Slashdot Mirror
Girls in the Gaming World
dkleinsc writes "The BBC is running an article about life as a female gaming squad. There's some discussion about the welcome or lack thereof women get in the gaming community, and arguments over whether it's a good idea to have separate women's matches."
Swell.. now that this the existence of female gamers is common knowledge, the most common messages in Counter-Strike will be "A/S/L?!" and "w4nna g0 c4mp1ng 0n 7h47 r00f709?!!!"
Trolling is a art,
Ctrl-Alt-Del Comic about a girl gamer
Are "gamers" that insecure about their masculinity/sexuality/gaming prowess/dick size/pick something else that they're afraid of playing against girls?
My girlfriend loves Mario Kart: Double Dash and it makes me happy it's one of the hobbies we can share.
If playing against girls makes you uncomfortable, don't play games at all!
and arguments over whether it's a good idea to have separate women's matches."
Why? This isn't real life, where men have more muscle than women do (I'm not being sexist, just take an intro biology course), and are therefore superior to women in terms of pure strength, speed, etc. Online, everybody's equal, the characters can be tuned to roughly equivalent stats, the only thing that matters is reflexes to move the mouse and hit the keyboard.
Sithu Thein's comment is the most interesting: "Why do they bother having women only events for internet gaming? Within sport, I can see the reasoning for sexual segregation - women simply are not as big, fast or strong as men. Thus there needs to be a separate contest for men and women in order to keep a level playing field. Last time I checked the x and y chromosomes were not linked to reflexes, hand - eye coordination, and visual acuity. Men are not going to be able to use any of these physical attributes to gain an advantage. As their advantages are thrown out of the window, so too goes the reasoning for segregated gaming. As for women feeling that men make them feel unwelcome in the world of CounterStrike - history is just full of instances where the dominant group in a field has made it perfectly clear what they think of any 'New Kids on the Block'. You just have to try that little bit harder. Sithu Thein, UK" I totally agree with him. I thought on-line gaming should finally make the genders compete at the same level, but I'm really sad to see that women still are set to "female compos". I understand that women actually may want this, since they still might meet some harassment and such (i can only guess what a 15year old guy say when he hear the enemy is a woman), but I still hoped compos with big prizes should have teams from both genders.
Does anyone else see this as an attempt to make an issue out of a non-issue? Games are marketed towards guys because guys make up the vast majority of the gaming market. Why don't they target the elderly with hiphop music? Becuase its more cost effective to target the younger crowd. Girls gaming? Great... But no one should complain about the fact that way more guys game then girls. Thats the girl's own preogatives.
The imbalance between men and women was clear to see, with almost 50 male teams taking part, compared with just seven female squads. And as in the world of sport, there were separate competitions for each gender.
Separate competitions? That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.
Boys' and girls' real-world sports are separated early on because of physical attributes. Physically, girls have different abilities from boys. And there are other physical attributes that cause both genders to become... distracted.
But online? Who knows -- who cares -- about your real-world attributes? For crying out loud, that's what makes gaming great for us geeks -- we don't have to be muscular, or fit, or even easily mobile! I'd probably lose 10-to-1 against Stephen Hawking at BZFlag.
So in a world where physical ability and differences are irrelevant, what justification could there possibly be for a gender-segregated gaming tournament?
Perhaps the organizers have a cynical ulterior motive? If I were a top-level girl geek, I'd turn down an invitation to such a demeaning event -- so all they'd get would be the second-rate girl teams. And then they can say "but look, they're clearly not in the same league."
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
My co-worker used to play online using a feminine name. If you'd ever seen my co-worker you'd realize how funny this was. Think Richard Stallman meets John Goodman... Anyway, he swore that he did better with a female name because people were less likely to kill him.
I heard that Slashdot moderators also go kindly on female posters.
Sarah_the_geek_grrl
I've spent the last year trying to get my fiancee interested in games... this last week, she started showing signs of being hooked on Roller Coaster Tycoon. I guess it goes: Mid-range PC: $800 RollerCoaster Tycoon Deluxe: $20 Watching my SO build a coaster that makes all the riders sick: Priceless!
Windows isn't the answer... it's the question. NO is the answer!
Oh come on! I think it is silly to have separate leagues for men and women in real-world sports, where it could be argued (not by me) that the physical differences between the genders would give one or the other an unfair advantage. In a virtual environment, even that would be voided. Why separate them?
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
I am a girl in the gamming world and I think having seperate matches for woman is rather stupid. It is a game, it is ment to be fun, and if some girls suck gamming then they can suck it up, practice, and get better.
"Most interesting how often you humans seem to obtain that which you do not want" -Spock
My wife got started on computers games playing the original tribes. It started out with me showing her the basics and helping her get started. I'd have her switch to my team so I could show her tactics, etc. Soon, she started playing a lot on her own.
Fast-forward to a few weeks later, and I would lose to her in duels 90 percent of the time. She would hit top scores on servers routinely, and I started switching to her team any time we played together so I wouldn't always be on the losing team.
The funny thing was, no one believed it was really a woman playing when she'd kick their ass.
-i
Where have I heard that one before?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
actually, it is a well-documented fact that while on average men are superior in the areas of simple strength, and aggressive competitive behavior comes more easily to men than women, women have significantly faster reaction time, better accuracy, and the ability to track more targets at one time. this was discovered specifically relating to women being fighter pilots, but i'd bet it's valid for twitch games too. what holds most women back is that they lack confidence and are not aggressive enough. that and they are scared that people will think they are a "bitch" if they act aggressive. it's sad that society beats that sort of thing into them... i'll tell ya this, my fiance hands me my ass at tekken...
sometimes, i wonder if i'm the only conservative on teh intarweb. ah well, back to mah hogs and warmongerin'....
1. Serious Gamers
Guys don't like playing them because they're smarter, better, faster, and sometimes you fall in love...
2. "WHEEE CUTE!"
Usually they watch anime and/or create bad erotic fanart about doe-eyed male anime characters. They don't play any game that doesn't involve a cute catgirl or bunnygirl. See Final Fantasy XI or Ragnarok Online.
3. Your Mom Playing Solitaire
You know she's playing it right now. Remember that 1.5ghz Athlon system you built for her so she can send digital photos to grandma and make her own mix CD's? Yea, it's a $900 solitaire deck shuffler.
That this would even be an issue is testament to how little we've really achieved in gender equality.
... er, whatever)
:)
Why do we have to relegate everything to the sexes ?
I'm a liberal !
Let women go head to head with men ! (hmmm, there's something about that statement that
So long as I don't have a female boss, I'm happy !
I'm mean really guys, lets get realistic here
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
...and they want to bring it back in? I play some of these games and not once in my mind has the gender of my teammate or opponents has ever entered my mind. In fact it would be a distraction. Thinking that someone has an advantage in a game because they are male or female is like trying to figure out if someone has an advantage if they are right or left handed. If someone wins or loses they do so because they are an accomplished or failed player. Gender has very little to do with it.
The one place where competition can be leveled down to fundemental non-physical attributes, a place where women can actually compete on equal footing as guys, they want to bring back gender divisions? I just don't get it.
I'll probably get modded down, because no one of either gender every listens to me, but.....
Since many major online games (UT, Quake, etc) offer granularity of servers, I imagine there's probably alredy "girls only" servers and other private interest group servers just the same (password protected, et al).
It seems natural. We already have television networks (several) specifically for genders. Chat rooms for certain interests.
Now, with all that said, I can't say I mind competing with/losing to a girl. I don't understand the need for specific major competitions specifically for females. In fact, I'd imagine that 'being a male' as a requirement for a competition would probably result in legal action.
-m.
My 13 year old daughter is probably the most vicious player I have ever met! Not only does she frag you, she goes the "extra yard" by blowing up your corpse! And when we are playing death matches in Quake she will mutter things like "My name is Perfect Little Angel, how may I kill you today?"
Maybe this is what the guys are afraid of when they are playing online is that they could get their asses handed to them by "a girl".Since there is no way to mod this "Duh", I had to respond.
OF COURSE! Have you ever played an online game? There are always those who are (or pretend to be) loud-mouthed, homophobic, racist, misogynist, immature dick-heads. They usually are the ones who cheat and play like tools. They either really are that ignorant, or they do it just to cause a stir and piss people off. Being female would only garner a different type of insult from these morons. They are what make online gaming so annoying. But it is so much fun and gratifying to own them. :-)
Now I know that not everyone is like this, but the ones who aren't don't care who they are playing against. Most of the time you don't know anyway, you just know people by their screen names and your past experiences with them. For all I know, some of them are women.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
My wife is an avid gamer, and has handed my butt to me on the proverbial platter several times in UT and UT2003 and now she's mastered (God help us all) the Raptor in the UT2004 demo. I've always been the proud monkey at LAN parties when she starts screaming "How'd you like that one, MotherF***er?" at all my guy friends. The family that plays together, stays together.
End of Line.
What exacally is wrong with girls gaming? I'm a female. I love video games... and I play well. Why should I have to play against all girls because some little 15 y/o boy is afraid I will beat him? Any male who thinks we should be seperated needs to grow up. It won't hurt your ego that bad to loose to a girl.
-ABG
I was playing an online game ( I think it was Battlezone by Activision) a few years ago and my handle was gender neutral. Someone asked if I was male / female. I was taken back by that question as why would it matter? I said female to see if it mattered. Boy did it. I had players taking damage by jumping between me and an opponent, players nearly killing off someone and then leaving the prey for me to finish off to up my score, and even offering tips! Normal protocol is to be mean, rude, and blast everything that moves and even some that don't.
Its one world but not everyone experiences it the same way.
Let them compete on an equal footing initially. If it really turns out that there is such a clear deliniation in ability, then you have a great case for a separate league. If not, then we've just eliminated a lot of unnecessary organizational overhead.
.
Seems fairly straigtforward.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Hear hear. I could be beaten by blind,pre-pubescent paraplegics with bad hearing all the live-long day and I'd still enjoy the experience. But it's ruined when some whiny brat from Jerkwater, USA calls me a "cheting haker" because I got a head-shot.Once.
To think that only women are subject to abuse is either naievity or ego.
...was regularly ranked in the top ten Tribes players in the world, according to the realtime stats at some site that tracks such things. She used to play 10+ hours/day 5+ days/week.
It was interesting to see the varied reactions of the guys. She didn't advertise that she was female, but if it came up the first reaction was usually disbelief and dismissal -- they assumed she was a guy lying about his gender. Then after adequate proof (using voice comm in game, for example) they'd be surprised, but accept the truth. Then they wanted to see pictures.
There were basically two reactions: anger and attraction. It was usually the younger guys who got angry -- for some reason they were pissed off that a girl could beat them. They'd get all bitchy at her and call her names, claim she was cheating and disappear. Maybe they'd be like that with anyone. Who knows?
Most of the older guys (heh -- meaning past puberty) ended up getting attracted to her. In fact a whole bunch of guys would flock around her online wherever she went... be it gaming, or IRC.
She went to TribesCon IV in Reno a couple years ago, and she was one of maybe three girls who came to play... out of 200+ total gamers. There were lots of girlfriends there, but they stayed off to the side.
Some of the guys became quite taken with her (it doesn't hurt that she's a hottie). Which got a little weird. Eventually she retired and got back into real life.
Cheers.
I just want to say that the comments from the male crowd here alone is a very good indication of why there aren't as many girl gamers.
We simply do not get any respect.
A common misconception about girls that play games is that they play "boring online games", such as Yahoo games, solitare, chess or whatever. Yes, many girls play those kinds of games. However, so do many guys. The thing is, most of those guys would never post here, and most of those girls are the only ones the average slashdotter would see (Yeah, I'm using a stereotype here, so sue me).
Another common misconception is that games are marketed towards guys because there aren't as many girls that do play "the cool" games. This is a matter of market forces. While I agree that there are fewer girls that play games than guys, the number of girls that play games isn't really that low. In fact, most of my female friends play games. Females make up 51% of the world population, after all, so there's a HUGE market out there.
A third misconception is that girls aren't interested in games. Totally wrong, see above. Girls ARE interested in games. Obviously.
These are misconceptions that are repeated constantly. We girls are simply seen as people who aren't techy. If one of us IS, then we're seen as not as competent as a guy. If we prove to be competent, then we suddenly turn into a threat. All of those are reasons to talk down to girls, not just in gaming, but in other areas as well.
I can tell you one thing that girls are though. We're not interested in being called names, just because we try to show an interest in the very same field as guys.
Maybe, just maybe, more girls would confess to being gamers if they weren't insulted whenever they tried it.
(Okay, maybe this post wasn't so thought through, but I'm currently busy starving myself to keep my figure.... or maybe I'm just delirious from coding all day and forgetting to eat. Bah, whatever.)
The thing that seems off about your post is how you're confusing videogames with sports. The physical differences (such as lower center of gravity, muscle-length / breadth, and etc.) that tend to delineate the female and male classes in sports don't really apply to videogames. PS: Chess grandmaster Anjelina Belakovskaia 1995, in case you were wondering. More recently, Alexandra Kosteniuk was ranked #29 over all in U.S. Chess on December 2003 (http://www.uschess.org/ratings/top/dec03/OverallL ist.php) which is ranked regardless of gender or age. She's only 20.
PPS: I regularly manage to kick people's asses in videogames, regardless of their gender. It's probably my lower center of gravity helping me.
I don't want the world, I just want your half.
Recently, I completed reading Blondie24 -- Playing at the Edge of AI, an interesting book by David Fogel on his attempt to use evolutionary computation to evolve a high quality checker playing program. He tested his program by playing online against other checker players on The Zone, an online gaming network.
Early on, he discovered that his rather pedestrian nickname attracted few opponents, so he changed his online nick to be Obi_WanTheJedi, which seemed to attract a great deal more competition. As his program was revised and became stronger, he noticed that opponents would often become rude and angry as they fell behind, and would stall hoping he would drop out, or just disconnect, often after swearing like a sailor. Such drop outs made evaluating the games more difficult, so they tried a different strategy. This seemed worst among intermediate players: the better players were often much better sports.
They developed a cover story for Blondie24, a 24 year old female mathematics major. She was also single, attractive, and looking for a boyfriend.
They reported that they were on the receiving end of crude remarks and suggestions in about 1 in 3 games. Interestingly enough, the better players were reported to be uniformly polite, complimenting "her" on her excellent play at so young an age.
It seems rather obvious to me that women and men should be competing in the same competitions in this arena. The mere fact that fewer women play should not be a deterrent, nor do I think the prospect of easier money for women competitors merely by virtue of their being fewer female competitors is a good precedent to set. But perhaps all players should review their own behavior, and try to maintain a degree of fun and sportsmanship.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
I have to say I can only imagine what it would be for me to live *as* a female gaming squad.
I suppose I would have 10 breasts and 10 arms to fondle myself wi....
OH, WAIT!
I had forgotten that Slashdot editors are incapable of using correct grammar! They must have meant, "Life for a female gaming squad."
The sad thing is that homophobic (gay, fag, queer), racist (jew, nigger, coon), and/or other inoffensive language (rape, cocksucker) seem to be a standard part of the lexicon for a large percentage gamers.
Frankly, I find this unacceptable. I'm not homosexual but I do find homophobic language offensive, and the same goes for the other, less acceptable language that crop up on almost every public gaming service.
I find it both funny and sad that these kids (and most of the people who resort to such language are kids) think nothing of using language that they wouldn't dare use at the dinner table or to a someone they bumped into at the mall to sound "cool" and "macho" online.
And it's amazing how far they'll take it: I've had people threaten to track me down in real life and kill me and my family, rape our corpses and then rip our heads off and shit down our necks. If it wasn't so laughable at the time then I would have been well within my rights to report the matter to the relevant authorities. I'd love to see some 13 year-old sat down on the couch with his parents and a pair of law enforcement officers explaining that he regularly sent death threats to people just because they outclassed him in a game.
The fact is that as long as this sort of behaviour is accepted or even tolerated by the majority of online gaming communities then those communities will remain the domain of teenagers who have bigger mouths and egos than brains.
There's no doubt in my mind that, whilst most men would shrug their shoulders, dismiss the idiots as part of life and just carry on gaming, most women will not tolerate such stuff.
As my girlfriend put it when she saw some of the stuff that gets spewed out by some of these people, "What idiot would say that kind of stuff and why would you want to spend your free time listening to it?"
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
1) Player moderation (ie. voting people out of the game)
2) Voice chat
I was worried about #2 when it started out, but it actually does a lot to reduce the trash in online gaming. A lot of people won't say out loud the kind of words they'll type, at least not the extremes. There's still plenty of salty language out there, but there is a distinct difference between what people will say, and what they'll type.
Also, for the kiddies, the fact that they have to say the things out loud, inside their house, can make all the difference. I've kept a great post from a gaming message board about this: "I was watchin my cousin play [Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War] and then this lil kid comes on over the mic and says mother****er then the next u hear is a giant smack n then the kid starts crying roflmao....". Plus, anyone that tries to talk someone down in a squeaky kiddie voice usually gets laughed and humiliated out of the room.
As for women, I'll often let my girlfriend wear the headset for playing SOCOM II online, and let her do all the talking for me. She often gets attention, but she never gets harassed, and the majority of the undersexed kiddies are too shy to try and hit on her verbally. That, and everyone else audibly laughs at them and makes fun of them when they try.
Some malcontents are undeterred by voice chat, but it does help weed out a lot of it. For the rest, players being able to vote losers out of the game is a great feature. My main complaint is that too few games explore such a feature fully.