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There was a time just about when Burning Crusade came out that I played WoW. My god that game kept me out of trouble (albeit my soon-to-be wife despised that I played it.) I loved it. It's the only game I ever really got into, and I was well into my 30s at the time. I thought about doing the WoW Classic when it was released but I simply don't have the time now, as a husband/dad.
Why didn’t she like it? My lady plays with me hehehe
I don't know. My first reaction would be that it's because she's female, but I suppose girls and women do take to games. Just not her thing, I guess, and the vision of me sitting there gazing at a screen for hours was sufficiently far from the man I guess she thought she was involved with that she balked.
Wow is about half women, although the raiding scene used to be more like 25% (I haven't raided since 2016, no idea about now).
Having wasted far too much time playing Classic on and off since 2019, the ratio there is probably closer to 20% total, and 10% of serious raiders. Fairly confident in that estimate based on experience in raiding guilds and hearing everyone's voices in discord.
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Interesting. The study I have seen said more than 80% were male but may be dated, to say nothing of the methodological issues. Personally I've never known IRL a woman who regularly played video games. Or maybe they've just never told me. Many years ago I saw my fiercely competitive wife on Mario Kart, and it's probably just as well that she doesn't have much interest in turning on the PlayStation .
My partner runs circles around me in Mario Kart, and probably has spent more time playing games in the last couple years than I have. She's sunk in probably >20x the time I have in BG3, last I checked, and is enough of a gamer that she started talking mad shit about my brother's unoptimised strats while he and I were playing co-op (note: my first run, 0 familiarity with any mechanics) despite him having completed a couple runs already -- though he's more of a Timmy while she's more of a Spike.
She also used to beat me in WC3 more than 50% of the time when that was relevant. (I did kind of self gimp myself by being interested in relatively high execution strategies that I couldn't perform, and she would just huntress rush me to death)
She is quite competitive and plays to win, though, so now she doesn't play competitive games because she doesn't feel like she could compete at a satisfactory level anymore without putting in enough effort that it would derail other commitments. I can't really disagree -- I've stopped for largely the same reason (though I loosely still play a bit of MTG).
n=1, but they do exist.
First time hearing about the Timmy-Johnny-Spike classification. I'm not super familiar with MTG, but I don't really get the distinction between Timmy and Johnny, since it sounds like both prefer flashy plays to purely optimizing for the highest win probability. Is Timmy optimizing for largest point differential over win probability (e.g., rather win by 10 with 51% probability than win by 1 with 55% probability) while Johnny wants to play unorthodox or off-meta sets?
Timmy: all fluff, love of the setting. This dragon cards is cool because it's a big dragon that breathes lightning. They are fantasizing about the setting of the game, not the game itself, and as a consequence are usually not very good at the game itself. They want to daydream.
Johnny: Balance of fluff and crunch, and love of the game. This dragon is cool because it enables an infinite loop using these three other cards. They are fantasizing about the game, about the mechanics and their interactions. They want to play.
Spike: All Crunch, with the goal of winning at any cost. This dragon is cool because it gives me an extra win every ten games. They are fantasizing about winning, the crunch is interesting to them only as it helps increase their win percentage, and the fluff is irrelevant. They want to win.
The distinction I've seen more often was more like:
Timmy: this card is cool because it's a big, often expensive, flashy effect (7/7 angel)
Johnny: this card is cool because it can synergize with 5 other cards in an obscure way (that one wizard with "if you would lose from having no cards to draw, you win")
Spike: this card is cool because it's a plus tempo drop that raises my win percentage (that one meta 3/3 flying vehicle thopter)
The appreciation for fluff was offloaded to one of the secondary classifications (Vorthos? Or was that the one who cared about card artwork?)
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I tend to think of it this way -- a Timmy is drawn to cool stuff represented by the playing of the game (whether it be through roleplaying, through big fat numbers, the social aspect of the game, etc.), while a Johnny is drawn to cool interactions created by the game mechanics, up to and including bizarre 5 card combos relying on arcane rules minutiae that doesn't work out 9/10 of the time but that one time it works it looks really impressive...
A Timmy would be happy winning conventionally but in a "cool" way (think more "would look cool on a movie screen" rather than "would impress other players"), while a Johnny is more interested in doing unconventional stuff.
On the other hand Spikes just want to win at all costs within the rules of the game -- and if the most effective deck is utterly braindead and uninteresting otherwise, so be it.
In an RPG you could maybe translate it thus:
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Kind of. As I understand it, Timmy is more about "dumb" big flashy stuff, Johnny more about "brainy" subtle off-meta strategies. Similar to Spikes, Johnnies still play for a challenge, but the challenge is about making some weird game mechanic work, not straightforward winning. In my experience, Timmy is the most derogatory term in practice, basically saying someone plays like a five year old or at best "just for fun" with no effort whatsoever, Spike is in the middle, sometimes used negatively for tryhards, sometimes positively for straightforward good playing, and Johnny is the most positively connotated, the kind of person who doesn't "netdeck" but still wins often enough due to their good deck building & playing.
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I think it's rather more common with younger generations, in all countries, though I do actually have a Japanese woman friend in her 40s who is a fairly dedicated competitive Splatoon player. I don't think I would have found out without several coincidences aligning, either, even though I had known her for a long time, given the Japanese thing where compartmentalising your life and following a default don't-ask-don't-tell policy about other compartments comes very easily.
(One of the coincidences resulted in meeting some of her Splatoon buddies in real life, and their commitment to not prying behind the online masks of their compartment was notable. I figure this might actually help with the gender ratio, considering the rude and awkward behaviour I've seen in Western online gaming communities towards even those merely suspected of being girls.)
Curiously I’ve observed enough of women I know playing games like LoL and Guild Wars (etc.) on international servers, and have had a ?feminine enough username in some games and been taken for a woman in games (???), to have had an experience of this around 2000s-2010s.
Most people were actually supportive, some to the point of white-knighting. I thought the proportion of men who were actually foul to women was probably well under 10%. But most of the games where communication are usually team games (and so you have (1-x)^9 chances of not rolling a shithead for a solo queue 5v5 game, which is going to be significantly higher than 1-x), and these people could be so foul (or wildly inappropriate, or just plain weird), that it does mar the experience a bit.
It's also my observation that women don’t get more abuse than anyone else when they play games. They don’t get more harassed than men on the internet in general either (if anything it is the opposite), and this finding has been replicated when looking across the board, even in samples which are most likely to attract online criticism like politicians and journalists too. And men don't just experience relatively harmless acts - serious online abuse is also more likely to be directed at men by the way. But people are much more sensitive to harsh comments and threats directed at women than they are when directed at men, who are generally expected to be able to take it and/or dish back; we have no such expectation that women do so.
"Online harassment" in general is one of these very many areas wherein women actually receive preferential treatment but the popular consensus somehow seems to believe it's the opposite based on what people find emotionally salient. Women really dislike being in male spaces wherein they will sometimes be treated like men (bullying and threats will be slightly adapted based on gender to optimise for mental damage regardless of who they are insulting, but the phenomenon isn't distinct), and many men take offence on behalf of female dignity when women are treated like men too. And as soon as any large number of women enter a space, the norms quickly adapt to cater to feminine sensibilities. I've seen these attempts at social enforcement in real-time, too - I was once in a close-knit private server populated almost entirely by men, and the only woman in there was a girlfriend of one of the men who would routinely storm out of calls in response to any off-colour joke (as an aside they later broke up and she started dating one of his friends in the server immediately after, which spelled the end of the whole thing).
EDIT: added an extra sentence. I will also leave this very angry, drunk-narrated two part video here. Part 1, and part 2. Bit vitriolic, but I agree with it.
According to the anecdotes, while men are often harassed in games for the perceived reasons of being bad, standing out, picking the wrong character, etc.; women have "sounding female on mic" on top of that.
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I have an anecdote to relate sort of in response.
Our group of 25 raiders in a semi-serious Classic WoW guild had been together over a year (maybe 2?), through TBC into WotLK. In that time, we'd been raiding 4-8h a week, every week through progressively harder challenges, building up a lot of camaraderie. There were 3 women on the team. Let's call them:
end of a long session of raiding already an hour past the usual quitting time. Yogg-Saron, zero light (hard mode). It's near 11PM PST, pushing 2AM for the east coasters, on a work night.
Our group has nearly got it down, but the fight is difficult and takes a long time for each attempt - probably 10 minutes or something, + ~5m to get run back and get ready after each try. There's an easy mechanic at the start where there's a big floating AoE that everyone is supposed to avoid, and screwing it up means the attempt is almost guaranteed to fail. People are tired and making mistakes, especially Bubbles, but not exclusively her. The raid leader makes a call: next person to screw up that mechanic gets benched for the night. This is harsh, but understandable. No one vocally disagrees, at any rate.
Of course, Bubbles is the next one to screw up. True to his word, the raid lead kicks Bubbles from the group (she's still listening in discord), and apologizes but explains it's just for tonight. Get some sleep, etc. Buttercup twists the knife with some sharp comments "fucking FINALLY", "should have done that 45 minutes ago". Blossom sticks up for Bubbles. "yo, chill" "just a game", "let's calm down", etc. Buttercup more than happy to double down and fight : "bro she's literally keyboard turning, shut the fuck up".
Somewhere in the middle of Buttercup and Blossom going at each other, Bubbles leaves the channel, leaves the guild. leaves discord, and doesn't play again.
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I agree broadly. I do note that there was one incident where one of these weirdos was incredibly persistent with one of my friends — tried to find her on Skype and sext her, etc — which was genuinely extremely offputting. And I think the one case where women do get more unwanted attention than men is in this arena.
But also (women broadly) don’t want to be treated like the boys so what can you do
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In the gaming communities I sometimes visit (i.e., Battletech, Starsector, Nebulous etc.), there are no men, only "girls" and "dogs" and a few tolerated minorities without pronouns who know better than to say anything on the subject of women.
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