poly_tldr | Question

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‘Ello Poly~ I’m currently in sociology in college and we need to write a few small papers for extra credit points. One of the subjects mentioned were gender stereotypes, such as girls don’t play video games or boys don’t play with dolls, the stereotype of what society views should happen. I’d like to write about RP’ing, I’ve found that generally (at least with RL people I know) RP is thought to be a “guys” thing.

So I need some basis of statistics to go off of, so if you don’t mind can you please leave a comment with your gender?

To be clear this is optional, it’s not a huge deal as I don’t need the extra credit to pass or event get a great grade, you’re lj name will not be mentioned, your online name/real name won’t be, and where I got the info won’t be mentioned. Basically all I need is a number in real life to go off of, the number won’t event be mentioned. I just need to know which side to go with, if it’s completely absurd to think that girls don’t rp (which is what I think XD) or if it’s fairly accurate.

If you’re not comfortable with telling your gender, don’t worry about it! The last thing I want is anyone to feel uncomfortable so don’t feel like you have to!

Thanks for reading~

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You haven't offended me. However, I'm very wary of generalizations about one gender preferring rules and another preferring depth. They are too easy and too likely to poison further inquiry. Particularly since the two types of gaming differ in many more significant ways than just those two factors.

Generalizations is what sociology is though. Sociology does not take into account the individual but rather the group as a whole.

Psychology has many different branches that say many different things but in one branch (I'm sorry I can't recall it exactly) submitted the theory of gender based upon children, adolescents, and adults.

The research was based upon the scenerio that as an adult you'd married your true love and then found out she was sick. You don't have the money to buy the medicine she needs but the pharmacy near you has it. Would you go and steal it to save your wife?

As children and adolescents the males said no, they'd find another way no matter what, they wouldn't break the law. As adults they thought it out more logically saying what other way they would find.

The female children, adolescents, and adults analyzed it and said that if nobody got hurt it would be fine.

The conclusion presented that the rules were much more important to males and the why is much more important to females.

There are of course individuals to consider, but since this is a paper for sociology I am only concerned with generalizations.

I know what sociology is. And I've heard of that question (though not that study and result). But again, if you seriously compare these two forms of gaming you'll find much larger differences than just rules-based vs. non-rules-based. The biggest one is the difference in what kind of social interaction the game is; a tabletop game is face to face, tends to put players on the spot, requires everyone to pay attention the entire session, whereas a game like this one is more similar to correspondence, people can play at their own pace, deliberate, break off into subgroups or pairs, form smaller social circles within a larger framework, etc. For that matter, one type of game usually involves five players and one more typically involves tens or hundreds.

Taking one of several obvious way in which the genres differ and assuming that that is primarily responsible for the gender gap seems like a shallow analysis, and if you overstate the importance of the first correlation you draw, it can influence any more in-depth study unduly.

Essentially, I'm saying that just because you are accepting that males are more rules-oriented as a premise (which I don't think has been demonstrated rigorously) doesn't mean that that's the most significant or even a particularly significant factor.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that studies that demonstrate that men are less likely to break rules or consider situations in which they may be broken does not necessarily have anything to do with what kind of games people of one gender or another might like at all. To confidently draw that kind of conclusion you would have to find studies that actually look for gender preferences in gaming - and I'm sure there are such studies out there.

If you want to continue this further IM me or something. I don't want to cause anything and certainly don't want to upset anyone, all I needed was information for an extra credit report and I'd hate to cause a disruption with something that had nothing to do with Poly but the mods allowed me to post anyway.

I never said that's why I accepted either. I also didn't say I needed opinions for my paper, all I was looking for here was some sort of statistic to have in my head when I was writing my paper.

I'm sorry if I've bothered you with generalizations. One sentence answers in above comments do not equate an entire viewpoint for a person.

You haven't upset anyone. I'm sorry if I'm overreaching; I just wanted to warn you that I thought the obvious answer being raised in comments repeatedly here was not necessarily the most important one.

Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss it all further, but I don't mind either way. I hope you do well on your papers, though, and draw interesting conclusions.

It's only one paper, just for extra credit, only a few pages. I actually was writing against both sterotypes that only males rp and that females don't. I just needed some factual data for it. The tabletop vs. online only came up in comments.

My mistake, then. Have you ever tried tabletop-style RPing yourself?

No, I'll admit I'm social phobic (literally, diagnosed) and I have no friends at all since high school and am too afraid to attempt to go to join in some group or attempt to. I'm a loser really haha I've always wanted to though, besides the part that involves numbers it's always seemed really interesting.

It's possible to do a tabletop game without numbers or rules. The key is that there has to be a story, driven by someone with notes and a mental picture of the game setting; otherwise the game descends into chaos (at least, that's my personal experience).

One thing I always miss from a game like Poly is meaningful interaction with NPCs. In LJ RP, usually players control NPCs themselves, to the degree necessary; and, since that's open to abuse, the degree is as small as possible. In gamemaster-led RP games, usually the players function as a group or team, and so there's interaction within the group but also between the group and the environment (played by the GM).

So, they're very different in a lot of ways. I haven't played a synchronous or tabletop-style RPG in a very long time; they're difficult to play and impossible to organize. They can be really great if everyone is on the same page, though.

Sounds like a lot of fun. I'd love to try but I'd never get up the nerve unless I knew someone. Event then I'd have a hard time.

What would make them impossible to organize?

Oh, wow, where to even begin. Number one is time. Everyone involved has to play at the same time, for the same length of time. There are things you can do to make it a little bit more flexible, but basically, substantially all the players have to be present (physically present, except for on an internet game). And not just present, but participating; on an internet game, it's easier to get people together, but if any one person isn't engaged in any particular moment, they're more likely to have their attention wander than to find a way they can participate in a scene (in person, this is less of a problem and people will be more aggressive about participating).

Number two is that all the players have to be on the same page as far as ruleset, genre, seriousness level, and how to roleplay in general. There are always SOME rules, even if only to the degree that a game like Poly has rules, and if you want a ruleset on top of that (which can add important dimensions of scorekeeping, realism and fairness to the game) then everyone has to be familiar with that. The players have to all be interested in the same genre, obviously, but even moreso they have to be interested in the same seriousness level. It's possible to convince a steampunk player to play space opera but it's really not possible to have someone who wants to play a one-eyed, one-legged prostitute "for the lulz" and someone who wants to play out a serious medieval drama with serious characters in the same game. And people have to know how to roleplay, which is an issue on internet games like this but is even more of an issue when there are only four players in the game and everyone is regularly put on the spot to RP in turn.

And, of course, the time issue limits the candidate pool so much that it's hard to pick and choose.

Three, there has to be a game world and the GM has to know it. For a "fish out of water" game the GM has to know the world, and for every other kind of game all the players have to more or less know it to.

Four, the GM has to be good at GMing, which is an extremely difficult social skill that can only be acquired by attempting to, and failing to, GM multiple disastrous games.

So, yeah. It's... very, very hard to get a successful game running. That doesn't mean I don't regularly try to do so, because the rewards can be so great. But I'm probably batting about .133 this decade so far.

Wow that is really complicated. Would it be possible for a game to be stopped mid-way and then picked up another day? Or would that just make things event more complicated?

It sounds like there has to be a lot of pre-planning involved in it. Are there ever games where the GM rotates or something? That seems like an awful lot of work for one person and a lot of responsibility. I guess though if the person really loves it it wouldn't matter.

In most cases games either take many sessions or are actually open-ended. This only makes the time issue more complicated since people have to be present consistently. Most games move really slow, particularly if a turn-based or dice-based ruleset is used, so trying to finish a story in one session would be grueling.

GMs have a lot of options to lighten the planning burden. Really, the hardest part about being a GM is actually playing (keeping the game moving and improvising so the players feel they have freedom of movement within the game), and the planning is more of the fun part. But for GMs who don't like writing or worldbuilding, you can buy "canned" adventures or campaigns, complete with maps, NPCs, premade player characters for players who don't want to design their own, really all sorts of stuff. There's a big market for books like that.

Rotating GMs is also an option, but actual competent GMing is such a difficult social skill to master that it's often best to stick with one person who knows his or her stuff. Of course, the experience level of the players matters a lot there as well.

Oh, that's another thing - these kinds of games are exclusively OC. I've never played a fan-based tabletop game. It's not impossible, but that's just how it is. One of the functions of the ruleset is to give players freedom to create their own characters, but in line with basic restrictions on power levels and the like. Without a ruleset, it's much harder to keep the characters balanced so that they all have a role in the game.

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