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Wag
 
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Last Login: Friday, November 21, 2008 7:33 PM
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There is a well known and well accepted stereotype in LRP that women don't like fighting, they like talking and pretty dresses and probably playing with dolls. Men like guns, fighting and playing with babe's breasts. Or something like that. It's a stereotype OF COURSE IT'S NOT TRUE FOR EVEYRONE, but is it true on average? Do women prefer the talky roles to the fighty roles?
Well Maelstrom clearly indicates that the prejudice is true, because Maelstrom is a predominantly social game with very little emphasis on fighting and it has lots of female players. Nearly 1:1. So all the anecdotes say... But of course anecdotal evidence is rubbish, it's often worse than nothing. I haven't been to CP but I as far as I can tell combat is significantly less of an emphasis in Maelstrom than either CP or LT. So if the game does attract more women (in proportion in comparison) than CP or LT then this would seem to support the contention that women prefer talky LRP.
So I thought I'd dig out some data. Turns out that at the last event the male:female ratio was 742:325 or 2.28:1 (Keep this number in mind for later, it's important as the baseline which everything else is compared to, 2.28:1) What does that mean? I don't really know, I admit I thought the ratio was closer to 1:1 than that but without a comparison with CP or LT ideally, or with other LRP events then the number doesn't really mean much. So maybe we can't say anything about the issue?
But then it occurred to me that if we can't compare our m:f ratios with other systems, maybe we can compare them within Maelstrom. For those not familiar with the game, you have to pick a culture when you make your character. Some of the cultures are fairly warlike and aggressive, some of them are more political, sartorial and conversational. If I had to pick two cultures that I would assume would appeal to women based on the stereotype that women like talking more than fighting then I would pick Flambard and Freiboden (for the Millense, not for the League characters). Both seem to have large numbers of women and to emphasize talking over fighting. I would expect militaristic nations like Merisusi, Gnolls and Amun-Sa to have very low ratios. Amun-Sa we might expect to be particularly poor since it's a fairly warlike culture and is quite strongly misogynistic. So what do the numbers show?
1.29 Amun-Sa
1.29 Tritoni
1.50 Rukh
1.70 Gnoll
1.72 Free Islands
1.95 Flambard
2.15 Kamakura
2.33 Schaffhausen
2.48 Malathia
2.50 Lyzanium
2.73 Maya
3.03 Freiboden
3.17 Alkyon
3.29 Fidelia
4.88 Merisusi
Firstly Flambard are in the top half of the list with a low number (of men:women - 1.00 would indicate one female character booked for every male character booked), but they are nowhere near the top of the list. The warlike Merisusi and Fidelians are predictably near the bottom, but they're only just below the high social Alkyon and Freiboden/Millenese. The Mayans and the Lyzars, both also highly social "talky" cultures are equally well into the bottom half of the table. By comparison the warlike Tritoni place near the top (but this may be a ringer due to their female dominated culture brief), but so are the Gnolls and very strangely the Free Islands. Apparently playing a pirate from a den of scum and villainy appeals even more strongly to women than playing the noblewoman. And most strikingly the Amun-Sa are joint top of the list, despite being a fairly warlike culture and highly misogynistic.
What can we conclude from all that data? Well it's still bloody crude, there just isn't enough data to be certain of anything and the cultures were written to be fun, not a sociology data collection exercise. The margins of error are large and there are only a thousand people in the sample. On the other hand I have a feeling that newspapers regularly print election forecasts on similar sample sizes... My conclusion is that there is no trend. Sampling a thousand LRPers within a single game system doesn't seem to indicate any substantial preference for combat or talking in terms of basic character choice. If there is no trend then that has to lead me to suspect that the assumption/stereotype appears to be false.
Interesting, but I think we can do better! Maelstrom has about a gazillion skills. Too many to count. So we categorize the skills into areas. For instance Offensive skills are all the combat skills for hitting people "Sword Double" etc. Defensive skills are all the skills for taking damage (extra hits, shield use, armour use). We have magic skills, priest skills, it's a LRP game, it's got skills. Since they're in categories I can total up the total number of skills that women have taken from that category compared to men. Here are the numbers for categories with enough data to make any comparison even worth writing down.
0.78 Jewellery Crafting
1.25 Crafting Swords
1.45 Priest Skills
1.55 Alchemy
1.67 Crafting Bows
1.85 Career
2.00 Theurgic Spellcasting
2.08 Enchanting Magic Items
2.48 Necromantic Spellcasting
2.52 Gun Crafting
2.72 Construct ships
2.96 Defensive
3.59 Sorcerous Spellcasting
3.74 Offensive
3.75 Crafting Axes
3.85 Construct Buildings
4.81 Siege Weapon Crafting
5.53 Armour/Shield Crafting
15.50 Craft 2-Handed weapons
Ok, so now a picture does seem to be emerging. For a start that Jewellery crafting statistic is frankly enormous. Women seem to plump for jewellery making in massive preference to men. Priest skills, perhaps the most social part of the game are also massively more appealing to women than men. Likewise for career skills (which is predominantly all the medical and non-magic healing skills), which does seem to play straight to the stereotypes.
At the other end of the scale defensive combat skills are not appealing to women, but offensive combat skills are particularly unattractive. I think it's interesting that extra body hits and armour appeals to women more than wielding a sword or a gun. I think it would also be interesting to compare gun skills with weapon skills, but that data isn't shown above. Making siege weapons is very unappealing to women, as is making armour, shields and axes but making bows is very popular and making swords is exceptionally popular. Clearly women are very happy to have the crafting skills, but is there a tendency for them to pick graceful beautiful things (bows, swords, jewellery,ships) over big heavy ugly things (armour, siege weapons, buildings, axes and two handed weapons).
Some magic is clearly favoured by women, especially alchemy but theurgy and talismancy are more popular among women than men and necromancy is only slightly more common in men than women. Sorcery on the other hand is very unpopular, which is interesting because in Maelstrom this magic contains healing spells and all the “blasting” spells. Alchemy however is much better at healing than sorcery. Are Maelstrom women picking the “healer” magic over the “fighting” magic? Or the social magic (theurgy and necromancy) over the fighting magic? Or are they favouring the magics that let them produce items and wealth (alchemy and talismancy) but remainin the background over the magics that let them cast spells and be the focus of attention?
What can we conclude? Apart from the fact that I am the most boring person in the world with far too much time on my hands? Almost nothing I suspect. Women don't seem to pick the “social” cultures over the “fighting” cultures in Maelstrom but they do seem to pick the “social” skills over the “fighting” skills for their character. Not a single fighting skill is favoured by women, they are all biased towards the blokes and the healing and priest skills are all very strongly biased towards women. There are too many caveats and potential causes to really be sure why though. People tend to attend Maelstrom in a group of characters from one culture but to try and cover all the skills. Possibly the group culture is being set for the whole group rather than by gender bias but maybe the blokes are grabbing the combatants and leaving the women to take the social character skills. Or maybe the women are elbowing the men aside to become jewellers, alchemists, surgeons and sword smiths.
I think the skill data does strongly suggest that men and women make different choices for skills for their character (beware small sample sizes however) but it can't tell us much about why they make those choices. The stereotype that women choose talking and healing skills over fighting skills does appear to be born out by the data, although we can't say if this happens because they want those skills or for other reasons.
(Apologies for not including sample sizes, but if I did that then I think it would cross the borderline into being useful IC information. I'm sure someone will be unhappy with me announcing that 57% of necromancers are male, but I feel that just giving ratios gives nothing useful away about the game itself).
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Champion
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| may i say dispite the intretsting nature of the research NERD
www.mandalastudios.co.uk www.kangena.co.uk RL - Mark (Coventry)
CP - Urtsi (Ael) [Ex Head Weapons Checker/ Ref]
Mandala - Wookie (Ref/ Props)
PD - Wookie (Ref)
GF - Organiser
Dark Secrets - Philip Stanley (Tech Assistant)
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Apprentice
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Last Login: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 10:53 AM
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Bearing in mind that 'anecdote /= data'...
I'm now on my second character in Maelstrom; both characters were designed for social interaction. I wanted to get out there and talk to people, I did not want to get into any fights (primarily because my OC combat skills are pretty weak) and where possible I wanted skills which would not automatically make me a target (so necromancy was right out, as was theurgy for the 'fallen will want to recruit you' aspect).
My first character was a meek, mild, modest young woman of good family who took craft/mastercraft siege weapon as her primary skills because she/I wanted to build HUGE WEAPONS OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION, RAINING DOWN TERROR UPON MY HAPLESS FOES AND AND *ahem* and so on and so forth - the contrast amused me. Jewelry crafting just didn't appeal to me as it didn't seem like you could do much with it - sure, you can make pretty pretty shinies, but what do they _do_? What is their purpose? (Someone will now pop up to explain just how many useful and practical things one can do with jewelry crafting, I'm sure, but at the time that was my reasoning.)
My second character took offensive skills (and the deciding factor in picking her culture was the tasty cultural skills), because various people had pointed out that it was quite useful, if someone was intent on doing you harm, to give them something more important to think about to distract them while you ran away very quickly. And few things are more distracting than a mortal wound and a ticking death count. Offensive skills used defensively.
So I may have skewed your numbers slightly by taken skills for less-than-straightforward reasons. 
---PD - Magdalene Grace - strapping Malathian wench The late Erin Eline-Alisse van der Eyre - Schaffen siege engineer and proto-teen-rebel CUTT - Myrun Einarsdottir - Queen of Shadows, Paladin of Luca and occasional plot-hound
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Heroic Knight
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| Women seem to like playing animal cultures, especially cats? Looking at the list, the first five are Amun-Sa (wemics), Tritoni (wemics), Rukh (avians), Gnoll (mokosh) and Free Islands (any race). The next two are Flambard (humans) and Kamakura (humans or mokosh). So I'd be fascinated to see the racial figures, if you can get them? Also, those cultures which have more women than average include some of the prettiest costumes. Amun-Sa, Rukh and Kamakura are all exotic and oriental, silks and embroidery; whilst Flambard is the obvious choice for the powdered wig and big bustle brigade. And the Free Islands seem to be a good choice for people wanting to play wenches. The fact Millen isn't more popular I largely blame on the fact that it isn't really mentioned as a viable culture in the character creation rules, you really have to play the game already to know about them. Basically, the only real surprise for me is the Gnolls. Never would have seen them as being so appealing. I guess maybe they tempt people who want to play less stereotypically female characters, that won't be judged as much by their gender? And let's face it, being a big butch Gnoll with a gruff voice does look a right laugh. Finally, I notice the native and awakened cultures aren't even on the list. And this makes me sad.
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Masquerades & Massacres (Jane Austen's Aliens): Organiser
Maelstrom: Papa Abgal (The Rum Fairy of Doom, High Exarch of Entertainment)
Serenity: Xavier Yu Ji ('Pointy Hat Man')
White City: Too Many Characters To Mention!
Dark Ages Society: Godfrid Swine-Herd (Scummy Saxon), Hauk Ragnarsson (Rus Viking Flashman)
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Prodigal
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What do *men* want from LRP then? Thats probably another thread.  Anyway, onto the topic. I can really only speak for myself. What do I want from LRP? I want the social stuff, I want the combative stuff, I want the complex political stuff, I want to be able to influence the game world, I want to be able to learn something new (I dont mean skills, I mean *things*), I want to tank around in armour, I want to wear pretty dresses. I want ... And breath. I want *all* of it. Sorry, I'm not being helpful, am I? I think there's some sort of bell curve thingy. I'm probably near the top in terms of my willingness to get stuck in to a scrap (I'm in the 'Why is LRP so wussy these days' camp with combat). I dont like dolls, never did. David (Balor) is far more likely to play non-combatants than I am. I also like making kit and swanning around in it and politicising. Like Bacon said on a thread nearby, I believe that women want the same things as men. What I decide to play depends on the system and setting. For example - I wouldnt sign up for an event which was advertised as being a predominantly political and social event as a heavy combatant. Question: why is playing a fighter so often considered as incompatible with also being heavily political and/or social? Or is that another different thread?
_____________________________________________________ It is not a competition. It is a web forum.
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Wag
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Can we get some errors on those? (I'm an idiot, yes I see why not).
How many events back can you grab data for?
There's a fairly obvious pro-wemic trend (it's interesting that this doesn't seem to depend on the content of the brief - whether it's misogynistic/misanthropic - haven't some people been trying to argue that the Amun-sa brief isn't misogynistic?). Whether or not the Gnoll/Rukh data fit into that is questionable (alkyons/swiss don't off the top of my head have a special role for women - but Rukh is very Thousand and One Nights flavoured which seems to conjure up images of Beaked Scheherazades). Gnolls as gnolls doesn't ring any bells, but perhaps gnolls as "mice"?
There could be a lot of reasons why you end up with a few more women in Free Islands, relating to new recruitment (sounds like a sensible choice for someone new to larp but not so confident - hard to put a foot wrong with Free Islands).
Skills - craft bow at least is seems fairly likely to be a hitchhiker on Tritoni. Craft Jewellry probably buoyed by the preponderance of Rukhi - but still choosing Jewellry over Telescopes/Surgeon's Tools.
Craft Sword is puzzling - perhaps the craft data is reflecting a bias towards crafting for public sale rather personal/group use (i.e. steering well clear of things with less than optimal demand)? After all (bar bows and jewellry) next on the list is "Craft Gun".
Alchemy lets you contribute without having to run into battle/grapple with instant rules effects. Poisons/love potions/healing? Magic which doesn't involve charging into combat/shouting mid combat/trying to remember rules mid combat? If that were the case then where's Talismancy? Too generally unpopular (the original talismancer is fairly far from the scene when the effect payoff occurs!) to appear in the data?
Overall I think the general trend is "Display" (Jewellry+Wemics >> Siege Engines and Fidelians). Perhaps it would be helpful to try inverting it and ask why there aren't more blokes in those areas - or perhaps not.
Marios
Marios
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Prodigal
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As a female, I feel the need to emplace my anecdote on this thread even though nobody cares  .
After quite a bit of experimentation, I know exactly what I want from LARP as a player - I want to put my characters in interesting (read: traumatic) situations and be able to vicariously experience them in a safe environment, and I want to show off my skills at putting together lots of information into useful configurations and passing it on.
Whilst I enjoy a good ruck, nowadays I tend to get my fill of that as a monster; combat with my actual characters doesn't appeal so much because having to keep track of the system knocks me out of character a bit too much.
I am not a fan of what is normally termed 'politics' (including social politics) and other games of manipulation (like haggling) because I am utterly hopeless at them. On the other hand playing someone who can reasonably be expected to be a bit naive / unsubtle on the periphery of such games is generally good fun.
I have seen quite a lot of women go through the 'you mean, we get to wear armour and hit people? Cool!' stage (i.e. enjoying being able to ignore social expectations and have a good fight on equal terms to the guys, without them being so worried about 'hitting a girl') and did it myself before discovering that personally I actually liked other aspects of LARP more.
Maelstrom: Jessily the Wemic, previously Tourmaline of Weaver
CUTT: Kerriville the Ninth, previously Ref 07/08
EOS: Study the Venin
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 Posted Saturday, June 14, 2008 11:01 AM |
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