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 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.


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 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.


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 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.