by Raquel Arnold

Created on: May 01, 2009

As a woman who is new to the RPG community, I was surprised by several things.

An avid gamer for years, I was never under the impression that women folk like myself did not exist in the gaming word. I owned several video games on several consoles and spent plenty of my younger years rushing to beat the next level in the hottest game at the time. As I grew up, my hobbies began to change to more reserved things such as writing and reading different kinds of literature.

Just recently, a male friend of mine introduced me to what is quite possibly the most popular MMORPG at the moment: World of Warcraft.

Hesitant at first, I began to play periodically. But as I got more and more free time, the fictional word of Azeroth became my favorite place to visit when oblivious to real life. Whether it was questing, participating in some of the in-game's annual festivities or just leveling up my character, I enjoyed the time spent playing WoW, the abbreviation for World of Warcraft. After my first month of playing, I noticed that a lot of people were eager to help me. No problem, right? There's never anything wrong with someone offering a hand to a new player.

Did someone help you? I asked my male friend. No, was his response, and he went on to say no one had ever offered to help him. While I found that odd, I didn't probe any deeper.

As I continued to level up my character, I noticed that people were very social towards myself, still a newbie player, while my friend who had been playing the game for years only talked to a select few that had known him for some time.

But the one incident that made me realize how, dare I say, rare a woman is in the MMORPG world is happened just some months ago. A fellow player said hello to me. Nothing out of the ordinary; a lot of players in WoW are very social. I said hello and continued question. His next question was:

"Are you a girl?"

I told my male friend, who went on to explain to me that girls were a hot commodity in-game.

While the topic of this article may differ from person to person, the purpose of mine is to inform my fellow gentleman RPG'ers of a few things.

1.) Yes, there are girls - REAL GIRLS - who play the game.

2.) No, we don't need extra special help when playing the game. We can manage just fine.

3.) I'm sure some of us have boyfriends, but even if we don't - that's not what we're here for! We just want to play the game, just like you're doing.

That's it. Happy playing.

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