A little something I appreciate about the RPG Industry

I was just noticing that although the RPG community would love to more consistently get female gamers, they've taken a strikingly different route than the video game community.

Let's think about this.  From what I've seen, there is no product specifically designed to attract female gamers to the RPG community.  There are games that do play around with gender, like Kagematsu.  A lot of these games play with societal gender roles.  This is entirely different from making an RPG specifically for women.  There are games that would like to appeal to more female gamers, but it's not quite the same when compared to what video games have done.

Specifically, the video game industry has tried to make games specifically for women.  And when I say women, I should really refer to the preteen to teenage market.  With games that have main characters like Barbie, Mary Kate and Ashley, and Miley Cyrus over the years, it's impossible to say that the industry has entirely neglected the girl market.  But has it actually penetrated the girl video-gamer market?

In my opinion, it hasn't.  The video game industry has been able to find out what a lot of younger girls like, but they haven't looked at why girls who already like video games like the games they play.

A lot of the games that have a fairly equal distribution or even a majority of female players in the video game market didn't try to market exclusively to girls or women in the first place.  One great example is one of my favorite game lines: the Sims.  Maxis merely went with a concept and ran with it, and without marketing to a specific gender produced a game that ended up having a majority of female players.  People can rattle on theories as to why, but it seems it was partly due to the fact that early on, there was no specific gender in mind for the players.  Well, there was the time when Will Wright decided not to call it Dollhouse because it made it more feminine, so one could even argue that the Sims market was equally targeting both genders.

The Sims model is more like what the RPG community has done: just make a good game and the players will come.  Could you imagine what would have happened if the RPG industry followed the video game model?  I don't even want to think about.

Don't think about it too much either, it might become a question of the week.

We are not alone.

In my last post I talked about a response to my question on a forum, and how I particularly didn't like dismissing an issue.  I apparently was not the only one.  Another poster responded, and stated a lot of the same points I did.

You can finally see what was said here, if you haven't figured it out already.  I was a little embarrassed before to share the link because I felt I might be a little sensitive to the situation.  I almost felt like I was being attacked.  It looks like I am not the only one that feels that way.

As you can tell I've had a bit of an interview drought but I haven't stopped looking!  There will be more of that soon.  Also going to a few events where I hope to meet some more contacts.  Keep spreading the word!   The blog is off to a fantastic start.  :D

I'm not the person who created this difference. I am a person willing to talk about it.

On a forum where I asked for feedback someone posted a very critical response where they (albeit indirectly) accused the people noticing the difference between male and female gamers for creating it.  Maybe I should put in a quote:

Calling out the distinction calls attention to it, and all of a sudden we have "female gamers" and all their needs. Or "male gamers", and all their needs.


I sat on this response, and thought about it long and hard, and decided to respond myself.


In response to the first quote.  In the society I live in today, in the country I reside in right now, there are differences between men and women that I cannot avoid for two reasons.  The first reason is that a lot of the differences between men and women are biological.  Females compared to males have different genitalia, different bone structures, even different rates of hair growth.  There is no avoiding that.  The second reason is that the society I live in treats each gender differently.  There is a whole evolution of society that goes along with those treatments.  It has nothing to do with anything I've ever stated or done on this blog, let alone in my entire life.  I was born into it, and as a women who is not considered the "norm" in many ways even outside of gender, it's impossible for me to not notice these differences.


When so many men consider me a rare specimen of my gender because I like Dungeons and Dragons and running campaigns, when I am the only female who ran games in my group of friends in college, how can I not notice that there is a difference between male and female gamers?  Even if it is a difference that is only perpetuated by something that has no real factual backing, there is a difference.


In his response, this man seemed to respond as if I thought something discriminatory was happening.  I have never stated that this difference is discriminatory.  A lot of the people I've talked to have not found a discriminatory difference at their games either.  But there is a difference that people notice by the way women play.  And what is wrong with noticing something in the world that was already there to begin with?  What is wrong with noticing a rain cloud when it is raining?  Pointing out the rain cloud did not start the rain.


I am examining something that already exists, and I am sorry that people feel like I am creating a problem.  One, I never said anything was inherently a problem in the RPG community, though it's a question I have asked during my interviews.  Two, I am not the one who invented gender or sex or even RPGs.  I'm just seeing how they all interact.  


I might be reacting just because I find it ends the discussion unjustly.  One should not dismiss a question merely because they don't like the topic, or what the topic might suggest.  


And I know I'm going to keep asking questions.