It was a joke yes. There is no in-game explanation. This is a game where this is a mount you can ride:
https://en.tera.gameforge.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/afro.png
The aesthetics of the game are pitiful. Again, it’s only the gameplay (fast, action-based combat and interesting mechanics) that make me bother to play.
Very much this. A big difference between “I have a preference” and “I have an uncrossable red line”. I’m sure someone out there absolutely refuses to play a female character so they don’t get girl cooties but I doubt that’s the norm even among the 44%.
Good point.
I think this highlights why caring one way or another about gender in a computer game is silly.
If you are a gamer you have likely played as a female many, many times (there is no shortage of examples). Probably never thought twice about it and probably had fun.
I always assumed the “butt” comment wasn’t completely literal, but just a general statement about how it’s more fun to play a character that you like looking at.
And that is very often the reason I will choose a female character. In fact, I’m pretty sure the idea started because someone made the butt comment. And then I though “You know what? Yeah. I’d rather make the type of character I enjoy looking at.” And, well, 9/10, that character is going to be female. The main exception is if I can make a really cool version of me, but I find that much more difficult than picking designing an aesthetically pleasing female character.
I mean, I played a female character in the South Park game Stick of Truth. There are no sexually attractive body parts in that game, even on the adults. But the boys are always somewhat ugly to my tastes, and throwing in “girly” makeup and modding outfits just meant I thought my character was prettier.
That is ultimately how I wound up playing a trans girl. She was out to her friends, but had to hide who she was back at home. It even fits with the narrative to some degree: the New Kid leaves their previous town because of some incident that happened. The parents are trying to be very supportive, but they’re out of their depths. One of the boys crossdresses, and the boys don’t really care, and there’s a point in the game where you have to dress up as a girl. Plus, you find a lot of traditionally girly looks, like makeup, girly wigs, etc.
Maybe it’s just me, but when I imagine a pretty person in my head, that person always has more traditionally feminine features. The only men I consider aesthetically pleasing to look at are prettybois.
It’s hard for me to come up with a male character that I wouldn’t find more aesthetically pleasing if they were female.
I hate to say it but I was a little bummed that the gratuitous butt shots of Miranda were removed in the Mass Effect remake. Apparently someone made a mod to put the gratuitous butt shots back.
At the end of the day I’m still a guy who likes gratuitous butt shots based off of Yvonne Strahovski.
I like playing as both BroShep and FemShep in the Mass Effect series. The main difference is the romance options. I love my shy quarian girlfriend, and my hot turian boyfriend.
In Fable III I played a female character, who got quite buff, and I kept her barefoot.
My main character in Skyrim is a female khajiit. I let her wear shoes, because they have a practical armor value.
Cis woman heterosexual tomboy, if that makes any difference, checking in.
For most of the early decades I played various RP games (I date back to before computers were a thing) I usually played male characters because there wasn’t any other choice (the exception being D&D, where I usually played females when not forced to be the dungeon master because, apparently, people liked the way I did that). It wasn’t until World of Warcraft and the later Myst games where you had a choice in your player character that I started consistently playing female characters. (My first avatar choice in Myst was the very first time I had an RP character that actually looked like me. I did not realize until then what an impact that could have.)
I’m still willing to play a male character, but I’m still making up for the first 25 or so years I was a gamer I guess.
Funny - that never worked for me. Then again, I wasn’t trying for it.
I think rumors of that are overstated. It probably has been tried, but not nearly as often as people think.
Yeah. This.
I belong to an Alliance Guild in WoW that was composed entirely of female characters - we didn’t care what you were in real life, but your toon had to be female. And about 2/3 of the time the G.I.R.L. picked a “slutty” name whereas the actual W.I.R.L.s (woman in real life, dontchya know) had names less… suggestive.
The big exception to this was the guild founder/master - he was a G.I.R.L. but gave his toons names girl elf names from Tolkien.
Yeah. The big downside to all that is that we women sometimes get that treatment in meat-space as well.
Male here, who, over the past few years, has come to realize that I’m not entirely cis.
Similar to @Broomstick, I was playing tabletop RPGs like D&D for decades before trying MMOs. Even when I started playing D&D, in my late teens, several of my characters (including my primary one) were women. We did a fair amount of actual role-playing in my groups, developing backstories and relationships for our characters; I didn’t feel strange in the least about the fact that one of my female characters fell in love with a guy (played by one of my friends), got married, and had kids.
When I started playing MMOs, 7 years ago, the first one I tried was Star Wars: The Old Republic. I did, indeed, refer to the “I wanna watch a cute butt” when I picked a female for my first character there. While I was playing SWTOR, my characters (I have a severe case of alt-itis) were probably 60% female, 40% male. Now that I’m exclusively playing Final Fantasy XIV, I have two male characters, out of about 20 total characters.
I do a lot of roleplaying with friends while playing MMOs, as well, and I have discovered that I’m more comfortable roleplaying a female character. I think that roleplaying female characters in RPGs (tabletop and MMO) helped me to figure out, and become more comfortable with, my own non-binary self.
(And, the glams generally do look better on female characters than male characters in these games, IMO, too.)
In the 90’s there seemed to be a large portion of the English cross-dressing community who were in it for the same reason people were in the LARP Society for Creative Anachronism: because they liked playing dress-ups.
My grade-school kid plays as a female avatar with a man’s name. I don’t think he’s looking at butts, and I don’t think he has an understanding of game statistics: he wanted to play something interesting and ironic and stupid, and, at his age, that was playing a female avatar.
That, and in a lot of games the default point of view is always from behind your character, so you mostly will be looking at your character’s butt specifically (and back, and back of the legs, and back of the head, and…)
In other games, you play in first-person, so you hardly ever even see your own avatar (Portal being a notable exception), and so preferences for what you see wouldn’t even be relevant.
There are, of course, some games where the camera is at some fixed or semi-fixed point in the room, and so you can see your character from many different angles as they move about the room. In such a game, of course, it wouldn’t literally be the butt that’s the basis of your comparison (unless you just happen to really like butts). But I think that’s relatively rare in games.
This is usually why I (a male) more frequently select a female PC over a male PC; I don’t care to look at a muscle-bound body with a face reminiscent of Eric Stoltz in “Mask”.
I rarely play online games and even when I do I turn off any chat functions, so I’ve never had anyone make any sexist comments.
When choice first came into video games for me was Super Mario Bros. 2. And I always played as the Princess because she could float and it made getting around easier.
But for me if I can I choose females because I’d rather look at the female figure than the male. So all of my mains are female. But if I can make a male that looks like me then I will always make a secondary one of those.
In Star Wars: The Old Republic I have about 12 characters both light and dark side. All female except for one male on the dark side who I went full dark side just to have the dark side corruption visual facial effects. I don’t like the dark side corruption visual facial effects on the female avatars because I like all my ladies as pretty as the games let me make them.
In GTA V my main is a female and I tried to make her as “pretty” as possible, which in that game means as little “psychotic” and “drugged-out” looking as possible. She still looks a little psychotic and drugged-out but I work with what I have.
For me games are a bit of role play escapism, and the greatest escape is an identity as far removed from myself as possible. That means opposite gender, and nonhuman if available. I live myself every day, the last thing I want to be in a fantasy world is just more of the same old me.
Cis male, and I tend to play around 75%male, 25% female - in newer games which don’t only have stripperific skins (Skyrim, Mass Effect. Yes, I know, very broad view of “newer”, there. I’ve been gaming since The Hobbit on the ZX Spectrum.), it’s more like 50/50. Only MMO I’ve played is WoW, and that, I mostly played male.
On the other hand, my absolute favourite game of all time, Horizon: Zero Dawn, has a female protagonist and that was great by me.
Quiet in MGS V
I’ve played Lord of the Rings Online for over 8 years. (I’m male.)
My first few characters were male. Then I tried a female character and found the following differences:
So all my characters are now female. 
I assume there are two reasons for this:
Male here. I’m generally single player only so don’t have any experience with MMORPGs. I have a slight preference for playing female characters. I’m pretty sure it’s not because I like looking at the arse end of a female more than a male character, I’m normally too busy looking at what is happening around my character to pay much attention to my character’s body. I think it’s more that I feel very little affinity with a massively built, military jock dude type. With a female character being portrayed as a bit softer it feels a more relatable to a normal human being.
Interesting thing about LOTR Online – if you play Hobbit, Elf, or Human you can pick your gender. but if you pick Dwarf, it is just Dwarf. That’s how they deal with ambiguous (at least to non-Dwarves) gender distinction in Middle Earth.
Brian
I played a female dwarf weaponsmith in a textMUD. This was shortly after the extended version of LOTR was available – with Aragorn explaining to Eowyn why they get confused with the males – and a relatively new player and she were in a bar.
I had a custom description (there being no graphics) and doubtless after a LOOK he snarked, “Huh. I’d heard dwarven women had beards.”
“Oh, I have a beard. It’s just lower down.”
I’m a male (cishet) gamer, 51YO, and when it comes to story-and-character-driven games (versus protagonist-agnostic puzzlers like The Witness or pure mechanical games like the Forza racers), I’m in the group of players with a preference for playing a female character where the game offers the choice. If I like the game, I will usually go back and try it the other way to see if and how the experience changes, but I’ll invariably take the female option the first time around.
Mass Effect has been named several times in the thread, so I’ll start with that. I’ve played through the whole trilogy multiple times with a dozen different characters. Maybe a quarter of my Shepards are male, just to explore the different relationship stories (in fact I’m doing a play now specifically for the purpose of romancing Jack, which I’ve never done before), but the rest are Femsheps. Somehow, the Mass Effect story just “works” better for me when Shepard is a woman. In the Dragon Age series, by contrast, my play history is more like half and half, though I still enjoy the female Inquisitor more. And I deliberately seek out games which limit you to a female protagonist, like Horizon Zero Dawn and the Tomb Raider series, because the publishers still seem to think “girl only!” is a risk and in a free market I regard my money as a vote.
I’m fine to play a game with a male avatar if it’s done well, but it rarely is, for a couple of reasons.
First, the conventional male character is so frequently boring and samey-same. There are many, many more kinds of people in the world than “weary, grizzled combat veteran,” and yet it seems the majority of games gravitate to the tight-lipped, square-jawed beefboy with a five-o-clock shadow and a bad attitude. The overt hypermasculinization in the gaming world is distracting and deeply annoying to me. For example, I really enjoyed the art direction and the clever combat mechanics in the recent God of War relaunch, but I also couldn’t restrain a patronizing chuckle every time Kratos reared back and punched through the lid of a treasure chest. Seriously dude? You can’t just open it like a normal person?
The flip side of the hyper-macho hero, of course, is the gross over-sexualization of the female characters in games that purport to cater to the male player. The ridiculously revealing costuming and the bizarrely narrow characterizations of women in many games frequently border on, and many times tip all the way over into, outright misogyny. Like, I know lots of people swear by the worldbuilding and the narrative depth of the Witcher games, but I look at the women in that game, the way they’re dressed, the way they walk and move, the limited roles they’re expected to play in the story, and I just can’t take it seriously enough to get past the first dozen hours or so. “But keep going,” I’m told, “the women become so much more than that.” My response is, if they really are so much more, then they should have been more from the beginning, you don’t need to grab my attention with ludicrous cleavage and waggling hips to convince me I should be interested in them as people. It’s counter-productive and stupid, and I don’t play like that.
Both of these are symptomatic, in my view, of game designers pandering to their audience’s fantasies and insecurities. I’m not wired like that, and never have been. I don’t need a steroidal avatar standing astride dewy conquests to project myself into the narrative. That shit bugs the crap out of me. And because I know I can avoid or minimize it by choosing games with a female option, that’s how I roll. It’s not perfect, of course; my least favorite moments in Mass Effect are the occasional indulgences in male gaze, as when we notice Miranda and Ashley are both going into combat wearing ridiculous high heels, or the whole design of EDI’s platform. (And don’t get me started on Morrigan’s outfits in Dragon Age.) But they’re infrequent enough to be overlooked, against everything else the series does so well.
As far as my reasons, my motivation for this preference, none of the three alternative explanations in the OP really fits me. I don’t pick a female character because she’s cute and I want to appreciate her visually (i.e. ogle her), and I don’t dress her in skimpy outfits if offered (e.g. I never put Aloy in those belly-baring Carja silks). I also don’t examine the gameplay mechanics to see whether the statistical attributes of the female avatar align to my style, in terms of apparent agility or other relative advantages. The second option is perhaps the closest, in that it describes a woman coming into her power, but for me it’s not about going from “combat-helpless to badass,” either.
No, what I like in a story-and-character-based game is the vicarious thrill of acting as a female hero who self-actualizes and makes a difference in the world. My favorite bits of Dragon Age Inquisition are not the battle sequences, choosing an optimal team and managing its positioning and talent use to overcome enemies in combat, though that is certainly enjoyable. No, the parts of that game I love most are where my Inquisitor strides into the halls of power, facing up to mighty lords and church officials, making demands and shaping history. Every time I play, I look forward most to the gala at the Winter Palace, where I search for unexplored threads of investigation and political revelation and seeking new ways to balance the resulting alliances. And somehow, for me, it just feels more significant and meaningful if the person navigating these complexities and going toe-to-toe with these aristocratic powers is a woman.
My favorite recent game is Last of Us Part 2. I know it’s been hugely divisive, but personally the game is an absolute home run for me. It’s not perfect, it has a few minor flaws in terms of structure and design, but it delivers absolutely everything I look for in a story-and-character-driven game. No, it’s not the “rise of a hero” escapism I mentioned above; instead, the game convinces me that these are real people making real choices for real reasons in a real world. Some commenters have dismissed this as merely a deconstruction of vengeance, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Rather, I think, in its unconventional structure, it’s a conscious exploration of the limitations of empathy, and it uses the player’s desire to project into a character-avatar as a way of challenging the player to explore their own personal empathic boundaries. It is thrilling to me that the game asks me to see the world through the eyes of two completely distinct women as they barrel blindly toward their inevitable confrontation. If either or both of them were men, it would work totally differently, and, in my view, probably not as well. I’m not sure why I feel this way, but I do feel it, strongly.
This is much, much longer than I intended it to be when I started. It might be clear, this is something I’ve thought about a lot, and something I believe is worth thinking about, deeply. Games are, I think, too easily dismissed as superficial diversions. If it’s Angry Birds or another time-filler, then sure, that’s fair. But in their more complex incarnations, there’s something really, really interesting about how we extend our emotional point of view into this virtual character and identify with their situation and their struggles, and I strongly believe that video games qualify, and should be evaluated, as a new art form. What we want out of a game, the way we play it, can be tantamount to a psychological X-ray, deeply revealing of who we are and how we prefer to interact with our surroundings. And it starts with the question of who we want to “be” when we play.
Maybe…I’m not so sure.
I agree video games can be a lot more than an idle diversion. And it may say something about your psyche when choosing a character.
Personally, I don’t give it a lot of thought. I am fine playing as a male or a female or a dwarf or whatever.
Some may give it a lot more thought and care a lot more (which is fine too).