Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
This topic has been locked 
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
But mostly I RP as myself so I use a male character.
In WoW, I ran Female Toons for my viewing pleasure. In BG3, in the pre-release I ran the Druid as a female, and the ranger, Fighter and Mage as a male.
As the first replier stated, It's also a little more entertaining watching a female toon running around. But weirded me out when the male NPC's were hitting on me. Right now my Cleric/Bard is a Male Half-elf
However, I wouldn't take that to mean men can't understand, or form a connection with female characters. Men read books with female leads in them all the time. They watch movies about women. In order to write a story, you got to often write female perspectives. Men and women probably go through far more similar life experiences, than humans and completely alien races do. Male and females living in a modern society, also probably share far more similar experiences than males today do with males from 2000 years ago.
So yeah, a lot of it just guys like how the female character look. That does not however mean, that every guy should feel like playing a female character is a weird and alien experience. Some people do have trouble identifying with other genders, but a lot of people don't see it as that big of a deal.
If you can imagine yourself as a robot, or a cat, imagining yourself as a different gender, isn't that big of a deal.
As someone who plays both male and female characters, and has been involved in MMOs for decades where this has always been common and spoken to a lot of other people who have done it, I can say all of the following contribute.
1. Like it or not most video game artists, male or female, put a lot more work into the female characters and designs for the most part. The female art, costumes, etc... all simply tend to just flat out look better, and it's not specifically a matter of sex appeal though I suppose artists being a bunch of pervs has a lot to do with it.
When I first seriously started playing female characters as my "main" in MMOs it was actually in World Of Warcraft. Back in the old days when the endgame was AQ 20 and AQ 40 an important stop for a cloth character (I mained a mage) was a robe called "Vestments Of The Shifting Sands". On a female character it was this really cool looking belly dancer type outfit, on a guy it was a hot pink mumu basically. It looked really, really, terrible. That was sort of when I decided I didn't want to typically male male toons anymore because even decades after the fact we're still at a point where collecting cosmetics and fashion is a big part of the endgame and they just don't put much effort into cool stuff for male characters to wear.
All jokes about how guys just like looking at a woman's butt all day aside, this is a more accurate, and honest perspective on it. It's not about the butt, it's typically all about the wardrobe options. In like 90% of the games out there you'll find even in character creation just the number of options and stuff make it entirely obvious what the devs were favoring.
2. A lot won't like this point, but far more guys are "actual role-players" behind the screen. This isn't to say that girls don't role-play, but as the community has shown over the years (starting with RPG horror stories) girls tend to project themselves onto any kind of customizable character more than guys do. Dudes are far more likely to differentiate between themselves and a character.
Typically when people are going "what's with all these guys with female avatars in MMOs and RPGs" it's because they tend to be people who see themselves in what they are controlling in game unless it's an assigned character. Guys who role-play? Not so much. It's not them all cross dressing or anything, it's just seen as no different than writing a character of a different gender in a story for them. To put this into perspective if I couldn't play female characters I wouldn't have been able to GM regularly for the last 3 decades for my PnP groups if nothing else.
I will also say as a writing and RP tool, having a character different from yourself can often be a good way to get better at RP by detaching from the character and aids in trying to think like them or put yourself properly into an experience. A lot of girls have difficulty doing this, and as you mention yourself you don't see it very often.
Don't get me wrong though, I am not saying there are no women who can RP or who aren't good at it. Just that there are less of them, especially in large communities.
3. One other factor besides the lack of RP ability and the ability to detach themselves from a character that contributes is that a lot of girls, especially in MMOs and such, can't handle the expectations that come with being seen as a dude.
See, guys are by definition are mostly judged by success, and tend to be both far nicer and less competitive with girls, and don't really reinforce or prop each other the same way. Oh yes I'm aware girls don't have any real solidarity, and can be quite nasty to each other, but with guys it's even worse, and what's more it can be pretty callous.
To put things into perspective, as a long time guild leader or officer in competitive raiding guilds and such (though I have retired), at least a dozen times I have seen girls I've known think they were being discriminated against for being female, so decided to make male characters and then claim they had no mic or anything. As each time it was people I knew, I was sort of complicit in helping them set it up, and in every case they freaked the heck out when they got what they wanted and saw it made things worse for them as what they saw as "discrimination" got even worse, and on top of that nobody cared. People watched the DPS, DKP, and other things even more closely than ever before, and were 10x more ruthless and cutthroat towards them.
I'm not trying to get particularly political with this, but it's part of why I sometimes laugh at the more extreme flavors of feminism. For all the "down with the patriarchy" stuff, I think most ladies don't realized how much they actually benefit from some of the things they associate with that, and even close online friends have not wanted to listen when I told them what was likely going to happen with such schemes.
I think some long term understanding over this ALSO has a lot to do with why you don't see as many girls pretending to be guys online. It should also be noted most guys with female characters, outside of perhaps RP situations, do not make any pretensions of being female IRL. I certainly don't, and generally haven't run into many people who have actually tried to go "full deception" to get stuff.
4. There is also a power aspect to this. Again despite what certain extreme feminists might tell you, when it comes to fantasy and pop culture, we haven't seen any real bias towards men for a long time, it's quite the opposite actually.
When it comes to most established fantasy worlds, I could count the number of actual patriarchies on one hand despite the historical inspirations. On the other hand these things tend to be riddled with all kinds of Amazonian and Matriarchal societies and such. If we were to really look into worlds like "The Forgotten Realms", or "Golarion" and took stock given the default "gender equality" of the games you'll find there are generally only societies that break that in a female dominated direction. "The Forgotten Realms" for example has both the Drow and Aglarond both of which are by and large matriarchal and filled with women running around beating dudes with whips casually (Aglarond used to have a special thing where the women there could have a whip enchanted with anything a sword could do, back when swords were their own category). Golarion to it's credit has the same stuff coming down, but does have "Taldor" which is Patriarchal, but it should be noted that the adventure path dealing with that presents it as a bad thing and is about undermining it. I guess the D&D-inspired-worlds male drow uprising will still have to wait a few years....
At any rate going along with this is the fact that fantasy games tend to generally have a ton of usually quite powerful "female only" character types. This applies to both video games and PnP RPGs. It's pretty rare when you see a male only character type, and when you do it's typically not all that special which is why people don't play them too often. This is another big reason why so many guys play cross gender.
To put it into a video game perspective look at say "Black Desert Online" most characters are gender locked female. There are a few male-only roles but they tend to be less well played, supported, and generally powerful. In cases where there is a mirror like the Wizard-Witch or Mystic-Striker (I think it's striker thing) there are differences and typically the female version winds up being stronger. For example while the Wizard can do higher burst damage it doesn't matter much given how fast things die, the the Witch does better sustained damage in the big fights and such as well as being able to quickly farm the trash... so far more Witches are played in practice.
You could also see this in games like Diablo with the female archers, or even PnP RPGs going back as far as say 2E AD&D (yeah I've been playing a long time) with kits like the "Amazon" (numerous versions), and sub-classes like Incantrix and Spell Dancer.
To be entirely fair on this last point I think you'd see a fair bit less cases of guys playing girls if they actually made male-specific characters that were actually worth playing, or which were superior to the female version with pseudo-mirrors like you saw with SOME of the BDO stuff.
5. Most recently I think the attempt to go "hyper-progressive" in sexual content has contributed a bit. Right, or fair, or not guys have an entirely different attitude about homosexuality and how they perceive other guys being into them. Oh sure there are plenty of girls who don't care for lesbians and are totally not into it, but they don't have the same emotional reaction.... like it or not.
I think a lot of dudes play female characters especially now just because they don't want to deal with other guys coming on to their male character. As increasing numbers of games make it so this option will be presented, and comments made, regardless of their desire, they just avoid the entire issue by making a female character. Most figure due to disassociation that they can still chase the girls oftentimes if they want to as lesbianism is also enabled, and if they are forced into situations with other guys it will seem less gay. Not to mention not being punished by the game for say offending some gay guy by rebuffing their advances or not really wanting to get involved in their personal gay soap opera ("Dragon Age Inquisition" anyone?) as a dude.
Speaking personally this sort of thing doesn't bother me, and as I said, I play characters of both genders, but a lot of the guys I know online make it 100% clear they are now playing girls in most games to avoid this. If you notice a lot of dudes with BG 3 playing female characters, let's just say the most common comment about the gay bear sex thing on a lot of gaming discords was less being offended than most guys saying "Well, that 100% guarantees I'm making a female character". They don't mind it being there for the target audience, but want no part of it.
This sort of thing could be avoided by simply putting content sliders into games so you can say disable certain kinds of content from appearing. Many adult games already do this. Various activist AAA developers though don't want to do that for obvious reasons though and did not take the suggestion very well when it's been brought up from what I've seen.
I doubt this will be read by many, or received well, but that's my experiences with the subject across the board. I don't see it as really being a problem to be honest, and after all this time it amuses me that the question recurs so often.
I'm playing a female wizard because, psychologically, I feel more protective than if I was playing a male barbarian. So, it changes my playing style.
I play a lot of different things, Ive made female character, make characters, tall, short, handsome, ugly etc etc.
I come up with some idea for a character and then play something that seems fitting.
The answer still essentially boils down to we just like boobs
lol