I found this link on another blog and found it to be an interesting topic:
I find it interesting because as a noob, most players assume if you come across a female toon, the person behind it is also female. It’s only natural to call someone’s RL personage by the gender you first encountered them as.
FoA has one notorious male player with multiple female avatars. In my mind, that’s just plain wierd. The only good explanation I’ve heard for it from a guy is: “If I’m going to be staring at a butt for 6-8 hours a day, I’d like it to be a nice-looking one.” At least that makes sense, even if it is brash and immature.
I can also see it for women under the condition that they want toรย be left alone from males with the rude, sexist comments, etc. that some guys seem to like receiving as female toons. I know several RL women who’ve had problems with guys in chat and TeamSpeak that probably wish they could turn their toons into guys and erase people’s memory that they ever knew their true gender.
Anyway, neat write-up and an interesting topic to me.
i can understand how some people in RL would feel playing a female char o on of the WoW servers.
i myself are a male and i have a male druid but my alt is s lvl 26 hunter Female just for the fun of it.
but one of the first things i experianced is that if u play with a female char almost everyone thinks ur a female in RL when my alt huner was lvl 17 or 18 i met a guy in our group for the deadmines who litterly anoyed me till a point i logged out and start playing with my main. just to avoid and ignore him .
because i was playing with a female hunter he thought i was female and he whisped me all the time with “I love u” and “u look cute” after telling him i was a male (and besides that fact no player on Wow would apreciate his anoying whisping ) he didn beleive me and he didnt stop the spamming.. in other words some people are truely a pain in the ass when it comes to gender class playing i myslef could`t care if some male o female are playing with char form the opposite sex… but thats just my 2 cents
GreetZ Momentum
I don’t think the “staring at a butt” excuse works for most of the races in WoW. Anyway…
I take the same approach to creating MMO characters as creating characters for tabletop games: I’ll have a concept in mind, and the rest just kind of flows from there. This determines not only the gender but also the physical appearance of the character. For example, I envisioned Crys as being the practical sort who wouldn’t go out of her way to color her hair, which is why she has brown hair and not pink or aqua. What ends up happening is that the character’s personality ends up seeping into her playstyle. My tarutaru white mage would never have abandoned her team for personal gain, but Crys did it so often (especially to pick Goldthorn or whatever) it became a running joke. I think that’s what makes MMOs fun.
As far as appearances are concerned, I prefer cute to sexy. Maybe because of that I’ve been spared the apparant catcalling people are always talking about. That said, few things are more annoying than a female toon so obviously played by a male character that it hurts. “Sexyelfgrrrl takes off all her clothes and starts to dance!” Yeah, right.
LOL, great post. Personally I did tabletop RPGs for a long time with a very open-mined crowd who enjoyed playing character very different from themselves. A lot of times this included women rolling male PCs and men rolling females.
My guild has toons of cross gender mains. We have a married couple who is cross gendered as well. The Wife is a male human 60 pally and the husband is a 60 female NE rogue. I guess I’ve never perceived any difference in treatment as a ‘female’ toon played by a male, but perhaps I’m just too obtuse to notice.