Why do you play a female character?

Killum

The first MMO I ever played was Star Wars Galaxies. I had absolutely no idea what to expect when I logged in. I got to the character select/creation screen and the choices available were (To me at that time) confusing. I must have spent a good couple of hours checking out what sort of character I could create. I ended up with a Female, Twilik entertainer because I thought it might be interesting to play something other than a combat role.

All through other MMO's EQ2, GW & GW2 etc, etc my main characters have mainly been female. For me because of the aesthetics, sometimes because I found female characters seemed to be more interesting and slightly off cannon in most games I have played.

I have played Male & Female characters, Human & none human.

People should play what they enjoy playing and what interests them but they should always also remember that everyone else is also role playing a character.

So to answer the OP. I find the aesthetics of female characters in ESO better than the male. I have yet to make a race other than human yet but I will most likely in the future, whether they will be male or female has yet to be determined.

AerionMagnus

Imagine being so needy for female attention and vicinity, as well as the need for controlling women, that you need to create a fictional female character that you use as a replacement for yourself in a video game. Yikes from me dawg.

Freud would have a lot to say about that.

Watchdog

Perwulf wrote: »

@Watchdog

Oooh, nice. Have an Awesome.

Megatto

I'm male and both my main and my Healer are female, because that's how I envisioned them in my head when I made them. I don't know if my next character will be male or female,

My main



My Healer



I think what I like most about them are the aesthetics and of course how viable they are in combat and dungeons.

albesca

AerionMagnus wrote: »

Freud would have a lot to say about that.

I think he would object to playing games in general and role playing games specifically as an adult, regardless of your character's gender, so there's that

Kesstryl

I'm female, and 1/3 of my chars are male. I see my toons as characters in a world, not as extensions of myself. They all have their own stories. Needless to say, I can empathise with males who enjoy looking at female avatars. My three males are certainly fun to look at when I play, which is something I don't get from my female toons. I do have to agree with some of the other female gamers here that the male char models can have some awkwardness, especially in the legs, but overall they can be attractive, and mine certainly are! I don't RP (except for maybe in my head) but In the end it all comes down to what kind of a story is this character living out. I have a male Breton who's story is having an Altmer father who secretly supports him while openly rejecting him for being half elf (I love how you can give Bretons pointy ears). I have an Argonian female who I started back when Morrowind came out so I could play the underdog in that expansion. Having an imagination is fun.

HappyLittleTree

But 2/3 of my chars are male and the rest are female because i imagined them as female when i gave them a backstory

Cloudless

Kesstryl wrote: »

I'm female, and 1/3 of my chars are male. I see my toons as characters in a world, not as extensions of myself. They all have their own stories. Needless to say, I can empathise with males who enjoy looking at female avatars. My three males are certainly fun to look at when I play, which is something I don't get from my female toons. I do have to agree with some of the other female gamers here that the male char models can have some awkwardness, especially in the legs, but overall they can be attractive, and mine certainly are! I don't RP (except for maybe in my head) but In the end it all comes down to what kind of a story is this character living out. I have a male Breton who's story is having an Altmer father who secretly supports him while openly rejecting him for being half elf (I love how you can give Bretons pointy ears). I have an Argonian female who I started back when Morrowind came out so I could play the underdog in that expansion. Having an imagination is fun.

^ also, this.

Grianasteri

It is interesting isnt it.

I am male and all 9 of my characters, are male and based loosely on me, with varying hair styles, tattoos, armour etc for variety. I have two more characters planned, they will both be male as well.

When I play an immersive game like ESO, my characters are extensions of me, in my mind, I am the character, I am in the world. This is why I do not play female characters. I am not female, why would I do that?

One of my best gaming buddies is precisely the opposite, he makes most of his characters female. His reasoning is that he is male and does not want to look at a guy running around for hours on end, he wants to look at an aesthetically pleasing female character.

Personally I don't really get that, but each to their own.

Zaketh

Verbal_Earthworm wrote: »

This begs the question:

Why don't you play a female character if you are male?

I think the answer would be more entertaining than the question you pose.

In all honesty, it never even crosses my mind to.

West1389

I dont get this looking and buts thing. When I play I dont ever once look at my characters backside. I focus on what's ahead of me, enemies, and what I'm about to do next. If your looking at backsides you may have a fetish for toons.

Robo_Hobo

Before I make each character I always come up with a backstory and such for them, and it's during this phase that I decide whether they're female or male, but really it's more of a subconscious choice because I never actually take the moment to decide that specific factor, I just start thinking of the backstory/personality and then realize during it "oh yeah, they're female/male".

I do always end up seeming to have more female characters than male characters though in games, even though I'm man in real life. I can't quite understand why myself, as it seems to be more of a subconscious thing.

I never try to make them look completely feminine or extremely beautiful or anything though, unless that's built into their backstory or something, I prefer to make them look more worldly for what it is they do, which is typically adventuring, so, not a beauty pageant.

BomblePants

I am female and I can only play females.... if there’s a game with a male only protagonist I just have no interest.... I don’t even know why.... shrug

ShellaSunshine

I am female and I have 2 female characters.

I tried making a male character once and it made me feel weird when NPCs would speak to me as a male. I guess it bothers me because in the 90s everyone would call everyone a dude whether they were male or not. That has always bothered me.

I will say that neither of my female characters wear dresses or have makeup and wear their actual armor instead as I want them to be treated as equals among the male heroes. To me, a female hero wouldn't be able to do much in the ways of fighting or rescuing people while wearing a dress!

ayu_fever

i am a dude in real life so i dont want to look at the backside of some other dude for thousands of hours!!!
aint nobody got time for that.

i only make female characters.
period.
they always are built with the most aesthetically pleasing details and the correct proportions.
anything else would just be ridiculous.

ShellaSunshine

ayu_fever wrote: »

i am a dude in real life so i dont want to look at the backside of some other dude for thousands of hours!!!
aint nobody got time for that.

i only make female characters.
period.
they always are built with the most aesthetically pleasing details and the correct proportions.
anything else would just be ridiculous.

Females don't stand with their backs arched 24 hours a day. It's completely unrealistic and slightly offensive but can be corrected by making them wear armor instead of costumes.

It's the one thing about the game that I absolutely despise. All women in the world would be in wheelchairs by their 30s if they stood like that in real life.

Donny_Vito

Yeah I always found men playing female characters really strange.

Then again, I am very conservative and I find it odd when I see men in real life dressing/acting like women, so I guess I shouldn't expect anything too different in a video game. To each their own, I suppose.

keevil111

I'm a guy who plays guy characters in games. Always have. I don't care either way what others want to do.

BUT!!! I kept getting lipstick and dresses in some of the free crown crates we used to get. And once I got a tiara lookin' thing.

So I made a couple female characters ( have deleted 3 so far) to "make use" out of the girly stuff I had.

Finally I have settled on a female Bosmer Warden and for the life of me I can't stop looking at the damn crown store for "outfits and hairstyles."

I never understood Fashion Scrolls... until now...

tunepunk

Mostly male characters but one female. No special reasoning behind it. Had a few make characters already so wanted to mix it up a bit.

mague

Completely random and depends also on the game. In the old days there was no choice. In D2 a sorc was always female and a necro always male. /shrug. It became a topic when teamspeak was introduced.

Kiralyn2000

Perwulf wrote: »

You don't play to stare at your character's butt, you play for the pleasure of the game. In this game, you play for RP because it's designed that way, it is an MMORPG after all.

Eh, outside the people who go out of their way to do improv acting (you know, the "RPer's"), there's very little actual "RP" in MMORPGs. Heck, even in lots of non-MMO digital RPGs. Many of them are just hack-n-slash games with a story and lots of equipment & skills to pick between. No "RP" in Diablo 3, no "RP" in Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts, etc.

Just cause a game has "RP" in it's acronym, doesn't mean there's any Roleplaying going on.



(and yeah, "if I have to stare at a butt all day" is just shorthand for "I have an appreciation for the female form, so I like to have a character that is good looking to me". You're right, I don't stare at the character's butt while I'm actually fighting. But when at the Dye & Outfit stations - where I'm trying to make the character look good; at the crafting stations - where I'm staring at a 3rd person closeup of the character while waiting for the crafting cycles to complete; in nearly all the menus, where your character is face-forward and centered on the screen; etc..... there's lots of places in this game where you get a good view of your character. So why not have it look good/cool/whatever?

....and did people say this "waifu" s**t about people who liked their favorite TV actress/Movie actress/Pop singer/etc twenty years ago? Or "ew, you're attracted to a cartoon/bunch of pixels" over hot women in paintings/sculpture/engravings two hundred years ago? Or is it just now that the world is full of silly people who can't deal with someone enjoying looking at something.)

iCaliban

I have 4 altmers. Male altmers look... pedo like. Thats why.

CaffeinatedMayhem

My male characters are eye candy. 2/16 lifetime in game.

Nestor

I have two characters who are brother and sister, so how else would I portray them?

I don't identify with my characters, I role play them. Some are Male, some are Female. No need to read anything else into it.

TiaFrye

I am a female and at launch it was quite hard for me to look at female models, not sure why, so my main is a male altmer (and he's still the best looking character I have, in 4 gens of cloning him for toons). But rescently I was making progress with female characters too.

jircris11

tactx wrote: »

Many female characters in game with the most feminine outfits and names, all the details with lipstick, personality, etc. are played by guys. My wife asked me why do so many guys play females? I play a male character. I didn't really know why. I said in jest, maybe they had a sister and didn't get to participate in the doll dress up stuff when they were growing up?

I know some say "because I like how they look", but many she's encountered take it to another level and then she finds out on discord it's a guy and she's really surprised.

In all seriousness:
1) Why do you play a female instead of a male?
2) If you're a female do you play male characters? Or is this a 1 sided sort of thing?

Personally prefer how they look. But they are also easier for me to rp despite being male.

Sabbathius

For me, it's a combination of factors, usually has to do with animations and audio though.

As an example, in Mass Effect I preferred female Shepard over the male version, just due to voice acting. Exact same situation with Fallout 4, and Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Nothing *wrong* with male voice acting in those games, but I felt female voice acting was superior.

In games coming from Asia, I cannot stand their idea of a "male", from body proportions to the haircuts and (often) lack of facial hair choices. Female ones aren't much better, for my taste, but slightly more tolerable than males. Unless they go full-throttle and cross into full-on creepy territory, like Tera with Elin and Castanic.

In WoW, the only female characters I had were Blood Elves, everything else was male. Because I couldn't stand the male Blood Elves. "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot, like me?" (said by a male Blood Elf). No, just no.

In EVE Online, where gender doesn't matter one iota, because there's no avatar gameplay at all and zero voice acting by your character (you are whatever spaceship you happen to be flying at the time), 100% of chars were male.

In Age of Conan I was also exclusively male. Though a lot of boys were in it specifically for the female toplessness, FunCom being one of the few developers not completely terrified of putting some nudity into their games, even when said games are already rated M. Must be a European thing, American companies have this weird puritan hang-up where decapitations and eviscerations are seen as normal, while a hint of a female *** causes mass hysteria.

As far as ESO goes, I dislike male proportions and especially the running animation. Something is just terribly off to me about it. Again, female version isn't much better, but the added hip swing helps to distract from it quite a bit.

I should also mention that playing as a female chars was very instructive when it comes to seeing just how many creepers there are. I can't tell you how many times I'd be on my Blood Elf in WoW, and have an Orc warrior (why is is always an Orc?!) ride up to me and say, completely out of the blue and apropos of nothing, "Hey cutie, you got a man?" They always get upset if I respond "Have you?" I can say with absolute certainty going back 30+ years of MMO gaming (back to text-only MUDs), I have never had a female character ride up to my male one and say that. Not once. And I have had some friggin' HOT male characters, I'll tell ya. A few of them made Ryan Gosling look like hammered doodoo.

TL:DR - It comes down to audio and video aesthetics for me. Some games do certain genders better than others, and that's what I tend to play.

Wing

male playing a female (but I play both)

btw one is a khajiit so not really a "sex object" as people claim. though I have no doubt those people exist, also lets not pretend this is relegated to men only. I have a mother and two sisters and they love making sexy women (two of them play BDO, yes my mom plays BDO) its led to some weird conversations you never thought would happen. but I digress, women like making sexy women and dressing them sexy (stores like Victoria's Secret do exist)

ill get looks reasons out of the way first:

-the female shape: is more interesting then male (not just T&A though obviously those are bigger) they have a more interesting figure with more interesting curves causing more interesting movement and design. males are very square and lack the more interesting figure of females.

-running animation: I know its a common excuse to watch a girl butt over a male, but in real life and every game running is different. biologically women have larger hind ends (humans in general do as we don't have tails so our bum makes up for it) and this causes a difference. now in games the male and female animations for walking and running are usually different. in ESO's case I HATE the male run animation SO MUCH, to the point that I cannot play male characters, I just hate it. I have tried so many times and am just like "nope still hate it" I have seen this same complaint once again from women as well.

-dress up: all clothes men can wear women can wear and look just as cool, the same cannot be said in reverse. the amount of clothes and options that are available and look good on female characters far out weigh those for males. seriously go through the store and costumes and just be even a little bit reasonable and you will see how skewed it is. its like this in most games.

I think I got most of the cosmetic out of the way.

-mental disassociation: when I play male characters (especially human ones) I tend to imprint on them, as we have some basic things in common. so I find I have an easier time forming some sort of character personality if we lack commonalities. for instance in D&D if im trying to play for instance a low int / wis character I will more heavily lean on monster races like lizardmen / bugbears / etc. as that is far more easy to get into how that might act, its actually very hard to sit down and play a normal human and try to act dumb. same thing behind female characters, its easier to RP the characters personality or motivations because of the differences between character and self.

-stereotypes: against males. . .yup (they exist, we just don't really care about them) just as females in RPG's are sex dolls, Men all have to look like Kratos or Conan the barbarian, be stoic fighters, die for everyone else, etc. standing in the back, being a small wood elf, using a bow. . .very not manly. being in the front, being a massive nord, using a huge axe? very manly! In this case there are just far more archetypes that I can play successfully as a female then as a male. not only that I can still perform the more manly roles as a female character and actually be comparatively more badass then a male character.

to highlight this point, if you watch something like Vikings, that have a lot of male and female characters fighting. do the female characters not seem more badass? everyone expects the men to throw down and die. but when you see women throw down its extra badass, and when they die it hits harder.

im done now. I would like to end this with im a 6,1 male that weighs around 150-160 and works out every day. im perfectly fine with my sexuality and have a good understanding of people and life. I have no problem playing anything really and could care less what other people play as long as they are having fun. if you want to be the dude and in the scantly clad wood elf chick, rock on. if you want to be the huge orc guy in the pink wedding dress, power to ya.

lygerseye

leeux wrote: »

For me it boils down to four reasons:

1. It's a character and not me, and I repeat: It's a character and not me some people don't seem to grasp this simple idea.
2. I like watching a strong female perform feats of heroism and get things done, since males doing that are ultra super common in all other forms of media, video games it's what's left for that
3. I connect better with a female character than a male character
4. Aesthetics: I like the female body form more than the male body form (eyecandy-wise) that's why I get annoyed at costumes that deform the body

This. Word for word.

I made a male character once. He’s still level 3. Maybe I’ll try a male Necromancer... Nah! Already have some good female names picked out.

tactx

So most people are saying they choose a female character, and dress up with lipstick and dresses with girly names and such because they would rather look like a girl than a guy in game... Even though many pretend they're female until they get on Discord for "immersion" purposes. Got it