I am a man. I can’t say that I have ever really wanted to change that. It is not like I have ever gone out in women’s clothing, I have only ever passed myself off as a woman once online, but… people look at me funny when I say that I often play women in games and I am not talking Tomb Raider or Bloodrayne.

My initial reason for this was simply ugly male models in MMOs. Oh, and the fact that I experimented in the bazaar in Everquest and noticed that my female toon tended to make more money than my male one.

I never really ‘played’ a female character in Everquest, so it was D&D Online where I first toyed with joining the distaff side. The male elves looked kind of indistinct and naff, like wiry old men rather than long-lived graceful creatures. The female ones looked a little bit busty, but I put that down to Lara Croft syndrome.

For the first three levels or so, all was fine. Even my female guild-mates accepted me as a female character, but it never got strange. As the guild started to fall apart, I ended up with pick-up groups. Oh dear… Misogynists and idiots abound in any MMORPG, but they seem attracted to pick-up groups. I think anyone playing a female toon who didn’t take off their armour and dance was assumed to be a real woman, to the point where even my protestations were assumed to be playing hard-to-get. In the end, that was what killed the game for me.

But why? Why do people assume that men never play women, even to the point of flirting and inappropriate emotes? Roleplaying is all about being something you’re not, right? I mean, I am not an elf or any good at spoting and disarming potentially-dealy traps either, but people can cope with that particular issue.

I suppose the issue is that people expect you to stick to those truths that you can manage. In D&D stats, we are all level 0 commoners or maybe (in certain cases) level 1 experts with lots of ranks in profession and craft. (some of us could stat ourselves in systems like Shadowrun, but that is another article) Since they offer multiple races in most games, people won’t ever assume that an elf is played by a 120 year-old perpetually-young aesthete, but gender… gender is inviolate…

Why?