"Male" games vs. "Female" games

[Kilroy_x]

Originally Posted by Arch0wl

I assumed women don't find competition and winning as meaningful because, generally speaking, they usually don't.

I have a better tournament record than you =/

Also... ugh. I don't know whether or not I use myself as an example against the OP or not. I know a lot of women that play MMORPG's and RTS's though.

[Cavernio]

Originally Posted by Arch0wl

I assumed women don't find competition and winning as meaningful because, generally speaking, they usually don't. What is true in general is not always going to be true in an individual's case, like yours.

Whoa whoa whoa...you can't get any cause and effect of women finding competition and winning as much of a drive because they don't 'win'. Generally speaking, most men, as individuals, don't 'win' either, because there can only be 1 winner in a competition that often has multiple competitors. Mathematically it is just not possible. I do not even agree that proportionally to the number of women/men who play, that women win less. I would believe it, but I could certainly see it going the other way too. Its not even a logical leap to say that women win less, therefore they won't even try. Trying leads to winning, not the other way around. What you said would also mean that men who lose often won't play the games either, which again, doesn't make sense due to the fact that not everyone can win.

[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by Kilroy_x

I have a better tournament record than you =/

At FFR? You and I are individuals; when you say "women tend to find competition less meaningful than men" you are speaking of men and women at large, not Arch0wl and Kilroy.

Even if you "used yourself as an example against the OP" this would only advance an argument about yourself and not women. You are hastily imposing a proposition of "All women are [x]" on my post, which is a misunderstanding of both my claim and the nature of general claims; in doing so you're making the ecological fallacy. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy

Originally Posted by Cavernio

Whoa whoa whoa...you can't get any cause and effect of women finding competition and winning as much of a drive because they don't 'win'. Generally speaking, most men, as individuals, don't 'win' either, because there can only be 1 winner in a competition that often has multiple competitors

You've misunderstood the quote you responded to. The quote is: "I assumed women don't find competition and winning as meaningful because, generally speaking, they usually don't. What is true in general is not always going to be true in an individual's case, like yours."

I take from your reply that you took this to mean "generally speaking, they usually don't [win]", but that's a misreading. You should read the sentence as "I assumed women don't find competition and winning as meaningful because, generally speaking, they usually dont [find competition and winning as meaningful]."

[Kilroy_x]

Originally Posted by Arch0wl

At FFR?

At music games in general, as far as I'm aware.

Originally Posted by Arch0wl

Even if you "used yourself as an example against the OP" this would only advance an argument about yourself and not women. You are hastily imposing a proposition of "All women are [x]" on my post, which is a misunderstanding of both my claim and the nature of general claims; in doing so you're making the ecological fallacy. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy

Oh sorry, I had a hard time telling what precisely your claim was because I didn't see any actual data.

[Arch0wl]

You might have a better tournament record than me in music games. I usually don't go to music game tournaments. I also don't know how you'd go about finding such a record. But this again would only matter if an individual example could counter the general, which it doesn't.

The claim of the first post can be reduced to "women generally prefer 'maintenance' games to 'expansion' games and this might be a plausible explanation for why men are overwhelmingly prevalent on forums and competitive video games despite their seemingly equal presence on websites like Facebook."

The data is pretty self-explanatory: look at the sex of FFR regulars (or the sex of regulars on the vast majority of forums) and compare that to the sex of any given person's Facebook friends list (even the most male-infested friends list usually tops out at 60%m-40%w); the sex of regulars at game tournaments (music games -- LAN games -- it's usually overwhelmingly male); the readership information for gaming magazines; honestly, all of this is common knowledge. This applies to most adversarial environments, as there are dramatically more male attorneys than female attorneys.

Do you dispute these ratios? Either way, this is unimportant, because I'm offering a possible explanation for those ratios, not establishing that they exist in the first place. If your concern about data was with respect to my psychological claims, here's an interesting article on the subject: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/...jec.122.3.1067

[Kilroy_x]

Ok, fair enough. There's just something about this discussion that makes me really uncomfortable. Perhaps it just makes me feel, well, between worlds if that makes any sense. Anyways, obviously I have nothing to contribute. Carry on and suchforth.

[Cavernio]

I indeed did misinterpret your quote arch. Now your quote is just meaningless though. 'It is so because it is so.' Not that I expected a contribution from you, being a competitive male gamer. I want female gamer's answers...why do you not want to compete in games? Is that really the case? Do some self-searching. Maybe this is a dumb question. Maybe if you answer that you don't understand how there's a strong desire to compete..?

[qqwref]

Originally Posted by Kilroy_x

Ok, fair enough. There's just something about this discussion that makes me really uncomfortable.

I think a lot of people (at least in the society I'm familiar with) are uncomfortable with talking about nontrivial differences between genders, and also races etc. I guess there's a subconscious connection between talking about gender differences and being sexist, even though it's not really discriminatory to look into or think about statistical contrasts between groups.

[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by Cavernio

I indeed did misinterpret your quote arch. Now your quote is just meaningless though. 'It is so because it is so.'

It's not meaningless. Your paraphrase of "I assumed women don't find competition and winning as meaningful because, generally speaking, they usually dont [find competition and winning as meaningful]" is circular, that is true, but that is an inaccurate re-wording.

An accurate paraphrase would be "I assumed women don't find competition and winning as meaningful because observable behaviors of women as a collective show that they do not demonstrate this tendency."

[ShAiOnEi]

Originally Posted by Cavernio

Totally agree Arch0wl. What I want to know, though, is why you women/girls DON'T find competition and winning as meaningful?
I am female, but I definitely feel like I fall on the male side when it comes to gaming. I was raised playing shmups and other quality Apple computer games (which I think we had hacked versions of?), and thanks to my older brother, had lots of exposure to them. I liked to win. These days I don't play many competitive games, although the main reasons for that is that now I'm old and slow, but the main reason is that the damned console controllers where all the GOOD competitive games are on, are unsuited to having a fingerless hand. (Giant xbox controllers are still giant and fail.) It also doesn't help that many competitive games have a single-player version that I don't want to bother playing (so I don't bother learning the controls well), and then I get my ass handed to me in online play. Furthermore, about the gender differences in spatiality (is that a word?), those could easily figure into why women gamers might find it harder to learn the games. Most competitive video games are based on spatial reasoning in someway or another, and if you're just bad at something (and bad at something where people like to rub it in your face that you suck), you're not likely to try that thing again. (Hell, this is why I don't play fps's anymore...I just have a steep learning curve. All that no-fingers crap is bullshit, I've overcome a million 'challenges' to having no fingers that if I really wanted to, I'd suck it up and learn to use a controller well if I wanted to.)
Anyways, I am a gamer, and I totally game (board and video) for the competition, and I feel that games are the perfect mediums to be a douche, because at the end of the day it doesn't matter. I don't want to pull all that competitiveness into real-life situations though, so I guess I do kinda get the non-competitive mentality.

My WoW main, uh, has over 9000, and, ummm, is a male character because ever since the advent of the internet I've hated being treated differently for being a girl.

I don't understand the no fingers statement there. Do you have fingers lol?

Anyways I kind of agree on arch0wl's personal theory on this because my girlfriend tends to like the facebook games such as farmville, millionaire city and harvest moon but what's also cool is she does sit down and play mmo's like runescape, FF 14. In that case she would also never lay her hands on an fps everytime I ask her if she wants to play black ops I get the same answers "oh I'm not good at that game, there is too much going on, I have a bad reaction time" what's funny though she can point out certain scenarios when watching me play online like people camping and the last stand perk that always pisses me off and empathizes with me which is kind of cool. I think she understands the game just isn't into it like I am.

[ShAiOnEi]

I don't know if I have some sort of magical power but recently everytime I post in a thread I epically kill it for good...

[reuben_tate]

Funny thing you guys mentioned Harvest Moon. I'm male and I have played that game (and actually enjoy it.) However, I don't play it for the maintenance or "female" aspect, I play it for the "male" or goal-oriented/expansion aspect. I place goals for myself as to go through the game in the most "perfect" scenario: marry the Harvest Goddess, get EVERY single item, master EVERY single crop. There is a statistics menu in the game and my general goal is to maximize every statistic in that menu. I actually dread the maintenance aspect. I hate having to ****ing plant, water, harvest, etc every single day in the game. I honestly play the game just to strive for those goals set in the game and to allow myself to expand in the game.

[Cavernio]

I have no fingers on my left hand, pretty easy statement to understand :-p

In any case, I take back a lot of what I said. I don't think its a competition vs maintenance thing, at least not wholly. Its really about marketing and who the game is primarily being made for, and competition is just a small part of those games. Farmville doesn't explode things, have gore, and...explode things. They are specifically designed for a niche market, and the competition factor in those games is just one part of them. And the more I think about it, the very definition of a game implies competition, and since apparently women play even MORE games than men (according to a link someone put up earlier in the thread,) the competition thing just doesn't hold weight. I believe that women play less FPSs, and since most games that are multiplayer on xbox and ps3 ARE FPS's, it makes a lot of sense that you don't find women on your friends list.

[deadlydreams_x]

Originally Posted by Arch0wl

This is an interesting topic and everyone's input can be useful here, because I'm sure most of you have opinions on this.

It's no secret that forums are usually overrun with men. Games, for a long time, have also been the same way. Recently though we've seen a few innovative companies capitalize on untapped female audiences: The Sims and FarmVille are perfect examples. Most of us know women who play these a lot, and before FarmVille it was NeoPets. But ruling out FarmVille, clearly there's something about The Sims that attracts women that other games do not have.

I became hyper-conscious of this when I stayed over at my girlfriend's suite virtually every other day for a year, while at the same time I was in theater, which is about 80% female. On a day-to-day basis I was engulfed by women. One thing I noticed was that all genders played a lot of games, but the men clearly played games differently than the women. This is what I mean:



If you think about forums and by association games like FFR, it's pretty obvious why games like this one are overrun with men and why there are so few female players at the top tier: quite simply, women are less invested in the competition. For however much you can say "lol, ffr is serious business", men like competition and view their accomplishments relative to what everyone else does, which is why number-based accomplishments ("429 XP! +1 STR!") are so appealing. Women do not usually do this -- they tend to view their accomplishments relative to what their friends do, or at most what people they know do.

(The best illustration of this happened when my girlfriend complained to me about "comparison compliments." I would say "you're one of the most beautiful girls I've ever met" instead of "you're beautiful." Honestly, I thought I was giving a more meaningful compliment because it was less ambiguous. >_>)

This is also supported somewhat by psychology. An old psych teacher of mine told me about a study where women fared much better in math classes made up entirely of women than they did with mixed genders. Thinking about it this way, it makes more sense, because there's an easily defined group to work with. I've known plenty of girls who would play Pokemon for example competitively among themselves, but they would never, and I mean never think to look up info about ideal team combinations on the internet.

Women, also, tend to fare better than men in vocabulary and remarkably worse in spatial skills. Games which heavily depend on sense of direction, like FPSes or flight sims, aren't going to mesh well with the female demographic. In fact, FPSes are almost anti-female. While RPGs also have a reputation for being dominantly male, they are at least dialogue intensive most of the time; FPSes are so designed for men that strictly speaking they're more male than sports games.

The image of a bunch of women in a room with tea candles and diaries isn't a common image without reason: women tend to like personal things and sentimental things to a much greater extent than men. I know very few men who keep journals, much less scrapbook; by contrast, almost every girl I know has a scrapbook of some sort. The games they play reflect this -- Animal Crossing and The Sims both allow for high degrees of sentimentality and personalization.

It's interesting that most of what has come to be known as "good gameplay" implicitly supports a lot of characteristics of games that men find appealing. Western game creators have gotten very good at making reward systems which make games extremely addicting for men. But the idea of reward systems is still, to some degree, the idea of expansion -- which goes back to that image I posted a while back. Any time you talk about getting better, about beating more people, you're talking about expansion.

And now you probably see what I mean, and see why there are so few female games out there. Most female games tend to focus on maintenance. This is an extremely unappealing game type for a lot of men, so when they do make maintenance-style games they do so in a way that can be played as if it were an expansion-style game. Pokemon can be played this way, as can Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and The Sims. By contrast, not many "male" games can be played in a maintenance-style way. They are almost always goal-focused with some sort of objective.

Notice that the maintenance-expansion difference also applies to websites, and why there are plenty of women on the internet -- just not in places you visit. My Facebook friends list is about 50/50 with men/women. My internet friends list, though, is a sausagefest.

What do you think? Does what I'm saying make sense? Do you have an alternate explanation? Either way, I'd like to hear your input.

I apologize if this isn't formatted correctly, it's my first post . Id have to say i agree with the chart, and the fact that MOST females are about there social life/circles. Females love to feel tight in a social circle, they enjoy bonding over having what they consider fun. Men can have fun while still being competitive. They are also a whole lot less sensitive. Men can loose a game and get upset, but know its just a game and there will be a chance for redemption, females being of an emotional gender, take to loosing personally. (when i say this i mean MOST not all lol). I do however feel there is a small percentage of woman who do not care about socialization. I would not classify myself as a man by any means, but i do feel game-play is competitive, i love gore, fps, and intense- interactive game play. i love to get better and better as i play. Most females don't find a game fun if they arn't good at it at first and almost instantaneously drop it (from what Ive seen) and move on to the next game they think looks cute or cool. They would not look up the strategical combination online, but instead dump the game. I feel game play that is not hard can get tiring after a while, and theres nothing more satisfying the completing what you have started in a game. Men however will keep trying if the game is intriguing (not they they have better attention spans they just are very goal oriented), which i respect and can relate to. i dont mean any disrespect to woman, lol i am one, i have just noticed these things over the years. I have sort of drifted from female friends and began gaming as i please. Maybe im just a rarity who knows.

[Vendetta21]

I don't understand why these generalities are at all important specifically because illuminating them feeds into the codification of gender roles and they are a somewhat dull and weak proxy for some underlying biometrics that we don't or aren't willing to understand.

[Cavernio]

Originally Posted by Vendetta21

I don't understand why these generalities are at all important specifically because illuminating them feeds into the codification of gender roles and they are a somewhat dull and weak proxy for some underlying biometrics that we don't or aren't willing to understand.

If you were making your living off of making video games, who your market is, and designing for it, would be somewhat crucial I think.

[Vendetta21]

Originally Posted by Cavernio

If you were making your living off of making video games, who your market is, and designing for it, would be somewhat crucial I think.

i guess but that makes this sorta ivory tower instead of some weird proxy about trying to understand each other (which is what it is)

[phe0nixblade]

i dont think killroy knows who arch0wl is lol

[LJRoX]

Originally Posted by phe0nixblade

i dont think killroy knows who arch0wl is lol

Looking at his FFR stats, he's really bad in music games in general.

[Kilroy_x]

Originally Posted by phe0nixblade

i dont think killroy knows who arch0wl is lol

Arch0wl: A dude who is terrible at everything except maybe stepmania and O2jam, dunno whether or not he's decent at IIDX but I doubt it.

Also, I don't think you know who I am, especially since you can't spell my name even though it's right in front of you.

Originally Posted by LJRoX

Looking at her FFR stats, she's really bad at FFR.

Fixed 4 coherence. Nice ban.