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

[Erik_Twice]

Guys, it is an inn before a lock.

I'm a moron


Anyways, shame a good thread is dead. Thanks everyone who posted in it. Send me a PM if you have any issues with anything.

[J T]

It's a picture of a Holiday Inn. Holiday Inn is a song by Chingy (ft. Snoop Dog). Which begins with Snoop singing "Bomb ass pussy, Ma I know you got that bomb bomb pussy" and later discusses how "ching-a-lling" is equipped with much "ding-a-ling." Clearly, dsheinem is trying to critique this thread's lack of discussion about the importance of large male genitalia for attracting female gamers with similarly impressive genitalia.

[MrPopo]

It's a picture of a Holiday Inn. Holiday Inn is a song by Chingy (ft. Snoop Dog). Which begins with Snoop singing "Bomb ass pussy, Ma I know you got that bomb bomb pussy" and later discusses how "ching-a-lling" is equipped with much "ding-a-ling." Clearly, dsheinem is trying to critique this thread's lack of discussion about the importance of large male genitalia for attracting female gamers with similarly impressive genitalia.

No no, it's a reference to a line by the Sugar Hill Gang:

Everybody go, hotel, motel Holiday Inn
Say if your girl starts actin up, then you take her friend

[Key-Glyph]

No! Wait! I want to continue with this discussion, but I'm at work right now and can't. I don't think it's out-of-hand enough to lock, but just in case a moderator is thinking about it, buy me a little time. I swear my intentions are rooted in civility. I love discussing these topics.

I will say I am enjoying the tangential theories about dsh's picture, though.

[Ivo]

This thread took an hilarious detour thanks to that picture of the Inn. But my questions earlier were serious

Ivo.

[Erik_Twice]

I would also like to salvage the thread is possible.

[brandman]

It's a picture of a Holiday Inn. Holiday Inn is a song by Chingy (ft. Snoop Dog). Which begins with Snoop singing "Bomb ass pussy, Ma I know you got that bomb bomb pussy" and later discusses how "ching-a-lling" is equipped with much "ding-a-ling." Clearly, dsheinem is trying to critique this thread's lack of discussion about the importance of large male genitalia for attracting female gamers with similarly impressive genitalia.

No no, it's a reference to a line by the Sugar Hill Gang:

Everybody go, hotel, motel Holiday Inn
Say if your girl starts actin up, then you take her friend

Absolutely not! It obviously refers to the song, "Cheeseburger in Paradise", by Jimmy Buffet.

"Heard about the old time sailor men
They eat the same thing again and again
Warm beer and bread they said could raise the dead
Well it reminds me of the menu at a holiday inn"

Where he see's threads go to flaming again and again, and now this thread resembles the holiday inn in the song. Now he hopes to lose the forum's weight on these threads by either him or another mod delete the posts, or lock the thread.

Derp.

[Key-Glyph]

Buckle in kids, this one's a doozy! (Seriously though, I apologize for the length of this.)

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.

It's all good, no worries.

In defense of Op.Wok's reaction, General_Norris' first statement of "the more involved the hobby is, the less women in it" really did sound like he was saying "women as a group appear to be uninterested in hobbies that require brainpower or advanced skills; let's discuss." That's why I asked what Norris meant by "involved," and with his answer I am now satisfied that I've corrected my misinterpretation and gotten his intended meaning, which was, "the more obsessively dedicated a hobby demands its members to be, the fewer women you'll find there."

On the one hand, I want to argue that this is not correct. There are plenty of equally demanding hobbies that entertain a strong (or almost exclusively) female member base, but the problem is that those particular hobbies are generally waved off as being "girly stuff," asserted to be fundamentally nonequivalent to the paralleling "boy stuff," and thus condescended toward for their feminine connotation alone. I don't know if anyone here knows any hardcore quilters, but my god. These people live and breathe their craft. It requires immense physical skill, analytical and mathematical prowess, an understanding of visual forms, and a sensitivity to aesthetic. I know of a local quilting group that meets weekly for several hours and has annual retreats. I don't "get" quilting myself, but I can definitely appreciate it and see it as an equivalent activity to modding electronics or game collecting. These women will seek out fabric stores like we seek out retro gaming stores; they appreciate sewing techniques and vintage stitch patterns from a historical perspective in the same way we appreciate bits and pixels; they savor their materials and sewing machines like we savor our cartridges and consoles; and they have their own active forum, just like us. But sewing is thought of as being a "soft" activity, and its lack of grit makes it easy to dismiss. It's not loud or dirty; it's proper and poised. It's harder to gauge how much energy or thought an activity takes when the signs of exertion are subdued or suppressed completely, and thus those activities are underestimated.

This is apparent even in our own niche when people badmouth casual gaming as "not real gaming." I maintain that the definition of a "casual game" is "a game with simplish rules that does not require huge quantities of time to play a self-contained instance or two," and I use this definition without negative connotation. No matter what anybody says, Donkey Kong is just as much a casual game as Tetris or Cruisin' USA or Street Fighter is. Average people played these games to kill time while waiting around in pizzerias and laundromats. The problem is, people often define "casual games" by the perceived habits of the players instead of the games' content. What elevates something like Donkey Kong in the eyes of many is the lengths the champions go to in order to master it. What diminishes something like Tetris in the eyes of many is, so far as I can tell, that a lot of non-gamers, and especially girls, play it. Why don't people roll their eyes when people "casually" play Donkey Kong? Why is playing a video game for a few rounds while you wait for your pizza suddenly "not real gaming" when you can do it on your phone instead of needing an arcade cabinet? And would people who define "casual games" by the habits of their fanbases categorize The Sims and Petz franchises differently if they were aware of the expansive communities of women who hacked and designed their own in-game skins, furniture, and items?

On the other hand, General_Norris is noticing something, which I think is this: when a hobby reaches a level that requires an amount of obsessive dedication that interferes with, instead of fosters, one's social health, you are going to find fewer women than men willing to be there. I think this is true, and here's why. In the eyes of society, the single most important quality for females to possess is niceness. From the time they're toddlers, little girls are bombarded with the message that being liked, and bringing out the good in others, is indicative of their worth as a female. Friendship is everything. Little girls' cartoons constantly trumpet things like, "it's okay if you're not a winner so long as you have friends," "it's okay if you're ugly so long as you have friends." I'm not saying that being a kind, compassionate person isn't a worthy quality -- but this goal is almost always served to girls in popular culture as being at the expense of other things (success, personal dreams, autonomy). If you are not a nurturing female, you are suspect. Ask any woman over 40 who doesn't have kids how often she's quizzed about why she never had children, or how often people allude to her lifestyle choice as being selfish. I believe that it's this pressure that keeps women from representing a greater number of the obsessives in hobbies that either aren't rooted in femininity or don't foster community ties -- even when they'd prefer to be in rank alongside the boys.

[irixith]

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.

I popped into this thread soon after the first post was made, and wrote something quite similar, but with a helping of snark so heavy that I closed the tab and went about my day. All you have to do is meet some women who belong to say, a quilting or scrapbooking group, and I swear they would grind an equal group of male videogame fanatics into the ground!

To say that the more involved the activity is, the less women you find is so stunningly.....stunning that it's really hard to form a response without wanting to see someone's testicles ejected through their mouth. However, after taking a few moments to think about it, it obviously wasn't meant as nastily as it read.

..and here we are!

Thankfully Key-Glyph said it better than I was going to, and brings up some very interesting points to boot.

[DinnerX]

I don't know if anyone here knows any hardcore quilters, but my god.

It's true. The same goes for about any crafting activity. I know people who spend countless hours and tons of money, beading, scrapbooking, knitting, etc. Some of them even have dedicated rooms in their house for their crafting, just like one of us might have gameroom.