Every few weeks, CrazyKinux runs the EVE Blog Banter – a collection of EVE bloggers giving their thoughts on a particular topic. The last one was about why so few women are playing EVE, and wow I wish I’d seen it earlier, because oh do I have thoughts on this.
To start off with: I am female. I’ve only been playing EVE for a couple of months now, but I love it to itty bitty pieces and wish to God I’d discovered it years ago. I do think more women should be playing, because the game is fantastic and many women who’d love it are missing out, but I don’t think CCP should change anything about the game mechanics themselves just to attract more women, because a) they’re not the problem and b) oh sweet Lord could that go horribly, horribly wrong.
So what is the problem? Well, I don’t know for sure, but I do have some pretty firm ideas on what it’s not as well as a few thoughts on what it might be.
It’s not because women don’t like spaceships. The SF community in particular has a huge, long-lasting and extremely frustrating blind spot about the fact that lots of women do like spaceships. Honestly. Really. We do. And we get a little tired when the conversation about it goes like this:
“Girls don’t like sci-fi, because space and guns and aliens are more masculine things.”
“No, lots of girls like sci-fi. I like sci-fi. I know huge numbers of women who like sci-fi.”
“It’s because female brains are more interested in relationships and empathy, whereas male brains are more focused on logic and science.”
“What? Uh, no, and honestly, there are huge numbers of female sci-fi fans. Seriously.”
“You see, men and women are just different, and sci-fi does not need to be feminised. Women don’t like it because it’s just not appealing to the way women think.”
“We’re over here! Hellloooooooooo! Here! Next to the tattered poster of the Millennium Falcon we’ve loved since we were fifteen!”
“It’s just more of a guy thing.”
And so on, and so on.
It’s also not because you can’t customise your EVE character enough, or paint your spaceship your own way. A lot of people are thinking that Incarna, the game extension that will allow pilots to walk around in stations as a human avatar rather than a ship, will bring in more women because women want to get to know their characters more. Incarna probably will open the game up to potential players who like a more Second Life-ish angle, but the idea of women being put off by the lack of a female character is… mistaken, I feel.
To illustrate. Here is the avatar of Calluna Ji, my main character:
Nice hair, right? I think she looks a bit like Natalie Portman myself, but maybe that’s just me.
And here is the avatar of Fungus XVII, half-troll priest, my avatar in the last game I played like crazy:
That game was Angband, a roguelike played with an ASCII tileset. Your character is always an @ symbol; other items, landscape features and monsters in the games are numbers, letters and punctuation marks too. (Fun fact: if you play Angband too long, like for an extended seven-hour session, the association between the glyph and the monster/item/whatever gets sort of burned into your head for a while, to the point where you take a break to check your email, and your friend Daniel has signed his off with, for some reason, a light-green ‘D’, and your immediate mental reaction is ‘ARGH A DRACOLICH HIT THE DECK!’, but, um, maybe that’s just me too.)
I do think the idea of being able to customise the look of your ship is a really good one that could add something to gameplay – people would probably be even less keen on losing a ship, insured or not, that was more Their Ship than just Interchangeable Bestower #24,731. But that isn’t about making things prettier so girls will play. Would any of us be playing Minmatar, if that logic worked? I mean, putting a Hello Kitty decal on a Rupture is not going to make it look like a cuddly toy.
It’s not because the game is tough/complex/full of spreadsheets and sociopaths (I’m looking at you, Jita 4-4). Women are fine with all of those things, in RL as well as in games about internet spaceships, and it’s a little patronising to suggest that we can’t cope with and thrive on any of them. Also, while EVE is indeed tough and mean, the idea that it’s somehow blisteringly hard compared to other games because you can actually die is somewhat exaggerated. If you die, you wake up in a clone vat. You may have to buy some new implants. If you forgot to update your clone, you might be set back in skill points, which would indeed sting like a bitter, bitter stingy thing. But, you wake up in a clone vat. Roguelikes, like Angband mentioned above, have permadeath – if you die, you’re dead. You have zero skill points, because you are dead. You have lost all your stuff, because you are dead, and you have not insured it, because even if there was a game mechanic for that, there would be nobody to collect the insurance, because you are dead. You can start again with a new character, if you want, and you can even name that character the same as your last one, if that makes you feel better about it, but the character you just lost, the one you might have been playing for weeks, the one that just found a Ring of Speed +11? That character is gone. Now that is tough.
So, what is it? How come the game is (by some estimates) 95% male, if there’s nothing in there that’s putting women off?
I think, honestly, part of the reason is that ratio itself. Once something is largely male or female, it becomes A Guy Thing or A Girl Thing, and that becomes self-perpetuating. Lots of women probably aren’t interested in trying something that’s filed under ‘man stuff’, because of a huge long history of socially-enforced gender stereotypes on the one hand, and a pick-your-battles attitude on the other – if all you know about EVE is that it’s a spaceship MMO with a mostly-male playerbase, you might well be forgiven for rolling your eyes in anticipation of all the inevitable “wow a GIRL hey a/s/l??????? lol” stuff and not bothering to find out any more.
I might have liked Evony, for example. But I’ll never know, because any game that gets advertised like this is suddenly about 500% less appealing.
What could CCP do about that? My suggestion would be to advertise the game with a view to promoting what makes it different. I saw several print and video adverts for EVE without ever realising it was more than just an FPS in space. Admittedly, Jita 0.01 ISK price wars are less easy to make an appealing trailer out of than cap ships warfare (I don’t think this one counts, either; for all non-players know the market stuff at the beginning is just worldbuilding filler), but hey, take a shot anyway. The game is great as it is, but there’s no point changing game mechanics to appeal to potential players who don’t even know what the existing game mechanics are. Reach out, not by gimmicky Stuff Girls Will Like additions, but by making sure that the girls who would like the game know that the game is there.
And also, honestly? There are probably more women playing than you think.
There was a “hur hur girlz suck they keep wanting to make us watch Sex and the City instead of playing internet spaceships” conversation in my corp’s channel recently. I mentioned that some girls actually like EVE, and several people told me that, haha, no they don’t. I said that there were probably women in this channel right now, even possibly – shock! – in this conversation, and was helpfully corrected (“no really, Calluna, EVE is like 98.99% male”) before everyone got on to talking about how periods are icky. Yes, they were actually discussing that. Really. Really.
At that point, I could have done two things. One was to jump right in, point out that I actually was a girl in real life, and spend a good chunk of my evening arguing. Another was to kick back with a glass of wine, turn up the Ramones, warp to an asteroid belt in the empty lowsec system I’d just found and start blowing up rats.
It was not a tough choice.
Tech 2 Duct Tape 