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According to studies performed by women, females are generally more interested in RPG type tabletop gaming than TBS type tabletop gaming.

This is borne out by my personal experiences as well. All my wargame characters have their own stories and personalities, and I like hero-hammer.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
According to studies performed by women, females are generally more interested in RPG type tabletop gaming than TBS type tabletop gaming.

This is borne out by my personal experiences as well. All my wargame characters have their own stories and personalities, and I like hero-hammer.

I can confirm. Most of the ladies at the tables do like playing RPG's more than wargames. I like RPG's more myself (I run a Numenera game and a DH2.0 game) and I see them consistently looking through the rpg book section or playing an rpg somewhere or trying to get people into their groups. Maybe the stereotypical image of a nerdy guy asking if they want to talk about their level 20 paladin should be corrected to a nerdy guy asking about their level 20 paladin. I've actually been invited to a few but I don't have a ride to the FLGS for 40k or their rpg's. :(

A girl I had a brief relationship with learned 40k from reading my Marneus Calgar parodies. She simply built an understanding of the 40k universe as she went along. She was a major genius, and it's not often I meet someone whose intelligence impresses me *immodestly sweeps a hand through his hair, heh* but good God Emperor.

Unfortunately my stories make the Ultramarines out to be prats and Calgar to be a flatulating oaf, but in fairness the GW were asking for that.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
According to studies performed by women, females are generally more interested in RPG type tabletop gaming than TBS type tabletop gaming.

This is borne out by my personal experiences as well. All my wargame characters have their own stories and personalities, and I like hero-hammer.

I have a lot of nerdy female friends. Many are in videogames and RPG or "single box" tabletops, none in wargames (but they have expressed interest in occasional painting). Actually, I found more "openness" toward RPGs from the part of my non-nerdy females friends (or girlfriends) than male non-nerdy friends.

 Grand.Master.Raziel wrote:

Spoiler:

 MrMoustaffa wrote:

The Imperium of man is a crap place to live. The lore outright States it all the time, the only equality there is is that everyone is an equally expendable cog in the machine. Please, can we let this argument die? It's outright stated as overbearing, outdated, and evil.

Not every setting needs to be, or even should be, a shining example of equality. It makes for boring storytelling. Nobody's trying to hide that, anyone who's read the lore for 20 minutes could tell you that and it's easily found. It's not some evil GW conspiracy theory to keep women out of the hobby

Edit:and neo fascists and white supremacists embrace that darker side because they're morons. It's clearly meant to be shown in a bad light, but they embrace it because they're the idiots that would put in place to begin with.

I don't see what any of that has to do with how women are treated when they try to enter the hobby, but since you brought it up, just because the setting hasn't historically had much in it to draw female gamers, doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't. The setting was written by male gamer nerds in the 80s, when female gamer nerds were a rare breed, so it's not surprising the 40K setting is such a boy's club. That was then. This is now. Even if one doesn't address the whole Space Marines-can-only-be-male thing, there is absolutely no reason not to have some prominent female IG Commanders, or make a half-decent mini for female Inquisitors (the current one is a stinker). Heck, why isn't there a female Eldar Farseer mini? The Farseers have been female in every single Dawn of War game.

Ignoring the female space Marines bit, I mostly do agree with this part. There is a lot of places in 40k where women (or females if you want to count that eldar and tau aren't human) are sorely under represented. Eldar, for being supposedly a pretty good 50/50 mix, has mostly male models for some odd reason. IG in the lore often mention mixed regiments, granted, all men regiments seem to be more common, but from many sources it seems to put women at at least 20-30% of the IG's total strength at any time. This is mainly a model reason, as GW isn't even trying with the men in their IG kits. Now imagine trying to get them to put women in too that have remotely realistic proportions and still have parts becompatible with the men in the kit. It's kind of surprising FW hasn't tried this honestly. And of course, we all know the travesty that is going on with the sisters, the "girl's space Marines" being outright ignored model wise.

Speaking of that particular sacred cow, the reason only men can be Space Marines in the 40K setting is a bunch of pseudo-technical gobbledygook the developers made up. There is absolutely no reason they couldn't make up some different pseudo-technical gobbledygook to justify why women can now be Space Marines. An ancient lab of the Emperor's could be rediscovered with the secrets for doing so. Or, GW could use the expunged legions, have them be all-female Space Marine legions - one loyalist, one Chaos - who took that technology with them when they disappeared, and brought it back when they reappeared.

GW already makes up random crap and shoehorns it into the lore. These are the classic "hey guys centurions have totally been around this whole time and we didn't just ignore 10,000 years of lore because feth you" moments. And every time they do this, it's handled badly. They handwave major details that have been established for ages, outright contradict things the faction is known for, etc. Honestly, the main reason I don't want female space Marines showing up is because they would drop the ball so friggin hard it would fall through the floor and head straight for China. And because the energy spent to make them could be spent, gee I dunno, updating the sisters of battle range, which they've proven they can do since they released the mechanicus models.

Please, and this is a serious plea, I want you to seriously think of a way for GW to ignore over 20 years of established material and over 10,000 years of lore to bring female Marines in, that doesn't involve massive handwaving or having the Imperium act wildly out of character. Designs like the razorback, which is literally a rhino with a gun on it, took the Imperium centuries to sanction. Now you're telling me they find some random technology that lets women become Marines, something that supposedly not even the Emperor could do, the GUY WHO INVENTED THEM, and they don't either

1.Immediately assume it's heretical/warped by chaos, because nobody has ever heard of it and the emperor never said he did it, and destroy it

2.Lose it in the massive piles of redtape and inefficiencies of the munitorum/mechanicus

3.Some Inquisitor doesn't just destroy it for the Imperium:s own good because reasons.

Please, seriously consider this. They'd have to reboot the setting in order to make it work. Anything less and they'd just be pandering, and very badly at that. It would come across as lazy and insincere to people who wanted it, and just another pointless contradiction to people who didnt care or didnt want it, a lose/lose situation.

The effort would be much better spent reviving the sisters line, giving them a shot in the arm with books/games, and giving them some strong characters in the background that are interesting and have some actual depth. You know, the force created by the eccliascary specifically to be an equivalent of sorts to space Marines since they needed elite troops and werr forbidden to have men. They have the armor, weapons, and even some of the vehicles, they just lack the insane gene mods. In many ways, they were made to be female space Marines from the start, and then just mixed with nuns and Joan of arc if she listened to nothing but 80's metal because 40k was 80's as hell at the time.

And I call shenanigans on the idea that women are inherently less interested in wargaming than men are. That's the kind of thing we might have said about video games and tabletop RPGs, and look where we are now. I've got 4 female friends who actively play 40K - they just don't play at gaming stores. We have a private space in which they can play, so they haven't had to deal with the boys club behavior of male gamers who feel like their territory is being intruded upon.

Not to be rude, but you'll need to provide some proof to back that up to convince me. I have met many women video gamers for example, but for the most part, they don't care much for 'war' games like shooters or strategy games. They have their own interests and tend to prefer things like RPG's, exploration, platformers, puzzle games, etc. Some do play shooters or strategy of course, but I find that it's the exception prooving the rule, so to speak.

And I've seen the same in tabletop. Many RPG groups I've seen had at least one woman, sometimes more, and were pretty common. I can count the number of women wargamers on one hand, and I've travelled to a LOT of different stores in the USA. And of them, most did it because they liked to paint. I doubt that's just a result of bad marketing and social pressures from the community, part of it is that men and women tend to be wired a bit differently. Whether it's due to genetics, social pressures, upbringing, or what have you, it is definitely a pattern I've noticed.

And please realize that I don't want to keep women out of any hobby, especially not wargaming. I enjoy having a variety of people to play against and it'd be nice to have more "normal' people in the hobby. It's just that no hobby is going to draw a perfect 50/50 split of genders, most have tend to appeal to one side or the other more. Again, there's a lot of factors that tie into that, but for the moment, that's just how the world works. Until society figures out a way to completely eradicate gender norms and expectations, that's how it'll be.

Maybe we should take this elsewhere, im realizing I'm kind of dragging this thread off topic.

 Jewelfox wrote:

 Gamgee wrote:

 Grand.Master.Raziel wrote:
This might be relevant to the topic.

http://latining.tumblr.com/post/141567276944/tabletop-gaming-has-a-white-male-terrorism-problem

It always astonishes me how stupid people can be. I always hear about this stuff but never see it here thankfully, but I don't go there all that frequently or for too long. I have noticed a few odd creepy comments here and there but that's it.

I think that like, the top reasons why this goes on in any community are stuff like

1. It's done by PM / stalking / email
2. It takes forms that are hard to identify as misogyny or anti-minority prejudice specifically (i.e. shaming Tau players also discourages female anime fans from participating, shutting down discussion of female space marines discourages would-be Adepta Astartes)
3. It seems like a "joke," or like it's no worse than other forms of criticism (except that it's gendered)

This is all why hearing accounts like the above is important. >_>b

You might want to read Wyrd's version of events (in particular the bit where she threatened to take all of her "evidence" to the police if they didn't give her a job) before taking that at face value.

Especially since she supposedly has emails containing criminal conduct and a year later nothing has happened. Canada might not classify harassment on the Internet as terrorism (rightly so) but it's certainly criminal.

This is another article that might interest people on the subject.

Just because many women don'y play them doesn't necessarily mean they don't like them at all. It could simply mean they are designed almost entirely for men and their interests and so most women don't get involved in them giving the impression they don't like them. There could be other social factors involved like how creepy men can be in the war gaming scene. Or even something else entirely. This can apply to any group of people and it's why we must not hastily jump to conclusions.

This is why we have research done to determine if a group really doesn't like something or if its being dominated by one particular group and the product/activity in question is only meeting the needs of said group.

Once this is determined any steps a company feels are necessary can be taken to broaden their audience if they feel there is a niche to produce a game that more women would play.

I've had boyfriends and gf's that play, but not for nearly as long as I have.
It helps though that I'm very casual about it and love to teach to paint and model and play.

 Gamgee wrote:

This is why we have research done to determine if a group really doesn't like something or if its being dominated by one particular group and the product/activity in question is only meeting the needs of said group.

Once this is determined any steps a company feels are necessary can be taken to broaden their audience if they feel there is a niche to produce a game that more women would play.

Of course there's nothing wrong with creating something designed to appeal more to one gender than the other. Lots of products and brands are expressly designed to target one gender over the other (look at the many fashion houses that produce clothes for only one gender, for example).

The real question would be - will broadening appeal also dilute appeal? Weakening the game's appeal to an established audience in order to try and attract a potential audience is a risky move.

On the face of it combining elements of call of duty and the Sims might be the recipe to make a game that's equally popular with both men and women but in reality it might struggle to find anyone that likes it...

LoTR might have been expected have more appeal to women than 40K (solid female presence in the fan community for the books & movies and it lacks the macho-turned-up-to-11 aesthetic that 40K has) but anecdotal this hasn't been the case.

personally, in my opinion, 40k isn't as appealing over all to women because they don't tend to be as competitive as men. The same reason most PvP oriented games (FPS, MMOs) don't have as much female presence. However that doesnt mean there aren't competitive women! not at all.

Or perhaps a better way to state is we tend to express our competition differently.

Anyway, just my two cents as on of the few women I see in wargaming

Now. Someone help me convince my husband to play with me!!

*edit* because I forgot...

I do not want to see female models personally. I really don't care about them. I want male (if humanoid). I like males. That's what I'd rather look at. Since the aesthetic for the female models is made for guys generally, I don't see the point anyway. I don't need a "female" model to represent me or whatever it is that gaming companies seem to think the women want female miniatures for. I just need the hunky men ^_^

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 Gamgee wrote:

This is why we have research done to determine if a group really doesn't like something or if its being dominated by one particular group and the product/activity in question is only meeting the needs of said group.

Once this is determined any steps a company feels are necessary can be taken to broaden their audience if they feel there is a niche to produce a game that more women would play.

Of course there's nothing wrong with creating something designed to appeal more to one gender than the other. Lots of products and brands are expressly designed to target one gender over the other (look at the many fashion houses that produce clothes for only one gender, for example).

The real question would be - will broadening appeal also dilute appeal? Weakening the game's appeal to an established audience in order to try and attract a potential audience is a risky move.

On the face of it combining elements of call of duty and the Sims might be the recipe to make a game that's equally popular with both men and women but in reality it might struggle to find anyone that likes it...

LoTR might have been expected have more appeal to women than 40K (solid female presence in the fan community for the books & movies and it lacks the macho-turned-up-to-11 aesthetic that 40K has) but anecdotal this hasn't been the case.

I wouldn't expect it to at all. If you know anything about LOTR it has very little females in it at all. The movies that everyone is more familiar with have way more women in them than the books do and yet they really don't have much. Well they have the same characters but most of the female characters in the books barely have any role other than to be there for plot reasons. The movie took them and expanded upon them (a good thing).

It might not be super macho but it is definitely male biased. You raise good points. Which is why its good to talk to people in general.

 Scott-S6 wrote:

Of course there's nothing wrong with creating something designed to appeal more to one gender than the other. Lots of products and brands are expressly designed to target one gender over the other (look at the many fashion houses that produce clothes for only one gender, for example).

The real question would be - will broadening appeal also dilute appeal? Weakening the game's appeal to an established audience in order to try and attract a potential audience is a risky move.

On the face of it combining elements of call of duty and the Sims might be the recipe to make a game that's equally popular with both men and women but in reality it might struggle to find anyone that likes it...

LoTR might have been expected have more appeal to women than 40K (solid female presence in the fan community for the books & movies and it lacks the macho-turned-up-to-11 aesthetic that 40K has) but anecdotal this hasn't been the case.

No offense, but I don't buy this for a moment.

Myself (a minority) and my girlfriend (a woman and a minority) are both avid gamers and nerds. Video games are her favorite, I'm mixed between them and table top / miniatures stuff. Never have either of us ever said refused to play something, or been turned off of it, because of a lack of our respective rarer bits (race for me, race and gender for her) being present in that game.

You know what does turn us off of things? How things such as race and gender are portrayed and the messages which is sent about those things.

The view of women (or minorities) not playing something - be it a table top game or otherwise - because there are not enough of their gender / whatever represented is both false and honestly quite an immature way to perceive it. Rather than that it depends on how the particular thing approaches race and gender, because each of those things come with various stigmas (good and bad) anywhere and everywhere. Handling them in a mature and reasonable matter paints a positive picture for those interested who may not be the majority, where as boiling them down to the recent Space Crusade game by Produs(sp) harms the image and is apt to drive that type of person away.

Quite frankly I'm astounded and disgusted that harassment has been going on under my very nose! Maybe I'm too busy staring at the table and listening to my opponent to notice? Maybe this sort of thing is less prevalent in Australia? Maybe it's because I'm almost exclusively into 40k and let's face it, it's so squarely aimed at men it's not funny (there is only one female 40k-er in my area and they are trans-gender). That said I have attended the local CanCon, and there is almost always a Mtg event happening on the other side of the room as the 40k one. If I see this kind of behaviour happening the offender had better look out. I was raised by a single mum, I have three sisters and a daughter. I also have about fiveteen years of martial arts training... The reaction of the police I think is more concerning than anything. So angry right now.

 Gamgee wrote:

I wouldn't expect it to at all. If you know anything about LOTR it has very little females in it at all. The movies that everyone is more familiar with have way more women in them than the books do and yet they really don't have much. Well they have the same characters but most of the female characters in the books barely have any role other than to be there for plot reasons. The movie took them and expanded upon them (a good thing).

It might not be super macho but it is definitely male biased. You raise good points. Which is why its good to talk to people in general.

I'm not sure where the assumption comes from that it must have women in it for women to enjoy it (much like the assumption that an army must have female miniatures for women to like them). The LotR fan community has a very substantial portion of females (but by your logic there would be hardly any female fans of the books since women have such a small role in them...)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 morganfreeman wrote:

Myself (a minority) and my girlfriend (a woman and a minority) are both avid gamers and nerds. Video games are her favorite, I'm mixed between them and table top / miniatures stuff. Never have either of us ever said refused to play something, or been turned off of it, because of a lack of our respective rarer bits (race for me, race and gender for her) being present in that game.

You know what does turn us off of things? How things such as race and gender are portrayed and the messages which is sent about those things.

The view of women (or minorities) not playing something - be it a table top game or otherwise - because there are not enough of their gender / whatever represented is both false and honestly quite an immature way to perceive it.

I didn't suggest that at all. In fact I've argued against that premise in several threads. Did you mean to reply to someone else?

I suggested that a wargame based on books/movies for which a substantial portion of the fanbase are female might expect to attract a greater than typical portion of female players. Anecdotally it does not appear to have done so.

Men are, on average, twice as strong as women. We are typically way more violent and aggressive than they are, although IMO this is primarily due to the way men and women are socialised. (They get socialised, we get neglected and left to kill each other off, because EQUALITY.)

I would imagine, though, that a male Space Marine would be more formidable in every aspect than a female. The female would still be deadly, but anyone who really believes the female of our species is deadlier than the male simply doesn't know any women.