You Be Who You Will


The Cheddar Master
Originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

Slow news day?

For lack of anything better to report, MSNBC has blown the proverbial lid off of a secret practice in the MMORPG world. Hard as it might be to believe, they’ve discovered that some male players prefer to create female avatars! Shock! Horror!

:faint:

This is so not news. If anything, it’s just old news.

The excuse I’ve heard most often (and cited in the article) is that the player, knowing that he will be spending a great deal of time gazing at the 3rd person view of their character, would rather stare at a pixellated female’s ass than a male’s. Fair enough, I suppose, though the admittance and acceptance of impending drudgery in such a statement strikes me as more than a little depressing.

“Well, if I’m going to have to play, then I might as well … :sigh:”

Me? Nah. In WoW, in City of Heroes, even back in EverQuest, I’ve stuck to playing as my own gender. Why? Easier to relate, perhaps. And as I’m not too much of a virtual role-player, I can behave pretty much online as I do off …

After all, when I throw on my yellow tights, armored boots and winged helmet, I look just like The Cheddar Master here. See?

August 15, 2006 – 9:06 am | By Thomas | Posted in General | Comments (3)
  • Sean

    I’m guilty of using the most common excuse for playing female characters in Guild Wars.

    I can’t speak for all other gamers in all other games. When it comes to me and Guild Wars, it’s not that I don’t want to play but having a female avatar makes it tolerable. On the contrary, I genuinely enjoy the experience of playing Guild Wars, but the ugliness of the limited selection of male avatars (with the exception of the Ranger class) would make playing the game intolerable.

    I’ll be the first to admit that I’m extraordinarily picky (some would say criminally insane). I have been known to shave brand new pencils into useless nubs if their tips don’t sharpen into perfect cones. I also hate desktops cluttered with icons, so every computer I own has one neat row of four (sometimes five) desktop icons in one neat column aligned to the left side of the screen.

    When it comes to Guild Wars, I am not opposed to the idea of playing a male character; however, it aggravates my nervous twitch if my character isn’t aesthetically pleasing to me. I have even deleted perfectly good female characters like my level 20 Assassin because I couldn’t stand to watch her run. Assassins run like crippled hyenas. I’m close to deleting my very first character, a level 20 female Elementalist, because she waves her hands from side to side when she runs, which didn’t bother me at first, but now it makes me want to strangle her to death. I have also given away or destroyed rare and powerful armor, weapons, and other items in the game because they were too hard to look at.

    The bottom line is… I have a problem. It’s not that I need something pleasing to look at so much as it is that I CAN NOT DEAL WITH creating things that I perceive as imperfect. When I really think about my playing style in Guild Wars, I realize that my ultimate goal is not to have a character that I like staring at, but it is to have a character that won’t aggravate my “condition” when I do look at him or her.

  • http://www.danandsally.com Sally Parrott Ashbrook

    Come on, Thomas, you don’t look anything like the Cheddar Master–your thighs are much more muscular than his.

  • Stephane

    Slow news day? Phssshh. My cruise ship crashed this day. There’s some news.

    Sean told me about this “Cheddarmaster”, so I had to come see for myself. Quite impressive. I don’t play WoW often, but I have a Yak (or whatever) named Fruit Cup for whenever I chose to do so. I do play guildwars, however.

    In both games, I have a male character. I don’t have them for ass-looking reasons, though it is true that I don’t want to watch the constant bouncing of the female badonkadonk, to use sientific terms. I have the male yak thing for the same reason most women have anything – it’s cute. And I have a male character in Guildwars because the females’ clothes are ugly and I wanted to be able to make my character do what looks like sexually explicit things to Sean’s character without looking like a lesbo.

    No matter what Sean claims his reason to be, it’s all about getting his character into her skivvies and watching her assets shake as she dances.