This. How many freaking times can you read or watch or listen to the same old male wish fulfillment tropes over and over again before wanting to try something even slightly different?
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Iāll believe it when I see this same study repeated for Nethack players.
Bruce āRotheBaitā Young
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Iām sure theyāll get on that once they figure out how to make a shapely @ with a nice round butt and pert boobs.
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I guess āthe buttsā is why some men like to dress up their young daughters in pretty dresses too?
It would be nice if we could give men a little space to think that girls and women look nice, and to enjoy their clothing, without having to make it sound like itās sex-sex-sex all the time. Maybe weād find out that there is more variance in menās motivations than we generally give credit for.
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Dammit Slateā¦ Caught me red handedā¦ A friend of mine IRL used to roleplay as a teenaged girl to great benefitā¦ Now Iām second guessing the random gold I occasionally would be given.
I did some packaging design (layout, not key art) for that series back in the early 1800s. When I tried to pitch a draft that didnāt showcase the half-naked elf woman front and center it got rejected immediately. Cleavage, bare midriff and gams were all must-haves, even for the expansion pack set in a frozen arctic wasteland.
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Although I donāt do much online gaming, that certainly is why I played Seung Mina in coin-op Soul Edge / SoulCalibur games.
I mostly, but not always, choose female avatar on single player games. Andā¦ yeaā¦ well the voice might actually be more of a plus for me than the visuals, every avatar tends to end up thoroughly encased in dragon scales or whatever pretty quickly and in game animation isnāt quite āup to the taskā yet. But, you know, sometimes you feel pretending to be āConanā or whatever.
On MMOās, which I am not a huge player of, I have not. It would feel a bit deceitful somehow, with a persistent personality interacting with real humans who have no way of knowing Iām actually male. I assume everyone on those games is a 14 year old boy regardless of names, avatars, and claims in chat.
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That quote appeared almost verbatim in a late 90s article (Edge Magazine, I think?) on the thought process that informed the creation of Laura Croft.
My the times are a changinā.
Role playing is fun. I choose females in Nethack, becuase theyāre the only Valkyries. Thatās a one player game. If I want to role play as a girl, and my friends sitting across the table or on skype with me watch me, a guy, role play as a girl, itās actually a challenge. If I fake people out and pretend to actually be a girl to anonymous strangers by just saying I am (clickbox choice = get avatar with bewbs) and I ALSO enjoy putting one over on them in this way, or taking advantage of their mis-perception, thatās just pretentious. There is room for roleplaying in the online games, but itās not a challenge, like it is face to face.
I think the difference between convincing someone, and fooling them, is important. The challenge is to be convincing, not take advantage and make a fool of strangersā¦ Right?
Why people play games where characters dress like whores and superheroes, that seems like a better question, to me.
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It isnāt the butt for me. Iām slender, so I move through the real world as a slender person does. Given a choice between an avatar in a humanoid shape I can relate to, vs an avatar that is literally as wide as it is squat, stomping around like a muscley angry apple, Iāll take the avatar that is vaguely me-shaped, thanks. Plenty of games, the avatar closest to real-world human proportions is the female avatar (which is kind of its own joke considering how bad female avatars often are at having human proportions)
And once Iāve taken that avatar, Iāll adjust my game character to work with that.
Maybe Iām some special snowflake in all this, but I suspect itās more likely that āitās all about the buttā is just lazy conclusion-jumping.
I thought it already had thoseā¦
I have an extreme pang of nostalgia looking at that picture - ahhhh City of Heroes / City of Villains, I miss you so!
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I started in a text-based MMO. I chose to start with a female character completely on a whim. There were no butts to look at. It was a fascinating roleplaying experience. I actually found I enjoyed it though more than when I tried to roleplay a male character. It just suited me.
I was accused of all sorts of reasons why, and insulted a few times. A surprising number of people assumed I was doing it to fool straight men into having cybersex with her, as if gender were an automatic invitation. It taught me something about the intersection of transphobia, homophobia and rape culture.
Iāve also been told that itās impossible for a man to roleplay well as a woman. That argument always falls to āYouāre roleplaying as an immortal elf who can throw fireballs in a world inhabited by goblins and dragons. I have observed the behavior of actual women in real life. How many elves have you met?ā Just because there are some players who think they have to giggle and jiggle their way through every situation doesnāt mean we are all so shallow.
As of a few years ago I began to self-identify as non-binary gendered. (Something along the lines of āTwo-Spiritā without the cultural appropriation angle.) I give games some credit for helping me to understand that.
I continue to this day to play more female characters than male. Part of it is because of the attractiveness, yes ā but I dress my characters practically and relatively modestly whenever itās possible to do so. I will avoid playing as certain race/class/gender combinations because the outfits are too skimpy. (Whatever that character in the screenshot wasā¦ I doubt Iād play that.)
I have heard this Butt Argument and the Free Stuff Argument many, many times over the years, and I reject both as insultingly simplistic views of men people and their motives.
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My first ever MMO character was a male Tauren hunter. After that, my only other heavily played male character was an undead warrior. And this warlock I had on an RP server, but that was with the idea I wasnāt going to RP a girl. Iād walk around as one easy enough. Second was female undead priest, third was female troll rogue. Right now in Guild Wars 2 my three most played characters are female, a human mesmer, asuran warrior, and charr ranger. I tend to treat my characters as things I own rather than extensions of myself.
Cause I can say my friends are big on recreating themselves in the game, and will nearly always play themselves or their own characters. But they also seem to have more PnP experience than I do, so they would have had to play out their creations, which is obviously more than what Iām willing to invest into my characters.
While I donāt play online games so much I almost always try to make the most hideous characters I can in everything - online or single player. Itās usually easier to make an interestingly hideous character than it is to make anything that looks like a person. For the week that I played WOW I was a jawless skeleton that was, I guess, technically male before all the flesh came off.
The worst part is that I can tell you the exact layout of the room that Carnie is in, from the doorway behind the wall on her left and one floor down to the usually vacant conference room on her right and the storage rooms in the lower level on the left. Plus of course the exit on the upper level directly behind her.
Even though I had mostly quit the game a year and a half before it was shut down, I was still sad to see it go. They were one of the last MMOs to hold out against the micropayment scourge.
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I almost exclusively played female avatars in EQ and found the experience to be similarā¦ but part of it was I always preferred female avatars (chun li, cammie when playing street fighter II).
Why is being a female deceitful while being taller or shorter isnāt? My skin is green when I play an orc, but do I have to make it white when I play a human?
I get it, but I donāt get it.
I sort of wanted to bring this up, but didnāt exactly know how.
Julia Serano convinced me (perhaps without even holding this view herself - Iām not sure) that subconscious sex is distributed bimodally. Most people still fall pretty firmly in the āIām a manā or āIām a womanā category, but some people are in the middle, and some people arenāt exactly āin the middleā but they are closer to it than other people.
For you, playing games helped you understand yourself in a non-binary way. I have to think that for many others who continue to understand themselves as men, playing games as a woman gives them an opportunity to explore a part of themselves that isnāt normally how they see themselves. The idea of men expressing femininity is very stigmatized.
Anyway, thanks for talking about this. Iām glad to see counter-narratives to āthem butts!ā
Yeah, but that @ sign, though. Amirite?
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