I'm male and play male characters
I'm male and play female characters
I'm male and play both
I'm female and play male characters
I'm female and play female characters
I'm female and play both
Exactly. Some of these posts are hilarious with their "Old man yells at cloud" stuff about "OMG men playing women, women playing men, cats and dogs living together?!?!?!?" stuff which was, frankly, Old-Age-Pensioner shit in the 1980s, back when kids like us were playing Golden Axe, Gauntlet, and so on. You better believe I'm playing Tyris Flare, she had the best magic, and you could cheese the hell out of the more difficult bits of Golden Axe that way!
I sometimes wonder if, for some of them, it's because they want to act like sex offenders, sexually harassing female characters, but are terrified they might "make themselves gay" or something by coming on to A DUDE (OH NO!!!!!). When I first played EverQuest, back in 1999 (probably before some of the people going "OMG men can't play women!" were born...), people did assume that if you had a female character, you were female, and the sexual harassment holy shit. I gained a new level of respect for women - I knew they got harassed, but bloody hell, the shit creeper-men say when they think they can get away with it, when they think there are no consequences, all the dudes following you around, trying to give you stuff, getting mad when you tell them to leave you alone and stuff. Initially I was like "Go away, I'm a dude...", but then that started feeling like a cheap cop-out, like letting women down, so I got more direct and called them out on being the creepers which they were.
That quickly died down as people who played EQ and realized that character gender is not the same as player gender spread to other MMOs. In DAoC I never got harassed, and nor did my wife (who, as you can imagine, is female IRL lol), nor in other MMOs of that era. WoW started up and it was initially fine, but then we got more and more kids who'd played WC3 or whatever, but never played an MMO, or never played a Blizzard game but their friends played WoW so now they did, and then it all started up again, albeit about 10% as frequent - still I got quite a few weird PMs (or "tells" or "sends" as they used to be called) and so on, on female characters. I don't imagine it'll happen again, thankfully.
Anyway, male, play both, whatever looks/sounds best for the class I'm playing right now (race often determined in part by racials).
Ashamed of what? I know it's a very hard to get concept for these really uncreative types who only play human and their respective gender, but this is a fantasy RPG. Of course you can play as yourself, but I find that a little disturbing... it's way more fun to create a different unique character with a fantasy background and see the story from that perspective.
Or play a human male, usually warrior, and pretend it's you, who am I to judge...
As a sidenote, I suppose you never played a game where the main char was a specific gender, like Tomb Raider and fiind it shameful for those who did?
Last edited by Loveliest; 2020-02-10 at 10:54 AM.
I'm male and mostly play female due to aesthetics (animations, look of your gear, etc...)
I've never identified with any of my wow charakters. I see them more as a little cartoony creature and each has it's own role.
Blame the Avengers. I grew up rooting for John Steed and Emma Peel. In X-Files I rooted for both Scully and Mulder. For me the game is similar I don't see them as stand ins for myself, I'm watching a set of adventures and some of my alts are male while others are female. I don't really do detailed roleplay in WoW, but I do like to have a general sense of how I see the character.
With COVID-19 making its impact on our lives, I have decided that I shall hang in there for my remaining days, skip some meals, try to get children to experiment with making henna patterns on their skin, and plant some trees. You know -- live, fast, dye young, and leave a pretty copse. I feel like I may not have that quite right.
Female, female.
Males in Warcraft look too derpy.
I don't get why playing a character of the opposite sex is so weird for people ... it is a game. I understand when people pretend to be a woman is annoying, but it is a game.
It depends on the character for me. It may play on race for example Male Blood Elves after the update model just looked goofy to me, I can't play one.
Peace is a lie. There is only passion. Through passion I gain strength. Through strength I gain power.
Through power I gain victory. Through victory my chains are broken. The Force shall set me free.
–The Sith Code
I have to say, the absolute biggest "warning sign" that a player is going to be "trouble" when leveling up via dungeons (particularly 20-50) is that their character is a human male melee DPS, particularly a Warrior or Monk. Double bonus "this guy is going to do something dumb" points, on EU only* if the character also has facial hair (again, this is only for human male melee DPS). Whenever I see a human male monk with a bald head and a strongman mustache or whatever, I'm like "Oh god..." and yeah, 8/10, that dude will do some combination of running off and dying, pulling extra packs at really bad moments (and just pulling extra packs generally, even when the tanks is an aggressive warrior pulling at max speed), standing in absolutely everything, failing to understand any boss mechanics or optional bosses, and so on. Why people who play other races/genders/specs are less trouble, I dunno, but they are.
The only other major indicator for "This person is likely to fuck with you" is that they're playing a Gnome or Mechagnome of any gender/class. Soz Gnome-lovers, I've got my eye on you! But it's like a 4/10 chance of them being idiots, not 8/10.
* = in the US facial hair is so common a choice on characters it's not a predictor of idiocy.