Gender Swapping

There is a lot of discussion concerning people playing genders other than their own in games. Particularly video games when the player's own gender is available to them. It is a topic I have considered touching on in the past.

A recent article by Angela Murray on Gnome Stew about playing alternate genders in pen and paper roleplaying games made some good points and helped tip me over to typing out a blog post. I think her article raises some nice talking points especially concerning expectiations from others concerning playing a different gender in relation to playing other differences from those of the player. I won't touch on most of what she covered as I feel her article is worth a read, but I will brush against a couple of points she makes.

As far as pen and paper games go, I am more likely to play my own gender. I have played females and both are enjoyable. I would say the ratio of my male to female characters is somewhere around seven out of ten of them being male. The opposite is true in video games. The majority of my characters in video games are female. The ratio is higher than nine out of ten. In City of Heroes for instance I had over ninety characters (I deleted way more) and four of them were males. Even in Lord of the Rings Online my favourite Dwarf was named Deborah. For those unfamiliar with the game, there is no option for female Dwarves.

There are many flippant reasons people give. I for example oftentimes tell people it is cheaper than an operation. It still surprises me when some people that know me think I am being serious.

Many men joke around and say they play females in video games because it provides a better view. In some cases this is actually true. Females tend to be less broad so take up less screen realestate which is also one of the two reasons I tend to prefer shorter characters as well. Run animations being the other as characters tend to cover the same distance at the same speed and the taller they are the more it looks like they are running in slow motion, but that is a separate topic. My point here is there are advantages to being able to see around your character. I do not have a widescreen monitor, so the less space a character takes on my monitor the better.

Screen space is not my primary reason however. The evidence can be seen from when I was playing MUDs on a regular basis. I was closer to a fifty/fifty mix of active characters then. I did however spend more time playing the female characters.

When I play a character in any game, either in person or a digital format, I feel the need to act as the character would. People might start to begin to think of me as my character or my character as me. I am my own person separate from my characters, and they are their own individuals separate from me.

I find this separation is easier to do when face to face. Those games tend to last a few hours once or possibly twice a week at most. Those players get to see me outside of the character. It is easier to see where the character I play ends and I begin. There is a time when you are definitely in character, and there are times when you definitely are not. There is also time to interact with others under both circumstances.

This is harder for me when playing video games. People can easily spend twenty or more hours a week playing an MMO. That time is spent running around in the game in the skin of a character with no time spent for most people to get an opportunity to see you outside of your character(s). There is a huge difference between playing a character a few hours a week and getting to know the people behind the character ourside of the game itself, and playing a character in the same environment day in and day out. It is difficult to swing in and out of character when the situation does not shift between being in and out of character.

Because of this I feel I have to always be on when playing a male in a video game. There is this constant need on my part to play male characters so extreme there is no way other people could think that is how someone really is. My males in video games tend to become so extreme as to never be believable. I can not let off the throttle unless there is a chance for pure out of character interaction. This can be quite tiring both for myself and others.

I can relax and be myself when playing a female however because that level of separation does exist. It is generally easier for others to separate their concept of the character from their concept of the player when the gender is swapped in a video game. Sure, I have to remind people from time to time that I am male in order to keep that separation going in their mind, but it is easier to be myself and not have people think me and my character are the same person. Sometimes this is as simple as switching pronouns when acting as my character or speaking as myself. Other times it requires me to straight up tell someone again and again. I will sometimes forget to give reminders and it can become rather awkward because people will associate me with the character where with tabletop gaming it is more likely to have people associate the character with me. Even with reminders I still experience reactions in games when playing a female character that I have not as a male character, and never in a tabletop game, but I still get to be myself.

I am sorry there is no short, simple explanation outside of "I am more comfortable playing a female." That answer is very easy to interpret in termss other than how I mean it so is not the short answer I like to give so you get this novel instead.