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MMO Bans Men Playing As Women
jkcity writes "In a bizarre move Aurora Technology the owners of the King of the World MMORPG has taken the unusual step of banning men who play women characters but the ban itself does not stretch to women playing men. If you want to play as a woman now in game you have to prove you are a women via web cam. This is something that people ask for in many mmorpgs I myself have seen people say people who play women in EVE online as being some kind of degenerate but how long can a policy of verification by web cam last since its so easy to get around it doesn't seem to solve much and is an insult to many."
no role playing in a Role Playing Game?
If I am playing a MMORPG, I am going to be spending a lot of time looking at my avatar. Why can't my avatar be something I like looking at?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
... for the Aurora guys to look at gamer girls on their webcams.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
I've played male and female chars in mmo's and have had no problems. It depends on the person playing, if they are going to cause trouble they are going to cause trouble no matter what gender.
Also, no matter how hard you beg the developer, that hot elven chick just won't be that way in real life. And this step doesn't get you closer to that.
...as suddenly, the in-game populations turn to about 80% male, 20% female.
And that's a conservative guess...I bet most would skew it even more towards male players.
If it's just a one-time webcam thing, the people who are really desperate can have their mom or sister appear on the webcam for them. Even Grandma Nana counts as a woman!
It's not too hard for a men to disguise as a women, specially under a webcam feed. Really motivated (and weird) dudes will certainly keep playing as women if they want to.
And all of a sudden, female avatars started gathering more male players than ever before trying to get them into their multiplayer party, and harass them with guild recruitments. :-p
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Any MMO where there is an ounce of roleplay would have a total of twelve players, max.
Go play a MU* if you want roleplay.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Like, there are going to be some existing male-as-female players, and to bring them in line with the policy, you'd have to make the female avatar male. Doesn't an RPG have to have some storyline reason for this?
(If they're planning to "grandfather" ["grandmother?"] existing male-as-female avatars, that'll probably create even more problems for them.)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
A little known MMO that I have never heard of has pulled a publicity stunt and gotten some free coverage from Slashdot. What what what? Slashdot is there target demographic. Congratulations sirs PT Barnum would be proud.
Sex: M/F
Real-life sex: M/F
"But it's kinda stupid cuz the actual females playing as females do that too."
;)
Well, that's what females do in real life; use their feminine wiles to their advantage.
But your complaint is absurd. If one is unable to resist the feminine wiles of an online-character, then it's his own fault, not fault of the the person playing the female character.
I've known many that have played characters of the player's opposite sex (both men playing as women and women playing as men), and I see no problem with it. The whole point of playing RPGs (either multi-player or single-player) is to get to assume a role you could never assume in real life. The ability to choose your character's gender, ethnicity, etc, goes along with that.
This business of requiring webcams for anyone playing as a woman is the stupidest thing I've heard of in a long time.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Erm, what about transgendered individuals, such as your mother?
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Guess I can't play Metroid any more or I'll be a degenerate. Guess I had better not accept Princess Peach as a randomly generated character in Mario Kart either. Better not accept any randomly generated Wii characters either.
What a load of crap. It's fantasy - a game for goodness sake. My guess is really some loser who runs the service just wants to look at pictures of the people playing women characters.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
I myself have seen people say people who play women in EVE online as being some kind of degenerate
So the grammatically-challenged, obviously teenage and sexually-challenged writer of the summary thinks it's his inalienable, god-given right to hit on anything with pixellated boobies, and finds the very idea of people role-playing in a role-playing game to be degenerate. Perhaps he shouldn't be such a slavering mess of inadequacy that he feels the need to flirt in a role-playing game with any avatar that approximates female and then be disturbed when the controlling player isn't. Avatar. Not player. The two are distinct, and it merely shows the stupidity of a significant proportion of MMO players that they can't appreciate that fact.
Amusingly enough, my captcha for this post was 'redneck'.
Yes, that he most certainly is.
Most of the posts here are skewing condemnatory of this goofball policy, and I agree. However, maybe there's a bright side. If the playerbase actually go through this verification process (big if), it would offer a rare opportunity to observe macroscopic differences in how men and women behave in MMOs. Do women tend to tank less and heal more? Do they tend to cluster together in all-female guilds? etc.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Most men who play women are doing it so they can watch a females ass while they are running around.
Hence Laura Crofts fame.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is why I hate 3rd person perspective. Most of the "scenery" is your avatar's ass. I like to see the damn game! It espeically pisses me off when your avatar gets in the way of seeing something important. Fixed camera (such as resident evil) is even worse--try and aim at a target in 3d space while viewing on a flat screen...WTF?
"On a similar note, bespectacled lanky computer nerds who choose muscular hulking warrior-types as avatars - which are naturally associated with the player, after all - are clearly engaged in fraud, denial, and working out complicated identity issues."
No, you missed the important part: the insistence by these male players that "I don't really see it as representing me" and "I just like looking at my avatar." Otherwise you'd also be trying to argue that it is wholly impossible for a truly heterosexual man to admire and envy another man's physique, and that the minority of male players who pick female avatars are the only truly heterosexual men on the server.
Avatars are about who you want to pretend to be. A scrawny geek will pick the butch male because he wants to pretend to be, and a guy will pick a female character because that is who he wants to pretend to be. But once the second guy starts dropping the "I just like looking at my avatar" excuse, it's less about pretending in the game and more about pretending in real life; the scrawny geek with the ripped barbarian avatar at least knows he's pretending.
It's the ones who enjoy pretending to be a woman and don't admit it to themselves that are the problem here, and that's what the "It's not really me" rationale is all about.
... suddenly, I'm thinking about how much *more* likely it would be to have the plot of The Crying Game play out in a virtual world than in the physical world.
And, if there's no law preventing a man from dressing up as a woman in real life, why should there be restrictions for them to do so in a virtual world?
For anyone whose thinking, "well in real life, at a real bar, I can tell it's a man dressed up like a woman so I won't ever talk to him -- that's the difference!", I challenge you to go see a cabaret show in Thailand and *then* say that. I saw a few performers that were way hotter than my wife who would have made me not care about the presence of a Y chromosome.
http://images.google.com/images?q=cabaret+show+thailand
You may joke, but there is a serious point there - what about transgendered people who cannot "pass" in real life? (Either pre-op transsexuals, or transgendered people who have no intention of transitioning).
It's sad that the assumption is that playing a gender other than your biological sex is only done for deception. Having to conform to gender roles is bad enough in real life; let's not bring it online too (and a roleplay game, of all places!), where your physical body shouldn't matter.
One of the things I found interesting about traditional (non-computer) roleplaying is that there were no hangups in playing a different gender (after all, no different to playing a different species such as a dwarf or an elf), but I guess as it becomes mainstream, we get all the mainstream prejudices and hangups.
I wonder, can women still play men in this game?