The issue of gender inclusivity in gaming has been around the traps for as long as gaming, and is something I’ve discussed on this blog before. One of the main reasons for this in both the computer and table-top gaming world is the images that are used, which signify gaming as a man’s world where women are not wanted; but another problem in the physical world has been the reception that women get, physically, when they enter a stuffy room full of fat, beardy men who haven’t had sex since they broke their blow-up doll a year ago. They tend to get stared at like freaks, and suffer a lot of unwanted attention related to their gender. One would think, though, that in a world where the player’s real gender isn’t visible, this wouldn’t be a problem, and that in fact online gaming would offer a way out of this problem.
Now, gay men and women in the military in the US are advised (in fact, forced) to get around this by means of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, which enables everyone to keep pretending that there are no gay men in a largely male organization, and thus avoids requiring the majority of the group to avoid changing their behaviour (in this case, largely “worrying,” one imagines) to fit the minority’s presence. It’s good for morale, apparently, but has come under attack from Lady Gaga, who is apparently more powerful than Nancy Pelosi, presumably because she has nicer breasts.
But perhaps Lady Gaga should be turning her enormous temporal power to a much greater injustice – the exclusion of women from World of Warcraft. The Border House blog has a report on advice to a female gamer who has joined a guild with a don’t ask, don’t tell policy – about gender. That’s right, she’s meant to keep her gender secret from the other players. Apparently she’s lucky – according to commenters on the post, a lot of top flight raiding guilds are male-only. The presumed reason is that the male players start “thinking with their sack” (to quote a commenter) when they hear a woman’s voice. Which sounds a lot like “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to me (and like all the previous eras’ unfounded concerns about women in the military, to boot). So this woman has to decide if she can hide her gender (which must be a little difficult, when you have to talk over a microphone – I’m not sure how that works), or tone down her raiding / move to a different guild – or be blamed for all the petty morale problems and fuck ups that affect the guild she’s in.
I’ve observed before that World of Warcraft seems to reproduce all the pettiest and most unpleasant parts of our normal world, and that its fantastic and escapist elements don’t seem to transfer to either the political, class or economic relations within the game. Gender, of course, can never hope to escape the constrictions of the real world in such an environment. Is this because of the conservatism of high fantasy, is it inevitable when a large number of ordinary men do a hobby, or is the attitude in the gaming world actually a notch more exclusionary than in the real world, because men are fragile about women intruding on their club – just as they were in the workplace 30 years ago? And can we as pen-and-paper gamers do better than this?
In reading this report I also discovered that there is a a semi-official “out” server for gay, lesbian and transgender players, “Proudmoore.”
October 24, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Eh, I’m not sure the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” thoughts apply in the same vein as we’re talking about a public organization versus a private one at that point.
The militaries policy was something that was forced on them by societal pressure. In the case of the raid guild its a private organization pursuing an exclusionary policy simply because they don’t want the associated drama.
Having done the raid thing I know it was very possible to pull it off without being exclusionary without too much drama. I know we can definetely do better as any sort of tabletop gaming simply because there is no rediculous ultra competitive environment to be the best gamers possible as with WoW. There isn’t ego’s to damage in that regard with women playing. It’s just a matter of taking time to change perception and getting people into it.
October 24, 2010 at 7:21 pm
“Is this because of the conservatism of high fantasy, is it inevitable when a large number of ordinary men do a hobby, or is the attitude in the gaming world actually a notch more exclusionary than in the real world, because men are fragile about women intruding on their club”
Come on… Do we need to wave around around intellectual theories to try to model this behaviour? How about we try using the model that the average player is an 18 year old sex starved geek who’d cut off an arm to get laid? It perfect matches their behaviour and is an excellent predictive model.
“And can we as pen-and-paper gamers do better than this?”
Hmm. I think that as online gaming becomes the norm and the average age of table top player becomes “grongard” we can expect that either the players will move towards groups of “Getting enough”, “Don’t care” or “smells like cat pee”. The first two groups should be common enough that non-straight geek male players can get involved without being overly weirded out. Of course, that’s based on an assumption of diminishing new player intake, which means that the odds of a girl joining a group is lower anyway, so the chances are we won’t have a large enough sample size to make a call.
The only solution is for this generation of gamers to breed and induct a new generation, much like how evil cults maintain their numbers. Or we could take the necromancy option. You know. Whatever.
October 24, 2010 at 10:52 pm
Grey: it’s still “Don’t ask Don’t Tell,” regardless of whether a private or public mob are doing it. And yes, private organizations in WoW do have the power to be exclusionary and it’s their “right” but sadly for this woman, it appears to be common among top flight raiders so she has to tone down her experience due to her gender. This is the definition of discrimination (in a very unimportant arena, I grant you, but still). It’s not unexpected, I suppose, but it disappoints me.
Paul, i agree entirely with you. But “they’re all a pack of wankers” doesn’t make an interesting conclusion to a blog post, does it?!
October 26, 2010 at 7:03 am
I dunno, the group of a dozen or so people I play with is mixed, but because we have rotating campaigns going on with different members, this sometime results in all-male and sometimes in mixed-sex groups. To be honest I often find myself having more fun when it’s just guys together drinking beer, insinuating that each other is gay, and pretending to kill elves. Like it or not, mixed-sex and single-sex groups have totally different dynamics and I’m not sure what’s wrong with people choosing one or the other when they feel like it. World of Warcraft and other internet games allow players the unique experience of being able to do both, and I suppose in that sense the female gamer you mention sort of has the best of three worlds (she can join female-only guilds, which I’m sure exist, mixed-sex ones, and don’t-ask-don’t-tell male-only ones too).
Incidentally, you do know that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is defunct now, don’t you? It has been declared unconstitutional and an injunction prevents the Department of Defense from enforcing it.
October 26, 2010 at 7:22 am
“Incidentally, you do know that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is defunct now, don’t you? It has been declared unconstitutional and an injunction prevents the Department of Defense from enforcing it.”
True, but isn’t the Obama administration challenging that? [1]
How about we compare it to female only swimming hours at council pools? As a rule I’m OK with such activities in practice, though I do oppose them in theory as being discriminatory. Such pool hours do exclude people but allow another segment of the populace to relax in a “safe” space.
This approach matches Noisms comment on the dynamics of different groups, which matches my experience. Generally speaking I’m in favour of a more female friendly group as it does push for “better” behaviour from the guys present [2]. But conversely I’d happily join a “males only” social/business club.
[1] Due to the way Americans only seem to be able to govern via court case this is a sensible action so a gradual solution can be put in place, but I still find it amusing that an administration that would probably support such a thing in the abstract has to oppose it in the particular.
[2] I remember gaming in high school with an all male group and I’d prefer to avoid that gaming experience if possible. Not to say it’s not valid, but just not for me.
October 26, 2010 at 7:30 am
I’m fine with single-sex clubs in principle, but the problem here is the top flight clubs are closed to women, so they can’t get the same range of gaming experiences (well, going on the word of the commenters – and it appears it used to be worse). This is more like having the main business club in town – the one with all the best connections and opportunities – being closed to women. In that case it’s not just empty discrimination, because the women lose opportunities on account of their gender. This is a problem for gaming because there aren’t a great many women in the game, and so it’s hard for the critical mass to be established that would produce a top-flight girls-only gaming group (which I’m sure lots of girls would like). In this regard it’s different to, say, the bar scene in Japan where pretty much every style of bar exists for every type of gender mix. I don’t miss out on anything knowing there’s an all-you-can-eat-cake bar in Oita targeted pretty much exclusively at women, because there’ll be a different bar which is largely focused on men, mixed sex behaviour, etc.
I tend to find the behaviour of boy-only gaming groups amusing at first but it quickly grinds on me. In general I think both genders behave better when the other gender is present. But in TRPGs a male-only gaming club (as opposed to private group) would be intensely evil, because women coming to a new town or new to the game would be excluded from one of the main ways of finding a new group. I would definitely look very askance on an all-male gaming convention or club.
October 26, 2010 at 1:25 pm
Your approach hits a problem in execution as it says that a personal perference (single-sex groups/events) are OK as long as they don’t impact opportunities for the excluded people. But making that link then means that anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable in a mixed environment is then forced to lose opportunities. So chronically shy guys who mix through gaming are then the penalised parties. Where do we draw the line?
For me, the only line I can draw is that I’m personally uncomfortable with such groups as I generally prefer a broader mix, but I’m unwilling to say that my beliefs on this issue should be enforced in any way.
October 26, 2010 at 3:40 pm
well no, because being a bit shy and unable to enjoy gaming with women is something you can deal with personally; being unable to game at a certain level because you aren’t allowed to isn’t something you can deal with personally. There are lots of women who aren’t comfortable in mixed gaming groups, and people like me who aren’t comfortable iwth online gaming at all because of our experience of arseholes. But that’s our problem, that we can deal with as we see fit. On the other hand, if I were just not allowed to game at all because I’m a boy, that’s not something that’s a personal problem that I can strive to get over[1]. It’s just a big fat problem.
It’s important to distinguish between personal issues (I’m uncomfortable as a black man being a member of the BNP) and structural issues (black men aren’t allowed to join the BNP). Practically, in top-flight raiding guilds and the BNP, the effect will probably be the same in both cases (few women game long enough to get to top-flight level and those who do join a guild that was previously male-only will probably leave because they can’t handle the way they’re treated personally). But a woman at least has a chance to try and get in.
To return to the military policy example: there’s a difference between banning women from frontline combat duties, and allowing them to participate but requiring physical standards that are so high women can’t effectively gain or maintain positions in these frontline roles[2].
—
fn1: well, obvious surgical solutions aside.
fn2: assuming that the standards are set for genuine quality-control reasons rather than just to exclude women, and assuming that women can’t easily meet the standards, and that there are gender differences in strength, etc. etc. blah.
October 26, 2010 at 7:16 pm
Eh, there is a critical mass to pull off a girls guild in WoW. I’d say it’s around 30% or so, which is far more than enough now that a lot of your recruitment in the game is done cross server. I think it’s just a far different percentage play socially than do guys.
October 26, 2010 at 7:22 pm
if I were just not allowed to game at all because I’m a boy, that’s not something that’s a personal problem that I can strive to get over
Mate, come on, I can’t join the women’s basketball team at my gym or the women’s hot yoga class either (much as I’d like to be a spectator). That’s not the same thing as not being allowed to play basketball or do hot yoga AT ALL and nor is the instance in the OP the same as this woman not being able to play WoW as a woman AT ALL.
Can’t we just put this down to the fact that in some situations people (sensibly or otherwise) choose to have single-sex groups and sometimes not, and just leave it at that?
True, but isn’t the Obama administration challenging that?
The Dept. of Justice is has been granted an emergency appeal to stay the ruling so that an “orderly transition” can be made towards allowing openly gay people to enter the military, as far as I’m aware.
October 26, 2010 at 10:20 pm
According to the OP, noisms, these are top flight guilds, and there aren’t very many of those, so it’s not the same as being banned from the local women’s hot yoga class (though in my opinion being banned from women’s yoga is a much more serious restriction!) It is actually a lot like being banned from doing yoga at peak level.
Whether we can put it down to “just a few folks wanting to do things their own way” depends on the relative numbers of top level raiding guilds that do this, but it does seem like it might be a problem. Alternatively the OP could be wrong and there are lots of guilds the woman is still able to join, in which case it’s just an example of some boys being a bit silly.
Regardless of how many guilds are doing this, I think it’s interesting how retrograde the process and the reasons are. It’s like WoW guilds have just caught up with the “women in the military” debates from, when, the 80s?
October 26, 2010 at 11:42 pm
It is actually a lot like being banned from doing yoga at peak level.
I don’t know anything about WoW really but it doesn’t sound from the entry as if all guilds have such restrictions (it also seems there are female-only guilds).
Incidentally, I don’t think I read a single comment on that blog entry that didn’t make me roll my eyes; what the fuck does “cis-gender” mean? Not transsexual? Anyway, thanks for opening that weird window on internetland.
October 27, 2010 at 8:29 am
Yeah, the actual extent of any of these phenomena will probably remain largely unknown, so we can only really discuss it on the level of “look at those people behaving badly,” but it’s interesting nonetheless that very old debates (like women in the military) are rehashed in a very new world. It’d be kind of nice if some of that stuff could just be… taken as read? Anyway, I think it would be interesting to compare different online worlds’ communities for their social structures, for example Eve Online (an Icelandic company) may allow very different social structures to WoW (American?) and it would be interesting to see how this is reflected in the real social interactions of the game. It’s interesting for example that there is an unofficial “out” server, which is pretty much a reflection of the (earlier?) American way of handling diversity (separate communities) vs. say an English or Australian model (integrated but culturally unique). Would a game with a community managed by an Icelandic company be any different? Or do all online communities adopt a kind of internationalist default community, like ex-pats in Tokyo?
Regarding the Border House, I think they’re a really interesting blog but they spend a lot of time rehashing debates that piss me off – there’s a post up below the one I link to which indicates the existence of an earlier post critical of bondage and discipline (B&D) sexuality, which is a common position amongst the lesbian/feminist anti-prostitution campaigners who I hate. I’m familiar with transgender and the politics of transgender activism from my work in HIV but I’ve never encountered cis-gender before either. Also, there was a claim there about “don’t assume a woman should have to have a vagina” which opens a real can of worms on many feminist sites (but not, interestingly, the Border House, which was a surprise to me). My pet beef so far though has been with the strange form of disability-awareness that they’re doing, where they put a description of the pictures in the captions. I can only assume that this is done for the visually impaired, but I can’t understand how they could read the text but not see the pictures; and in any case the captions almost invariably seem to rely on assumed knowledge about sight that many visually impaired people presumably wouldn’t have. It seems a lot of work for no gain. But I don’t know anything about making a website accessible, so who am I to judge? And I also shouldn’t get into this meta-site thing of commenting on other people’s sites here (I hate it when people do that about me).
October 27, 2010 at 8:59 am
Visually impaired people are able to get programs to read the text off a screen. But such programs actually also read the alt text on pictures (the stuff you get when you hold your mouse over a picture), so I believe the “correct” standard is to put the description into the alt text then just caption the pictue whatever you want. It may be that Border House doesn’t allow the user to set alt text when entering pictures or they just may not be very good with technology.
If anyone more technically capable wants to clarify/correct me then go for it. I’m only on the fringes of such things.
October 27, 2010 at 9:10 am
well then, there’s further evidence that when you see something that doesn’t make sense but is very deliberate, it probably means you’re missing some important knowledge!
October 27, 2010 at 9:22 pm
I hate to derail this, but are you really saying with a straight face that minorities in England and Australia are integrated? Anecdotally American immigrants are far more integrated into society at large, I would say. (Philosophically too; look at Bourne’s Trans-national America.)
On the Border House, I just find it so funny that a group supposedly dedicated to breaking down barriers is so keen on erecting linguistic and cultural ones of its own. But I suppose that’s the point, really; being a member of a middle-class, nonethnic minority has its benefits, and ultimately if the barriers no longer exist neither do those benefits.
October 27, 2010 at 10:20 pm
I think minorities in Australia are quite well integrated into the community, and yet retain their cultural uniqueness (this is a well-developed concept in Australia). I don’t think this has worked in the UK but it’s closer to the general idea; I get the impression that America is more focused on assimilation vs. ghettoization, though I don’t know for sure and I wouldn’t want to make any strong judgments either way (it was more of an example of how I think different national companies might construct different online communities).
Are you implying the people running the Border House are from middle-class nonethnic minorities? I don’t quite understand your last point, I think.
October 27, 2010 at 10:54 pm
I don’t know if Australia’s recent history with Lebanese and Indian immigrants supports your point… but I’ll defer to the person from the country with the well-developed concept of cultural integration.
The people who run the Border House seem to be typical bourgeois people from typical bourgeois minorities. By which I mean that people who are gay or transgendered and not bourgeois tend not to identify strongly with the minority sub-culture in my experience – they’re more interested in just living their lives, probably because they don’t have the breathing space to luxuriate in being different. Middle-class people on the other hand have plenty of breathing space to be as wacky and unique as they like.
October 27, 2010 at 11:14 pm
Australia’s recent history with lebanese migrants and Indian students isn’t necessarily relevant to my point (unless you think that America’s recent history of lynching black people is relevant to their superior level of integration?) Bad people do bad things in defense against political and cultural movements they don’t like, and those things aren’t necessarily a sign of the greater cultural phenomena happening at the time (though they may be). Australia has a generally very well accepted and functioning system of multiculturalism, with a little bit of friction attending each new wave of migration.
I don’t like to make judgments about the personal histories and economic backgrounds of the people writing at that blog, and I think you’re altogether too eager to tar all left-wing or alternative thinkers with the claim that they’re just bourgeois rebels. I suppose it suits your marxist sympathies, but I don’t have a great deal of respect for that particular straw man.
October 28, 2010 at 12:01 am
Like I said, I defer to the person from the country with the well-developed concept of cultural integration.
How does thinking people at the border house are bourgeous rebels suit my Marxist sympathies, though? I wasn’t sure I had many of those – which ones are they, again? I agree I was being judgemental, but I’m fairly sure I was also pretty accurate in my assessment. I live and breathe, etc. (“Alternative thinkers” is a laugh, by the way – good joke. You were being ironic, right?)
October 28, 2010 at 9:59 am
On Australia, we probably need more time to assess whether the current issues are re-occurences of the problems with earlier migrants which eventually settled down (i.e. Italians, Vietnamese) or if there has been some change in multi-culturalism in Australia coming in has rendered it less effective.
I differ from Faustus in that I’m a little worried that the modern interpretation of multi-culturalism now has too wide a meaning (of abstract tolerance) which, combined with the Western self-doubt since the end of communism, may result in a failure to achieve the integration that earlier waves of migration managed.
Still time will tell. I suspect it should only delay the process, as if it there was a large enough problem the populace would reject the current multiculturalism and revert to the earlier one [1] a la Germany.
[1] I’d define the current multiculturalism as something like “All cultures are welcome and equal” which can be taken as an invitation not to join the existing community, while the earlier version is more along the lines of “You’re welcome, your food’s welcome, but we’re going to tease you for about 20 years and never forget you wanted to join us so feel free to piss off if you don’t like the deal.” [2]
[2] Yeah, there’s really more to it than that and it’s all shades of interpretation, but I don’t have time for the essay now. Lots of other poeple have expressed their problems with such ideas and I’m open to the idea they may be partially right, even in Australia.
October 28, 2010 at 10:09 am
Paul could be right, though I think the common recurrence of these events is evidence strongly in favour of relaxing and assuming that every new wave of migrants will be greeted with a riot; and the lack of deaths or serious injuries in the latest one is a sign that we’re getting better. I’ve observed before, though, that multiculturalism in Australia is generally supported by “conservatives” as well as “liberals” (these terms being a bit useless in Australia) as a means of managing diversity – the obnoxious yet esteemed Gerard Henderson provides good documentary support for this. All that remains is the kind of tinkering-around-the-edges of policy that Paul describes (and which in fact is all that our most recent crop of conservatives managed to do to the policy, despite making very strong claims to not support it).
Noisms: Marxists were very fond of claiming anyone who discusses identity or culture is a bourgeois loser with no genuine rebellious tendencies. It’s one of their less obnoxious traits (witness opossum deciding I’m part of the “post-modern right” because I support multiculturalism and think culture is important). And we’ve seen before that you love marx, unconditionally and without criticism 🙂 QED