Recently I stumbled into this piece in the course of my internet meanderings:
Top Ten Myths About Girl Gamers
While tabletop Roleplaying is still a male-dominated hobby with a lot of potential for wacky consequences when women get involved, I think the above article creates more myths than it dispels. It enumerates, that is, myths that propagate little, if at all, outside of the author’s head. And yet I found this link from another article that claimed that it “neatly dissects this stereotype”.
Let me tackle these one at a time:
I don’t suspect this is a common belief about female gamers. I suspect this arises out of a single person having been an asshole, and I don’t rule out the author as the asshole in question.
I’ll hazard that nobody thinks girls play D&D to meet the kinds of guys who play it. But there is a suspicion that some girls have discovered that it is gratifying to be in an environment in which female company is at a premium. It may be that the author herself has an adverse reaction to this extra attention, but she’s misinterpreting the behavior she’s observing.
A genuine stereotype exists, however, which I have seen instantiated – the girl who plays because her boyfriend does but isn’t otherwise interested in the game.
I’m in a quandary as to which is the more bizarre claim – that gamer girls are like this, or that anybody actually believes they are like this.
I suppose that there may be some old fatbeards or grognards who think this way, but even that seems unlikely nowadays. I have found that female gamers are far more likely to bring scratch-baked snacks or fresh-cut flowers to a game, but they are under no special pressure to do so.
At least here I can believe that somebody actually believes this. And I suspect there are specimens of this type among female gamers. But if I were to generalize on my own anecdotal evidence, I’d conclude that female gamers are hack-n-slash types overall.
I will stipulate that this is a real stereotype that exists outside of the author’s paranoia. Nevermind that she undermines her boast about math skills by dismissing the discussion of rules as arcane, and the scenario she depicts in which she is not even allowed to look at the rules is missing an important addendum to add credibility: “…this happened in the 1970’s.”
The running joke is that Vampire: The Masquerade attracts the most female gamers because the stats are dots. But on average I have found female gamers only slightly less fascinated by the minutiae of combinatorical analysis, and only slightly less inclined to scour sourcebooks for ways to trick out their characters than the males. But based on the much smaller sample pool, the difference is too minor to generalize on.
Again, I believe that somebody actually believes this, and holds a grudge against female gamers on account of it. But she seems to be more confirming the stereotype than dispelling it.
I hear anecdotal reports of queen-bee-ism in many walks of life, but I haven’t experienced it at the gaming table. My own possibly stereotyping assumption is that the kinds of girls attracted to roleplaying games are less inclined to behave this way.
The bullet point suggests that she’s going to make a point about the stereotype that female gamers are more interested in the actual roleplaying over combat. But that turns out not to be what she’s thinking at all. This is not a point about a mistaken belief male gamers have about female gamers. This is just a snark against nerds for being nerdy.
I suppose you could extrapolate that she has a legitimate beef about certain gamers she knows dismissing her lack of nerdiness about hoplology in a sexist manner. Yet, she is also clearly engaged in gender-based smearing.
Yes, yes. Women be different from men. This non-point is just rounding out the ten.
She has given short shrift to actual gender stereotypes peculiar to the roleplaying community in favor of general venom. This is mostly a list of complaints about male gamers, including what she imagines (quite preposterously in some cases) they think of her.
