I have. Claimed to be anyway; it was an all-female pug except for me, as I recall.
The only multiplayer game I play is Team Fortress 2, and girls that reveal themselves on public servers (by voice) are not terribly common.
However, one server I play on generally has relaxed game-oriented chat, but whenever this one lass comes in, she’ll start talking about mundane details in her life, including her oh-so-fascinating job as a pizza restaurant manager. And surprisingly, everyone else lets her just vent for 20-30 minutes at a time about such things as bad policy decisions her boss made, or how this one customer was so rude today. The other players even make token murmurs of sympathy as she goes on and on. I somehow doubt a guy would receive similar treatment, so I guess the lesson I’m taking away from this is: if you don’t have a Y chromosome, feel free to use online games as your own personal soapbox for issues even your friends are probably sick of?
(Re. City of Heroes)
I’ve been told the game actually begins after that but… whenever I play it for a few months, I barely seem to be able to leave the character-maker. And I didn’t even like playing dress-up with my dolls, it’s like I revert to the 7yo I never was!
On the other hand, on City of Heroes there’s the fairly well known Sister Flame, presently about 8 years old I believe. She started learning to read by watching Daddy play, and then started playing herself on his second account when she was five. There’s a cute thread on the CoH forums where he talks about it all.
Dawwwwwwwwwwww.
I don’t doubt that there are young teen, tween, or prepubescent girls who play WoW–I just haven’t met any of them, while I have met the occasional boy in the 10-16 range (the youngest being the son of a guildie).
I generally do not. In MMOs, sure - you usually use a mic anyway to be competitive, and you tend to hang around with the same people. I do nearly always play male characters, though, because I like to.
In things like Team Fortress 2, hell no. If I’m off mic, I don’t need a bunch of guys asking me to “prove” my vagina-possessing status. I’m concentrating on objectives, bitches. Well, and achievements.
The vast majority of people who have encountered me in multiplayer games would have no idea what my gender is. I do speak up when people say stuff like “no girls play TF2”, but they usually don’t believe me anyway.
From a male perspective, when gender is unknown, I will generally refer to the player by the gender of their toon. If I don’t know the gender of the toon, which isn’t terribly uncommon since I usually play zoomed out pretty far, I simply assume male. If it bothers someone, they can correct me, otherwise, I don’t care at all what gender someone is, as long as they can play.
Interestingly enough, I do know several guys who play mostly or exclusively female characters and, when asked, their reasoning is “if I’m going to stare at someone’s butt for hours on end, it might as well be a girl’s.”
And, because someone else will anyway, obligatory xkcd link: xkcd: Pix Plz
People tend to assume I’m female about 80% of the time. The other 20% it’s male and generally in pugs. My guild knows I’m female since I’m one of the two GMs.
I don’t correct people if I get called by my toon’s gender - hell, I call people by their toon gender unless I know straight out what they want to class themselves as.
My toons skew slightly more female than male, counting every server.
If I were female and good, I would do the same thing. Why not take advantage of people who think girls can’t play well? They’d probably be enemies, anyways. At least, until she thoroughly schools them.
That’s what I do. Of course, that works a lot better in CoH than WoW.
Oh, believe me, guys do that too. That’s the reason I keep reupping once every several months: making costumes.