The Volokh Conspiracy

The September 2006 edition of The Believer magazine (no religious affiliation) has a great article on the pop culture history of D&D and RPGs in general. The article is by Paul La Farge. You can't view it for free, but it's worth the money to purchase.

The Role Playing of "The Sims" was more popular with the female demographic than with the male.

What did that do differently?

How about #29 under section 1:

"Play in the Phallic Universe" by Margaret A. Honey

Now that's comedy.

"Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Freud....."

How very interesting. I have always suspected that there was a sizeable contingent of actual pen and paper gamers in the professional legal world, but I've never seen independant confirmation of it. I, personally, have kept my bi-weekly gaming sessions under my hat out of fear of social and professional condemnation. Perhaps it's time to come out of the D&D gaming closet... Rules lawyers unite!

I was surprised at the survey which showed few female MMOG players played male characters. In tabletop role-playing, at least in my social circles, it seems to be more common for women to play male characters than for men to play female characters, and the woman I know who's most into on-line games commonly plays male characters on-line. I suppose it's just evidence that even among gamers my friends are weird.

There is almost no role-playing in online RPGs. In a table-top game, you actually play the role of your character. That almost never happens online. People typically just talk as themselves. And as MMO guilds have moved more and more to things like Teamspeak, which allow them actually to talk to each other instead of type, the amount of roleplaying online has plummetted.

The Role Playing of "The Sims" was more popular with the female demographic than with the male.

What did that do differently?

The Sims is entirely openended, and depends on the creativity and social skills of the participants. Almost all other MMOs are level treadmills of some sort, where you kill 28383883838 monsters to advance to the next level to become more powerful so you can kill 399399393993992893 monsters. Or where you spend a gazillion hours completing a quest to get that Uber Bastard Sword of Dorkitude. Maybe men are much more willing to volunteer to be gerbils?

Partially I suspect it is a social thing. Women are far less likely to hang out only with nerds and geeks. Any other group will often have strong social prejudices against playing such games.

More broadly though roleplaying systems, as opposed to just reading books or even writing them, seem to appeal because they bring a quantitative technical system to the game. RPG players love to poor over their tables and figure out what combinations are optimal. Hell most RPG players I knew spent far more time doing this than actually playing.

In other words I suspect the same reason men seem to be far more interested in mucking around with computers and other pointless technical pursuits is at play. Scientists have been trying to work this out for years. It seems very complicated as the studies I have seen suggest it lies somewhere in that vast muck of nature/nurture interactions and feedbacks hence correlations don't help you much (does the fetal testosterone matter because it affects interest or because it affects sexual desire or socialization which affect behaior?)

nazi,

isn't there also something going back to the hunter-gatherer societies, where the skills needed for hunting were different from the skills needed for gathering, the result being that men today have more to do with things like math and computers... if RPG's, something that I am unfamiliar with, call upon those kinds of skills, that would help explain the disparity.

/channeling Larry Summers

Am I the only one who's noticed that when there is a woman playing an mmorpg, she's often playing along with her husband And often as a healer class while he plays a tank/DPS class -- i.e. very traditional gender roles?

I've played WoW and EQ1 and 2, and I've seen that more than a few times.

The article linked to above makes a number of good points, but I think there's more going on than society or the media telling women that's it's not "normal" for them to play mmorpgs.

Also, I've noticed that often the head guild officers are often female -- perhaps making more a social game than a stereotypical hack-and-slash, solitary "male" game.

I guess my experience with this is that there's more to the traditional gender roles than them just being ways of thinking society places on blank slates. But having said that, I'm starting to worry about why I picked a PvP server on WoW.

If you want real roleplaying online, you're currently pretty much limited to MUDs. The MMOs and such have aspects of roleplaying (customization/power over time), but don't really allow you to 'play a part' in a fictional world.

One of the best I've found is Armageddon, which has a surprisingly high number of female gamers. It's 'roleplaying required', which is much more than just not discussing the score of the recent Redskins game. In fact, the person who has been running it for the last decade is a woman.