What can the RPG industry do to encourage more female gamers?
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As a long time female gamer and game designer, I have always loved the creativity and spontaneity of roleplaying games. Traditional tabletop roleplaying games require quick thinking, imagination, and teamwork to achieve goals. While more women play RPGs now than ever before, there is still this notion that RPGs are a male-only sort of activity, and women often don’t even consider the hobby.
What steps do you think the industry could take to make the hobby more attractive to women?
I have been gaming for 20 years. My wife and I have gamed since we’ve met – 7 years.
The reason we don’t get many female gamers is directly proportionate to the positive level of cockiness displayed by the male gamers.
Female GMs won’t try to make the female characters sluts, won’t need to prove their smarter by killing everyone off, and tend to be more socially oriented than vs. oriented – DM against everyone.
This is a social game; therefore, you need the different social circles of gaming to change OR you need to present material that causes female gamers to create their own gaming circles.
I think that an easy, quick-start on how to GM a game (that builds confidence in one’s ability to run a game) would go a long way.
I don’t know, I am a guy :/ But I think that it’d be cool if there were more women gamers in rpgs..not because I want an online gf (eww) but because the games need a more diverse fan base. Keep it up
As a girl gamer myself I would like to see a quality RPG with a female main character. There are main RPGs with females in the party, but the main-main characters are always male. Final Fantasy X-2 didn’t quite cut-it for me. It was more about outfits and fanservice than a serious female main character.
I would definately buy any RPG that seemed to be quality with a female main character.
I play World of Warcraft because it is the only RPG in my experience that lets female characters have the same strengths, abilities, armor and game experience as a male. Also, while there is a definite "physical" difference in a male and female character on WoW – they aren’t overly cartoonishly porportioned and the armor/clothing sets nearly identical for male and female.
Every game should have an equally challenging male/female option to play.