How are they missing if they don’t want to be there? I’m not sure what the empirical basis is of the claim that every human activity should have exactly equal interest to people of different sexes.
I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole here. Someone else lamented that 5% female participation is too low. I was merely trying to explore the size of the potential female audience for the game that we think is out there. I understand that some feel that exactly the same number of women as men would play this game if some set of barriers were removed. I doubt that, but don’t want to create diversion.
Historically, a lot of male-dominated activities have gained a lot more female participants as the stigma against women participating in them lessened. The reverse is true, too. Taking a couple careers as examples: Women were once prevented from becoming doctors, but the stigma against women going to medical school has dropped, and now a substantial number of doctors are women. On the flip side, many early computer programmers were women, but as computers came to be seen as for boys, the number of women programmers dropped.
So there’s lots of evidence that social factors can cause men and women to be interested in something at different rates. There’s not much evidence, however, for any innate difference in interests, because for virtually everything that men and women have very different interest levels in, there’s a lot of social pressure that could be causing the difference.
It’s not that “every human activity should have exactly equal interest to people of different sexes.” It’s that if an activity doesn’t have roughly equal interest to people of different sexes, that’s pretty likely to indicate that something is driving one sex away, and that sucks.
The fact that a large number of free and voluntary activities with no barrier to entry are pursued at much different rates by men and women.
I do not deny the existence of social pressures. I just don’t see the argument that social forces are the only factors at play or that we should conclude that every case of unbalanced participation is something to be lamented. It is possible that there are some things that on average more men enjoy than women and vice versa. That does not mean the women who do enjoy an activity should experience a hostile environment, but I do not think you can leap straight from a head count of players to the conclusion that it must be sexism keeping women away from the local meet up.
I have a friend who runs a retreat center where groups come for a weekend to either quilt or do scrap booking. The center is booked nearly every weekend of the year and virtually every person who attends - it may actually be all - are women. Does that mean no men like to do these things? Of course not. But neither should we conclude something is wrong in the quilting community merely because of the fact of differential participation rates in a purely voluntary hobby.
By all means let us try to expand our hobby. But can we at least entertain the hypothesis that the large disparity in interest between men and women might have something to do with the nature of the activity itself?
Let me first say that being drunk is never an excuse, you’re just as responsible for your behavior as of you were sober.
Having said that, maybe consider not having somebody commentate a livestream if they show up with a bottle of vodka? Quite apart from any offensive comments, drunk people are never anywhere close to as funny as they think they are.
No, we can’t, because you’re really missing the point. Tabletop gaming, as a hobby, is historically male-oriented in the same way that videogames were (at least starting early 90s when game companies decided to focus almost exclusively on young males). If you cater to one type, you’ll probably attract one type. It’s the same circular logic for why most big budget movies tend to not cast outside a very specific type. There’s also the fact that gaming is still difficult due to still existing and prevalent sexism (c.f. gamergate or five seconds on most online games). There’s nothing that says women are just less willing to like games like Netrunner-- there’s no netrunner or gaming gene linked to the Y chromosome.
More broadly speaking, absotively mostly summarized this point pretty well.
How are FFG, as the publisher, or we as a community, only catering to one type of player?
I think the article by @Ajar is great and certainly helps as a reminder on how we all can be the best people we can be.
That said, you can’t actually force people into playing a game… Social perceptions do exist and can’t be changed overnight. This will influence the diversity in the player base, like it or not. Gaming as a whole has become more diverse in recent years, but Netrunner is (a) quite a difficult game to master and (b) very very time-consuming to play competitively and take part in the community. So naturally it only attracts a small subset of the general gaming population. Combine this with (also) a smaller subset of non-white male gamers and you arrive at the numbers we have at tournaments today.
That is not to say we in the NR community shouldn’t do our absolute best to be inclusive and welcoming to all types of players. But that’s really all we can do from a community standpoint. The ‘outsiders’ still need to make the active decision to start partaking.
We’ll never know this to be true unless all the social pressures are removed. These pressures are pervasive throughout our society and often affect people on a subconscious level - for example the study of chess players (link below) in which women performed equally as well as men when unaware gender of their opponent but experienced a drop in performance when they were aware their opponent was male.
I don’t think we’re going to change these factors overnight. But what we should do is try to be better. Not just better than we are now, but better than gaming culture as a whole. Why? Because I love netrunner. I think it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. And because of that love, I want to play it with as many people as possible and I want as many people as possible to have the opportunity to play it and see why it’s so amazing. If some people don’t like the game then that’s fine, but I never want someone to be put off because they feel like an outsider or that this community is hostile to them.
In order to achieve this, we need to look for ways to counteract the stereotypes society puts forwards - that gaming is a interest “for men” and that’s just the way things are. And if we can find a way to achieve a more diverse community then hopefully other communities that suffer from the same issues we do now can look to us and see how we got there, and if one of those communities gets there first then we should look at what they’ve done and work out how to implement it into our own space. Good work is already being done by groups like Women of Netrunner, and by those organising specific events for women. As well as these positive efforts, we need to look at toxicity and sexism whenever it occurs, and show that these behaviours are not acceptable in our community.
FFG the publisher have made a game which includes diversity, with both male and female identities, and varying ethnicitiies - I think Netrunner is one of the best games out there for this. I don’t consider that the reason for the dominant current demographic is in any way a consequence of game design (in contrast, for example, to video games in which female characters are overly sexualised and/or play only minor roles).
Maybe there is some ‘intrinsic interest’ that women just don’t have, but we’ve no idea what that is, and it doesn’t take more than a cursory glance at history to show that a lot of the time this explanation was used for low female participation in various things (sports, voting, reading, sciences) - and was completely wrong. The actual reasons were at least in part that women didn’t think that activity was ‘for women’, or they were intimidated by the pre-existing gender disparity, or any number of other reasons that didn’t have anything to do with any amount of ‘intrinsic interest’ in the activity. The worst reason was that the communities of men involved in those activities had a culture of sexism and prejudice (stories of young female mathematicians being asked to make tea, for instance). I don’t think we, for the most part, have such a culture. Such things should be relegated to the dustbin of history by now. But it’s not entirely gone, as has been discussed in this thread.
We can’t address ‘intrinsic interest’, if it exists. You are right on that. But the things I have listed we can actually take some minor steps to address. Many of those steps are mostly about trying to act with more care and kindness to one another. That’s hardly a steep price to pay.
As for why you might want to care about this, rather than being satisfied with how things stand: potentially half the population are missing from the game. That’s huge. That’s a massive boost to turnout and contributions to the community, the game, and FFG’s market share. At a social level, I find (and I think you might find) events of solely one gender kinda weird - most of my day-to-day life does not involve such gender disparity, and it’s jarring to revert to. And finally I don’t like the idea that there are people out there who would enjoy Netrunner, or board-games in general, but are driven away by perceptions or behaviour about themselves or about us. My life would be much happier if my board-gaming life did not split my real-life friends by gender, and I think theirs would be too.
I find some of the posts here about female participation rates a bit selfish. There should be as many female Netrunner players as there are women who want to play Netrunner. We should try to remove any barriers to entry for women, but we shouldn’t try to get women playing because we want to feel less weird or want to feel progressive or anything relating to us. That’s selfish, and I could actually see it turning off women from coming to meetups.
[Does anyone know what the gender split is in Destiny right now? At my FLGS, the Destiny crowd tends to be much more diverse in terms of ages of the people and it does draw more females than my local Netrunner group.]
On the subject of inclusive language, referring to women as ‘females’ is weird and dehumanising.
Handled in a poor, sleazy way, it could. You are right that this requires being socially aware of how such things appear, and it is valid to worry about it being counter-productive. I’m not sure ‘selfish’ is the most constructive word to use when voicing such worries.
On the subject of enlightened self-interest, I’m comfortable with that. Do I buy my friends a gift because it makes them happy, or makes me happy? I’m not sure it matters, providing it’s handled with appropriate social awareness.
At least one other person on the internet seeing this thing from the perspective I see it (more or less). Let´s play Netrunner and leave the real world to the rest.
My guess is that many women just can´t see the point investing the amount of time and money into something completely silly like boardgames, computer games or Netrunner. That´s sadly my wife´s point of view. Come on everybody, you´re getting politics and all kinds of serious stuff in here that (at least that´s what I play Netrunner for) belongs somewhere else. My attitude when I play Netrunner or any other game: F*#+~ real life!
I’m sorry, that’s a terrible attitude. Netrunner means a lot of things to different people. It can be a hobby, it can be a retreat from real life pressures, it can be a safe space. Why you, or anyone else, plays is a personal decision and is unrelated to the qualities and values that we should be looking for in the community.
This thread is like a long list of all the common fallacies and problems that always crop up in conversations like this, which very patient and kind people are trying to address. The latest is in your post, where you claim women don’t play Netrunner because they don’t want to invest the time and the money in to it.
Firstly, that’s not a gender specific issue. Some women will feel that way, some won’t. The same will also apply to any other gender that you care to look at. There’s absolutely no evidence that it applies more to one gender than another.
Secondly, do you not think it’s a bit weird for a man on the internet to confidently assert why women don’t play games, especially when their self proposed answer means that they’re not in any way at fault and they can pat themselves on the back and just carry on as before? Would it not be better to actually ask women who are interested in gaming instead?
This is almost the definition of privilege here. Just because you do not experience barriers to participating in Netrunner doesn’t mean that they don’t exist for other people!
What? How is the word “female” dehumanizing? I use the word “male” in other places. Is that dehumanizing? In the case of Destiny at my FLGS, some of the players were children, so referring to them as women would have been factually incorrect.