Wimmin and Social Media

Here’s a blurb from Broadsheet (part of Salon) about women outnumbering men on social networking sites.

I’ve edited my official Darth Bunnywabbit “Here I’ve been, typing about this sort of thing for years, waiting for clueless developers to listen up” speech down to this paragraph.

And in the comments section, the predictable tribe of internet misogynists are quick to chime in that this isn’t “real” use of technology, it’s navel gazing, although if you’re sharing pictures of your navel on Facebook, it seems like you might need to find a new metaphor for “self absorbed.”

Although it’s tempting to riff on a good metaphor for “a bunch of people being self absorbed together” – an activity which can happen on Facebook or in WoW, or at your friendly neighborhood singles bar.

And it’s also tempting to talk about my own social networking experiences – I’m one of those female holdouts re social networking sites because the only thing my social network really has in common is the fact they all know me. And I was in a discussion group schism that was entertaining for a while but degenerated into inactivity when it became apparent that a few women there were really uncomfortable with actual discussion as opposed to posting stuff about themselves. Facebook is probably a better venue for that. If I were a guy it might be tempting to riff about how women like dumb superficial stuff and men are engaged in more serious pursuits, but I’ve been a WoW player too long to fall for that trap, and guys are just as dumb and self-absorbed.

Unless there are gates.

A real life gated community attempts to keep its inhabitants safe from “undesirables.” You know, people who look poor, people who drive strange looking cars, people who want to paint their houses in dangerously subversive colors that aren’t in the approved palette.

I wouldn’t want to live like that IRL, but on the internet, I’d really rather not give equal time to spammers, scammers, internet misogynists craving sammiches, people who desperately want you to adopt their religion and/or ideology despite its grievous logical shortcomings and rogues who fail at dps. And Facebook allows users to socialize with anybody in the whole Facebookiverse – with gates. Not by forcing them all into little tribes with gatekeepers, but by making everyone their own gatekeeper, empowered to include and exclude everyone they want.

WoW, a primarily male social media, fails hard when it comes to gatekeeping. I would even go so far as to say that gatekeeping failure is the main problem complained about in WoW. Asshats mouthing off in trade chat. Incompetents looking for pickup groups. Thieves and griefers with fluid identities. And the never ending search for “game-compatible” (similar level, similar skills, similar goals) players, which runs sort of like picture brides in the 19th century – after a brief written exchange, one party spends money and inconvenience moving somewhere far away, hoping to be compatible with the strangers who have already developed a community there).

Seriously, how difficult would it be to include some kind of search engine or web app that lets you say something like “I am a rogue with good dps who wants to do 10man progression raiding Thursdays and Saturdays at 8:00 PST” and hook up with others? Very difficult, apparently. To find new guilds – and yes, the thought of finding a new guild for myself has been crossing my mind lately – you can either wade through the guild recruitment forums, which look like what would happen if one of the Craigslist roommate listing servers (without search filters) exploded. Or you can make a noob on some other server and then hope to get the attention of people who might be like the people you seek (a little time consuming, even given that the players have informally designated some servers as “the raid recruiting server” or “the server where people don’t talk smack about GLBTs all the time” or “the server with a lot of hardcore progression players” – and also given that in WoW, your reputation is everything, so you’re stuck with “hi, I’m a level 1 noob, but if you alt tab out of WoW and go to a weblink you can see the REAL me”). Or you can ask your RL friends and roommates, which is what a lot of people seem to do.

People outside WoW have tried to set up something of this nature but the matchmaking websites I saw looked sparse. And I’ve learned from experience (see last post) that someone who might be a damn good gamer in one game can turn into an unrepentant scrub in another game.

There are a few promising developments on the horizon. For example, cross-server interaction. In the future, supposedly we’ll be able to text and instance with people from other servers. Which means that if I want to talk to a bunch of prospective guildies on some other server, I don’t have to go over there and create a new character. Maybe I’ll even be able to run a few heroics with these potential guildies to make sure we have compatibility under fire and not just keyboard chemistry.

And the whole faction change feature moots the issue of horde versus alliance, although there is no way I’ll ever faction change my troll and risk losing my raptor collection.

As far as advanced gatekeeping, there are addons that allow you to expand your ignore list. There’s one called “thanks for the warning” that lets you tag a player for future reference. “Oh look, that guy who was spamming trade chat the other night wants a raid spot, I think we’re full.” There’s one that lets you share your ignore list among all your characters, although for me, running around with people who don’t realize that you’re the person they pissed off yesterday can have its own rewards. And – based on what I’ve heard rather than personal experience – there are IM programs that let you just replace WoW chat with one where you can talk to anyone you want, whether they’re on another server or playing a different game entirely.

I’m still on my soapbox, game manufacturers. If you guys really want our princess-pink dollars (last I checked, they exchange at the same rate as sweaty-smelling, manly dollars), give us better social networking, and more gates.