Vive Virtual: WOMEN IN EVE

Welcome to another special installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

I am completely unqualified to speculate about WOMEN IN EVE. Please don’t read this with the same voice tone as PIGS IN SPACE, as I don’t know many people (or women for that matter) who like being associated with pigs. Or space(ships). Face it, EVE and internet pew pew spaceships are for Geeks.

While there are certainly female geeks, my distant memories of middle school inform the theory that there is less socially adaptive advantage for women to embrace their inner geekdom. Geeky girls have plenty of opportunities to cross over into other social spheres, whereas the male geek may be more stuck in his social stratus in those formative years.

Despite the fact that half of us playing EVE are over 30 and over the gaming hill (defined by being unable to compete with a 15 year old in ultra-twitch FPS due to age-dulled intellect and slow reflexes), the problem with WOMEN IN EVE began in grade school. Boys with geeky tendencies get sucked into video games early. While there is a sizable and growing proportion of gynecogamers, the estrogenergic ones are dwarfed by a testosterone train (shaped like an Avatar Titan) pounding down the gaming section of your local big box store. If you want to see more women in EVE, you need a better gateway drug for the feminine young-uns than the weak Link, Space Invaders and Mario most of us cut our teeth on.

Once the brain has formed, it is nearly impossible to change deep perceptions of the utility in sitting at a computer for hours at a time yelling into a microphone while punching F1 through F4 and talking smack in local. I can’t even get my wife to play Wii with me despite purchasing fodder such as Agony Christie murder games and Lego cooperative love fests. Selling a non-hardcore gamer on EVE falls below futile into grave folly territory. I often wonder why I love the griefer-infested dark Darwinian paradise of New Eden so much myself! Sadly, that love likely betrays a Machiavellian participant in the endless chaotic drama that pulses through the best sandbox on earth.

Given the upward trend in subscriptions, I think CCP has at least been able to attract the cross dressing role player crowd in addition to the uber-I’m-not-gay homophobic mouthbreathers. Maybe CCP should stick to what they know and keep encouraging those cross dressers to Harden the Fuck Up. If a few exceptional females choose to jump on the train now and then, we all benefit. If EVE remains the ultimate sausage fest in a vacuum, at least it is a damn entertaining exercise in exploring the fun to be had on the dark side of the human behavioral spectrum with a bunch of cross-dressing spaceship fetishists. It may cost a few thousand real world dollars to have your Titan ganked by your ex-corpmates, but it is about the fun, damn it! (The fun shall not be confused with the epeen, see mouth breather comment above…)

More banter on the topic of WOMEN IN EVE:

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

WOMEN IN EVE

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