What could CCP Games do to attract and maintain a higher percentage of women to the game. Will Incarna do the trick? Can anything else be done in the mean time? Can we the players do our part to share the game we love with our counterparts, with our sisters or daughters, with the Ladies in our lives? What could be added to the game to make it more attractive to them? Should anything be changed? Is the game at fault, or its player base to blame?

In answer to CrazyKinuxs' Blog Banter 17: The Ladies Of Eve here, this is my entry.

Space Boobies Are Bad, m'kay?

The challenge is to have more female players in Eve Online so really it goes without saying that you need to make Eve Online a more attractive place for a wider diversity of female players than we currently have right now. Roughly 5% or something?

Anyway, I did a little bit of research. It involved some Internet browsing that wasn't completely Eve related but I got over that barrier and found several studies on this very subject. So what I am going to do is pick three points from one study then compare with what we have currently in Eve.

Provide examples in the online world of female role models.

I suppose we could start with this, however we have very few actual role models to use unless you go delving into the Chronicles. Once there, you see vain rich ladies ripping slave faces off and so on. Very grisly but not exactly a role model...well maybe not one we want anyway.

So let's try again. What would you want if you were a female player in Eve? Oddly enough I have some female friends and they seem to like the idea of being a female pirate. Maybe it's the patch or maybe it's the power? Not really sure as when I pressed on the matter all I got was some evil laughs and something muttered about Girl Power. There was a glint in their eyes. Seriously. I got scared and left.

We do have the renowned Eris Discordia, very famous for shooting first and asking questions later. Then she starts to work on the enemy! We need more female celebrities to be identified and promoted. What about the Hellcats? A woman only pirate corp in Eve. (What is it about pirates?) So yeah, I think we do have role models for women in Eve. They just need more publicity. Definitely.

Allow customization of player-characters armour/dress, but leave gaudy looks out.

Interesting. How do we do this in Eve when we are essentially ships at the minute? And do the Gallentean female booby avatars count as gaudy? I suppose they do. I guess we need to wait a bit for Incarna for a proper character realization and social tools.

I'm going to sound totally sexist here but women love to chat, compare and generally socialise more so than men. The hardened, battle weary veterans are now screaming at their monitors in frustration and despair but if Eve was to attract more females, it needs to cater to that particular need by having places to socialise, different clothes to wear and something to do in stations. Sorry dude.

Men will also use Incarna but my gut feeling is that 95% of men will continue the fleet flights and so will likely all the existing women, but a new crowd will see Eve as a game they might be interested in. I'm totally not going for a /dance emote though.

Whatever happens, it must be done correctly. By correctly I mean it's got to be cool. Ultra cool. And not in any way demeaning to women. Sexy can be done without being demeaning so CCP do really need to strike a balance that makes the guys jaws drop and the women think “Yes, I can look good in that!”.

Discourage sexist behaviour from players.

Laughs aside, this could actually be very easy. A lot of other games have disparate servers and an odd community aspect when you compare to the rich community and single shard server we have in Eve Online.

Gradually we are starting to see real life names linking to accounts hitting the “Eveosphere” via avenues such as Facebook, Twitter and of course the CSM. Opinions, attitudes and reputations are starting to cling to certain community members and will likely to continue doing so. Because of this I think people will likely continue to behave in general. If not then we do have the harassment petition category and I will assume here that CCP will already have an internal policy in place for dealing with sexual harassment in the game world.

I'm not for one second saying we don't have the mouth breathing, six toed variety of knuckle dragger who slurps the word “girl” when one comes into view or is mentioned. I think we do, but we also have a high proportion of those of a more cultured disposition. Look at the Eve Fanfest as a prime example. Many males attend obviously, a fair few with wives and girlfriends.

I have also had the pleasure of chatting to a few female players who visited Fanfest by themselves. They do exist and I can't help but feel that there should be some way of altering or combining the Sisters of Eve scheme to cater for some of the female attendees who might not simply want to attend all of the regular Fanfest attractions. It may attract more! If you want something to grow, you nurture it, you don't leave it to fend for itself.

The meets in the UK that I know of are also a great example. Yes, there are drunk men but hey, the women aren't exactly sipping lemonade and everyone gets along fine. So behaviourally as long as a policy is in place and has teeth, I think Eve scores quite highly.

TL; DR;

Promote the female role models. CCP need to reach out to the female players and communicate. Get to know them. Write news articles.

Be wary of going seedy in Incarna. Make it look sexy and cool not sexy and sleazy.

Ensure harassment policy has teeth. Make Fanfest more female friendly, combine elements of Sisters of Eve.