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I do talk a good fight
 
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I think you could reasonably have one or two gender-blind cultures in a game, but to me, for believability, they'd have to be (a) non-human and (b) pretty damned alien. Some kind of highly advanced critters who'd evolved beyond notions of gender roles -- maybe like humans might be 10,000 years down the line, after several thousand years of being a Telepathic Unification (in Master of Orion 2 terms) and practicing genetic manipulation to weed out examples of highly male or highly female individuals.
Of course, having a neuter gender, to which most characters are assumed by default to belong, is probably the easiest way to something like gender-blindness in a species, in that OOC males & females would all be neuter IC. I presume (but am not entirely sure) that the insect characters in Maelstrom are like this.
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Heroic Knight
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| I wouldn't advocate gender blindness, just not making gender an 8 page issue or rather just not making one gender an issue. It's patronizing, just as if there was a thread saying 'What do black people want from larp?' or 'What do gay people want from larp?' might be perceived as patronizing in diferent ways. This is eight or nine pages thus far singling out women (again) I find it alienating; 'what do you creatures with front bumps want from our world?' I hadn't considered I was part of a hive mind that wanted anything perculiar to my gender from live roleplaying...maybe I do and don't realize it..hmm that is a nice blue dress. I just want the same as most people want from the real world; equality. In this context to roleplay/fight/knit anyway I want to within the parameters of the game world and not to be judged or analysed based on my gender. Now before people put their foot down on the extreme peddle that doesn't mean grey boiler suits and androgeny, just not to be singled out as different from the 'norm' by dint of weeing sitting down, and then being analysed as a big homogenous lump 'women do this' and 'women like that' I'm quite an advocate of equality in the real world and see no reason why I should abandon principles (aspirational as they are when I put on silly clothes and muck about for a weekend, so as I say I find threads like this to be patronizing and alienating. What did Twaine say Disraeli said about stats?
~'What is Archangel worth? - 'Nothing...everything'~
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Knight
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| Actually that's a good point, not wanting to start a riot (And possibly derailing the thread) about being PC but... LARP (and perhapse RP in general) seems abnormally slanted in favour of white Europeans, while gender mix is improving, I don't believe the racial mix is. When I go onto a university campus in most places I see a very mixed bag of skin tones. When I come to almost any LARP I am confronted with a much more limited selection even in progressive LARPs like Maelstrom. Personally I blame D&D and it's crude racial shortcuts for this (Drow are black and therefore evil leaps to mind) and I suspect puts some people off playing the tabletops which in turn lead to recruitment into LARP (LT due to drawing on D&D heavily also seems to suffer from this). Are these points valid or have I just been wandering around with my eyes closed? (On the other hand anecdotal and personal evidence seems to indicate relativly proportional selection of LGBT people. OOC faith... forget I said anything, that's too big a can of worms.)
PD: Veritas (Smith Eidolon)
LT: Michaelangelo D'Crotez (Militia)
OOC: Andy
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Wag
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Sikorski (6/24/2008)
This is eight or nine pages thus farsingling out women (again) I find it alienating; 'what do you creatures with front bumps want from our world?' I hadn't considered I was part of a hive mind that wanted anything perculiar to my gender from live roleplaying...maybe I do and don't realize it..hmm that is a nice blue dress.
I mostly just started the thread to look at some statistics. I was interested to know if there was any kind of evidential basis for suggesting that men and women want choose different things when they LRP. I'm interested in all aspects of what people want from LRP and if I thought "black people" or "gay people" was a category I could look at (because I had data that allowed the analysis) then I'd probably look at that as well, although my expectation would be to see no trends in such data. A more interesting set of data might be age data, to look the choices of 16-21s compared to the 30s and over. There I would expect to see trends.
I think it's unfortunate that the issue is patronizing but is there some way you can discuss the subject that wouldn't be? And if there isn't, does that mean the subject shouldn't be discussed?
As for being part of a hive mind, I'm afraid I do think your choices are influenced by your gender and I do think you are unaware of it. Likewise I believe that my choices, tastes and interests are influenced by my gender, sexuality, genetics, upbringing and other factors and I'm blissfully unaware of the influences except in the sense of the most trite pop-psychology analysis. I've never met anyone who was consciously aware of the ways in which their gender or similar factors influenced them, it just doesn't seem possible as a concept. I fancy women, I'm pretty darn sure that this is because I happen to be a bloke, but I am not in anyway consciously aware of that being the reason. It feels to me like it would make no difference whether I was a man or a woman, and yet statistically, it clearly would.
I just want the same as most people want from the real world; equality. In this contextto roleplay/fight/knit anyway I want to within the parameters of the game world and not to be judged or analysed based on my gender.
In the real world we are frequently presented with imbalanced gender ratios as proof of sexuality inequality. More men than women do engineering and this is proof that our education system is failing women, more men than women become board members of large companies which is proof that boardroom policy discriminates against women. Occasionally you see the other analysis/consideration, that possibly women are not (as a group) as interested in engineering as men or are not as desirous of running companies as men. In either case unequal gender ratios are seen as something that must be analysed and either corrected or explained.
Maelstrom has a 2.88:1 male:female ratio and I still feel (although I have no proof) that that is relatively high for the hobby. We often think in terms of 5:1 or even 10:1. Whatever the figures are, the ratio warrants some investigation and consideration. Is it that the structure and format of LRP is offputting to women, is it fundamentally sexist and therefore inaccessible, does LRP as a concept not appeal to women or does the nature of the LRP games we run not appeal to women. To me they are important questions, if the answer is the first two then I think it's important to identify the factors and eliminate them not to patronize women but because I don't want anyone to find LRP inaccessible. If it's the second then it's much less important but it's interesting as a philosophical and academic point of interest.
Now before people put their foot down on the extreme peddle that doesn't meangrey boiler suits and androgeny,just not to be singled out as different from the 'norm' by dint of weeing sitting down,and then being analysed as a big homogenous lump 'women do this' and 'women like that' I'm quite an advocate of equality inthe real world and see no reason why I should abandon principles (aspirational as they are when I put on silly clothes and muck about for a weekend, so as I say I find threads like this to bepatronizing and alienating.
You can't analyse any individual by analyse a category into which they fall and it's a serious mistake to think that an analysis of what women want from LRP has anything at all to say about what individual women want from LRP. This only becomes true in the extreme in which all women choose the same option. If *all* women chose necromancy as a skill option then the analysis of why that happened *might* have something to say about why an individual woman chose necromancy. Since this clearly isn't true, you cannot extrapolate from the data to the individual except in the sense of a statistical prediction which is largely meaningless. In a very real sense you are not being analyzed by the thread, men and women are, the fact that you are a woman is actually no more relevant than the fact that I'm not.
If you look at the original data sets, they're expressed as ratios, so they represent statistical departures from the 2.88:1 male:female ratio, the point is that they say exactly as much about men as they do about women. The unusual jewellery figures simple say that more women choose jewellery skills than men or that less men choose jewellery skills than women. The thread could equally be called what do men want from LRP? This kind of analysis can only reveal relative choices of one group compared to the other.
I think it's a real shame if you find the subject personal or patronizing, it really wasn't meant to be. I do accept that discussion of these subjects often does end up being patronizing, I think that's a shame but if you want to look at the influence of gender in LRP how do you do that in a way that doesn't appear patronizing?
What did Twaine say Disraeli said about stats?
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Wag
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Nath (6/24/2008)
Personally I find 'gender-blind' cultures feel artificial and shallow.
I remmeber discussing gender in IC cultures with Lex while bouncing ideas for her (uk style fest in the US) larp Meridian. Our feeling there was that no culture shouldbe completely gender-blind, but that didn't mean the cultures had to have an uneven power relationship between the genders. For example, theoriental/kamakuran-type culture had a custom where being a samurai was considered more appropiate for malesand being a priest(ess) was considered more appropiate for females. Female Samurai and male priests did exist in the culture, butwere looked down upon as a result. Gender was being used to reinforce a class/caste divide.
Personally I find gender-blind cultures just fine. I don't believe any exist in the real world, but then neither do 6ft talking badgers, so this has never seen like a very helpful insight to me. To me the question is about enjoyment. Do the options presented to you by the culture add to your enjoyment or subtract from it. If I play a drow character, the cultural gender roles are what it's all about, it's playing a character with those embedded attitudes that is the point of playing a drow (for me) and what makes it an interesting choice. Remove the gender roles and there isn't much left. The gender bias adds to my fun - when I play a drow, because I've opted to play that.
My personal analysis of history is that human culture is not gender-blind and is overwhelmingly geared towards an unequal power relationship between men and women. If you want something to be historically accurate or feel "realistic" then you'd have to try and embed the same unpleasant power relationship into every single culture in a way that continually limited women to the least interesting roles. As a concept in LRP that has the same appeal as putting nails through my eyeballs.
When you design cultures for LRP you have to look at what is fun to play and what brings options. The unequal power-balance of the drow is fun to play, but your description of Lex's Meridian culture does not seem like fun to me, it brings nothing to the characters at all, it simply limits options. My choice of character roles has now been restricted on the basis of something I cannot choose (my gender). This makes gender a very poor quality design choice for cultural bias in most cases.
This restriction seems key to LRP to my mind. You can't choose to play a man or woman, generally speaking. So cultures with gender limitations, restrictions or bias tend to limit the restrictions on what you can play. They reduce the range of fun available and thereby make the game potentially less enjoyable. They have to bring something to the table to make up for that cost.
Hence my feeling is that most cultures in LRP should be gender-blind because it makes for a more enjoyable game. I don't find this remotely shallow since it's no more or less meaningful than any other cultural bias, since the whole thing is made up anyway. It's not like the gender bias you are describing is "realistic" or has real world parallels, the real world parallel is one of profound social inequality and you are expressly stepping away from that. But you want to keep gender differentiation without the historical backing and claim this makes the culture less shallow. To me this is like saying "I find cultures that don't differentiate role by hair colour to be shallow and artificial". It makes no sense to me.
Cultural bias makes a culture more interesting and more well developed, but you can have any of a million different kids of bias, we're limited only by our imagination. Choosing the same bias every single time - gender - seems to me to be artificial and shallow in the sense of a profound lack of imagination. It's also deeply counter-productive since it directly impacts on the fun quotient of your system and often without bringing any net gain to go with it. For me gender-bias is something to be used carefully, sparingly and where you are convinced it adds fun (I'm not convinced in hindsight that either of Maelstrom's gender biased cultures would pass this test, with the possible exception of the Tritoni). When there isn't a clear and abiding positive reason to make gender bias a part of a culture then you should definitely make the culture emphatically gender-blind. (Maelstrom also made me realize how important it is to specifically and explicitly reject any gender bias drawn from historical analogy otherwise you can find such non-positive design concepts being added to your game by players).
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Prodigal
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| .. Personally I find gender-blind cultures just fine. I don't believe any exist in the real world, but then neither do 6ft talking badgers, so this has never seen like a very helpful insight to me Possibly the existence of sentient humanoids with badger-like features is actually more plausible than a gender-blind culture? If I play a drow character, the cultural gender roles are what it's all about, it's playing a character with those embedded attitudes that is the point of playing a drow (for me) and what makes it an interesting choice. Remove the gender roles and there isn't much left. The gender bias adds to my fun I agree in part, though I would hope there is a lot more to the culture than just the strongly defined gender roles. My personal analysis of history is that human culture is not gender-blind and is overwhelmingly geared towards an unequal power relationship between men and women. If you want something to be historically accurate or feel "realistic" then you'd have to try and embed the same unpleasant power relationship into every single culture in a way that continually limited women to the least interesting roles. I disagree. I'm not sure I'd agree every culture is '*overwhelmingly* geared' towards unequal power relations. In some social class is far stronger than gender (e.g. noblewoman > male serf) I don't think anyone is saying 'realism' requires every culture to be massively unequal. I explicited avoiding saying that. I'd also disagree that it limits people to 'the least interesting roles.' Lex's Meridian culture does not seem like fun to me, it brings nothing to the characters at all, it simply limits options. My choice of character roles has now been restricted on the basis of something I cannot choose (my gender). Actually it doesn't place any limits. This was deliberate. It was just saying that certain genders tend towards certain vocations. For example in a modern day setting engineers tend to be male, but you can play a female engineer if you want to, which colours interactions because you are through playing against social expectations. Essentially rather than an over-rigid 'historical' restriction, it was designed with a softer 'modern' gender bias. (This is was something the Pendragon RPG suggests as an option, when addressing the 'female arthurian knights' issue). I might well agree that a stronger defined gender role may be more interesting (thought has some drawbacks as you say), but I think at least some gender bias, even if slight, is better than completely gender blind. nb. if you have lots of cultures, I can see a case for making one or two gender blind to provoke contrast. So cultures with gender limitations, restrictions or bias tend to limit the restrictions on what you can play. They reduce the range of fun available and thereby make the game potentially less enjoyable. I'm not sure that less character creation options = less fun. Has my fun being decreased because I'll never get to play a dwarf? I'm not sure. I don't find this remotely shallow since it's no more or less meaningful than any other cultural bias, since the whole thing is made up anyway Being 'made up' doesn't make something less meaningful. All the great works of fiction were 'made up.' Just because something isn't literally true, doesn't mean it can't have 'artistic truth.'
------ <insert really amusing sig here>
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Heroic Knight
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Matt Pennington (6/24/2008)
Sikorski (6/24/2008)
This is eight or nine pages thus far singling out women (again) I find it alienating; 'what do you creatures with front bumps want from our world?' I hadn't considered I was part of a hive mind that wanted anything peculiar to my gender from live role-playing...maybe I do and don't realize it…hmm that is a nice blue dress.
I mostly just started the thread to look at some statistics. I was interested to know if there was any kind of evidential basis for suggesting that men and women want choose different things when they LRP. I'm interested in all aspects of what people want from LRP and if I thought "black people" or "gay people" was a category I could look at (because I had data that allowed the analysis) then I'd probably look at that as well, although my expectation would be to see no trends in such data. A more interesting set of data might be age data, to look the choices of 16-21s compared to the 30s and over. There I would expect to see trends.
I think it's unfortunate that the issue is patronizing but is there some way you can discuss the subject that wouldn't be? And if there isn't, does that mean the subject shouldn't be discussed?.As for being part of a hive mind, I'm afraid I do think your choices are influenced by your gender and I do think you are unaware of it. Lol, oh you do, do you? *chuckles* I think I know me better than anyone else and I think I know what makes me tick and why thank you very much. Likewise I believe that my choices, tastes and interests are influenced by my gender, sexuality, genetics, upbringing and other factors and I'm blissfully unaware of the influences except in the sense of the most trite pop-psychology analysis.
I agree we are influenced to a lesser or greater degree by some of the above but I would hope we are aware of it.
I've never met anyone who was consciously aware of the ways in which their gender or similar factors influenced them, it just doesn't seem possible as a concept.
Why not? this surprises me, as I would have thought most people considered why they do what they do or feel what they feel.
I just want the same as most people want from the real world; equality. In this context to role-play/fight/knit anyway I want to within the parameters of the game world and not to be judged or analysed based on my gender. In the real world we are frequently presented with imbalanced gender ratios as proof of sexuality inequality. More men than women do engineering and this is proof that our education system is failing women, more men than women become board members of large companies which is proof that boardroom policy discriminates against women. Occasionally you see the other analysis/consideration, that possibly women are not (as a group) as interested in engineering as men or are not as desirous of running companies as men. In either case unequal gender ratios are seen as something that must be analysed and either corrected or explained.
But in comparison not in isolation, the minute you get into analysing one group and not other re
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