Greg
04-17-2004, 03:23 PM
I found Michael Karlin's article on gender equality in games very interesting. I wonder if there has been a poll on female gamers attitudes to this. I haven't run online historical games, but I have run a lot of paper-and-pencil historical games (often over email) and my impression of what most female gamers want doesn't quite cohere with his.
If I understand what he is saying, he thinks that female gamers would usually like worlds that treat men and women fairly, even at the expense of fidelity to the setting. My own experience suggests that female gamers would usually like worlds which allow female PCs to achieve just as much as male PCs, but that unfairness to women in general is preferable to anachronism or other divergence from the source material. I also found wide disagreement among female gamers as to how heavily opportunities for female PCs should be allowed to chip away at historical accuracy.
To put the point more concretely, female gamers were unanimous that there had to be something that female PCs could do at least as well as the guys, and that was at least as important as what the guys were doing. How much opportunities for female PCs should chip away at anachronism was a matter of some disagreement - some, for instance, would want women to be able to be medieval knights while others objected that this ruined their suspension of disbelief. However, they all would have objected to gender-balancing that didn't prevent them from playing the character they wanted, if such balancing didn't fit the source material. For instance, if I had made godesses more powerful than gods, they would complain that this doesn't accurately reflect Egyptian mythology. Similarly, if I had forbidden men from being sorcerors, they would point to male sorcerors in Egyptian stories and insist that men should be able to cast spells in the setting. (To be fair, mythological fidelity isn't quite the same as historical accuracy, but you get the idea).
I'd love to know what female gamers (or even the men who have known them) have to say on this subject.
If I understand what he is saying, he thinks that female gamers would usually like worlds that treat men and women fairly, even at the expense of fidelity to the setting. My own experience suggests that female gamers would usually like worlds which allow female PCs to achieve just as much as male PCs, but that unfairness to women in general is preferable to anachronism or other divergence from the source material. I also found wide disagreement among female gamers as to how heavily opportunities for female PCs should be allowed to chip away at historical accuracy.
To put the point more concretely, female gamers were unanimous that there had to be something that female PCs could do at least as well as the guys, and that was at least as important as what the guys were doing. How much opportunities for female PCs should chip away at anachronism was a matter of some disagreement - some, for instance, would want women to be able to be medieval knights while others objected that this ruined their suspension of disbelief. However, they all would have objected to gender-balancing that didn't prevent them from playing the character they wanted, if such balancing didn't fit the source material. For instance, if I had made godesses more powerful than gods, they would complain that this doesn't accurately reflect Egyptian mythology. Similarly, if I had forbidden men from being sorcerors, they would point to male sorcerors in Egyptian stories and insist that men should be able to cast spells in the setting. (To be fair, mythological fidelity isn't quite the same as historical accuracy, but you get the idea).
I'd love to know what female gamers (or even the men who have known them) have to say on this subject.