I’ve been playing mmorpgs for years or at least since tibia, lineage, pwo and mu and all my guild leaders have been women, with a sustancial quantity of women was well on parties and guild wars. What’s this all about
It’s pretty clear that games being male oriented has been somewhat of a self-fullfilling prophecy for decades. Publisher’s and manufacturers have pretty much exclusively targeted young males and so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they historically made up the bulk of the market as a direct result.
It’s honestly embarrassing how long it’s taken for that mindset to shift when there’s an obvious financial disincentive to perpetuating it.
Debatable whether there is a disincentive, the conventional wisdom as to how it came about was that toys are marketed in a gendered way and Nintendo decided to explicitly target their products at boys only to avoid spending double on ads.
If they were right, and marketing costs were not commensurate then, we might have passed the break even point since, but that’s no guarantee.
Plus it’s objectively easier to make successful products for a narrower audience (though “men” isn’t exactly narrow).
I’m seeing indie projects like BattleBit where they’re taking a very hardline stance towards voice toxicity, and I’m curious if that environment change could ever make it feel like a safer space to speak.
Few years ago I changed my nick on PSN because I coudn’t stand my old one anymore. I choose a name that sounded feminine to say the least. Unicorns and shit, don’t ask. So naturally people thought I was a gurl or at least super gay. I felt the change of behavior immediately.
In Destiny 2 alone I got revived way more often. People went out of their way to run across the open world map just to get to me. Damsel needed rescue I guess. I got a lot of invitations to Raids “Hey, we are LFG and we can explain everything to you if you want to”. I got these messages while standing arround the main hub. Doing nothing. While wearing the Raid exclusive Exotic on my character for everyone to see (fucking Eyes Of Tomorrow is almost as big as my char). I got called “bitch” and “slut” many times…come to think of it, that wasn’t new. Party invitations out of nowhere, chat invitations out of nowhere.
In Warframe some guy gave me an item for half the price for no apparent reason, after that he send me a chat invitation, I declined and he send me a PN wishing I would get raped. Another one I thought was afk in a mission, but no. He was just typing a message to me: “Hey, how are you doing? You new to Warframe?” Again, me jumping around in a highly optimized Nekros/Atterax build…
Sooooo online gaming is full of psychos. I didn’t question that but it was then when I fully understood how bad it was. There are a lot of women playing games, some even play Call of Whatever is cool atm. They just stay quiet and play eighter with friends or with other women. There are nerds out there who are beyond insufferable.
When I was about 13 or 14, I revealed to my WoW friend (who I’d been playing with for months) that I was a girl and within a day he went from being my cool friend to someone who was offering me raid gear in exchange for talking dirty to him through Ventrilo.
Nearly 20 years later and I refuse to let anyone in on my gender. It’s dehumanizing that we can’t even play a game without being harassed.
I often play female characters and occasionally have the same experienced.
Recently i started a new game, someone helped me with something that I thought would take like two minutes, but it went on and on and he was friendly and helped me further. When we were finished after at least an hour, he said something which made it obvious he thought that I was a woman. I corrected him and he said “oh, lol” and immedeatly left the group. So fucking weird.
It’s also funny to me because i never even look at usernames, neither in games or reddit, lemmy, etc. don’t know why, but I just skip over it. So I don’t even come to think who the person might be. Only when I’m in a group and have adress someone specifically I read what the names are.
I typically do it regardless since its not harming anyone by using it but is definitely helpful for those who need it. It does also help Monster Hunter understanding of needing it since I also have trouble determining if a message is meant to be sarcastic or fr fr
I’ve played wow (MMOs tend to be popular with women, my guild has several women), overwatch, and am playing diablo now. Call of duty just looks kinda boring to me. I also play alot of single player games.
I almost exclusively play single player games or multiplayer games with friends I know in real life. I’ve had some bad experiences with online gaming and they are often way too stressful for my liking.
I can totally see why we’re more attracted to MMOs. Even male players are playing as women so it’s way easier for us to blend in. It’s also not really voice reliant so there isn’t an indication that we are women. Along with just typically having way more content we can do solo
The comments: No way, women don’t play games. I never see them.
Yeah no, they might not be on your games. But having seen the sheer lust for Link, I’m not surprised switch is popular.
And the crazy thing is, the industry really doesn’t do a good job at this. The numbers could really be higher, especially mobile, but the sheer number of male fantasy waifu games out there is ludicrous. (Although, unsurprisingly, the dollars earned from whales are overwhelming male, especially internationally where the wage gap is higher, so that’s what drives that).
Even if I don’t intend to start hard-simping and white knighting, it’s always a good indication to me if a Discord server or community has at least one woman in it. This canary isn’t coughing up toxic fumes, so maybe I won’t mind this coal mine.
Word. Just left a few communities that I was the only gal in. They can choke on their rape jokes, dick holding and death threats. But I’m the one overreacting to them “burning off steam”.
I wanted to play a game without having to deal with a bunch of sexist manchildren, not call the suicide hotline twice in six months.
Not to mention that a lot of women have bad experiences with online gamer guys being sexist assholes, so they might not want to call attention to themselves.
Wow I’m a little surprised it’s grown so much so fast.
I guess anecdotally it’s not terribly surprising? 30s. Busy af. However my gf has been straight dragging me through Terraria, Cosmoteer, and seems like Battle Bit soon. She had a lot more flexibility with her schedule so I’m just trying to keep up.
I (F) have always played video games (started with the NES and AD&D games on PC) because my dad had bought them for my brother, and they were fun. Nearly all of my female friends in junior high played N64 games along with our male friends, but now having friends in my upper 30s, very few of them play video games unless they’re on mobile. And even if they do play mobile games, it’s not Stardew Valley. It’s the shitty ones that come pre-installed or they found through ads on Facebook. There are a few from my junior high nerd bubble that I’m sure still play, but I keep it on the DL at work because everyone is mostly frustrated with their husbands and kids and how much time they sink into games. They’re judgy about it. I’ve started occasionally admitting I play games, but feel like I have to say we play them as a family, and relate it to board games.
The article surprises me. Although my daughter had tons of friends to play with online during the pandemic, so maybe it’s more zoomers and 20-somethings?
I think it might be that women with kids are often overwhelmed with looking after everyone, the idea of sitting and investing time in a console or computer game is just not part of what they feel they have time for. Mobile games are a bit easier to just put down when needed. That said I’m in my 40s, no kids and gaming all my life. I tend to play single player, replaying BotW at the moment and trying to 100% it. I have a lot of other women friends who play as well, but they do all tend to not be moms.
I get the productivity shame as well. Like if I mention a game I play, then someone is piping up with a fence they fixed or something etc etc.
It seems like you’re getting your femininity attacked as well which seems so strange. I just thought we would’ve learned by now. Like in our generation (looks like we started at the same time) I was teased (to say the least) a lot for my “nerdy” interests but now it’s like most of it is vogue. It’s dumb that we would repeat that with a specific gender.
I don’t know if it’s of any use but the majority of my lady friends game. Thru mostly also tend to be quiet about it unless nudged. That is to say that you’re not weird, just awesome.
Your comment is so kind! Thank you!!! And you’re right, I’ve never really thought about it like that, but it DOES feel like my femininity is attacked! It’s easy to wave off the incel “tHeRe ArE nO wOmEn On ThE iNtErNeT” comments that I don’t come across as much anymore, but from people I know face-to-face, it gets to me. At least enough to avoid the topic. I’m sure there are a lot of women like me all hiding that we play video games!
It’s not fair that you’re getting the productivity shame either. The people who do that are usually the same people that are like, “Have you seen the latest 5 different series that have dropped on Netflix? I watched them all last weekend.”
Oh well. I feel like it’ll only get more socially acceptable to spend our free time however we want! It can only go up from here!
I can’t quite find where it is, but there is a Wikipedia article about percentage of female gamers around different parts of the world. I can remember FPS players was few, only about 10%, in Japan more Women play games, and in average it was indeed around 50%. And this number was from years ago.
I can say from my experience most women I know are gamers. I'd say the biggest difference is they tend to play more single player experiences. My older sister has always been a big jRPG nerd, and my younger sis was always into Bethesda games, especially Fallout. Meanwhile a lot of my friends are into life sim games like Stardew Valley, the Sims, and Animal Crossing, and we tend to play the latest big nintendo game together.
I am probably the only person in my group of friends that does anything remotely multiplayer, unless it's local or coop.
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