Question: Tell Me What You Think About This?

Crazy Kinux has chucked out another doozy, this time about what CCP could do to attract and retain women in game.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure they can, short of doing something with the new player experience to encourage more people to join a corp straight out of the block. Don’t ask how they’ll find the right one. I ended up creating my own.

EvE can certainly be a hostile place to pretty much everyone, but without the opportunity for the women out there to link up and enjoy the social aspects of the game I can see the enjoyment factor disappearing fairly rapidly. The upside of course, is that those women who do stay, tend to be both quite extraordinary, and very VERY good at what they do.

I know of three in the wider alliance that I’m part of… and thank god the moment of realisation on comms was over fairly quickly. “Another woman! Thats three now isn’t it? Three! Squee!!!! Ahem. Right. Lets go blow shit up.”  Have to give our alliance some big props for the general lack of smack talk and mysoginistic commentary. It is to a large extent unsaid, but we do respect the women who are with us.

And that brings me to my point: Respect.

Eve is a reflection of the world. A distorted, melted one, heavily skewed to one end of the SF bell curve to be sure, but still a reflection. It’s also one with the ordinary social controls largely switched off, masked behind our alts. It can be all too easy to be a right numbnuts. Don’t be one. Just don’t.

Women who try out EvE are pretty rare in the first place. Help and support them. Give them the opportunity to grow into the game, then let them find what they love to do within it. If things actually reach a critical mass, that social interaction and word of mouth advertising could very well become self perpetuating. And that would be a very good thing indeed.

H

Here are a few of the other postings that are absolutely well worth a read:

http://capsuliere.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/8/

http://podlogs.com/ztikara/2010/04/19/eve-blog-banter-the-girls-who-fly-spaceships/

http://cailais.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/tech-2-stilettos/

http://talknerdytome.dk/blog/?p=77

http://antiquityinspace.blogspot.com/2010/04/eve-blog-banter-special-edition-ladies.html

Better yet: go here and see them all —-> !