thanks (I think) for getting me to consider ev psych again after years of casually rejecting it out of hand, and for cutting through several layers of tedious cruft here to get to the interesting part.
keep you and your darn girl cooties away I've never witnessed this but I understand there's a lot of it. Where do I go for a discussion of the diversity of gaming experience, I wonder?
It might just be easier to say that many games are designed by men to appeal to their often teenage tastes so it's not surprising that they appeal to less women. But I wouldn't want to stand in the way of a big web shouting match.
controversy, genes, gaming, race, etc.wanton_heat_jetJune 3 2009, 14:51:45 UTC
Thanks for picking up this topic.
I have a particular fondness for human fallacy, and the intellectual weaknesses of my fellow liberals elicit special attention. The leftist (especially Marxist) resistance to the idea of a built-in human nature is one such weakness, and it squares up nicely with my interest in evolution in general.
I've given some amount of thought to how to make RPGs more attractive to women. The problem is that a too-explicit attempt to accommodate women comes across as sexist because it implies that women and men are different. I've done what I could to increase the presence of female images and language in the games I've worked on, but that only goes so far. Maybe what's next is a full-on treatment of what seems to work and not work for women in gaming. That's a big task to get right, but maybe that's the task that's cut out for me.
I'll have to check out the critique of sex selection.
As for race and genes, even I know better than to go there.
Re: controversy, genes, gaming, race, etc.eyebeamsJune 3 2009, 16:01:16 UTC
With all due respect, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more essentialist form of leftism than pure Marxism.
I think your criticism is kind of a lampoon. It's not really about the existence of data saying people are different. It's about how it's used to construct stories about why people are the way they are, and this disconnect is a problem you can't wave away, especially since the distortions it causes are problems for actual biologists, not just Marxists.
To look at more broadly, people have said very, very silly things about human intelligence and behavior using just this sort of rationale for what, maybe a century? This means that current evo psych claims need to bring something pretty powerful to the table to be taken seriously.
Lots of interesting links to follow there - thanks.
Without having been present at the event, I wonder if the apparent predominance of women who feel they've been badly treated by boys is because that's the subset of women gamers who (understandably) feel the need to make the unjustice they've suffered publically known? Meanwhile the rest of us just carry on listening to the interesting theories, and gaming.
Further thought - it may be particularly acute in women for whom that sort of discrimination was a new experience. If gaming was the first thing they'd tried that didn't fall into the typical female areas, it probably came as quite a shock. I say "probably" because I can only guess - I met RPGs after a year doing an apprenticeship in a military engineering firm, and a further year studying physics at Cambridge. Being one of two or three females in a group of (say) 20 was a vast improvement on being one in 500. A more "typical" female would, I suspect, find it a lot harder.
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keep you and your darn girl cooties away
I've never witnessed this but I understand there's a lot of it. Where do I go for a discussion of the diversity of gaming experience, I wonder?
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Try Iris:
http://forums.theirisnetwork.org/index.php
And the Astrid's Parlor forum at WotC rolls ever on, doing good work as it flails in and out of madness.
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I... think his data might be out of date.
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I have a particular fondness for human fallacy, and the intellectual weaknesses of my fellow liberals elicit special attention. The leftist (especially Marxist) resistance to the idea of a built-in human nature is one such weakness, and it squares up nicely with my interest in evolution in general.
I've given some amount of thought to how to make RPGs more attractive to women. The problem is that a too-explicit attempt to accommodate women comes across as sexist because it implies that women and men are different. I've done what I could to increase the presence of female images and language in the games I've worked on, but that only goes so far. Maybe what's next is a full-on treatment of what seems to work and not work for women in gaming. That's a big task to get right, but maybe that's the task that's cut out for me.
I'll have to check out the critique of sex selection.
As for race and genes, even I know better than to go there.
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and yet Marx built his whole theoretical edifice on the idea of Homo Faber. It's mystifying.
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I think your criticism is kind of a lampoon. It's not really about the existence of data saying people are different. It's about how it's used to construct stories about why people are the way they are, and this disconnect is a problem you can't wave away, especially since the distortions it causes are problems for actual biologists, not just Marxists.
To look at more broadly, people have said very, very silly things about human intelligence and behavior using just this sort of rationale for what, maybe a century? This means that current evo psych claims need to bring something pretty powerful to the table to be taken seriously.
Reply
Without having been present at the event, I wonder if the apparent predominance of women who feel they've been badly treated by boys is because that's the subset of women gamers who (understandably) feel the need to make the unjustice they've suffered publically known? Meanwhile the rest of us just carry on listening to the interesting theories, and gaming.
Further thought - it may be particularly acute in women for whom that sort of discrimination was a new experience. If gaming was the first thing they'd tried that didn't fall into the typical female areas, it probably came as quite a shock. I say "probably" because I can only guess - I met RPGs after a year doing an apprenticeship in a military engineering firm, and a further year studying physics at Cambridge. Being one of two or three females in a group of (say) 20 was a vast improvement on being one in 500. A more "typical" female would, I suspect, find it a lot harder.
Reply
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