Player/Character Gender in Video Gaming

The Game Room
1

Quantic Foundry ran a survey of 2,956 gamers and found that 29% of men prefer to play as a female character, if given the option. Conversely, only 9% of women prefer to play as male characters. Curiously, men who prefer a FC skew a couple years older than men who prefer a MC but we’re only talking a median age of 26.2 vs 24.7 so hardly a generational difference.

The most commonly stated reason for a man preferring a FC is along the lines of “If I’m going to look at a butt for 30+ hours, I want to look at a woman butt” but the survey team isn’t sure if that’s the actual reason or if men are simply giving the most masculine, accepted reason for choosing to play as a FC. From personal experience, that’s by and far the most common answer when this question comes up on forums or subreddits. I’ll admit that I find this reasoning amusing in games like The Division 2 where everyone’s butt looks like someone dumped a sack of potatoes into your jeans.

Personally, as a cisgender heterosexual man who is also an unabashed female character player, I think that for me it falls along three general non-butt-related reasons:

  1. Women characters in games tend to have more/better cosmetic options and I enjoy the “dress up” part of many games such as Red Dead Online, The Division and various MMORPGs. Men often just have stacked armor options that cover the body whereas women character models tend to have cosmetics that keep the body form rather than “hulk of armor and gear”.
  2. I feel like I enjoy the “combat-helpless to badass” arc of your Connor/Ripley types more than the “badass to greater badass” arc of many male action heroes. Granted, the Kick Ass Fighting Female is hardly breaking new narrative ground these days but maybe, as someone who was never athletically inclined (or interested), I find the female arc more relatable.
  3. In games that divide stats/roles by character, the female characters tend to have the in-game stat attributes that best match my play style: fast/light attacks, dodge abilities, stealth, speed, and support abilities such as heals/buffs. If there’s 3+ character options and one is a woman, she’s usually the sniper or assassin type or else a medic. Even in games where characters all have the same stats/abilities, I think I’m inclined to pick a female character skin because I’m used to picking that option.

All that said, I don’t have any issues with playing as male characters in games where that’s the only option or in games where I just want to try that play style (“Hrm, let me try the Heavy Gunner dude…”). In games where you pick a gender and have multiple character slots, I tend to go with MC as my second choice or for a second play through. Non-video games but in TTRPGs, I tend to switch from character to character unless a specific concept jumps into my head.

Anyway, I just found the numbers interesting and made me self-reflect on my own selections. It’s more common than I would have guessed. Oh, and 60% of FCs in online games are played by men. Which made me wonder about another often given reason: FCs get treated better in games, given more gifts, etc. Granted, for a woman player that probably comes with a steady stream of harassment that a male player brushes off.

2

I used to play Nexon Combat Arms and the female characters were harder to hit (for the enemy, being thinner and smaller,) and much more agile.

I have heard of male players deliberately pretending to be female to catfish gifts or whatnot out of other men; it seems quite common indeed.

3

I don’t do a lot of video gaming, but i play RPGs and some simple video games. I identify as a cis women, but I’m fairly butch, and would likely identify as non-binary if i were 20.

When the gender is 100% appearances, and has no other impact, like picking a “Mii”, i tend to select something that kinda looks like me. That’s usually a female character, but because my dress style is androgenous and i almost never wear skirts, i sometimes pick a male avatar just to get the pants. :wink:

In the RPG I’m playing now, I’m playing a male, and the females in the party are played by guys. I have no special explanations for why any of us picked our characters, including me.

Like @Jophiel , i prefer the sniper or medic role to the tank role, so i often pick the female in that kind of choice.

4

I’m part of the group that uses the first excuse mentioned in the OP, but that’s not the only reason. As brought up in said post, the male avatars are generally built like meat mountains (yes, there are exceptions, but they are exceptions for a reason) - which is fine if you’re making a meaty tank or warrior style, but looks plain dumb if you’re playing a caster or rogue class.
Especially wizards/priest roles, where you are constantly looking at what is effectively a linebacker in a robe or dress. My rule from WoW onwards was that if it was a cloth wearing class (which is generally in 90% robes), I was making it female. It is just much more pleasing in proportions. Since I find the healing classes to be more fun in group play than dps (and I hate tanking), about 80% of my avatars ended up female.
There is a converse as well, and EverQuest and WoW are just as responsible for it. If I was making the rare (for me) plate wearing class, it was always male. Because those two games (much less so these days but still) had a very, VERY bad tendency to make the same armour on a female into a literal ‘breastplate’ or bikini. It was plain dumb and sucked me right out of any immersion just as a linebacker in a dress did.

5

Most games that offer a choice between male and female (or other) characters have only two differences between males and females:

  1. Romantic options.
  2. Appearance and voice acting.

Occasionally an NPC might react differently for non-romantic reasons. For instance, a female Shepard will get disrespected for her gender once in Mass Effect 2 by a misogynistic jerk. (It wasn’t particularly plot-relevant. Interspecies racism came up a lot, by contrast, and that was plot-relevant.)

So the whole “third party seductress” thing actually makes sense.

6

That holds true for RPG style games. Combat/fighting games often have individual characters with distinct stats and abilities and there’s a definitive “type” that usually gets applied to female characters

7

I think I first saw that as a joke in a web comic called PvP more than 15 years ago. When given a choice, I tend to favor male characters. If it’s the type of game that might warrant a reply I’ll pick a female character the second time around just to see if it makes any difference. Though my first playthroughs tend to be in good guy mode which means many of my female characters are kind of mean.

In the last Star Wars MMORPG, players were able to select a thin, “normal,” muscular, or fat body type for their characters. The male fat character was shaped like a potato so of course I selected that one, named him Blimpy, and eventually got the point where Darth Blimpy was running around the world. But the female “fat” characters just looked all curvy and what the kids today might call “thicc.” I always thought that was amusing.

I honestly can’t think of any game where the female characters start out any less competent or powerful than their male counterparts. If the game has an arc of helpless to badass it’s probably not dependent on the gender of your character.

8

True. I meant more as a mental framing device than an in-game plot device. I found that story more interesting and thus find it projected onto my character as more interesting even if the game itself doesn’t reflect it. Although I remember my FO4 character started out as a lawyer (woman) versus the male option of a soldier. Not that it had any mechanical effect on game play.

A friend of mine said that he usually chose male characters because he saw them as a self-insert and get more invested in the game when playing as “himself”. I thought that was valid and somewhat interesting since I approach every game as “The story of X” and never think of it as myself in the game.

9

So, I got curious enough to check. In the game I’m currently playing the most, gender has no effect whatsoever on gameplay: Any character type can use any (highly-customizable) body model. At most, there are a few instances of NPC dialog that differ depending on your gender, but the majority even of those are just changing pronouns or the like.

I’ve created 27 characters total. Out of those, 13 are male, another I think is male, but I’m not sure how reproduction works for either of es species, 9 are female, and four are nonbinary (two robots, a golem, and a manifestation of the primal void). Of the characters I’ve played the most (long enough to get to the max level), five each are male and female (the two robots are the next closest).

Doesn’t seem like I have a strong preference. I guess I just think of some character concepts as male, and some as female.

For games with set, pre-made characters with set abilities, I basically ignore gender and other cosmetic matters entirely, and choose based on playstyle (and yes, I also tend to prefer the subtle, support/specialist style). But I haven’t been playing any games like that for a while.

10

I often played female characters in MMORPGs. The main reasons for me were that they looked less clunky moving around and generally took up less real estate on the screen. The armor choices didn’t matter too much to me since I usually wasn’t zoomed in enough to see it well. I did generally avoid skimpy armor 'cause it was distracting and made my character feel less epic. I also gave my characters obviously masculine names so that other players knew I was a male player. I think the general assumption in these games was that most female characters were played by male players anyway.

11

I’m a cis woman who always plays a woman in video games. Its because I started playing video games in an era when there usually weren’t female options. I remember how often I was delighted to get to play a woman back then, and its stuck. (And still, there are times when there is only one choice - often in the JRPG console games - and its usually a guy).

12

My go-to standards for what I’ll play are “interesting gameplay” and “interesting visuals”. So characters that radiate some kind of personality, and maybe have punk, scruffy or pragmatic elements to their appearance. Not too pragmatic in the case of modern military stuff (but I rarely do that so it scarcely matters).

I have made both a male and female character in Wildlands. Both of them were fairly cheerful-looking faces (the only exception from a long series of sour-looking sonnovaguns of both genders), and the female character got dressed up in Max Max-inspired post apocalyptic leather. The male got a powered exoskeleton and I’d just annoy my team mates by voicing out his lines as “killbot”. (Beep boop, kill bot attacking left flank, boop beep).

In GTA Online, my main character was female, with the facial expression of a happy psychopath, who wore big stonkin’ boots, shin-length cargo pants and tattoos of piranhas. She might just as easily shake your hand as bite your neck open and dance in the blood spray.

In a lot of online gaming, there’s an acronym that gets bandied about: G.I.R.L: Guy in Real Life. The usual give aways are incredibly slutty dress and behaviour. There were some extreme cases of this in APB, but describing those would cross the line of good taste and veer into the literally pornographic.

I have been hit on, and I have been sexually threatened as well, and only when I played a female character. I wasn’t even properly equipped to understand what was going on the first time it happened, and each time since I’ve found it utterly bizarre, though also really enlightening. It’s been done by people who were enraged and looking to lash out, and that’s easily done with no repercussions online. So it’s made me aware of whatever other bullshit women might have to deal with online by cowardly guys who think they can get away with it.

Anyway, a friend of mine (like myself, a cis-male who leans extraverted with a keen interest in nerd hobbies) has his own motto: “make the ass you want to chase.” I don’t get it. But reducing us to broad stereotypes, I went to university to study theoretical chemistry, and he took up electrical engineering.

I feel like I rambled pointlessly for awhile, but I’ve been avoiding doing work. Apologies. I hope something of value was found in what I just typed.

13

I don’t have a full explanation for why but when given a choice I will always pick the female model in an RPG. I think part of it is a prefer female voice acting but I do it even when it’s not a voiced game. Although when I played City of Heroes while my first character (my “Main”) was indeed female I created dozens of characters that were, female, male, robot, mutant, alien, grown in a lab etc. Etc.

14

I’m a dude, and a probably create/choose to play a female character 70-80% of the time in RPG-type games. For non-butt-related reasons, I should add.

We’re talking way back to the first Fallouts, Baldur’s Gate etc. I think I have tended to skew more female as I get older, as mentioned in the OP. Not sure why that is, exactly.

Reasons…it never boils down to stats, actual roleplay options etc. It’s probably a girl-power thing; my wife says that I have a thing for women who are a little bit scary, so maybe that factors in, haha.

The game I most enjoyed playing a female character was Division 2. I took more pleasure than I should probably admit in kitting out my 2 characters with cool outfits. The general aesthetic chosen by players seemed to be uber-tactical, black or olive-drab, bearded sunglassed dude, so it was fun (if for nobody but for me) to be running around in bright coordinated outfits.

Actually it occurred to me after playing my second character for a while that their look was pretty androgynous.

15

I am a cis male and generally play male characters because it feels more immersive for me. I don’t have anything against female characters and do play them on occasion but it’s rare. When I’ve played a female character it has been for one of three reasons:

  1. When I was really young (early 20s) I played a few female characters to “catfish” as hinted earlier. I wasn’t being sexual or anything; I had a scam where I’d make a new female character and claim in chat that I was a teenage girl who was struggling and lost and I was going to give up and maybe my brother was right that girls can’t play MMORPGs. Inevitably some player would help me out and show me things and give me stuff. I’d then drop off the stuff, swap to my main, and pick it up.

That was in EQ, 20 years ago. I’m not proud of it, it was an asshole thing to do. You could argue that I was exploiting the misogynistic idea that women need help but no, I was perpetuating it and taking advantage of people who were being kind. I sucked. I haven’t done it since then.

  1. I will sometimes make a female character to be different. If I have a number of alts I want variety. I will usually have one or two female alts if I have, say, a dozen characters.

  2. Sometimes you need a female character to play a particular role. I don’t mind making a female if that means I’m playing a class I like. This seems especially common in Asian MMOs.

Speaking of which, right now in TERA Online my main character is female. My favorite class is the “Valkyrie” and you have to be female (and originally a specific race, the “Castanic” which looks like an elf with demonic horns). Female characters in that game are extremely sexualized, and Castanics maybe worse of all; it’s like they breathe through their skin and have to be mostly naked to not suffocate or something. I have her in the most appropriate-looking armor I could find (a cosmetic skin), and instead of looking like a streetwalker she looks more like a barbarian warrior woman with a lot of skin (and some lace for some reason). Her high-heeled boots are somewhat combat-worthy.

If there was any game where I wish I wasn’t forced to be a female in a role it’s that one, because the “chain mail bikini” is the best you can hope for, the alternatives are (no exaggeration) variations of cocktail dresses or maid outfits. If the gameplay wasn’t so fun I’d not bother.

Oh well I did what I could and she’s at least fierce-looking.

16

This is true but then it is really only a skin choice.

You have a variety of characters to choose from who each have different stats. Who really cares if it is a male or female skin?

When I play fighting games like Mortal Kombat I do not care one bit if my choice is male or female. I play the character I have the best success with (or, more usually, bounce around between choices for the variety). Does anyone start a game of “Civilization” choosing a leader based on gender?

I do find the OP’s bit that “29% of men prefer to play as a female” a little weird. It may well be true. But, speaking for myself, I have no preference. I am happy to play as a female character (ala Lara Croft) or a male character. If I have a choice as I have had in Mass Effect I have played as both (nearly equal times…I never counted but close enough I think).

In short, I care about the experience. All things being equal I am happy to play as either gender.

17

22% of male gamers claim no preference. You’re even rarer than the “female character preferred” male gamers! :smiley:

I actually found it more curious that 44% are a hard “male preferred” since I assumed "I don’t care"would be the majority/plurality response.

18

I am curious how these people would respond with a little more questioning.

The first time I played “Mass Effect” I chose BroShep. Is that a preference? I have since played many times as FemShep. Is that my preference?

When I play Diablo or Mortal Kombat or Civilization am I even thinking about gender in my choice?

If I am a “male preference” gamer should playing Tomb Raider as Lara Croft bug me?

It seems likely that there are some guys who “care” about whether they are playing a male or female character. To each their own but it is kinda ridiculous. Just enjoy the game. If you (general “you”) have not played the latest Tomb Raider games because you don’t want to play a “girl” then you are missing out.

If you play only male characters in fighting games like Mortal Kombat you are really, really missing out. And how anyone would skip women in Civilization is beyond me.

The best I can say for a male player choosing a male character is it may be easier for them to feel they are the hero. They can identify with the character a bit better and it makes them feel better. Escapism is a thing…one reason to play games.

But you do you.

19

There’s a wide gulf between preferring a male character and refusing to play a female character. I care but not enough to restrict my gameplay choices.

20

I’m not sure if that was meant as a joke or not, but at least one game has literally used that as an actual canonical reason why a female character must be scantily clad.

And yeah, oversexualization of female characters is definitely a thing. Even with as many costume options as City of Heroes has, for instance, there are literally zero skirts below the knee. And one adjustment you can make is a slider for chest size, but a female model with that slider set to the minimum is still somewhere around a C cup, and the maximum is up around “Dear lord, how is she capable of standing upright with those?”.