When I played MMOGs, most of the time I had a female avatar. This isn't much of a secret as my game friends know my true identity, but the game is a bit more bearable as a female than a male character. Even in the virtual world, traditional gender roles apply -- men are supposed to be self-reliant, independent and never ask for help or show weakness, while women are supposed to be more social, and ask for help. In MMOGs, being social and able to ask for help are paramount to succeeding in the game, while being independent will often get one's character killed.
In Confessions of an MMOG Cross-dresser, Bruce Sterling Woodcock (SirBruce of MMOGChart, not Bruce Sterling of Islands in the Net) recollects his experiences with in-game crossdressing.
In most games, players don't have a choice of their character's gender -- if you're playing Tomb Raider, you are Lara Croft and you are female. If you're playing Super Mario Bros. you are Mario or Luigi and you are male. However, as games have gotten more advanced, the choice of gender for a character is now an option in many games (and almost all MMOGs) and three to five times as many males than females are likely to gender bend in MMOGs.
When I was working on Diablo II, I'd often read the message board and see posts by players expressing their anger over our decision to make our only pure magic class Sorceress character female (as opposed to the male Sorceror character we had in Diablo), saying that they refused to play a female character. These posts used to amuse me a great deal, because in most games, it is the women who had to play men in games, and now with a gender switch, male players were suddenly complaining (quite loudly, I might add) of what women had endured for the past two decades in games: being forced to play a role in a gender that was not their own.
Alice of Wonderland had this to say about Boys, Gender and Games:
Christmastime really hammers home awareness of gender-ised play, I think, seeing all the pink stuff on the shelves for girls, and the camo-and-guns stuff for boys. But while I'm often disheartened by the candyfloss inanity of the girls' toys, I've been really struck at how oftentimes the boys' fate can be worse.
While the games market is dominated by boy games, there are a fair number of gender neutral games, and a really small amount of girl games. If you go to a toystore, there's the girl section and the boy section, and they're about equal, with the gender neutral stuff (legos, block toys, stuffed animals, exercise gear) in the middle. That's the way games should be too, but they're not -- boy games take up a disproportionate amount of the videogame section when it really should be equal to the girl's section, and we have the male-dominated games industry to blame for that. While Hollywood seems content to produce movies like Titanic and Pride and Prejudice, there's no equivalent game studio willing to produce a blockbuster game for a largely female audience, and I feel a big part of this is simply because game developers don't know what attracts female gamers. Of all game genres so far, the MMOG has one of the highest female population rates (at 20%, most of them introduced to the game by their signifigant others). The Sims is a higher percentage, but the Sims is not really a game, so much as a simulation software toy.
More in the extended about my own journey to the female side, and further observations of gender roles in MMOGs.
When I started playing Everquest, I originally started off as a Male Elf Wizard -- despite my unbridled power and utility, I didn't find that many players wanting to group with him, so I created an Elf Druid (which had almost all the powers of Wizard, plus some healing abilities). The difference was that this time, the character was female, and the entire experience from grouping to communication was different. Sure, I had to put up with 15-year old boys (or grown men who acted like 15 year old boys) hitting on me as if I was a girl behind the avatar, but the sheer amount of items given to me made up for all the wolfwhistles and inappropriate private messages sent to my character. I was also able to forge better relationships within the game with other characters (not just female characters in which a sisterhood was established), but also establishing the bonds of friendship with male characters.
Just as I preferred to play female characters in these games, there were women that I knew who preferred to play male characters in these same games. In talking with the about the gender reversal, their reasons could be classified as the following:
- Players treated them with more respect in regards to their playing ability.
- Not getting hit on by other players.
In the case of player characters, if they were "outed" as the player being the opposite gender, they would find that they would be treated as their true gender by those that knew their real gender, and treated by their character gender by the populace unaware.
In a cooperative game like Everquest or WoW, the assumption is that the majority of female characters encountered by players are played by males and should be treated as such, however, my own personal experience seems to run counter to that assumption -- male characters seem to want to believe that the female avatar onscreen is being played by a female character.
In traditional roleplaying games, I've always split my characters pretty evenly between genders. In that context, it's just about being different (pretty much like playing a mage is about being different).
In my very limited online gaming experience -- two MUSHes -- both characters happened to be women (and I'm male, for outside reader reference). The one I actually played for quite a while saw no real difference in treatment from other players, but part of that may have been a higher-than-usual count of female players on that particular MUSH. The second character, on a different MUSH, saw me getting aggressively hit on by at least one random guy, which was a little consternating for a teenage male (me).
Of course, all of this is in the dark ages of online gaming.
One factor of note from my experience is that I'm talking about MUSHes, where players can use free text to describe how their characters look. Within the limits of customizability, in a modern MMOG you're stuck with someone else's visualization of your style of character. The upshot? If they think girl elves are all hoochies, that's what you're stuck with -- and that may fuel some aspects of online gender behaviors.