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.