Gaming and Women

[nancylebov]

http://www.tasteslikephoenix.com/articles/women.html

A very interesting essay--I can't speak to its accuracy because I haven't gamed much, but it sounded reasonable, and is the best thing I've seen about paying attention to your student's awareness while you're teaching.

I don't think it's quite right about why women hate having their player characters raped. The essay focuses on the implied real-world threat during in person gaming, but my bet is that getting a character raped in anonymized online play would still generally be unwelcome. There are women who like rape fantasies, but I suspect they would at least want a clearly marked context, and gaming in general is not that context.

Link thanks to Joe Bednorz in rec.arts.sf.written.

Comments

[solri.livejournal.com]

"No, no, I heard you. I just don't get why anybody plays like this when you can have a success-based system that makes combat go faster, uses one kind of dice for everything so you don't have to memorize it all, and has a definitive scale that tells you what the numbers mean in real-life terms."
That was exactly my reaction to D&D when I first encountered it (I started role-playing with the now defunct and much better Dragonquest, which used a simple percentage system for everything). D&D and its relatives are too heavily influenced by table-top wargaming. Not that I've anything against wargaming (I used to have a Roman army back in the 1970s) but it's a different kind of game.

Imagine how you would feel if every time a player mentioned killing your character, you knew they were wearing a gun.
That's a very good analogy. I don't think even consensual sex between PCs is good, let alone rape. In one game I ran, a player raped an NPC (or at least had sex under ethically dubious circumstances - I forget the details), so I gave him a venereal disease which made his dick fall off. Then I magically resurrected his dick as an NPC, just so we could carry on taking the piss out of him.

Thanks for mentioning this article - if I do my games course again (which I probably will next semester) I'll use it in class, or at least link to it from the course website.

[cleverthylacine]

What in the world could be wrong with consensual sex between PCs?

(I don't think I would play in a game where that wasn't allowed!)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Imagine how you would feel if every time a player mentioned killing your character, you knew they were wearing a gun.

I'm not convinced that's the issue. I bet there are people who routinely carry guns--police, soldiers, hunters--who play games which include deadly combat but who don't find it frightening or a violation of trust if a character is injured or killed.

[twistedchick]

"Generally unwelcome"?

Character rape in a roleplaying game is an act of open hostility toward the woman playing the character. It can be used as a psychological threat, as harassment, as many other things that should not be going on in a friendly roleplaying game. It should be no more allowed in the gaming world than it is in the real world.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

It's role-playing, not reality. I have no problem with it, as long as there is also no problem with the results there-of. In other words, if a female character is raped, then the male character doing the raping can expect to have his dick cut off while he sleeps. Or, if (in D&D, anyway) he's of any good or lawful alignment, he's just totally screwed that all to hell, and any benefits he received from alignment disappear -- good-based magical items now turn on him, the party palidin now considers him an enemy to be destroyed, or if he is a paladin or a priest class that requires good or lawful alignment, he's just lost his class, magic, and any other benefits of that.

I like hard-core role-playing, with gritty realism. If you play a weak, helpless character in a party of cut-throats, expect difficulties. Anything else would be out of character. However if you play a vicious amazon bitch goddess... then they should expect difficulties with carrying out any nefarious plans, and you should exact appropriate revenge if they happen to succeed. If it's in character, it's in character. Choose your characters wisely.

And be fair, too. If you're running the game, remember that the men are targets for brutalization in prisons every bit as much as the females, and just might take it harder. Also remember that there are settings where castration is a likely outcome of capture. If you and your group want to rp on those levels, then make sure it's not just the female characters that suffer.

Of course, all games should be suited to the temperment of the group. I certainly wouldn't allow or script any rape-scenes in the game I run for my two kids (g-9, b-12), for example, and I've had 'fragile' friends (both male and female) who I wouldn't run such a game for, either. But I'd never say that such a thing was 'always' a threat, or that it was 'never' appropriate, and frankly don't think anyone has any business saying so to me or my groups. People are far from homogenous, thank the deity of your choice.

[twistedchick]

Yes, it is role-playing, which allows people to express emotions and attitudes toward others through their characters that they might hesitate to express otherwise. That doesn't mean the emotions go away after the game, either. Hostility is hostility. I walked away from it as a player after a situation in which thinly veiled male hostility at the lone female in the game spilled over into active verbal attacks afterward. There's no reason for that, and no excuse. And, FYI, the reason given for the attack was that my characters *weren't* wimps, "weren't female enough"; they were a top-level valkyrie and a kick-ass wizard, the equal of any other characters on the table.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

Okay? I've encountered the same thing. I've also encountered groups where their characters could be the most vicious of mortal enemies, and after the session they're best friends, laughing and joking. I've been the sole female in groups and felt obvious hostility, I've also been in groups where I felt incredibly welcome, and other where gender didn't seem to matter a bit. Yes, in some groups, they use the freedom that being 'in character' gives them to express hostility... but that hostility was there to start with, so whether or not it was covered up by 'play nice' rules, you still would _not_ be welcome, and they still _would_ be assholes, and at the very least, you'd know they weren't people you wanted to trust or associate with.

No, there was no reason for your experience, and no excuse. The guys were jerks, period. They'd still be jerks even if there was a 'rule' against hostile role-playing, though. Jerks are jerks, and no amount of rules are going to change that. Likewise, good people are good people and no _lack_ of rules is going to change that, either. Sorry you met up with the jerks rather than with a good group, but it was the people who were the problem, not the game or the freedom it gives.

The main thing that strikes me as important is to not generalize and make broad declarations of 'never' and 'always' based on individual experiences. There are groups like that, yes, but there are others who are quite capable of seperating in-character emotions from real emotions. Speaking as someone who does a lot of the gm'ing, I've never yet felt any desire to slaughter, torture, and maim any of my players, despite the fact that the badguys I play have exactly that goal in mind. Nor have my players ever expressed any feelings of being threatened by me, personally, because some evil wizard trapped their character in a room with a hungry dragon. Bear in mind that in every campaign, there's at least one participant who's _job_ it is to put your characters in peril. If there's never any feeling of 'danger' to the game, then it quickly grows incredibly boring, but no one ever things the dm is going to follow them home and attack them (unless, of course, the dm is a slimey bastard, in which case, why are you gaming with him?)... they just see it as his job and part of running a good game. Part of playing a good game is to get in character as much as the gm does for her NPC's, at the very least. Part of being a grown-up is being able to leave that character behind when the game's over.