Day 53 – Male or female?
If given the option, I always pick female characters. Thankfully more and more games are making either gender available to play, but even in games where gender is assigned, I will go with the female option as my first choice.
Even though I have tried playing male characters, I simply don’t identify with them as much, which does impact my enjoyment of the game. My interest really wanes quicker.
This doesn’t mean that I never play games with male protagonists. If the game is good enough, it transcends gender. For example, Diablo 2’s necromancer is by far my favorite class, which only had the male gender as an option. On the other hand in Diablo 3, because either gender was available for each class, I made all my characters female.
Tags: 30 days of video games, fantasy, female, fps, girl, mmog, online, roleplaying, scifi, star wars, world of warcraft
December 26th, 2012 at 10:58 am
I often choose female, if given a choice
December 26th, 2012 at 12:46 pm
<3
January 2nd, 2013 at 10:52 am
Female Shepard seemed more in line with my idea of Shepard than the male. I didn’t really like MaleShep’s voice, either. Jennifer Hale ftw!
January 2nd, 2013 at 4:25 pm
Those were the most recent four character images that I had taken. MMOs still have the most female character options, thus three out of the four are MMOrps.
January 2nd, 2013 at 5:03 pm
It never comes down to the sex of the character for me. It’s all about voice and looks for me, and how that fits with the character I have in mind. If the necro looks or sounds cooler as a guy, I pick that. If the female version is better, that’s what I pick. But I can’t say it’s anything to do with their sex. Looking at my history, I’d guess I’m 50/50.
January 2nd, 2013 at 5:30 pm
Hmm, maybe I should clarify with an example. For the necro:
I’d imagine a sickly, sinister looking thing. Manipulative, but somehow alluring. Sexy even. Whichever combination of hair, clothing, voice and body shape matches that best, I go with it.
So any fat and/or burly characters would be out. Characters who sounded unintelligent would be out. Asshole characters would be out. So any characters with those attributes, male or female, would be cut. I keep narrowing it down until I have the character I want. Then I see which sex the character is, and decide on a name that fits. I never start with “I want to make a badass necro guy, or badass necro girl”; just “badass necro”.
January 2nd, 2013 at 7:58 pm
But how can you even gauge that at the beginning of the game? Most of the time their styles aren’t fully revealed until much farther in the game.
January 3rd, 2013 at 12:40 pm
Not sure what you mean, TFG. You mean their final wardrobe (i.e. top tier gear)? If so, I don’t care about that stuff. I usually don’t like any of it, so I wear things that I think look better, even if the stats aren’t as good.
I usually have an idea in mind when I get to character selection. I cycle through all the races and sexes, looking for the best visual matches to what I have in my mind already. Some games give speech samples too.
To use WoW as an example:
When we started, my friends were playing Horde. So that instantly ruled out some races. I wanted to play a DPS character. I was thinking at first of a caster. I thought the Tauren looked stupid (still do), and the Orcs looked too beefy for what I wanted. So it was between the Trolls and the Undead. The undead males all looked fugly. The undead females were similar, but there were a couple that were creepy and doll-like in appearance, which was cool. I liked the Troll males for their face paints, but didn’t care for the females. So it was down to either Undead female or Troll male. Looking in my list of standard character names, Lucidique fit perfectly with an Undead female caster. So there she was. (And then of course she also got my built-in ditzy factor, since that’s just me.)
January 4th, 2013 at 10:07 pm
Fair enough. =P