Cerise Magazine

Once upon a time (not very long ago), I helped to run a theatre-style Live-Action Role Play game. This isn’t a particularly special thing to do; people run LARPs all the time. However, we tried something I’d never done before: a registration questionnaire asking all the players what kind of characters they’d like to play. This helped us to fine-tune casting - it meant that with some of the storylines, particularly those involving romance, depression and same-gender relationships, we could be far more relaxed about which players were doing what. And, of course, it gives me the opportunity to answer the vexing questions:

What do LARPers really want?
How different are men and women gamers, really?

The Background

This LARP was written for up to 66 players and set inside a religious Sanctuary. It was designed as a low-combat setting with primarily social interaction. We used homebrew rules that abstracted mechanics like combat and poison. Also, we had advertised it as containing a fair amount of romantic comedy.¹

We were interested in how people felt about the staples of theatre-style LARPs: politics, romance and combat. We were also interested in how much work they were willing to put in beforehand in costuming and helping us out, how much perseverance they would have in carrying out their character goals, if it would bother them to be cast into a same-gender relationship, and a few other bits and pieces that were specific to slotting them into place in our particular LARP. The game was run as an evening event at a convention focusing on tabletop roleplaying. Out of the 119 people at the convention, 62 attended the LARP.

The Numbers

Here’s where it gets interesting. Nearly a quarter – 27 – of the convention attendees were female; our LARP netted 21 of them, bumping our LARP-specific gender ratio up to just over a third. Put another way, 78% of the woman convention attendees were also LARPers, compared to the 45% of male convention attendees who came to the LARP. Interestingly, our LARP didn’t have a significant increase in numbers from the previous year, which I would have expected from the increased convention attendance (up by about 20). This may have been in part a self-selection out of Sanctuary by people who disliked our themes, it may also mean that we weren’t advertising well to the new people coming to the convention.

The specific statistics relating to the questionnaire were also interesting.² In some cases, they confirmed my preconceptions about gender, in others they refuted them. I will note, however, that in all questions which had a range of possible answers there was a healthy middle ground held by both genders, so any conclusions I make from these numbers relate to tendencies rather than pigeonholes. (I hate being told what games girls/boys ought to like just as much as anybody.)

We found that political interest was reasonably balanced across the sexes, with a slight bias towards men. 10% of both men and women “called themselves Machiavelli,” the middle range answer was the choice of 68% of women and 85% of men, the low range answer was more popular with women, 21% women instead of 5% men. Fighting and swashbuckling were far more popular with men: 33% of the males wanted to buckle their swash compared to one lone female, just over half of men chose the middle range answer and only 15% wanted the low range answer. In contrast, women were equally divided between the low and middle range answers at 47% each. Difficult goals were slightly more attractive to men than women, but not by much, 30% of men and 20% of women said that struggling against uncertain fate was just part of the fun. Both genders tended to be in favour of achievable goals (63% men and 58% women), but for the low range answers, of the six people who asked for easy or no goals, three were women.

I had expected romance to be far more popular with women and it both was and wasn’t. No female participant selected the low range answer, 74% opted for the middle range, “romance would bring a little spice,” answer, and 26% were looking for true love. Men had a wider spread in their answers – 13% wanted nothing to do with it, and nearly half chose the mid range option. I was surprised, however, by the number of men seeking true love, 40% of men (16) selected the high end answer. Romance lives! On a related note, when questioned about how players felt about role-playing a same-gender relationship, 65% of men and a whopping 84% of women were fine with it. (A married friend has since made a comment that he would “be more comfortable, and likely to be less restrained” LARPing a romance with another man than with a woman who is not his wife.)

I had expected romance to be far more popular with women and it both was and wasn’t.

Costuming was another field where women were keener than men. As with romance, no women selected the low range option: about two thirds wanted the middle range and a third wanted the top range. In contrast, a quarter of men said “Meh” to costuming, 55% wanted the middle range and only 20% wanted the top range answer. (Although that top 20% worked quite hard. The Best Costume prize was taken out by my male flatmate who disguised himself as a woman so convincingly that our other flatmate walked past him three times before recognition struck.) Women were also by far the leaders in emotional hard-coreness. Over half the women asked for wailing, angst, and gnashing of teeth, 42% chose the middle range answer and only one wanted the low range answer. Men were a little more likely to have stiff upper lips at 15% with the low range answer and only a third with the high range, however both genders had a significant number choosing the middle range of angstiness.

On a final note, when we began writing characters, one of my fellow organisers said airily: “I think women are more organised than men, we’re probably going to get a higer proportion of female signups than male in the early months. It’s horrible gender stereotyping, I know, but it will help us with planning.” ³ Actually, my co-organiser was wrong. In the first two months after we opened registrations, the numbers of male and female registrants as a percentage of their final numbers was so close that the difference is barely visible on a graph. In the later months, November to January, there was more variation in the ratios of women and men signing up, however I find no evidence to suggest an echelon of predominately female keen first-off-the-mark signer-uppers – men seem just as likely to make us happy by being organised and signing up early.⁴

The Applicability

How is this relevant to other people’s LARPs? Well, it depends on your audience, really. Our parent convention has been running for 17 years. It predominately caters to tabletop roleplayers, and the Saturday night LARP was introduced as an event eight years ago, so it’s been around long enough to be considered a fixture. I don’t have statistics on the demographics of the convention as a whole (beyond the male: female ratio of this year’s attendance), but to my eye there are very few teenagers. Most of the participants are in their 20s and 30s with a few older. There is a wide range in the games being run, from old school to indie, many homebrew games, and a strong thread of experimentalism, which is a roundabout way of saying that I think the potential audience for our LARP was both mature and sophisticated in its roleplaying tastes.

I expect that the trends I’ve found here will probably vary from audience to audience – for instance, a student club run out of a university might have very different overall tastes – however, at the least this discussion might provide some food for thought for people in the planning stage of their own events.

¹There’s an afterLARP report here for people who would like more background to the event. This article originally appeared as a section of the report.
²These statistics are based on the 59 questionnaires returned by the people who registered in advance. I’ve included people who later realised they could not attend and removed the first entry for people who resubmitted their questionnaires after second thoughts.
³Or something like that. I wasn’t taking notes at the time.
⁴Or at least no evidence barring I pull out a statistics textbook and remind myself how to do hypothesis testing and confidence intervals.

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Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Analyzing a LARP

March 2008 Issue

Features

Interviews

Articles

Gamer Stories

Reviews

Odds 'n Ends

The Background

The Numbers

The Applicability