Gaming genres were the topic last week, and not altogether unexpectedly, fantasy came out on top, with 95% of voters saying it’s what they enjoyed. Second place, with science fiction, took 72% of the vote, which says I need to get in more Traveller or Starblazer Adventures to experience more. Modern and Horror were close for the third, but far behind the top two.
We started soliciting Inquisition ideas via our fancy new Facebook page, and one of the first suggestions was an interesting one that has come up recently, about women in gaming. (The fact that the suggestion came from someone I live with was only part of the decision to ask it.)
Conventional wisdom and surveys show that women are in the minority among gaming groups of all kinds, but I think the ratio is starting to shift. (Among game designers too!) We touched on the issue almost three years ago (to a bit of controversy) but I’d like to pose a slightly less loaded question:
[poll id=”143″]
Define “primary gaming group” however feels best to you, and it’s not limited to RPG groups or tabletop groups. I’m interested in hearing your experiences, especially since ever since college my groups have been pretty mixed as far as genders go.
I don’t have any in my primary gaming group, but my 14 and 16 year old sisters would like to play if only we ever had time to set something up. They get too much homework and I would feel guilty setting them back for it
.-= Wyatt´s last blog ..Spirits of Eden Combat Styles =-.
My group has one girl member, but its interesting that we have 3 male and 3 female pc’s (Each player runs two PC’s).
Funny enough, I only ever play female characters myself nowadays. Currently one of my characters is a middle-aged female artificer. Usually I just find it easier to come up with concepts off the beaten path that way.
.-= Wyatt´s last blog ..Spirits of Eden Combat Styles =-.
Yeah I’m the same, I tend to roll females in most games I play these days. Not really sure why other than I really like using the name “Ashbrook” and that doesn’t suit any male characters.
Though I’m forcing myself to roll a guy in Dragon Age as I don’t want to romance any of the male companions… 0_o
.-= Aaron´s last blog ..Review: Prototype =-.
Sounds like another great poll question… I never play female characters (in any medium) if I can avoid it!
I had a few female guests to my gaming group, but no regulars until my girlfriend started gaming soon after the launch of 4e. She’s my DM now, but still the only girl in the group.
.-= Nicholas´s last blog ..Geeks Next Door – The Wiz =-.
My “main group” is currently the group I left halfway across the country. In it were 3 girls, out of 7 people. All 3 were involved with guys at the table, but that had nothing to do with their being gamers, just which group they joined. (One in particular was present without her boyfriend for quite a long time.)
The group I’m starting up in my new city will (at this point) be 2/5 female.
I should also point out that I have never played in a group without at least one regular female player (with the exception of a couple month stint).
And since my fiancee is a gamer, I probably never will.
.-= Graham´s last blog ..CriticalAnkleBites and ChattyDM pretend to be journalists =-.
I’ve had at least two females in my gaming groups for the past five years, currently in the process of teaching two more. The best way to get women in you’re group is to teach them how to play, in my opinion; there are many potential female gamers out there who just haven’t been offered the chance to join a group.
I prefer DMing in a mixed-gender group; as a player it doesn’t matter as much to me, since I’m more focused on my own character, but as a DM I definitely notice a different energy that women bring to the table.
.-= Spenser´s last blog ..Sunday Hooks – Beetle Juice Edition =-.
Our RPG club (40 or so members) is nearly 50% female. Half the officers and better than half the GMs are female. I attribute at least some of this to having visible, active female GMs, officers and organizers since the beginning(1996). We go out of our way to make it a novice-friendly environment.
Jae Walker, President
Capital Area Role Players
http://www.carp-mi.net
Every female I’ve gamed with was dating a member when they joined, though some stayed on after the relationship ended.
All the players in my group are 30+ year old married men with kids. Gaming is our “night out with the boys” activity. We have no female players and if our wives have anything to say about it, we never will.
The Lords of Tyr only has one full-time female gamer: Stephanie. There is another female gamer who plays with us on occasion.
This is pretty consistent with the makeup of my RPG groups over the last decade. Mostly guys, but usually with a woman or two in the mix.
While my wife doesn’t play any pen and paper RPGs, she is a huge video game player. She has been heavily involved in several MMORPG’s over the years, including City of Heroes and Age of Conan.
Because I don’t play video games nearly as much as she does, she often explains to her online friends that her husband “is not really a gamer.” I have to admit I take offense at that. 🙂
.-= Rob a.k.a. “A Hero”´s last blog ..Dollhouse Recap: Belle Chose =-.
My main group is a girl-only group with 6 girls and there’s 2 more in the other groups. 🙂
I voted 1 because the person in my Saturday group dresses like a woman, she’s apparently a transvestite, but I can’t tell and I don’t care enough to ask what’s in her/his pants…
The Roleplaying Club I go to has a transvestite dressing as a woman who is in a relationship with another transvestite who dresses as a woman (I know this because that’s what she said)… and the club has one woman who is in a different campaign so I don’t know much about her but that might change when the current campaigns finish and we reshuffle people…
The two online games I’m in have 2-3 women in them and I talk to 4 more women gamers over the internet…
I think that about covers it…
I’m not sure if I count as a full member, considering my love of sleep and short attention span 😛
Marrying a geek gamer was the best thing I ever did in my life.
.-= Mike´s last blog ..Four Tips for New Dungeon Masters =-.
My main group has three women out of five players, not an unusual mix for me. Back when I began gaming (1980), I was usually the only woman at the table (and usually the GM, as well). That still happens at cons a lot, but it’s never bothered me.
Two of us are married/engaged couples, the third woman is married, but her husband doesn’t game. Both of us in committed relationships would be playing regardless of whether or not our husband/fiance did. I was married once before and my ex-husband was more of a computer gamer, so he got teased a lot about being the “gaming widow”.
I generally play male characters, but not always. I generally decide whether a character is male or female about half-way through character creation. My fiance tends to play female characters in MMOs (as does my son), but male characters in tabletop games.
.-= Jade´s last blog ..Dancing with the Dark =-.
Our group now consists out of 3 men and 3 women. All 3 couples.
This is actually my first gamer girlfriend (been together for 3 years now). Don’t think we ever played together before we got together though. Very refreshing to have a gamer GF I must say. Previous women were not interested in the hobby or in one case even strongly against it.
Then there’s one of the women who’s I have played with quite a few times before this, though at that time her BF was not gaming with us a lot. I think she got him into the scene though.
And then there’s the third who introduced her BF to our group after we’d been playing for a while with 5. They met through gaming so not like one can blame the other.
We actually have 2 different campaign running with this group. Ran by respectively the male part of the second and third couple.
My group consists of two married couples (including myself & my wife) and a fifth person who is married, but his wife doesn’t play. She sometimes hangs around and works on other things during a game, though.
I basically asked them all to play as a favor to me. I think it’s growing on them, though.
One thing I have noticed is that girl gamers usually don’t join games without knowing (at least as a friend) at least one person already in the game. I’ve not joined a game anywhere where no one knew each other and one of them was girls. This includes recently, as I’ve done that with a group I found recruiting on a forum, and they were all male.
I am forced to say “one,” because while I know several girls who would like to game, have expressed interest in one or more of our current games, or plan to get in on games that will be started soon, I am the only one who actually does game right now.
D’oh! Here I am forgetting the Midgard group just because it’s online. My answer should have been two.
And I play guy characters half the time if not more. I recall one particular party where only one person was playing their own gender. Of my guys here, only one will regularly play girls.
Years ago, my wife had asked a few passing questions about how D&D worked, and she loves playing games, so after I put some work into removing the unfortunate stigma that D&D tends to have to the uninitiated, I got her on board and into the game. While not a hardcore gamer by any means, she has been playing in my home campaign for about 4 years now, and has been to 2 Gen Cons with me. It’s awesome that she was able to get into it and have fun playing this game that’s been such an enjoyable part of my life for the last 22 years (and counting)!
Apparently I’m the first with 4 female members.
I met my wife at a con, and she plays without me as well. A second comes with her boyfriend, but they met while both already gamers. The other two aren’t currently attached to gamers at all.
Guelph has a very high female gamer ratio, however.
Again, hard to define “primary” group. But in the two I play right now on has 1/~10 women, and the other is 2/5. The 2/5 involves no boyfriend/girlfriend relationship and is DM’d by one of the women.
Almost every game I’ve been in since high school has involved at least some women so I don’t find it odd at all. Though I have yet to encounter (personally)a group where the women outnumber the men.
I would consider all of these women “gamers”.
I’m not sure if someone has mentioned this, but claims about “majority of women” is going to be difficult without a measure about how big gaming groups are :p I could have 4 women in my group, but there is a difference if I only have a group of 4 or if I have a group of 12 ;p
My primary group is 2/5 female. My wife is one of the female players, the other is my friends wife. Both women were gamers before hand. My wife and I met as players in another RPG group, which was 5/7 female.
My secondary group is 6/9 female. The females in this group consist of my wife, my sister-in-law, my two oldest daughters, my two oldest nieces.
I’m male and have been gaming for 6 years now. Ever since I started playing, the majority of my gaming group has been female. I don’t know how it happened, but it certainly made gaming more popular in my male-only residence on campus. 😛
2 Main live groups now.
1/4 women in one
3/6 women in the other.
But it wasn’t always this way. We always had a few, but a much lower ratio until recently. Recently being the last decade.
OK. Approximated by decade? Make that 1 in 11 in the 70’s. 4 in 42 (or so) in the 80’s. 4 in 35(or so) in the 90s. 6 in 15 in the 00s.
Maturity, marriage, networking, etc, performing magic?
.-= LordVreeg´s last blog ..edited Daily Life in Igbar =-.
My current (and only) gaming group has two female players, but only 1 female PC. The group just before that had 2, and both played female PCs. I had a female player in the last 3.5 campaign I ran. Before that, my groups were all-male.
.-= Kameron´s last blog ..The tale of two goblins =-.
My games have almost always been majority-female games. It just works out that way.
I’m in two other games which are 100% male (except me). Not quite so much fun.
.-= Kynn´s last blog ..Pork is a nice sweet meat =-.
The only male in my current gaming group is the GM. All the players are women.
In my previous games (around 7 years ago now) had approximately a 50/50 split, maybe slightly more men then women. The GM for one game was a woman too. While there were some cases of boyfriends/girlfriends (the GM’s boyfriend played), for the most part the women were gamers in their own right rather than playing because they were the girlfriends of gamers.
My main group consists of two girls which is half of the players. Which thinking about it is the most I’ve ever played with.
Why is it that this is such a “guy” hobby? Is it our need to be a hero?
.-= Tyson J. Hayes´s last blog ..Character Considerations: Naming Your Character =-.
My group had three for almost two years (with a short stint in the middle where we had four), but the group disbanded and reformed with two less players, and they were both girls, so now we’re down to one.
-1 str +1 cha
Oddly enough, my last 3 groups have been male minorities. My dragonstar campaign had a revolving cast of 5 of the eight players being female.
My 3E campaign days were about 50/50, and my current 4E games are 3 girls to 2 guys (even if you count the DM).
I’m not really even sure why, aside from they seemed to be actively recruiting more girls for the game. IMO, if you ask just about any female if she wants to spend 4-6 hours sitting in a chair, pretending to be an elf, and surrounded by 4 guys who want nothing more than to tell her all about their character’s childhood – most would run away screaming. Not that I can really blame them. At least Hygeine isn’t as big an issue as it used to be.
Your mileage may vary, but “my” girls are very much of the Roseanne Barr camp, and are generally more manly than the men they outnumber – make of that what you will 🙂
The older I get the more women I have in my games. In high school, I did have one very unusual group that was mostly women (it was affiliated with the drama club), but otherwise through college it was mostly men. In my late 20s, it started to shift considerably, and my current groups are usually 40-50% women. That said, it may have a lot to do with the fact that most of my friends are coupled off now instead of single.
When my friends and I were playing 4e regularly, we had 2-3 girls typically… with one of them being very hot 🙂
Personally, I’ve never played a female character in a tabletop game. I’ve done it regularly in videogame RPGs, especially MMO or 3rd person games. Why? I just like seeing THAT rear end more so than a male’s all day. haha Kidding aside, I think its because the guys in MMOs and 3rd person RPGs just tend to be TOO clunky and masculine. If I’m playing a mage or rogue, I hate looking like I’m about to fall over at any minute and crack the Earth when I get there. The female character models tend to always be sleek and much more agile looking.
.-= Tonester´s last blog ..Threadless Tshirt Giveaway at jaypeeonline.net =-.
I’m a woman who games, would game if my husband did or not. Most of the women in my group would be there, men included or not. I have played as a lone woman in a group of men, been in all women groups, but I’ve found as I’ve gotten older most of my groups are a pretty even mix.
And, actually, there are a lot of women game designers, but in table top/pen and paper gamers as well as in the video game industry.
Women are a growing percentage of gamers, (heck, we’re 40% of the market on the video game side of things.) We even gather sometimes and talk about things. http://letterstogaming.wordpress.com/
As far as playing as the other sex, it’s rare in my groups. Most people just can’t pull it off seriously, and realise this. When it is attempted, it often turns into a parody (all the male-played women become sluts, and often lesbian sluts, for instance). See “Gamers: Dorkness Rising” for a good example of what my experience has been.
But I too play about 50/50 male/female in video games, as roleplaying isn’t required, so I can experience both sides of the story in the game.
In third-person behind-the-head games, such as WoW, I’m nearly always female, but this is largely a practical concern. The smaller stature takes up less screen real estate and allows for a wider view. Similarly, I have never played Tauren or Dranei, and it gives me one more reason to love Gnomes.
.-= Graham´s last blog ..CriticalAnkleBites and ChattyDM pretend to be journalists =-.
We don’t have any in our group, but it’s not for lack of trying. We just haven’t found all that many women interested in gaming. I encounter many more in online games.
A more interesting phrasing may have been the ratio of women to men. After all, one woman in a group of three is a more significant statistic than one out of eight.
My current group is really small–there’s only 3 of us, and we’re all guys. But I’ve been in groups that had as many as 3 women (out of 7), and been in 5 ongoing games that had at least 1 girl in them over the years. On the other hand, this is also my third regularly meeting group that was composed entirely of members possessed of a Y chromosome.
My RPGA circuit has about 3 women out of 12 players total. My groups over the years have always included a few women. That said, it wasn’t until I started playing Dungeons & Dragons that I was introduced to the notion of a person playing a character of the opposite sex. Seriously, it still wigs me out when the big bearded guy decides to play a slutty princess spellcaster. ON top of that, it offends the crap out of my wife, because all the guys playing girls tend to go into terrible stereotype land.
…
I keep trying to find the interview that Chapel Waste (Dungeons & Dragons playing Adult Film star) discussed this topic. I remember it being spot on but, now that websites and links have re-aligned, I can’t find it to save my life. The general thing with the interview was how someone who pretends to be the slutty stereotype professionally can still take offense when people do it casually. Something about it all being a game and gender play is not a part of roleplaying for everyone. I’ll keep my eyes open and share if I can find it.
-Jared
One additional thing: I find it interesting that in my pen & paper RPG groups, girls are the minority, while online I’m often one of the few guys in my group. I know that “online gaming” isn’t considered true roleplaying for the hardcore folk, but I do find it interesting that when logging into City of Heroes all my RPG adventurers are female (or claim to be, admittedly) while most folks in the fleshworld are male. It’s….weird. Somehow.
I always found it weird… I played female characters and I had female player characters and yet I never had a slutty character in a game…