We were unpopular dorks who had few women friends. And I was extremely awkward around women. I took a freshman who asked me to prom, to give you an idea for how bad I was.
The only girls I knew who were into anything similar to me were in this Star Trek fan club I went to. All of them were older and didn’t live near me. In the hours I spent in the comic and game shops, I think I can count on one hand the number of girls I saw shopping there. I had a little crush on Darlene from the show Rosanna because she liked comics. NO ONE was into vampires back then.
In college I do remember I played a couple games with women, but I eventually did less gaming and got consumed and started playing and writing for paintball.
Hmm… maybe I’m just old. I started playing RPGs when I was 9 (starting with D&D and on up through Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Shadow Run, etc) and while I was the only girl at the table when I was younger none of us ever thought it was weird that I was a girl playing the game.
I think it has to do with time and place. I remember being put off of it just because it was weird being the only girl and people were like… looking at me. Or trying to hook up with me. Which is also weird.
I am sure time and place played a roll (pun intended). It was Kansas, where people told me it was the devils game because Satanist played it. My retort was, “I bet they play Monopoly too. Does that make it the devils game?”
I loaned my basic set to a friend to get him to play, and his mom shut it down.
We actually got away with mixed gender overnight “gaming days” with my High School Sci-Fi club. We had one maybe once every 2 months. We had really strict no drugs/alcohol/sex rules, and lots of the parents wanted a long talk with the host parent when a new kid joined but things went ok and it was really great. Most of us had no interest in drinking/drugs yet anyway, and sexual behavior wasn’t totally absent but pretty rare anyway b/c usually we were sleeping in big piles on the floor, no privacy.
We were also smart enough not to ruin a good thing by getting out of hand, we were ridiculously polite to the host parents.
This was mid to late 90’s. Mostly White Wolf Games, one Call of Cthulhu larp where we made a fake mine shaft out of sheets in the back yard.
I never played with girls in middle school or high school, and only later learned of one girl who did play (she, incidentally, is not exactly famous these days, but I’ve occasionally run into her byline, so she may be the widest-known of anyone I knew back then). On the other hand, I recently had a few acquaintances from that time reminiscing about playing D&D, and at the time I had no idea whatsoever that they played. I don’t know if it was just me being typically clueless and socially unaware, or if all our gaming groups were just utterly insular.
I didn’t play in college, but our group in grad school had women in about the same proportion as the department’s grad student population, I think, maybe a bit lower.
These days, I run two games. One is my wife and older son, another married couple, and an old (male) friend of mine, The other group is my wife, three married couples, and one of their sons (my older son refuses to play with this group, as several of them teach at his high school). In other words, 2/5 and 4/7 players are women.
My younger son isn’t quite mature enough to play with either of these groups–during our games, he plays with similarly-aged kids of the other players, and I run solo adventures for him. I’d love it if a couple of the girls in this group would play D&D with him, but they’re not showing interest just yet.
There’s a certain social dynamic that happens when a total newbie first plays with an established group, and it isn’t always positive. I imagine they wanted to avoid the situation where the girls are bewildered and the boys are being “helpful” without realizing how patronizing they sound.
Outside of cursory games with cousins, the first RPG games I played were at a game story. This was across the street from Stony Brook university. I’d say between 1/5 and 1/3 of the RPG session players were young women, many from the campus SF club.
My daughter is an insaneo stereotype ADHD pink princess(very unlike my very nerd/tomboy RPG’er wife), she and my wife along with the ADHD stereotype boys squad love the free form RPG’ing we do. They especially like the figurines and terrain when we have time to set that up rather than drawing out the adventure map on a table sized sheet of paper.
RPG’ing is usually cheaper than buying new board or card games as you loose the pieces, smarter than video games and TV, and far more entertaining for everyone.
It is only now many years later looking back that my wife realized how hard the boys were perving on the only girl in the group, she was convinced by her sister she was ugly so missed all of the heavy and sometime creepy flirting thinking it was a joke. For comparison in her 30s she did some catalog modelling to make some cash while between jobs. I think the weird behavior was from all of us frustrated boys who were socially inept dorks but who liked her because 1-attractive&intelligent girl and 2-she not just tolerated our presence but actually had fun being around us.
Uh. Yeah? Didn’t say they couldn’t be. My school had some nerdy girls, but I don’t recall anyone into comics, sci-fi, RPGs, etc. Perhaps there were, but I didn’t know about it. I would have talked to them had I known.
Not to be a dick about it, but I found myself wondering exactly what a “cheerleader-type” girl is. Maybe it means having social skills? Hell if I know.
My gosh you just made me remember one of the few girls who played with our group back in the Pleistocene. I looked her up recently and found out she has published a dozen novels under the Dungeons & Dragons imprint, and a bunch more under her real name. She has several fan sites.
In my school it would have been a blonde (the Cheerleader coach only accepted blonds onto the team[1]) and status conscious girl who absolutely could not afford to be seen fraternizing with people outside of her clique lest she be in danger of being ostracized. She would be dating a member of the football team.
I love all of these stories of inclusive D&D groups in schools, but that’s absolutely not what I experienced. RPG groups were sausagefests all the way through college (going to an engineering school probably did not help this however). If any women were interested in joining, they were too intimidated to ask.
[1] Brunettes would become majorettes instead, which made them a lot more approachable because they were considered part of the band, and the marching band was full of nerds.
My goal was to relate that he was shocked at average “normal” looking girls being into what was (is?) a niche geek genre. Like Penny from Big Bang theory. Though maybe the whole “geek” culture has really made it more into the main stream from when I was young. BBT is huge, and yet I can not conceive most people getting half the jokes. Or maybe they like it even though they only get half the jokes.
His actual words were, “Hot high school chicks”, but I thought that was a bit inappropriate.
