I just read some of the postings here and looked at the leaderboard and i recognized that noone here seams to be a woman... Are we all just some freaky male idiots or are there any women here????

-- Ejoty Hijksen (djlotion@gmx.net), June 11, 2000

Answers

I think the only female here right now is "queenmary"..

She4s also competing in t4.

I hope there will be more females here in the future!

QRS

-- QRS (qrs@telia.com), June 11, 2000.

There is also julie who entered T3 who's picture is suspciously pretty in the Gallery. Sorceress is also a female name who uploads once in a while on regular marp.

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), June 11, 2000.

Girls can't play video games, it's a well known fact.

-- LordGaz (garyjlee@hotmail.com), June 11, 2000.

Sorry Lord Gaz,but i don4t agree with you there.. I have two close friends (females) and they beat me in almost every kind of PSX games we play.. Icluding Bust a move, tetris etc. So i think your theory is old ;)

Cheers folks and more females to MARP!

QRS

-- QRS (qrs@telia.com), June 12, 2000.

99% (or at least 97%) of all marpmembers seem to be male... It is a fact that only very few girls play well. A long long time ago, when I got first in contact with videogaming (Game Gear), it really fascinated me. When my younger sister got a gameboy years later she played with it for about 2 weeks and since then it`s lying somewhere under some "Wendy" magazines... (Wendy = magazine with lots of cool ponys and horses in it) i think we , the male members of menkind, are just freakier and we just get more fascinated by things like MAME or building nuclear power plants (or bombs?)...

-- Ejoty Hijksen (djlotion@gmx.net), June 12, 2000.

I think you're close to what's going on, Ejoty, but just to clear up the stereotyping, let me point out a few things:

1) There are a lot of female videogamers, but usually the type of games they play is different.I don't think many women spent a lot of time with vertical or horizontal scrollers (maybe because they're predominantly war-like shooters?) but I have known a lot of women who played Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Tetris, Warcraft II, and as QRS said, Puzzle Bobble. Seems to me that most female vid-gamers just like a different type of game, that's all.

2. I don't think women WANT to be as competitive as men in the videogame field--you don't see many of them hanging around in arcades, unless accompanied by a male friend. This may be because of the atmosphere, or just because of different interests--the only games I've seen girls plaing in the arcades lately are Crazy Taxi, multiplayer driving games, and that dancing one (can't remember the name). It's intersting to note that there just aren't that many innovative games being released, so where would the motivation be for a woman with a moderate interest in gaming to go to an arcade when a die hard like me rarely goes anymore?

Same thing online. Most of the scoreboards on the Internet are for games like Quake, Half-Life, Tribes, etc.--all shooters. MARP has other types of games, so we attract a few female members--and look at the games that they play for the most part--Bubble Bobble, Diamond Run, Moon Patrol, APB, Mouse Trap (although Sorceress does have a few Smash TV .inps, it's more than likely because she was leeching firsts on games with no .inps). Go to somewhere with a really strong social element, say, Bezerk's Acrophobia or other online video gaming where you can actually meet and interact with people, and the population is often predominantly female.

Just some stuff to think about before we get into more 'girls don't play videogames.' They just play different kinds.

QCN

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), June 12, 2000.

Usually girls like cute games like the Bubble Bobble/Puzzle Bobble saga (like my sister) or Parappa the Rapper (my girlfriend, sigh...); in fact they think videogames are all equal, which means all you have to do is kill, kill and kill again. The fact MARP players' gender is 99.9% male is due to the fact that girls don't even know what's an emulator, so how do you expect them to download MAME and its roms, then upload their recordings here?

-- Vaz (mrvaz@inwind.it), June 12, 2000.

Actually, I knew this girl who was a regular in my favourite arcade. Now admittedly she was a bit 'butch', but she could play Shao-Lins Road to millions, and a few million on Robotron !

She also was a dab-hand at Centipede, plus some early 80`s games which I can`t remember.

And no, I don`t have her phone number :)

ALEX ( who is still waiting for Tommi's comments...re: Funspot !! )

-- Alex Weir (alexweir@indigo.ie), June 12, 2000.

I can4t help it Vaz but i must admit that Parappa the rapper is one of my favorite PSX games... It must have something to do with my long hair *lol*...

Cheers

QRS

-- QRS (qrs@telia.com), June 12, 2000.

I seem to remember knowing a few teenage maori girls who liked to play Street Fighter II... I wonder if that means anything...

-- Barry Rodewald (bsr@hn.pl.net), June 13, 2000.

I think girls are too good at games like Puzzle Bobble, Bubble Bobble and a very few more....I remember when Wonderboy appeared first in the arcades....ONLY girls playing (at least here in Italy)!!!

-- Cicca (cicca@writeme.com), June 14, 2000.

Hmm strange that you mention Wonderboy.. and only girls....

I loved that game.. Me and the girls i4t seems And Beejay of course *lol*

QRS

-- QRS (qrs@telia.com), June 14, 2000.

Did you guys ever consider the fact that maybe one of the reasons that 99.??% of MARP is men is the fact that we stereotype them like we do above? Perhaps if we stopped claiming that all that they're good at is puzzle games, then we could get some more women......wait a sec, what am I saying? Of course they're better at puzzles! Let them stay away from MARP; it means less competition for Tetris and such. *joking*

Sincerely,

J.D. "One Point" Lowe

P.S. GB9, if you read this: thanks for posting that I had one point in Sunday's trivia game. Considering how I only played for one out of the three rounds (a problem with a woman, ironically; mothers, go figure :) ), I don't think that I had much of a chance to rack up points :(

P.P.S. I don't want you to do anything about it; I just had to explain why I was last place (again). I'm just joking around as usual. However, I will have my revenge this Saturday on ALL OF YOU! :)

-- J.D. Lowe (jedidrunkenllama@hotmail.com), June 14, 2000.

wonderboy, puzzle games???? When I got the Game gear years ago I had just three games: Super Monaco Grand Prix Columns (puzzle...) and Wonderboy... Am I gay or even transsexual... or does the fact that Super Monaco Grand Prix was my favourite save me????

-- Ejoty Hijksen (djlotion@gmx.net), June 15, 2000.

Barry, I have to agree with you on the Maori girls front.

When I was a youngster and frequenting the arcades it was surprising how much of the female population of the arcades were Maori girls (the vast majority of them it seemed) and how damn good most of them seemed to be at the games they played !!

BeeJay.

-- BeeJay (mamester@i4free.co.nz), June 15, 2000.

Not like it matters now, because this whole debate has become a bit outdated at this point. But I just wanted to add my two cents. I am a girl and I play videogames. Here is an example of what I play etc. I own an atari and have a collection going of mostly adult video games, Custer's Revenge etc. I have a C64 and an 8-bit construction set record which has data that you can download for either the C64 of the atari. I have a panasonic 3do...my pride and joy really, with just about every game ever made for it's short life span. A nes, sega, sega cd, dreamcast, ps, ps2, gamecube, and xbox with tekki simulator. I play everything, though I find some puzzle games to be quite tiresome and "girl games" like britney spears' dance game to be insulting and frankly...stupid. the only reason why I am not a member here, is because I hold my 3do in high esteem and spend my time with it, watching battle bots, and making creatures out of cans. I don't go to the arcade too much because the record shop that I volunteer at has pinball games that I don't have to spend money on. In conclusion, I think girls are just as capible at playing videogames as boys are. Its just people are different...there are some boys who don't even like videogames, just as there are some girls that hate the color pink. Boys are more previlent in the gaming scene because that's how it all got started. And I have lots of theroys on that, that I won't get into that. So, now that I've blabbered on endlessly, here is the end.

-- Megan Proxy (pimpin_emu@yahoo.com), August 10, 2002.

Yea, it's an old thread alright. It's actually too bad that there aren't more girl gamers; especially since there are more girls in the world than guys, which would in turn bring more people on the gaming scene. I don't believe MARP has any female members that have submitted frequently, or even recently. I think females are just as capable to do what men can do on games.

Even though you aren't interested in submitting to MARP, if you ever get interested, just drop by to marp.retrogames.com and see whats up. Or even visit our newer forums amd a post a message in the General forum sometime; forums.marpirc.net , I'm sure more people would be interested in talking there. :)

-- Joe Ledesma (JoeyL21988@yahoo.com), August 10, 2002.