Author Topic: are better players men or women?  (Read 10905 times)

biggerbirdbrain

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are better players men or women?
« on: February 21, 2007, 10:53:42 PM »
Alan, and all you players out there:

Have you wondered whether the consistently better players are men or women? It's hard to know at present, unless profiles reveal, who is male or female, but maybe someone might be able to discern a trend. It might be slanted in a certain direction if more women play, or men.

Age may or not be a factor, nor education, relative to skill or the desire to compete. It may even be a matter of sheer persistence. I thought it might be a fun, though hardly scientific, social experiment if players were at least willing to say which gender they are.

On another note, could there be such a thing as team-playing?

Cheers,
B-B-B (not a man)
« Last Edit: February 21, 2007, 10:55:19 PM by biggerbirdbrain »

Alan W

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Re: are better players men or women?
« Reply #1 on: February 22, 2007, 10:33:01 AM »
Among the registered players, 95 have identified themselves as female and 34 as male. This is not conclusive, since 155 players have not specified their gender, and there are still quite a few unregistered players.

But studies of people who play "casual" or puzzle-style games generally show that around two thirds are female. So we would expect the majority of the top scoring Chihuahua players to be female anyway. I'm not sure if the really high scoring group is big enough for statistically meaningful conclusions to be drawn. But it's still fun to speculate!

To complicate matters, some players are collaborations. "Vizal" is a team made up of Viz (female) and myself (male). In theory, such combinations should get the benefits of two styles of thinking (assuming females and males have different styles of thinking). I think it's true that when one of us is not around, the remaining player tends to score lower, compared to the targets and other regular players. But of course this may have nothing to do with male and female brains - it might just be a matter of two different people, who know different words.

Which brings me to your question about team playing. The collaborations I was just talking about are between people sitting in front of the same computer. But I like the idea of people being able to form more widely scattered teams. At present, there's nothing to stop friends who use different computers sharing a player name and password, but if you were playing at the same time, the words played by your team-mate wouldn't show up on your word list unless you reloaded the page.

So there would need to be some enhancements to the game if remote teams were to work well. (Maybe we would want the words to be displayed in some way that identifies which player found each word - perhaps colour-coded.)
Alan Walker
Creator of Lexigame websites

biggerbirdbrain

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Re: are better players men or women?
« Reply #2 on: February 22, 2007, 11:26:01 PM »
Thanks, Alan. Again, I appreciate how you always think things through, which makes this game so much better than those generic kinds that just post comments where it's just all about whose on top.

If anyone's game, so am I.

B-B-B

technomc

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Re: are better players men or women?
« Reply #3 on: April 28, 2007, 04:15:00 AM »
Hey,
I had a thought on this subject...following a sexist comment or 2 at work[all said in fun i hasten to add as i am the only woman there   ::) ]...
Of course women are better than men...after all..how many men are playing this game? only a small %...is that because they know we women will whoop their a***s? Of course it is....
We have the patience, commitment, dedication, thoroughness, intelligence, fortitude, and after a days work and  the kids are in bed and the dishes are done, and the ironing sorted, and the house cleaned, and the fridge and cupboards full, and the beds made, and the lunches sorted, we have the time to do it.
Wouldn't you agree Alan???
Happy days...
;)
{ that should create some banter..nothing like being contaversial!!}