LOLZ, y u play girlz?!

If you are one of the many male players out there playing a female character the title of this post may be quite familiar, if on the nicer end of the spectrum. It’s a question that we all have had to ask ourselves & I suspect many have their own answers. For some it’s the usual refrain, ‘If I’m gonna spend 15 hours a week staring at my toon’s butt, I’d rather it be nice looking’. For others it may simply be an extension of the escapism playing a game like WoW provides, recreating yourself as someone else in a fantasy world. After all, if you’re playing an entirely different species, what’s the big deal in being a different gender as well?

For me, both these answers factored into my decision. I am currently studying art & design with the hopes of becoming an illustrator/animator/concept artist. I have always been a prolific sketcher & imaginer, since I was old enough to hold a pencil I’ve been drawing dinosaurs, dragons, aliens & monsters. I love creating worlds in my head, then trying my best to translate them into imagery. This may seem like a wild tangent, but this aspect of me is the main reason I decided to roll a female. I treat character creation just like drawing, a way of presenting my vision of an individual. In an MMO like WoW, this is all the more important because, until recently, the decisions you made at that character creation screen were permanent. So I agonised over that screen for hours, I would spend so long switching races, faces, colours that the game would log me out for inactivity. I made my first character playing the WoW trial after getting the disks from a friend. BC had just come out a couple of months back & I wanted to play a draenei. Unfortunately the trial only allowed you to play the vanilla races. As I was starting the trial with Ros & another mate we decided to all roll Night Elves, since they were the only race we could all agree on. I made a female hunter called Vanha.

I decided on a female largely because the male Night Elves look terrible in my opinion. To me, my character isn’t simply me in a fantasy space, it’s a chance to create an entirely new persona from which to experience the game world. MMOs are strange in how they blur the line between the real & the virtual. The game & its world are all crafted purely from imagination, but the social interactions between players are deeply rooted in the real world. But when I’m at the character creation screen, I don’t think of this real world social aspect, all I want to do is create a unique & engaging character to play. I think of a story & a personality, I create a look that appeals to me & my idea of the character. In the case of Vanha the Night Elf, the ugliness of the male option made female the obvious choice. I didn’t worry about what other players would think of me in the real world for playing a female character as to me it seemed as much of a choice as class or race.

It would be many months later that I would purchase the game proper. At first I joined my friends Horde-side as a Forsaken warlock. Again I played a female, however this time the choice wasn’t as clear cut as it was between the Night Elves. I didn’t find either gender more visually pleasing than the other, but still I chose female. This was because I was still playing the same character in my head, Vanha. The race & class had changed, but the persona was still the same. About 2 weeks after buying the game my Horde friends stopped playing, allowing me to finally play the character I’d been wanting to since I installed the trial, Vanha the female Draenei hunter.

It was only much later in the game that the apparent strangeness of a male playing a female character ingame was made apparent to me. It seems as though the conflict comes from how people perceive themselves & others ingame. Some people treat their characters as a mere artifice of gameplay, they see other characters as the people behind the screens. To them, a male playing a female is the equivalent of crossdressing, that the player is actively pretending to be the opposite gender. I am not saying that these players are playing their characters ‘wrong’, but that the difference in these views of the role of the character create a misunderstanding. The unfortunate consequence is that this misunderstanding often causes ridicule & derision. I am lucky enough to be in a great guild that doesn’t care about why I play a female, they are willing to accept that people create their characters with different intentions & reasons. I can only hope that any other players, male or female, that face similar discrimination based on a choice made way back at the character creation screen can find others that can accept them for how they choose to play.

-Vanha