www.Multiplayergames.com – Multiplayer Games

Blade & Soul- She is perfectly suited for combat. Seriously.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games, (MMORPG), run the gamut from Tolkien-esque fantasy to Asian martial-arts to demonic and divine worlds, but all share in common the option to choose the race of your avatar. The spirit of the RPG is the spirit of role-play, and with that comes the option to choose who you wish to play as. Playing as the opposite sex, (a.k.a. gender-bending), is considered another issue entirely, and some countries and players consider it to be a very serious issue.

Shanda Entertainment in China has frozen the accounts of male players who play as female in-game characters in their MMORPG King of the World. It now requires gamers who chose female characters to prove their sex by submitting web-cam images of themselves.

Aside from being a ridiculous invasion of privacy, (and sounding like a cock-and-bull scheme to get women to send pictures of themselves), this course of action puts into perspective just how out-of-hand the issue can get.

According to some sources, about 85% of MMORPG players are male, and while women do gender-bend, men are five times more likely to do so. Which means a lot of non-female females in MMORPGs.

Bayonetta- Playing as women implies something now?

Why does it happen? There are reasons aplenty, but they often fall into these three categories:

• Because of the heavy social interaction between characters, the sex you choose often determines how you are treated by members of the online community. Females, typically, may be picked on more by male players, but are also generally treated better; other player characters are typically more generous with advice, tips, and in-game gifts to female characters than to male characters.
• Because of the nature of the beast, some people actually do role-play in role-playing games. Why they would choose to play as a women is entirely up to them, but it is entirely within the realm of possibility that a male character could actually want to role-play a female character in a fashion that is neither sexualized, malicious, or homosexual.
• The third reason and perhaps the most often stated, is simply because the female characters are attractive. Many gender-bending players defend themselves by stating that they if they are going to devote time and money to play a MMO and spend most of it looking at their character’s backside, it may as well be the sexiest backside possible. Let’s be frank here. Women in MMOs typically wear outfits so scant they would make a hooker blush. So it’s no surprise that a male would want to stare at that backside during their playtime.

In the end though, it seems extremely unfair to limit the choice of who you can play as, especially if the player is paying to play. For some, choosing sex is no different than choosing race or skin color; in other words, it is just another choice they should be able to make. For others it means an entire level of immersion. And what of non-MMO games that center around female characters? What of Lara Croft, or Samus Aran, or Bayonetta? Does playing as these characters imply something of the player? Is this all simply an over-blown case of homophobia? Or perhaps a scheme to make it easier to pick hit on chicks in MMO’s, without the nagging fear that you might be flirting with a guy?

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