Suboptimist

boys will b grls. lol.

I start the Spring semester tomorrow morning at 08:30 with a class that, for all intents and purposes, I have taken four times previously under a variety titles. The course, Shi’ism, is taught by Prof. Michel Mazzaoui. At this point in his career, his courses, whether on modern Middle Eastern history or the ancient Near East, start in 570 AD with the birth of the prophet Mohammed and proceed along similar lines. In fact, I once took two of his courses simultaneously with identical midterms and finals. This will be fun. I will also start posting more linguistic updates as soon as the semester starts. I would have done so over the break, but nobody would be interested in my reading of Arabic grammars.

Previously on this blog, I have written about the carry-over of real-world prejudices and constraints into virtual worlds, particularly MMORPGs. I had intended to continue on that topic, but I decided to address another (related) issue: gender-bending. As a boy, I always wondered why my peers were so fascinated by the Tomb Raider game franchise. I never found it very enthralling. I was able to understand why female players loved it, with the protagonist being a strong, smart woman, but it took me much longer to realize that male players loved it because the same character had enormous breasts.

Nick Yee of the Daedalus Project reports that male players of MMOs are far more likely to play female characters than female players are to play male characters. In fact, some 50 % of female player characters are likely to be played by males on a standard World of Warcraft server (68 % on a PVP server). Yee cites several possible reasons why males are more likely to gender bend:

-Social gender boundaries more stringent in real-life for men, and in an anonymous space, men are more likely to explore gender roles.
-Female avatars receive more “freebies” and are treated “better” than male avatars.
-Male gender-bending is another form of dominating the female body.
-In PvP games, female avatars are perceived to be weaker and this might give the player a psychological edge against unsuspecting chauvinistic players.

To this I offer two other hypotheses. First, some players, particularly those with more vivid imaginations, live vicariously through their virtual avatars, affording them the opportunity to pretend there is a more awesome world than the real world. I would guess that these players are less likely to gender bend, and I imagine that most women would fall into this category, with a history of being below the so-called glass ceiling, which has a virtual representation as well. The second is along the line of Yee’s second point: some players want to look at something more appealing, so they gender bend. I would say that men are more likely fall into this category.

In my experience, I have generally assumed female player characters to be played by females, and males to be played by males. Gender bending in a game seems weird to me. In fact, I am more comfortable reading novels where the protagonist is an honorable male character, as I like to identify with the character. I can think of few books I’ve read where I identify with female characters. The same goes for games. When speaking to The Reverend about gender bending in games, he told me that his female character in Guild Wars was often given free uberleet gear and such. In fact, he thinks that may have been the initial reason why he was approached by our guild leader. His little brother said he played as a female because he would rather stare at the ass of a female avatar than a male one. He also played a troll, so… Anyway, I thought I would close with the two accounts from Daedalus:

The funniest experiment about ‘not being me’ was to play a female character. Strange how players were nice with me. They start conversations without reasons, gave me items, money or time. Some even died to save me. I guess a lot of MMORPG players are single men, that’s why. [M, Anarchy Online, 34]

I never realized how irritating it can be to have to put up with unwanted advances. [EverQuest, M, 38]

Note: A good summary of all of this, along with a discussion of possible confounds, can be found in this article.