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style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">Let's Hear it for the Girls

by Mercurie

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In the 80’s when I first started
playing pen and paper RPGs, female
gamers were a very rare thing. In the nearly twenty years that I played
pen and paper games, I only played with two different women on a
regular basis. One of the women was the girlfriend of a fellow gamer.
The other was a fellow gamer's sister. And while the number of women
with whom I played pen and paper RPGs might appear low to many today,
it seems to me that my gaming group actually had more women participate
in our games than the average gaming group did. I've met a lot of male
pen and paper role players who never played with a woman.



Given the apparently low percentage of women who played pen and paper
RPGs in the 80’s and 90’s, I would have thought that a similarly low
number of women would participate in MMORPGs. This is apparently not
the case. A study done by T. L. Taylor, assistant professor of
communication at North Carolina State University, and published in The
Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 9, 2003, indicated that
20-30% percent of all individuals who play MMOs are women. Indeed, I
must admit that I know many more women who play MMOs than I did women
who played pen and paper games. In fact, the first person I ever met
who played Everquest was a woman (although, like me, she had begun in
pen and paper games).



To many old time gamers like me, the revelation that many women play
MMOs was a bit of a surprise. In her paper, "Multiple Pleasures: Women
and Online Gaming," Taylor gives various reasons why women would be
attracted to MMOs. One is quite simply the social dimension of online
role-playing games. In MMOs a woman can log on, meet new people, renew
old acquaintances, and socialize in general. Quite simply, the virtual
communities of MMOs give women the opportunity to forge new
relationships. Indeed, Taylor points out that traits stereotypically
thought of as feminine--social adeptness, social inclusion, and forming
and maintaining relationships--are precisely the traits desired in
MMOs. It is those traits which can make or break a good role-playing
party.



Yet another reason Taylor gives for women being attracted to online
gaming is probably one that attracts many men as well. Quite simply,
MMOs give women the chance to create a new identity in a fantasy world.
In an MMO a woman can generate a character who is her exact opposite in
everything from temperament to physique. Like many male roleplayers,
women enjoy the chance to play someone other than themselves for a
change. Indeed, one of my friends (the first woman I ever met who
played Everquest, in fact) says that she knows a woman who enjoys MMOs
for precisely this reason--she can be someone she isn’t in real life.



href="http://vanguard.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=article-illustrations&id=girl_gamer&op=modload&name=Gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php"> alt="Girl gamer"
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hspace="4" vspace="2">Another reason women enjoy MMOs is one that
defies the usual feminine
stereotype: women enjoy the competition. MMOs allow women to take an
active role, facing the same dangers as male characters, and as a
result give them a chance to compete against other characters. It would
seem that enjoying a good competition is not solely a male trait.
Indeed, Taylor testifies that there are women who actually enjoy the
combat aspect of MMOs. Like many male players, women enjoy the combat
as a means of showing their mastery of the game as well as a means of
earning experience.



Regardless of why women play MMOs, I must say that it is good to know
that they do. One of the problems shared by nearly every pen and paper
role playing group I knew was the lack of anyone to play female
characters. True, men can play female characters (I must confess that I
played a few in my days as a pen and paper gamer), but I don’t think we
can do nearly as well as actual women can. In this respect, women
playing female characters make the games more realistic in my mind. One
has female characters actually behaving as actual women would, not as a
male either thinks or expects them to behave.



Of course, I do think MMOs could be more “female friendly.” While it is
true that nearly every MMO treats male and female characters as equals,
giving them the same starting stats and chances for experience, combat,
etc; and while it is true that nearly every role playing game usually
has several major female NPCs; it seems to me they fall short in other
ways. Some MMOs give women fewer choices in avatars than men have.
Furthermore, even when a game does give women as many avatar choices,
those avatars aren’t always pleasing. My friend who is also the first
woman I knew to ever play EverQuest complained about the female avatars
when EQII first came out. She said that all of them were the same--big
breasts and ugly faces! I must admit that, upon looking at the avatars,
I could not argue with her.



Regardless, I think I can speak for a large number of male players when
I say that I am very happy that many women play MMOs. I think gaming,
whether pen and paper or online, had been a boy’s club for far too
long. For a good, even, realistic game, there needs to be women playing
as well.



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Gamer Girls for the Win, by Shayalyn

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