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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

[Stove]

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.

This is not consistent with what I've heard about the WoW community (scroll down to "Reasons Why This Is Bad").

[Footkerchief]

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.

^{[citation needed]}

Seriously, that's a really bizarre and sexist generalization.

[Mike Mayday]

I'm a male goblin.
I'm also engaged to a female imp.

[NW_Kohaku]

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.

^{[citation needed]}

Seriously, that's a really bizarre and sexist generalization.

This was mostly raised to my attention by this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=q3s4f3ib1cuhbvt6s3p9s7hl&page=1 (obviously, when I was more active in TVTropes than here).  Wikipedia does have a serious gender discrepency because of its policies and its culture, and pointing that out isn't sexist (nor does it mean I am making a greater statement about whether women "can hack it" in a professional world in general).

Female here. I fell in love with DF instantly, can't stand Sims. I tried a Sims game once on gamecube, got to something like the third mission which was to get my guy to earn so much at his job or something. zzz

I only played it for the ability to mod it.  I have no idea why people buy it for anything but PC.  Likewise with Oblivion, the adding in different costumes and homes and riding around on a dragon parts you mod in are so much more fun than actually playing the game.

On gaming communities: I also play Pokemon (shaddup!) and used to be fairly active on Gamefaqs - now there's a community that's the antithesis of this one. There's a surprising number of females on the trade boards, who can usually be identified by their ability to type words.

Male player (~15 years old): "i want shiny squitl sum1 give me a shiny squitl plz fc in sig"

Female player (~15 years old): "Does anyone have a squirtle for trade, preferably shiny? See my sig for my Friend Code"

I have no idea why this is.

Apparently, I've had a vagina all these years.  Who'da thunk?  But seriously, I've retained a persistant, fervant loathing of such uncouth vulgarians, and have ascertained their crippling achilles heel - utter intolerance for susquipidalian loquaciousness.  I never get tired of having "You're using a thesaurus!" thrown at me as if it were some kind of insult (not that I do, anyway).

This. As a long term pokemon player I know damn well that my favourite golem is just a collection of numerical binary data on a chip that runs repeated calculations with a certain random element, but at the same time that guy is my buddy. We've been through great adventures together, we beat the Tower Tycoon together. It's the same in Dwarf Fortress. I mean, look at Boatmurdered (hands up who got into DF via Boatmurdered). Look at the way Toady "sells" DF through those stories on the mainpage. Look at how people who do community fort stories in the story forum sometimes mod the game into unrecognizability or even dispense with the game entirely and use Asciidraw to get the story they WANT to tell. Dwarf Fortress is not the game, it's the story about the game.

*puts his hand up*

I'm afraid a proportion of women are just rather stupid. (I'm a woman, I'm allowed to say this). What I mean is, it's acceptable or even desirable for a female to "not know very much about computers" - even if she's intellectually capable of it, which she almost always is. I heard it once from a nineteen year old who was perfectly au fait with writing complicated CSS to pimp out her Facebook page: "Computers just hate me, I can't do anything with them." Of COURSE she can do things with them - she just thinks being attractively "feminine" has to be linked with being a technological idiot! With that attitude, how is a female supposed to sit down and play an ascii-based game with an absolutely arcane interface? No, she'll go to Puzzle Pirates or Bejeweled because it's okay for women to like those games. I have several female friends who seem to think like this and it drives me absolutely wild.

Seriously, why do we have to keep using games I like as examples of "dumbed down games for girls"?  Puzzle Pirates has plenty to offer male players, too, you know...

But anyway, yes, this is largely what I was trying to get at:  Studies show that girls will be equal to boys in math at the elementary school level.  When they get to around 7th grade or so, however, they suddenly start dropping behind, not because math suddenly ramped up into something they couldn't handle, but because they are told that it is, basically, not "cool" to be good at math.  Males can wear being a nerd almost as a badge of pride nowadays, but females still have reason to dread it.  It's not "women aren't capable of being good at math", but "women shouldn't be good at math," (so they aren't). 

Pokemon is hardly less complex than most RPGs, and has plenty of arcane grinding techniques to go with it... but that's OK, because Nintendo gives it a cutesy veneer that lets you say you're playing for the cuddly critters, and not to kick someone's ass with your thoroughly researched min/maxed monsters.



In any event, if you seriously do want to make a conscious effort to bring in more female players, the way to do it would probably be with working on helping make DF build a story, which means making dwarves more empathetic, and more "human", less interchangable happy-face stickers that flicker around the map to perform actions invisibly, and create raw material tokens or process raw material tokens into finished product tokens.

Or, you know, just make it look cuter.  Stonesense would make that fairly easy, as it's already fairly cartoonish.

[darkrider2]

I'm male, but almost all my friends are female. Interestingly many of them claim they play video games, however none to the almost shameful degree that I do.

I was also told that girls think its cute when I go on about dwarf fortress or portal or half-li... etc.

[citation needed][vertification needed][relevance needed]

[Noble Digger]

DF is not a game for everyone. Let's stop pretending. I personally think that the females interested in playing DF will find DF and play it just fine, like they already are. Just about every post in this thread so far which has mentioned females at all, has contained some type of pointless generalization about females (or a guess, from a poster who probably hasn't interacted with too many females). Ravenplucker: "Men and women" aren't different. Every single human being is different. No generalization applied to either gender is going to hold up for every individual. Not even easy ones like "boys have a penis, girls have a vagina." Saying that men excel in one area and women in another is an ignorant generalization even if you add qualifiers like "on average" and "though not as much", the important thing here is to stop talking about "men" and "women", these theoretical people do not exist. There are only individuals with individual likes, dislikes, concerns, leanings, and all the rest. Each time you refer to these theoretical "men" and "women", your understanding skews further from the truth that no two people are alike.

World of Warcraft (in the US) has one of the most abrasive and judgmental communities i've ever been a part of. The forums (especially most of the realm forums) are not a safe or friendly place. Trolling, while harmless in most forms, is rampant on nearly every board. You can go on the public chat channels in WoW and shout any kind of racial epithet you want in all caps for seven hours and not get banned. Revealing yourself as a female in the public channels and forums invites other kinds of harassment, and even though some of this harassment is completely illegal, the offenders will not be banned even following a complaint. The /ignore command is the only effective weapon, and it can only ignore some arbitrary max number of people like 30 or 50 or 100. It's never enough.

I'm afraid a proportion of women are just rather stupid.

:O

(I'm a woman, I'm allowed to say this).

No you're not--I mean, you are, but it's still ignorant if you say such a thing, even though you're also a woman. A proportion of all people are rather stupid, I guess, relative to whatever benchmark you're using and haven't shared with us. But it sounds more to me like you're in denial about the fact that some men are turned off by women who are more capable than themselves. You're obviously angry at the women who choose to play the ball where it lies, in that regard, but what I can't understand is why? They're making their own choices, i.e. to represent themselves as effeminate and distressed, possibly to get along better with "the boys." You're choosing...something else. What, I can't say, but your bitterness clearly comes through in your post. If those girls are trying to get into relationships with macho boys who are turned off by women more capable than themselves, then those girls are doing it right. Such a male may not meet your needs, but chances are it's what that girl is after. The real shame is that you don't seem to be able to live and let live. Being a woman, though, doesn't make you the expert or even a shining example, so your "I can say this because I'm a woman" nonsense, wow, it's just unattractive in every way.

[NW_Kohaku]

The problem with your rant, Noble Digger, is that it melds actual studies on gender ratios or on how males and females, especially due to social pressures that do not apply to both genders equally, react to different inputs and "generalizations about men and women".

Hypothetically, if we were put in a room filled with balls of different sizes and colors, and I measured all of those, and found that the green balls were, on average, 1.2 times larger than the red balls, even if some red balls were larger than almost any other green ball... would that still be a generalization?

Do not let a misguided, though not entirely wrong, notion of male and female equality confuse the notion that there are still different social pressures placed upon the genders, and that this does have a measurable psychological impact.  It would be as wrong as the notion that racism is over just because the Jim Crow laws are struck down, even if people still hold prejudices that black men are violent and lazy, and that they therefore can't be trusted with a job, and that black unemployment remains higher than other races because of it.

[Kagus]

I believe she said that to dispense with any "you're a guy and thus cannot make generalizations about women".  Being a woman, it's 'alright' for her to say that since she would know.  It's still a negative generalization, and so yadda yadda individuals.

But it sounds more to me like you're in denial about the fact that some men are turned off by women who are more capable than themselves. You're obviously angry at the women who choose to play the ball where it lies, in that regard, but what I can't understand is why? They're making their own choices, i.e. to represent themselves as effeminate and distressed, possibly to get along better with "the boys." You're choosing...something else. What, I can't say, but your bitterness clearly comes through in your post. If those girls are trying to get into relationships with macho boys who are turned off by women more capable than themselves, then those girls are doing it right. Such a male may not meet your needs, but chances are it's what that girl is after.

They are preventing themselves from doing things they might otherwise want to do and are effectively lying to themselves and others in order to support some image?  How the hell could this possibly be the right thing to do?

"Playing the ball where it lies"?  Yes, they're doing it right.  But they're doing the wrong thing right.  Getting together with someone who enjoys your image rather than your true self is very, very rarely a happily ever after.  Let those dweebs go off and find someone who truly is just the kind of person they're looking for, don't try to change who you are in an attempt to satisfy some warped perception of what you think you want.  If they don't want you for you, then they don't want you.  It's not easy, but it is simple.

I'm a guy, and I'm sickened by anyone attempting to be something they most clearly are not.  Screw the gender difference, dishonesty is never attractive.

The real shame is that you don't seem to be able to live and let live. Being a woman, though, doesn't make you the expert or even a shining example, so your "I can say this because I'm a woman" nonsense, wow, it's just unattractive in every way.

As I'm sure you can perceive, I am also quite bitter.  I dislike certain personality traits, and I see those traits in entirely too many places.  I also don't see anything wrong with disliking personality traits like that because they are detrimental to others around them.

[Noble Digger]

Very true, Kohaku, I had the least to complain about with your posts in this thread. It's certainly true that women face different external social pressures than men in most situations.

[Noble Digger]

I believe she said that to dispense with any "you're a guy and thus cannot make generalizations about women".  Being a woman, it's 'alright' for her to say that since she would know.  It's still a negative generalization, and so yadda yadda individuals.

But it sounds more to me like you're in denial about the fact that some men are turned off by women who are more capable than themselves. You're obviously angry at the women who choose to play the ball where it lies, in that regard, but what I can't understand is why? They're making their own choices, i.e. to represent themselves as effeminate and distressed, possibly to get along better with "the boys." You're choosing...something else. What, I can't say, but your bitterness clearly comes through in your post. If those girls are trying to get into relationships with macho boys who are turned off by women more capable than themselves, then those girls are doing it right. Such a male may not meet your needs, but chances are it's what that girl is after.

They are preventing themselves from doing things they might otherwise want to do and are effectively lying to themselves and others in order to support some image?  How the hell could this possibly be the right thing to do?

"Playing the ball where it lies"?  Yes, they're doing it right.  But they're doing the wrong thing right.  Getting together with someone who enjoys your image rather than your true self is very, very rarely a happily ever after.  Let those dweebs go off and find someone who truly is just the kind of person they're looking for, don't try to change who you are in an attempt to satisfy some warped perception of what you think you want.  If they don't want you for you, then they don't want you.  It's not easy, but it is simple.

I'm a guy, and I'm sickened by anyone attempting to be something they most clearly are not.  Screw the gender difference, dishonesty is never attractive.

The real shame is that you don't seem to be able to live and let live. Being a woman, though, doesn't make you the expert or even a shining example, so your "I can say this because I'm a woman" nonsense, wow, it's just unattractive in every way.

As I'm sure you can perceive, I am also quite bitter.  I dislike certain personality traits, and I see those traits in entirely too many places.  I also don't see anything wrong with disliking personality traits like that because they are detrimental to others around them.

Yeah, for sure, a LOT of us are wearing brown-colored glasses like you, as well. It's by pretending to be something for an extended period of time (until the change takes) that you can become something else which might otherwise seem out of your ballpark. That, too, is a kind of freedom. There are women who are perfectly capable and intelligent who nonetheless enjoy behaving like uneducated immoral sluts. I don't mean that in ANY derogatory way, truly. Sometimes it's fun to step out of your usual realm and be something you aren't. Given enough time, it stops being an act. Girls who enjoy a lot of fucking are not bad people.

Being a woman doesn't make her "all women" - one woman is not qualified to generalize about all women, nor are those generalizations inherently less harmful or incorrect on the basis that the speaker has a vagina or other feminine traits.

For reasons you may not understand, that girl who is excellent at CSS but nonetheless bimboes over to the jerkish guys and says "oh my, I can't computer, I might accidentally a nail" then goes home with one of them, might be pursuing her own perfectly valid interests. You might see it as a misrepresentation, or a lie, or anything else negative...but it's still not. Is it a lie when you go work for McDonald's and make a genuine effort to do well at the job, just because you aren't truly, deep down, the kind of person who wanted to work there? I know my example skews far away from what we're talking about, not involving sexuality and all, but please try and see the parallel I'm attempting to make.

As a male, whenever I've gotten into a relationship with a girl, it had to start out with me "misrepresenting" myself by pretending to care about that girl's life, friends, feelings, and other things unrelated to me or my life. Eventually, that girl becomes my girlfriend, and I actually care. When I've met a stranger, I had to "misrepresent" myself by showing an interest in whatever they happened to be talking about. Eventually, I know that stranger, and it's less of a lie when I act like I care. Less of one, I stress that part. In any case, there are tons and tons and tons of guys and girls out there who may seem to have a questionable level of light in their hearts--I use that term to refer to the "goodness" we're all quick to claim we possess--who nonetheless want to find hope and happiness in their lives. The whole microcosm of their interactions might sicken you, from your ivory tower of moral superiority, but they are pursuing happiness the same as anyone else.

One thing is for sure. If I chose to greet this world with 100% honesty at all times and never pretend anything for the sake of others, I'd be in prison. I think a little make-believe is helpful to our ability to coexist as a society.

[Deon]

Sucks to be you.

That hurts. That hurts both my fragile girly heart and my manly inner dwarf.

FOODFIGHT!

[Grimlocke]

Id just like to pitch in that I realy dont see what is wrong with generalisations. They have plenty uses for the purpose of marketing, insurance and pretty much any other form of large scale estimation.

Whats IS wrong however is the misuse of generalisations,  and the use of invalid generalisations.

And what I frankly see as just as stupid is this modernist trend of though that says that generalisation is bad in any form and use. Saying that men and women arnt different because everyone is different is just plain rubbish. Cant see the slightest grain of logic in there, its a completely false comparsion between groups and individuals. Of course the gender groups are different, it is a very important part ones person. The same goes for ethic groups, cultural groups, age groups, political groups, whatnot.

What you should be lashing out against is the stupid people making false comparsions, the ones saying 'this one is black so he must be unemployed' or 'this ones a woman so she must hate technology'. Lashing out against generalisations in general realy just shows you dont know what a generalisation is.

[Kagus]

It's by pretending to be something for an extended period of time (until the change takes) that you can become something else which might otherwise seem out of your ballpark. That, too, is a kind of freedom. There are women who are perfectly capable and intelligent who nonetheless enjoy behaving like uneducated immoral sluts. I don't mean that in ANY derogatory way, truly. Sometimes it's fun to step out of your usual realm and be something you aren't. Given enough time, it stops being an act.

I've never fully believed this.  Yes, you can form personality habits, but I don't think it actually changes the core of who you are.  And since you are now acting in a way that is different from or directly contrary to your true self, even though it is automatic, you risk inner conflicts that will spill out into the other aspects of your life.

Mind you, this is just how I perceive things.  I'm not a psychologist, so I can't make any deeply founded statements on the nature of the beast.  This is just a personal observation.

Girls who enjoy a lot of fucking are not bad people.

This...  Doesn't really have anything to do with anything.  Am I missing something?

Being a woman doesn't make her "all women" - one woman is not qualified to generalize about all women, nor are those generalizations inherently less harmful or incorrect on the basis that the speaker has a vagina or other feminine traits.

No, you're right, being a woman doesn't make her an official spokesperson for all her gender. 

But I am fairly certain that the comment was only included because of the standard response we have when listening to someone talk about the opposite sex; namely that they're just blowing smoke and don't actually know what they're talking about.

It's an incorrect statement made to combat an equally misguided assumption.  Don't put too much emphasis on it.

For reasons you may not understand, that girl who is excellent at CSS but nonetheless bimboes over to the jerkish guys and says "oh my, I can't computer, I might accidentally a nail" then goes home with one of them, might be pursuing her own perfectly valid interests. You might see it as a misrepresentation, or a lie, or anything else negative...but it's still not.

Okay, here's what I'm having difficulty understanding...  How is that not a lie?  How is it not a negative thing to use misdirection as a means of getting what you want?

Alright, so I do see a gray area here, but it's not the same one you're seeing.  The one I see is the area of 'social games', wherein people will say any number of wild or untrue things as an indirect method of communicating with the other players.  While I still don't particularly care for this, it is debatable as to whether or not it's really lying, since the person doesn't believe it themselves and doesn't expect the other person to either.

Even if we decide to do away with lasting relationships and focus primarily on the sex (which seems to fascinate you for some completely obscure and unfathomable reason.  I mean, it's not like us guys spend 100% of our time thinking about sex), I do maintain that it is quite possible to get into someone's pants without the need for untruths.   Then again, maybe I'm just so awesome that I pull it off naturally.

Is it a lie when you go work for McDonald's and make a genuine effort to do well at the job, just because you aren't truly, deep down, the kind of person who wanted to work there? I know my example skews far away from what we're talking about, not involving sexuality and all, but please try and see the parallel I'm attempting to make.

I'm afraid I don't actually see the parallel you're drawing, because I don't consider those two aspects (taking pride in your work and wanting to work somewhere better) as being related.  Some people (like me) just enjoy making the most out of what they do, and try do the best they can at whatever they're doing.  They don't have to like what they're doing in order to like being good at it.

Now, fudging your resumé so you can get into a good-paying job?  That's a lie.  It's still a bad comparison though, since you're not lying to yourself as much.

As a male, whenever I've gotten into a relationship with a girl, it had to start out with me "misrepresenting" myself by pretending to care about that girl's life, friends, feelings, and other things unrelated to me or my life. Eventually, that girl becomes my girlfriend, and I actually care. When I've met a stranger, I had to "misrepresent" myself by showing an interest in whatever they happened to be talking about. Eventually, I know that stranger, and it's less of a lie when I act like I care. Less of one, I stress that part. In any case, there are tons and tons and tons of guys and girls out there who may seem to have a questionable level of light in their hearts--I use that term to refer to the "goodness" we're all quick to claim we possess--who nonetheless want to find hope and happiness in their lives. The whole microcosm of their interactions might sicken you, from your ivory tower of moral superiority, but they are pursuing happiness the same as anyone else.

You are faking interest in someone.  Not only are you lying to them by pretending to be interested, you're lying to yourself by making such an effort to be around someone you don't actually like talking to.  You're right, that does sicken me. 

Now I'm going to have to scrape vomit off the side of this tower for the rest of the week.

One thing is for sure. If I chose to greet this world with 100% honesty at all times and never pretend anything for the sake of others, I'd be in prison. I think a little make-believe is helpful to our ability to coexist as a society.

Is it Eurasia or Eastasia we're fighting with now, brother?

[strongrudder]

...This reminds me of why I'm both attracted to and repulsed by politics. I find the way it works to be fascinating, and yet the pointless bickering eventually makes me want to throw my TV at the wall.

[Grimlocke]

Frankly I too have never felt the urge to be around people that dont interest me.

I just hate feigning interest and kindness, not because I am moraly concious or anything, but just because me makes feel fake. I find prentensiousness sickening, and I cant possibly be the only one. I very often see conversations where at least one side is just feigning interest, and doing so poorly enough for me to notice. This trend of though of 'I have to feign interest/flat out lie to get along with people/get laid' realy puts me off. Unless you are a completely rotten or apathetic person there should be plenty people and subjects you are genuinely interested in.

This may all sounds very bitter and miserable, but it has actualy kept me making bad 'friends' and lets me spend more time with people I am genuinely interested in.

@strongrudder: im glad I dont have a TV with the way my coontry's politics are faring.