Inspired by my post about playing female characters online, I got thinking about gender roles in RPGs. I don’t believe in women’s things and men’s things, but there is a tendency for people to drift toward certain stereotypes. You probably don’t think about it when you are actually playing a game, but CRPGs do give us stereotypes. Arch-mages are men with beards, clerics are dour men and dwarves if they are NPCs and women if they are PCs. Fighters are men or else women trying to prove themselves better than men, rogues are slimy men or halflings who think they are cassanova.

I played a woman in some MMOs and people used to give me stuff, both in my guild and in pick-up groups. It was never overtly ‘have this because you are a girl’, but I saw so many examples of ‘I don’t really need this, so you might as well have it’ when I was playing a female character and never saw it with male ones. Do people think that a female rogue is more in danger of having substandard equipment?

Playing Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights, the original storyline has two love interests; one is male and one is female. The female interest seemed very much an equal, but very emotional (especially for a paladin) and conflicted. The male interest was stoic and protective, resolute in spite of his troubled past.

I suppose you play to your market. Given the things I have done, the evils to my gender, while working on a game for girls, I cannot really hold it against them. When your market is projected to be mostly men and boys, you play up the wish fulfilment. When (like World of Warcraft) you reach close to equal numbers, you make sure that the genders both get some heroes and heroines.