Especially in the context of minimizing inferential distance, it’s important to have experience exchange both ways. For example, DMs shutting down a player’s attempt to deviate from the script is a common enough experience that I expect more than half of D&D players can relate, and letting the person who shared the anecdote know that “yep, this is a common problem” is valuable information that can help them feel less singled out. Of course, this can be interpreted as a status-reduction move; they’re trivializing the concerns and making the speaker less special! This is the uncharitable interpretation and so in general I recommend against it.
I think this is an excellent point, and in the interests both of minimizing inferential distance and perhaps making some other points relevant to smart/geeky women’s issues, I offer a personal anecdote:
My early experiences as a D&D player included some memorable instances when I tried to “deviate from script”, though at the time I didn’t entirely understand that there was a script and that I was deviating from it; I was doing what seemed to make sense in my character’s situation. My DMs would sometimes be unprepared, would respond either by explicitly stating that I had gone off script or by more subtly trying to corral me back onto the rails, and some frustration would ensue; I would be frustrated because I felt like my freedom of character action, my ability to flex my imagination, was being curtailed.
My DMs were frustrated too, though the nature of the DM’s frustration was not something I understood until later, when I started to DM my own games, and learned firsthand about the way combinatorial explosion rears its head in adventure and world design, about the difficulty of anticipating the imaginations of several intelligent, creative, self-selected-for-out-of-the-box-thinking people, and many other issues. As a DM, these problems are solvable with effort and practice, and I’ve gotten better over the almost 10 years that I’ve been a DM; I try rather hard to set up my world and adventures to allow for maximum freedom of choice and action (or at least the convincing illusion of such; much DMing comes down to sleight-of-hand).
Most of my DMing experience has been for an all-male group of experienced tabletop gamers, but recently I had the opportunity to run a semi-regular game for a group that was (shock and gasp!) majority-female. About half of the players, including two of the girls*, were entirely new to D&D and tabletop roleplaying in general; this was their very first game.
The games and my DMing met with satisfaction; all involved, as far as I can tell, enjoyed themselves, to the extent that after the game ended and we had to go our separate ways (the setting for this was a summer-long internship), a couple of the first-timers immediately went on to seek out regular D&D groups, which means that the D&D game I ran was what got them into this particular part of geekdom (that is, tabletop roleplaying gaming). All the players who expressed their satisfaction — including, notably, the first-timers — said that prominent among the things that contributed to their enjoyment of the game was the feeling of freedom, of options; the sense that their imagination and creativity in deciding what their characters could do, was not artificially constrained.
I took pride in this, because I’ve worked hard to develop the DMing skills that allow for such flexibility; my own early experiences are what prompted me to keep firmly in mind this particular failure mode of DMing (the inflexible script). I took pride also in being the vehicle through which intelligent women are introduced to geekdom (or, for those who were already geeks but in different ways, have their horizons expanded).
Of course, a certain awareness of women’s experiences, such as those mentioned in this post, and of certain of the sorts of gender-related failures that plague geekdom, did also (I hope!) help in creating the sort of atmosphere in which female geeks/gamers could feel comfortable.
* “girls”: college-age women, several years younger than me. No belittlement intended.
I think this is an excellent point, and in the interests both of minimizing inferential distance and perhaps making some other points relevant to smart/geeky women’s issues, I offer a personal anecdote:
My early experiences as a D&D player included some memorable instances when I tried to “deviate from script”, though at the time I didn’t entirely understand that there was a script and that I was deviating from it; I was doing what seemed to make sense in my character’s situation. My DMs would sometimes be unprepared, would respond either by explicitly stating that I had gone off script or by more subtly trying to corral me back onto the rails, and some frustration would ensue; I would be frustrated because I felt like my freedom of character action, my ability to flex my imagination, was being curtailed.
My DMs were frustrated too, though the nature of the DM’s frustration was not something I understood until later, when I started to DM my own games, and learned firsthand about the way combinatorial explosion rears its head in adventure and world design, about the difficulty of anticipating the imaginations of several intelligent, creative, self-selected-for-out-of-the-box-thinking people, and many other issues. As a DM, these problems are solvable with effort and practice, and I’ve gotten better over the almost 10 years that I’ve been a DM; I try rather hard to set up my world and adventures to allow for maximum freedom of choice and action (or at least the convincing illusion of such; much DMing comes down to sleight-of-hand).
Most of my DMing experience has been for an all-male group of experienced tabletop gamers, but recently I had the opportunity to run a semi-regular game for a group that was (shock and gasp!) majority-female. About half of the players, including two of the girls*, were entirely new to D&D and tabletop roleplaying in general; this was their very first game.
The games and my DMing met with satisfaction; all involved, as far as I can tell, enjoyed themselves, to the extent that after the game ended and we had to go our separate ways (the setting for this was a summer-long internship), a couple of the first-timers immediately went on to seek out regular D&D groups, which means that the D&D game I ran was what got them into this particular part of geekdom (that is, tabletop roleplaying gaming). All the players who expressed their satisfaction — including, notably, the first-timers — said that prominent among the things that contributed to their enjoyment of the game was the feeling of freedom, of options; the sense that their imagination and creativity in deciding what their characters could do, was not artificially constrained.
I took pride in this, because I’ve worked hard to develop the DMing skills that allow for such flexibility; my own early experiences are what prompted me to keep firmly in mind this particular failure mode of DMing (the inflexible script). I took pride also in being the vehicle through which intelligent women are introduced to geekdom (or, for those who were already geeks but in different ways, have their horizons expanded).
Of course, a certain awareness of women’s experiences, such as those mentioned in this post, and of certain of the sorts of gender-related failures that plague geekdom, did also (I hope!) help in creating the sort of atmosphere in which female geeks/gamers could feel comfortable.
* “girls”: college-age women, several years younger than me. No belittlement intended.
Maybe we need a “minimize inferential distance to DMs” thread?