At the European Championships, as far as I can tell, around 220 of the 240 or so competitors were cis, white, males. That’s a pretty narrow demographic. There were 5 or so women players - that’s 2.5%
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I do not know much about other LCG communities, or board-gaming communities, or even video-game communities. But I do think the Netrunner community puts forward an unusually strong effort toward being inclusive, even if we are still faced with depressing statistics like the above. (Frankly, that may actually be an improvement on previous years.) That’s a good thing.
That’s probably why we’ve had such a strong reaction here. Because a lot of people really are putting a deal of time, thought and effort into making sure that nobody is made to feel unwelcome. That’s a good thing.
To clarify, the issue with the commentary was not that it was ‘silly’. It was not the quality, or professionalism, or relevance that anyone is concerned about in this thread (we can have a separate, much more light hearted discussion about that!). Rather it was content of the commentary: the words used, and the views expressed.
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It was a mistake to write out my comments without taking an hour or two to sit down and evaluate exactly what I wanted to say without causing confusion, both for myself and for others. Sorry about that.
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I don’t think there’s the expectation people spend an hour or two in contemplation before posting.
If it has helped clarify your thoughts, perhaps it has helped with those of others, too. So that’s no bad thing.
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@dragar I think this is generally true, yes - the game flavour is incredibly inclusive, and as a community, I think we’re better than many. As you say, though, it’s events like this one that hit so hard. We aren’t where we need to be.
At my Regional in Chicago there were only a couple of female players in a field of 37 (I think that was the number).
I noticed that there were a couple of female players in or near the cut at the recent DC Regional, but I have no idea how many were in the entire field.
What would a benchmark ratio be where we would say we are probably creating a good environment?
I have a hypothesis that I cannot test. We know that not every human on earth likes to play competitive card games. I would hypothesize that if you could do a random sample of the entire adult population, you’d discover a fairly pronounced gender split when it comes to interest in a game like Netrunner.
Part of that is probably due to the male-dominated state of the meta. That alone might discourage female interest. But I suspect – and I may be wrong – that you’d find more men than women have a base level interest in playing this sort of game.
If that is true – and even if you think it is not – what ratio of male-to-female participation would you want to see in order to feel like the game was doing a good job in being inclusive in this area?
[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.]
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Frankly, I’m not sure it’s productive to be thinking in terms of ratios. I’m deeply skeptical about the possibility of gender differences in Netrunner-liking, but that’s not to say that I think we should be aiming for 50/50. Still, there are different ways to approach the question. For example, we can start with “are there remotely enough women participating?” I don’t think we really need to start asking about specific numbers until the answer to that question stops being "no."
Another non-quantitative benchmark we can use is “are things like this still happening?”
That said, I do want to emphasize how pleased I am with the response to this situation. Precious few gaming communities would be having this conversation at all, much less as well as y’all are.
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I don’t know what you mean by “base level.” There is no physiological predisposition for a gender to like “this sort of game.” Women play videogames, men can like dolls, etc. That’s the same attitude that caused 90s videogames (and the associated advertising) to be terribly sexist-- it was a cyclical argument. So, yes, I think you may be wrong. Though, I know you meant well with your post.
The ratio that reflects the general population. Until that point, the balance is not good enough.
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Historically, of course, this has been used to explain why women aren’t interested in all sorts of things. The effect seems to vanish the less women expect, and are expected to, conform to this stereotype.
Expectations take time to change, but I’d like to live in a world where half the population are not missing from male-dominated activities I enjoy. Best get started now.
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Anyone else watch this stream just because of this article? I have to say I was a bit disappoint–expected more craziness after such build up haha.
Still an excellent article and very fair points. Certainly some of the comments went beyond the scope of acceptable banter. It stood out as particularly “wrong” being the finals of a major event. I can also see the argument for it being quite low content commentary for a finals game. I would also have been disappoint if I had watched this hoping for quality analysis. But to be fair, the game was also quite boring/low content, and there was still some quality analysis packed in between some obnoxiousness, eeews, and some real humour.
In any case, the silver lining of the whole thing is it shows how amazing the netrunner community is in coming down hard on these issues instead of brushing it aside. The most important thing is to not normalize it, and to not let it become acceptable. There are lines you don’t cross–even if the majority of your audience thinks it’s funny/ok. Thanks Ajar!
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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.
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What is the empirical basis that it shouldn’t?
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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.
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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?
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Social pressures affect men too. I would have thought that this was obvious.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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