"Male" games vs. "Female" games

[Minion133]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

girl gamers LMAO

[Reincarnate]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

I know plenty of female MMO players, but they're usually casual. That's the cool part about MMORPG games -- there's something for everyone, both hardcore and casual. Personally, I hate MMO's because they require so much timesink.

Agreed about "maintenance" though. I can't count the number of times I've heard of female gamers who were really into Pokemon, The Sims, and Harvest Moon, haha.

[Cavernio]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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.

[Arch0wl]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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.

[Cavernio]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

I have to say that I enjoy other types of games than just competitive ones though too, so maybe I'm just getting old or rebelling less or something. Recently I've gotten really into co-operative board games.

[Kilroy_x]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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

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]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

At FFR?

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

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]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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]

Re: "Male" games vs. "Female" games

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.