It’s a video game. It really shouldn’t matter which gender I play. In WoW, I wanted to play a pally. I hate the way all of the male characters looked. So I made a female. You’re going to invest a lot of time into the character. Why not pick something that you like the look of (and no, not in the *bow chicka wow wow* way)?

Honestly though, after about two people thinking I was actually a girl, I just couldn’t play as that character anymore.

There are, presumably, males who play female avatars AND present a female gender identity. On the one hand it’s deceptive, especially if they use it to milk favors from rapid teenage boys. On the other hand, it is a ROLE PLAYING game and a male playing a female character as a female, is role playing. You’re not an Orc in real life either, after all.

I don’t think males play female avatars out of any desire to be female themselves, or because of homosexual tendencies, or mental illness, or anything else. Gay men would have no reason to play female avatars. They’re MEN. Men who like men, but still men. If you have a deep seated gender identity issue where you think you should be female but you were born a man, playing a female avatar in an MMO is not going to assuage your discomfort in any way.

Honestly, the only people that worry about males playing female characters are horny teenage boys and homophobes (which frequently go together anyway). If you’re trying to cyber with some collection of polygons in an online game you have your own problems to worry about. Stop projecting :p

While this is not at all scientific, if you look back over the posts for this thread, there are only one or two instances of malicious behavior and a lot of testimonials of neutral cross-gender playing, and a lot of casual indifference to the whole endeavor. While some jerks use cross-gender characters for griefing, there remain many other mechanisms for them to piss off community members, and there remain many other players who use cross-gender characters with no ill effect.

I have no confusion of my own identity and I speedily correct anyone’s false impressions of my RL gender (male). Not so much because I care, but because I don’t want them to be embarassed later.

I wouldn’t say that I don’t care what my toons look like. They all tend to end up with a specific look for themselves that I’ll try to stick with as the progress through levels… but I don’t actually care what that look is. I’ve played attractive and unattractive avatars of both genders.

My current favorite in EQ2 is a female Iksar. I’ll never look at her butt (she wears a cloak) and she has no boobs at all (being not a mammal) but she does have these head ridges that stand out when she’s fighting, like the dinosaurs that killed Nedry in Jurassic Park. No other race/gender combo in EQ2 does anything cool like that that I’ve seen. I have no idea what conclusions a researcher would draw about that decision.

Anyhow, I’d be quite surprised if I learned from a credible survey that I’m not the majority out there - a person who plays both genders nearly indiscriminently, without concealing their real one, and has no “actual concrete reason” why they do so.

heh - like the female toons aren’t “too stereotype”? (ie, “big boobs, sexy dance animations, rediculous skimpy armor”)

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You’ve obviously never played EQ2. . . . no sexy dances, no skimpy armor, though I will give you that on most of the races (notable exceptions being gnomes, Kerra, Erudites, and the SOGA Halflings) have oversized breasts. The elves are proprotionately oversized though not terrobly so, but the humans, dwarves, ogres, and barbarians are simply grotesque. Hopefully the promised new models and skeletons will help to fix that.

No matter what one’s reasons are for playing an opposite gender, the act in and of itself is harmless, and therefore, so are the reasons. Actually, I would be curious to read a more thorough, statistically significant analysis (with anecdotes) of people’s reasons for playing the opposite gender, but without any condemnation. We’re getting a lot of anecdotes here, but it’s not too scientific.