Have you read to the end?
This was on guild runs. And several of the players would ignore anything that was said by a female player; if a guy said something, they’d listen, but if any of the “girls” did, our words would be ignored in favor of “flirting”. It did lead to a guild split, surprise surprise.
You know Nava, you can be an awfully combative person. I’m sure you would have no troubles fitting in if you gave it a fair shot. 
Nope. You’re the one telling us the story in bits and pieces.
As I said upthread an ex of mine was really heavy into WoW. She used teamspeak and was apparently a major player in her (large) guild. She never mentioned being treated anything like this. At all. In fact, I know a bunch of female gamers who play WoW and none of them have ever complained about this problem.
You weren’t playing in a guild of eight year olds, were you?
Yep! I’m fluiddruid on Steam, too; I’m in the SDMB group. I’m currently splitting my time right now between a few games but I generally play a few rounds (at least) of TF2 a day. I’m trying to finish the achievement milestones I need for all the weapons. (I stopped playing for awhile due to LOTRO addiction, so I missed the release of several of the class packs. Finishing up Soldier, and then it’s… eugh, Demoman, Scout, and Spy left to go.)
It really, really depends on the group you’re with.
The easiest time I had was in a raid guild led by a woman who’d been playing MMOs since Everquest came out. If people had a problem with chicks in leadership, of course, they’d never join or would leave soon. Even then, it seemed to take longer to get the trust of the group than others (a real-life friend and I joined at the same time).
Harassment happens, but usually the behavior is more macho than anything. Playing LOTRO was fun but I wanted to do Minstrel, and unfortunately girl + healer means a lot of guys stepping over each other to be your burly protector. It took a lot of doing to really be taken seriously. I had to request to be an officer, in a guild where officerships were given out like candy (someone I recruited, actually, got the nod first). Nobody really listened until I started writing out some detailed strategies and plans on the forums. The assumption is that girls are there to socialize and follow along, and they’re not necessarily bad per se, but not assumed to be leaders. We definitely had quite a few ‘giggly girls’ who got handouts by basically flirting and charming, but I really hate that, and it perpetuates the stereotype. For what it’s worth, it seemed worse in this group because the men were in their 40s and 50s more – the guys around my own age (late 20s, early 30s) seem to be the best for handling female gamers.
You don’t need to do any of the achievements to get the weapons in TF2.
It isn’t just video games. Chess is a good example of a game where women don’t seem to do well when competing with men.
It means nothing, on the larger scale of things, but the top PVP player on my old WOW server was female. I don’t know if the public at large knew her sex, but she was our guild leader so we all knew.
Outside of mmorpgs I have noticed a serious gender gap, especially with FPS games.
We’re not just talking about a gender gap. The point is why competitive males are supposedly better at any given activity than competitive females of the same activity.
Sports: This is obvious.
Video games: I’ll make the claim that men naturally have faster reaction speeds.
Chess: No idea.
What else is under discussion?
Has anyone ever done a study on reaction times in the genders? I’m surprised there aren’t a bunch of ladies in this thread arguing the notion that men have better reflexes.
Actually it takes totally thrashing the guys repeatedly to be accepted as a female gamer [when they know you are female]
I have a friend that I will not name that uses a device to make herself sound male, and only plays the daintiest looking toons and makes crude jokes about needing the girly butt to watch while running and otherwise acting like a 12 year old guy. Any time she played as a known female, they would ignore every suggestion she made, and they marginalized her toon in raids.
I can play aggressively - I have a fairly macho go-to-hell style of playing because I gave up hard core raiding a few years ago and I pretty much solo. I use my warlock [and now death knight] as a tank and rarely die running quests.
In EVE Online I am a hard core industrialist. There is only one industry skill I dont have [drug manufacturing. I have the book Im too lazy to skill it up] and I am specifically waivered from PVP in my 0.0 alliance because I mine a significant amount of the mins that my alliance uses for ship replacement programs. Right now our area in space is having issues with another alliance trying to push Mostly Harmless out of the spot in the Northern Coalition space we are in. I have specialized implants and training to run mining fleets, and frequently play all 4 of the household accounts as a mining fleet, and can chew through 2 asteroid belts in a day [call it 7 or 8 hours of actual mining.] Why yes, I have no life =) actually no job, but as long as the household stuff gets done, mrAru has no problem with a gamer grrl. One of hte hosuehold accounts is his - he jokes about being kept a as mining slave by his Amarr [a slave holding race in EVE] wife =)
Why would we? Guys do seem to have better reflexes.
That’s just weird.
Because every other time I’ve seen gender differences mentioned on the Dope, someone has come in to argue about it. Someone always has to pop in and point out that it’s only generally true.
Incidentally, if this really is an accepted difference between the male and female brain, it could be used as evidence for transgenderism being real. An MTF (whether pre- or post-op) should have lower skills than a cisgendered male and an FTM greate than a cisgenedered female. (I’d understand not quite being the same as the cis version of their gender.)
I just wonder what she uses to make herself sound male. Merely lowering pitch doesn’t work. I’ve tried it both ways. (making myself sound female, or making a female sound male.)
Why? How would you like to try and game while guys are hitting on you? Not being taken seriously? Ever had some guy running around whispering cybers at you? After so many idiots the ignore function fills up…
Makes perfect sense to me. I don’t do it because I know GMs and can get the ban hammer dropped on the jackasses pretty quickly.
Some program she got, works on teamspeak but not ventrillo. I don’t bother, people I game with value me no matter what my gender is.
No, it’s not. Even just playing female characters and not being the sort of raging chauvinist that your average dumbass young male expects from other males has me occasionally assumed to be female, and the behavior of said dumbasses towards me is markedly different when they think that. It happens to me fairly rarely and even then I find it disgusting and tiring. I can not only understand why someone would want to masquerade as male online, I hope it becomes easier to do, as well as the opposite. Outmoded social constructs have little place in the egalitarian online world, and if it keeps my teammates from turning on their mic then it impacts the quality of my gaming too.
As towards the topic, I’m not convinced there’s really any strong support to be made either way. The data is pretty lacking. Quite a few tournament events wind up with females in the upper brackets, so the potential is obviously there, and yet there is a very large gap in numbers. While competitive gaming is obviously going to be fairly male-dominated for assorted social reasons, you’d expect that to level off more towards the top end as the weight of numbers becomes less relevant in comparison to personal ability.
Using something like WoW to make the case is a weak argument, though. It seems like a clear choice since it’s up there as one of the most gender-balanced major games, but WoW is aimed primarily at a casual market. By far the very large bulk of its huge player base is terrible at the game - that’s the whole point of a casual game, it’s easy to pick up. Only very, very tiny portions of it can be considered competitive, and in both the arena tournaments and the races to world-first raiding goals, females are not hard to find.
Bullshit. I’ve played plenty of female characters and never had a problem. The occasional idiot who tries to hit on me without knowing my RL gender is easily told off.
It’s fucking weird when you feel like you have to hide who you really are though because you don’t have the balls to stand up for yourself (uh, metaphorically of course).