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Courtesy Amazon.com
The burning question, brought up in response to one of my other articles, was the woeful lack of female role-players. Gary Alan Fine’s book, Shared Fantasy, estimates that only ten percent of the player population is female. That was in the early 80s, so it’s possible that has changed, but all evidence points to women still being in the minority.
In the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, wargaming was the primary draw for role-players. Being a primarily male-dominated activity, wargaming had an almost non-existent female population to draw on. This was perpetuated into the role-playing world.
But it didn’t have to be that way. Studies of children aged 12 and younger found that girls have more interest in imaginative play than boys. Role-playing involves many of the attributes that are common in other female youth-oriented games, including shopping to equip characters, character design and customization, the ability to possess and own pets, and playing a more attractive and mature character. So why aren’t there more women playing role-playing games?
The answer may lie in the duration of play. Role-playing involves sitting at a table for long periods of time with a group (often three to five people). Boys’ imaginative play tends to run longer and involve larger groups than girls. As my wife has put it on more than one occasion, “I just can’t sit there for five hours straight.”
These attributes can be overcome of course, as evidenced by the fact that my wife and sister-in-law were both active gamers in our role-playing campaign. However, other forms of role-playing that that remove the duration of play and the requirement of sitting at a table for long periods of time seem to be more popular with women. For example, massive multiplayer online role-playing games focus on character and object customization, without the requirement for long stretches with a peer group. Conversely, live action role-playing games include all the imaginative play of tabletop role-playing games, but focus more on interaction between individuals than a group confined to a table.
There are other problems that keep females away from gaming that are endemic to any male-dominated form of entertainment, including the self-reinforcing nature that a male-dominated game seems less welcoming to women because there are so many men playing. That females can be portrayed in fantasy literature in as sex objects doesn’t help; chauvinism of male players, who game for the express purpose of getting away from wives and girlfriends, further reinforces the gender barrier.
Ultimately, the term “girl gamer” is slowly being taken back by women as a badge of pride. As role-playing games spread to other forms of gaming, many of the barriers that discouraged females from playing fell away. Online games are the most promising change of the gamer landscape. We can only hope that a more equally balanced gaming population will continue to transform the pen-and-paper role-playing culture.
Comments
I do think the number of women who play role-playing games has increased. My current gaming group includes four women. That was unheard-of 20 years ago.
I'm doing my part. I have three daughters, all being introduced to gaming to varying degrees. My oldest, now 21, is dating a gamer, plays numerous games, attends conventions, and does costuming.
My last gaming group included my wife, my sister, my niece, my daughter's godfather and his SO. At one time I had a group of 7 players, 5 of which were women. So I think it depends on the environment you're playing in. If the males in the group are respectful and tolerant of females, more will be attracted. If they act like slobs and goofballs the girls will stay away. Maturity is the key, I think.
I must be lucky. Currently, I have two in my Mutants and Masterminds group. My prior group had three before two moved away for school and the third to be with her significant other (two of them still come down two or three weekends a year to game us). And, the D&D group prior to both of those had another before she got married and moved away.
I think it might merit mentioning that the lamentation, "where are all the gamer girls?" is not, strictly speaking, about female gamers. It's about eligible female gamers.
Many gaming groups have female players as a result of a boyfriend or significant other who introduced them to the game. While I think this is fantastic (and as I mentioned, how my wife and my sister-in-law ended up gaming) it's not quite the same thing as a woman choosing to play role-playing games on her own.
I'm glad to hear this is changing and hope over time more women will be interested in gaming without a man introducing them to it. I think more groups will be formed by gamer parents like Groovydave (go Groovydave!).
Thanks all for your comments!
The article begins with the assumption that expanding the pen-and-paper crowd to include more female gamers is a natural good for the hobby. I'm not sure this is necessarily true. There are already female PnP gamers out there, and it seems that whenever someone decides to lament the lack of perfect gender balance, it inevitably involves a call for significant changes to the hobby itself, rather than attempts at outreach that would be much more likely to produce positive results.
I also think that the "chauvinism" criticism needs to be reexamined. The idea of engaging in a hobby to get away from something - including wives and girlfriends - is incredibly common (and arguably the point of a hobby), a healthy way of getting by, and (perhaps most closely related to this discussion) practiced in equal measure by both men and women in their respective hobbies.
It may be time to consider that a significant gender disparity in a niche hobby isn't inherently bad.
Although I started role-playing back in the early 1980s, when I was attending an all-boys high school, I was fortunate to know several female gamers through college. In fact, during my freshman year, I had run sessions for my entire dorm floor! In grad school and after, there were fewer female role-players than male ones, but that reflected the fact that there were fewer female fans of genre entertainment (science fiction, fantasy horror, superheroes, etc.). In recent years, thanks to anime and manga, popular and accessible franchises such as Harry Potter and Twilight, and the ubiquity of video games, I think the potential pool of role-players of both sexes is still untapped.
My gaming group has two women: my wife and the daughter of one of the guys in my group. For 12 years, I have had two or more girl gamers belly up to my table. I don't think there is an issue of attraction to the game at all.
As with many elements of gaming that I've encountered over the last 32 years, my experiences have exemplified the exception rather then the rule. For the first time in nearly 25 years I am running a monthly campaign with no female players. I do run a second monthly campaign that has two out of the four players being female.
I've always had between one and four women at my table since the early to mid-eighties. I get that it is not common but feel its quite unfortunate. To me, the more diverse perspectives you bring to the game the better.
I have 3 girl-gamers in my group.
Odd... no girl-gamers have responded to this thread?
Girl Gamer, RPGer, MMO player and damn proud of it. For the Horde!
~Samantha
I think the lack of female gamers might be something more unique to D&D than other games. I'll agree that a lot of D&D groups I've been in have been male-dominant, but nearly every GURPS group I've played in has had a healthy amount of female gamers involved. I'm not entirely sure why, but that's how it's been for me.
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