This week’s Community Spotlight focuses on the thread “Most Girls Play…” by uquipo who believes that most female gamers play World of Warcraft. The resulting discussion turned out to be hit-or-miss, but was often funny and at the very least quite insightful, thanks to our resident female readers here at MMORPG.com.

Uquipo’s thoughts:

“I'm guessing most women play WoW.

I'm talking about a per capita amount like out of every 100 people 20 are female.

I once heard that 40% of WoW players were female, but that sounds high.  PvP servers would have fewer women while RP servers would have more, I assume.

I would think a game like EVE would have a small female population.”

Read Community Spotlight: Girls in MMOs.

My first experience with female gamers came from SWG and I have to say that it convinced me to never delve into the personal lives of people I gamed with and to this day I've stuck to that, not to sound sexist and say that all girl gamers are going to be like those few bad apples I met in SWG but for me atleast the chance of it happening is far too great for me to ever care what girls play and where (of course I would have a totally different opinion if I were single hehe.

I recognize this is a light-hearted post but I always find this topic a bit silly.    In this day, what does it matter the gender behind the avatar for an MMO?    If it were a dating website it would make sense.    Even if the player is not a role-player, how does the gender affect the game?    I've met good and bad people and players in MMOs of all ages and both genders.    Surely today running into someone in a game who is a female irl is not all that rare, unique or noteworthy?     It's great to meet fun people who share your gaming interests, but beyond that, what diff does it make?

I also have to agree, why are we still making such a huge deal of this whole thing? Yes, women also play MMOs.. what a shocker, huh? What annoys me is that, from my personal experience, women tend to close up or act more reserved from there on when this situation arises in a guild or on TS because of the whole forced and unwanted placement in the spotlight.

They exist, they are real... deal with it and move on.

I care because female gamers seem to want more aspects to gameplay than just "I pwnz joo d00d". Aspects like SWG (pre NGE) had. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying females don't like to do some pwnzing, but on the whole it just seems they think more outside the box than alot of the guys as far as what an online world should be.

I agree with those thought and hey, if they can band together enough to get their voices heard  and a developers incorporates those elements in a AAA title, well, the combat focused e-peen MMOs out there will see an exodus of us guys who agree and want more out of an MMO. As it is right now there is little choice with there only being a handfull of dated games or games that offer no combat at all.

When I first played SWG and met a lot of female toons my first thought was wow that is a lot of female gamers. Then a few months later I find out that nearly 98% to 99% of the female toons are acutally guys and that turn me off real fast. Nowadays in any type of MMO including World of Warcraft if I run across a female toon am going to assumed it is a guy pretending to be a female.  This is why I use voice chat like teamspeak or vent.  You can tell which is which.  I been playing WAR and there are female gamers, I would say about 80% of the female toons are female gamers. Interesting to note that guys who used to play female toons have actually rerolled into male toons as to not offend the female gamer community. Sad to say WOW has a very low real female gamer population due to the bad reputation of sexism and other sexual harrasment and sexual perversions that guys playing female toons have done on the WOW servers. 

Lot of the female gamers in WAR are married who play along side thier husbands, few of them are guild leaders in thier own right. Female gamers are a force to be reckon with, I dare say that there will come a day when MMO's will be forced to forbid males from playing female toons. 

Everquest and Everquest two have had more female players than any other I've seen.

Last check that was done that I saw said that female players are roughly 40% of the populace in Norrath.

Ultima Online (yes its still around) Has more females (real ones) than any other MMO than Ive ever played or heard of. most of them are 40 or older and or disabled and sit at home all day playing UO, and most of them are crazies (to my experience). I have only met a couple real females in WoW but I play a PvP server.

It's really, really hard to judge how many girl MMO gamers there are as the "typical" MMO community gives most people a lot of reasons to lie about their gender.  Admitting to being a girl can open someone up to harrassment like you wouldn't believe, but also works as a way of getting preferential treatment from hormonal teenage boys.

My girlfriend plays MMOs (currently WOW, but she's previously played LOTRO, GW and HKO) and so far the highest number of actual girl gamers seems to have been in LOTRO, primarily because of its setting, its graphical direction, its "fluff" games and cosmetic items, and its easily soloable content.

For what it is worth I  am female and I play mmos. I started with things like Sims Online and Rune Scape lol. Then got into the real stuff from EQ to WoW. I kind of flit around trying others out as I find them and sometimes playing for a while. I always keep my WoW account up to date though because I really enjoy raiding.

For what its worth. I have a job, a couple in fact (a "real" job and I'm a freelance photographer). I have a fiance, who also plays mmos. I have 2 kids who are well cared for, have good grades and don't get into trouble.

I have no problem revealing that I'm a woman and I play games. I have heard it all from "women who have kids and play games are bad mothers" to "women can't play games well so they are all casual".  Get over it. There are a ton of us out there and we not only enjoy playing but a lot of us are also good at it.

 Honestly the people i'm playing withs real life gender makes no difference, it's just pixels on a screen so why does it even matter?

 Statistics be damned, it's just a virtual world to escape the real world, and if someone is pretending to be female or actually is female, neither changes anything and i'd rather just not know lol.

I have not played a wide range of games -- Asheron's Call 1 and 2, DDO (briefly), and LotRO.  The discerning reader will note that these are all from Turbine.

I haven't any hard data on how many of my fellow gamers in any of these games were female.  I do know that when I mentioned that *I* was, cautious players would ask, "Are you a girl in RL?"  (They'd been burned a few times, y'see.)  I would answer, "At 62 [or 65, or whatever it was that year, currently 67], hardly a girl, but I'm female."  After that statement, I would not get harrassed at all!  It would seem that even a horny teenager is unwilling to fantasize about a woman who's just told him she's old enough to be his grandmother.  In fact, everyone would be very polite and compliment me on playing MMOs at my age. 

But maybe that's the Turbine influence.  Turbine player communities attract sensible, courteous, and mature people.  :) 

Two points:

1) I'm sure WoW does have the most female gamers. If has more gamers than any other MMO by an order of magnitude, male or female.

2) It's been by experiance that EQII and LoTR both have very high percentages of female players.

My stock answer to 'there are no gurlz on the Internetz' has always been 'there are no men on the Internet, either'.

Secondly, this is 2010 and our moms are on the Internet. Somewhere. I only *wish* mine would game with me.

Thirdly, the only useful answer to the question of "Most women play...?" ends in ", currently." I've never gone to any game including Shadowbane, Darkfall, or the beta of Mortal Online and not found some other gamers who were women.

This topic is in a general class of 'golly whiz, girls play ___' topics that are about ten years too old to be fresh. Pardon me while I /yawn.

I'm 36 and have been playing MMO's and MMORPG's for about 3 or 5 years.  I played warcraft for 2 years, I play DDO, Seal Online, Runescape, Ultima Online, Hello Kitty Online, Gaia Online, Holic, Pirates of the Carabiean, Neo, Puzzle Pirates, Wonderland Online, Angels online, Dufus,  Neo Pets, Webkins, many games from Aeira Games, G Potato, N Doors, NC Soft, Flyff, Rapelz, Dream of Mirror, World of KungFu, Trickster, Florensia, Atlantica.   Get the Idea.   That is my short list believe it or not.  I got a book full of passwords for all kinds of game.   We are out there and we do play these games and have fun.   I play client based as well as many browser based games.  I also like Beta testing games and have done so a number of time.  I fequent sites like this for MMO information as well as a few others.   This is what I do.   I've also done some bloging reviews for some games.   I love all kinds of games from the toony anime games to the 3D types that I would say are more like the Atlantica and DDO type graphics.   That was maybe a quarter of my list and I'm not joking.   Well that's it from me.

I am a 52 year old female who has been playing online games for years now and plan on playing long into my retirement years. My son, now 21 was the one that got me hooked on gaming.

I play them all but look for ones that have good quests and fun crafting. When the quests run out that is usually when I move on. I have played SWG, WoW, LoTR, CoH/CoV with long term subs and many many of the cute freebie ones. I love testing them all. 

We are everywhere but it is true it is hard to find us with so many guys playing female characters. What I love to see like in Aion, EQ or WoW is there are just as many of you guys standing right there by the crafting station as us girls. Not everyone loves the blood and guts in a game all the time. We like to have variety and that is what keeps people in your game.

I have a 19-year old daughter. 

She started playing MMOs in EQ1 when she was about 14.  Here are the MMOs she played, and those she still has accounts open in (she's busy getting an undergraduate dregree now so not spending much time on-line).

Played: EQ1, EQ2, Earth & Beyond, SWG, CoH/CoV, Guild Wars, LoTR, AoC, WoW

Active: Guild Wars, AoC, WoW

She's eagerly waiting for the KotOR MMO .  She's not a big fan of WoW actually, but plays it on occasion because many of her friends do.

it is important to listen to the ever silent voice of the female player too. so far mmorpg's are built off the ramblings and wants of the boy mind or adrenaline driven male students. testosterone plays a huige factor in todays mmo's/ its evident because the majority well all of them centre around killing eachother or massive raids where boys can just mach it up with other boys and bang on about their new swords and armour and how uber cool they are for smacking shit out of thaty illitarate nooby from japan and feeling good about  it.

 i like finding female gamers, they remind us of the more important aspects of mmo games and they show us and tell us and let us see that most of these mmo games are missing oodles of potentialy great  content that only a females mind can put value in.   thats right people blokes on a whole are just gorey muppets that want to run round in thick armour mashing up bad guys. sure thats part of an mmo but its not the core element.

also          the more mature gamer will share some of the more complex views with the female gamers. they just want a fuller game experience and better emmersion into the game world its self. not just the games back story..

i think all the female gamers should take a stand and start makeing sure the games cater for them as mush as they cater for males. they need to be open in the forums  and such start talking more about the aspects they prefer to play.

so far they are relatively unheard.

im sick of all these stupid boreing hack and slash games. they are al the same they only last a few months and well  its just getting old. games havnt changed a great deal in the past 10 years.

come on girls make your selves heard.

It all depends on the game. What makes me mad is that there are talks of EA Games making a classic UO shard. There is a whole topic on it on uostratics, even with a voting pole of what time frame of classic UO. There are a few LOUD MOUTH  females on the startics forums that make insane amounts of posts that they do want a classic UO shard but with VERY HARSH restrictions for PvP/PKing that go far beyond what was implemented in any era of classic UO. Each time a male posts on how much he wants and misses the classic UO days back, these females cut them off with a five page reply, basically telling them no, its our way or the highway.  These females are long time members of uostartics as well. What makes me mad is that EA Games do listen to carebears like these females and we all know that the saying ( the squeaky wheel gets the oil ) is 100% true with EA Games.

There are a few females that are in my guild since the classic UO days, even played Shadowbane from release to closing with us guys without one tear shed. It makes me wonder what crawled up these LOUD MOUTHS asses on the uostartics forums? There is no hope of a pay to play, true classic UO shard due to these girls... not to mention the brown nosing dudes that agree with these females on the uo startics forums... I wish I could lock people up like this in a box and throw it into the sun like Superman did with all the nukes in the movie.

The whole "O amazing girlz play too!" thing seems a bit goofy to me. I think it's part of the narrow-minded concept that many people hae about MMO gamers, which seems to follow the (very wrong) path "MMO gamers > gamers > teenage boys > teenage boys who wear glasses and can't get a girlfriend to save their lives".

It's not true, it never has been. In fact, the biggest hurdle that MMOs have had to overcome, in terms of who plays - and all gaming - is the idea that the games are for boys alone that their marketers propogate (and if you think they don't, take a look at the female toons in WoW across the board, which are even made to look as attractive to human boys as they can in Tauren and Orc form. Shapely Tauren, by Human standards? Please!).

Imagine though coming from the viewpoint that the potential MMO player would be the kind of person who reads SF and Fantasy, and wanted to try immersing her/himself in a virtual world and play a character like the ones she/he read about? The idea that reading these genres is for boys went out decades ago, and the same should have for MMO gaming - and all gaming, for that matter.

The question is now not "Do girls play?", or even "How many?", it is "Why would we think they don't?"

For any of you who are thinking along the terms of "marketing for women", I suggest you don't. "Marketing for" is the problem, no the solution, and is what is wrong with WoW, not what is right. If you market for a generic audience you end up with a generic solution. Flavorless.

;)