Tonight, I have been sitting here and thinking about girls and gaming. And the notion struck me that girls are natural-born gamers.
Granted all children have creative and elaborate imaginations but girls are often known as having deeper ’story lines’. For instance, picture a young girl playing happily in her room. She has all of her dolls out. There is conflict, disagreement and, in general, a plot.
When I started to think about that it struck me that girls were gaming from the day they started playing. Why then is it it such a male dominated activity?
When do boys take over control of the imagination train and become the ‘gamers’? Girls love stories and make natural storytellers. Now don’t get me wrong. I know plenty of male children (my own included) who seem to have no problem creating a happy story in their heads. And the only DM I have ever worked with has been male.
I just think that if perhaps more women looked at role playing as ’storytelling’ then just maybe there would be more female gamers.
It was one of the ways my husband got me interested. Oh, of course the idea of combat was quit a draw too, but I liked the idea of moving little figures around the table who had an adventure to live out. It was almost a grown up version of playing dolls. In fact, I wasn’t interested in RPG’s till I found out that miniatures existed.
Maybe, all we need to do to get more girls to play is to let them pick out their miniatures first and then explain the concept of the game.
What do you all think?
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May 9, 2009 at 4:40 pm
mike
i have a two year old daughter, and she already likes to watch what has been labeled as ‘guys night’ and its labeled this by the wife’s of the players.
I think you offer a very interesting point about role playing, i hope my daughter likes it as much as i do.
May 9, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Swordgleam
Eh. I played with action figures, not dolls. Boys have GI Joe, and I’m sure their stories are just as elaborate. I played plenty of make-believe growing up without any dolls, just a tree fort and some friends. I never knew D&D had minis until I’d been playing for a year.
We’re all natural storytellers when we’re little; it just eventually gets beaten out of us because indulging your imagination is embarrassing in this culture for some reason. Look at gaming; it’s like playing videogames, only you need actual friends and actual skills (mostly imagination) and yet it’s considered much more geeky and anti-social than videogame RPGs. Which is absurd when you consider that you don’t need expensive hardware and do, as mentioned, need actual real-life friends. So what about it is so bad? the fact that you’re actually pretending you’re an elf, and getting invested in the character, rather than just clicking things on a screen.