Women & Roguelikes

[kraflab]

Since I have the luxury of seeing demographics through Desura, I came across some pretty interesting data on the gender of Epilogue players:

90% Male
3% Female
7% Anonymous

That's right, the female percentage is less than half the percentage of people that chose to remain gender-anonymous.

I don't have stats on gaming as a whole, but surely that number is incredibly small!

[AgingMinotaur]

Yowza! No comment, I guess.

As always,
Minotauros

[Darren Grey]

The DCSS survey statistics were kinda similar.  Of course we are the niche within the niche, and female gamer penetration is very very poor for less accessible game types.  I know Dredmor and Cardinal Quest have been much better at attracting female players.

Of course there are still many very skilled and dedicated female roguelike players across many of the traditional titles.  In spite of the typical male hero fantasy theme of most RLs I don't think there's anything in the gameplay that's inherently off-putting to female players. It's more about visibility.

[guest509]

female gamer penetration

Please Mr. Grey, can we keep this professional. 

[Darren Grey]

Would you rather I talk about male gamer penetration? Because even casual penetration is poor for ASCII games. Penetration is much deeper when gamers have something nice to look at, it seems.

:-P

[Krice]

I think women are much more casual gamers, but they do play games. Women seem to play certain types of games. I remember The Sims was (and still could be) a big hit and many multi-player games like World of Warcraft.

[Krice]

Double post, crap.

[guest509]

Would you rather I talk about male gamer penetration? Because even casual penetration is poor for ASCII games. Penetration is much deeper when gamers have something nice to look at, it seems.

:-P

Nice

[Skeletor]

Not surprising - as enjoying a roguelike is 99% about dealing with logical-mathematical challenges, which isn't exactly known to be women's cup of tea.

[Darren Grey]

Tell that to the many female mathematicians in the world...  Honestly it's that sort of shit generalisation that keeps a lot of women away from gamer communities.

[Z]

Agreed with Darren. I know some female roguelike players, and they are very good at maths too.

[Krice]

Honestly it's that sort of shit generalisation that keeps a lot of women away from gamer communities.

I don't think anything "keeps" women away from anything. We as men have to understand that women don't always want to spend hundreds of hours to beat some hardcore roguelike games.

[getter77]

Just one of those historical/cultural oddities among many others----there have been girls gaming since the very start and there continues to be more and more by quite a number as the years go on same as with guys:  People on the Whole are more down with it than ever before.

Like other things, Roguelikes are along for the ride and will get lifted up proper as it goes.  I would say the main factor isn't necessarily gender based as far as norms and such go....well....outside of stuff like Noxico maybe....but mainly it just comes down to Polish Polish Polish----on all fronts, with much attention paid.

This is why Dredmor has many folks, same as, traditionally at least, jRPGs, and so on----no matter the gamer, polish gets noted and appreciated, and serves to perhaps ultimately have the power to tempt even detractors to test the waters.

[Irinka]

I agree with Darren as well.

[Quendus]

As an undergrad not long ago, my maths courses were close enough to 50/50 that I couldn't tell which gender was better represented. It was the computer science courses that were male-dominated.