Men Playing as Women

A reader writes, "According to this report written by an on-site psychologist, 20% of males surveyed play female characters in computer and console games for "gender exploration" purposes. There are some pretty amazing stats cited there- check it out- Pretty hip site. "

Comments

do women play as men?

[Numeric]

I wonder how a survey would result if the question was proposed...

Do women play as men?

Re:do women play as men?

[Zulfiya]

I've certainly played male characters. Sometimes I don't even do it on purpose. "Default" gender in our society is male. I have an identifiably female name here, but a lot of my psuedonyms are less obvious. Unless you identify yourself some way, you're just assumed to be male. It's amazing the stir you can cause by waiting a while and "coming out" as female.

The atmosphere has become a little less testosterone laden, but it used to be "inconceivable" that a female would be online unless it had something to do with her boyfriend. I had at least one online friend who wouldn't believe I was female until he met me.

It's not like we had a choice in Tomb Raider.

[Evil Poot Cat]

Maybe we'll have to wait for TR 8 or 9, when we find out that Lara Croft is actually related to Pitfall Harry, and we get to play either char. ;)

Seriously...
I think "tactical crossdressing" is an appropriate description. In some games, the female models are indeed harder to hit, especially with sniping weapons. But nobody outruns blast damage, so always pack a rocket launcher and a couple of grenades.

not valid survey, but interesting discussion

[cara]

Only 33 surveys were completed and a few other comments were included in the findings. The researcher spends a paragraph explaining that this was very informal. Thus the results should not be taken with any weight. However, the discussion on why men play female roles is interesting.

Re:What about on Slashdot?

[gnarphlager]

Odd. I play a troll on slashdot ;-)

seriously though, I use this nick all over the place. Even used it for the name of my record label. And still no one knows what it means :-)

"Gender Exploration?" That's like, totally gay!

[weisserw]

I mean come on man, sure I play as a girl sometimes, but that gender exploration thing sounds totally gay. I mean, sometimes I pretend to be a girl on IRC, but its only so the total gaywad guys will hit on me which proves they're gay. I mean, sure sometimes I feel more comfortable as a girl in video games? So what??? Are you calling me gay??? I'll kick your ass!

Stupid fags.

cutiechick@hotmail.com

Re:"Gender Exploration?" That's like, totally gay!

[plunge]

check out Baiting.org a site dedicated to pranksters posing as sexchat girls and then pulling the rug out from under the stupid guys who fall for it. Some of the logs are pretty damn funny.

Why I do it.

[Anonymous Coward]

When people play games of fantasy, they play as gnomes, wizards, warlocks or whatever. You get a chance to play as someone you are not. So when I play a female online, it doesn't mean I'm a transvestite or anything, any more than those who play wizards actually think they are wizards. Its just doing something you could never do in real life. That's why people play games in the first place.

Absolutely

[Ted V]

In High School and college I did a lot of RP Mudding. And while I didn't spend much time on FurryMUCK, I knew some people who did. For those of you who don't know, FurryMUCK is an anthropomorphic mud-- everyone role plays a character as an animal. Furry eventually became the red light district of MUDs, and that's all I have to say about the place.

Anyway, I knew more than one real life women who had alternate male characters on the MUD simply because they were sick of getting hit on. On the internet, no one knows you're a dog. So that 14 year old lesbian school girl is probably some twice divorced 35 year old guy named earl. The real question is, "Who's playing the 35 year old guy named earl and what's her phone number?" :)

-Ted

Does this count?

[Anonymous Coward]

I played Ms. Pac-Man once...

My name is scumdamn and I've played as a woman.

[scumdamn]

It all started in Street Fighter II. I started off with Ken (I consider him a gateway drug. He looks so effiminate.) and of course got hooked on Chun Li. I mean, she was so strong. She could throw from feet away and I could kick everyone's ass with her. After learning her idiosyncracies, I couldn't play with anyone else. Since Street Fighter, women in fighting games have been either too weak, just wierd, or their boots clashed with their tights, so I've played as men. Of course, with Virtual Fighter 2 I played as the drunk. I guess that says a little something about my state of mind, huh? If I can't be a woman I'll self-destruct. With the advent of Quake, the female skins were always too butch. What fun was that? Might as well just play as the Marine.

With Quake II, the female model was fine, but she just couldn't match up to Chun Li. I thought the magic was gone. A Chun Li model came out, but by then I was playing Half-Life with that boring Gordon Freeman.

That brings me to the crux of the problem. Now that Quake 3 is out, there's a model named Mynx who looks good, isn't too weak, doesn't have annoying pain sounds, and doesn't have any weaknesses. The problem is that if I were to play as her my son would rag on me and make fun of me. What should I do? I'm all confused.

Just sign me

Mixed up in Mississippi

Computer-based RPGs

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, interesting thought.

<Dungeon Master> You encounter a script kiddie!
<Haxxor> Heh, I'm compiling "trinoo"
<Wumpus> I'll use my P3 +5 on him
/Wumpus rolls dice
<Wumpus> shit! I missed
<Dungeon Master> Ok
<HaXXoR> I'm casting "trinoo" on his P3
/HaXXoR rolls dice
<HaxxoR> Hah! a 20
<DM> Sorry, Wumpus your Pentium is DoS-ed for the rest of the battle...
<Wumpus> I draw my dual 486s.
/Wumpus rolls dice
<Wumpus> Hah! a hit with cpu0, but cpu1 misses. Take 33mHz!
<HaXXoR> Ok, that's it. I'm compiling "kill"
<Wumpus> I'm stepping back and pinging him with my +3 TCP stack.
/wumpus rolls dice
<Wumpus> bitch! take 16 pings!
<HaXXoR> That's ok, I'm gonna kill(1) you this round.
<HaXXoR> BTW, I hardly felt that, I'm wearing +8.2 send mail
<Haxxor> I'm going to kill -9 Wumpus
<DM> "kill" has no effect.
<HaXXoR> WHAT?!??
<Wumpus> That's right, I'm running as root, fool.

Re:Those arn't females, those are men

[Keith Russell]

I think you can find accurate male/female abilities in fighting games. If you watch the more realistic ones, like Virtua Fighter or Tekken, the female characters don't do as much damage with strikes, but are faster and more agile to maintain the balance. When a male character does a throw, it is usually a wrestling move, like a body slam or suplex, where the damage comes from landing alone. The women's throws are more judo-style leverage moves followed by strikes once the opponent is on the ground. Or she just grabs the guy by the collar, bitchslaps him around a little, then finishes him off with a knee to the head. (Bonus points to anyone who gets that reference.)

I think game designers deal with gender issues in one of four ways:

• Real World: Typically fighting or sports games, where realistic gender differences add to the experience.
• Balancing Act: The game relies on character classes, with men and women being equal within the class. This is easy to do in RPGs like Might and Magic (to pick an example I'm familiar with). It's also the "politically correct" way.
• Deal With It!: The characters have specific gender either for plot or design purposes. Good examples would be Alpha Centauri (where a rule-driven choice of faction comes with a gender-specific character as leader), Tomb Raider and Oni (where the central character just happens to be a woman), and Diablo (where Sorcerors are men and Rogues are women, and allowing you to switch would have made the game even later. :-))
• You're The Character: Think about Gran Turismo. You don't have any representation in the virtual world; just the car you're driving. And the car has tinted windows, so you can't see in! :-)

Keith Russell
OS != Religion

*g* very interesting

[Chris Johnson]

Time I spoke up... it's a very interesting topic to me, as I've played/interacted crossgender for a couple _years_ on a muck... and not as your stereotypical 'hottie', either, at least not the way that is usually meant ;)

For me it's a bit like the way Lewis Carroll made the protagonist of his Wonderland books a female- there's a certain type of geekiness that just can't relate to trucks and boasting and fragging people in Quake and all that stuff, and this can easily be seen as a more female perspective. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it'd be equally helpful to just interact with really intense geeks who cared only about nifty algorithms and programming APIs (not so much CPUs- cpu dicksize wars is, well, rather male ;) )

I did, however, spend an adolescence feeling very frustrated and outclassed and afraid to talk to girls, and never understood why none of them made the effort to reach out to me- and this is why I _know_ the genderbending thing can be educational, I've learned from it. I know some people get flustered from being hit on when they pose as females, but since I was trying to work out a comfortable persona to _stick_ with, I had to find answers to that problem- and I ended up being just like the girls who'd intimidated me so much when I was a teenager. There was no way around it- to cope at all with a flirting sort of situation I needed to deal with more confident people who were able to say what they thought, just the kind of person I wasn't. That kind of insight is something I never had as I was growing up.

I certainly agree that many males passing as females do a questionable job of it- certain attitudes and especially descriptions (!) just scream, "horny teenage boy living out fantasies!"- but it's not a rule that such genderbending is always spottable. I know that I've occasionally startled IRL women who'd assumed, after getting to know me, that I _was_ one of them. The trick is that you can't really cover up your true self, it will always show through one way or another- and hell, I've never understood Guy Stuff or felt like I belonged to Maleness anyhow. When my true self shows through, people take it to be a female self. This doesn't trouble me, because it doesn't really matter much in the long run- not like I have an active sex life so it's rather a moot point most of the time.

Oddly enough, I am not wildly effeminate. I have to shave or I get 5-o-clock shadow, my voice is pretty deep, I have no complaints on a certain very private level *g* so I have to wonder- is my basic confidence in my physical maleness strong enough to totally permit my embracing of a _personality_ oriented femaleness? In other words, if I was hung like a chihuahua, would I be driving a pickup truck, lifting weights and fragging people in Quake with massive displays of virtual testosterone? *g* this notion amuses me greatly.

Well, _that_ was bizarre to talk about on Slashdot. Back to the normal posts for a while. Yeah, gimme that crakhor quake model! She's a real hottie plus I think the bounding box is smaller so you can beat the other guys and frag their asses! (huhuhuhuh, he said 'box') ;)