Vulcan wrote:

Ah... you weren't a geek in middle or high school, were you. Never one of the social outcasts the girls would rather die than be seen with, yes?

Actually, I was. My family moved a lot when I was young, and after about the third or fourth school change in as many years, I just stopped trying to make friends. Then along came a physically abusive step father who spent 6 years trying to convince me that I was a total failure of a human being. By high school, I was a skinny, nerdy teen in a school full of kids who idolized sporting ability over anything else.

I think I was in about my mid twenties when I realized that high school was a long time ago, and I didn't have to let the rest of my life be dominated by the opinions of insecure teenagers who I would never actually see again.

So the answer is to kick out all the socially awkward people in the hobby? I mean, yeah, the ideal would be to magically make all the socially awkward people suave and sophisticated... but it's hardly realistic...

There's a fair amount of space in between 'socially awkward' and 'actively blaming women for making me socially awkward' for people to exist in.

My early life was fairly similar only other crap happened as well. Ofc I'm getting over my victim complex and that's something I've seen a lot in the woke crowd but admittedly in my own as well.

I started to get rid of my victim complex for different reasons though. I started to see how badly it effected those that cared about me and how hard they worked only for my selfish victim complex to kick in. This is something both sides need to work on but I see more work need to be done on the woke side but maybe that's because I'm not woke so I see the failings of the woke side more.

You end up fighting to see who's the biggest victim or use it as an excuse not to improve in anything. It's more about instead of taking something as a challenge to improve to rather take it as an excuse to fail or to be lazy or scared and to make no decisions in your own life and then feeling like a victim when someone else chooses things for you.

Anyway both sides do it but you gotta learn to fix yourself.

In my case I'm not saying I can't be less socially awkward. It just might take more effort on my part not to be. Ofc I've never heard people tell Harry potter nerds, yaoi girls or others to be less awkward or rap songs to not seem so abusive to certain groups but that's just how people choose to change. It feels unfair that's for sure.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
No one is asking geeks to become suave. Simply that if the socially awkward want to be accommodated by others they need to make an effort to accommodate.


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 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I was an outcast in middle and high school. I was laughed at by women. I still think you come across really badly in this thread.

I agree with Ninthmuskateer about this thread being a great illustration of the toxicity in the hobby.

Yeah. I have spent an untold amount of effort in learning how to behave in a fashion to not make others uncomfortable, it boils my blood when people act as if it is everyone else's job to adapt to their individual needs.

Well that's weird because I'm supposed to understand what every single person's personal preferences are on your side and not to make anybody uncomfortable as an autistic man no less. I would expect a more give and take attitude but I guess not. You totally expect people to understand a person's situation but if it was a socially awkward autistic person not knowing how to socially act towards others it's somehow the autistic persons fault. May as well tell a man in a wheelchair to go up the steps because everybody else is expected to.

Well it is more reasonable than expecting every other member of the game group to go out and get a degree in psychology and specialize in the study of autism so that they can accommodate the one autistic kid without that kid making even the slightest effort to accommodate them.

Since we are making up bs and all.

I'm not making this up. I said the wrong thing before and about 7 to 8 people from a local game group crapped on me for it and a bunch of them wanted me to leave (out of over a hundred people). I never once insulted any of them in that facebook group. I'm also the autistic man in this situation. I could even post the conversation I had with 2-3 people from that group post thread topic through dm's.

Your line of thinking also goes if we have maybe 1% or so of trans people or asexual people then they're the odd one out and need to accommodate others but we know already that your stance would automatically switch with that.

Also I said a give and take attitude so yes I would change myself somewhat to accommodate them but they'd have to be more lenient with me as well

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
No one is asking geeks to become suave. Simply that if the socially awkward want to be accommodated by others they need to make an effort to accommodate.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I was an outcast in middle and high school. I was laughed at by women. I still think you come across really badly in this thread.

I agree with Ninthmuskateer about this thread being a great illustration of the toxicity in the hobby.

Yeah. I have spent an untold amount of effort in learning how to behave in a fashion to not make others uncomfortable, it boils my blood when people act as if it is everyone else's job to adapt to their individual needs.

Well that's weird because I'm supposed to understand what every single person's personal preferences are on your side and not to make anybody uncomfortable as an autistic man no less. I would expect a more give and take attitude but I guess not. You totally expect people to understand a person's situation but if it was a socially awkward autistic person not knowing how to socially act towards others it's somehow the autistic persons fault. May as well tell a man in a wheelchair to go up the steps because everybody else is expected to.

Well it is more reasonable than expecting every other member of the game group to go out and get a degree in psychology and specialize in the study of autism so that they can accommodate the one autistic kid without that kid making even the slightest effort to accommodate them.

Since we are making up bs and all.

I think some context is necessary.
According to the latest statistic around 1 in a 100 kids has been diagnosed with autism in the UK.

https://www.bma.org.uk/what-we-do/population-health/child-health/autism-spectrum-disorder#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%20around,diagnosis%20of%20autism%20spectrum%20disorder.

If of those 1 in 100 half are drawn to geeky game stuff like wargaming that would be a huge chunk of the budding yearly crop of wargaming populations.

This number only seems to be rising as far as I understand. I don't know why it is, it could be due to diagnosing getting better (most likely) ?
But that's a whole other topic/
I don't think people are making up BS neceessarly.

The point is a lot of people even if not autistic will likely not realise they have done something wrong in the first place unless somebody trained or experienced will be able to explain to them I guess?
I'm not sure how you tackle this to be honest. I think all we can really do is build good communities where we help people be better, rather than attack and ostracise people who make mistakes.

I'm blessed with a very good community and we don't have any issues whatsoever. We were actually discussing this same article I think(or one like it). Our leadership reached out to women who are members to get their honest feedback. All of the response have been positive for our club...
But, there were complaints in regards to big events where they were met with uncouth behaviour such as being talked down, or "stared at" and one case of outright groped (this got me really really reaaaaaly angry). However, this was stated to be occurring very very sporadically in a very large concentration of people at huge events. Which kind of makes sense. If you have a 1000 people at a convention, you will 100% get one or two utter pond life dikheads.


Its anecdotal of course, but I take this as an indication that we don't have any sort of endemic problem more or less to other spheres of society. BUT there are certainly bad actors. Just like anywhere else. So as a community we need to protect and look after our own, and resolve issues amicably but also if someone cant be taught or bring to understand certain aspects of their behaviour than perhaps a sanction should be enforced. I think though this should always be the very last resort.

I really detest not giving people a chance to improve themselves just because they haven't developed the social skills through bad parenting or a condition.
Spaces like this seem to attract these people in disproportionate numbers so we have our work cut out.

isn't it just possible that a far smaller percentage of women find wargaming interesting? Is it just possible that this isn't a problem that needs solving? Is it just possible that it's not the fault of 'the patriarchy", "Misogyny", "toxic masculinity", "incels", etc?

 Matt Swain wrote:
isn't it just possible that a far smaller percentage of women find wargaming interesting? Is it just possible that this isn't a problem that needs solving? Is it just possible that it's not the fault of 'the patriarchy", "Misogyny", "toxic masculinity", "incels", etc?

Yes but when people obsess over one thing or another too much they see it everywhere. This works with anything. At this point people could hold an inkblot in front of someone and they would assume some political extreme.

Honestly I think the issue is everything got political and I enjoyed gaming of all kinds more when we all just got along overall despite differing opinions.

Usually the truth is more complex than just throwing out a blanket bigotry complaint and reasons vary from person to person. Sure some things may make it worse but there might be a variety of other reasons.

 Vulcan wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Voss wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:

And let's face it. Of that 25%, a good chunk never learned because the women around them refuse to spend enough time with them to teach them how.

You've italicized that like it's somehow something that should be expected, which is odd. It's not up to women who just happen to be in your proximity to go out of their way to teach you to be less anti-social, and if you're not giving them a reason to want to spend time with you, that's on you, not them.

I agree it's not up to women, but then on the flip side I don't think it's up to socially awkward gamers to change themselves to make wargaming more accommodating to women.

Absolutely it is.
Learning how to deal with other human beings in a socially acceptable fashion is the baseline required for anyone to participate in society.

And that's why some of them get really hostile to strangers. They HAVE their own little society where they all get along just fine and who are you to intrude in and tell them they have to be accepting of others who have constantly and cruelly rejected THEM?

Nope. If you really want to hold onto a personal grudge for the individual that was your specific personal high school nemesis, feel free. Maybe even their friends as well.

But as soon as you start applying that grudge to every single person of <type> that comes through the door of a gaming shop? You're the hostile jackass. Hostility to _strangers_ isn't warranted by your high school drama with someone unrelated.

Its not a big ask to treat strangers with polite neutrality. That's literally a defining trait of society.


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 flamingkillamajig wrote:

In my case I'm not saying I can't be less socially awkward. It just might take more effort on my part not to be. Ofc I've never heard people tell Harry potter nerds, yaoi girls or others to be less awkward or rap songs to not seem so abusive to certain groups but that's just how people choose to change. It feels unfair that's for sure.

I mean... I think you're just not looking. People spent a lot of time freaking out at Harry Potter nerds, yaoi fangirls and rap in general gets hit with organized protests groups and even legislation.

A quick google search would find a lot of rants on those subjects, including live recordings of people browbeating those groups in public.
Examples:
https://www.google.com/search?q=yelling+at+yaoi+fangirls&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS839US839&oq=yelling+at+yaoi+fangirls&aqs=chrome..69i57.5592j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

@voss: yes and while I used to sort of think my dad was bad for hating or disliking people on the political left I've seen plenty that hated people for being conservative or republican automatically just for that reason in their own words. Keep in mind this goes for both big political sides. The one that confuses me is big city people or big states completely dismissing swing states or fly over states. That's like hating the neutral group you should try your best to win over every election year.

 Argive wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
No one is asking geeks to become suave. Simply that if the socially awkward want to be accommodated by others they need to make an effort to accommodate.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I was an outcast in middle and high school. I was laughed at by women. I still think you come across really badly in this thread.

I agree with Ninthmuskateer about this thread being a great illustration of the toxicity in the hobby.

Yeah. I have spent an untold amount of effort in learning how to behave in a fashion to not make others uncomfortable, it boils my blood when people act as if it is everyone else's job to adapt to their individual needs.

Well that's weird because I'm supposed to understand what every single person's personal preferences are on your side and not to make anybody uncomfortable as an autistic man no less. I would expect a more give and take attitude but I guess not. You totally expect people to understand a person's situation but if it was a socially awkward autistic person not knowing how to socially act towards others it's somehow the autistic persons fault. May as well tell a man in a wheelchair to go up the steps because everybody else is expected to.

Well it is more reasonable than expecting every other member of the game group to go out and get a degree in psychology and specialize in the study of autism so that they can accommodate the one autistic kid without that kid making even the slightest effort to accommodate them.

Since we are making up bs and all.

I think some context is necessary.
According to the latest statistic around 1 in a 100 kids has been diagnosed with autism in the UK.

https://www.bma.org.uk/what-we-do/population-health/child-health/autism-spectrum-disorder#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%20around,diagnosis%20of%20autism%20spectrum%20disorder.

If of those 1 in 100 half are drawn to geeky game stuff like wargaming that would be a huge chunk of the budding yearly crop of wargaming populations.

This number only seems to be rising as far as I understand. I don't know why it is, it could be due to diagnosing getting better (most likely) ?
But that's a whole other topic/
I don't think people are making up BS neceessarly.

The point is a lot of people even if not autistic will likely not realise they have done something wrong in the first place unless somebody trained or experienced will be able to explain to them I guess?
I'm not sure how you tackle this to be honest. I think all we can really do is build good communities where we help people be better, rather than attack and ostracise people who make mistakes.

I'm blessed with a very good community and we don't have any issues whatsoever. We were actually discussing this same article I think(or one like it). Our leadership reached out to women who are members to get their honest feedback. All of the response have been positive for our club...
But, there were complaints in regards to big events where they were met with uncouth behaviour such as being talked down, or "stared at" and one case of outright groped (this got me really really reaaaaaly angry). However, this was stated to be occurring very very sporadically in a very large concentration of people at huge events. Which kind of makes sense. If you have a 1000 people at a convention, you will 100% get one or two utter pond life dikheads.


Its anecdotal of course, but I take this as an indication that we don't have any sort of endemic problem more or less to other spheres of society. BUT there are certainly bad actors. Just like anywhere else. So as a community we need to protect and look after our own, and resolve issues amicably but also if someone cant be taught or bring to understand certain aspects of their behaviour than perhaps a sanction should be enforced. I think though this should always be the very last resort.

I really detest not giving people a chance to improve themselves just because they haven't developed the social skills through bad parenting or a condition.
Spaces like this seem to attract these people in disproportionate numbers so we have our work cut out.

Oh I am 100% on the same page as you. He just made a completely fictional straw man to use as my opinion, while explicitly quoting a statement that is VERY different, no less. I figured it must be how he wished to be treated considering that was how he treated others, and responded in kind.

All I have ever expressed seriously is that both sides of the equation should work to understand one another and it is unfair to put the responsibility entirely on one of them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:

 Matt Swain wrote:
isn't it just possible that a far smaller percentage of women find wargaming interesting? Is it just possible that this isn't a problem that needs solving? Is it just possible that it's not the fault of 'the patriarchy", "Misogyny", "toxic masculinity", "incels", etc?

Yes but when people obsess over one thing or another too much they see it everywhere. This works with anything. At this point people could hold an inkblot in front of someone and they would assume some political extreme.

Honestly I think the issue is everything got political and I enjoyed gaming of all kinds more when we all just got along overall despite differing opinions.

Usually the truth is more complex than just throwing out a blanket bigotry complaint and reasons vary from person to person. Sure some things may make it worse but there might be a variety of other reasons.

You are definitely spot on with that. Since the start this thread has been littered with posts that have little to do with the article and are just political rhetoric with some words changed around.

What is it I'm making up? Perhaps I'm being uncharitable here somehow or misread what you meant or you misread my statement?

It's not really that hard to read autism as you think. Granted its a broad spectrum and I'm lucky enough to be higher functioning but even so it tends to make social connections more difficult as well as doing some more adult functions in some cases (drive cars, live alone, work a job and get married). I have done some of these and not others. Sadly even higher functioning autism has these issues.

I'd say the thing I hate most is the infantilization of people with disorders. Plenty of people act nice to somebody but treat them mentally like children. If you don't understand look at someone that has down syndrome. I've gotten similar treatment as that from people which said they wanted to help me. I have wants and needs too and my opinions should be worth considering without dismissing them as child-like or less worthy of attention or consideration.

I want to try harder with self improvement and being more independent and social interaction but it's not the first time I've said something that's gotten me into trouble (up to the point of insults or physical threats) and I was almost never having negative intent more than teasing to which I just expect others to tease me back. Maybe in some cases I'm thicker skinned if I know someone's just joking.

Holy crap did we just manage to keep the thread fairly reasonable for an off topic thread normally likely to get locked?

 AustonT wrote:
Those hobbies it seems acceptable to just shrug and say “it’s not for everyone.”

Unlike this extremely niche hobby that requires a pretty focused interest in a number of things women don’t especially care for.
Then it’s unacceptable to point about that this already fringe hobby may not be very attractive to women (and most men); and that’s fine.

So for me its because with another hat on I am playing professional wargames. There we are desperate for women, in design and in the teams. An awful lot of the men involved came to it through wargames. I would love to co-opt the hobby to feed the professional world more fully. And that is a require for the security of the nation.

Otherwise I prefer to be around people who can handle the presence of women. I have found the mixed boardgame clubs as much fun as the all male wargame clubs. I would love to bring my daughter along and not get the creepy comments. Those guys don't have to go away, but I would like women to be a routine feature of the environment so they at least hide any unsavoury comments or stares as they would in other walks of life.

I believe a hobby that can and does include anyone has a stronger and more sustainable base, and I want to be playing with my (no doubt 3d printed, machine painted) toys 20 years from now.


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 flamingkillamajig wrote:

All this said I have trouble wanting to get people into warhammer with my own hang-ups with the current game. Im just not really having fun anymore in the game.

If you like wargames, perhaps it time to try a different non warhammer one. There are some surprisingly good ones out there!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

A.T. wrote:
You can already get resin pillar men custodes. They are fabulous.

They are indeed awesome


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Matt Swain wrote:
isn't it just possible that a far smaller percentage of women find wargaming interesting? Is it just possible that this isn't a problem that needs solving? Is it just possible that it's not the fault of 'the patriarchy", "Misogyny", "toxic masculinity", "incels", etc?

The point is a) women's participation in wargames is lower than in previous centuries, b) women's participation is lower than in what are considered comparable hobbies.

No one has said things should be 50/50, or there may be a smaller market amongst women. Question is of those women that could be expected to play these games, why aren't they? Historically they did (19th century) and today they do all the other niche comparable games that were considered for boys 40 years ago.

As for it being a problem, that is a matter of personal perspective. You get a lot of railway enthusiasts who are happy with a dying hobby as it means you don't get the wrong sort joining it. Conversely you get those that think commercial support will be better with a growing market segment. For wargames you are see a variety of perspectives over the previous pages.

I imagine tabletop gaming is more just a dying breed. If video games might have helped put it one foot in the grave then id say 3d printing is gonna eventually put them 6 feet under. Until then they seem to be doing well somehow.

Honestly I think it's a mix of how awkward it is and just so many other things people could do or want to do. Video games and computers have come a long way since the 80s.

I remember i once suggested they should've scrapped dark tide and instead had a balls to the walls 4 player co op assassin game (eversor, callidus, vindicare and culexus) where you go on a rampage that'd make vermintide look civil and toned down in comparison. Basically vindicare snipers far away enemies on some hive spire addressing rogue troops or take out greater daemons or powerful weapons at a distance, callidus is the sneak mode followed by some nasty melee when things go wrong, culexus is great for psychics esp. Chaos and eversor is just absolute no one is left alive to tell the tail because things have gotten that bad.

NOW THAT is how you'd market a 40k game Fat Shark.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
I imagine tabletop gaming is more just a dying breed. If video games might have helped put it one foot in the grave then id say 3d printing is gonna eventually put them 6 feet under. Until then they seem to be doing well somehow.

How is 3D printing going to put them 6feet under?
Thus far barring a few odds and ends for the house from what I see most 3D printers are either being used to machine masters or test designs for companies going into production; or they are being used by hobbyists to produce models. For painting and/or gaming.

The 3D printer is also a long way from being a common household item and the nature of resins makes it not very safe nor practical for younger customers who are unsupervised. So for a long time yet the injection mould or spin cast metal are still going to be able to compete. 3D print stores might be able to lower the market value of models and compete there on the highstreet/shelf but the GW injection moulded sprue would take a lot to beat.



However to say that 3D printing will kill tabletop gaming just seems strange. IT might change the nature of smaller companies as they shift from physical to digital sculpting and distribution methods; it might change the nature of getting into the market ; it might change the nature of 3rd party alternatives and how companies learn to deal with them (esp medium sized companies where its easier to lose a larger percentage of their customers to 3D printing). However if anything it will add to the tabletop market. Heck it will likely encourage model use in things like RPG games to be far more common and at a higher level of quality than a lot of your standard pre-painted DnD models.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
b) women's participation is lower than in what are considered comparable hobbies.

You keep saying this, I don't think it's true.
RPGs are not comparable to wargames, at all.
Nor are boardgames or video games.

When it comes to investing in RPGs, whether that be time or money, there is none. You can literally turn up to an RPG session (as a player), with no preparation and start playing using a pre-gen character. Or you can make own character takes about half an hour tops and a sheet of paper.
Same with board games, I can turn up to a boardgames night and join in. No investiture at all, explaining the rules for most games takes no more than 15 minutes.
Video games as well, turn on computer, boot up game, away you go.

Wargames are totally different.
Learning the rules is a project, they'll never explain all the rules to you quickly. And unlike RPGs you can't just rely on the DM to interpret your requests for you.
Buying an army is a significant monetary investment. Assembling the army is a significant time investment, painting it even more-so.

I think this is a big part of why wargaming attracts so many people on the spectrum, they have a tendency to get really invested in certain things.
Men in general are more likely to show this sort of dedication than women.

About the only similarity between RPGs and wargames is the fact that both involve combat, but they even focus on that combat completely differently.

Which also feeds into the other point you make about different centuries. War was seen completely differently in previous centuries, especially amongst the colonial aristocracy.

I mean computer games have no investment provided you actually own a gaming capable pc at home.

I know a good many people now don't own a pc, they use their tablet or phone and might use a PC at work.

Meanwhile owning a PC and owning a gaming PC are two totally different things. One might be £500 the other might be easily £1K for the tower alone, that excludes a good screen, mouse, speakers, keyboard etc...




Also RPG games are more and more using models these days. Sure the DM might provide all; but having models is becoming part of the hobby in a growing way. You might not have dozens but you might have one for your character and such.

1 model for your character (optional) vs dozens or even hundreds of models for your army (non-optional).
My DM uses dice for figures.

The same is true of boardgames, you *can* go all out and buy the fancy metal crafted meeples and whatever other extras, but you don't need to.

That huge dichotomy of investment is still there.

*I know there's wargames that can be played with fewer or even no models at all. But once you're past GW you're entering a niche within a niche.

I think all of the reasons brought up in this thread certainly contribute to the discrepancy. I do also think that the comparisons to other tabletop games (RPGs, boardgames) are not as applicable as many people think.

The elephant in the room when it comes to wargames is in the tile. War. Women, on average, are less interested in war as a concept (I have no data on this, it's just my first-hand experience). Obviously, there are many who are (about 1/4 of my professors on the subject back in university were women). I would also note that the subject matter of violence (say, in a dungeon crawl RPG or board-game) is not the same as war.

However, once you begin applying the other filters to the population of people interested or at least non turned off by playing war, it paints a different picture.

I think to get into wargames for a significant amount of time, you have to be interested in war. But you also have to be interested in long term modelling and painting projects, and miniatures, and so much that you're willing to spend thousands of dollars on those projects over time. And you have to be willing to learn and play dense rule sets.

I don't think any of those things appeal wildly more to men, but it's possible that on the margins, men are more interested in them. When you apply those filters to the original variable (interest in war and conflict), I'm not surprised that the end skew is so significant.

RPGs and boardgames are much, much, much broader genres of tactile gaming than wargames. Wargaming is actually a very narrow category. There are RPGs and boardgames for every conceivable milieu and genre. By definition, they will appeal to a larger pool of potential players. It's just not the case to wargaming. To those pointing out the larger player pool of women in these genres, do you think the proportional difference persists in the subcategories that are more analogous to wargaming, like avalon hill games, or GURPs WW2?

That said, I would love to see more women play and get involved in wargaming. I think there are clear things people can do to facilitate that like eliminating gatekeeping, stamping out casual or outright misogyny if and where it exists, etc.

I'm just skeptical that the wargaming population would ever, or necessarily should strive to be, reflective of the population gender-wise.

I agree, it's not one single net that excludes all women.

There's dozens of factors surrounding wargaming. If every factor is just a little skewed towards men, they will still quickly stack up to a heavily skewed system.

That said, I would love to see more women play and get involved in wargaming.

We do see larger percentage of women in stuff like Malifaux, which to me suggests that the idea of using toy soldiers to fight isn't entirely anathema to women. Though I guess it, like necromunda, isn't actually a WARgame, nor is Frostgrave or Mordheim.

Cronch wrote:

That said, I would love to see more women play and get involved in wargaming.

We do see larger percentage of women in stuff like Malifaux, which to me suggests that the idea of using toy soldiers to fight isn't entirely anathema to women. Though I guess it, like necromunda, isn't actually a WARgame, nor is Frostgrave or Mordheim.

Definitely take your point. I think it makes sense that if you scrutinize the margins of wargaming, the proportion differs. I don't think its necessarily relevant to get into the semantics of what is or isnt a wargame. Mostly because there ARE women who are interested in wargaming, so as you adjust the sliders of theme, modelling, mechanics, that a larger population of women players would appear makes total sense to me.

But yeah, I think when you get into the territory of 'munda, mordheim, frostgrave, and malifaux, you're closer to RPGs/boardgames than you are to traditional wargaming. Or at least far closer than you would be with 40k, and certainly than with DBM, Lasalle, or Art de la Guerre.

 AustonT wrote:
The difference is no one is writing articles about why fishing is so problematic; or salon/spas. Those hobbies it seems acceptable to just shrug and say “it’s not for everyone.”

Are you sure no one is writing articles about it? I am pretty sure they are.....

https://gearjunkie.com/outdoor/hunt-fish/women-fishing-advocacy-access
https://d2ouvy59p0dg6k.cloudfront.net/downloads/women_conservation_fisheries_2012.pdf
https://www.sportfishingmag.com/women-who-love-fishing-and-have-beaten-its-barriers/

I think most hobbies are trying to get their heads and hands around this issue. Why should Wargaming be different?

At the end of the day we keep asking women why and they keep giving the same answers, it isn't complicated.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
At the end of the day we keep asking women why and they keep giving the same answers, it isn't complicated.

I think so far the thread has done more guessing than actual asking and answering.

 Overread wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
At the end of the day we keep asking women why and they keep giving the same answers, it isn't complicated.

I think so far the thread has done more guessing than actual asking and answering.

I'll admit I haven't read the entirety of this 11 page thread, and the article focuses exclusively on removing social barriers. Could you indulge me a bit and surface what these answers might be? No sarcasm here on my part, I'm generally interested in this discussion.

Incidentally, I'm a little interested about this from another angle. ie; the conversation so far seems to me (from skimming, to be fair) to have circled around the barriers encountered by women who were interested in wargaming but found themselves bounced from it by social culture. While obviously important, it doesn't quite examine the question of why it appears that women seem to be less interested in wargaming in the first place.

I have a lot of female friends who I play RPGs and boardgames with, but not one of them is even slightly interested in wargaming, despite having been exposed to it. I know this is completely anecdotal, but I don't think its especially unusual. By contrast, while the vast majority of men I know are likewise completely uninterested in wargaming even if they enjoy RPGs and board games, I have had infinitely more luck introducing some here or there into the hobby.

This, by the way, is within a closed gaming culture: as in we are not interacting with strangers who may present as a passive or active social barrier, but with people who are already trusted and known to one another.

Getting women interested in wargaming isn't much helpful if the barriers pushing them away are still in place, so it logically follows that those barriers should be dealt with first.

There is also a certain morality to it; if someone is interested in the hobby but pushed away by abhorrent behavior that is a bad thing which should be minimized regardless of who that someone is.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Getting women interested in wargaming isn't much helpful if the barriers pushing them away are still in place, so it logically follows that those barriers should be dealt with first.

There is also a certain morality to it; if someone is interested in the hobby but pushed away by abhorrent behavior that is a bad thing which should be minimized regardless of who that someone is.

I mean, I definitely agree that people have a moral duty to not be misogynists. For the record, I also recognize that those barriers absolutely exist.

I do think that it doesn't quite answer the breadth of the question posed by the article's title. In order to encounter those barriers at all, you'd need to be interested in wargames to begin with.

 Las wrote:

 Overread wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
At the end of the day we keep asking women why and they keep giving the same answers, it isn't complicated.

I think so far the thread has done more guessing than actual asking and answering.

The potential reasons have been many including and not limited too:

Social ones - smelly rooms; bad hygine; bad behaviour; leering looks and social inexperience on the part of existing members

The marketing of "WAR"

The fact that it requires attention to detail for a prolonged duration (both in terms of building models and playing the game)

The lack of diplomacy/social interactions present within the game structure

Psychological make up - girls/women just do not like "war games"

The lack of sufficient public role models

The lack of historical marketing resulting in a gap

The existence of boob plate

The lack of female models present within every army




Those at least are the ones I recall appearing most often in the discussion. Personally there's some that I think are overblown and some that I think are more influential. My personal view is that its more a case of a lack of role models, marketing and general attempts to draw women in as one barrier; with the other being issues within the social group. I note that its not just the ones I outline above but also the fact that many wargame groups are often a bit informal in how they run and often as not so long as people "pair up" for games they are happy. So sometimes newbies (male and female) don't get the clear welcome, introduction and general orientating that they might otherwise need. Which, of course, affects both groups, just that when you couple it to a reduced influx of women walking in the door in the first place, it then compounds the issue.
I think this is the same with social aspects in general - guys also don't like rooms that stink and can also feel uncomfortable with people who have social interaction issues at times. However more guys tend to get marketed too (now and historically) so there's more volume of them walking through the door to off-set those that walk away.

 Las wrote:
I have a lot of female friends who I play RPGs and boardgames with, but not one of them is even slightly interested in wargaming, despite having been exposed to it. I know this is completely anecdotal, but I don't think its especially unusual. By contrast, while the vast majority of men I know are likewise completely uninterested in wargaming even if they enjoy RPGs and board games, I have had infinitely more luck introducing some here or there into the hobby.

This, by the way, is within a closed gaming culture: as in we are not interacting with strangers who may present as a passive or active social barrier, but with people who are already trusted and known to one another.

This has also been my experience.

 Las wrote:
[
Incidentally, I'm a little interested about this from another angle. ie; the conversation so far seems to me (from skimming, to be fair) to have circled around the barriers encountered by women who were interested in wargaming but found themselves bounced from it by social culture. While obviously important, it doesn't quite examine the question of why it appears that women seem to be less interested in wargaming in the first place.

I mean, the overwhelming majority of humanity, male or female, is not interested in wargaming, miniaturegaming or any variation of it. Wargamers are, i imagine, less than a statistical error in the sea of humanity on this planet.

Okay. A couple days off to think about things does wonders.

The core point here is NOT 'who should we attack for not welcoming women gamers into wargaming'?. It's 'how do we get more women into wargaming?', something that seems to have been lost along the way.

As a manager, I have found there are two general strategies to getting people to do what you want.

The first, most widely used, is negative reinforcement. Punishment. This ranges from scolding to termination. It generally gets lackluster results at best, as the person being punished feels wronged and, if they co-operate at all, do so grudgingly and in a lackluster manner. Hardly ideal under the best of circumstances.

Under these circumstances? Completely counterproductive. An employee at least has the motivation to work with you because they're being paid to. A game group? Scold them, punish them by chasing them out of a public venue, they retreat to their homes and play there. Women players remain unwelcome and the punished game group are even LESS willing to consider changing their minds.

The method I prefer to use as a manager is positive reinforcement. Rewards. Showing people how doing what I want will make things better for them - and not in a 'this is how you don't get fired' sort of way. But this requires understanding WHY they feel the way they feel. It's harder to do than just resorting to scolding and write-ups... but the results are well worth it. The worker comes on board fully. Instead of working in a lackluster manner not caring whether things fail, they are actively trying to make things succeed.

This is the place where you figure out how to make corporate's new policy that is... shall we say, less than optimal from the workers point of view?... into something functional and useful. Or at the very least, detail the EXACT places where it breaks down despite our best efforts and make that SPECIFIC information available for corporate's use in revising policy. And sometimes we're all surprised when what looked to us like a disaster waiting to happen actually works way better than we thought it would... but only IF we're all on board and willing to pull together and make it work.

All because I was able to get the workers to change their minds.

So. Apply this idea here. We want to get more women into wargames. Does scolding and punishing wargamers who don't want women in wargaming result in more women being accepted into wargaming?. No.

Does attacking those who agree with the goal of getting more women into wargaming because they have the background, experience, and empathy to understand why some people don't want women in wargaming get more women into wargaming? No. Indeed, it can drive someone who would be a friend and ally into becoming an opponent. Rather counterproductive, don't you think?

I get it. The male instinct is to charge straight in and attack. Show the girls we're aggressively trying to fix the problem. We want to be the knight-errant, charging in and chase off the metaphorical dragon.

But... isn't aggressive behavior toward 'the other' a good chunk of problem? I expect women are not very impressed by people claiming to be on their side engaging in the exact behavior they want to see changed. They don't want the dragon gone, they want to join the dragon in his games!

So what's the point of this aggressive behavior? Of attacking those who disagree? To paraphrase an earlier post, 'If your behavior does not fix the problem, change your behavior'.

To get a behavior to change, the very first step is getting the person to want to change. Attacking them does not accomplish this. Instead, you need to understand their point of view, and shape your approach based on that.

Going back to my earlier post on some wargamers having been exposed to mircoaggression - and even not-so-microagression - from the popular clique. To a wargamer whose whole and entire experience with women is nothing BUT microaggression is not going to feel any more positively about women than an African-American whose whole and entire experience with Caucasians is nothing but microaggression.

So the argument to get this person to accept a woman wargamer is not to argue they are wrong. Their personal experience is different; they will not agree with you and will simply entrench more firmly in their belief. You are no closer to the goal of getting more women into wargames.

Instead, you help them understand that women wargamers ALSO experience those micro( and not-so-micro )aggressions. If they're classmates, odds are they've suffered those aggressions at the hands of the same exact aggressors. Give them a common ground to meet on and build from there.

This is all the more important given most 'gamer geeks' are also heavily introverted. Unlike an extrovert, for whom building new relations is as easy as breathing, an introvert has to consciously WORK at it. The work is a lot easier when the other person is also an introvert - you 'get' each other better. And if their life experience of attempting to build new relationships is full of microaggressions from others, that work has a lot less (if any) reward to it. So the outsider coming into this environment has to bear this in mind. The best way to alienate an introvert is to demand friendship from them when they barely know you. It takes time to get close to even the most outgoing and socially experienced introvert.

I speak of this from experience AS an introvert. Now, in my middle age, yes, I can talk to someone I just met and be friendly and socially agreeable. That doesn't mean I want to go out with you after the game for a casual drink or hang out at your house playing videogames or anything; I don't know you and won't be comfortable doing so. It takes time for the relationship to grow enough for me to actually comfortable with you, instead of feigning it in a socially acceptable manner.

As a young teenager? I was a total basket case around strangers. Took me years to get past it, well into my twenties.

The best description of how it works is that an introvert is really only comfortable alone by him( or her )self. To become their friend, you have to have spent enough time around them that you've become part of their definition of 'him( or her )self'. This is obviously not a fast process. But once you're part of that person's definition of themselves, the bond you forge there is very strong.

Sound unfair? Possibly. But the goal is not to push introverts OUT of wargaming, it's to get more women into wargaming. Taking the time to allow that bond to grow will turn those introverts from your opponent into a strong ally and friend.

And is that not the ultimate goal? For us all to be friends wargaming together?

Or, and hear me out here, we could simply allow women/girls who want to get into wargaming to enter the stores and buy the items they want/require, and leave it at that?

Simple as that. No social engineering required.
And we know it works because plenty of female wargamers/painters have already done it!

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Or, and hear me out here, we could simply allow women/girls who want to get into wargaming to enter the stores and buy the items they want/require, and leave it at that?

Simple as that. No social engineering required.
And we know it works because plenty of female wargamers/painters have already done it!

We've also heard multiple times that there's a certain "fragrance" inside a significant number of hobby stores that acts as a repellent for a lot of people (and apparently especially women). Reducing such hurdles could increase the amount of potential wargaming enthusiasts. And hear me out here, we could do the same for all kinds of issues and not just smell based complications.

We could try to improve the situation instead of assuming it's as good as can get. Some of these improvements might be more impactful for some groups than others (men/women, kids/adults,…). Because the status quo seems to caused by social engineering too, just in a way you don't seem to be able—or willing—to perceive or acknowledge.

Agree 100% about reisty folks, but what are you going to do about that? If people still smell in this age of abundant showers and soaps you're never going to change them, and the only way to stop them getting into events and shops would be a sniff check at the entrance barring folks who don't meet the standard.

But that's just one of those things. Sometimes you have to put up with things you don't like.

Disagree on the last point. No one has engineered wargaming/hobby spaces to be this way, it's just how it's evolved naturally. There is nothing stopping females from getting into the hobby. They are perfectly capable of learning the games and setting up clubs, same as everyone else.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Agree 100% about reisty folks, but what are you going to do about that? If people still smell in this age of abundant showers and soaps you're never going to change them, and the only way to stop them getting into events and shops would be a sniff check at the entrance barring folks who don't meet the standard.

But that's just one of those things. Sometimes you have to put up with things you don't like.

Disagree on the last point. No one has engineered wargaming/hobby spaces to be this way, it's just how it's evolved naturally. There is nothing stopping females from getting into the hobby. They are perfectly capable of learning the games and setting up clubs, same as everyone else.

I mean, we don't let people who actively smell of urine and dead animals go to restaurants, I don't see why it should be any different for game stores.

 Laughing Man wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Agree 100% about reisty folks, but what are you going to do about that? If people still smell in this age of abundant showers and soaps you're never going to change them, and the only way to stop them getting into events and shops would be a sniff check at the entrance barring folks who don't meet the standard.

But that's just one of those things. Sometimes you have to put up with things you don't like.

Disagree on the last point. No one has engineered wargaming/hobby spaces to be this way, it's just how it's evolved naturally. There is nothing stopping females from getting into the hobby. They are perfectly capable of learning the games and setting up clubs, same as everyone else.

I mean, we don't let people who actively smell of urine and dead animals go to restaurants, I don't see why it should be any different for game stores.

Do wargamer shop people smell of urine and dead animals? No...
Would a bad BO person be told to leave any other shop? I suppose it depends on the shop.

Personal Hygene is a touchy subject for peeople, because, its, well.. personal.

I wonder if an adoption of "Personal Hygine Required in this shop" or other such notice in doors/windows of GW stores and 3rd party shops would have any positive effect.
Not sure how common this is tbh. 1/3 shops ? 1/2 communities?
Would such notice not ostracize the hobby from main stream passers by more so than it is already? I can fully imagine people walking past seeing the sign and sniggering.

The fact this is remotely necessary is kind of cringy..
We know this problem isn't stricly tied to Wargaming. This is an issues at MGT, and all manner of nerdy conventions as well as Gyms.

I think its a very good question. How exactly would you effectively get people to shower/step up their hygiene game?

I think the best approach would be take someone I was playing with, off to the the sides make sure nobody else can hear, and just say " hey.. This is a bit awkward. But we gotta share this space, and in the nicest possible way, just gotta tell you man, you could really do with a shower."

If it turns out to be a medical issue (some people have this) Id apologise profusely I guess.

 Laughing Man wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Agree 100% about reisty folks, but what are you going to do about that? If people still smell in this age of abundant showers and soaps you're never going to change them, and the only way to stop them getting into events and shops would be a sniff check at the entrance barring folks who don't meet the standard.

But that's just one of those things. Sometimes you have to put up with things you don't like.

Disagree on the last point. No one has engineered wargaming/hobby spaces to be this way, it's just how it's evolved naturally. There is nothing stopping females from getting into the hobby. They are perfectly capable of learning the games and setting up clubs, same as everyone else.

I mean, we don't let people who actively smell of urine and dead animals go to restaurants, I don't see why it should be any different for game stores.

Agreed. No need to be rude about it, but yes. Some people need to be politely asked to go home and shower before coming inside. May not solve private club issues, won't even touch private groups playing at home, but public venues really should be more aware of this. Not least of which because most adult guy gamers hate stinky gamers too.

I have a friend (he wasn't part of the Game Nite group) with a medical condition that caused him to sweat heavily at the slightest excuse. But he didn't smell because he showered two or more times every day, and used strong deodorants. It can be done! As has been said, there's really no good excuse for body odor funk in modern America.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Argive wrote:

We know this problem isn't stricly tied to Wargaming. This is an issues at MGT, and all manner of nerdy conventions as well as Gyms.

To be fair, there's a darn good reason a gym smells of fresh sweat. That's rather the point of going to the gym in the first place, to work up a sweat. Although if the gym staff has anything on the ball, they'll be cleaning, disinfecting, and deodorizing as much as is reasonably possible to keep that aroma from becoming funk.

And there's a wee bit of difference between the unpleasant smell of fresh sweat, and the funk of someone marinading in their own smells for weeks or more.

I think its a very good question. How exactly would you effectively get people to shower/step up their hygiene game?

I think the best approach would be take someone I was playing with, off to the the sides make sure nobody else can hear, and just say " hey.. This is a bit awkward. But we gotta share this space, and in the nicest possible way, just gotta tell you man, you could really do with a shower."

If it turns out to be a medical issue (some people have this) Id apologise profusely I guess.

We agree, No need to be rude, no need to publicly embarrass the poor (likely very socially awkward) person. Odds are when they realize you can smell them they'll be plenty embarrassed enough. That's pretty much the perfect way to handle it.

Having been that guy before, it's because you don't think anyone can smell you.
You can't smell yourself (I assume because you're used to it), and everyone else is even further away from you than your own nose is, so they definitely can't smell you. No one's mentioned anything, which is even more evidence that it's not an issue.
You sort of need someone to shatter that assumption for you.

Often it's not even that they need a shower, it might be a jacket that they don't wash frequently enough, or maybe it's an issue of the deodorant they use not working.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:

Disagree on the last point. No one has engineered wargaming/hobby spaces to be this way, it's just how it's evolved naturally. There is nothing stopping females from getting into the hobby. They are perfectly capable of learning the games and setting up clubs, same as everyone else.

So I would argue that wargame groups and associated ecosystem are more welcoming of men than women, with women being the white elephant in terms of people dealing with them. So it isn't yet a case of let them come if they want to, because it isn't a fair level of access. the argument of let them come if they want to of course has a fairly negative history when it comes to women doing stuff that was regarded as for men.

then you cross into professional wargames and there getting women to participate is a critical business requirement and the traditional route of recruiting wargamers doesn't work.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Las wrote:
I think all of the reasons brought up in this thread certainly contribute to the discrepancy. I do also think that the comparisons to other tabletop games (RPGs, boardgames) are not as applicable as many people think.

The elephant in the room when it comes to wargames is in the tile. War. Women, on average, are less interested in war as a concept (I have no data on this, it's just my first-hand experience). Obviously, there are many who are (about 1/4 of my professors on the subject back in university were women). I would also note that the subject matter of violence (say, in a dungeon crawl RPG or board-game) is not the same as war.

I'm just skeptical that the wargaming population would ever, or necessarily should strive to be, reflective of the population gender-wise.

So what are comparable activities?

Female interest in war has varied over time, currently it is seen as not for girls, but in the past (especially 18th and 19th century) women were encouraged to support militarism and send their sons off to participate. And indeed lots played wargames (see previous article links).

And no there shouldn't be an effort to get X numbers of Y people in. Wargaming, my favourite hobby, should just be as easy to get into for others as it was for me. And hopefully some are decent people and fancy a game!

The_Real_Chris wrote:
So I would argue that wargame groups and associated ecosystem are more welcoming of men than women, with women being the white elephant in terms of people dealing with them. So it isn't yet a case of let them come if they want to, because it isn't a fair level of access. the argument of let them come if they want to of course has a fairly negative history when it comes to women doing stuff that was regarded as for men.

As something of a side thought on this - i'm curious how many people here got into the hobby via anything formally organised.

The majority, if not all of the players I started out with at the very start of my wargaming were local players at home or in school with next to no time spent in any game store or hobby shop save in and out with impatent parents to pick something off the shelf that had been seen in a magazine. Board games like space quest and blood bowl, and the boxed starter 2nd edition set were entry points but there was no 'ecosystem' save that which we made for ourselves, and the social expectations of others.

What percentage of players actually get into the hobby via playing games in an actual brick and mortar shop these days I wonder? In all my time personally in the hobby i've played exactly half of a bloodbowl game inside an actual store.
And relatedly, how significant are games with broader availability to bringing players in - space crusade for instance, and GWs recent push on computer games.

The_Real_Chris wrote:


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Las wrote:
I think all of the reasons brought up in this thread certainly contribute to the discrepancy. I do also think that the comparisons to other tabletop games (RPGs, boardgames) are not as applicable as many people think.

The elephant in the room when it comes to wargames is in the tile. War. Women, on average, are less interested in war as a concept (I have no data on this, it's just my first-hand experience). Obviously, there are many who are (about 1/4 of my professors on the subject back in university were women). I would also note that the subject matter of violence (say, in a dungeon crawl RPG or board-game) is not the same as war.

I'm just skeptical that the wargaming population would ever, or necessarily should strive to be, reflective of the population gender-wise.

So what are comparable activities?

I assume that you're referring to my point that TTRPGs and boardgames as categories are too broad to be compared to wargaming. I gave a few examples of comparable subcategories of those (avalon hill or the many hex-based military games, roleplaying games set in wars). I would also add to that tactical military strategy video games like Total War, RTS games like Starcraft, Company of Heroes or Dawn of War, or grand strategy games that are about war like Hearts of Iron. I would hazard a guess that men who play these games outnumber women by a large percentage. On the modelling front, the closest thing would be non-game scale military modelling.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

Female interest in war has varied over time, currently it is seen as not for girls, but in the past (especially 18th and 19th century) women were encouraged to support militarism and send their sons off to participate. And indeed lots played wargames (see previous article links).

And no there shouldn't be an effort to get X numbers of Y people in. Wargaming, my favourite hobby, should just be as easy to get into for others as it was for me. And hopefully some are decent people and fancy a game!

On your first point, what you're referring to is not the same as interest in war. Enthusiasm for war in the militarist societies of Europe in the 19th century was socially engineered and enforced by consensus dictated from the top down. It was, in fact, the result of strict social codes that served a political purpose and actually harshly segmented military affairs away from women. Most obviously by excluding them from military service and education. I would confidently argue that there are more women expressing interest in military history and war today as a result of the opening of our society than at the height of European militarism.

Further, support for war as policy and the supremacy of the military as a political institution is not synonymous with personal interest in war as a concept.

On your second point, I couldn't agree more.

A.T. wrote:
As something of a side thought on this - i'm curious how many people here got into the hobby via anything formally organised.

Speaking for myself, although I was introduced to 40k through school I was cemented in the local GW.
1hr after school once a week, with kids that were more interested in messing around than playing games, meant very little playing actually happened in school. Instead, I played at the newbies games nights on Saturdays in the local GW store, then graduated to the more usual games nights on Sundays.
In hindsight I wouldn't recommend it, but honestly if you were introduced to it through friends you might even know that independent stores or games club even exist - I didn't when I was starting out. Even after I joined Dakka I thought "FLGS" would only refer to a GW and that that was what everyone was doing.

I got my start playing with a friend, but as someone who really likes to teach new players, I'd wager a decent majority of people I've pulled in have come from playing in public and talking people up in the middle of my game and offering demos. Board/Card/RPG players stopping what they're doing to watch are a huge audience in my experience.

So a comment about venue aesthetics. In my town there's a game store that's rough and improved inside. The gaming area looks like a large unfinished attic, because it is. The other store has always tried to give a polished vibe, clean, well lit, and continues to improve and refine it's decor and looks. This latter shop I would say has a much higher ratio of female gamers present on a given day.

There's something about making a venue look like a place a civilised human being would be at that may be helpful in reminding humans to act civilised.

queen_annes_revenge wrote:Disagree on the last point. No one has engineered wargaming/hobby spaces to be this way, it's just how it's evolved naturally. There is nothing stopping females from getting into the hobby. They are perfectly capable of learning the games and setting up clubs, same as everyone else.

If we accept "evolved naturally" then we also have to acknowledge that a lot of stuff that has evolve naturally is not optimal, could be actually bad, could be improved upon, or is even an evolutionary dead end that may not survive into the future.

So why not try to make things better in some way? It's a better attitude than shrugging and just ignoring everything that's the slightest bit out of your comfort zone.

 RegularGuy wrote:
So a comment about venue aesthetics. In my town there's a game store that's rough and improved inside. The gaming area looks like a large unfinished attic, because it is. The other store has always tried to give a polished vibe, clean, well lit, and continues to improve and refine it's decor and looks. This latter shop I would say has a much higher ratio of female gamers present on a given day.

There's something about making a venue look like a place a civilised human being would be at that may be helpful in reminding humans to act civilised.

Honestly I'm surprised that men play in an unfinished attic.

 Turnip Jedi wrote:

, the nearest GW was a 2hr train ride (I think, any other Devon hobbits confirm GW Torquay was before Exeter or Plymouth ?)

It was indeed, by some margin IIRC. I remember insisting on dragging both parents and grandparents in search of it one year around 1990 while down in the English Riviera for a show. I think it was Little and Large, but it may have been Bobby Davro.

Exeter didn't open until I was out of school and earning money in a Saturday job, so maybe 94/95? Used to take the 3 hour bus ride, only to the have to kill 7 hours before the 3 hour bus ride back.

So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

 Laughing Man wrote:

 RegularGuy wrote:
So a comment about venue aesthetics. In my town there's a game store that's rough and improved inside. The gaming area looks like a large unfinished attic, because it is. The other store has always tried to give a polished vibe, clean, well lit, and continues to improve and refine it's decor and looks. This latter shop I would say has a much higher ratio of female gamers present on a given day.

There's something about making a venue look like a place a civilised human being would be at that may be helpful in reminding humans to act civilised.

Honestly I'm surprised that men play in an unfinished attic.

My first apartment was a shotgun layout, but had an unfinished attic. It was the only place there was enough room to wargame in the place. Having said THAT, even the little caveish game room at Ogre games was far superior, much less a nice game room like at the Fantasy shops or Game Nite.

 BlackoCatto wrote:
So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

Whats a yankee candle?

 Argive wrote:

 BlackoCatto wrote:
So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

Whats a yankee candle?

I'm sure there are plenty of women that think of warhammer the same way.

I just don't get the urge to get women into the hobby. You'd think the over-excitement to add them to the group and treat them extra special or different would turn them off wargaming or make others resent them for being treated differently.

In my gw the wargaming dudes got all excited but the gw manager made sure even the slightest misstep around one female newcomer wouldn't be tolerated. She basically left after some months despite massive effort to get her to stay (including massive amounts of models practically just given to her during the holidays). I can't help but wonder if people would put this much effort into people in general that enjoyed the hobby (men or women or whatever) if they wouldn't succeed much more.

I'm just worried you guys care more about getting women in the hobby rather than getting people that enjoy the game into the hobby or maintaining loyal years long fans.

The few ladies that do play in my experience are at best casual gamers or only play because their significant other or son plays the game. I think painting tends to be more popular for them. Honestly I just don't think girls care about it. Don't get me wrong it does happen it's just rare.

 BlackoCatto wrote:
So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

Easy.

Belgian waffle and vanilla cupcake.

That's literally all you need.

My wife loves a good candle. I'd be in there often enough getting a new one. Had a chat with the lassie behind the counter, joking that we both know which candles the other will like, because I dislike the scents she likes and vice versa. She said in her experience most guys were drawn far more to sweet scents like the two above, and women were drawn far more to the fruity and fresh ones.

So I compromised and got both. I've got mine in my hobby room upstairs and herself has got hers in the living room where we both watch TV.

I used to play in a sort of back-room storage wine cellar type place. Complete with stripped walls and piled bricks in the entrance way (although the actual gaming space was prettied up a bit with camo nets on the walls). Very dingey, very cramped.
I couldn't find it until a member described it as "if you think you're walking into a drug den, that's the place". I found it instantly.

Independent gaming stores work on really thin margins, the much nicer one I go to at the moment is operating at a loss.

I can definitely see how this sort of thing might be more likely to deter women. In general consumer habits show that they're more likely to be driven by aesthetics, whereas men are more prone to disregarding those and focus on function.

 BlackoCatto wrote:
So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

Well, probably a different topic, but sales of scented candles to men are increasing and the companies are fairly confident of their sales angles (often marketed to men as ways to improve your chances with women...). Personally I think they are a fire hazard and threat to civilisation, but no one can see me when I decry them through all the smoke.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:


I just don't get the urge to get women into the hobby. You'd think the over-excitement to add them to the group and treat them extra special or different would turn them off wargaming or make others resent them for being treated differently.

I'm just worried you guys care more about getting women in the hobby rather than getting people that enjoy the game into the hobby or maintaining loyal years long fans.

The few ladies that do play in my experience are at best casual gamers or only play because their significant other or son plays the game. I think painting tends to be more popular for them. Honestly I just don't think girls care about it. Don't get me wrong it does happen it's just rare.

Well I would completely disagree with treating them differently, the idea is for people to be treated in an equally welcoming way. There shouldn't be a barrier for my daughter to come in and shop and game in the same way if she goes into Primark the customers are treated the same (with equal contempt, bad example). Those other retail experiences are the norm, the, for example, strange comments in a game shop are not. Clubs are a little different because they are social constructs, but there are plenty of ways to get mixed environments to be as normal as mono gender. The upshot of that is my daughter likes all my different boardgames, loves wargames especially the professional stuff (I have tried to highlight the easy money out there for women in that field), but wouldn't dream of doing anything miniature wargame related.

The exception to the special treatment of course is if you had a business reason to. If a games shop had data that having a cadre of women customers would increase the numbers of females playing and their overall customer numbers that would make sense. But GW experimented with female managers and the like and didn't see any difference in who came in and bought stuff. I think this is out of our knowledge bank, but it would be interesting to know how historically male or female shops widen their user base to include more of the opposite genders. It of course happened in stuff like pubs as well, where you had a combination of societal change in what was considered acceptable mixed with business change to accommodate women as well (cue historic grumbling about one of the toilets just being for women and they barely use it because none come in etc. etc.).

On your last point women of course did play wargames in the 19th century, but as has been somewhat discussed this was part of a culture that promoted warlike activities across Europe. See WW1 as to why this may have been a mistake and participation of both genders in wargames dropped sharply after WW1, but pretty much disappeared amongst women. Perhaps all we need is a return to justifying colonial adventures to the masses through massive government messaging on the superiority of our nation over anyone who looks different.

 BlackoCatto wrote:
So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

I like Yankee Candle.

- They are a good way to make your place smell nice.
- Plus, the ambience lighting of candles can be great too.
- Finally, the power grid in my area is a bit crap, so they double as back up heat and light sources.

What's your point?

I like the woodsy candles, like pine needle-ish, but I'm not above a nice vanilla.

BlackoCatto wrote:So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

Tell men that it's okay to like nice smells and buy them in candle form. That's pretty much it.

For me the real aversion to candles is less their innate charms - I like warm lighting and pleasant smells - and more about that I am a clumsy dumbass who doesn't need any more avenues for inadvertent fires.

 Ouze wrote:
For me the real aversion to candles is less their innate charms - I like warm lighting and pleasant smells - and more about that I am a clumsy dumbass who doesn't need any more avenues for inadvertent fires.

I was waiting for someone to talk about the fires xD , us ladz do like us some accidental arson.

I feel like candles for me is more of a seasonal/situational thing used for stuff like candlelight vigils, during Christmas/other religious events and less of a general consumer product that I MUST have in my home. If things smell, it's probably cause someone and deposited their brown goods in the toilet recently and I just need matches for that.

 Argive wrote:

 BlackoCatto wrote:
So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

Whats a yankee candle?

They're a device for making my rabbit's room smell less like, well, rabbit.

My wife and I are both asthmatics, so we can’t be in the same building as a scented candle, or any scented product for that matter. Heavily scented cologne, perfume or deodorant will trigger an asthma attack. We’d prefer bad human BO to “good” artificial scent, as we prefer breathing in stinkies to not breathing.

I guess what I’m saying is I wouldn’t game with a yankee candler.

Catulle wrote:

 Argive wrote:

 BlackoCatto wrote:
So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

Whats a yankee candle?

They're a device for making my rabbit's room smell less like, well, rabbit.

Sir your rabbit is clearly plotting to kill you.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

Catulle wrote:

 Argive wrote:

 BlackoCatto wrote:
So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

Whats a yankee candle?

They're a device for making my rabbit's room smell less like, well, rabbit.

Sir your rabbit is clearly plotting to kill you.

I thought that's what the cats were up to? There's a book about it, and everything...

BlackoCatto wrote:So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

I had to google what that is and then simple followed that up by googling for manly candle (had a hunch that it would work) and picked a few of the links:

https://www.amazon.com/Masculine-Candle/s?k=Masculine+Candle

https://www.mancandlereviews.com/dude-candles-10-manly-aromas-youll-love/

https://www.etsy.com/market/manly_candle

https://www.dapperconfidential.com/best-candles-for-men/

https://www.elledecor.com/shopping/g27420843/candles-for-men/

https://manlyindulgence.com/

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/gallery/best-scented-candles-for-men?image=60acf519706e4cbce0b34e51

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/the-17-best-candles-for-men

https://nextluxury.com/home-design/ten-scented-man-candles-for-manly-bachelor-pads/

The last one even has a "male" Yankee Candle version:

Midsummer Night Candle by Yankee candles feature a masculine, manly blend of musk, patchouli, sage and mahogany. When burning these manly candles maintain a very pleasant, but subtle presence in the area even when not lit. Although this aroma is designed for masculine preference, women also claim to like this scent very much. A medium size jar man candle lasts between 65 and 90 hours.

https://www.yankeecandle.com/yankee-candle/candles/jar-candles/small-jar-candles/midsummers-night/ORCL_138174.html

MidSummer's Night®
An intoxicating and masculine blend of musk, patchouli, sage and mahogany cologne.

Now I'm no expert when it comes to the scented candle business and I don't know if Yankee Candle hold a similar position in the candle business as GW does when it comes to wargaming but they seem to have specific scents made to fit their male audience's taste, and there seem to be other scented candle makers who are also aiming for the male market. If you are looking for a scent that goes beyond what you expect ("girly scents") then it seems like there are options that should appeal to men. You just haven't been looking hard enough. Hard enough meaning: One simple google search for many candle.

That question reeks of that type of whining we hear on every 8th of March (International Women's Day) along the lines of "but why's there no International Men's day?" and the answer to that is always: 19th of November is International Men's Day, every year. When somebody asks that type of question without having done any research at all on their own it really shows what motivated them in the first place.

From my experience (with a statistically totally relevant sample size of 1), my girlfriend is not interested in Warhammer or Warhammer 40K, because she thinks the models are ugly and she doesn´t like the war-aspect. I tried to show the different factions to her with their distinct style (after all, an ork buggy is totally different to a Tau Suit), but the scepticism remained.

On the other hand, we did play X-Wing and Star Wars Armada several times against each other (and she won significantly more often than me), but that was a game of a well established franchise with relatively "clean" and well-known aesthetics and a really broad target audience, maybe making it easier to play such a wargame.

As said above, that´s just my anecdote and I still haven´t given up the hope that one day we may play WH against each other.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Sir your rabbit is clearly plotting to kill you.

Well, yes.

I mean, *rabbit*..

Plus he has previous form involving darkened staircases.

DocFoots wrote:
From my experience (with a statistically totally relevant sample size of 1), my girlfriend is not interested in Warhammer or Warhammer 40K, because she thinks the models are ugly and she doesn´t like the war-aspect. I tried to show the different factions to her with their distinct style (after all, an ork buggy is totally different to a Tau Suit), but the scepticism remained.

On the other hand, we did play X-Wing and Star Wars Armada several times against each other (and she won significantly more often than me), but that was a game of a well established franchise with relatively "clean" and well-known aesthetics and a really broad target audience, maybe making it easier to play such a wargame.

As said above, that´s just my anecdote and I still haven´t given up the hope that one day we may play WH against each other.

I'd also add the characterization aspect - you can feel something about Han or Vader or Finn flying around blowing stuff up.

When I look at my hobby table and say "hooray, time to paint a sergeant, a plasma gunner and 8 wound counters for them" it's a major turn off and a reason I bounce to so many other projects.

 BlackoCatto wrote:
So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

New Car Interior.

 BlackoCatto wrote:
So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

They should make new scents like gunpowder, napalm, beer etc.

Catulle wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Sir your rabbit is clearly plotting to kill you.

Well, yes.

I mean, *rabbit*..

Plus he has previous form involving darkened staircases.

How has no one mentioned the big, pointy teeth?

I am amazed no one has commented the rabbit gets its own room.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

DocFoots wrote:
On the other hand, we did play X-Wing and Star Wars Armada several times against each other (and she won significantly more often than me), but that was a game of a well established franchise with relatively "clean" and well-known aesthetics and a really broad target audience, maybe making it easier to play such a wargame.

But haven't the new films established all the stormtroopers are orphaned brainwashed kids the heroes blow away with never a moral qualms...

The_Real_Chris wrote:
I am amazed no one has commented the rabbit gets its own room.

I assume it’s where it’s tractor or cage is. Letting a rabbit loose in a space is a good way to get a territorial rabbit. Which isn’t fun.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:

 BlackoCatto wrote:
So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

They should make new scents like gunpowder, napalm, beer etc.

I love the smell of Napalm in the morning.



I think Catto successfully de-railed the thread. Good work!

 BlackoCatto wrote:
So how do we make Yankee Candle more appealing to men I wonder?

You can't, it's not possible; and it would be weird if you could. Men aren't interested in such things; the technical "men" you see here however, who own pet rabbits, are furries, or any of the creatures on this site might be convinced to shop for scented candles.

 Easy E wrote:
I think Catto successfully de-railed the thread. Good work!

Discuss social/marketing/participation issues, vs gentle making fun of someone with a poorly chosen example for their argument

Based on activity in FB groups, it’s pretty astounding how many more women have an interest in Malifaux than (for example) GW product lines. That said, most of the posts from women I have seen in Malifaux groups are about painting rather than list building or any kind of play (casual or competitive). It’s interesting to me that it seems to be the aesthetics of the setting (and therefore, as part of that, the models) that attracts women even despite them perhaps not being all that interested in the particular kind of game Malifaux is (combo-heavy, relatively competitive). It could also be that assembling and painting models is largely a solitary hobby that can very easily be a “community experience” in terms of social media whereas playing table top games like Malifaux tend to have the reverse dynamic (more social in person, not as “naturally” communal in digital spaces).

Majority of girls are simply not into "craft" hobbies like tabletop games in which you need to assemble and paint the models first.

That doesn’t make sense to me because, at least here in the US, there is a pretty large industry of “craft” hobbies marketed quite successfully to women particularly with extensive retail support.

But there are also no Wired articles about why men are not shopping more at stores like HobbyLobby or why more men are not interested in making seasonal wreathes.

 Strg Alt wrote:
Majority of girls are simply not into "craft" hobbies like tabletop games in which you need to assemble and paint the models first.

How the hell are you defining craft hobbies? Googling craft hobbies yields sewing, handicraft, knitting, and crochet as the first four results. I don't know who you think is doing that.

 Strg Alt wrote:
Majority of girls are simply not into "craft" hobbies like tabletop games in which you need to assemble and paint the models first.

In general, the very definition of a hobby as "crafts" as opposed to "art" is that women do it rather than men: Sewing, knitting, beadwork, etc. So yeah, women are really into craft hobbies it turns out.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

But haven't the new films established all the stormtroopers are orphaned brainwashed kids the heroes blow away with never a moral qualms...

One could argue the same about many of the soldiers in the European theater of WWII.

 trexmeyer wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:
Majority of girls are simply not into "craft" hobbies like tabletop games in which you need to assemble and paint the models first.

How the hell are you defining craft hobbies? Googling craft hobbies yields sewing, handicraft, knitting, and crochet as the first four results. I don't know who you think is doing that.

"Craft hobbies" is obviously the wrong description because people associate craft with the things you mentioned, but I assume what Strg was talking about was the hurdle that is painting an army, while there might be parallels with other female-dominated crafts, for most it is an arduous process before you ever get to the actual "wargaming" part.

That said, a broad observation has been that women who are into the hobby tend to be more into the painting portion than the gaming portion, though I wonder how many of them are interested in painting an entire army. Painting a few models here and there is quite different to the act of painting an entire army that's ready for a game.

Judging by the number of boring grey plastic armies I saw as a TO, there aren't many male gamers into the painting of a whole army before playing games, either.

 chromedog wrote:
Judging by the number of boring grey plastic armies I saw as a TO, there aren't many male gamers into the painting of a whole army before playing games, either.

Depends on the event, most stuff I've seen painting is a requirement, but when one of the local stores relaxed their no painting policy the grey hordes were released, but a lot of places don't let you play unpainted still.

But yeah, I think painting an army is an obstacle to all but the biggest weirdos regardless of whether they're female or male. But when you consider the bell curve of men and women, potentially there's more men on the tail of people who are willing to go to the effort of building and painting an army.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
I think Catto successfully de-railed the thread. Good work!

Discuss social/marketing/participation issues, vs gentle making fun of someone with a poorly chosen example for their argument

Derail, I thought it was rather on topic.

I myself think a Fried Chicken Scent would be a good strat for the male demo.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 trexmeyer wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:
Majority of girls are simply not into "craft" hobbies like tabletop games in which you need to assemble and paint the models first.

How the hell are you defining craft hobbies? Googling craft hobbies yields sewing, handicraft, knitting, and crochet as the first four results. I don't know who you think is doing that.

"Craft hobbies" is obviously the wrong description because people associate craft with the things you mentioned, but I assume what Strg was talking about was the hurdle that is painting an army, while there might be parallels with other female-dominated crafts, for most it is an arduous process before you ever get to the actual "wargaming" part.

That said, a broad observation has been that women who are into the hobby tend to be more into the painting portion than the gaming portion, though I wonder how many of them are interested in painting an entire army. Painting a few models here and there is quite different to the act of painting an entire army that's ready for a game.

It's the difference between the modelling section and the gaming section of the game. This can be seen in the general hobby of wargaming.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 chromedog wrote:
Judging by the number of boring grey plastic armies I saw as a TO, there aren't many male gamers into the painting of a whole army before playing games, either.

Depends on the event, most stuff I've seen painting is a requirement, but when one of the local stores relaxed their no painting policy the grey hordes were released, but a lot of places don't let you play unpainted still.

But yeah, I think painting an army is an obstacle to all but the biggest weirdos regardless of whether they're female or male. But when you consider the bell curve of men and women, potentially there's more men on the tail of people who are willing to go to the effort of building and painting an army.

Maybe, but I firmly believe the ease of collecting/painting is why skirmish games exploded in popularity last decade and large scale games seem to be less and less popular (with the usual exception of 40k which is pretty much it's own damn hobby if we like it or not). I know the last full army I painted was in...2005 I think. After that I've just not had the patience or inclination to paint whole armies of 50-100 models vs small skirmish forces of 10-20.

I saw some KFC scented fireplace logs last year.

Cronch wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 chromedog wrote:
Judging by the number of boring grey plastic armies I saw as a TO, there aren't many male gamers into the painting of a whole army before playing games, either.

Depends on the event, most stuff I've seen painting is a requirement, but when one of the local stores relaxed their no painting policy the grey hordes were released, but a lot of places don't let you play unpainted still.

But yeah, I think painting an army is an obstacle to all but the biggest weirdos regardless of whether they're female or male. But when you consider the bell curve of men and women, potentially there's more men on the tail of people who are willing to go to the effort of building and painting an army.

Maybe, but I firmly believe the ease of collecting/painting is why skirmish games exploded in popularity last decade and large scale games seem to be less and less popular (with the usual exception of 40k which is pretty much it's own damn hobby if we like it or not). I know the last full army I painted was in...2005 I think. After that I've just not had the patience or inclination to paint whole armies of 50-100 models vs small skirmish forces of 10-20.

I guess part of the question is also what are we defining as "wargaming", a lot of those skirmish type games I consider more like board gaming with painted models than wargaming, and also I've noticed more female gamers interested in those types of games (at least around these parts).

I mean, that is a good question, but wargames are essentially a sub-type of a boardgame, up until the umpire-run simulations that you see in the military. 40k is in no way different to say, Infinity except by how many models it runs, and then 10 marines are essentially one model with 20 wounds and a single bolter with 40 shots when it comes to manouvering and combat.

But there are distinct differences.
The commitment, both financially and time/effort wise into playing 40k is much greater for a start.

When I think "wargaming" I tend to think of games that are platoon sized or larger engagements.

Not saying that's a correct or even appropriate definition though.

It's important in the sense that I think when you get down to those smaller games, female representation does start to improve for whatever reasons.

I think 'hybrid' is a good term for the design shift we are seeing. Not quite traditional board game/boxed game, not quite traditional wargame.

Anyway,female wargamers.

Are there any/many female writers/designers/industry leaders when it comes to wargames?

Companies are encouraged more and more not to go down the old school route of all male boardrooms etc. I agree. I tend to feel women being a different/broader perspective to things than us guys left on our own. Would more women in leading roles, or designer/developer lead positions help foster the changes and cultural shifts to get more girls and women onto our hobby?

What cultural shifts would we need, and why should we undertake those?

For what it's worth GW's board of directors is 57% female so I don't think that's actually causing the cultural shifts you seem to desire.
https://investor.games-workshop.com/the-board-of-directors/

GW did bump their female representation significantly last few years though, at least when it comes to miniatures.

Anyway, 40k requires more time/money investment, but surely that doesn't make it a "wargame", or the actual kriegsspiele wouldn't be a wargame, as it involved wooden blocks or chits, and yet it's definitely more of a war game than any GW game will ever be. GW games (and most other tabletop figurine games) are not really wargames in the traditional sense, as they very rarely trouble themselves with the issues of command and control. They simulate combat about as well as nerf guns simulate firearms.

Cronch wrote:
Anyway, 40k requires more time/money investment, but surely that doesn't make it a "wargame", or the actual kriegsspiele wouldn't be a wargame, as it involved wooden blocks or chits, and yet it's definitely more of a war game than any GW game will ever be.

It's not the investment, but I think the scale of the game is important in defining whether or not it's a wargame. Platoon size and up (40-50 models per side minimum) is kinda what I have in mind, but I'm sure others have different definitions.

The article in question starts off talking about historical wargaming and then ventures off talking about Warhammer.

I think if you set the bar for "wargaming" lower than that, the proportion of female gamers will grow, at least from my casual observation at the local gaming joints.

I think it's simply that women as a whole have far less interest in military topics, whether that's fiction or historical. Whilst 40k far more so than AoS, both are very much styled as military fiction in outlandish settings. I think that's got a lot more to do with upbringing and common media that stinky neckbeards - look at the boardgaming market for a comparison, where the amount of body odour is probably about as prevalent but has little trouble pulling in women.

I've known a fair few more women into Blood Bowl, Malifaux and even Infinity by comparison (proportionate to GW's playerbase size I mean). Even looking at DnD and other RPGs where participation of women isn't rare, it's been very rare you'll encounter women playing characters who're ex-soldiers compared to it being a pretty common background for male characters.

Even going back to GW, the vast majority of women I've known play tend to swerve towards the more outlandish, less militarised armies such as Sylvaneth, Nighthaunt, Daemons and Tyranids rather than Sisters of Battle or Sigmarines despite the obvious push for them to be the face of Warhammer female representation.

Platoon size and up (40-50 models per side minimum) is kinda what I have in mind

That's incredibly small, it gives you two, maximum 4 units to play with on the tabletop unless you go for the unrealistic and un-wargamey direction that 40k goes where "squads" are sections and each section can be drawn from completely different unit. Which is more of fantasy wish fulfilment than wargame.

Cronch wrote:

Platoon size and up (40-50 models per side minimum) is kinda what I have in mind

That's incredibly small, it gives you two, maximum 4 units to play with on the tabletop unless you go for the unrealistic and un-wargamey direction that 40k goes where "squads" are sections and each section can be drawn from completely different unit. Which is more of fantasy wish fulfilment than wargame.

I beg to differ, she says. < (female wargamer speaking here.)

It depends on the period you play.

WW2 and on a platoon evolves. So, arguably 40+ models is 10 fire teams of four plus fire support; mortar/HMG etc.

Arguably one could one add or two vehicles in support too.

So while this is definitely down scaled war, the platoon has from WW2 been considered the smallest formation that operate on the battlefield before you end up with isolated skirmishing. Happy to be proved wrong.

Sure, but they'd be all drawn from the same company, not 10 tactical marines, 5 laser cannon boys, 5 jump pack boys and 2 random tanks that happened to turn up. And I still think it doesn't give you enough elements to be a real wargame, it's literally a skirmish game because platoon vs platoon would be classified as skirmish not "battle" in any reality.

If you go by that, Bolt Action is a Skirmish game.

Cronch wrote:

Platoon size and up (40-50 models per side minimum) is kinda what I have in mind

That's incredibly small, it gives you two, maximum 4 units to play with on the tabletop unless you go for the unrealistic and un-wargamey direction that 40k goes where "squads" are sections and each section can be drawn from completely different unit. Which is more of fantasy wish fulfilment than wargame.

I did say "minimum". Basically removing the games that only have a handful to a few dozen models per side.

Battalion sized games just aren't practical in 28mm. If we use that as the bar, it might be more realistic in terms of "war", but then almost no one would be considered a wargamer on this forum other than those who collect games in smaller scales

But it's mostly an arbitrary number, I admit that, it's an arbitrary number I picked to say I don't consider games with a few handfuls of models to be "wargames". But maybe someone else does. It doesn't really matter, the question is just what games are we talking about in the context of this thread rather than some nebulous definition of a "wargame".

If all we're talking about is historics like Napoleonics, ACW, etc and Warhammer, I'd say low female involvement is an inevitability because there'll always be a discrepancy unless you can get women passionate about war, which doesn't seem like a great objective.

 BlackoCatto wrote:
If you go by that, Bolt Action is a Skirmish game.

If you go by that, War Games don't exist.

 trexmeyer wrote:

 BlackoCatto wrote:
If you go by that, Bolt Action is a Skirmish game.

If you go by that, War Games don't exist.

Not with minis, anyway. Companies like Avalon Hill have done wargames with cardboard counters covering whole theaters of operation clear on down to platoons and companies for longer than I've been alive... and I'm not exactly a spring chicken anymore.

Cronch wrote:
Sure, but they'd be all drawn from the same company, not 10 tactical marines, 5 laser cannon boys, 5 jump pack boys and 2 random tanks that happened to turn up. And I still think it doesn't give you enough elements to be a real wargame, it's literally a skirmish game because platoon vs platoon would be classified as skirmish not "battle" in any reality.

So a chunk of the Marines from a standard Battle Company, you mean? Y'know, the formation where, before all this Primaris silliness, the 100 troops were split into 60 Tactical, 20 Assault, 20 Devastator?

Miniatures games =/= wargames.

Wargaming in the classical sense has to do with simulationist intent (Cronch already mentioned Kriegsspiel) that was developed for leisure time table top play mostly through hex and counter design. A lot of miniatures gamers call themselves wargamers, which would not make much sense to people whose main hobby is playing wargames.

Miniatures games are certainly superficially about war in many cases but not always and just as certainly are not necessarily or even generally simulationist. Miniatures gaming tends to favor generating story, something I doubt anyone would say women don’t find appealing. Even something like Warhammer has virtually nothing to do with war as such; it’s really about characters doing interesting things in a fantastical story.

So even if we were to assume for the sake of argument that women don’t generally find war very appealing (which to me seems wrong) that would still be no explanation as to why women don’t play games about the sweeping dramatic conflicts in settings with larger than life heroes and villains, considering they certainly find such things interesting when it comes to other media like books and movies.

I doubt women would, in general, be very interested in what miniatures gamers refer to as competitive play; that is, where narrative, character, story are all trivialized for the sake of this strange conceit that someone can be determined to be “the best” at a random-dominant game. But the people interested in miniatures gaming in that sense constitute a niche of a niche of a niche even among men.

 Manchu wrote:
<snip>

Even something like Warhammer has virtually nothing to do with war as such; it’s really about characters doing interesting things in a fantastical story.

So even if we were to assume for the sake of argument that women don’t generally find war very appealing (which to me seems wrong) that would still be no explanation as to why women don’t play games about the sweeping dramatic conflicts in settings with larger than life heroes and villains, considering they certainly find such things interesting when it comes to other media like books and movies.

I'd argue that is only a small facet of the hobby (or hhhobby as the case may be).

You aren't just bringing an Orc character to do interesting things in a fantastical story, you are also spending hundreds of hours list building, buying, assembling and painting his 40 to 100 basic Orc buddies that are following him in to battle. Maybe that's just something that is less appealing to your average (or edge case) woman compared to man compared to using that same Orc character in an RPG, video game, etc.

I doubt women would, in general, be very interested in what miniatures gamers refer to as competitive play; that is, where narrative, character, story are all trivialized for the sake of this strange conceit that someone can be determined to be “the best” at a random-dominant game.

At the risk of turning this into another competitive vs casual discussion, the competitive to casual transition is a spectrum and I think an aspect of competitiveness finds it's way in to all but the most fluffy bunny of gamers.

 Paint it Pink wrote:


I beg to differ, she says. < (female wargamer speaking here.)

It depends on the period you play.

WW2 and on a platoon evolves. So, arguably 40+ models is 10 fire teams of four plus fire support; mortar/HMG etc.

Arguably one could one add or two vehicles in support too.

So while this is definitely down scaled war, the platoon has from WW2 been considered the smallest formation that operate on the battlefield before you end up with isolated skirmishing. Happy to be proved wrong.

Yep I have wargamed scenarios where the smallest unit was a section and for most of the scenario the military component was sub platoon. Wargaming doesn't have to be Operational or Strategic, some stuff if figuring out very down in the weeds tactical stuff.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I think an aspect of competitiveness finds it's way in to all but the most fluffy bunny of gamers.

Certainly yes, this must be the case because, after all, no matter what it is still a game where, at the end, one person wins and the other person loses. But there is one sense in which that factor is merely driving the unfolding story and another in which that factor is, for the players, the goal in itself. I suspect that for most people, miniatures gaming is a matter of the former rather than the latter. It doesn’t matter whether it’s one orc or 40-100; they are still “your guys” and their main function is to do cool things/have cool things happen to them.

My wife tells me there is too much "Mansplaining" in wargaming.

I did not believe her, until I read this thread.

 Manchu wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I think an aspect of competitiveness finds it's way in to all but the most fluffy bunny of gamers.

Certainly yes, this must be the case because, after all, no matter what it is still a game where, at the end, one person wins and the other person loses. But there is one sense in which that factor is merely driving the unfolding story and another in which that factor is, for the players, the goal in itself. I suspect that for most people, miniatures gaming is a matter of the former rather than the latter. It doesn’t matter whether it’s one orc or 40-100; they are still “your guys” and their main function is to do cool things/have cool things happen to them.

I tend to be of the opinion most people lie closer to the middle than the extrema, where the story is kinda not important without competitiveness and likewise competitiveness is kinda not important without some background. Potentially that "middle" is still offputtingly too competitive for many women gamers, I dunno.

Personally, I tend to care about story when I'm in the unsocialable portion of the hobby of building the army, I've always invented back stories for the forces and histories for the characters.... but once I hit the table top I don't need a story driven game other than "this is the objective". My observation is many GW gamers are like that, as I've rarely played against players who felt the need to "forge a narrative" so to speak, at most I get opponents who like to make pew pew pew noises


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Easy E wrote:
My wife tells me there is too much "Mansplaining" in wargaming.

I did not believe her, until I read this thread.

There's too much mansplaining in forums in general, and sometimes the worst mansplainers on forums are actually women

 Easy E wrote:
My wife tells me there is too much "Mansplaining" in wargaming.

I did not believe her, until I read this thread.

Explain, please, how a discussion online translates into how people treat each other in person.

I am just saying, my wife felt she experienced too much "Mansplaining" in wargaming. Then, I come here and there are plenty of men explaining why women aren't into wargaming. I think it is pretty obvious where the connection is between an in-person experience and the experience in this thread.

Now, this is more of an off-hand observation. There is no "winning" the argument or whatever. It is just an observation from one posters wife. Anecdotal evidence is not evidence, just one poster's wife's lived experience.

Doesn't mansplaining typically require a woman to be mansplained at?

AFAICS, there's one poster in this thread whost been open enough to admit she's a woman, and basically nobody has responded to anything she's said.

So while ignoring a woman (perhaps we'll see something she's said regurgitated by a male user later as their own idea) is quite typical male behaviour, labelling it mansplaining in this context just kinda feels like a need to label something with a buzzword, irrespective of how accurate it is.

I see the light now. I may have used an improper definition of "Mansplaining" when I applied it to a thread of men explaining why women may not be into wargaming.

Going forward, I will be sure to keep the opinions of the women I know who wargame, my wife and daughter; out of a discussion about women in wargaming.

Thanks for clearing it all up for me. In the meantime, please continue to discuss why there are not more women in wargaming. I am sure we will get to the bottom of it somehow.

So, certain people can't have an opinion on something because they are those certain people? Helpful.

I suppose, since there aren't any threads started by and being posted in only by women; and if men shouldn't be commenting on the topic; the problem goes away. Progress!

As I said before why push specific groups to a hobby. Why not just concentrate on who is interested in the hobby. If a woman, man, white person or black person seems excited about models or wargaming then get em into it.

Honestly for people in general even when people like this hobby the main thing preventing it is time, cost and effort. Why spend hundreds or thousands on something you don't know if you'll like with multiple hours assembling and painting when I could just bust out a computer game and play that.

I used to know a bunch of dudes that got into 40k when indie and only because Dawn of War 1 brought them in. If i remember correctly at least half the people in the shop i was in came in because of that game way back or half had at least played it.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
As I said before why push specific groups to a hobby. Why not just concentrate on who is interested in the hobby. If a woman, man, white person or black person seems excited about models or wargaming then get em into it.

It's not about pushing different groups in, its about finding ways to encourage and promote different groups to taking part. In the end more gamers is better all round. It means:


more customers for the companies making the games - that means more room for growth of the market.

more money for local stores and clubs - that means more local level support

more gamers at stores/clubs/events which means more chance for gaming, a greater skill and experience spread and overall more potential to support more titles.


Overall if you can find ways to keep what you have and welcome new people in its basically all gains for those involved.

I remember a saying I've heard before though. If you try to appeal to everybody then you appeal to nobody. It's just hard to find common ground with so many.

In the case of women it could be good in some cases but the more different groups join a hobby the more it changes and in any hobby of decades long hardcore fans they hate change of most kinds.

I see this as a tough balance. You want new people because without them a brand becomes stale and stagnate and eventually loses money. However if you change all the time then you have no loyal fans and they won't buy all the various crap you make and brand loyalty (hopefully for positive company decisions) is definitely nowhere to be found with new customers.

So sure I'd want some more women but I can't help but wonder if there aren't many greater issues to address with the game that would make it more accessible for people that already wanted to play but lacked something.

-----

I think gw for all its faults I think new management gets how to get gw's image out there to the public like with those bobble head dudes.

I suppose I'm derailing the thread though.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
I remember a saying I've heard before though. If you try to appeal to everybody then you appeal to nobody. It's just hard to find common ground with so many.

In the case of women it could be good in some cases but the more different groups join a hobby the more it changes and in any hobby of decades long hardcore fans they hate change of most kinds.

I see this as a tough balance. You want new people because without them a brand becomes stale and stagnate and eventually loses money. However if you change all the time then you have no loyal fans and they won't buy all the various crap you make and brand loyalty (hopefully for positive company decisions) is definitely nowhere to be found with new customers.

So sure I'd want some more women but I can't help but wonder if there aren't many greater issues to address with the game that would make it more accessible for people that already wanted to play but lacked something.

-----

I think gw for all its faults I think new management gets how to get gw's image out there to the public like with those bobble head dudes.

I suppose I'm derailing the thread though.

No, it's a valid concern. Bringing in new customers by doing something that will alienate much of your existing customer base is a risky move. It paid off for GW when they blew up WFB and replaced it with Age of Sigmar, but how much money did Hasbro lose (or fail to meet projections, which to corporate executives is the same thing) on D&D 4E?

Of course, such corporate moves are far beyond the scope of what you can expect the participants in an online forum to undertake. We can support them when they do make such moves, but they have to make the move before we can support it.

@Vulcan: I'd say WHFB being replaced with AoS was bad timing more to do with Vermintide and Total War: Warhammer being released right around Fantasy's death which could've been potentially huge for Warhammer Fantasy but i think New Management managed to fix AoS enough since it was first conceived. I imagine there's a lot to figure out when you work for a company. For all the odd choices New GW Management has taken it has made some decent ones. They even took Sisters from on life support to very popular which is honestly incredible.

I suppose my choice would be more to make Warhammer more accessible for people that want to play but maybe don't have several hundred or thousands in cash just lying around and nowhere better to spend it. Being priced out of the hobby even for hobby lovers is a huge concern. I think Specialist Games made Warhammer more accessible price-wise and for a time they were big locally but i dunno where that is now and where it's going.

Affordability is a problem for GW, meanwhile they release a more inclusive Cadian upgrade sprue which when combined with recent price rises has taken the price of 10 Cadians from $41UD to $77AUD But at least now you have female and varying ethnicity heads on the models you can't afford.

There's also the issue of 40k as a setting. I think a woman on this very board mentioned she preferred WHFB to 40k just because 40k is a dark ugly universe where everything is overly bleak. I'm not sure if most women think this way but when actual female warhammer players are saying this that might be an issue.

Dunno if AoS is better in that regard but oddly I felt WHFB had some somewhat good sides or shades of gray in good guy factions rather than 40k's different shades of black. Sadly 40k can't really change this without becoming something very different than what it's generally been and fluff rewrites are bad enough.

As far as getting women into the hobby. I'd rather just see if a game or book does it. I imagine a dystopian universe doesn't work so well for women but old warhammer fantasy and AoS books might work. I really don't expect 40k to have many women wargamers in it. It's just too dark and gritty. That said I've seen women cosplay 40k so maybe that's one way to go about it.

Honestly I don't know if GW did do better with AoS over Old World. Lets not forget Old World had issues with its system that could have been fixed - heck just giving it new models and attention led to End Times making it popular again.

GW also spent a lot of years with AoS not selling well after the disaster of a launch.

Plus, as said, almost everything AoS does, Old World could have done as well. In the end I think however well AoS does is as good as Old World could have done had it been properly supported at the right time with the right marketing.


That isn't to say AoS is in any way bad, just that its not outright superior to Old World as a creative setting.

This made me wonder...do women have power fantasies? You know, the ones about gaining attention and respect through acts of recklessness and/or violence.

My wife says she never had anything like that but I know it's a regular thing for boys and it's a trope for male characters in stories.

A quick search with a 'site:edu' tag didn't provide a satisfactory answer.

Power fantasy shows and characters for women exist: She-Ra, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, etc.

Although I do believe power fantasy for women are usually more about gaining freedom or some other higher goal than just gaining attention or respect. Power and violence in the sake of something rather than for its own sake, and 40k is violence for its own sake.

 Tyran wrote:
Although I do believe power fantasy for women are usually more about gaining freedom or some other higher goal than just gaining attention or respect. Power and violence in the sake of something rather than for its own sake, and 40k is violence for its own sake.

I was browsing the channels the other day and caught a little of 'bird girl' which gave me the same kind of vibes as bits and pieces i'd seen of the Harley Quinn cartoon. Lots of random violence for the sake of 'lol, random concequenceless violence'.
They seem like reasonably popular shows.

Harley Quinn also does have an extensive character driven narrative focused on character relations. It does have violence for the sake of violence, so yeah point, but also violence for the sake of violence tends to backfire on Harley as a recurring plot point and to highlight it as character flaw.

Moreover Harley Quinn is usually outmatched by more powerful heroes or villains, because she is a street level villain in the same setting that has Superman and Darkseid (both which she has personally met), so a lot of the time she is the underdog and thus not very "power fantasy".

I do wonder if this has a reflection in 40k. I mean, if the female 40k gamer is more likely to play "underdog" factions like the IG or the Eldar.

No idea about bird girl, never watched it.

 Tyran wrote:
Moreover Harley Quinn is usually outmatched by more powerful heroes or villains, because she is a street level villain in the same setting that has Superman and Darkseid (both which she has personally met), so a lot of the time she is the underdog and thus not very "power fantasy".

Only caught a few bits here and there, Harley leading an army of parademons to slaughter everyone in gotham and then just deciding after a while that nah, do something else.
Out of curiosity I had a quick youtube search on superman from the show and... he appears to have a room temperature IQ. As for Darkseid i'd lean more towards celsius than fahrenheit. I guess that's just the style the show decided to run with.

As for what factions are more common with female players, personally speaking i've seen - admech, custodes, marines, daemons, grey knights, and tyranids. No pattern at all.

A.T. wrote:
Only caught a few bits here and there, Harley leading an army of parademons to slaughter everyone in gotham and then just deciding after a while that nah, do something else.
Out of curiosity I had a quick youtube search on superman from the show and... he appears to have a room temperature IQ. As for Darkseid i'd lean more towards celsius than fahrenheit. I guess that's just the style the show decided to run with.

As for what factions are more common with female players, personally speaking i've seen - admech, custodes, marines, daemons, grey knights, and tyranids. No pattern at all.

I mean, to get that parademon army she had to get her ass kicked by Granny and only survives thanks to Psycho, and when she realized destroying Gotham wasn't distracting her of her emotional issues, psycho betrays her, hijacks the army and she spends the rest of the season almost being killed by parademons, Psycho or her mind controlled friends.

 Tyran wrote:
I mean, to get that parademon army she had to get her ass kicked by Granny...

"So I just gotta beat up an old lady and I get an army?"

Not really trying to make any point here other than that the mindless violence, with emphasis on the mindless, doesn't appear to have hurt the show. Birdgirl, for what it's worth (and what little i've seen) was literally violence for the sake of gaining attention and respect.

A.T. wrote:
"So I just gotta beat up an old lady and I get an army?"

Not really trying to make any point here other than that the mindless violence, with emphasis on the mindless, doesn't appear to have hurt the show. Birdgirl, for what it's worth (and what little i've seen) was literally violence for the sake of gaining attention and respect.

And then Harley got the gak beaten out of her by said old lady. No one gets a "Harley is a powerful woman" from that scene, but rather a "Harley's poor impulse control and poor decision making strikes again."

Mindless violence and power fantasy are related, but not the same thing. Harley does try to gain recognition and respect through violence, but it always backfires or only provides momentary satisfaction or it ends driving her friends away, it is basically a deconstruction of power fantasy.

 Tyran wrote:
Mindless violence and power fantasy are related, but not the same thing. Harley does try to gain recognition and respect through violence, but it always backfires or only provides momentary satisfaction or it ends driving her friends away, it is basically a deconstruction of power fantasy.

You make it sound like 40k.

Well, 40k if Khorne was fabulous and Slaanesh was a misunderstood anti-hero.

Which they aren't. Hell neither is really a character, both are mostly background concepts that once upon a blue moon actually do something.

Now to really make myself unpopular...

We talk about how women don't want to be around wargamers who act in a... shall we say, skeevy manner? Always flirting when it's clearly unwelcome? Sometimes even going as far as outright sexual harassment?

Consider some of the places skeevy behavior is not just common, but almost expected. Bars. Nightclubs. Dance halls (if such things still exist). Skeevy behavior galore. And yet, young women flock there. Why? Because there's something there they want enough to deal with the skeevy behavior.

If women want something enough they'll ignore skeevy behavior. There's proof aplenty every weekend in bars and clubs all over the word.


Now with that in mind, should we condone or ignore skeevy behavior in our cohorts? HECK NO. If for no other reason than because it's rude and unpleasant in and of itself, and gets in the way of what we're there for - playing wargames. But I submit that occasional skeevy behavior is pretty far down the list of things that keep women out of wargaming, given that regular if not routine skeevy behavior does not keep women out of bars.

I thought receiving the 'skeevy behaviour' was the point of going to bars and nightclubs.

It's important to note that whilst we expect a baseline of behaviour from our fellow humans, there is also a huge amount of variety in the tolerance of behaviours based on the environment.

People will tolerate/expect that you'd behave differently in a bar or nightclub than you might in an office.


I think in part then saying that women have no problem with "skeevy" behaviour in a bar and thus it shouldn't be a barrier (or as much of one as its being made in this thread) is overlooking that the bar and the game club are two very different environments with two very different outlooks on the acceptable and expected behaviour of people in those environments.

In the end more gamers is better all round.

That gets said a lot, it sounds good, but I am not sure if it is true and there is nothing inherently necessarily true about it.

 Manchu wrote:

In the end more gamers is better all round.

That gets said a lot, it sounds good, but I am not sure if it is true and there is nothing inherently necessarily true about it.

What's the downside? Esp considering that many groups are lucky to have more than 10 people on regular game nights

I think it's less that the statement itself is necessarily false, rather the assumptions around it.

Even just introducing women into the hobby would change the dynamic. It's no secret that there's a large number of socially awkward people in wargaming.
In my younger days I wouldn't have felt as comfortable if there were pretty girls in the hobby as well, that may have prevented me from getting into it in quite the same way.
TBH that's still more true than I would like today, but I like to think I've improved.

The crux of sharing that is more women might mean less people overall.

Any changes to encourage more women (such as adding diplomatic solutions someone suggested earlier) would change the game in a way that people don't enjoy. So again, that might drive out more people that it brings in, and it would definitely change the game in a way many people would dislike

 Overread wrote:
It's important to note that whilst we expect a baseline of behaviour from our fellow humans, there is also a huge amount of variety in the tolerance of behaviours based on the environment.

People will tolerate/expect that you'd behave differently in a bar or nightclub than you might in an office.

Yes, but... within cultural norms.

 Overread wrote:
I think in part then saying that women have no problem with "skeevy" behaviour in a bar and thus it shouldn't be a barrier (or as much of one as its being made in this thread) is overlooking that the bar and the game club are two very different environments with two very different outlooks on the acceptable and expected behaviour of people in those environments.

Me and my friends on a girls night out don't appreciate 'skeevy' behaviour.

The only reason I will put up with 'skeevy' behaviour is that's the cost of being where I want to be. Funnily enough, as I've gotten older the cost has exceeded the benefits. That, and other changes that come with age or growing up that happens as one gets older.

 Easy E wrote:
Thanks for clearing it all up for me. In the meantime, please continue to discuss why there are not more women in wargaming. I am sure we will get to the bottom of it somehow.

https://www.duffelblog.com/p/navy-considers-crotch-level-rank

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I think it's less that the statement itself is necessarily false, rather the assumptions around it.

Even just introducing women into the hobby would change the dynamic. It's no secret that there's a large number of socially awkward people in wargaming.
In my younger days I wouldn't have felt as comfortable if there were pretty girls in the hobby as well, that may have prevented me from getting into it in quite the same way.
TBH that's still more true than I would like today, but I like to think I've improved.

The crux of sharing that is more women might mean less people overall.

Or it might not. This is all conjecture based on nothing but anecdote. I would argue that introducing socially awkward people to a wider range of other people within the context of a shared hobby experience would have a beneficial effect for those people in the long run.

Your position implies that every woman that takes up the hobby will somehow drive out at least one man merely by their presence. Given the under-representation of women in wargaming compared to other similar hobbies it seems like there's a fairly large untapped group of people there. It also seems like a stretch to theorise their inclusion within the hobby would lead to some exodus of the established player base.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

Any changes to encourage more women (such as adding diplomatic solutions someone suggested earlier) would change the game in a way that people don't enjoy. So again, that might drive out more people that it brings in, and it would definitely change the game in a way many people would dislike

Substitute "black people" for "women" in that statement. Are you still comfortable with it?

I'm not sure how having more people playing would "change the game in a way that people don't enjoy". Over the years I've met and played with a huge variety of people. Some treated the game like it was a genuine life-or-death contest, some had phenomenally painted armies and loved the fluff but were terrible gamers, some were uber-nerds, others were stereotypical jocks, some were extremely socially awkward, others were ridiculously charismatic and comfortable around people. Whether those people were male, female, black, white, gay, straight or anything else you can think of was irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether the shared experience you're having is enjoyable for you. Even in cases where that experience wasn't enjoyable for me there were often other people in the group who would enjoy their hobby interactions with that same person.

Lets also not forget that a lot of the changes that have been suggested are not even going to touch the models or rules of the game.

They are social things like marketing, outreach, role models, advertising, social dynamic shifts, behaviour shifts, welcome groups, ventilation etc...


Basically marketing, social and environmental elements. The actual game, the sculpts, design, models and lore are less touched upon.

Meanwhile some things like more narrative and diplomatic elements to the pre and post game are things that, in general, are well received and purely optional elements to the game.



So in general we aren't looking at waking up to a massive night and day shift to the hobby; what we are more considering is a shift in attitudes and the composition of the social group and the marketing of it as well as behaviours tolerated within the group. Most of which are in general net gains (or present no loss) to current members.

Slipspace wrote:
Substitute "black people" for "women" in that statement. Are you still comfortable with it?

I think you've missed the context of the earlier posts they were referring to - the suggestion that certain aspects of the game rules themselves are part of it's appeal or lack thereof.

Slipspace wrote:
I'm not sure how having more people playing would "change the game in a way that people don't enjoy".

Again in context it's what you do to get those additional people.

I guess the best example would be for you to think of a game that you don't like personally, and then consider something you do enjoy being altered to appeal to more people by bringing in the aspects that you didn't like from the other game.
You may end up with more people in the hobby, but would you still be one of them?

A.T. wrote:

Slipspace wrote:
Substitute "black people" for "women" in that statement. Are you still comfortable with it?

I think you've missed the context of the earlier posts they were referring to - the suggestion that certain aspects of the game rules themselves are part of it's appeal or lack thereof.

Even if that's true (and I'm not sure your context argument is true after re-reading the last couple of pages) that sort of justification is all too common as a justification for continuing to exclude people for no good reason.

A.T. wrote:

Slipspace wrote:
I'm not sure how having more people playing would "change the game in a way that people don't enjoy".

Again in context it's what you do to get those additional people.

I guess the best example would be for you to think of a game that you don't like personally, and then consider something you do enjoy being altered to appeal to more people by bringing in the aspects that you didn't like from the other game.
You may end up with more people in the hobby, but would you still be one of them?

Again, not really seeing that context in the post I replied to. I don't think you need to change much, if anything, with the game itself to attract more women. Even if you did, the extreme lack of detail from people about what would need to be changed just comes across as another excuse rather than an honest analysis of the situation.

World of Warcraft changed quite a bit over the years to appeal to a wider audience and many felt it made that game worse. Some changes contributed to the game reaching its peak popularity around late Wrath/early Cata, but it's steadily declined since then. I've played WoW Classic some and I would say most people I've encountered have zero interest in retail WoW so they killed some of their playerbase off in the long run...only to regain it via Classic.

Maybe a better example would be how The Elder Scrolls reached new heights in sales with Oblivion and again with Skyrim, but both games "dumbed down" mechanics, had inferior worldbuilding, and less creative main quests. Morrowind felt like a whole new world while Oblivion and Skyrim are generic fantasy settings, at least on the surface.

Slipspace wrote:
Even if that's true...

You'll need to go back more than a couple of pages.

I mention this as the post you were replying to mentioned "such as adding diplomatic solutions someone suggested earlier" - which does refer to discussions of the differences between wargames, boardgames, rpgs, etc from a week or two back in this thread.

Hence the follow up example of how broadening appeal can also be shifting appeal when it changes how a game works. As compared to something like the recent increase in chess interest driven by fresh presentation of the same old system.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I thought receiving the 'skeevy behaviour' was the point of going to bars and nightclubs.

If she's going there looking for a one-night stand, or even just bilking the skeeve for free drinks, sure. Is that the only reason women go to bars?

No, that's a serious question. I have no idea why ANYONE goes to bars, much less women.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
It's important to note that whilst we expect a baseline of behaviour from our fellow humans, there is also a huge amount of variety in the tolerance of behaviours based on the environment.

People will tolerate/expect that you'd behave differently in a bar or nightclub than you might in an office.


I think in part then saying that women have no problem with "skeevy" behaviour in a bar and thus it shouldn't be a barrier (or as much of one as its being made in this thread) is overlooking that the bar and the game club are two very different environments with two very different outlooks on the acceptable and expected behaviour of people in those environments.

Good point, and I have no counterargument against it.

 Vulcan wrote:
No, that's a serious question. I have no idea why ANYONE goes to bars, much less women.

I can hear the same question being asked of a lot of people as to why you'd want to spend a perfectly good evening in a gaming store.

 trexmeyer wrote:
World of Warcraft changed quite a bit over the years to appeal to a wider audience and many felt it made that game worse. Some changes contributed to the game reaching its peak popularity around late Wrath/early Cata, but it's steadily declined since then. I've played WoW Classic some and I would say most people I've encountered have zero interest in retail WoW so they killed some of their playerbase off in the long run...only to regain it via Classic.

Maybe a better example would be how The Elder Scrolls reached new heights in sales with Oblivion and again with Skyrim, but both games "dumbed down" mechanics, had inferior worldbuilding, and less creative main quests. Morrowind felt like a whole new world while Oblivion and Skyrim are generic fantasy settings, at least on the surface.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I was referring to.
One can argue that this exact thing has happened with 40k. 8th edition was a significant change to the game which undoubtedly brought in many more players. Yet discussions of how much better older editions were and/or how gakky current trends are are not uncommon on Dakka.

Slipspace wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:

Any changes to encourage more women (such as adding diplomatic solutions someone suggested earlier) would change the game in a way that people don't enjoy. So again, that might drive out more people that it brings in, and it would definitely change the game in a way many people would dislike

Substitute "black people" for "women" in that statement. Are you still comfortable with it?

Yes, why shouldn't I be? What random characteristic you've deemed important is actually irrrelevant to the point I'm making. The point is, you're advocating for getting people who aren't interested in the game interested in the game. Clearly something has to change to get them interested, and if that thing is the game itself (which is highly likely) you will alienate people as explained above.
This applies whether you're trying to encourage more women, black people, thrill seekers, hippies, elderly, kids, whatever.

World of Warcraft reached heights of which very few properties have ever even considered feasible. It was, at no point, ever going to be able to maintain that indefinitely. People get bored, they move on, their lives and priorities change. The one thing I've learned over the years, is that as many of these perpetual properties rely on habit to maintain themselves, whether they be a game or long running comic or show, and eventually people will take any excuse to get off the treadmill. Times change, nothing lasts forever.

World of Warcraft crushed its own genre out of existence and outlasted its limitations to never be toppled by anything greater. The number of games that have lasted more than a decade with an active playerbase are very few and far between. The fact its still as popular as it is, is honestly, downright astonishing.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
So, certain people can't have an opinion on something because they are those certain people? Helpful.

No, anyone can have an opinion, no matter how stupid it is. I am a perfect example!

It is when the impacted group and its members' opinions are disregarding and ignored that there is a problem. This thread, often runs a foul of this very thing....

However, you know this all ready QAR.





@Manchu
You bring up an interesting point about whether or not an increase in gamers is or is not a good thing. I mentioned earlier that I am not 100% convinced wargamers ACTUALLY want more wargamers. I know I for one am NOT a welcoming wargamer anymore. I had a time in my life where I was, but now that I have my group of like minded players (including my wife and daughter) I am not sure I want to bring in anyone else to that group. New people are a potential threat to the stability we have created within our group.

Therefore, I AM part of the problem as I no longer want to get more wargamers in MY personal group. This may change at some point as I move back into an "expansion" phase, but who knows when and if that would happen.

Therefore, until that "expansion" mode starts again, I will not be very welcoming to a new wargamer, whether they are male, female, trans, alien, fluffy bunny, killer elite, or whatever.

trexmeyer gave some good examples on the last page but it’s worth noting a general principle potentially at work when a company’s goal is to broaden its consumer base: namely, the product itself needs to be altered to have a broader appeal.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; but it also isn’t necessarily a good thing, especially when the product is a work of creativity. Creativity tends to expressions that are idiosyncratic and even proactive and overall not terribly well aligned to commercial accessibility.

Some of these iconic, enduring fictional settings are what they are precisely because they came from a particular point of view or subculture. Turning them into theme parks for the broadest possible customer base means they will need their rough edges sanded down, even if those rough edges are what made the setting compelling in the first place.

I’d prefer if rather than colonizing and plundering existing settings, the capitalist barons (“white slavers” as George Lucas calls them) would just create their generic, mass appeal products from whole cloth. I know they don’t because (a) they aren’t artistically creative in the first place and (b) such a product would probably be way too boring to get anyone’s attention on its own merit. But this just points out the problem of invading something weird and iconic.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LunarSol wrote:
Times change, nothing lasts forever.

A great reminder — and another reason people shouldn’t be too hasty to trade weirdness for mass appeal. Whatever heights a fad reaches, it will just as surely peter out, and if along that course whatever was special is lost then we are at an overall net loss, even where the two factors are not necessarily related.

 Manchu wrote:
trexmeyer gave some good examples on the last page but it’s worth noting a general principle potentially at work when a company’s goal is to broaden its consumer base: namely, the product itself needs to be altered to have a broader appeal.

But wargaming isn’t just 40k. You have chit and map, 2mm model, 54mm skirmish, whatever scale GW is moving to Sci fi, and so on. There is enough out there in its many permutations that you don’t need to change existing properties to have a product that could appeal. Now if, say, 54mm skirmish took off massively with women you would see GW and co trying to figure out what they could do to capture some of that cash. Make the models bigger? Have a skirmish game? Increase the points per model of 40k? And so on. But it isn’t automatic that one product in a crowded marketplace has to change to get new customers in.

Wargaming that isn't GW is very niche, clearly good female representation in Malifaux et al alone isn't enough for the writer of the article in question, nor some people in this discussion.

It would seem that the sort of 'wargame' that women generally enjoy departs enough from the formula as to no longer be considered a wargame; see DnD or boardgames.

When I asked my wife why she won't go to our gaming club with me she said 'It's filthy and it stinks, and the toilet is even worse."
She is right, but I don't care as much as she obviously does^^

May be a stereotype, but I've heard (and smelled) exactly the same occasionally.

Probably that's only the first barrier anyway.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Wargaming that isn't GW is very niche, clearly good female representation in Malifaux et al alone isn't enough for the writer of the article in question, nor some people in this discussion.

It would seem that the sort of 'wargame' that women generally enjoy departs enough from the formula as to no longer be considered a wargame; see DnD or boardgames.

Both of these positions show a cognitive bias that GW is somehow the whole hobby, or representative of the whole hobby. While GW is the 800lbs gorilla in the room, it is in the bigger scheme of things actually a niche all of its own, say compare to Star Wars etc.

As for the second point, again, while seemingly a reasonable generalization, I think this yet another cognitive bias; this time in the definition of what counts as a wargame. Not a path worth going down, because the more one tries to define something, the more likely it is that one can find edge case.

But I'm only a woman wargamer, game designer, reviewer, so what do I know?

The very article focuses people who are wargamers outside of the GW orbit.

 Paint it Pink wrote:


But I'm only a woman wargamer, game designer, reviewer, so what do I know?

Yep far too close to the problem, let us figure it out

 Easy E wrote:
The very article focuses people who are wargamers outside of the GW orbit.

The article talks about someone who is a historic gamer, but then jumps to Warhammer and seems to hang with Warhammer.

I imagine historic gaming is even more gender biased, at least I *occasionally* see women in Warhammer, but that's just a guess as I haven't had as much involvement in the historic gaming crowd as fantasy / sci fi.

When it comes to scale historic models I'm struggling to think of having ever seen a woman involved in it, mostly old blokes talking about the correct shade of green for RLM70 on a He111 from 7th July 1940 and the correct thickness of wire to use for a pitot tube on an E4 model of Bf109... but then you don't encounter as many people in general there.

 Moscha wrote:
When I asked my wife why she won't go to our gaming club with me she said 'It's filthy and it stinks, and the toilet is even worse."
She is right, but I don't care as much as she obviously does^^

I've left games for similar reasons; it's hardly just a 'woman' thing. And I'm not any sort of neat freak either; some game groups are just. plain. filthy.

 Paint it Pink wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Wargaming that isn't GW is very niche, clearly good female representation in Malifaux et al alone isn't enough for the writer of the article in question, nor some people in this discussion.

It would seem that the sort of 'wargame' that women generally enjoy departs enough from the formula as to no longer be considered a wargame; see DnD or boardgames.

Both of these positions show a cognitive bias that GW is somehow the whole hobby, or representative of the whole hobby. While GW is the 800lbs gorilla in the room, it is in the bigger scheme of things actually a niche all of its own, say compare to Star Wars etc.

As for the second point, again, while seemingly a reasonable generalization, I think this yet another cognitive bias; this time in the definition of what counts as a wargame. Not a path worth going down, because the more one tries to define something, the more likely it is that one can find edge case.

But I'm only a woman wargamer, game designer, reviewer, so what do I know?

Maybe my intention carried poorly through my phrasing in text, my apologies.
But it seems we're in total agreement.

That cognitive disonance is exactly what I mean to point out, along with the definition of "wargame".

 Vulcan wrote:

 Moscha wrote:
When I asked my wife why she won't go to our gaming club with me she said 'It's filthy and it stinks, and the toilet is even worse."
She is right, but I don't care as much as she obviously does^^

I've left games for similar reasons; it's hardly just a 'woman' thing. And I'm not any sort of neat freak either; some game groups are just. plain. filthy.

Yeah, the reason why I left my original game shop for one that was (at the time) 45min away instead of 15min away was because one was a basement that always smelled faintly of whatever gaggle of cardboard-slinging degenerates most recently befouled it and the other was a fairly spacious warehouse space with the lightest infestation of card ogres I've ever seen in a game shop.

It's rather a question of why so few People Wargamers isn't it? Also, what's up with wargamers/card-gamers/nerds-in-general?

What is a card ogre?! Lol! Never heard that expression before.

I'm going to throw this out there but there basically aren't any (there's a handful) female Total War content creators. If women aren't represented in a video wargame free from IRL ogres, why would we expect them to play miniature versions?

 trexmeyer wrote:
I'm going to throw this out there but there basically aren't any (there's a handful) female Total War content creators. If women aren't represented in a video wargame free from IRL ogres, why would we expect them to play miniature versions?

...What makes you think video games are free from IRL ogres?

Show me where I said all video games. The entire industry.

Sorry, I don't get what we mean by "free from IRL ogres", do you mean smelly, unhygienic people in the community?

To be fair, in videogames the smell of the other players don't matter...

My opinon would probably not be of interest to the article author, given that I'm a middle-aged man.

The article seems a bit rubbish. Why put a picture of a GW store on top of a story that focusses on a different type of environment?

The article focus is on a woman who is into historical wargaming, where I can imagine the demographics are even more skewed than with our SF/Fantasy wargames. In addition, the average age is higher, and they do note that the mis-understood woman is comparatively young.
Logically, what follows is that the false assumptions attendees at the con made regarding her reasons for being there were - while certainly annoying - reasonable to make.

In my local tabletop club, we have only a handful of female members, but it's not like we are anything but welcoming.

 Vulcan wrote:
To be fair, in videogames the smell of the other players don't matter...

Aye, but their manners and choice of language can be vastly worse. The lack of person to person interaction and the nature of many games means that swearing, insulting and derision are very common. Heck some people get exceptionally stressed out by the way many online games are designed. Fast paced, high attention with a desire to grind/play for reward. Many people log in and only want to play up to the daily limits for rewards, feeling entitled ot them in the limited game window that they've got. So anything that gets in the way (or that they perceive gets in the way) results in stress which translates into hostilities.


Online games also often don't have many means to resolve or mediate this conflict beyond waiting for it to happen, reporting it and then perhaps suspending/banning the person (remembering that most of the time the person who was the target of the insults might not see any resolution).



The way some people will behave and conduct themselves in a game is vastly different to how they'd ever act to a person face to face and it can create a very toxic environment to engage with.

 Overread wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
To be fair, in videogames the smell of the other players don't matter...

Aye, but their manners and choice of language can be vastly worse. The lack of person to person interaction and the nature of many games means that swearing, insulting and derision are very common. Heck some people get exceptionally stressed out by the way many online games are designed. Fast paced, high attention with a desire to grind/play for reward. Many people log in and only want to play up to the daily limits for rewards, feeling entitled ot them in the limited game window that they've got. So anything that gets in the way (or that they perceive gets in the way) results in stress which translates into hostilities.


Online games also often don't have many means to resolve or mediate this conflict beyond waiting for it to happen, reporting it and then perhaps suspending/banning the person (remembering that most of the time the person who was the target of the insults might not see any resolution).



The way some people will behave and conduct themselves in a game is vastly different to how they'd ever act to a person face to face and it can create a very toxic environment to engage with.

But in the context of Total War, none of that applies. At least that's my understanding, I don't play TW multiplayer, but from what I've seen people at most type "GL HF" and "GG" in the chat box and that's about it.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Overread wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
To be fair, in videogames the smell of the other players don't matter...

Aye, but their manners and choice of language can be vastly worse. The lack of person to person interaction and the nature of many games means that swearing, insulting and derision are very common. Heck some people get exceptionally stressed out by the way many online games are designed. Fast paced, high attention with a desire to grind/play for reward. Many people log in and only want to play up to the daily limits for rewards, feeling entitled ot them in the limited game window that they've got. So anything that gets in the way (or that they perceive gets in the way) results in stress which translates into hostilities.


Online games also often don't have many means to resolve or mediate this conflict beyond waiting for it to happen, reporting it and then perhaps suspending/banning the person (remembering that most of the time the person who was the target of the insults might not see any resolution).



The way some people will behave and conduct themselves in a game is vastly different to how they'd ever act to a person face to face and it can create a very toxic environment to engage with.

But in the context of Total War, none of that applies. At least that's my understanding, I don't play TW multiplayer, but from what I've seen people at most type "GL HF" and "GG" in the chat box and that's about it.

Maybee dependant upon the game type. Strategy seems far less likely to be , well , toxic (i hate that word). Exception being WW2 strategy regardless of COH (even thought hat community improved massively) or HOIV (seriously take a gander into the MP browser and watch game names...... )

Contrast with shooters, probably also to do with the adrenalin and attitude being far more hotblooded..

Not Online!!! wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Overread wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
To be fair, in videogames the smell of the other players don't matter...

Aye, but their manners and choice of language can be vastly worse. The lack of person to person interaction and the nature of many games means that swearing, insulting and derision are very common. Heck some people get exceptionally stressed out by the way many online games are designed. Fast paced, high attention with a desire to grind/play for reward. Many people log in and only want to play up to the daily limits for rewards, feeling entitled ot them in the limited game window that they've got. So anything that gets in the way (or that they perceive gets in the way) results in stress which translates into hostilities.


Online games also often don't have many means to resolve or mediate this conflict beyond waiting for it to happen, reporting it and then perhaps suspending/banning the person (remembering that most of the time the person who was the target of the insults might not see any resolution).



The way some people will behave and conduct themselves in a game is vastly different to how they'd ever act to a person face to face and it can create a very toxic environment to engage with.

But in the context of Total War, none of that applies. At least that's my understanding, I don't play TW multiplayer, but from what I've seen people at most type "GL HF" and "GG" in the chat box and that's about it.

Maybee dependant upon the game type. Strategy seems far less likely to be , well , toxic (i hate that word). Exception being WW2 strategy regardless of COH (even thought hat community improved massively) or HOIV (seriously take a gander into the MP browser and watch game names...... )

Contrast with shooters, probably also to do with the adrenalin and attitude being far more hotblooded..

PvP multiplayer I noticed can get a lot more...spirited than co-op.
There is some nastiness in co-op but there is a vast difference in attitudes between say, League of Legends and Warframe.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Overread wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
To be fair, in videogames the smell of the other players don't matter...

Aye, but their manners and choice of language can be vastly worse. The lack of person to person interaction and the nature of many games means that swearing, insulting and derision are very common. Heck some people get exceptionally stressed out by the way many online games are designed. Fast paced, high attention with a desire to grind/play for reward. Many people log in and only want to play up to the daily limits for rewards, feeling entitled ot them in the limited game window that they've got. So anything that gets in the way (or that they perceive gets in the way) results in stress which translates into hostilities.


Online games also often don't have many means to resolve or mediate this conflict beyond waiting for it to happen, reporting it and then perhaps suspending/banning the person (remembering that most of the time the person who was the target of the insults might not see any resolution).



The way some people will behave and conduct themselves in a game is vastly different to how they'd ever act to a person face to face and it can create a very toxic environment to engage with.

But in the context of Total War, none of that applies. At least that's my understanding, I don't play TW multiplayer, but from what I've seen people at most type "GL HF" and "GG" in the chat box and that's about it.

Maybee dependant upon the game type. Strategy seems far less likely to be , well , toxic (i hate that word). Exception being WW2 strategy regardless of COH (even thought hat community improved massively) or HOIV (seriously take a gander into the MP browser and watch game names...... )

Contrast with shooters, probably also to do with the adrenalin and attitude being far more hotblooded..

PvP multiplayer I noticed can get a lot more...spirited than co-op.
There is some nastiness in co-op but there is a vast difference in attitudes between say, League of Legends and Warframe.

Total war is PVP, again I don't play it much so maybe I just missed it, but people there mostly just say hi at the start and bye at the end of a match and not much else.

Total war was the example Trex was using which is why I brought the discussion back to that.

Obviously online shooters can be terrible, I stopped playing them after having a headset became a requirement because it ruined the experience too much. L4D was one of my most despised games that I paid money to buy, lol.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

There is some nastiness in co-op but there is a vast difference in attitudes between say, League of Legends and Warframe.

Of the many, many reasons I don't play games online anymore; one of the worst was actually in Left 4 Dead 2. I don't even know what I did to piss the guy off, but after failing a run he proceeded to spend the rest of the day getting into lobbies with me and unloading all his ammo while screaming obscenities at me until I quit playing altogether.

The PvP/Co-op community of Total War is an extreme minority. I assume for all games, but I know it is a very small percentage of the playerbase for WH2.

I thought it was mostly used to simulate "how many squigs could it kill?" runs.

ONline shooters are indeed more hot blooded.
Otoh Mute buttons exist, mordhau has an exceptional mute function aswell the one that makes things the other person says actually complementary.

I have to say I've never been bothered by this sort of thing in online shooters.
I mute them, me and my friend have a laugh, then we continue.
I don't think I've ever had anyone 'physically' hounding me, although when occasionally we get a cheater or whatever we just leave. If we get a lock eh, we wait it out or jump games.
My experience in mostly in RainbowSix casual though, so it there isn't much of that at all, I imagine they're all try-harding in ranked

 trexmeyer wrote:
The PvP/Co-op community of Total War is an extreme minority. I assume for all games, but I know it is a very small percentage of the playerbase for WH2.

I think Shogun 2 has a larger PvP community, because of the avatar system and the gameplay is a little more balanced and fast paced.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 trexmeyer wrote:
The PvP/Co-op community of Total War is an extreme minority. I assume for all games, but I know it is a very small percentage of the playerbase for WH2.

I think Shogun 2 has a larger PvP community, because of the avatar system and the gameplay is a little more balanced and fast paced.

Well had, the CA disabling the chat feature has hurt it.

 Overread wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:
To be fair, in videogames the smell of the other players don't matter...

Aye, but their manners and choice of language can be vastly worse. The lack of person to person interaction and the nature of many games means that swearing, insulting and derision are very common. Heck some people get exceptionally stressed out by the way many online games are designed. Fast paced, high attention with a desire to grind/play for reward. Many people log in and only want to play up to the daily limits for rewards, feeling entitled ot them in the limited game window that they've got. So anything that gets in the way (or that they perceive gets in the way) results in stress which translates into hostilities.


Online games also often don't have many means to resolve or mediate this conflict beyond waiting for it to happen, reporting it and then perhaps suspending/banning the person (remembering that most of the time the person who was the target of the insults might not see any resolution).



The way some people will behave and conduct themselves in a game is vastly different to how they'd ever act to a person face to face and it can create a very toxic environment to engage with.

That's very true. Sad, but true... and hardly restricted to the online gaming community; it's sadly very common across all online communities.

 Vulcan wrote:
That's very true. Sad, but true... and hardly restricted to the online gaming community; it's sadly very common across all online communities.

I've been on a few forums where people were quite civil.

Gaming is one of the worst. Certain car forums I've found to be good, others are terrible, it's probably no surprise that the ones that are terrible are often the ones popular among younger kids who just got their licenses.

Some based on historical model making forums (not wargaming, scale models) have actually been really good. Though I have met some real cranky fethers in person in the same scene.

REMOVED.

Kindly stop necro'ing old threads already.