Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
I can't count the number of times some friend has been all crazy over his new girlfriend and thinking she's the best thing on earth while the rest of us scratch our heads wondering why he's sunk so low.
Happens on-line, happens off-line. Happens to guys, happens to gals. What really happened is they wanted to sleep with someone and didn't care about the consequences or if it was the right person for a relationship. The thinking she's the best thing on earth is just him not being able to seperate love from lust. Fitting your preconcieved model of what you think is hot really doesn't preclude wanting to sleep with them... sometimes even out of curiosity. Sometimes this miscongruence results in people justifying their hormones by attributing the feelings to emotional bonding.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
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.
...and her name is John Romero.