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Male

265 (71.2%)

Female

22 (5.9%)

Dwarf Male

39 (10.5%)

Dwarf Female

4 (1.1%)

Goblin

42 (11.3%)

Total Members Voted: 372

Voting closed: October 29, 2010, 10:24:03 am

[Cotes]

Am I being misunderstood, or am I the one doing the misunderstanding?

Both posts were meant to present reasons as to why women might want to hide their gender from the gaming community.  I try to make the gaming world more hospitable to female gamers by treating them like everybody else, and yet I even notice changes in my behaviour when someone of that persuasion makes themselves known.  Usually I just start acting more polite than usual, but it's still a change based on gender.

Yes, I realize that both Guy #1 and Guy #2 were acting inappropriately.  They were doing so to completely different degrees, but it shouldn't have been there at all.  Even me with my automatic defense of her was because she was female (although I do tend to take whatever opportunities I can find for putting down people who act like that).


I'm not trying to say it doesn't happen, nor am I trying to downplay the reactions.  Quite the opposite.  I've had my sarcastic remarks misinterpreted many times before, but I think this is the first time I've had my explanation fall into the same trap.


Hell, now we're even getting touchy on the subject of defending female gamers, which just emphasizes the difference even more.  Can't we all just play some Zombie Master and shoot some zeds up in happy sharing equality?

I thought you might have disapproved both from the tone of your post, although you didn't state it that clearly. Just thought I'd add my take on why the first guy was being a douche too .

[Melagius]

Toady should code some sort of post-processing effects to make everything sparkly so more girls will play DF, and consequently, spend large sums of money on it, because girls love doing that.

[Cotes]

Toady should code some sort of post-processing effects to make everything sparkly so more girls will play DF, and consequently, spend large sums of money on it, because girls love doing that.

Don't forget to make the interface pink. That'll really make the chicks go crazy.

[KrunkSplein]

Every time I play The Sims, I find myself setting up my house with dwarven sensibilities.  Crappy bedrooms, huge dining rooms, booze instead of TVs, etc.  I also value cooking skill above gainful employment.  Needless to say, my Sims households tend to go the way of my dwarf fortresses.

I LOL'ed.

As for the girl gamers thing, I think the problem is that you are qualifying them.  They aren't girl gamers - they are simply Gamers.  While I definitely appreciate the sociological aspect of finding out the layout of the community, everything that's spawned as a side effect of the poll seems foolish.  Hmm... perhaps that's too strong a word.  Let's go with Unnecessary.

Lets take this example to the extreme to illustrate my point!  Imagine if someone were asking which (RL) race everyone was.  Again, interesting from a sociological standpoint, but blatantly irrelevant. (and maybe offensive, i dunno)

In short, saccharine terms: we can't come together until we ignore our irrelevant differences!  Lets all hold hands.

Yeah, that last sentence was sarcasm, but the rest is real 

[GlyphGryph]

Weird, from real life experience I would have expected a far more even ratio - the number of guys to girls I know that play is actually roughly even. And this considering the fact that I know more guys than girls.

[NW_Kohaku]

As for the girl gamers thing, I think the problem is that you are qualifying them.  They aren't girl gamers - they are simply Gamers.  While I definitely appreciate the sociological aspect of finding out the layout of the community, everything that's spawned as a side effect of the poll seems foolish.  Hmm... perhaps that's too strong a word.  Let's go with Unnecessary.

Lets take this example to the extreme to illustrate my point!  Imagine if someone were asking which (RL) race everyone was.  Again, interesting from a sociological standpoint, but blatantly irrelevant. (and maybe offensive, i dunno)

Well, what I wrote, I wrote in response to, essentially, this mentality:

I would have expected there to be more female players then this, with a game that has many kinds of appeal to it. From the sims-like household management on a larger scale, to nifty architecture and mechanics, to the merciless slaughtering of everything that moves in horrendous detail.

People seem to think that DF gives unparalleled freedom, and has something for everyone, when it really doesn't, and it's not just "interface problems" doing it.  (Which is a whole other argument...)

This game only really has depth in two areas, one is combat, and the other is your ability to divert magma or water flows with extremely complex and interdependant mechanical systems.  One applies only to strategy wargamers because of the sheer opacity of the system, and the other only applies to real engineering/computer logic geeks.  There's also some matter of being able to just set up a fortress with farms and booze and flux and iron ore and charcoal, but that's actually fairly shallow, if intimidatingly front-loaded, and once you learn it, it's fairly routine.

What you wind up with if you want something else from your game is basically trying to pretend to play with happy face stickers and trying to build a story out of their lives, which is a noble endevor, but one that the game doesn't go very far to help support right now.

That societal and happiness system suggestion I wrote (and seriously, I'm trying to drum up someone commenting on it ) I wrote because it involves the things I want to see (and in case you missed it, I'm male) in the game, but at the same time, I know it is the sort of thing that would broaden the appeal of the game, especially to female gamers, although this sort of demographic marketing is peripheral to my main point.

[Eviltane01]

First Kagus.
I get your point of view now and yeah I had misunderstood it. I do behave a lot in the same way.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Every time I play The Sims, I find myself setting up my house with dwarven sensibilities.  Crappy bedrooms, huge dining rooms, booze instead of TVs, etc.  I also value cooking skill above gainful employment.  Needless to say, my Sims households tend to go the way of my dwarf fortresses.

I LOL'ed.

As for the girl gamers thing, I think the problem is that you are qualifying them.  They aren't girl gamers - they are simply Gamers.  While I definitely appreciate the sociological aspect of finding out the layout of the community, everything that's spawned as a side effect of the poll seems foolish.  Hmm... perhaps that's too strong a word.  Let's go with Unnecessary.

Lets take this example to the extreme to illustrate my point!  Imagine if someone were asking which (RL) race everyone was.  Again, interesting from a sociological standpoint, but blatantly irrelevant. (and maybe offensive, i dunno)

In short, saccharine terms: we can't come together until we ignore our irrelevant differences!  Lets all hold hands.

Yeah, that last sentence was sarcasm, but the rest is real 

Id love to hold hands . It might be irrelevant to you but at least I do have an interest in the topic as far as im concerned it went even better then expected in so far that at least a few people are having a form of discussion over it.

In the end this discussion could be over anything  Choclate / vannilla ice cream , Boxers or briefs.
 If the topic interested me and the venue was appropriate I would draw as many answers and view points as I could , I just love to know what people think.

Also in a way its necessary to talk about it  just to prove that i know the problem exists and i want to know what the people that are around me think about the topic at hand. In the end I agree with kagus that being on say TS with a girl or not, only  changes my behavior in how dirty the jokes get.

[strongrudder]

Strongrudder
What do you think is the barrier , if there is one ,that keeps women from this game?
Is it that their simply not exposed to it as much? Do you think its social pressures? Would you agree with Kohagu on any points?

I don't want to deal in stereotypes, but you kinda have to in order to make general statements, so here goes.
Disclaimer: This is based on the people I know and have observed. Any of your experiences may be different.

It seems to me that a higher percentage of women, when exposed to games, prefer the more casual, pretty ones. This could be due to the ease of getting into the game, as well as the ease of being able to put it down when something else comes up. Social pressures also seem to favor casual games for women; most people aren't going to call a girl a nerd for having cute games on her shelf.
Then you get TF2, with its strong/interesting characters, which might account for the large female following despite the war setting and black humor. (Though, granted, a certain percentage of the ladyfans just participate in the fandom and don't actually play the game)

DF, at this point, doesn't really have either of these traits - "casual" or "strong characters." It's pretty hardcore and intellectual, and the graphics aren't always perfectly representational. Even installing a tileset requires a little research into how the game files work, unless you download it preinstalled. Not to mention the sheer investment of time required just to understand how to do the most basic of tasks. I spent a lot of time on the wiki before I even had the confidence to install the game. And the dwarves of course don't really have personalities, except for the ones you project onto them. This shouldn't necessarily be considered a weakness, but if a barrier exists, this could be it. Casual gamers will probably be turned off by DF, and more ladies seem to enjoy the casual stuff.


I'd be interested in seeing what kind of background and interests the female DF players do have in common. I know I'm not terribly surprised that I've stumbled into a male-dominated community. Having been a female in a computer animation major, my graduating class had a roughly 20/3 male/female ratio. So I'm kinda used to being interested in things that are mostly enjoyed by guys. (One of my foci in school was storyboarding, which probably explains my willingness to pretend that dwarf A killed the invading hydra in revenge for pulling off the arm of dwarf B, her lover)


Footnote:
I also think that it is an interesting observation that chicks tend to be drawn a lot more toward things like the Sims. I enjoy the Sims for the story potential as well, but the interior decorating aspect, clothes, etc really bore me. It's why I prefer premade houses, so I can just get to the fun part. There was a room once that all the Sims hated, and I couldn't bring myself to care about how to fix it. So I told them to go spy on the neighbors instead, and laughed when the neighbor came over to beat them up.

/walloftext, my apologies.

[chaoticag]

According to the forum statistics, the male:female ratio has steadily been approaching one. When I ran the first poll on this (and with more and more people running polls on this, I feel ashamed for doing so) the ratio was about 17:1 , now it's 5.5:1. This includes anyone who basically put male or female on their profile, so I don't see the point of these polls.

[NW_Kohaku]

According to the forum statistics, the male:female ratio has steadily been approaching one. When I ran the first poll on this (and with more and more people running polls on this, I feel ashamed for doing so) the ratio was about 17:1 , now it's 5.5:1. This includes anyone who basically put male or female on their profile, so I don't see the point of these polls.

mmm... but people don't always put data like that out there.  I don't put anything on my profile I don't have to, so I have no gender according to my profile (and people have previously thought I was female just because of my avatar).  It isn't anonymous like a poll would be.

Also, some people will just plain lie on profiles or forms you have to fill out.

I once filled out some questionaire online as "Sue Donym" just to see what kind of spam would hit my (webmail spambait) email account because of it.

[Dakk]

@strongrudder
Can't disagree, the reality I live in also confirms this. At my university 90% of all programming and 3d animation students are males. What we have to admit is that while stereotypes are frowned upeon when you actualy mention it, they still apply to the current model of western society. Most fashion students are either female or gay, most programming students are males, most psychology students are creepy, etc.

Seriously now though, as much as we may dislike stereotypes, they still exist in our society. We can't just pretend to be amazed at how 90% of all DF players who took part in this pool are all male. I'm assuming the goblins are either gender benders or agnostics 

Girls are attracted to more casual games because they're easy to play, you don't need alot of effort to play, say, super mario galaxy. So what about MMO girls? Well, MMOs aren't that terribly hard to play, all you need to do is repeat the same tasks for a while, but MMOs have something else that is even more attractive to girls: Social interaction. Most MMOs encourage you work as a team with other players, which involves all that sweet sweet social interaction thing.

Now lets look at DF: Basicaly you need a good ammount of effort to learn how to play it, and THEN actualy play it and try to survive for as long as you can. If you want to learn how every system in it works, you need a few hours of wiki reading and forum browsing, and of course, more gameplay. You also need to learn how to translate all the ASCII into your mind, and if you don't wanna do that, you have to actualy search for a graphic set and install it properly.

Is it casual at all? No.
Is it easy to get into? No.
Does it offer any manner of social interaction? No, the forum isn't a game feature.
Is it awesome? Absolutely.

You have to want to like DF at first, you only start actualy liking it for real when you know what you're doing, and chances are you won't know how to do anything at all at first, unless you read the wiki very carefuly and prepared yourself. A casual player would try it, fail completely, and drop it. It just so happens most girls are casual or social gamers.

[Eviltane01]

Strongrudder
lol and thanks for the reply. I have played the Sims for 3 hours and I never knew you could have even get hurt in the game.


 Once I read your post it got me thinking that at this point  I have to give  Kohaku credit.

As a whole I also enjoy strong characters. Several "war" books I have read recently pointed out that basically as a general you have to know your troops  and in effect have to be their Mother.
They must know each soldier. Their strengths their weaknesses ,as much as possible. The he must teach them to do their best. He must know them as a mother, then teach them as a general.

I guess in the end its just fun to see the dwarfs grow from obscurity of the masses to strong Indivuals,  Warriors......Legends.....

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm assuming the goblins are either gender benders or agnostics 

Since when is "agnostic" a gender?

[Dakk]

I'm assuming the goblins are either gender benders or agnostics 

Since when is "agnostic" a gender?

It doesn't?

[Cotes]

I'm assuming the goblins are either gender benders or agnostics 

Since when is "agnostic" a gender?

Because they are atheists without balls.