OMG Girlz Don't Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1
 

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

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!

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

Great article too.

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.

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...

GIS Whitney Butts.

Click on the escapist link to see her.

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. :p

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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 :lol:

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.

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)?

lol, i remember that!

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

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

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

My GF has a shadow priest that melts faces.

She's also the opposite faction :D

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"

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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)

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.

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.

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 :thumbsup:

Out of WoW,

most of the girls get pwn3d by me.

*chuckles* just kidding.

Amazing article, I dig chiqs who can frag.

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

if online games had more bunnys and cute characters...i bet the numebr of female games would go up by 3 times

Hahaha, oh man, that's a funny article. The guy who wrote it must have been playing as female characters for years to gain that much insight. Because it's true, there truly are no girls on the intarweb. :p

Another funny thing about that article is the conversations were so true, that is exactly what all the twelve year olds say. The poor fools actually believe there are girls on the internet. I remember those days, back before I learned the hard way that the opposite was true.
Heh, back when I played World of Warcraft I was always the "Nice Guy with Good Grammar" in those types of situations, I'm just like, "Leave the poor guy alone, if he wants to get free stuff from flirting with other guys, then that's his own prerogative."

I really enjoyed this article.

I showed it to a buddy of mine who met his girlfriend through WoW and they both thought it was very amusing and accurate.

BTW, if the girl that wrote the article is the one featured on the pictures... WOW

Yeah, and that statistic includes games like hearts, poker, Bejeweled, and whatever the hell other time-wasters there are. There are a few girls out there that really get into games, but not that many.

That being said, I think games are a predominately guy thing, like fast cars, beef jerky, pirates, pocket knives, flannel, steak, and sports. I don't find it attractive when women like these things because I like my females to be... well... feminine. Most of the time, women who claim to like these things don't really like them, they just act like they do because they think it's sexy or making them independent. What makes you independent is doing what YOU like because you LIKE doing it, not doing what you're not supposed to like. I find it sexier if a woman wants to talk on the phone while looking at shoes online and watching an episode of "Friends" than if she were to play Madden '06 in between bites of steak. Put down the controller and pick up a copy of "Cosmo."

*EDIT*
And that chick is smokin'.

Overall i've found that alot of the longer lasting girl gamers tend to get rather well..good. Most of the ones I've met could kick my ass (last clan I was in)
and the girl down the hall was an everquest junkie, and can decimate me in warcraft....
(she's also a beautiful girl)

and yes I have found a significant number of players on WoW to be female, although most don't go announcing it and people assume they are guys. (the secret is, be polite and if you suspect something ask nicely and NEVER ASK FOR PICS)

Again, games are games are games. Less girls play boy's games, that's obvious. Would you argue, however, that not that many males play hearts, poker, Bejeweled and whatever the hell other time-wasters there are? If, say, the percentage was anywhere near 50%, or even 40%, there's still a lot of girl gamers playing other games.

I've had cases where no one would take me very seriously in raid chat until spoke on up TS/Vent. Suddenly I got a lot of attention and everyone who were being rude and obnoxious stopped being so rude and obnoxious -- nice even. Go figure. I still got a flood of tells from people asking "was that you on ts?!". No, noob, it was your mom! Pwnt.

60 undead shadow/disc priest LFG. Will respec disc/holy for MC/BWL/ZG. PST or I will melt your face!

Speaking of... I've actually had another girl leave the guild because she apparently couldn't handle having new people -- one of whom happened to be another girl -- in the guild. Someone was obviously starved of attention. Not like it was a big loss since she admitted to buying her 60 from eBay. Too funny.

Clearly it's not the gender that matters, but the maturity level. ;)

I have to say, I really can't see what all the fuss is about. I thought her article was amusingly written but incredibly self-indulgent, and it says less to me about the nature of female participation in games, and more about the general state of the internet population, which, as I believe has been stated previously, is comprised largely of fuckwads. Part of me felt she ought to, I dunno, get over herself.

Funnily enough, I talk to more girls online than I do guys, always have. So it's never really occurred to me, to be honest.

Besides, who cares what gender you are? Apart from desperate teenage one handed gamers, that is?

For me it's actually the fact that I'm in disbelief when I hear or see a girl playing games. It's not that it's bad, it's just too GREAT. I wish I had a girlfriend who would play MMO's with me or FPS games. I'd love to come home from work and here the question, "hey babe, wanna set up the lan?" =)

I agree completely, dun_ask - a friend of mine regularly plays video games with his girlfriend (he built a very nice gaming rig for her and everything), and they play Warcraft 3, Farcry, and plenty of other games online together. Now if only my girlfriend didn't mock my video gaming habits ;)

having a girl playing games online is pretty rare, and causes sopme commotion.


so much so, that at least one person on Live that I know about used to stick the headset on his girlfriend, caused such a commotion he did'nt have any problem mopping people up.

and yes, I know it wasn't her playing, he admitted it to me in a private communique.