Gender’s Effect on Social Identity in Games

Why would a male, given a choice want to play a female character in a game? This is a particularly interesting question in online games where a player’s avatar is the physical image that other people are interacting with when they type to you. In a very recent study 57% of the sample group said that they have gender-swapped in online games [1]. Why don’t people like playing what they really are?

Thinking about it logically, you could probably come up with a few explanations that would work. Here are two of the more popular ones:

1) “Another pragmatic reason is that in games where third-person perspective is used, men prefer to stare at a female body rather than a male body.” [2]

2) “…males and females had different reasons for gender swapping, with female gamers primarily seeking to avoid ‘unsolicited male approaches’ and male swappers finding that they are treated far better by other males.” [3]

The first explanation doesn’t explain why people who play text-based MUDs would gender swap, and since it has less to do with social identity than the others I’ll set it aside as a preference that some people happen to have.

As a player of online games I know for sure that the second explanation is true. Even from personal experience I know I’ve been nicer and more willing to help out female avatars whether I know the player behind character’s gender or not.

“I just felt like it, really. Mostly my characters are female, but I think I made my male character because I was tired of creepy guys hitting on my female characters. It’s utterly ridiculous, very annoying, and not the reason why I play the game.” [4]

This is another instance that I can reflect on from experience. When I play a female character I get asked things I would never get asked if people knew I was male. Although it doesn’t happen anymore since I’ve been playing for a long time and most people know me on my game server, I recall getting asked if I have pictures all the time; probably even a few creepy instances of guys asking if I have a webcam.

To me it’s just amusing, but real females have to deal with that constant harassment even more if they reveal that they are a female. Understandably they might want to play a male character to escape this. It’s much easier for a female to blend in as a male, because it’s very unlikely that a guy would ask a male character if he’s really a male. But females that play males get an interesting perspective too. They get the previously mentioned advantage, but at the same time they no longer get helped as easily and are more likely to experience the normal trash-talking that occurs in games where enemies can talk to each other.

I circled around it but lastly there is another possibility why males would gender swap in a game. Rather than being offended by harassment and extra attention they may enjoy it. In the Turkle paper it seemed to me like the males gender swapping in MUDs really liked exploring the world of being a female in a way that they wouldn’t feel comfortable doing outside of a game. This is likely to give the male a greater appreciation of the world females live in, however it may have a downside if the male perceives the advantages gained when they ‘become’ a female to be unfair to males.