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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

[revier]

I voted in your poll when it was new, thinking it was a slightly odd thing to ask, but having thought about it, I decided to come back and elaborate.

I am a human of the female persuasion, but I often take advantage of "no girls on the internet" syndrome and allow people to assume I'm male. If you claim otherwise, one of two things tends to happen:

1) "Wow, really? And you like the same games as me? Pics please?" Which can devolve into "You're not REALLY a girl unless you send me timestamped pictures of your breasts, WHY WON'T YOU?"

2) "Go away, we don't need any attention whores here."

I'm not a woman to get attention, I play games because I like playing games, not because I want in your pants. The same is true for most girl gamers I know. The ones who want in your pants aren't usually that interested in the game itself - they're playing a whole different game. There's a few ways to avoid this.

1) Don't admit to being female. Ever. Even if the topic comes up, if you don't know the people you're playing with, let them think you're a guy. Does not work in real life, or anything that requires you to talk over a headset.

2) Only play games no one is "surprised" to find girls playing.

3) Attempt to politely deal with and correct people's assumptions about you.

Most of the girl gamers my age (late teens/early twenties) that I know use strategy number one. It's like a general internet safety rule - you can do whatever you like, as long as they think you're a guy.

Most of the older girl gamers I know use strategy two. Or maybe they actually just only like "girly" games, I haven't conducted any research on the topic.

Strategy three is probably the best one in terms of helping get rid of the problem, but it's a lot of work when I just wanted to play games, not engage in feminist debate.

Anyhow, I suppose my response to OP is, no, you don't have to know. There've been times, I guarantee it, where you DIDN'T know. And if you hang out where I hang out, it'll happen again.

That said, most of the Bay12ers seem to be pretty reasonable people, so I don't mind "decloaking" to add my two cents.

[Aqizzar]

2) Only play games no one is "surprised" to find girls playing.

Most of the older girl gamers I know use strategy two. Or maybe they actually just only like "girly" games, I haven't conducted any research on the topic.

As long as you're here to ask, what sort of games count in that category anyway?  Any other trends to note?  I and most guys don't really have any perspective on that.

[Cthulhu]

I read somewhere that depending on the game, potentially up to two thirds of the player population is female, with most of them just hiding it.  That is a sad statistic.  We gamers are bad people if the only girls who are willing to play with us will only do so disguised.

More to the point, what does that say about DF?  I know I'm a guy, as far as I know you could all be girls.  So which one of you destroyed the locker full of blood samples?

[Nikov]

Every time I see "male" and "female" be used as non-sexist non-ageist universal gender denotations, I want to rage. I'm not a male. I am a man. I am defined in my gender by far more than simply having sex organs.

[Jackrabbit]

You might be a man, but you're male as well.

[Beeskee]

The irony of it all is that rather than make themselves look like complete jerk-offs, I've seen guys in situations such as this be praised for their manliness.

I've seen that too. The end result is, until a community is PROVEN safe, most women online prefer to keep their gender a secret.  Which leaves everyone with the impression that their community is primarily male.

[Muz]

Women are just as good as men in games. It's not like physical sports, where there is a slight physical disadvantage. I think the only reason they seem a bit worse is that there's less of them, so a lower chance of an exceptional player showing up as opposed to an exceptional male player.

My sister is an example of a very hardcore gamer. She powergames the hell out of a lot of games, up to the point where they're no longer fun. She exploited Fable to get a maxed out character in the red and yellow XP. She accomplished all the objectives in The Sims 2 and 3, and even Unreal World. She's even makes this annoyingly physically invincible horde with Ulm in Dominions 2 and 3.

My girlfriend is a very casual gamer, who only plays for fun, and because I tell her that girl gamers are hot. She's also an environmental engineer.. so there goes that theory that girls don't become gamers for the same reason they don't become engineers

Both these two people don't call themselves gamers. Neither hang out on gamer forums. My sister likes to do her attention whoring IRL, she only checks out gamer forums for bug fixes and mods. If anything, I think the only reason you don't see female gamers is because a lot of guys get very annoying when they see a woman. It's not really a great social group to hang out with and chill.

On a different note, know what pisses me off? When someone acts like a prick to a female gamer, and then someone else says "dude, don't be such an asshole" and is branded a white knight and is suddenly a loser.

Context. I actually hate when people play the white knight. I'd fight for a woman's rights to play a game without being harrassed. But when I joke about saying "there are no wimminz on the internet", you're going to branded a loser if you give me a 10 minute lecture about it, calling me an asshole. But if you reply, saying "be nice to her", there's nothing wrong with that. Just don't be an asshole about calling other people an asshole and you should be fine.

I'm certainly not sexist, and that's why I'd joke about being sexist just the same way I'd be racist against elves... you don't expect anyone to take to take it seriously, unless that person has ulterior motives. If the girl gets defensive about it, I'd apologize. If you step in front of her and get defensive, you make it look like you're showing off.

[Cthulhu]

I had a guy don his helm when I used the "If there are any girls here I wanna dooo'em" quote from 8bit D&D once.  Contemptuous looks were had by all.

It wasn't even out of context either, everyone was quoting it.

[Jackrabbit]

On a different note, know what pisses me off? When someone acts like a prick to a female gamer, and then someone else says "dude, don't be such an asshole" and is branded a white knight and is suddenly a loser.

Context. I actually hate when people play the white knight. I'd fight for a woman's rights to play a game without being harrassed. But when I joke about saying "there are no wimminz on the internet", you're going to branded a loser if you give me a 10 minute lecture about it, calling me an asshole. But if you reply, saying "be nice to her", there's nothing wrong with that. Just don't be an asshole about calling other people an asshole and you should be fine.

That's basically what I mean. Joking that there are no women on the internet is fine, saying "lol show me your boobs" or "make me a sandwich" is being an asshole and you shouldn't be in the wrong for calling someone out on it, so long as you don't go over the top, get creepy or something similar. But yeah, context is important.

[Cotes]

On a different note, know what pisses me off? When someone acts like a prick to a female gamer, and then someone else says "dude, don't be such an asshole" and is branded a white knight and is suddenly a loser.

Context. I actually hate when people play the white knight. I'd fight for a woman's rights to play a game without being harrassed. But when I joke about saying "there are no wimminz on the internet", you're going to branded a loser if you give me a 10 minute lecture about it, calling me an asshole. But if you reply, saying "be nice to her", there's nothing wrong with that. Just don't be an asshole about calling other people an asshole and you should be fine.

That's basically what I mean. Joking that there are no women on the internet is fine, saying "lol show me your boobs" or "make me a sandwich" is being an asshole and you shouldn't be in the wrong for calling someone out on it, so long as you don't go over the top, get creepy or something similar. But yeah, context is important.

Indeed. And I'm pretty sure that most of us who would step into to call those idiots asshole would do the same if they were harrassing someone because of ethnicity or sexual orientation.

Actually, I'd probably find it easier to do the latter, exactly because the whole white knighting thing. I mean, it's one thing being ragged on by the idiots afterwards, but when there's the chance that the person you were defending turns around and starts to call you out on sexism I'm that much more likely to just keep my mouth shut.

[DeKaFu]

For what it's worth, when I play MMOs with any amount of character customization I usually end up playing male characters. It's not to consciously hide my gender, but because of clothing/armor options. Male character clothing tends to look a lot better and be (relatively) closer to what I'd be comfortable associating myself with in real life. Games where female armor doesn't arbitrarily have half the style and a quarter of the material of male armor are fairly hard to find.

Making it easier for people to assume I'm male is just a positive side effect.

[Jackrabbit]

Yeah, I was thinking that might factor into it. Being forced to play Ms. Fanservice all the time can't be that fun.

[Cthulhu]

And likewise, a lot of men play female characters in MMOs because they don't want to stare at a guy's ass all day.  The resulting special treatment because ronery guys happily assume you're a girl IRL is an added bonus.

I don't though, I play male characters.

The problem with leaping to a woman's defense is that then you have to leap to everyone's defense or you look just as sexist as the guys you're against.  Unless it's getting seriously disruptive and offensive or the person being attacked is one of your bros (The only time I've ever intervened in a white knight-ish way was in WoW when someone called my friend/guildmaster a "silly cunt."  He called me a white knight, but everyone was rebuking him at that point so it wasn't a big deal) you should probably avoid getting involved.  If you have to get involved, it's probably better to just quietly and calmly hit the report button.

It can be hard to be a girl in a place where 90% of the websites are degrading pornography, but they're not damsels in distress.  They can handle themselves, and if one can't white knighting or similar responses are rarely the right way to handle the situation.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

See, I've had to deal with the opposite of your white knighting problems. That being, guys who try to force the group to refrain from criticizing women present in any way, or disagreeing with them at all, or expressing anything besides absolute love for anything said woman has a positive opinion towards. It gets old, and fast.

I was once forced to try and verbally smack the stupid out of one of my friends, who was alienating our entire online group through afformentioned behavior towards a girl he had met online and became infatuated in. He did his best to try and intigrate her into our group, but this was not a good idea. She was unstable at best and an evil, manipulitive individual at worst. The situation was resolved with their eventual breakup, but things got very down to the wire near the end of it.

[Jackrabbit]

So, when calling someone else out, regardless of gender or race or whatever, play it by ear and use discretion?

You'd think that'd be obvious but it never seems to be.