Totally with you on the voices. If I’m going to play a game for 40 hours, I’d rather hear a female voice than a male voice.
Saints Row IV FTW there.
As someone who plays around with gender in real life(and has a really awful time passing), I find myself often more at ease with female gaming avatars.
It’s not about staring at someone’s butt, it’s about being in virtual worlds how I can’t be in the real world. I’m also generally on board with the complaint about female armor, too. I don’t want to look sexy when I’m fighting dragons, I want some goddamned plate mail!
At least she’s wearing fuzzy boots…
Yeah, I thought that was kind of funny too. "Well, I’m leaving this magma-strewn hellscape in the Plane of Fire to go hunt ice dragons across the frozen continent of Velious—I guess I’d better put on my warm boots!
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Or in Mass Effect where the female voice actor did a better job with the part, not that 85% of the playerbase knows that because they stuck with the default male character.
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Damn, I knew Everquest is old, but I didn’t realize just how old. I guess the name is more literal than I realized.
That was back before Adobe InDesign, so I had to make each package by hand. Luckily I had a team of monks to help with the scrollwork and Illumination.
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I get it, but I don’t get it.
Not sure I get it either, heh. I mean obviously I’m not an orc, right? And, well, most likely i’m not a 300 pound mountain of muscle. But most likely I am male or female. So maybe that’s it?
I wonder what they’d think of those of us who use female avatars in 1st person games? Or pixelly retro platformers?
The point your missing is that representations of men in these games aren’t representations of stereotypical male beauty as directed at or asserted by women. But representations of stereotypical male beauty (or whatever) intended as wish fulfillment for male players. The two things aren’t necessarily the same thing, and one wouldn’t expect both men and women to react to either representation in the same way.
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Before I get started, I was very much into City of Heroes/City of Villains, and the pic you chose was actually of an NPC–Madame of Mystery from the Carnival of Shadows, if I’m not mistaken–and not a player character, although you could get a Carnival costume during the Halloween event.
Anyway. For me, character design (including gender choice) is usually a combination of who I want to be and who I want to be with; since the POV is usually behind the character, it’s almost like you’re following them around, almost like the disembodied astral head of Professor X in the old X-Men comics. And, for me, it wasn’t about the booty; I used to pay more attention to the way the hairstyle looked, since I’d have to look at the back of it for hours. And, further, contra to the example in the Slate article, one of my favorite female avatars did have a pink mohawk–Too Punk for Paragon, in City of Villains. In fact, probably my main alt was Riot Nrrd, with wire-rim glasses, spiky green hair, and the smallest bust that you could give a female character in that game (about a B cup). Some of my toons were butch and some femme, but I probably leaned toward the former.
But, it’s true that most of them were female, and the same is true for my alts on World of Warcraft and probably most of the MMORPGs that I play. Maybe it’s my inner anima coming out; maybe it is because, at least in WoW, the male models tend to all look like goons, with much more subtlety in the difference between the female faces. I really don’t care all that much. They’re my games and I play them pretty much how I want, and if the occasional self-appointed gender cop has a problem with that, tough titty, as it were.
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So what about my tail?
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As a male gamer - I will more often than not play as a female character, given the chance. Why? Mostly because there are comparatively so few games where you can play as a female character and it’s nice to play someone who isn’t a bald space marine/muscle-bound Conan rip-off.
Granted, the female characters are often poorly characterised and clothed, but baby steps. And if you’re focusing on your avatar’s butt rather than, you know, the gameplay happening around you, then you’re either doing it wrong or the developer did.
I never thought of this much before because I’m a FPS guy and don’t really play RPGs. That all changed with GTA V when playing on someone else’s character when it became obvious that I much preferred his race-bikini clad tatted chick with stilettos and (amazingly re the article) a pink mohawk over the cargo pants-wearing scar-faced redneck character.
I’m also probably not a very useful datapoint in this study because in general i couldn’t give two shits about game characters or storyline cause I’m in it for the gameplay and game dynamics. The only game characters I identify with whatsoever are Mario and Master Chief - and I suppose that’s because I’ve literally grown up with them, from the original Super Mario Bros on NES and Halo: Combat Evolved as an xbox launch title.
You know, even now, I think that was still THE best character generator I’ve ever played with–the level of customization was unreal.
I play female characters in single-player RPGs to test the game designers - to see how well they actually accounted for women in their game.
Almost all the time, I run into dialogue mistakes which assume that my character is male. An NPC says “Hey bro” or “Yes M’Lord” - minor, but obviously incorrect. Those mistakes are because the designers wrote the game dialogue for a male character, and then forgot to insert logic to check gender for some situations. Those mistakes slip through the QA process because playtesters didn’t choose female characters, or if they did, they weren’t really thinking of them as female so they didn’t notice the inconsistency.
It’s kind of annoying, but I also find it interesting and even a tiny bit enlightening.
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Thats kind of my point. People play a lot of different games, for different reasons, in different ways. 300+ MMO players is a pretty narrow slice of the pie (one with its largest player base in Asia too). So I kind of doubt how far we can generalize the findings here.
For my part I don’t really see a distinction between male and female player characters when I’m playing something narrative with a defined main character. That’s the story they wanted to tell, I play through it. But with games (especially RPG’s) with a heavy character creation element I almost never play as a gender other than my own. I’m the type that views these kinds of characters as a player substitute. So I almost always play male, and tend to play with a rather limited selection of character classes/play styles/personality types or whatever varied play dynamics are available. I’m honestly probably missing out on a bunch of interesting stuff, but whenever I try to stray to far I have trouble getting into it.
tend to play with a rather limited selection of character classes/play styles/personality types or whatever varied play dynamics are available.
Heh, same. You’re talking to the guy whose standard COD class doesn’t change between game types or even versions of the game. Give me a powerful assault rifle with no scope and no silencer with IED/claymores as the explosive and I can consistently hand people their asses. I’m that annoying guy that picks you off across the map with an assault rifle as you’re trying to snipe me 
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With FPS and even your more action oriented hybrid games and RPGs it does really matter. But increasingly a lot of the better more complex games (and even some of the great classics) certain content is tied to certain character classes, races, or other character creation/play style choices. It gets frustrating to be so set in my ways when I’m missing out on potentially interesting character or story content. That’s why a lot of the people I know who genderbend in RPGs do so. Either because they’re completionists and want to see and consider everything, or because they prefer or find interesting the options/NPC reactions/developer approach to the other gender’s characters. I think the tendency with games is to assume people are taking them less seriously than other media, and view them on purely mechanical/game play terms. Particularly among developers. Its why story takes such a back seat much of the time, and at least part of why social issues (like gender) get such backwards, stereotypical treatment. “Noone cares! It goes BOOM!”
Eh, I agree, but there is plenty of data to support the hypothesis that men think about sex a lot. Twice as much as women, in fact:
I get really tired of thinking about sex so often, to be honest. It is kind of a curse to me at this point in my life.
There is also a great Louis CK skit on this topic.
Yes, it really is like this inside my head, though I wish it wasn’t… from my perspective as a dude this is an accurate depiction.
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