Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

Women and EVE Online

I received a comment a couple weeks back, that if EVE Online players could do away with the general misogyny that is not uncommon among male gamers, if EVE Online could do away with such things as pornfleets and comments such as "tits or GTFO", then more women would flock to EVE Online.

I can certainly agree that if there were an attitude adjustment among some of the male subscriber-base of EVE Online, it would certainly make for a more comfortable gaming environment for women, thus increasing the percentage of women playing EVE. No doubt about it. Though, I argue that increase would be small. Perhaps on the order of only a couple percentage points.

Negative attitudes toward women are certainly not issues restricted to EVE Online alone. The attitude exists in any online game, from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy. Yet, why do those games have a higher percentage of female gamers? Perhaps because those games have more to offer, are more attractive to the woman gamer, thus their threshold for negativity is higher.

The ratio of men to women in EVE Online is currently estimated to be around 19:1. Five percent of the playerbase are female. If an attitude adjustment were to occur, maybe that jumps to seven or eight percent. Any increase is a welcome increase, of course.

EVE Online's larger problems in attracting female gamers are few-fold:  that it is hard science fiction, that the developed character plays such a small role in player-to-player interaction, and that EVE is difficult to roleplay.

47% of gamers are currently female. What sorts of games attract them?

You can correlate female interest in science fiction with women in science. Whereas "women comprise 48 percent of the U.S. workforce [they comprise] just 24 percent of workers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields."

You can correlate further with science fiction programming on television. The fourth season of Battlestar Galactica had a female viewership of only 25%. The Star Treks and Stargates have had similar numbers. Contrast that with fantasy programming ? such as Game of Thrones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood ? and the female audience rises to 45% to 60% of total viewers.

This is reflected in gaming. The highest female figures tend to be in non-science fiction and non-military oriented games. You'll find higher female numbers in games such as The Sims and World of Warcraft, than in games such as Halo or Starcraft. For World of Warcraft, an estimated 38% of players are women.

EVE Online is already on its back foot in this regard. EVE is marketed as hard sci-fi (the actual "science" in EVE not withstanding.) That's already a detriment if attracting more female players is a goal. Second, nearly everything that one does in EVE serves the military industrial complex. EVE is very much a game about militarization.

Women tend to prefer games that focus on interpersonal contact, whether with real people (in MMOs and multiplayers) or NPC-only (such as in games like The Sims or the Final Fantasy series.) Women tend to want to interact with their games at a more personal level, even if said interaction is programmatic.

This sort of interpersonal contact is made difficult in EVE when you're playing not a character, but a spaceship. The interpersonal is made difficult when you're a small bit of iconography on screen. There is no standing in front of someone. There are no animated emotes. There is no dancing. You're an object, and you fly to and fro, where distances are measured in kilometres when pals are on grid with you. There's certainly an element of the interpersonal via chat windows, but that lacks a certain expressiveness that a character and emote system can supply. If something pleases you in World of Warcraft, you can do a happy dance. You can't even waggle your ship in EVE.

Even EVE's questing system is impersonal. The characters in those quests are meaningless, and if you spend any amount of time missioning, you tend to "save" the same people over and over again. The interactions with those NPCs are entirely unidirectional and one-dimensional. They "talk" to you via a text box, and that communication is not at all interactive. The person you're interacting with is nothing more than a profile image. Hardly the sort of NPC-style interaction that women gamers prefer, which are the sorts of pseudo-dynamic NPC interactions found in games such as The Sims and World of Warcraft.

Whereas EVE has a backstory, it is not particularly prevalent in the game itself. The missioning system rarely touches upon the backstory. The missioning system rarely expands upon the backstory. There are the epic mission arcs, to be sure, but they are few and far between. You can count the number of epic mission arcs on two hands.

Few people know who the major NPC characters are in New Eden. The game never allows players to interact with them. The only time you ever hear of them are via news reports on the EVE Online website, and few people even pay attention to those.

The characteristics of the four races are ephemeral at best. The Gallente are democratic. The Caldari are capitalists. The game already directs every player, no matter race, into capitalist activities (EVE is a market-driven game, after all.) How does one play a democrat, when democratic principles are not game mechanics? Whereas one could latch onto these ideals, it is difficult to express them uniquely within a character, and be able to demonstrate those ideals through the game.

There's certainly roleplaying in EVE Online, but it's a niche activity. Roleplayers in EVE tend to be insignificant in the grand scheme of the game. They rarely have an impact on the grander player-driven conflicts, which are usually unrelated to any of EVE's backstory.

That the gameplay of EVE is player-driven would suggest a higher level of roleplay than in other games, but the reasons for these stories very rarely have anything to do with the history or characters of New Eden. Goonswarm does not attack Fountain because of some perceived slight by the Serpentis, they do so wholly outside of any stories CCP have created for their universe. Real roleplay (in my opinion, of course) is not only taking on a character, but fitting that character into the backstory of the milieu. Very few players do that. We create our own stories, but we're not really concerned with how those stories interact with the story of New Eden.

EVE Online is severely lacking in areas of gameplay that attract female gamers. To invest in an increase in female subscribers would be to develop into areas of the game that might turn away current subscribers. EVE Online would need a more immersive environment for interpersonal contact, and that would mean further expanding upon WiS (walking in stations.) The game would need a greatly expanded, and non-repetitive questing system, that is better woven into the New Eden backstory and history. Is this development that CCP is willing to tackle? Probably not. The scope of each, the development time required, would be a risky proposition.

EVE Online will likely remain a game that is simply not attractive to the general female audience. If CCP wants more female gamers, their best bet would be to focus that intiative on World of Darkness. That game has all the elements that would be attractive to female gamers ? fantasy, roleplay, interpersonal contact. Even if World of Darkness is a sandbox game similar to EVE Online (i.e., cruel, harsh and relentless in its gameplay), it will still offer an experience more attractive to women gamers.

EVE Online's major problem is not the attitudes of its male gamers. (It is still a problem, and should be corrected, it is just not the primary problem.) Those attitudes are prevalent across the gaming spectrum, and yet certain genres still attract women despite negative attitudes towards them. These negative attitudes should certainly be stamped out, but they are not the primary reasons why more women do not play EVE Online.


Sources
Breckon, Nick. Nielsen Estimates 400,000+ Female World of Warcraft Players in US. shacknews.com, 2009.
Entertainment Software Association. 2012 Sales, Demographic, and Usage Data. theesa.com, 2012.
Hamilton, Erin. The Girl Gamer's Manifesto. gamespot.com, 2008.
Seidman, Robert. SciFi Scores Best Year Ever in all Key Demographics. tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com, 2008.
Wikipedia. Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (United States). en.wikipedia.org.
Source: Women and EVE Online