Gender in Avadon: The Black Fortress

I played the demo and then very nearly didn't buy this game. I changed my mind and bought it after I found the developer's blog, and rediscovered that he'd done the Avernum games as well, one or two of which I've played and enjoyed before. But it was really hard for me to be optimistic after the very start of the game: character selection.

The men are fighters, and the women are casters.

That's it. There's no choice, no customization, in that regard.

I will concede, at least it is a 50-50 split. The two blade-wielding characters are men, and they're matched by two female caster options. And I've yet to be in any way insulted by anyone's clothes in this game; everyone seems pretty reasonably dressed. (Within the bounds of tradition, you know, wizards going to do battle in robes.) These are good things. And I understand that it's easier, when you don't have a big development team, to limit the number of sprites you have to create.

But my first gut reaction of dismay and resignation was telling, and in fact, being halfway through the game, I feel my gameplay experience is negatively affected by the inability to choose a warrior chick for my main character. I picked the shaman, but it's just not the same.

See, I have the habit when I play an RPG, if I can choose a class for the main character I have on hand all the time, it will be something like a paladin if that's available. Something built for survival. Why? Because sooner or later, they tend to put you into one or two solo missions. If you're a glass cannon, and you're prone to dying on your own, it's going to be a problem. And in fact, there are solo missions in this game, and I did feel a little irritable about it, and I think I had to reload once, because it was hard. And as well, I'd absorbed enough of the in-game thematic encouragement to think of myself as totally badass and able to handle anything. Thankfully, I chose a shaman and not a wizard, so I could summon a pet to help hold off some of the groups of enemies. But if I had the blademaster, I could have just run in and attacked everything and I think it would have been more satisfying.

The other problem I have is that when you're exploring, it's just practical to have your melee characters go in front. That way they get most of the default enemy attention, and they have less distance to run to get into the fray. Now, the way the game interface is set up, you can put someone at the top of your roster to be the "lead" character, i.e. the one that walks around in front. But this also means that this is the character who steps forward when you go to take an action, like open a door, open a chest, or talk to someone. This is the default person who picks up inventory items, and the default person you shop for. So, I feel like this is the person in charge of my party. Not my "main" character. Doesn't help when I take the blademaster on a mission where I get to work with other soldiers and he starts going on about how "I'm so happy I have my own command, now!" Hey, man! This is MY command! I'm the one in charge! Jerk.

On a related note, but not so much to do with gender: I have yet to find any characters I really like in this game. All the companion characters are crazy and obsessed about something and usually really violent regarding their obsession. I feel like I'm playing through the Facebook movie, where everybody is shifty and bitter and I don't much identify with any of them. At least they're...interestingly flawed characters? I guess? But, man, when I take the wizard girl everywhere, and then she's like, "Hey! We need to talk. Look, I'm tired of waiting around here all the time. When are you going to take me out hunting?!?!" and I'm like, "Uh. I take you everywhere. Everywhere! We just got back from a 5-story dungeon crawl!" but all I can say to make her happy is "You're right. We should go hunting soon." Well, that's a little weird.

Note that I'm not through with the game, and I can already see a plot reason developing as to why all the people I can pick to go adventuring with are slightly psychotic.

In fact, the only person I really unreservedly like in the game is a duke. One duke. He's all young and idealistic and wanting to use his power for peace after years and years of war in his country.

Which brings me back to the gender discussion. It seems that most all of the people at the top of the power ladder here are male. You could say, hey, it's just a feudal society, so what do you expect? But -- there are lots of women with power. All the shaman women seem to have power, they're just isolated and people don't necessarily respect them anymore. (Aside from the one lord's shaman wife, who talks big, but she's just kind of isolated, and opinionated by herself in a little garden, I guess?) Redbeard's "wives" are the people with most of the day-to-day power in the ultra-powerful fortress of Avadon itself, but really, they are subservient to Redbeard, and maybe not that happy about it. They are powerful women, but there is a glass ceiling, maybe. And Redbeard is set up as the ultimate power that no one can defeat (unless, I suppose, you do it yourself -- again, I haven't gotten far enough to see how that option might play out.)

Ultimately, the power balance in Avadon is convoluted enough that I'm willing to let it lie. I have mixed feelings about the name "Redbeard's wives" for the three powerful, dangerous, competent women who answer directly to the man in charge, given that none of them like the name and it's evidently intended to be slightly derogatory, but okay, maybe we're dealing thematically with sexism here and it's making a point.

But there's no reason that the ultimate powerful rulers of the different countries should all be men. This isn't medieval Earth. No one in the game's world ever questions that a woman can be as powerful as a man. The idealistic duke could be a duchess. The shaman wife of the iron-fisted lord could be reversed to a shaman husband of an iron-fisted lady (if you had a sprite for a male shaman). That would be even more of a compelling character, I think: the violent woman trying to strengthen her leadership position at any cost for the long-term protection of her people.

I think I've seen two soldier leaders bugged to display a female warrior while the dialogue text refers to them as "he". Every time it happens, I get excited. Is this a lady in an active combat leadership position? ...Oh. (So then I kind of keep flipping their gender in my mind, and trying to assume they are women as they appear, until they open their mouths again.)

Anyway. It's a good game, overall. Worth playing if you like old-school RPGs with skinny sprite graphics, and lots of complex moral choices with no clear-cut "best" option. Possibly a tad violent (being that you're plotwise expected to kill anyone who defies your organization and won't submit for punishment). And most of my gender-related issues with it are subtle and complex rather than blatant and obvious. I am really happy about art that doesn't feature pointless cleavage, even to advertise the game. I'd just like to encourage things to keep moving in the right direction.

On play (and life?) mirroring story: the token girl

I was reading a ReelGirl article about how Disney has decided to make more animated shows for boys, because boys are more interested in animation than girls, but the author argues here that this is because there aren't as many shows about girls, aside from damsel-in-distress roles. And another about Smurfs -- how there are 15 of them that are boys, and only one is a girl.

I started thinking about my own childhood and what kinds of stories I absorbed...

First of all, I just wasn't very interested in movies with "real" actors until after 4th grade. I liked animated movies. I dunno why. Maybe my parents were just really good at convincing me I didn't want to see anything over PG. (Kind of like how they taught me to be excited when the "music truck" went by...it was years before I knew they even carried ice cream in it.)

Then, I grew up with video games, and boys for best friends in my childhood. Our go-to game, on which we based a lot of our make-believe play, was Final Fantasy 2 (or IV in the properly ordered re-releases). I always, always chose to be Rosa or Rydia when we were acting out turn-based combat or whatever other outdoor videogame-based play we did, except when we made up additional characters, and then I'd still play female characters there too. I think we made up families for all the game characters, and those may have had more balanced gender lists.

So, in FF2, there were two playable female characters to, I dunno, at least 6 or 8 male characters. But it was 2/5 of the really important characters you took to the end of the game. But, for me, this wasn't too weird -- because all of my favorite friends (that I played with outside of school) were boys, too. One girl in a group of boys? Well, sure! Nothing wrong with that. (Besides, while in retrospect, Rosa was pretty submissive, Rydia was sassy and opinionated and strong-willed and could put out a lot of firepower and on one occasion single-handedly rescues your entire party.)

Then I think of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I didn't watch it very often on my own, but I picked up on the excitement about it from my guy friends, so I liked the theme song and at some point memorized all the character names. One of my friends had a TMNT themed birthday party, where all the attendees got to dress up. I got to be April, the only girl in the story. My friend's little sister, the only other girl involved, made the generous choice to be a Turtle and let me have the only April costume. I was faintly ashamed that I hadn't been the one to step up and make the sacrifice of a same-gendered identity for her benefit, but also a little relieved, because I liked being a girl character. But it was a really cool party with friends I really liked and some kind of elaborate maze in the garage, so I definitely wanted to be there and participating.

And my own favorite saturday morning cartoon, the one based on Super Mario Bros. 3! I loved Princess Toadstool. I got to be Princess Toadstool for Halloween once. But I don't know if I would have liked her as much if it hadn't been for that show. She probably had to be rescued by Mario and Luigi sometimes, sure. But other times, she was an active participant. I remember a scene where she shows up with vital powerup items -- without her being on the team, Mario and Luigi totally would have lost the fight. And sometimes she gets headstrong and goes off and does her own thing (for some reason I have this picture of her in a swimsuit in my head, hanging out with surfer dudes, but somehow this is associated with her being a free-willed, independent woman. Maybe it's just that it shows she can have more aspects to her personality than only and always "princess".)

In any case, I had plenty of childhood exposure to a skewed gender ratio in my stories, and in my friend base. As an adult, I sometimes crave a more even balance, or even female-centric stories and groups. But at the same time, I'm able to enjoy myself in a group of men, doing a traditionally male-dominated geeky activity. Maybe I learned that this is possible thanks to those token females in the stories. Maybe I'm prepared to dive into these man-groups because I learned early on that it's okay to be the only woman in an otherwise man-group.

So if you're going to make a token female character, please make sure that she pulls her weight as an active part of the team, at least. And remember, I still want more women around me in my geeky groups and my stories, even if I can make do without them.

Accidental femsploitation?

I like to spend some of my time creating game ideas and writing them up. One involved a pair of girls, who were Best Friends Forever since childhood, and one of them must rescue the other from the evil villain, using the power of science.

I shared the (slightly more fleshed out) early design with a friend, and his reaction was, "femsploitation, nice, i can dig it."

I was taken aback. Exploiting stereotypes of femaleness for the sake of humor? That sounds bad! I didn't mean to do that! Except, I kind of did. I was giggling a little inside as I wrote up the storyline.

And then I begin to question the validity of the work and my goals in how I set it up. Am I going to include something that trivializes the experience of women or any other group represented in the story? Am I going to offend feminists by letting the women in the story have "trivial" interests like crushes and BFF? Will I trivialize the experiences of black women pursuing advanced science degrees if I make the main character into a black woman scientist who makes no big deal of being what she is? After all, I haven't thus far consulted any black woman scientists in the real world to try to find out what they feel about life, the universe, and everything.

I've also spent a lot of time in the past couple of weeks reading about feminism and concepts like privilege, wherein a person doesn't realize the benefits they have or the ways in which another group is disadvantaged. So I feel an urge to do mental backflips to try to see what I might be overlooking in terms of messages I accidentally convey that could somehow hurt people.

But I think I am on target. I wanted to make a story that pushes the boundaries in storytelling a bit, something that takes the default superhero "man saves woman hooray!" story and turns it on its side, to "woman saves BFF hooray!" and see what happens. I want to reach the "normal female" audience, or the audience who has a certain narrow idea of what a "normal female" is, and tell them it's okay and possible to become a strong woman without giving up everything familiar and girlish if they don't want to. I want to say, you can have a major, dramatic life experience without it being all about falling in love and living happily ever after with your SO, even if you are a woman. I want to celebrate values of friendship and community; whether you think of that as stereotypically feminine or not, I believe those are good things!

Yes, I have it in mind to play off of some stereotypical female behaviors, partly for the sake of humor. But I don't mean to pin down and weaken the female character with these behaviors, nor to define her with them. I mean to allow her to have them, without reducing her overall strength and capability.

And I realize it's impossible to predict everything that could possibly offend anyone. Maybe it's overly feminine to worry about it in the first place, or maybe it's just the same kind of quandary that many standard-white-men face when someone first accuses them of ignoring their privilege, but it's taken conscious effort for me to move past it. My solution is this:

1. Don't deliberately include content I know to be really offensive to some groups of people.
2. Acknowledge any feedback from offended parties and try to consider them next time.
3. Acknowledge that no story will ring true to every audience member.

I can't write something that illuminates all aspects of an ideal world at once, and also resonates with all possible readers. My work will be incomplete in that sense, and it will be flawed in some ways. Then, 100 years from now, it may seem offensively old-fashioned and stereotypical. But it will still have value now, and it will put something new into the mix of culture out there. I think that is a good goal: create something that is different from most of the other video game and superhero stories out there, and see if anyone follows that path.

That would be my favorite possible outcome: as a result of something I make, more people create major characters and concerns that are minorities amongst the current collection of characters and concerns in the medium, and eventually we get to have stories that make me think and feel more new things, and help me become a broader-minded person, able to believe in new possibilities.

Arrogance in a casual game design (about butterflies)

In checking out the Chrome web store, I've found various Mahjong games. One I picked up a few months ago, Mahjong Butterfly, I found to be fairly enjoyable for a mindless, relaxing variety of game. You can pick up three different tiles at once and match any of them, so it's rare to be seriously stuck. And there is a "butterfly collection" component on the side, which allows for an excuse to keep playing the game longer than a handful of rounds, where you still feel like you're achieving progress toward a longer-term goal. I eventually filled out the butterfly catalogue, and wandered off from the game for a while.

The other day, I was looking to fill that mindless puzzle game urge again, and thought, why not a couple rounds of this game again? I never uninstalled it (mind, it was a bookmark app anyway -- another issue entirely) so it's an easy thing to find.

Turns out, they've updated the game.

My butterfly catalogue is empty. I don't really care. It's almost nice to have that secondary goal available again.

It loads with a 30-second video ad. This is irritating, but would be tolerable, except that from time to time, the game will bug out and freeze up. I can't click on anything. 10 seconds of no input is about my threshold before I refresh -- and then I have to wait for the ad again.

But the thing that bothers me the most is the "Would you like to share this achievement?" questions. When I first picked it back up, it started spamming me with four of these popup messages per butterfly, and some of them seemed to be exactly the same. I have to tell it, "No! No! No. No!!" before I can get back to my game. It doesn't even say where it would share anything if I told it yes; I assume either Facebook or they have something on their own company game site. And I absolutely don't care enough about this game to want to tell everyone on facebook that I play it, much less that I have found a dozen different butterflies. (Obviously, this is an issue with many Facebook apps, that aggressively try to trick/persuade users into spamming their friends with messages from the app, rather than respectfully allowing a default setting of "Nah, I don't want to say much about this to anyone.")

Annoyance with this primes me to be annoyed at the hint button. Sometimes I look away from the screen while I'm playing this low-priority game. But take 15 seconds of inactivity, and it starts blinking. Hint, hint, hint, hint! When I finally come back to the game, I either push the button, or I click on a random tile I didn't really want to mess with yet, because of the irritation of the blinking. It's a little thing, but in the context of the way I play the game, it suggests to me a huge arrogance. "This game is important! You are definitely focusing only on it! If you can't figure out what to do in our time limit, it is certainly because you are too stupid to see the solution, and you could not be either strategizing several moves ahead or attending to something off the computer!"

Ultimately, the take-away message for game design that I have built up for myself here is this: Don't be arrogant. Accept that your players may not consider your work, no matter how lovely or brilliant, to be the center of their world. Make sure there is an options menu, wherein they can turn off all the repetitive demands for attention that you might think are a good idea to include for some users. Be respectful in your requests for players to do the work of free advertising (i.e."sharing") for you, and back off if they're not interested.

Gender-neutral language and storytelling

Today, I saw this blog post about dogs and smurfs. It discusses how stories about women are often viewed as stories for women, rather than stories for people to read, and it suggests this has to do with our language, in which we usually assume that unknown people or creatures are male, as well as a kind of tokenism, where in most children's stories, the main group of protagonists contains only one girl, and her main character trait is that she is a girl.

I've believed for some time that our language shapes our thinking. We hear "he" often enough and we come to assume "he" ourselves. We don't have a gender-neutral pronoun in "proper" English.

Now, for some time, I've assumed that it must be a worse problem in languages like Spanish and French. The very nouns are masculine and feminine. How does it affect you to hear that this object is masculine, and that one is feminine? If the language sticks objects into a male/female category, wouldn't that make it harder on some subconscious level to break yourself out of male/female stereotypical behavior?

But then I read some of the comments following that blog post, and saw people from France and Iceland saying that in their native languages, they have stories about different kinds of creatures, and the different creatures have different default-gender implications. So they get a broader spread of female and male protagonists in their children's stories, where the turtle is generally a girl, in keeping with the femininity of the noun for "turtle", or the gorilla is a boy.

Here in the English-speaking land, we don't assume a gender via our nouns, and then the result is that we just assume everything defaults to male, and our stories come out weighted with a male population. Which I believe feeds into hesitancy and underconfidence in many women whose favorite childhood female role models always follow the lead of the (male) hero/prince/leader in the end.

Serves me right for assuming things about other cultures without talking to natives about it.

I'm still jealous of Japanese and its ability to comfortably refer to someone as "that person" instead of "he" or "she", though.

Fate of the World

This weekend, I picked up Fate of the World, since it was sitting around on my Steam wishlist and fit my general price preference. It's a game about solving global disasters, centered around climate change. I think it is the coolest thing ever!

Ok, there are a couple potential flaws. First, the interface is complicated, and to figure out everything that's helpful to know, you have to poke around in it a lot. I had no idea it was possible to look at very specific statistics, like how well trained a country's agriculture workforce is, until I eventually visited the Steam forum about the game (about 3 tries into the second scenario).

Which brings us to the other "flaw" -- or, alternatively, feature I rather like. This game is hard. The downside, some less patient players may get frustrated and give up, I suppose. And I might not put up with this level of difficulty in just any game. But here the difficulty level is an excellent vehicle for the concept that the world is likely to develop a lot of problems as we ignore the environment and keep growing our world's population and commerce. It's not an easy job, even if you start working on it as soon as possible. It's challenging, but if you pay attention to everything, maybe do a little extra research, and you have a plan from the start, you can succeed in saving the world. It seemed like it's part of the point for the game to be hard. It wouldn't be a very effective piece of Eco-Awareness campaigning if it was easy.

The most important bit of non-obvious information: Biofuel can replace oil! But only if you ban oil worldwide from the global HQ (which you have to build beforehand.)

Even if you happen to disbelieve in global warming and feel environmentalism is nonsense, I'd say it's still a good turn-based strategy game. There's a lot of depth to it. And also a scenario where you get to be a villain.

What can we learn from an "easy" old WoW raid

This weekend, I went back into ICC, and it was the most fun I've had in months with WoW.

It wasn't a primary goal for any of us. The group I raid with has trouble fielding enough people anymore to reliably get a group going into the new raid content. Even when we do go to a new boss we've downed before, it's rough; there's none we can easily one-shot. Some more casual players have started to sign up, which would be nice for filling in the ranks, except that the regulars aren't overpowered enough to "carry" them and they don't have the gear or experience on these particular raids to hold their own, yet. I've been a little burnt out, just try to hang around and see if they need people. So, this weekend, I filled in for some no-shows, but we still ended up with only 9 people, so it was decreed: "Backup plan! Let's go to ICC on heroic. With achievements."

Now, I did a lot of ICC in the past. Enough to start to get tired of it, not enough to beat the Lich King. I'd not done more than a couple of fights on heroic ever. Most of the group, however, had been through most of it before on heroic, maybe once, and most had most of the achievements. I decided not to slow the group down by asking for thorough explanations of boss fights (unless I started getting us killed) and instead I just shadowed the other healer from 10 feet away (seemed like a good policy) and this led to one of the best experiences in a while.

I could play through a challenging boss fight, learning on the fly, and still win.

Do you know how long that's been? I mean, maybe it works on dungeon bosses, even some heroic ones. But it's our general policy in raids to look up the boss, run through the strategy in vent, and of course we still wipe at least a few times while everyone gets the hang of what to not stand in.

But here, we had fights which took several minutes. At times, we'd take a lot of damage. There are percentage-based mechanics in there, and on heroic mode, sometimes there's enough going on that someone eats one of the "one-shot" effects that would have killed them in the old days, but don't, since we're over-leveled. It was enough to wipe us on a couple of fights, but only once per each (except we didn't quite get the Lich King down -- it was deemed to be a better fight for the start of an outing than the end, when we were already past the usual stopping time.) There were fights when something went wrong, like the other healer died halfway through Putricide, and I thought we were all doomed (I surely couldn't track all the crazy effects going on at the start of the fight)...and then we still won.

So why was this so much fun?

• It still felt like a challenge, but we were succeeding more than losing. There was a sense that we would soon succeed, even if we messed up.
• We had the chance to recover from our mistakes and learn to do better, over the course of a single fight.
• It was new to me. ICC in the old days got to be rote. Go in, do things the way we always do them; the only variation was with weird group makeups or someone who knew a different strategy.
• It was about my skills, not my knowledge of the fight. I got to prove myself as a good healer, a good player, rather than a good researcher and memorizer. I felt more present in the moment, trying to figure out what was going on and what I should be doing.

This isn't to say that I find no value in raids as they are now. With a good-natured group, it can be fun to bash our heads on the wall, trying to figure out what different strategy will let us win this time. But when the first time you face a fight is when you are the weakest (due to gear and experience), there is no room to stand in the fire that kills you in two seconds, the parasites that spell certain eventual doom, the healer to fail to predict two big hits in a row. If you mess up, the attempt is doomed. That's okay in small doses for some of us who like a challenge. But if it's the only form of challenge we have, maybe it's worth looking at other kinds of experiences to design into a game like WoW.

Making games for women, or making women via games

In discussions of game design that takes gender into account, I see two directions of thought, but people don't always connect them or consider them together.

1. We can make games that women will enjoy. Thus, we can tap into a less-targeted demographic of potential gamers.

2. We can make games that will influence girls to grow up into strong/smart women. Teach them relevant skills and show them strong female character role models.

I think #1 is already coming to pass, with games from Zynga and Popcap allowing more players to sneak into the classification of game-player without needing to admit to being a gamer nerd. Newer statistics seem to show that the numbers are evening out.

I know people think about #2, along with other ways to get girls interested in science and technical fields, though I can't think offhand of examples of games that specifically are designed to get young girls to move in that direction.

But #1 is about accepting women as they are and trying to figure out what they want in a game. What is comfortable, and what is enjoyable for the average woman. #2 is a more feminist perspective, saying that the status quo should change, and we should try to figure out what in games will make a woman want a different path or focus in life.

Is one of these right, and one wrong? I don't think so, not inherently. It's good to accept people as they are, and good to offer outlets for relaxation or mental stimulation or socialization, or whatever the "average woman" seeks in a game. And it's also good to encourage people to learn new skills, consider all their options, and reach their full personal potential, whatever that may mean for them. There's room for both ways.

But maybe we can mix the thinking from both angles, and get wider adoption of a game with a positive influence. If we can draw in girls or women with gameplay that is enjoyable, and doesn't scare them away, but then include avenues for learning more traditionally masculine skills in a non-threatening way, then it's a double-win.

Gaming communities and the female perspective

I think community is a massive draw for female gamers, generally speaking. Why play World of Warcraft instead of a single-player RPG? The only reason is community. If I didn't have a community of friends already playing it, or a strong hope of finding such friends anew, I would never put up with the level grind. Storylines built to support a lot of people each being the only hero of the world are tough to make sufficiently compelling on their own. For single-player gameplay, I would take any Bioware RPG any day over soloing in WoW.

Women are taught, in our American culture and likely elsewhere, to value community. Or maybe it's simply more socially acceptable for us to stick our noses into other people's business and worry about their happiness. By no means are men barred from an enjoyment in or a focus upon community, but I am sure it is a highly important for most women.

From the feminine perspective, community does not mean score boards and bragging. Community means communication, cooperation, and caring. We enjoy having like-minded persons with whom we can talk. We often prefer to work together rather than compete. We get a kick out of feeling that we are taking care of people in some need (within reason).

Sometimes we brag about how awesome we are; I see this as a part of learning to fit in to a male-dominated community (when it happens in American culture anyway) because too often we women learn in adolescence to put ourselves down instead. Sometimes we get drawn into flame wars on message boards; I'd hypothesize this has a higher rate of occurring in defense of a friend, percentagewise, rather than in personal aggression, compared to male posters as a whole. But we get embarrassed about proclaiming ourselves to be the best -- many of us have learned not to stand out too far from the pack, and to be self-conscious about being in the spotlight.

One thing I notice in my own experience playing WoW is that women seem to gravitate towards communities that include other women. I read articles and comments talking about the one woman in the raid group speaking for the first time on vent, and the startled silence that follows from the rest of the raid. But for myself, I can easily spend 20 seconds and think of ten other women with whom I have regularly raided in WoW over the past couple of years. I've led 10-man and 25-man raids, switching off from night to night with a handful of other raid leaders, one of whom was another woman. Partly, I expect this concentration of women has to do with men convincing their significant others to play the game with them, and then couples start playing with other couples. But offhand, I can think of three of us who gravitated to the group while not being romantically involved with anyone. I think this may be because we are a group that is inclusive to women. It's more comfortable to seek out company where our kind is obviously welcome, because there are already examples of our kind present.

I notice a contrast in personality types across different groups of geeky women, as well. Some of the women I game with possess a raunchy sense of humor, and they will participate in sexual innuendo in their banter along with the men, or occasionally amongst themselves. Some (like myself) just ignore it as best we can, along with some of the more reserved men. One, from a more religious background, actively protests it and mutes offenders for herself. Then, when I've been to potlucks and gatherings for a Women-in-CS group, everyone is extremely polite and offers little reference to sexuality at all. That may be partly due to cultural differences, since there were international students, and shyness, since it was a less frequent meet up. But it leads me to wonder if gamer women who spend more time around gamer men -- usually inevitable in certain varieties of games, given the skewed gender population -- may pick up behaviors based on what the people around them are doing and saying. A group of only women playing the same kinds of games together since childhood might have a far different code of social acceptability.

A take-away lesson there may be: don't automatically expect a woman new to gaming culture (or new to you) to put up with things you wouldn't say in front of your mother, just because you know another gamer woman who goes along with it.

Another observation about womens' sensitivity to the content of banter and humor: nearly all of the people I have noticed expressing offense for chat content have been women. I can think of several of us who I know dislike hearing people use the term "gay" as an insult, or "rape" in a casual, humorous context. Too many of us have, if not personal experience, good friends who have personal experience being on the wrong side of the realities represented by that kind of language. Given statistics like "one in four women will be a victim of sexual assault in her lifetime," think twice before you declare your intention to "rape" the other team on a player-versus-player field. If you're trying to get women to hang out with you, it's probably best not to routinely make them think of painful memories or unjust scenarios.

Creating an accepting atmosphere for women may not mean giving up the traditional geek culture we know and love. Our student CS group in college had movie nights with Monty Python, MST3K, and assorted science fiction movies. It was still a male-dominated group, but I believe the several of us who were women still enjoyed ourselves just as much. We passed around the same geeky internet links, commented on Hitchhiker's Guide references, and by senior year, I felt very much in sync with the computer scientist geek culture. I remember one day, another student, a guy, walked into our CS class before the bell, spread his arms as he looked at the dozen or so of the rest of us sitting there, and he proclaimed, "My people!" I felt it resonate in my mind. Not all women may adjust to the same experience as easily, but some of us can find a sense of belonging in a male-dominated group.

Finally, it is community that drives women's acceptance or rejection of an identity as a gamer, and not all of that community is within your control as a game player or designer. If a girl's friends think it is nerdy and undesirable to be playing a game, that's a lot of peer pressure to overcome. Here, games like Farmville might do us (as "hardcore" gamers) a favor, as they provide a basis for some related behavior that might be more accessible to younger girls. If they see other people they like playing a game, of course they are more likely to try it out, or admit to playing it. But as long as gaming is "not something girls do," then only outsiders and rebels will publicly join in, or invest in a costly game purchase and subscription.

Granted, there is a draw to being a scarce commodity in gaming culture. It's fun to surprise people, show up out of nowhere as a skilled female player, and to hear that we are desirable and rare from a romantic perspective. For a little while. But there's potential for that to become draining, too. Being the only one of a kind isn't something I think most women would hope for in the long term. So if interested male parties should wish to help with retention of female gamers, I would suggest: treat us respectfully, and help us network to find other female gamers when possible. I'd like to meet more of them, myself.

Parent-friendly multiplayer games

I'm not a parent. I just have a lot of friends in MMO's who seem to be becoming parents. There seems to be a common pattern: the pregnancy, wherein everyone makes a lot of jokes about how the baby is already becoming an excuse for afk's and how we are recruiting new guild members through breeding. The birth, where the couple disappears for a time. The infancy, where the couple may return to sporadic playing, with some significant amount of unpredictable afk time. Then when it's a couple playing together, they tend to stop playing altogether, during the toddler phase. I'm not sure exactly what happens after that when it's a couple, but the cases where only one parent plays, we see that player come back once the child is old enough to not be watched closely every minute, or to follow a regular early bedtime.

In every case, a parent must be allowed to go away from the keyboard immediately, in case of emergency, or even the child requesting/demanding attention. Usually they have time to say something on vent or chat, "AFK kids!" In the guilds and groups I play with most, we like the people well enough to tolerate this, and we adapt as best we can, either continuing our dungeon run without them, or calling a break for the whole group, or both (if their emergency takes long enough).

As I get into the age range where a lot of my friends are having children, I see more and more of a potential market for parent-friendly social games. The housebound parents, I think, appreciate having a social outlet during naptime without trying to find a babysitter. And I want people making big MMO's to bear them in mind, so I can keep playing games with my longtime parent-friends and others with schedule restrictions. There are some basic issues to bear in mind when making games to support them:

1. Unpredictable play-time

Games should allow the player to come and go as needed. Sure, it's nice to try to be sure everyone's present when you get to the boss fight, or some cinematic special event. But sometimes it's not feasible, when the 2-year-old is bleeding profusely and the parent realizes a hospital trip is necessary, and he forgets to say so on Vent.

I'd suggest mechanics such as non-linear storylines -- don't require players to have completed X & Y quests before they can participate in Z, at least not very often, because if you have to go afk during Y, you won't always catch up before everyone else is in the middle of Z. Consider using semi-randomly generated, perhaps semi-reusable questlines. If someone jumps into the middle of a group's questing, give them a story blurb about what's happened so far with this group and begin including them in the activities & rewards as a late joiner. Try to set it up so they aren't excluded from going back and experiencing gameplay from earlier in the questline ever again, after participating in the later stages.

Also, scaling difficulty with group size: let the group leader choose a difficulty setting, rather than presenting challenges like "Can you do this 10-man dungeon with 8 people?" Instead, let the dungeon adjust itself for 5 to 10 players, or 9 to 16 players. If someone has to go afk, let them "pass out" and lie around on the floor, out of the reckoning of difficulty. Don't force everyone to rely on one specific person, but do allow them to be included and contributing when present. Offer equally challenging tasks for different general group sizes, so if you walk into a dungeon knowing 2 people are prone to sudden afk's, and 2 more people might happen to join in the middle of a run once the kids go to bed, you can include them all, rather than having to switch between something requiring exactly 10 people and something requiring 5.

Similarly, flexible roles -- if it is the only healer who keeps having to run afk in a game like WoW, you're in trouble. Let people easily change what they're doing to fill in, in a pinch.

2. Limited play-time

Multiplayer games should support players who can only play an hour every week in being able to play meaningfully together with players who play a couple hours every night. People change over time, and so do their schedules. But with the internet, those of us who build lasting friendships can stay in touch, and some of us would like to play with our friends who have different amounts of time to spend than they used to. This applies not only to parents, but anyone taking on new and different elements of life outside MMO's -- school, work, dating, personal projects.

See my post on levels for one aspect of how to address this -- grinding 85 levels before you can reliably play together is only going to hurt the occasional/casual players playing because they miss friends.

Also, prioritize the ability to jump in and start meaningfully playing together with other friends who are already in the middle of something. Don't make them wait for 5 minutes of travel time -- let them warp in right away, or after a brief orientation to what's going on.

3. Child-friendly games

Looking ahead, someday my friends who are parents of young children will become parents of older children. And those children may be interested to try playing the same games -- already, one young son plays WoW on a low-level, chat-blocked character. I don't know what I think this should mean; I don't have that much experience with children. All I know is that if you can rig it so that a guild of mature players can comfortably play in a way that includes children, and everybody still has fun, that would be nice for families. Good luck!

Mixing player skill levels

Sometimes, I like a good, challenging experience in a game, working together with like-minded players who have learned and practiced how to most efficiently play the game. I like to take on something that's a little too hard, and push my limits together with the rest of the group, and share in the rush that a group victory creates.

But in playing an MMO, skill is not my only criteria for making friends. I tend to gravitate in general to seeking out groups I know to be reasonably competent or interested in becoming better players. But sometimes, I like somebody because they make me laugh, and they fit in well with our guildchat, and enjoyably contribute to party chat. Maybe questing through the level grind was more tolerable because they were around for socialization.

Then, there are friends-of-friends. A guildmate convinces his childhood friend to start playing the game for the first time, and the childhood friend joins the guild. We try to include the newcomer, because we like the first friend, but longtime friendship is no guarantee of play style.

And family-of-friends. A mature guildmate, moved away from home years previously, finally convinces a parent to play. The parent gets into the game, but doesn't care for high-pressure activities. Another guildmate hears her 13-year-old nephew is interested and gets him to play on the same server. He makes a valiant effort to figure out what's going on and how to fit in to the group, but he's not as quick on the big picture strategy of the boss fights, yet.

Solutions

So, how can we make games that empower the people who just want to tag along and hang out together with the people who want to seek out challenges and push their limits?

I've talked this one over with Jeremy, who has ideas about letting the skilled players generate extra bonuses to help the less skilled players, which I think is a good idea. A "catch-up" buff that helps a weaker player to be more effective, but doesn't give much bonus to a skilled player who is pushing the edge, could go a good ways to helping solve the problem.

I also like to see different kinds of tasks in a fight. All of the tasks must be accomplished, perhaps each by one or two people, but some are harder than others, or more challenging to learn. Think of the Flame Leviathan fight in WoW: each player gets to ride in a particular type of vehicle and operate different kinds of machinery.

Personal achievements, mixed in with group achievements: sometimes, you'll have the group that is full of like-minded, serious players who enjoy a group challenge, but sometimes, there's only a couple of those and several who are present because they like the first couple. Make some options for each case. Whole group pushing; individual accomplishment; one or two individuals enabling the achievement for the group. (WoW does have a variety of these in its current incarnation, which is nice.)

Flexible group makeup: Make it possible for people to play in the styles they enjoy. If there's a harder or higher stress role, don't make it vital to have 3 or 5 of that type of player in a 10-person group to get through the content. Or, allow people to try it out but rotate out of the job before getting burnt out.

Avenues for private practice and learning: It's rough to learn how to heal or tank or crowd control for the first time at a high level in a live group setting. If individual failure means doom for the group, there needs to be a way for players to learn how to do it right at their own pace, if they want to branch into new personal skills.

Caveat

I don't think these ideas stand as absolute rules. There is some value in the experience of patiently trying to learn how to work together as a group, consciously distributing roles based on who can handle them best, failing together and finally succeeding through communication and practice. Players who aren't as skilled can learn to become more skilled, and when we help them get there, there's that shared pride in accomplishment. But I think it's still valuable to keep an eye on how to enable players to play with whatever friends they have playing the same game, regardless of their respective skill levels.

Levels are dumb! (Especially for multiplayer.)

Okay, I will admit that levels have a degree of value. I grew up loving jrpg's, Final Fantasy and so on. Part of the reason for this was that I had a terrible fear of Game Overs in Mario types of games, so when I was 4 or 6, I remember I would ask my mom to play Mario so I could watch, rather than playing by myself. With Final Fantasy, here was a type of game that I could play with careful strategy rather than relying on twitch or jumping skills. And best of all, if I ran into a monster that was too hard to kill, I could always go back a little ways and level up, and then come back, and it would be easy. (This was before I developed much of a taste for challenge in gaming.)

Levels give you a way to represent and track character growth, as the character runs around learning to fight better (or beat challenges in a non-fighting game). This is useful, as a designer, because it gives you a way to say, "This character is level 20, so they're probably tough enough to go in this dungeon with level 19-20 monsters. Let's send them here." It's useful as a player for the same reason, and because (if you're not at a level cap) you can always get to be more powerful without becoming a more skillful player. And of course, it helps space out the rate of learning how to use new skills as a player, when you only get one every so often.

But a few years into playing MMORPG's, I finally realized: I hate levels. They are a terrible system.

Problems

The biggest reason I say this is that they prevent me from playing with the people I want to play with, when I want to play with them. Look at WoW. I have one or more max level characters, and it's all about gear. There is nothing built into the game to support me in having a challenging, fun experience working together with people still going through the level treadmill from 1-85, unless I happen to have a character close to their level to play with them. All I can do is run them through dungeons, which is only particularly interesting for the scenery and the loot, and maybe the novelty of initially learning how to most efficiently solo a low level dungeon while not letting the lowbie die too much.

So meanwhile, the person is left to gain levels alone. Or, in my case, the past few times I've leveled a character, I always have found one other person to play with constantly, because I cannot stomach grinding levels alone. It's so boring alone, when my primary goal in it is just to reach the maximum level! We agree to never get more than one level ahead of the other, if at all, and we leave most groupings of quests open to play through together. Otherwise, we cannot productively do the same thing at the same time with our characters.

Then, when the new character finally reaches max level, the (small, close-knit) guild springs into action. Dungeon time! Everyone bands together to suddenly try to drag the new character into teamwork, after levels and levels of solo work. Sure, once in a while, the new person has experience running dungeons with random groups of people as they leveled. But often it's requiring a new set of team-based skills to be learned all at once, along with suddenly being judged by min-maxers for not having optimal skill rotations. The leveling game, then, makes the social, teamwork game harder to transition into. And for some of us, the teamwork is the entire reason why we play MMO's.

But during the leveling itself, the part that makes me angry is that these arbitrary numbers tell me that even though I happen to be online at the same time as these three other friends with whom I would be ecstatic to play together, I cannot play with them.

It's not just MMO's, either. I've run into this same problem with Neverwinter Nights and Borderlands. I start trying to save extra copies of characters as I level up, so that I can always hope to be able to play with any friend who is in the middle of a campaign. (And then I overwrite my highest level character and can't find it again, but that's what I get for messing with the files.)

Solutions

Granted, there are some attempts at mitigating these kinds of problems. Sidekicking (CoH) and mentoring (EQ2) are certainly better than nothing, allowing people of different levels to meaningfully play together. But then, when I played EQ2, and had a character slightly higher level than a chain of guildmates who kept going through their 30's, so I could mentor them and play at their level, I got awfully tired of that one zone with the faeries after the 5th time playing through it on my same character. Sidekicking, or bringing a lower level character along with your high level character, might have more potential, but as long as the game is built to have a level progression, there is a danger that the low level character will skip all the low level content and be bored with high level by the time they get there.

Or, consider some of the Bioware RPGs, or Xenosaga, where monsters' levels scale with your characters. Levels are only meaningful in terms of character specialization. Can you replace this in an engaging way with increasing character specialization and NOT increasing character strength, so that there is still something to work towards, but it won't create artificial barriers to playing with friends?

A game like Dragon Age also has a benefit of being non-linear. So with a multiplayer version, there is potential to say, "I'm going to save the forest area to play together with you later -- don't go there yet!" Or, "I haven't been to the mountains yet, have you? Let's go." With a whole world (or universe) to choose from, rather than railroading players down a set track, there should be more room to create engaging experiences for groups of players who don't exclusively play together all the time. Of course, there is a challenge in making some cohesive story, so players don't feel lost and confused or forget what else they were working on -- but I get that way in WoW with its partially-linear questlines. Some kind of journal system to tell you stories recapping what you've done might help there.

Then there's games like l4d, which I haven't played yet, but I've seen played, and I get jealous of the ease with which I see people jump in and join their friends. People don't seem to mind not having levels in these games. But it's more of a skill-based game, which excludes a different set of people, and that's worth considering too -- how can you make a game that supports people who aren't as skilled working together with skillful players, because they are friends and like hanging out playing together? That may be another topic...

What if you had an MMO without a vertical leveling system?

Let's imagine a futuristic setting, with space travel and mechs. Your character can go up in military ranks, or in piloting ranks, after completing training exercises and certain kinds of missions, and then gets licenses to use different kinds of technology. Now you can control the biggest robot type allowed on the next planet over. But you still need people to sit in the arms to control them, and people to sit in the turrets on the top. Those tasks don't require as high a skill level, either in- or out-of-character. So, a beginning player can join in with the experienced one and contribute in a meaningful way.

Without working with the more experienced player, the newbie can't access the mission using the biggest robot, but there is still the hope of someday trying out something new -- being the robot pilot -- upon gaining more training and experience. Yet, without extra companions, the robot pilot is not nearly as effective, because she cannot control guns or arms. And even if characters are overqualified, they can still choose to fill the old role of gunner, when a gunner is what is needed. Perhaps highly experienced gunners can learn new tricks, too, maybe an ability to warn away less hostile creatures by shooting near them and not at them, but it doesn't mean their bullets hit massively harder -- it's still the same equipment.

All your successes can still be tracked and counted up. Consider the driving force of achievements on the xbox, Steam, WoW. Is this not enough motivation to get players to work together enjoyably to accomplish things? Consider faction increases and their shallow effect on interacting with NPCs in WoW -- it's still kind of cool to see an NPC greet you by name. Can we expand on that gameplay? And it shouldn't be hard to help the player keep track of how many times they have run through a certain type of mission in a certain location, and what role they played when they did.

Ultimately, I can see why character levels are a handy game design tool, but I believe it costs much more than it's worth to continue to allow its inclusion in multiplayer game design. It'd be nice to see some more alternatives soon.

The internal struggles of women in technology

Speaking as a woman with a degree in computer science, having belonged to Women-in-CS groups and attended Women-in-Technology conferences, I believe there are a lot of contradictions in our psyche, and it's hard to know what to do about them. I offer this analysis for men trying to understand women involved with the tech industry and/or gaming industry, and for women who might experience these same self-contradictions without realizing it.

Affirmative Action

First, there is the inherent contradiction behind affirmative action and policies aimed at diversity. We want our society to be equal, gender-blind (and color-blind and other kinds of positive blindness); we want to not even have to think about these kinds of differences when we choose an employee or someone to collaborate with. The focus should be entirely on competence and on whether the new person will fit productively into our group. That's the only fair way to do it. But, embracing "blindness" at this point in time is counterproductive to that eventual goal. We have to at least acknowledge that there are traces of inequality built into our culture, and thus into our socialized brains, very often without our realizing it. Look into scientific studies of attitudes about men and women, if you don't believe in sexism amongst non-sexist persons. We have to remember it, in order to reach a place where we might someday forget it -- if that's even the answer.

Right now, there are two purposes I see behind pursuing diversity.

1. By including a diverse set of creators, your product will more likely reach a diverse audience.
2. By including a diverse set of employees, you make new potential employees feel more welcome when they match up to a category of diversity already represented.

Number 2 is kind of counterintuitive from the equality angle. It means, I like to be around people who are similar to me, because it makes me feel more comfortable. If you don't have anyone like me, I feel like an outsider. From this perspective, you could argue that there is some potential good behind having an incompetent female employee, because maybe she will allow you to acquire and retain an additional ultra-competent female employee. But, you might give them both some kind of complex from trying to figure out why they're both there, and with a huge difference in competence, the similarity level might be too low, too. Still, two-of-a-kind is probably a good minimum to shoot for, when you reasonably can.

The hidden downside to Number 1 is that the "diverse" person you get may be the exception to the rule. I am a woman, but I never really got into all the stereotypical woman-pursuits: sociable shopping, talking on the phone for hours to girl friends, pillow fights...(ok, as far as I know, pillow fights aren't really a big thing for women in general.) I got into gaming at a young age, and always perceived myself as much more of a gamer than any other girls I knew in person, up until I started meeting people in person that I'd first met through gaming (after high school). I had female friends through school, but the only time I remember playing a video game with a girl I knew from school was in kindergarten. I had one other friend in junior high who expressed a liking for Chrono Trigger, but I don't know if she ever beat the game, while I played through New Game+ to see all the endings.

Maybe that experience of friends who are not gamers would give me enough insight into their world to be able to make games they would enjoy. But I don't have much common ground with them for gaming, so I don't know as it's a surefire thing. I think it will help to include a diverse selection of team members, according to the common categories of diversity, but it won't cause massive change all at once.

Activism versus Action

Some people complain that there are women in technology who complain a lot about inequality, and then there are women who simply do work equal to any man. Why all this protesting and attention-seeking when they could just change the system from within by proving themselves through their competent actions?

Like affirmative action, activism about gender equality runs counter to the ultimate purpose -- that it not be necessary. We hope that increased awareness now may someday lead to a decreased need for awareness. Statistics about how few women are in computer science and other technical fields surely give us a clue about how things stand now.

The problem with demanding competent action instead of activism is that it creates unreasonable pressure. You are also saying, "If a woman is as valuable as a man, let her prove it." And the implication, given the already low supply of women in the field, is, "If a woman can do as good a job as a man, let her outshine all the men with whom she is competing." There aren't enough other women to take up the slack when she has a bad week. Leaving aside how women are generally trained by society to prefer cooperation to competition, you are now comparing her, or at least she is comparing herself, to the very most skilled, talented, intelligent, and competent man she knows in her field. If she can't match or surpass him, she fails the test, and "proves" that her gender isn't suited for the work.

As if that test isn't enough, studies have shown that a woman is more likely to undervalue her own performance while a man will overestimate his own, even when the two are objectively performing at an equal level. So when this holds true, a woman must perform significantly better than a man before she will judge her own performance to be equal to his.

So for a woman who cares about gender equality, to try to encourage equality through only action and no activism is to try to be better than everyone else. Is this the kind of woman you want to bring to your organization? Is this the kind of pressure you want to put on an employee or coworker?

Sexiness and Objectification

As a woman, I want to be taken seriously for my ideas, not to have my audience distracted by my appearance. I feel like, in any professional setting, and even in social gaming events (board game nights and the like), I should dress to not emphasize my appearance at all, because both cases tend to be male-dominated populations for me. I also get irritated with the existence of makeup: why should I spend so much money and time that my male counterparts would be ridiculed for spending? But here and there I find a dress-for-success article about how important makeup and an appearance of youth is for a professional woman. And then at the same time, I want people to notice I am a woman, so I can represent my gender with excellence (i.e., A girl kicked your butt at poker! So you better not ever assume girls can't play poker!) And when not involved in a relationship, I didn't want to totally exclude the possibility of getting to know a potential romantic interest.

As a female gamer, when I play a game like WoW where I get to create an avatar, appearance is important to me. I spend a long time sorting through all the options of hairstyles and facial expressions; maybe I never quite kicked the habit of playing dress-up on my dolls. But for me, it links into an imagined personality for the character. I tend to like to play serious, no-nonsense warrior types. And I like to engage in a bit of min-maxing to play well, too. So, when I find a piece of armor that looks like a bikini top when I put it on, I am outraged. I have to wear THIS if I want this stat upgrade?! But -- I don't mind at all, really, that the option to wear a bikini top is in the game, as long as it is a reasonable choice. Helps sort out the guys who like to look at "sexy women" and the girls who want to be "sexy women". I just get irritated when I end up showing a lot of virtual skin and it's not by my first choice.

I don't mind that there exist women who choose to play up their sexiness. (Though no one should ever feel forced into it.) And once in a while I like to wear a dress and put my hair up, to prove that I can. I only resent the times when I feel like someone is trying to stuff me into the sexy bucket when I want to be in the competent human being bucket.

Femininity versus successfulness

Then, there are the feminine habits for which I have been socialized, which I am beginning to be able to spot and struggle with how to handle. In high school, I had a calculus teacher who insisted that all the boys in the class must raise their hands before giving answers, and none of the girls were allowed to raise their hands before giving answers -- girls must blurt the answers out. He explained that this was to give useful workplace training, because girls are more prone in general to wait their turn, and then never get a turn because the boys would jump forward and take it. I would otherwise assume that it is only that I am shy in comparison to other people -- not just shy compared to boys.

Then, I had a mentor teach me after my college years that there exist people in the world who expect you to interrupt them as part of normal conversation. This might be something that varies by family, but the skill surely applies in larger, male-dominated meetings. Since then, I make an effort to practice interrupting to get my two cents in, even when I don't think my two cents are necessarily worth the interruption on their own merit. The point is to be heard, and let people know you're there and you are a thinking, present individual. As a bonus, if you're the sort of person routinely told, "You're awfully quiet," this will reduce the frequency of that.

I think there are a lot of habits I struggle against, that many people, but particularly many women, share. We need practice and encouragement to get over them. If you are a successful woman or man, and you manage to notice a woman in the corner who doesn't say much, a little advice backed by experience or research might be more helpful than you realize.

Stereotypes and prophecy

I believe that we become what we are told we are. This isn't a solid rule; it can be overcome with conscious effort. But if you tell me I am quiet, I may make an effort to throw out an extra comment here and there so I'm not silent, but I probably won't ever talk to you for hours on end. I'll default into staying quiet.

So, too, when we acquire and share ideas about what women are. We know that most women aren't gamers. (Not like "us" anyway.) We know girls are sweet and kind, or catty and mean, the fairer sex, polite and helpful, emotional and sensitive, likeable or bitchy. We know men are strong and tough, competitive, leaders, logical, charismatic and respectable. I believe it is true that we are each far, far more the same than we are different from any other human being. But even if you believe that, some part of your brain still likely "knows" all the differences that are floating around in our culture's say-so. Some part of your brain may believe it to be true, without your realizing it. And some of these categories are traps that ward us away from success, as when a woman is allowed in society's subconscious to be likeable or respectable, but not both.

And maybe we are genetically predisposed to be a little different, too, but we still have to work out what we want that to mean to us, and it shouldn't disallow us from pursuing a course of action we personally really want to take.

Here's the part I want to say to game designers, writers, anyone who contributes to entertainment and popular culture: I believe that in order to achieve the future reality we'd like to see, we must first tell stories about it. Create a believable world where likeable, respectable women collaborate in problem solving and leadership and are brilliantly successful together (perhaps with a handful of tangential men, to teach us how to cross the gender lines constructively). Let us see what it would look like, so we can believe it is possible.

Farmville

When I wanted to learn about Farmville, I created a fake Facebook account, googled for people seeking Farmville neighbors, and added several dozens of people I don't know. Made things interesting later on when I logged in from another computer, and Facebook said, "That's unusual! Let's make sure you're really you, by quizzing you on profile pictures of these friends of yours." I'm not sure if the photos of random women or the screenshots of a farmville chicken were harder to guess the identity. Though I passed on the 6th try or so.

Farmville, and games like it, have a brilliant strategy of tricking players into working for them for free; that is, make the very gameplay into an advertisement. You can't avoid participating in the viral marketing if you want to succeed in the game to maximum effect. And it worked on me: I saw people I liked and respected making posts about "Soandso really needs a neighbor to help fertilize their crops. Will you help?"

But then, it didn't precisely work on me, because I created that new account and avoided like the plague all temptation of connecting to people I knew. When it comes down to it, I'm still a little bit of a closet gamer in some social contexts. If I play to level 30 in a game like this, and I spam their facebook feeds with 305729 messages about Farmville, I feel like I am both likely to come across as a hopeless nerd and to annoy people. I have this fear that anyone who knows enough about Farmville to know how much time I must put into it to get to that point, but who has played less than me, must judge me to be some kind of terrible addict, entertained unreasonably by what must be in their eyes a low quality entertainment.

The above is an important point for expanding to border cases of the untapped gaming market, I suspect. People may be shy about crossing that psychological barrier of identity. Like coming out of the closet. Don't expect everyone to do it all at once, to a very public audience.

• Support shy players.

On the flip side, I think it is a very valuable technique to make a game built on helping others. Letting players offer gifts to other people, at no cost (save time) to one's self, is an excellent way to make people feel good about playing the game. I suspect this is especially true of women, who are often particularly socialized to be caretakers and helpers.

The "evil" that I see in Farmville, however, is the hooks it ties into the player. Come back within a given time window to harvest your crops or lose it all. Send and receive a bunch of stuff for this new, limited-time event, or you'll miss your chance, and by the way, there's a new event next month, same deal. Make sure to ask your friends for help, so they get stuck with the hooks, too.

Those hooks kept me playing for a while, but at some point, they were self-defeating, especially when combined with the viral marketing machine built in. To succeed (to expand my farm to the maximum space without paying a bunch of money) I needed 50+ neighbors. 50+ active neighbors sending 1-4 requests every day adds up to a lot of requests. Even a half a dozen neighbors active daily (which happened after a few weeks, from my 50+ random "friends") is a lot. Addressing each request required several clicks and a pageload for each click (at the point I quit playing). Then, some of the requests became inactive due to age, but wouldn't tell you they were inactive until you clicked through. I'd fall farther and farther behind, trying to limit how much time I spent to a few minutes in a day, triaging down to helping only the people who'd helped me most, or who were asking most recently.

So when I skipped playing Farmville (and half a dozen other games of its ilk) for a few days, and it turned into a few weeks, I found I had a great desire to never return to that demanding, whining page of a hundred time-consuming requests.

So, I think that may lead to another useful point of good casual game design:

• Support casual playing.

Like squeezing too hard on a handful of sand, if you try to build too much pressure to play constantly, you'll lose people permanently from your pool of players, when they might instead just want a break. Sure, it's a good thing to have enough content to support the serious, hardcore players. And it's probably important for Farmville's profit scheme to make people feel like they need to spend money to "keep up" with collecting every free offering. But for the players who enjoy a bit of the gameplay once in a while, and who might potentially want to get only a handful of trusted friends to play it with them, isn't long-term retention a plus, still?

The whyfor & whereto

I always get excited when I find a blog or a site from women authors about gaming or game development. I go, "Ooh! More anecdotal evidence that I'm not THAT unusual!"

I also spend a good bit of time thinking about games, and how they could be better in ways to attract more women, and how they could be better in general. All that brain effort expended, may as well make it public, in case it sparks someone else's brain effort to positive effect.

So, some general points I can think of offhand that I'd like to get around to making, but which probably deserve their own blog posts (or might get mixed and matched):

• Parent-friendly games from parent-friendly studios
• Levels are jerks
• Puzzle Pirates versus World of Warcraft
• Community and women gamers
• Women's conceptualization of gamers from inside and outside, and overlap thereof
• Farmville's brilliance and evil

And more to come.