My least favorites were Questor and Merlin. Questor was fast, which was great for levels with wide-open spaces, but his speed was a liability in later levels. Merlin was fine for magic, but useless for basic combat. (Good to have as a second player, though, so he could take out generators and Death easily with magic). Both had fast shots but weak shot power.
That left Thyra and Thor as my characters of choice for basic play; Thyra had better armor than Thor, and Thor had even slower shot speed than her. Hand-to-hand wasn’t my thing-- even Thor took damage from doing it. So I chose Valkyrie, which was usually open even when a crowd was around the game since most arcade players refused to be a girl.
Really, though, the only character I hated was Questor.
I’m female, and I tend to play female characters. I just could never connect with a male character, though I’ve tried.
Some games only have one avatar, and it’s inevitably male. Unless there’s a in-depth storyline about that one specific character (like Half Life or Thief), I think there should be a choice of male/female.
It’s even worse when they give you a choice of characters & races, but no females. WTH? You go through all the work to make a green-skinned 4-armed alien but you can’t be bothered to make a fookin’ female?
I’m male, and typical go for female or semi/nonhuman avatars over male. Females have the “looks pretty” factor going for them. And males are, well, boring; I’m a male after all. My main game is City of Heroes/Villains at the moment, and my characters are roughly 2/3rds female I think, with the majority of the rest being cyborgs, lizard people, dog people, robots, zombies and so on. Only a few of my male CoX characters could dress normally and walk down a city street without drawing stares for things like horns, cyborg parts or spikes in the eye sockets.
Basically, I play games because they aren’t real, to try something different than I’m used to in the real world.
In MMOs, it depends more on my mood. My main in WoW is female, but when I was playing GW I decided to go male. People tend to assume everyone is male, regardless of avatar gender, so I figured I’d mess with them. Hey, if they’re going to assume I’m guy anyways…
I usually prefer the look of females more, but I think any future MMO characters will be male as payback for all the shims running around.
I don’t really care what the gender of my avatar is. In most RPGs where I’m playing as Character X instead of my own customizable dude, what I’m looking for is strong storytelling and character development.
In MMORPGs, I tend to prefer to play males, because then I get less players hitting on me. (Idiots. How do you even know I’m a female in real life? Or why do you think it’s a good idea to start hitting on me once I admit that I am indeed a chick? :mad:
Then again, I don’t play MMORPGs in general because I don’t really like interacting with other people.)
Posts so far have been pretty consistent with what I read, although I note some of you didn’t say if you were a man or woman so I can’t be sure how you fit in.
The material I was reading said that research in this area and anecdotal evidence indicated that a lot of male gamers didn’t care a whole lot about the sex of their avatar. If it made no difference with regard to gameplay then most men would go for a male avatar, but a fair number would choose a female either just for fun or because they preferred to look at a(n attractive) female character. In games where certain character classes could only have avatars of one sex (e.g. the warrior is a man and the magic user is a woman), or when there was a selection of characters with different abilities like in a fighting game, men made their decision based primarily on gameplay. If they wanted to play a particular class or wanted a character with a certain fighting style then they’d pick that one whether the avatar was male or female.
On the other hand, female gamers generally expressed a strong preference for female avatars. In games where the player had no choice of character this wasn’t as big of a deal, but some women would avoid a game altogether if there were no female avatars. If a choice was available and it made no difference with regard to gameplay, women would almost always choose a female avatar. If only certain types of characters could have female avatars then many women would feel “stuck” with the female magic user or Chun Li even if they would have preferred to play a character with different abilities. Women who did decide based on gameplay would still say that they’d have liked the game better if they could have chosen a female avatar.
As for me, I’m a pretty typical woman in this regard. In a game where there’s no choice of character anyway then I don’t really care if the protagonist is male or female, but if it makes no difference to the story then I think players should have a choice. If the player gets to choose their character then want a female avatar and I don’t want my choice of character types limited because of this. I can understand that in the '80s and early '90s it wasn’t always practical to provide this much choice in a game, but I don’t think there’s any excuse for it nowadays.
The material I was reading didn’t directly make this point, but from a purely commercial standpoint it seems strange that the game industry has so often failed to provide much choice of female avatars when it seems that both male and female gamers like them or at least aren’t put off by them.
For solitaire play I preferred Thor - I aimed to make his armour as irrelevant as possible, his shot power rocked even though his shot speed was slow, whereas Thyra’s slow 1-power shots basically could not get the job done. Merlin’s shot power was second only to Thor’s - 50:50 single or double - but I seemed to do better with Thor. I once found a machine where I managed to make one credit last about six hours, the only time I ever made the high-score board. Could last about as long as I liked on the port for the Amstrad CPC464 tho.
I was a bit surprised when I discovered that the avatar in Portal is female, and apparently without a male option. There’s almost no backstory, and the only place where it’s relevant at all is at one point in the late game “Hey, you’re that lady from the tests”.
It’s a single-player first-person, so ordinarily you wouldn’t have a chance to see the avatar at all, but due to Portal’s unique gameplay, you not irregularly end up getting a view of yourself off in the distance or to the side.
I’m female, and I invariably choose a male avatar in MMORPGs. I play WoW, and all of my characters (that I’ve leveled past 10 or so) are male. All of my major pen-and-paper RPG characters have been male as well. I just feel more comfortable playing a guy–in many ways I identify more with male heroes (always did in books, too) and also I don’t have to put up with the crap that many female characters (whether played by a man or a woman) have to deal with.
Male, and I usually play about 60/40 female characters.
I may be a little unusual in that I don’t care much about peak performance of my characters, but about exploring all the options. In City of Heroes, I have at least one character of every power set; in trying out World of Warcraft (I’m still in the first free 30 days) I’ve got 1 of each race both male and female.
More than 50% of the time I play females, but strangely, I find that the look of the character does make a difference. In COH I started three different Fire Tankers — two female and one male. The female ones got deleted, the male one didn’t. He just … fits the Tanker role better — ride to the rescue, save the day, take a beating.
Although I don’t play a lot of games these days and rarely bother with new ones, I have been happy to see that there are many more games now that have a female protagonist. I guess Tomb Raider helped to change things, although I believe it was King’s Quest IV that first broke that barrier.
I’m male and I usually play a male character unless the females are pretty hot and it’s a 3rd person game. My first character in WoW was a female night elf. All my other characters were male. I subscribe to the “I spend a lot of time looking at the character, I want something pleasant to look at” theory.
I also tried a female character in Fable 2 but I was disappointed in the overall lack of hotness. They get fat easily if you eat food at all (I pretty much starved her and only used potions to regain HP), and your appearance also changes based on how good or evil you act. I was playing an evil character so she quickly got cracked out grey skin with glowing veins and horns. Neat but not very hot. Also a lot of the armor/clothing models look very frumpy on the female Fable 2 character, while in WoW, most of the armor is designed to highlight the female models’ ample assets.
I’ve generally suspected that they were running under the assumption that their mostly-male customer base would regard female characters as some sort of threat to their masculinity. I’ve noticed that the entertainment industry in general seems to regard it’s customers as bigoted idiots, and bends over backwards to please their usually imagined attitudes. And then when political pressure gets them to include the first female this or the first black that or the first interracial whatever, the great majority of customers turn out not to care.
Actually, there was an Alice in Wonderland game published in 1985 (King’s Quest IV is from 1988). It wouldn’t surprise if there are earlier examples, too.
To actually address the topic: I’m male, and I don’t care much. If there are gameplay differences, I base on that, if there are multiple characters with storyline differences I’ll likely play through all of them. Lacking any such factors I go with whoever I enjoy looking at most (which tends to be females, yes).
When it comes to choosing avatars for actually representing myself to other people (as in online games, or avatars on message boards) I strongly prefer gender neutral avatars (and names).
I wonder if this could be a holdover from the days when games were considered to be mostly for children? I know that in both publishing and the movie industry it’s generally believed that little girls are often willing to read/watch things about boys as long as the story is otherwise appealing to them, but that little boys do NOT want to read/watch things about girls. So if the intended audience was going to be more boys than girls anyway (as is the case with most games even today) then I can understand early game companies not bothering with creating two different avatars.
I do remember that even in the '80s games that was supposed to be at all educational would usually have both male and female avatars. I guess the expected audience for these was more evenly split between boys and girls, and if they were hoping to appeal to teachers and parents the game companies may have been more concerned about looking sexist.
You’d think the companies would have a clue by now when it comes to games geared at teens and adults, though. Especially since people who work FOR game companies presumably like to play games themselves. There was a funny anecdote in one of the books I was reading, about a company that had a game (I don’t think it said which one) in playtesting that featured a choice of male or female avatar. After a while one of the higher ups realized that nearly all the playtesters were using only the female avatar. When asked, the women said they were more comfortable with the female avatar and the men said they’d rather look at the prettier avatar. The company had to start requiring that equal time be given to the male avatar so they could be sure all aspects of the game were working properly.
It seems like there’s still a lot of room for improvement in games when it comes to including black playable characters. I’m not up on many recent games, but my impression is that it’s far more common to have a white (or Asian) female avatar available than a black one of either sex. I can think of a lot of games with black supporting characters, but aside from fighting games (and not even always then) there don’t seem to be all that many chances to play as a black character.
*I mean black humans. Dark-skinned elves may actually be more common in fantasy games than humans who appear to be of African descent.
My mom was an elementary-school teacher (mostly second grade), and thus had a wide variety of children’s books in her room. She said that by far the most popular books she had, among male and female students alike, were the Addy stories, from the American Girl series. It may be true that TV/publishing executives think that boys won’t read books about girls, but the reality seems to be different.
My only avatar-related gaming is online poker. I do tend to notice when someone has a female avatar, but it has more to do with utter romantic desperation than any strategic calculation.
Male here, and I’ll play either gender, for a variety of reasons, a lot mentioned in this thread already:
If it’s a game with a lot of third-person camera, I might choose whichever looks “better.” Sometimes this is purely for the “if I’m gonna look at an ass for hours on end, make it a shapely female ass” reason; other times one genders’ model will look much better than the other. (I picked a male character in Titan Quest partially because the female models look kinda ugly IMO).
In a very story-heavy game, I’ll feel that one gender fits more than the other. I felt the PC in KOTOR1 should’ve been female, and preferred that the PC in KOTOR2 was male. (I was a bit disappointed when it turned out to canonically be the reverse, but at least one stayed a female - it’s usually been LucasArt’s policies to make all gender-chooseable PCs male). (FWIW, I also felt the Exile should’ve been black. Though this might’ve been more due to the reason above - all the other male choices were fugly).
Sometimes I’ll choose a female just because I don’t think there are enough females in that world, or that role. I made my PC in Dungeon Siege II a female warrior, for example. (And no chainmail bikinkis either).
Yeah, I don’t know what research has actually been done in this area, but it seems to be pretty well accepted among those who produce children’s entertainment.
