Wow did Fink find a crate of weapons that fell off of a truck? 
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Sorry I was a bit quiet in the past few days, I was volunteering at a (ixda) conference and it swallowed up almost all of my time, must more than Iâd anticipated. I donât know if Iâve missed much but Iâll be catching up in the next day or so. (depending on where the amount of posts is on the scale from doable to staggering). 
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Weâve got a rocket, and weâre dragging it north.
I encourage others to offer their own, short, one-sentence summary of the story so-far, including any of the subplots.
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Iâm not playing the game, but Iâm curious if you mean on the BBS here or in the game⌠because I think (from my perspective, at least), there are a fair amount of women on BB. I donât know if itâs roughly equal, but I donât think women are grossly underrepresented here at all. Nor are the women here afraid to speak up and be heard on a variety of topics, not just on gender stuff, but a whole host of issues. If you mean in the game you guys are playing, then I donât know about that.
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I think the gender ratios, and openness to gender issues generally, are better here in the BB community than most high-visibility and highly interesting places. For example, reddit or hackernews.
I do think the door games are at risk of under-performing compared to what the BB average is. It was of sufficient concern that @patrace noted it in the post-mortem to Badass Space Dragon, and I find it encouraging that others are open to discussing âcan we do better?â
So, to the extent that the games here are more exclusionary, or more elitist, or more racist, or more sexist, or generally offensive and less inviting or welcoming than the main site, people should be free with their suggestions on how we can do better. Not that we arenât already doing pretty good.
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This is one of the things that makes BB overall so a good online communityâfor the most part, we can talk about such stuff, openly and honestly, and not have it descend into a bunch of racist/sexist nonsense. The people who bring that nonsense tend to not be core members of BB anyway. All the regulars I know are smart and open minded, and willing to hear what you have to say, even if they disagree. The fact that some people are even worried about gender disparity in the games gives me hope for humanityâŚ
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I think the demographics of the commenters shifted when they switched to this BBS format. I may be totally wrong about everything I said earlier, too.
I do know there are plenty of women commenting on all topics, many of whom are far more regular regulars than myself (like you!), and part of what draws me to BB is that very inclusiveness and diversity among commenters - something you donât see much elsewhere.
In fact, an IRL friend of mine who is female has been commenting alongside me on BB for years and though she knew who I was (because I use this username elsewhere) I had no idea she was here until she told me fairly recently.
Similarly, one of the players in our game is female (well, more than one but Iâm talking about one in particular) and many of us had no idea for quite a while even though she wasnât hiding it or anything (in fact she was making jokes that only really made sense coming from a woman).
Thatâs why I freely admit to falling into the classic trap of assuming everyone on the internet is male. That was never true and it certainly isnât true now, especially on BB.
So what Iâm kind of trying to figure out here is, how does that affect what weâre doing with the game, and how can we do better? Of course the gender of the person youâre talking to online really doesnât matter 99%+ of the time (other than discussing gender issues etc. I guess), but at the same time, this game world (and the space-pirate BSD world) is drawn from fiction that is extremely male-dominated (not forgetting Tina Turner in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) and we hope that we made it relatively inviting to all. The player demographics in the game are very different from the broader demographics of BBS users in general due to whoâs interested and who isnât and thatâs expected, we just donât want to be at all exclusionary on top of that.
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Well, I and Iâm sure others here really appreciate that some guys are interested in making the internet a more inviting place, even if it is only one game on one BBS at a timeâevery little bit helps. Itâs nice that there are some guys who actually care about that, because all too often, when we discuss these issues, men will take it as a personal affront and get all huffy about it.
I donât know⌠Recently, at my school, we had a roundtable about women in academia, and literally zero guys showed up (and we had free food, how can any grad student resist free food! One of my friends was supposed to come, but got sick the day before). That really bummed me out, because academia is supposed to be better about that sort of thing, and often times, it just isnât.
So, thanks, is my point.
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Being an academic myself it really doesnât surprise me about the women in academia thing, unfortunately, but Iâm actually quite interested in that topic. My field is geology, a very classically male field if there ever was one due to all the strenuous outdoor activity and such. Yet today, most geology departments are 75%+ female students - in my undergrad class I was one of 2 males out of 10 students in my graduating class (small department) - and the professors, who stereotypically are old men, are being replaced by females at an amazing rate as they retire.
So at least for geology, âwomen in academiaâ is basically just âacademiaâ. Itâs bizarre and sad that there are still people with a different opinion about women in academia.
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Thatâs happened on other threads too. Probably because she codes and assumptions are made about coders.
I should add that I really appreciate that BB/BBS isnât a total sausage fest. I have learned a lot by reading what posters like @anon61221983 have to say.
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Stick with Jane. Mission three kills.
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While itâs true that there are more male programmers at the moment, I would have to say that more so this is caused by our cultural norms. Here, the default is male and white. Unless you speak otherwise, thatâs whatâs assumed.
Which is why this happens:
If you donât think you fall into this trap ( I do too sometimes ) just try reading books that play around with this. In particular, a recent example is Ancillary Justice where the narrator is gender blind and the default is female. Some characterâs genders are never revealed, and refreshingly, it doesnât matter at all.
1: http://www.amazon.com/Ancillary-Justice-Ann-Leckie/dp/031624662X[quote=âpenguinchris, post:209, topic:20666â]
this game world (and the space-pirate BSD world) is drawn from fiction that is extremely male-dominated
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I think itâs getting more balanced in literature. In the post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland genre (which is pretty niche) off of the top of my head I can think of ( Boneshaker, Rise Again, Under a Graveyard Sky ) that are narrated by women. Outside of that, you can even more easily find interesting women in your epic space operas / hard sci-fi novels.
Movies, television and games seem to be lagging behind unfortunately. Most likely because of money, and what people with money think will make more money.
While browsing io9 today, I read this comic by Shaenon Garrity which eloquently sums up a lot of the issues women face when getting into gaming. As long as we donât fall into these tropes I think weâll do just fine.
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The one time someone had a dog and it died and they got sad and left and came back and saved the day.
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I saw that comic as it made the rounds on tumblr yesterday - itâs what got me thinking about all this again.
Regarding gender balance in this genre, weâre drawing heavily from Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas here, and you bringing up all those recent genre books with female characters reminds me that in both of those games I chose the female character option, both because it was there and because it made some aspects of the story more interesting. And at the same time, the gender of every single character in the game does not actually matter now that I think about it. Just because weâre human, In a video game or TV show or movie in most settings itâd be strange to have everyone appear androgynous, but I am intrigued by that Ancillary Justice book which sounds like itâs pretty effective at making you forget about gender in a way that a novel would be best at.
In most stories, really, the gender of the majority of characters shouldnât matter. I think that it seems like it should in BWD but except in the case where people are drawing upon a very specific caricature (like Junior) it doesnât. Also, BTW, my character of Jane is loosely based on a couple of female NPCs from the Fallout games combined with a real-life friend who is from Little Saigon (Garden Grove CA, near our starting point of Huntington Beach, where I lived for a while) and drives a small Japanese car.
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One time, at band campâŚ
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The people who can read made a union, and nobody likes the mean rusty salesman.
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Right, the people in that book have no trouble telling gender apart, the AI narrator is the only one thatâs gender blind. In reality, the person that has a problem is you, the reader. As you read, you build up a character in your mind with limited information and then eventually rearrange your thoughts about a character or a relationship once you piece out which characters have which bits⌠only to realize by that point that it really doesnât matter and you just care about the characters because youâre already emotionally invested in them.
A good test in general would be to flip the gender of a character and see if theyâre still interesting. Do they have their own motivations and fears and weaknesses and strengths? Itâs not necessary that they need to be a strong badass (Mary-Sues are rather boring to read about) or androgynous, but that they are a complete separate unitâa real personâand can exist apart from any other character.
Isnât this how James Cameron writes his female characters?
I believe the people who can read have skipped right past union and are starting a religion. Good fun will be had by all.
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I wouldnât be surprised if it was a common technique. Itâs hard to break biases and see how silly some things are until you flip things around. In particular, bad comic book poses, advertising, and covers come to mind.
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