Kohaku with the mention of the Sims you actually brought up one of the reasons why I was interested in finding out what the actual female / male ratio is though I had a suspicion that it would be testosterone heavy.
I figured that Dwarf fortress is in some ways a lot like the sims. We govern the lives of individual characters not in a direct way as in the standard RTS but more in a managerial role. And as some us have proven even men can make their "dwarf" caves quite pretty.To me the 2 games seem very alike on that front.
Except the games aren't very similar if you look at the appeals of what you actually do in to a house in the two games. In The Sims, you can construct the house from the foundation up, pick out wallpaper and carpets, furnish it, including with custom mod furniture, of which there is a bajillion on the Internet, and fashion design your little Sims house as much as you see fit. It is, pretty much, the entire point of the game.
In DF, there really isn't much to do - you dig out a few tiles of room, throw a bed, maybe a container and a dresser down, and call it a day. If you get all fancy, and do an engraving, it will probably be of someone who lived 100 years ago being eaten by an ettin. Or of dogs screaming while they get turned into doggy shnitzel. Housing is pretty much just someting that keeps dwarves from being angry that they sleep in mud.
I concede to you the points on the social and technical aspects though one might also argue that the technical barriers of the game should present the same difficulties to men and to women. As the counter to that of course one might argue that men have traditionally held more roles in the IT sector and thereby more of us have at least a rough background understanding of whats going on.
It's just as easy for a woman to learn geology or what have you as it is for men, but the difference is in the
willingness to learn. It's not about being hard, but about how someone feels about themselves and how they conform to their own gender stereotypes. If you got some kindergardeners who were on a field trip to a museum, and tried to start selling them the wonders of geology, and started with melting things with magma or making steel to create serrated buzzsaw traps to cut goblins to bits... would you expect more of the boys or the girls to be interested in your lecture?
The one point I do not really agree on is that you said :
So yes, I would expect a serious gender bias, and for most female forumgoers to not particularly want to hop out from behind the cloak of anonymity to identify themselves.
These forums aren't exactly leet speaking TF2 forums filled with 13 and 14 year olds taking their first steps into the online world and trying to measure out each others e-peens.
These forums here strike me as being used by a very mature crowd although it can become silly sometimes. So I don't think that even if a women was to identify herself she would face any sort of harrassment from testosterone rich teens which is honestly where the vast majority of the "OMG girls" comes from. Even if she did I'm very confident that a large part of the forums user base would arrange for a meeting between an Atom smasher and the perpetrator.
Maybe I should compare this place to another male-dominated Internet site, then: Wikipedia. Wikipedia, because of its confrontational, prove-it-in-writing approach, has almost completely driven out anyone but the scientifically inclined relatively young male nerd demographic. Women do not like an environment where every statement they make can be challenged, and must be backed up in triplicate. E-peens or not, that's the environment we have, where you have to show your work.
There are quite a few gaming communities where women show them self's without any sort of attention being brought to it.
Take the WoW forums for example in those forums women have very little issues with proclaiming who and what they are. Its just simple everyday stuff there. From what I know of the EVE community it is much the same there.
And yet, those games are social games. Even if they are competitive, they are designed to heavily encourage team play. I remember reading an article in either Time or Newsweek recently about the difference between whether boys or girls consider their sports activities to be about striving to excell, or to be about trying to dominate the other side. Males, regardless of which they were trying to do, felt fairly good about themselves, but females were significantly more likely to feel depressed and isolated for trying to dominate others. The attempt to act outside the gender role isolates girls from their peers, and is discouraged, rather than rewarded as a male would have been. Maybe it's not fair, but that's how it works.
Anyway in the end the ratio is becoming quite obvious. For the sake of a discussion , what could be done to make the game more female friendly. Would the inclusion of say a Social networking style "friends chat" or chat rooms with an easy way to transfer in game images solve the matter to a large extend. Or would we need a serious graphical overhaul.
It would take a conscious effort to change the focus of the game, honestly. I've been saying pretty often that this game can be divided into two major focuses: military and architecture/engineering. Females are not attracted to the kind of military we are dealing with, which is largely a sober analysis of the most efficient ways to seperate goblins and elves and kittens from their limbs in such a thoroughly detached way that litterally all you see is an "E" and a "
2" fly apart, with some background colors turning red. The Architechture is a potential draw, but only if you were to have more ability to actually see and interact with and customize what you are making.
What would really help, however, is making another draw for the game, which is what I was trying to do
in this suggestion, by making social classes and demands for better quality of life a part of the game. Like I said before, currently, there is no reason to give dwarves much more than a bed, food, booze, some statues in the dining room, and keep them from direct danger. The environment of the dwarves is fairly sterile and bleak. Giving dwarves more personality, some politics, and most of all, the reason to build all those fireplaces and carpets and tapestries and allow players to design high-class neighborhoods with parks and recreation would give a focus on society-building that would be far more attractive than simple deathtrap engineering or sending champions out to effortlessly slaughter 90 goblins in a race to see who can make the longest kill list.
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Topic: Men or women , something i just have to know. (Read 10642 times)