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FAWS comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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I don't understand how Christine the female dungeon master who has apparently consistently been playing with approximately gender-balanced groups not accommodating plowing fits in here. Plowing doesn't even seem like a particularly feminine activity (compared to e. g. trying for peaceful relations with the elves).
The writer and danerys thought so, apparently, and it made sense when I read it. Maybe you mean cultural_expectation_feminine, and that diverges from what geeky girls playing D&D are more likely to do than geeky boys?
My point is that I don't know what exactly they were thinking and that's why I'm asking. If they think that plowing in particular is a feminine activity that would make it somewhat more understandable, but it's not at all obvious to me from the post that this (their thinking so) is actually the case, and even then I don't quite see what was supposed to be signified since Christine was already regularly including things like making tea. Occams razor would suggest a single misapprehension the absence of which leads to the whole section to making sense more likely than multiple misapprehensions.
I don't think the idea is that real-world plowing is feminine so much as that choosing a non-violent activity in a role-playing game is a more likely choice for female players.
I doubt things are clear cut anywhere as to whether girls playing games in general (D&D or not) tend to opt for non-violent stuff as a property of human females, or because they tend to opt for it as causally linked with social expectations and other feminism-important issues.
I personally know several females who vastly favor direct, gritty hack'n'slash over stereotypical "girls prefer nonviolence in games". Only one of them is remotely similar to a "tomboy" and most wouldn't be identified as "man-like" in many other things. I'm going to ask them what they observe on this subject and how they got there, and whether society gives/gave them pressure to prefer nonviolence (which would be some evidence that it is not caused by gender directly, if yes).
And therefore what, though? The DM was female. The players were female. I'm unlcear if this is just supposed to be a vignette on how females may view the world, or illustrating some difficulty women have interacting with the world because their viewpoints are otherwise ignored, which if that's the intent, I'm lost as to what should have been different in order to bring a more harmonious game session to the momentarily frustrated female players.
I want to make a point now (while we're still into the less controversial stuff), that I do not necessarily agree with everything I am going to be posting in this series, and (except for dividing some of the longer submissions, to put it in the proper themed post) I am, in general, not editing anything out of the submissions. I will edit the Intro part to specify this.
That said, in this particular instance, I do think what Julia Wise is saying is very worthwhile (Obviously, since she didn't submit that post. I found it on her blog and thought it was useful.) But note she didn't write that blog post specifically for this series. So some of the anecdotes rely less on gender than others. Overall, though, it is exactly the sort of thing that I think is a good start to this series of communication.
Christine understood the game to be about combat, so she had planned an adventure that led us toward combat with the elves. But when she gave us details about starving farmers, my wanting to feed them was considered off-mission.
I don't have much data on what D&D is like with groups of different gender mixtures. At the time, we considered agricultural forays and many stops for "okay, now we make tea" to be things that probably didn't happen when boys played.
Addendum: approximately 900 people have now told me that this kind of thing happened in their groups too and is not a girl thing. Point taken.
Sounds like we've successfully reduced the inferential distance a bit, eh? ;)
FWIW, I don't know about tea, but the kind of plot derailing you describe happens about ten times per session in our current all-male roleplaying group. Some GMs are better at handling it than others...
FWIW, this does not match my experience. But then, most of my gaming has been in mixed-sex groups.
Yeah, I'm revising my opinion on how gendered this experience actually was.
My (normally all-male) groups have had a few forays into "make don't break," and many forays into "the DM wants us to do X? Y is the most important thing in the world right now."
In general, something I talk about with players is asking them how much of their ideal session is spent on combat, and how much is spent on role-playing. You get people who prefer 100% combat, and people who prefer 100% roleplaying, and seating those people at the same table is a bad idea. (I tend to go for >80% roleplaying myself, these days.) I would surprised if there weren't a male skew towards combat and a female skew towards roleplaying, but I also expect both distributions to be positive everywhere.
There's also a wealth of tabletop roleplaying systems out there these days, such that if you find your group prefers to mostly roleplay, you should play a game designed for mostly roleplay, rather than D&D, which is basically designed for >95% combat.
... if only because an aggressive team might use plowing to draw the elves out in a trap rather than trying to hunt them on their own turf!