[Raya]

This is the last article in this series. Thanks go out to all the participants who made it possible with their thoughtful and often hilarious answers. Thanks also to the readers who wrote in (or posted on the forums) their views and experiences.

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[Eclipse]

such an amazing piece of work, I'm so impressed. I am one of the guys that is absolutely thrilled anytime they see someone ingame that is not only playing a female character, but is female behind the screen.
This is not because i now have someone I can hit on, but because it represents a promising new age where women are shrugging off society's suggested norms. "Girls don't play games. Girls put make-up on and look pretty." Is horse-$hit, and whenever I meet a female gamer I know that piece by piece this societal wall is coming down.
Female gamers are in no way inferior to male, in fact I see no reason whatsoever to think that. Do men have a trait women don't possess that makes them better apt at crunching a keyboard? Pfft.
Awesome Raya, I'm a happy camper!

[PS: Ever since high school I have always always envied the guy who managed to convince his girlfriend to play games that most would consider 'nerdy'. And there is also a stigma about gamers that assumes most are overweight or anti-social...and to me the female perspective is the first step in the tearing down of online stigma. I was labelled a jock in high school, much to my chagrine, but I considered myself more of a 'geek' LOL It baffles me even now when I talk to people about MMOs or other online stuff, and they automatically think all the people i play with fall under the same category, and they'll be automatically unattractive or anti-social. Man, it is a slow process, but I see good things in the future! ]

-Eclipse

[Havelock]

Congratulations on an outstanding conclusion to an outstanding series, Raya. You have put a lot of work into these articles, and it shows. They are a valuable resource for both players and researchers.

[Niborea]

I agree, very nice set of articles.

I enjoyed them all very much, thank you for putting the time into them

[Jasarina]

Awesome series Ray. /hugs

Thank you for taking all that time to write and present the Female Perspective. It was very interesting reading and very imformative.

Jasarina

[Raya]

I am so glad you all enjoyed this series. Although it was a huge amount of work (that I never suspected it would take ), I was very gratified at the results and at the reception it received. For those who don't know, the SV hit count at the bottom of the article on the news page does not reflect the number of people who read the article...it just reflects the number of people who didn't realize they didn't need to go through the readmore click-through to get to the article

After the last article, I received a great many emails from people who had enjoyed the series. One of them was from the husband of a woman who had written her dissertation on women in the workforce. Apparently she wasn't a gamer but had read my articles with interest. She found a lot of correlation in her studies compared to the results of mine, which was an interesting point, probably for both of us.

I also received this email from a male reader:

Originally Posted by Panjandrum in an email to Raya on 8-18-05

Raya,

I've just finished reading your series of articles on Silky Venom and found them both amusing and informative. I have a large interest in the statistics surrounding mmo's and am always happy to find a new source.

Do you have any way of knowing that your respondents are in fact women? I know of at least two males I play with regularly who are gender confused in mmo's. I also know of several women who never play female characters. Perhaps an interesting next step might be interviewing the men behind the female toons. Personally I always make my main a male and tend to make female alts, not sure why.

Another avenue to explore that got short mention but could do with more is women and guilds, having been a member of several larger guilds in EQ, DaoC and EQII I've always noticed that women seem to make up a larger than representative portion of leaders in guilds. The reasons are likely plain but might be worth exploring further.

Anyways, just thought I'd add to your deluge and encourage you to keep it up. People are listening, somewhere.

Panjandrum

I thought his questions were valid. Here is my response:

Originally Posted by Raya to Panjandrum 8-18-05

Hi, Panjandrum,

Thanks for your email. I enjoy getting mail from my readers and finding out what they liked (or didn't like) about my articles.

Although I do not have a foolproof way of ascertaining if the participants are women, I solicited their aid from forums that I, myself, frequented (I am part of a news team at a fansite for Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and know the ladies who contributed from that forum; I was a member of A dileab de Paegen at one time; I was co-leader of Carillon; I was part of the Force of Valor's multi-guild strike force called Project Betty; I was (and am) a supporter of EQ Pixel Army; I have been a fan of WTF Comics for a long time and wrote up a series of articles around my interviews with Jeremy Waller, the cartoonist, plus some of the RL players that he immortalized in the comic strip; and finally, for quite some time I was a member of EQ Women.) Thus I know a great many of the women who contributed answers to the FEMALE PERSPECTIVE. In addition, I pride myself on being able to distinguish the males from the females, if they play female characters (not so easy to distinguish females from males in the reverse role). Guys just don't have the female touch Of course, none of this is good enough for scientific research, but I am reasonably satisfied that my respondents were, in fact, female.

As to your first suggestion, although I admit to some curiosity as to why guys play female characters, I do not have enough interest to sustain the long and laborious process of gleaning answers from respondents and then collating the information. As a note of interest, in addition to the original composing of the questions for FEMALE PERSPECTIVE, visiting the various forums to put them up, collecting the answers and corresponding with people to field their questions about the survey, each article took me an average of 10 hours to collate the information, write the article, put it into HTML form, select the graphics and put the article up on the FTP server. That boils down to 90+ total hours for this project (more like 120-130 actually but I didn't keep track before the starting of article 1). I therefore have to have a vested interest or keen desire to find out this information in order to keep me going. This particular survey was actually generated by my anger at one researcher who maintained that women only played "safe" games like The Sims (I loathe the Sims) and had some statistics to "prove" it. I was positive she was wrong and set out to prove it. The survey grew from my original antipathy to the results of the said researcher from "I'll show YOU who plays games and why" to a thoughtful and in-depth look at female gamers. I feel enriched by the process.

As for your suggestion of women in leadership roles in guilds, you are right. After I had the questionnaire out for a while, I noticed that a large number of the women had been leaders or officers in their guild and I wished I had added that question to the survey. I did make mention of it in one of the articles (the first, I believe) but I simply did not have enough accurate data to display that information as a statistic. In many cases, the women themselves gave reasons as to why they became leaders but, again, not enough to provide a useable statistic.

I probably will do another survey, after I have recovered from this one. I learned a lot about what questions to use and how to phrase them in this survey. Although I have been a selling free-lance writer for a number of years, this is my very first series of articles based on a survey. I enjoyed it immensely, despite the huge amount of work it took. It not only increased my appreciation of female gamers as a whole, but my admiration for people who do surveys all the time and seem to take it in their stride. When I do another one, if it is based on female gamers (which I think highly likely), I will definitely include the question about leadership and guilds. I think it would be interesting to do another survey at the same places asking the same or similar questions and see what the difference is with the advent of EQ2, WoW, and Guild Wars (which is my game of choice now, until Vanguard comes out).

I appreciate your encouragement. It has come as somewhat of a surprise to me how many people felt this series of articles not only furthered the "cause" of women gamers, but enhanced the image of MMORPGs overall. And, so far, most of the people responding to this last article (and some of the previous ones) were male.

I have a couple of questions myself. Firstly, you state you have a "large interest in the statistics surrounding mmo's" -- why is that? Secondly, I would like your permission to print your email (along with my response) on the forum attached to Article 9 at Silky Venom [Raya's note - permission was subsequently granted].

Thanks again for writing.

Regards,
Raya

I thought that followers of the series might be interested in some of the additional information surrounding the preparation and writing of it.

[Zenya]

Thank you very much, Raya, for this outstanding series of articles; a very interesting and enjoyable read!