Women gamers

Xeni Jardin of Boingboing.net is going to be talking about women and gaming tonight. I wonder how many women gamers are my age - 42. I know, I know, most people playing things like Yahoo games and Pogo games are women over 40 (you guys should see how filled those dang rooms are! There's a bunch on topics, then quite a few in the under 20's... but 20's & 30's aren't that filled. Then I turned 40 and went to go check those chat rooms out... and whooo boy, they're crowded and raunchy.

I used to play online Bingo at BugleBingo.com... but then they changed the rules. It was great back in the first days there... I ended up winning about $2-300 from them. There it was like 80% women and great fun.

I also used to play Yahoo Mahjong... the real deal. Not the stupid solitaire game that you match tiles up but the real, 4-person, 5 hour involvement if you play 9 fans, 4 rounds. Again, there it was mainly women who played. Then they changed the rankings, and the subscription and I left that community. I still wonder about some of those people I used to play with like CrankyK9... he was a hoot.

After those two online communities, I found a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) to hang out on. Threshold-rpg was a great game for 4 years... it was primarily role-playing SO as a result, the community was pretty even in gender ratio. About half the women enjoyed "borging" - the act of killing monster after monster to gain xp (experience points) - a fairly boring act except you used to be able to chat while in the midst of fighting. The other half pretty much stayed in social areas and used the game as a fantasy chat room. This MUD was unusual in that all but three channels of chat, you HAD to stay in character. So entering this game, you basically had to pretend you were this other person almost the entire time you played.

Threshold changed and most of my friends left that game and are now on NewWorlds-rpg, which is again a role-playing MUD. BTW, I know of like 20 couples that met in Threshold and got together. My love and I are one of those happy couples.

Most of the women I met through Threshold are in their late 20's to 40's. It was always great finding someone my age... We'd make 60's jokes that few got.

Me? I've been gaming since 1970's... since Pong first came out. I owned a Coleco-vision, an Atari and considered getting a Trash-80. In my house, I have 3 old macs, 2 old pc's, a pc laptop and a mac laptop. We have 2 PS2s and 2 Xbox and multiple multiple mutliple controllers. I think there are still some remnants of a playstation and a SNES somewhere in the house. The Genesis has been given to the person who owned half of it.

Will I ever stop gaming? I hope not. There's XBox 360, PS3 and lots more to check out!

Filed under Gaming-Obsess Much?.