Not just free linen bags: being male and playing female

July 30th, 2007

People have long discussed what it’s like to play a character of a different sex in an MMORPG, and there’s not much left to say on the subject, but a post by the Infamous Brad about the treatment of his female character in City of Heroes made me realize that men playing women may be shocked my something that’s all too familiar to women players.

Brad argues that, when other (male) players think the player is a woman, they will treat that player as stupid or, if the player is assertive, call that player a bitch. To such assholes (as Brad accurately dubs them), women players serve as viable flirtation targets, and possibly as audience for long-winded instruction they don’t need. But the assholes simply don’t think real women deserve respect.

I’ve found this to be completely true, I’m afraid. About half my MMORPG characters are female, and players usually assume (wrongly) that there’s an actual woman player behind the character. When they do, some—not the majority, but a significant minority—treat me like a fool.

To some degree, I think it’s mostly players like the Infamous Brad and me—men who convincingly play female characters—that make a stink about this sort of thing. My wife plays, and plays female characters almost exclusively. She gets this sort of treatment all the time. But she doesn’t say much about it. I suspect that’s because she already deals with it in real life. Let’s face it; this sort of treatment isn’t at all unique to the anonymous online worlds where we slay dragons.

It’s endemic to academe and meeting rooms, too.

There are women players who roll with the punch, others who make a fuss even at the risk of being branded a bitch. But men simply don’t expect to have their ideas and suggestions dismissed without being considered. When men speak, they expect their contributions to be given due consideration. When they participate in an activity, they expect their efforts to be equally valued at least until they prove themselves unworthy.

So for us men, it’s absolutely shocking when we encounter it online. For women, it may be enraging, but it’s not altogether surprising.

Women simply don’t get respect from everyone. They consistently get dismissed, ignored, ridiculed for no other reason than that they’re women. Not by everyone, no. But there are enough assholes, online and off, that the experience can’t be all that unfamiliar to most women.

The real point, here, is that convincingly playing a woman may give men a chance to experience the downside. (The upside—free crap in exchange for typing /dance and acting like a complete moron in major in-game cities—is well-documented and not all that much of an upside.) Men, it’s your chance to do what Eddie Murphy did on Saturday Night Live so many years ago. (Go watch the video if you haven’t seen it. Hilarious.)

So if you’re a man eager to experience to prejudice and condescension women face regularly, roll up a female character and play her well. This is an interesting wrinkle to the roleplaying aspect of these roleplaying games, one that’s not truly available to tabletop gaming or online games with voice chat (but that is available to online interaction outside of games).

As a humorous endnote, I’ll mention here that I’ve had good success being perceived as a woman player when I play woman characters. I attribute this to a lot of the same things Brad mentions in his blog post. But I never expected it to have anything to do with my training as an editor.

Apparently, though, grammar helps! Several years ago, while playing my main in Dark Age of Camelot, a female mercenary, I formed a pretty good online friendship with another player. Eventually, he worked up the courage to ask if I was really a woman. I don’t know why, but I told him I was. “i knew it,” he wrote. “want to know why? because of the capitalization and punctuation. men don’t do that.”

Entry Filed under: Gender, Online, Roleplaying, Problems, Massively Multiplayer