own my computer, Bitch". Especially the really insultful ones. They're just insecure little nerds who couldn't do Jack if you confronted them in real life!! *deep breaths*

I'm a fan of the internet in general but the anonymity factor can really bring out the worst in people. As for girls in general... well, they kick my ass in for the most part.. I usually like to think I'm a pretty competitive in most things I attempt, but it doesn't matter; if i'm head to head with a girl, I'm screwed.

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Siege

Believe it or not, 43% of the gaming audience is female. Or so claims my local newspaper.

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Slavakion

TFP is like the ultimate proof to that article. Out of the regulars (not TB lurkers or TB dwellers), I'd say that females are 40-50% of the population. Then again, I've never counted.

GoldenOuroboros

Haha, excellent!!
Yes I believe this, I have a few female friends, will have to link them to this article xD

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Slyboots

Girls on the internet has always been something of a good and a bad thing. For example when it comes to message boards, having a vagina could lead to a ton of trouble. I come from 2 message boards that have had some problesm with this. Females comes out and shows herself off as a gaming girl, next thing you know she is called attention whore for posting pics or telling people she is a girl. Gaming wise, girls make a large portion of it, but we dont know it. Games like everquest and WOW have large porstions of females gamers,usually it turns out they are house wives who are into the whole fantasy theme.

I feel bad sometimes that these ladies of gaming are treated like a myth but sometimes I laugh at the fact they most of these girls could kick any male gamers ass in game and out.

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Jeff

What kind of games though? If we're talking little games like Snood, I'd believe it, but otherwise I find it hard to believe.

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Antikarma

My wife gets that jazz ALL the time. She plays tons of games, from WoW to Battlefield, and its true, noone will believe she is a woman without the inevitable "Show us pics plz". Its been the same for YEARS, back to when we used to chat in IRC 9 years ago.

I have to groom my daughters to be Ubergamers to break geeky little boys hearts in counterstrike worldwide. That'll teach the bastards.

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hulk

Games are games are games. Genre dependant, of course, but most games are made for boys. When you consider that the best selling games of all time, like Myst, The Sims and Mario appeal to both sexes, it's not that hard to imagine.

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Siege

They didn't say. However, the article had a testimony of a couple who played xbox games with each other. I assume from that, they meant video games.

However, either way, I don't really have too much trouble believing it. Maybe I just happen to be surrounded by females who like playing video games

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"Your name's Geek? Do you know the origin of the term? A geek is someone who bites the heads off chickens at a circus. I would never let you suck my dick with a name like Geek"

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Siege

If you're female, you just can't prove it in the gaming world. If you claim you're female, everyone just says that you're not. Or you get tons of messages saying to post a pic. Then when you do, you're either an attention whore, or posting pics of your sister.

Any girl that I know who takes a game she plays even semi seriously is an above average player. I remember playing with one of my lady friends at an Internet cafe with a bunch of my guy friends who considered themselves quite good at CS. She demolished them all

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"Your name's Geek? Do you know the origin of the term? A geek is someone who bites the heads off chickens at a circus. I would never let you suck my dick with a name like Geek"

--Kevin Smith

This part just makes my posts easier to find

Wingless

Great, great article. I don't know the gender of 90% of the people I've talked to on the TFP, or any other website I frequent. Frankly, I don't care either, although by default I assume everyone else on here is a fat white guy It's more fun when that assumption is shot down.

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majik_6

Interesting article! Maybe it's because the sites I hang around tend to be obvious as to the poster's gender and such, but I haven't seen that kind of reaction to women online in a few years.

I remember back when I first got connected, though, it was always like that. Now days, however, most of the sites I'm on have very few "false" women or even that 13 year old reaction to women. It seems to me that those reactions seem to be most prevalent on sites in which a poster's identity is not "connected" to their online persona as opposed to sites like "myspace" in which a poster's picture is openly available.

I'm suprised, though, that these reactions are still so common in other areas of the web.

On a somewhat related note: I remember once seeing a flash video on this subject...it featured a female stick figure revealing that she was a woman to her online pals, then it showed their l33t 5p34k reactions (complete with humorous photos of the stereotypical dorky male virgin). Quite humorous, though I can't seem to find it anywhere. Anyone know what I'm talking about (and have a link)?

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stevie667

lol, i remember that!

i'll see if i can find it around...

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Halx

I have several females in my WoW guild. Real, actual, females.

I should know, too. I've *felt* one of them before!

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MrFlux

My GF has a shadow priest that melts faces.

She's also the opposite faction

Our guild has 184 accounts and we have at least 10 or so females. I'd say that's statistically significant enough to say that girls "exist on the intarweb"

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Catdaddy33

My wife plays some and refuses to chat about anything non-game related (even then she makes me type/talk), for the reason she stated.

One of the guilds I was in had a couple of female members, and as soon as they logged on I got a kick out of how different most of the guys would act. One was married to a guy that rarely played, but it didn't matter they would go out of their way to try and "impress" her both in and out of the game. It didn't help that she ate up the attention, my eyes would hurt from the constant rolling...

MooseMan3000

See, that just proves my point. Only about 1 of 18 people in the guild is a girl, and that's in a genre that is typically noted as drawing more female participation. I'm not disregarding the fact that there are girls that play games. The fact is, however, that there are so few of them, that most of the time it's safe to assume you're talking to a guy.

It's like age. Most gamers are between 10 and 25. The numbers drop off significantly after that point. Yes, I'm sure that will change. As our generation of video game junkies ages, the proportion of older gamers to younger ones will increase. But at the moment, old people just don't play games.

Yes, there are exceptions. But they are the exceptions that prove the rule.

MechCow

Interesting article.

WoW is definately very sexist, but its certainly the least sexist multi-player game I've ever played on the web. I was very surprised that it took till about level 40 that I had a negative multiplayer experience, and it really made me realise how much when I was playing counterstrike I was having these negative experiences and just kinda shrugging them off as people getting into the spirit of the game. But they weren't in the spirit of anything they were just dicks being dicks and the game kinda brought that out. I think WoW does a good job of providing an atmosphere that people do co-operate (although a lot more could be done).

I have been thinking some kinda in-game shun system would be kinda neat although it obviously has potential to be abused. This kinda blatant sexism is pretty, well, lame. I play and my gf plays casually and I know quite a few girls who play. Certainly still only a fraction but I never knew any girls who played CS. heh.

alansmithee

When I was playing WoW, I always assumed that everyone was male. And if they said they weren't, I would still assume it. Because honestly, it doesn't really matter if they are male or not. It has no bearing on gameplay.

Redlemon

Had to jump in for a nitpick here, sorry. In this phrase, "prove" is an older meaning of the word, one which means "to test"; for example, the "proving grounds". An exception "tests" the rule, and finds it wanting. See the writeup at World Wide Words.

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hulk

Well, let's look at some facts, from here.

-35% of gamers are under 18
-43% are 18-49
-19% are over 50

Overall, 43% of game players are female. That's beaten by the statistic that 44% of online gamers are female.

Hardly a massive majority, either way. Perhaps you're looking at the wrong genres?

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MooseMan3000

Alright, a few things wrong with that study.

One, it's voluntary response. There's no reliable data for exactly who's buying the games, because it's based on polls that are voluntary to complete.

Two, it's all the people who buy the games, not the people who play them. Most people under 18 aren't buying their own games. They're getting them from parents. Thus the age of the person actually playing the game isn't reflected in the statistics.

Three, the age groups are divided into skewed categories. "Under 18" includes people below 13, who can't legally respond to these polls without parental consent. Who's going to see the poll and run to their parents to get them to sign a waiver allowing them to participate in a poll? Also, the group "18-49" includes 3 more years than the under 18 group. It may not seem like a lot, but when one of the key areas is the area right between the two categories, those extra 3 years can make a lot of difference. And the average age of a gamer is also skewed too high. It only takes a few 70 year old gamers (yes, there are some) to bring that average from 25 to 35. They're called outliers, but this report makes no mention of accounting for them, so I can only assume they're included in all the stats.

Four, that female gamer number. The article in the original post was speaking of "real" video games (I'm not arguing over what makes a game real, just stating what I saw). Essentially games you can buy in a box at a video game store. You pointed out that 44% of online gamers are female. Also, according to the report, 56.8% of the games played online are "Puzzle/Board/Game Show/Trivia/Card." Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but everybody in the entire world has played Bejewelled. That hardly qualifies you as a "1337 ch1x0r g4m3r." But as far as the report is concerned, they're female gamers.

Five, I'm talking from experience. Yes, girls go to video game stores sometimes. Yes, every once in a while you get one who likes to play Unreal Tournament or Grand Theft Auto (fuck, I'm dating one, and it rules), but 9 out of 10 girls that go into that store are looking for that Sims expansion pack. The thing is, I'm not even joking.

Six, you all seem to be taking me wrong. I don't dislike female gamers. I think they're awesome. I wish there were more of them. My only point is that there are very few girls I would consider "gamers." You may think I'm an elitist for thinking so, but I don't believe that playing PopCap games makes you a gamer. That's my entire point. So stop trying to read some sexism, or whatever else, into my argument. It's not there.

Seven, statistics are easily manipulated. See points 1-5 above for a small portion of things that have been manipulated in this study to give numbers that look like they want them to.



That's how I was attempting to use the phrase, though perhaps I didn't make myself clear. Looking at the original article, she spoke of her WoW guild. She also spoke about how her guild was (without using the word specifically) an exception to the no girls exist on the intarweb rule. She said that because of specific actions, girls felt more comfortable joining that guild. That guild is the exception, the rule being that girls aren't comfortable joining guilds.

In the context I used it originally, the rule is that girls don't exist on the intarweb. The exceptions are the small, select areas where girls do exist. Bah. I wrote that at 8:17 AM. I wasn't hardly coherent as it is, let alone clear or concise. Sorry.

hulk

To be quite honest, the only thing that appears skewed is your impression of what constitutes a game WoW and similar games do mainly appeal to young men and as such they constitute it's largest audience. The Sims Online, on the other hand, is still an MMO yet is by quite a majority a female audience. Funnily enough, with the majority of females being, well, female, they tend to prefer games of a different genre. Expecting otherwise is silly.

(BTW, the ESA study was not just taken from polls but from data from nearly every main publisher in the US. As such, it wasn't a small poll of maybe 1000 people but information gathered over the year from basically every source available)

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Coppertop

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute...o_games#Genres

The article above cites that the average gamer age is 29, for what it is worth*:

*actually, the article linked cites an article that states this.

snowy

This article has the girls on the Ladies of WoW community over on LiveJournal in an uproar--mostly because while yes, sometimes guys are surprised that there are girl gamers, this chick makes it out to be that guys are surprised all the time and only want pics, etc etc.

I play WoW and I've only been asked for a picture once--after I'd talked to this guy for quite a while and he'd shared his picture with me. Most guys I talk to in-game are really nice and don't care about me being a girl--rather, they're pleasantly surprised and pleased that gasp! a girl is playing a game.

About stats, the fact is that there are a LOT of girls who play WoW especially. Why? A lot of us joined because boyfriends/guy friends were playing and we thought it looked cool. Normally I stick with RTS games but I decided to branch out into the MMO genre after seeing my friend play WoW in the open beta. Most of us are not hardcore gamers--though for some of us WoW has turned us into one.

Hopefully a female gamer perspective helps a bit--and as I do play more than World of Warcraft (Battlefield, Age of Mythology, Warcraft III, GTA...you get the picture) I do consider myself a gamer, though not always the best one.

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Mantus

WoW, bah! There was a chick who played CS in my old can. She was one of our best snipers and I always trusted her to cover my back. Now that was a real woman.

Rl is the best game for meeting girls though, they aways give out their pics

itch vaccine

Out of WoW,

most of the girls get pwn3d by me.

*chuckles* just kidding.

Amazing article, I dig chiqs who can frag.

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dabossy2k

Man I did a myspace search cause I am one of those guys who is like ya right your a girl whatever. Only because I had a someone who I thought was a girl end up being a guy. But anyways did the search and to my surprise found that a lot of girls do play WoW and that is very good to know. Now I get to combine to of my favorite things to do. HaHa

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