first i have no clue what PvP means. i was merely trying to convey that in my household i will go screw around on the computer and stuff after work while my wife seems to be more focused on other stuff. and even when i tell her take a night off she seems to be more interested in rearanging the closet cabinet than in engaging in some sort of computer fantasy.
How do you signal that to them?
As for the thread:
Seems the main reason more men than women are found at the top of competitive entreprises is because, whether you’re talking about sports, videogames, chess or business, if you want to be at the top of anything very competitive, you need a mix of wanting to be top dog and having something to prove while being willing to sacrifice other parts of your life to dedicate yourself to a single project. An obsession with increasing performance also helps. Men are much more likely to have those traits.
There are some areas that require those traits where women can be at the top. E.g.: Some musical instruments are now perceived as girly (flute) while others are still acceptable to men (piano). You could find a good portion of women at the top for flute but not for piano.
Seeing as you no nothing about gaming, you might not belong in this thread.
Women aren’t as good at competitive gaming because they don’t care. There is something inherently male about wanting to be better than anyone else at something even if it’s insignificant. Look at your local bars trivia night, you will never see woman as proud of knowing more useless shit as men.
From what my biology teacher told me in 10th grade: men do not have as many connectors between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, women have more, that’s why they are better able to focus on multiple things at once.
Because men aren’t able to focus on multiple things, they’re able to focus completely on one thing at a time. That’s why the top chef/video game person/whatever are always men.
The best girl clan I’ve ever seen was in CS 1.6 back in '06-'09 – SK girls. We scrimmed them a couple times, even had a match against them. They were actually decent. Their best player was easily better than the bottom 2-3 people on my team. She had enough reaction time to get flick kills, or insta-hses around a corner. We game planned on not going to the site she guarded, or trying to draw her away with a fake. She also owned my face with an insane shot during a critical pistol round in the match which left quite an impression.
They were also sponsored and girlfriends to a lot of pro-dudes. They were at a cal-im+ / cal-m- level. So not coL material or anything, but surprisingly good for girls. Like, I couldn’t expect to win unless I played our best lineup. Otherwise things would be really interesting.
Every other girl gamer I’ve ever seen in StarCraft, Diablo, CS 1.6 – pretty meh. But it’s still always fun to play with them just for the sheer novelty.
One strange thing though. It may just be luck, but I swear L4D1 and 2 have an insane amount of girl gamers compared to any other game I’ve ever played. They’re very common just in random pubbing. On the one hand it’s one of the more violent games around. On the other it’s centered around cooperation and teamwork more than almost any other FPS. That just plays into the stereotype too much for me. I try not to accept that. But damn if not every other 10 pubs there’s a girl on our team.
But yeah, the entire true competitive thing is very male. Take CS 1.6. So you’re gonna get 5 girls (plus some backups unless it’s like a pro team) who all have good reaction time and movement skills and teamwork and know all the good nades and have tons of experience and they’ve watched hundreds of hours of demos and they’ve played for years practicing on like 10 maps? And continue to practice? Good luck with that. You have to be a bunch of hardcore nerd losers like my friends and me to do that. Most nerds in general are guys.
Winning a big CS match, especially if you’ve practiced the map a lot in preparation, is a huge fucking rush. The euphoria afterwards lasts for at least a day or two. And that’s kinda embarrassing to say, but it’s true. I don’t think most girls can even relate to that.
I play Gor in Second Life (SL Gor) a roleplaying game based on the works of John Norman. It has also sorts of fascinating elements wrt male vs. female game players.
For example, Gor is widely considered to not only have a sizable component of female players, but to have a MAJORITY of female players … one of the Lindens blogged that the names on credit card applications among those who played Gor was about 60 percent female, 40 percent male. And there are other indications as well.
But the interesting point WRT this thread is, SL Gor is divided into two camps, “By the Book” (BtB) Gor and “Gor Evolved” the difference being that Gor Evolved allows women to be warriors, BtB does not. And the interesting aspect there is, there is a LOT more fighting going on in Gor Evolved, in fact, raiding is RARE in BtB Gor but commonplace in Gor Evolved. And the leaders in Gor Evolved tend to be female, though be best fighters may not be the leaders, as role playing is an important element of the game in both groups. However, there are many “best bows” and “first swords” in Gor Evolved who are female … for example, the best bow of the group I roleplay with.
So in SL Gor, the women lead in the subgroup that does the most fighting (Gor Evolved). Interestingly, Gor Evolved, by anecdotal evidence only, but pretty strong anecdotal evidence, has more male players than BtB Gor, and it’s widely agreed that that is because there is so much more actual fighting in Gor Evolved. Yes, even in a game replete with naked sex slaves who are PROBABLY being played by women, men would rather be fighting!
In any event, SL Gor is clearly filled with highly combative women who like to fight and also like to roleplay, but since most of them are culled from the subset of people who like BDSM, I am not sure if this is indicative of anything about gamers in general. Just thought I’d throw it out there.
I think experience should not be discounted.
Young males generally grow up in a video-game heavy culture. Their parents are probably more likely to see game consoles as a necessity. Their peers are more likely to be interested in sitting around for hours playing games. Most young men have grown up with video games as a primary social activity, which is not generally the same for young women. Even if hours logged on WoW are similar, I bet the male players generally have a vastly higher lifetime total, and a lot more when they are younger and building up basic skills.
Heh. Now this is an area where, if I liked to go to bars, I’d probably excel (I’ve always been tops in trivia, ever since I was a kid). I sometimes regret that I don’t like to drink or go to bars, because I think I’d enjoy the trivia scene immensely (and especially pwning guys!) 
The only thing I’m typical to my sex about is that I know next to no sports trivia. If it’s hockey I might get it–if it’s anything else, no way.
Try Battleground Europe. While male dominated we have our share of females. One was even OIC! One leads a major Allied squad.
I have to call some bollocks about females here…
On games like WOW then many females will be attracted to the social element. However, A game like Battleground Europe…while still male dominated…have some tough females.
One was Allied OIC for a campaign. One was once Axis OIC.
A female (Quizno) leads a major Allied squad called the Dogs
There is an Axis sniper type…who I didn’t know was female for a long time. She was one tough cookie with very high kill/death ratios. I once hunted her for an extended period finding her favorite killing spots and learned much from hunting her.
We had a DEAF female bomber pilot…who was PHENOMINAL. She could nail anything on the ground…it was erie.
In my experience with gamer women, it’s the “killer instinct” that seems to be the difference (this hearkens back to some of the discussions earlier). I play both WoW (raiding DPS Shaman) and EVE Online (hardcore pirate/war pvper) and the majority of female gamers I know tend to fall into the WoW PvE camp–many are at the top of their game, and none of them are the slightest bit interested in PvP because they don’t care. Most of the males, on the other hand, PvP at least part of the time “to have some real competition” or “to see how good I really am”.
In EVE, all bets are off–both of the women I know who play it are atypically combative and have that edge to them (and it’s not a negative observation, I married one of 'em :D), and both PvP pretty much in proportion to their relative aggressiveness–my wife ONLY PvPs, she won’t do PvE or industrial stuff, and my other friend will do both as her fancy is struck.
Of console gamer females I know, none do any kind of competitive gaming except very indirectly–even the one who is driven to unlock everything in games she plays, write authoritative GameFaqs stuff, and posts YouTube vids of completing things, etc. will not play competitively. She’s also fairly unaggressive in other aspects of her life.
So I would argue that in my experience, the primary differentiator seems to be aggregate tendency toward aggression/“killer instinct”, since that seems to be the primary driver among people I know as to who’s a competitive gamer and who’s not, male or female.
So from my observations,
I was thinking Scrabble would be a game women dominate because in my experience, they do. I know a few female players who play often-- my mom enjoys it enough to own computer versions and special dictionaries. My wife plays online with friends. I don’t know any men who play, or at least none who told me.
But when I googled “world scrabble championship” I found a Wiki article listing the champs and as far as I can tell, they’re almost all men.
I used to play trivia a lot online, and while there were many good female players (one was awesome with American sports trivia in particular), the top ones were male-- again, as far as I could tell. There was some gender misrepresentation going on. When one pretty-good player turned out to be a guy, a friend of mine said she should’ve known, because he rocked at some browser game where you threw cows or something.
I was discussing this with my husband last night. He is absolutely convinced there is a window of opportunity during the brain’s development for acquiring video game skills, and that women more often than men miss this window as children, thus creating a real disadvantage for us when we do enter the world of serious gamers.
What I want to know for the men vs. women reaction-time study LOUNE posted is whether it controlled for childhood experience with reaction-time tasks. You can’t just attribute a disparity to biological difference without taking factors like childhood development into consideration.
I am her reverse, I only PVP when I am caught in lowsec or 0.0 and have no option. I actually fly an amazingly tanky hulk - I can sit in 0.0 and let a pair of vice admirals in the ore belt pound on my hulk until someone wanders past ratting. If I catch the admirals at the begining of getting to the belt and my hulk is empty Ill kick my drones out to kill them. It takes them a while [I usually pack hammer 2s, though I really love ogre 2s.]
I just spent 6 hours today on sisi [test server] playing with the new planetary mining toys, making screen caps of the different screens to make a corp tutorial for when it goes live. Ill go back periodically until it actually goes live to see what changes are made so I can tweak the instructions.
Yeah, we play in groups and sports are a total blind spot for me also. History, geography, political science and a massive assortment of odds and ends are my contribution. We do alright. The guys used to get alpha male and pipe in with answers they weren’t really sure of until we instituted the stamp system. If you’re absolutely sure you know the answer against consensus opinion thats ok, but you have to put you initials near it. After it’s all over it’s incredibly humbling to see you initial next to wrong answers.
I was watching some documentary about a trans person (female to male). His reaction speed was drastically higher after he started taking hormones. Anecdote, not data and all that.
**AClockworkMelon **(at least I think it was you), while I’m a female WoW gamer, I’m somewhat different from winterhawk.
I’m a PVE raider (hunter), yes, but I also PVP. So does my GL (enh shaman), who’s also female. Hell, she got me into PVP when I was ready to climb the walls after a raid one night, which was all it took.
Personally, I fell in love with PVP because it lets me really stretch my skills, and I can see the improvement in my PVE performance too as a result. My hunter has a decent set of Furious/Wrathful Glad gear, and runs a tweaked BM PVP spec with a corehound for extra dps/cc. And while downing a raid boss is great, there is a special joy in killing someone who thinks that because I’m a hunter I’m going to be an easy kill, oh yes.
Heh, if you’re recruiting, I have a nearly all Vs/IVs Hulk/Orca/Obelisk pilot who’s currently wasting time mining 0.5s for lack of top cover (and money to tank a hulk “correctly” after buying and fitting the Orca to run mining gangs that died when the economy did and 90% of my little indy corp quit the game.)
Does you computer also lack a Shift key? 
PvP is “Player Versus Player”, in case you were wondering.
Personally, I think that a lot of the “Women Aren’t As Good At Games” thing is a 70/30 mixture of “Most women aren’t hardwired to want to blow stuff up and take over the world” and “Society says women shouldn’t be wanting to blow stuff up and taking over the world in the first place”.
Besides The Sims, most of the “Girly” games I’ve seen tend to either be of the “Care for cute animals” variety, Sudoku puzzles, or things like Bejewelled and Diner Dash (both of which are more properly termed “Casual” games, but most of the people I see playing them are women).