A hostile play environment

October 2nd, 2007

Last week, I wrote a post about what’s wrong with asking “what women want” from hobby games. Now I’d like to talk a little bit about why I think people keep asking the question.

It’s weird, isn’t it? No one asks: “What can we do to get more women into sports?” Male sports fans grin and talk about how lucky they are to have girlfriends into football, but those whose sweethearts don’t care about sports don’t usually push.

And even though I belong to a “Men Who Crochet” Yahoo! group, I’ve never heard anyone say: “What do men want out of yarn arts?” Knitters expect anyone who knits, male or female, to do it for pretty much the same reasons.

Okay, knitting isn’t as complex as video games. (Oh, there’s just as much complexity about yarn types, equipment, technique, and so on, but knitting is fundamentally about transforming one form of fiber into a useful or decorative fabric.) And sports, though geeky in their own way, have a completely different set of cultural expectations (and even more difficult gender issues).

Obviously, the main reason people try to figure out what women want from games is to attract more women to a hobby in which they’re underrepresented. Existing gamers (of both sexes) do it because they’d like to play games with more women. Game developers and publishers do it because they’d like to make more money, and a bigger audience has more money.

Here’s the heart of the matter, though: the gap may be narrowing, but relatively few women are “gamers.” Oh, more and more women play games. For some games, the player base comprises mostly women.

But hobby gaming—historically the sphere of men, heavily influenced by the male-dominated sf genre, weighed down by the perception that it’s the sphere of children rather than adults—is hostile to the entry of women into the community.

Some women don’t really notice the hostile elements, or even like them. Others get “grandfathered” in by having become interested young enough not to even mind the nastier bits. Many women gamers, though, like games enough that they just overlook the nasty stuff and get on with the fun.

Calling hobby games hostile to women isn’t new, but it does explain why more women don’t game. In a day or two, I’m going to spell out what I see are the elements of the hobby that are unfriendly to women.

Entry Filed under: Gender