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OMG Girlz Don't Exist On Teh Intarweb!
The Escapist has a brilliant article penned by a young woman who has to deal with blatant disbelief at her existence. Why? Because there are no women on the internet. From the article: "This is the story of my internet life. (I'm not quite sure if it's a good or bad thing that I have an internet life, but internet life it is.) I'm a girl, I play games and I exist on the internet. Or so you think. Time after time, I get told I'm not a girl and that I don't exist. It's happened so much that I'm beginning to think that it's true. So, I spend some time getting to know them. Who are these mysterious creatures called girls if they don't exist on the internet? What does this mean for the men of the internet?"
or why he's pretending to be a chick, but everyone knows there are no girls on teh internets.
Women are made from sand, and would we want something made of sand on the internet? If you've ever taken a laptop to the beach you know - sand and computers don't mix.
Note that this initial disbelief may soon be followed by, "OMG BOOBZ!!1!" so caution is advised.
"Men of the Internet"
THERE'S a calendar I wouldn't want for Christmas.
nos laetus epulor qui would domito nos
...she gets her professionally taken pics plastered all over The Escapist.
Way to prove you're a girl, I suppose. Still, so much for the "I don't show my pic to random people" thing. Couldn't get much more random than that!
Who cares? Actually I have some very good friends who play Wow that are female - of course I've known them for years from playing a mud we all frequented, But neither I or my close friends have any problems with girl gamers, after all we're all here for the same reason - to have fun.
"What use is power to the Keeps of Balance?" -Disnt of Nightmare LpMud
My wife went through this recently. She plays WoW... a lot. She's a female, NE rogue and has been in a guild for about four months now. They talk all the time and she's said many times that she's a woman and all that. Well recently, on their guild website they were posting pictures of themselves and people were shocked that she was actually a she. I suppose they figured she was really role-playing it up or something.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hell, my mum is and always has been a heavy Red Alert gamer. Prior to Westwood selling up she played online all the time. The other day I stumbled across an old spreadsheet where she'd been collecting player stats.
My mom is 40 years old and she has a level 37 Warlock on WoW. I messaged her on MSN after reading this asking about her experience. She is not shy about the fact that she is a woman and she has used vent now and then and she hardly ever gets a reaction like this article describes.
I dont know what server she is on or what internet she is using but I have been in many raids with women and have never heard anything quite to that extent that she is complaining about in this article.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be. -PF
While it's difficult to get accurate stats on the real percentages of men and women playing games, I'm sure that different types/styles of games will tend to have a greater or lesser amount of the various sexes.
I'm not surprised to see more women playing games , as the games evolve into more of a social type of situation. I, for one, like this development, as it seems to cut down on the amount of trash talking that young teenage boys tend to do, and also broadens the game strategies (men and women definetely think differently, not that one is better than the other).
..........FULL STOP.
It doesn't really matter unless you're hitting someone up for something sexual. That's the nature of it, anonymous, with handles designed solely to put continuity into the communication. We're all just text, judged solely by what we say.
But yea, there are girls on the internet, girls on slashdot, girls in WoW. There seems to be a minority of them that identify themselves as such, but hey, that goes for everything: gender, race, religion, etc.
It rarely matters. I've been the only guy in guilds/clans, one of a handful, one of many, etc. Never find this out or really care until enough bonds have formed through the anonymity to actually give a rats ass about the other's actual real life personas.
And of course, the internet is also populated mostly by people that use the anonymity to be jackasses. Post your pics! Mexican Jewlizard! yada yada. You get to see people as they are, socially, with basically no consequences or prejudgements.
It's a wild, wild place, and we likes it like that.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
I think their version is far more amusing.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
When I first started playing online games (Descent 2, Quake 2 timeframe), I found that the reaction I would get for being a female gamer would be based on what group I was talking to.
:)
- Clan/Guild members would automatically believe me, and I rarely got any odd treatment for being a female.
- Denizens in channels I'd frequent would be more reluctant to believe that I'm a female, and very often ask for pictures. When I would refuse these requests, I'd get the aforementioned flood of "U R a D00D lolololz"
- While actually playing the game on servers, I'd almost never mention that I'm a female. I learned to do this because whenever I would mention my gender, I'd get the pix requests tenfold, and the excessive chatter (sometimes inquisitive, but most often crude) would deter me from the action and ruin the experience.
This list, of course, has some exceptions. While part of a online gaming clan, I was once a ranking officer of a section of the guild responsible for playing a particular game. During a clan match, one of the members found that one of our other members was cheating, and brought the questionable screenshot to my attention. While I was in the process of bringing this to the clan leader, I was subject to a rather vicious attack, one that focused mainly around the fact that I'm female, and of course must be a "camwhore" or "extremely fat and stupid", of which I am neither. He still got ejected from the clan, but not without dealing the damage and attacking me in front of 100+ clan members.
What has all of this taught me? There are times when I can be proud of being a female gamer, and other times when sticking my neck out like that will end up with my head rolling. I learned that it's far easier to just let my gender be a mystery while playing online, instead of letting my gaming experience being ruined by asshats.
With the increasing popularity of MMORPGS, however, many female gamers are now playing games online. These female gamers are now encountering the same treatment that I've been used to for years, and are quite taken back by it. Hopefully this flood of female gamers will bring the fact to life that female gamers do exist, that we do play, and that we just want to play.
We shouldn't need to provide a picture to prove who we are.
Just no girls on slashdot.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
Mostly Men Online Role Playing Girls.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There's women ALL over internet, it's just that they all live inside the porn sites that the men visit.
The whole point of a roleplaying game is that you are not supposed to reveal anything about who you are. You are supposed to roleplay. So if your character is male, you should act male, even if you are female. Much like if you character is a big strong barbarian, you should act like a big strong barbarian, even if you're really a short weak accountant. That's the purpose of the game, to provide an outlet for you to express the parts of your personality that you don't get to express in your everyday life. Questions about whether you're a guy or a girl or what you do for a living in "real life" should be met with distain. You should tell such people to mind their own business and get back to roleplaying.
How we know is more important than what we know.
But no one really cares. I guess that is the advantage to being in a gaming community with an average age of around 25. We're a FPS community, we use TeamSpeak, but whe a woman gets on the channel, she is just another player as far as we're concerned.
I am surprised that the women haven't formed their own internet by now. Guys get stupid around girls enough as it is. Adding in the fact that many of the guys escape to games because they have problems relating with people, let alone females, it only gets worse.
I, thankfully, haven't freaked out too much when the person on the other side revealed themselves to be female. On the other hand, there have been a few times where people were roll playing as a female and later revealed themselves to be a guy. It wasn't quite a crying game type of situation, but it was enough of a shock for me to still remember...
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
With a name like 'Whitney Butts' you just know thats a guy!
There's some sort of weird perception on this site that women dig sensitivity or whatever the fuck. You'll find this idea taking root anywhere large number of unused penises congregate. The strange this is how this idea continues to take root, since its adherents obviously don't reproduce.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Simply put: This is an to-be disputed rant about a targeted audiience. It's far from all encompasing and can't even generalize on any experiences outside of the expamples she had given. She might as well have just ranted about immaturity in teenage kids.
Move on.
Unique.
Wow, I just realized that I have never been on the internet. I guess I never realized that the whole of the internet consisted of the World of Warcraft. How could I have missed this? I mean, what other explanation is there for why no girls on World of Warcraft could equal no girls on the internet. It's all so clear to me now.
-> Fritz
Spooooon!!!!!
EVERYONE knows that girls only exist on Xanga and MySpace...
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We're posting stories about how a girl complains no one believes she's a girl...a girl with a really, really horrid looking website. Is it that slow a newsday? Didn't Microsoft do anything wrong today?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
...and her name is John Romero.
The Internet:
Where men are men, women are men, 13 year Old girls are FBI agents.
"The test of the morality of a society is what it does for it's children." -Dietrich Bonhoeffer
its not that we dont believe there are women on the internet, its that we dont believe the people who claim to be women, women are like deer, you see them from your car window when your driving through the countryside, or sometimes - once in a while - you hit one head on and it smashes your car up.
That's the kind of reaction I guess you'll get in the genres that're still mostly played by male players - especially the combat oriented testosterone fueled games like first person shooters (or to a lesser extent, most MMORPGS). But half the users of the Internet are female, and in fact they're the best customers for a lot of the "casual game" genres. I doubt she'd get that kind of reaction in Spades and Hearts gamerooms, or in places like Puzzle Pirates or A Tale in the Desert. I know on my own Furcadia, 57% of the players are female, and half our company's staff are women. Of course if her favorite types of games are the male dominated ones, she's going to run into those kinds of players & reactions. It is a shame, but they're not universal all over the net and in all games.
Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.
I play FFXI (Final Fantasy MMORPG) and at least half of my friends list is female, and over half of the "linkshell" (like a guild thingy) must be female.
79% of my MSN contact list is female.
My MOTHER, who is an eBay queen and 'leet warez haxor' is, so I'm told, a female.
My three best geek pals (web design guru, game master, anime queen) happen to be female.
Not to mention my little sister, who has a veritable LEGION of friends who are constantly online.
I wonder what internet this daft tart lives on? Or is she just perpetuating a sterotype that no longer applies just to get a moment in the spotlight?
C17H21NO4