After taking a few months hiatus from WoW and finally picking up the newest expansion pack – Wrath of the Lich King (or WotLK)- I have finally jumped on the proverbial wagon and finally made a death knight. The death knight is a very cool addition to the game and the starting area is very fun, but what has made my death knight special is that I made him male.
For those not in the know, I am a female gamer. Whenever, I have a choice between female and male, in a video game I usually choose female. WoW is the only game where I have dabbled in the realm of cross-tooning. In 2005, I made a male troll for my horde hunter, but despite my initial burst of energy he has been sitting at level 35 for about 3 years now. I have also made other male toons, but mostly just to play with the character creation modes, or to serve as bank characters. Alas, my poor male toons are neglected.
So I finally tried to dive in and start playing a male toon again. Orinoco – my death knight – is male, a Draenei male to be specific. I just happened to pick the biggest male alliance class to start my gender crossing adventure, but he is huge. I’m not used to seeing giant shoulders taking up my screen like that. But besides my own gender projections onto my digital friend, nothing much is different. I haven’t noticed any markedly different behavior to my fellow WoW-ians, although I do have remind myself randomly flirting with male toons will be generally frowned upon.
It seems to me, that in a world that often values males and stereotypical masculine features especially in combat (such as strength, bravery, etc), the majority of gender crossing in adventure video games tends to be done by males. While I don’t have any statical data on hand at the moment, my experience has been that women play females and men play both male and female. I always think that people assume that male characters are always male characters and female characters could be either male or female in real life.
In fact, the female on-line characters have reputations of always being male – even if they “pretend” to be female. This kind of thing serves as a warning to those guys who might think that hot night elf chick bouncing and clapping her hands is really a hot girl in real life. I have heard some guys explain to me they would rather look at something good looking (ie a female, most often with a nice figure and full breasts) while spending endless hours of grinding experience, rather than a dude (which… would be assumed not to be attractive to most males). Still it seems to me that our on-line persona’s lend themselves to personal projection.
While I don’t think that my Draenei male looks particularly “hot” or “sexy” (male video games character rarely look that way to me), I think he does look cool. So heres to me donning on my “male” costume – dropping my flirts, my giggles and my other girlie traits – and entering the man’s world.
