Women gamers: How many in each community or kind of game?

[o.pwuaioc]

Sorry, Key-glyph I missed that part of your post

Involved, as in, effort, time and proportion of your life spent into something. Someone who only plays facebook games from time to time is less involved than a competitive FPS player, for example. I think the number of women in each division of gaming is related to the involvement neccesary, though it's just a rule of thumb.

Book clubs, sewing, knitting, fashion, cooking, all stereotypically seen as spheres for women, are not involved activities at all, let alone child-rearing, teaching, or the numerous other fields that women regularly are engaged in. No woman ever wrote a lengthy scholarly tomb; women only become nurses and never doctors. No woman has ever attempted Mt. Everest, nor are there women politicians. Clearly women are the inferior species since they don't do anything which requires a lot of "involvement."

That this thread even exists is just shameful.

[AppleQueso]

Dude, those are some pretty heinous conclusions you're drawing. There's very little evidence to support this idea you have that General_Norris hates women or believes them to be somehow inferior.

I know you love to argue, but I'd say you're way off the mark here, to say the least.

[o.pwuaioc]

Dude, those are some pretty heinous conclusions you're drawing. There's very little evidence to support this idea you have that General_Norris hates women or believes them to be somehow inferior.

I know you love to argue, but I'd say you're way off the mark here, to say the least.

It's the very implication. He quite clearly said that women don't get into "involved" games. There's something fundamentally wrong when such a clearly sexist remark is shrugged off.

[AppleQueso]

I don't think he's implying so much as you're inferring...

[o.pwuaioc]

I don't think he's implying so much as you're inferring...

"The more involved the hobby is, the less women in it." - General Norris

[brandman]

And that ignorance is probably getting passed down through the generations. Especially here down in the south ignorance is REAL bad. Obviously no KKK or something but dumber stuff such as video games.

And yet the ignorant one speaks... Don't generalize.

I don't mean to generalize, obviously not everyone is like that, and you will find people like that spanning the globe. I've just seen enough of it to conclude in a lot of small southern towns that a good bit of it has backwards people. Do I mean anything negative about them, well, technically. Do I think of myself superior to them in every way? Absolutely not. Every one has problems, and I would like to believe I don't share some of those problems. I just feel bad for the kids growing up, but luckily they aren't under some huge lock down where they can't change even in there communities like some Anabaptist's cannot. They can look into the world and get more out of it if they truly want to. I just don't like any suppression. I'm not saying it's a bad way of life either, just that they shouldn't enforce their ideals on their offspring.

Let me explain further, I don't mean straight up hillbillies, making moonshine, living in forests, owning more guns than an government armory, screwing pigs, etc. Just about everybody is more advanced than that. They're for the most part in modern times, but they shrug off or even retaliate to anything different than they're comfortable with.

It's kind of hard to sum up what I mean, so just know I'm not trying to generalize, just saying there can be very ignorant people.

[AppleQueso]

I don't think he's implying so much as you're inferring...

"The more involved the hobby is, the less women in it." - General Norris

Wow, you're really out to make him look like some kind of misogynist, huh?

You know exactly what the context of that phrase is. You know full well that he's talking about hobbies specifically relating to gaming.

I know that he'd never use it as a crutch, but English isn't his first language. You know this. He's very good at it, sure, but attacking and judging someone, especially a non-native speaker, over something that in all likelyhood can be chalked up to poor wording? That's pretty low.

[brandman]

That this thread even exists is just shameful.

Idk, I thought it was pretty interesting. It's just to observe the way society works, centered on female gamers. It's informative (for the most part) and entertaining. It's not like it's a disgrace to humankind. Just chill out, and you should probably apologize to General Norris, I'm with Apple he didn't mean to or even intend on imply all that your claiming about him.

[Ivo]

I don't think he's implying so much as you're inferring...

"The more involved the hobby is, the less women in it." - General Norris

I will admit I winced a bit when I read that line, but I think you are inferring way too much.

Excuse me for cherry picking but here is an instance of the issue:

He quite clearly said that women don't get into "involved" games.

No he did not. He said that he observed that there were less women getting into "involved" games.

In Norris' own original post, he mentioned he observed an exception in paper RPGs. Similarly there are very good counterexamples to his statement outside the realm of gaming, as you suggested: book clubs, sewing, knitting, fashion, cooking. Without supporting Norris' belief about involvement, I would say that (like paper RPGs) many of those involve or can involve significant amounts of socializing.

I don't know how it is so often construed as sexist to observe something. Norris is giving anecdotal observations, so perhaps you could call him on his lack of rigour instead?

If it was statistically, rigorously verified that women (on average) look to get different things from their hobbies than men do I would not be surprised (I don't know if it is true or if any such proper studies have been undertaken in the past). Does the fact that I would not be surprised at such an outcome mean that I am sexist?

Let me make things simpler. I could observe the following fact:
the 100 m dash world record for men is lower than for women.
Am I being sexist just for stating such a fact?
(the current world record for women is 10.49s, the world record for men has been below that since around the 1920s)

I'm not saying "all men run faster than all women" (I think that would be sexist, and I am certain it would be false as well).
I'm not even saying "the average running speed of men is higher than the average running speed of women" (I think it is very hard to know if this is true - even though apparently the top runners are men, maybe the slowest ones are men as well).

Ivo.

[o.pwuaioc]

I don't know how it is so often construed as sexist to observe something. Norris is giving anecdotal observations, so perhaps you could call him on his lack of rigour instead?

Anecdotal evidence says far more about the person giving it than the story contained therein.

If it was statistically, rigorously verified that women (on average) look to get different things from their hobbies than men do I would not be surprised (I don't know if it is true or if any such proper studies have been undertaken in the past). Does the fact that I would not be surprised at such an outcome mean that I am sexist?

If by "not surprised" you mean "this confirms what I suspected about women all along even though I conducted no such study of my own", then how does it not indicate prejudice?

Am I being sexist just for stating such a fact?

Of course not. But no such facts were given by G_N.

I'm not saying "all men run faster than all women" (I think that would be sexist, and I am certain it would be false as well).

That's not the right parallel.