I read an article called "Gender and Sexism in Online Gaming Communities" by Matt Rafalow. This article talked about how female gamers are treated within the community and how cultural norms and expectations shape women gamers. I'll only be looking at one part of the article (that really interested me) for this blog post.
Rafalow begins by talking about how there is an increase in female gamers, but often cultural ideas about women and their role/what they do affect how they game. Some research he looked at showed that there were three directions that women went when it came to games. The first was all out gamer who got involved in the creation of games as well as enjoying playing games. The second was a casual gamer who played games to relax and maybe was involved in forums and such, but they didn't get involved much more than that. The third way they could go is not seeing any point in games at all and moving toward more traditional 'girl roles'.
Unfortunately, very few women are in the first category. Having both male and female in a community shows that it is a healthy and growing community that can come up with brilliant ideas that otherwise would not be possible. The (gradual) balance of genders in the community is probably going to help games and the gaming community become better and better in years to come.
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