Sociologist E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman has an interesting article on women and role-playing games, trying to explain why so few women play RPGs.

OK, the article may well be interesting primarily to those of us who spent a lot of time in high school playing Dungeons and Dragons. But I suspect that RPG veterans are, ahem, disproportionately represented among the learned VC readership.

To me, another fascinating aspect of the article is the way in which the RPG culture is now primarily focused on online gaming, as opposed to the "real world" interaction that was the only game in town in the preinternet era when I played D&D.