I play more female than male characters, but it really isn't dramatically skewed by gender.

Then again, I write professionally; I'm a professional storyteller; I do community theater, and when I was a kid, my contralto voice got me a lot of "boy" parts (I could sing tenor if it didn't go all the way down to C or people weren't fussy about tone) in youth musical theater and choir/glee/whatever.

I'm not un-feminine, but I am a good actress, and I enjoy the stretch of "playing" a male as much as I enjoy imagining playing an elf or an alien.  Frankly, it is sometimes more easy for me to imagine an elvish female of a certain age (I'm 53 -- I have a son who's 19 and sometimes seems more alien than...aliens...)  than a human teenage male -- but lets not go there... oh wait, I did...:)

I am proud that my males "pass."  And I sometimes have fun passing as different cultures.  I play SWTOR on the EU RP server, and people are invariably shocked I'm American, usually qualifying that as a compliment) -- and if they are playing with my dark-side main, a decidedly male Sith lord tank, they are often boggled that it's a 53 year old woman behind the keyboard if I bother to reveal that.

My most common reason for revealing my age and gender is, actually, to express my requirement for people to be respectful regarding women, gays, minorities, etc. in chat when I am playing with them.  I will not play with jerks who can't be civil about other people, and I'm not talking about strict PC crap (although I will do some consciousness raising) but I'm talking about the really foul stuff -- what I think of as XBox Live culture, if you're familiar.  It just spoils my time online.  I don't need to hear parts of my anatomy being used as terms of disparagement for other people's bad habits.  It grosses me out and makes me feel like trash.  

You can spin it out from there.  I have totally lost groups from them freaking because the tanky evil sith turns out to be their gramma.  *sigh*

Proto grrl gamer geeks just wanna have fun?  But not with the overly sincere dickwolf contingent, sorry...

yrs

Shava

If I make a male character then I identify with it. If I create a female character it then becomes a "character". As if I was leading it through a book/adventure.

I usually try all the male options first then if I'm dissapointed the female options usually don't dissapoint.

I am a male and play both.  It just depends.  I like to make characters and personas and immerse myself.  Sometimes I like to identify with a male character, as if a transformed "me" is in the game world.  It adds to the illusion and immersion of a virtual environment.  Guild Wars 2 is like this for me.  Most of my other male and female characters have personas that fit the race, class, and role they like to take.

In pvp games (it's been a long while) like Lineage, I always had at least one female character because I found that young boys are gullible and easily fooled.  Not only would they try and give you items and stuff, it would seem they often assumed I was trustworthy, much to their chagrin.  Thus my female characters were my PKs and took care of nasty gankers and mouthy harrassers.

I'm a munchkin.

I play whatever gives the best stats.

Originally posted by bcbully

funny for years I played all males, until I made my first chick toon. At that point I understood. It's much more ummm pleasing watching the backside of a chick toon for X levels. Especially in GW2 ;) 

 

 

Do you also wear silk womens panties in RL because they are more comfy?

I play both. Male for more manly proffessions like warrior and a girl when playing mage etc.

I asked a friend once, why he is always playing with female characters. He told me: "If i have to play MMO's for 4-6 hours daily, i rather watch girls ass than dudes. I think he was quite right :).

Originally posted by Mawnee

Originally posted by bcbully

funny for years I played all males, until I made my first chick toon. At that point I understood. It's much more ummm pleasing watching the backside of a chick toon for X levels. Especially in GW2 ;) 

 Do you also wear silk womens panties in RL because they are more comfy?

I don't know which is the saddest part of this post. The homophobic approach in life "touch a barbie doll and you turn gay" attitude or the fear that a potential cyboring target may not be of the perceived sexual orientation.

Get over it, mmorpgs are not women picking clubs, but an escape from reality. If your best bud picked an opposite sex actor as his favorite, would you slap him the sexual orientation card or would you (as a normal person would) attribute it to different taste than yours?

Bottom line, he may have a fetish for dressing or undressing his female avatar. What's your excuse for picking a male one?

I always play male characters.

But I don't judge, I pretty much assume that 80-90% of all girl toons are played by guys. Whatever floats your boat.

I'm a male and in mmo's I have never rolled a female.   Ever.   I prefer not to be asked if I'm a man or woman every 15 minutes.  Also you gamers are more than free to do as you like but cross gender avatars annoy the heck out of me.  Sorry.   They just do.  A lot.   I won't give you any grief about it though.  I never have given any male player playing another gender any kind of hard time.  If I find out they're a guy in real life I'm not usually even the one that brought it up. 

In other words yea, I'm highly freaking annoyed but I keep it entirely to myself.  That's good enough right? 

Anyways sometimes in single player RPGs I might play as a woman after beating the game two or three times playing male just to get a different experience.  I admit I've enjoyed it every time I've done it.  But even that is a little rare. 

I'm a male and my main toons are male only. However, my "clone toons" (one who does grind for me) are all females and have names with little meaning (once got some "lover" asking if I was really female and that "lover" needed girl-friend in that MMORPG...).

Why did I create them? I need to have lots of toons to grind Turbine points in Lotro (it's pretty legal there) and I don't care how that character would look like or how his/her name would sound. it could be "Abc" or "Noname1".

Originally posted by Indrome

Originally posted by LoverNoFighter

Originally posted by CujoSWAoA

whats the difference?

I don't give a crap what people are in reality or out of it.

If you don't know the difference between males and females....well, good luck in life, champ. :-D

ZING! so hard.

 

I consistently roll both depending on what I feel like suits my idea of the virtual person I'm about to create better. IMO some classes like f.e. guardians or engineers work better with male characters while f.e. mesmers and necromancers develop more depth with females.

If I meet a female character ingame I treat them as a real-life male by default.

Funny.. When i meet a character in game, i tend to treat them like a gamer, end of story.

People should be required to make characters that look like themselves!

I'm kidding, but if that was required and your forum posts showed your in-game avatar, I think we would never again see the "Armor is too skimpy" or "All characters look like anorexic models" threads. Maybe less forum snobs too.

The world would be a better place. So please, everyone. Make your character look like yourself!

Really though, for some reason I think people should play their gender.

As a woman gamer, I just find guys that play female characters to be offensive. 

It's because so many guys feel the need to flaunt their hidden feminine side (a.k.a. virtual crossdressing) that our very existence is often questioned.  If a male character says he's a guy, it's accepted.  If a female character says she's a girl, we immediately hear "there are no girls on the interwebz," and other ignorant crap like that.  Beyond that, many of the guys who play female characters choose to dress as slutty as possible, which indirectly leads to the false assumption that if there are women gamers, we're all sluts who love to run around half naked.  In the morning the guys go back to their regular lives, but the women have to deal with the the erroneous belief that we're all sluts.  It's sickening.  To top it off, guys who choose to play female characters also tend to influence game developers costume designs.  Instead of decent looking clothes, the clothing options offered are:  swimsuits. 

Part of the problem with virtual crossdressers is that it's become widely accepted as "normal" in modern MMOs.  If the general player base treated these woman wannabes like they do transvestites in real life, many of the problems would go away. 

Or maybe those issues wouldn't exist if some people wouldn't treat games and ingame avatars as extensions of their actual lives. If games had any touch with reality, then we should all be locked away for being murderers in a massive and remorseless scale. The toon you pick in a game may or may not represent you or your hidden desires IRL.

At least some people know how to distinguish between real life and fantasy land. The rest are trying to enforce their skewed perception that games are indeed an extension of RL and thus people playing them should abhere to some arbitrary ruleset of conduct. Good luck with that.