A few musings about gender
May. 7th, 2008 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
melliciousVideo-game gender, that is.
When I first started playing GuildWars, I was young and naive (well, naive, anyway) and I was surprised at how many females there were - it was my first MMO, I certainly never played Tomb Raider, and I had yet to learn how many guys liked to be able to ogle their female avatar. (If anybody is wondering about the Tomb Raider connection, well, I'm told that Lara Croft is the toon who started this phenomenon.) The interesting thing about this to me, now, is that so far I am not seeing that happen nearly as much in WoW. I suspect that this is because at least in the starter areas, WoW skews several years younger - I think that a lot of the players in these areas are 10 or 11 or possibly even younger. And mostly boys. And I imagine that the average 11-year-old boy doesn't think of playing as a girl instead of a boy right off the bat (although of course there may be exceptions!). At that age, being able to masquerade as an adult male would probably be a more attractive option for a lot of boys.
Come to think of it, I see more female toons in draenei areas than the human ones. But then the draenei areas are much less populated generally. My observations above are really more about the human areas. Although... maybe draenei females are more popular than human females because they are somewhat more ogle-worthy, by current standards. Compared to the very Barbie-doll shapes of the GW females (except for assassins, who are extremely skinny and look more like Barbie's little sister), human females in WoW are a bit on the zaftig side. Plus, Draenei have horns and hooves and tails - but in a cute way, not the fire-and-brimstone way that horns and hooves might imply. Their walk definitely has a bit of a prance to it. You can think of them as sort of a sexy two-legged My Little Pony - but with a weapon.
I've only played a human and a draenai so far so I can't say too much about the others. Gnomes are cute. Dwarven females mostly seem to be shorter versions of human females - and I haven't seen very many of them so far at all, even though I've been adventuring in the dwarf/gnome lowbie areas. Night-elves definitely have willowy figures so I guess that's why they have the reputation they do, but for me, there's something about their faces that I don't like. (It's not just the glowy eyes because the draenei have those too. I think maybe it's the eye-eyebrow combination, or something.) And I haven't played Horde at all yet - but I'm still intending to get around to it eventually.
Come to think of it, I see more female toons in draenei areas than the human ones. But then the draenei areas are much less populated generally. My observations above are really more about the human areas. Although... maybe draenei females are more popular than human females because they are somewhat more ogle-worthy, by current standards. Compared to the very Barbie-doll shapes of the GW females (except for assassins, who are extremely skinny and look more like Barbie's little sister), human females in WoW are a bit on the zaftig side. Plus, Draenei have horns and hooves and tails - but in a cute way, not the fire-and-brimstone way that horns and hooves might imply. Their walk definitely has a bit of a prance to it. You can think of them as sort of a sexy two-legged My Little Pony - but with a weapon.
I've only played a human and a draenai so far so I can't say too much about the others. Gnomes are cute. Dwarven females mostly seem to be shorter versions of human females - and I haven't seen very many of them so far at all, even though I've been adventuring in the dwarf/gnome lowbie areas. Night-elves definitely have willowy figures so I guess that's why they have the reputation they do, but for me, there's something about their faces that I don't like. (It's not just the glowy eyes because the draenei have those too. I think maybe it's the eye-eyebrow combination, or something.) And I haven't played Horde at all yet - but I'm still intending to get around to it eventually.
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