On my primary World of Warcraft (WoW) server, I have several high-level characters on the Alliance faction -- all male. Every now and then I get sick of guild drama or the game's snail-like progression through the high level armor and weapon set upgrades, and I head over to another server where I have some Horde characters. I think of this other server as my own personal Bizarro World, where I make totally different character choices than I would on my Alliance server. As such, most of my Horde characters are female -- not for any other reason than wanting to make different choices so that I can see parts of the game that I've never seen before. That mission was easily accomplished; the entire social aspect of WoW is completely different between male and female characters. Here are a few of the things I've discovered about playing a female character in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

Traditional gender roles bleed into the virtual world

Among the World of Warcraft player classes that can be healers, players unanimously assume that if you are female, you are a healer. If you're male, you're generally assumed to be a tank (you take all the damage and focus enemy attacks on yourself) or DPS (an abbreviation for Damage Per Second, meaning you do most of the damage). There is a sense of surprise when you announce that you, a female paladin, are in fact a tank or DPS. Even after you've made that clear, you'll probably still be expected to heal a 5-person group, even if there are male characters more qualified to heal than you are. People just tend to assume that a girl cannot do as much damage as a guy, and that your primary strengths as a female involve caring for others.

The good news is, if you actually are a healer, the male characters feel a much stronger urge to protect you from enemy attacks. This has an overall positive effect on group dynamics, because all 4 other players should protect the healer with their lives -- it's the healer that is keeping everyone from dying. One of the things that frustrates me about my main Alliance character -- a healer-spec shaman -- is that your teammates tend not to notice that you're being attacked until you're dead or you scream at them to protect you. My shaman is not only male, but kind of ugly too -- nobody you'd want to impress, I suppose.

You can fit through doors

Some races are taller than others. Gnomes are the shortest and can fit through any door without any trouble. Draenei and Tauren are the tallest of the races, and can't fit through some openings (like the stable side door in Arathi Basin). While on a mount, these races are even taller, and can't fit through most doors in major cities, which forces you to dismount before you can go inside. Obviously this is annoying. Female Draenei and Tauren, however, are just a little bit shorter than their male counterparts, and can usually fit through the same doors that males cannot, while mounted. This may sound like a trivial problem, but to some people it is a really big deal -- so much so that some people have vigorously petitioned the WoW developers to allow them to switch genders on their Draenei and Tauren characters.

You get free stuff

Just standing around in a major city, it's quite possible that someone might walk up and give you something valuable. I was in the Silvermoon City auction house once, when a male character sent me a whisper asking if I liked 2-handed swords. Since I obviously had one equipped, it was more or less a rhetorical question. "Yeah, they're okay," I replied. The character responded by opening a trade window and giving me a good 2-handed sword close to my level, with a pretty decent enchantment on it.

Oddly, the character that gave me that sword did not seem to expect anything in return. He didn't ask for payment, bother me with personal questions, or follow me around like a lost puppy.

In dungeons, if a female character asks to take particularly good loot, male characters won't usually argue with her at all, even if they really want it for themselves.

Everyone wants to group with you

No I will *not* be your fairy princess, and put that back in its sheath...

Whether I'm looking for a 5-person dungeon group, or running around the outside world on quests, people are constantly inviting me to groups. At first I thought they were spammers, because group/party chat channels are a common way to send gold spam to players, so I usually declined the invitations. But then I'd get messages from the people who invited me asking me why I didn't want to group with them for a certain quest or whatever else they were doing.

The positive side to this is that it's much easier to do group quests. On my Alliance server, I have characters who have had group quests in their quest logs for months, unable to find other people who will help to complete them. On my female Horde characters, it's never a problem to find help, as long as the other players can see me. In some cases, a female-sounding name is good enough to merit an invitation.

You are the center of attention

In party, raid, battleground, and guild chat channels, conversation always flows to and around the female members. People are always commenting on what you are or are not doing, or are telling you jokes, offering support, or asking if you need help. Being a female character in World of Warcraft is like being a D-list celebrity in the real world.

Of course, when you screw up, everyone sees it because you're the center of attention. But since all of the male characters want to be on your good side, people rarely say anything other than words of support and encouragement. One time I was waiting for an auction delivery to go through in Undercity, so I thought it would be funny if, while I waited, I laid down in one of the coffins near the mailbox. A couple of male characters made a show of doing various mournful emotes at me as they came to the mailbox.

Being the center of attention can also make you feel a sense of guilt or shame, since being a male in real life, I am deceiving other players in the game. I'm not actually claiming to be female, though -- it's just a cartoon character in an online game -- but I do generally allow other people to assume that I am who my toon looks like.

Nothing infuriates a man like a woman laughing at his ineptitude

I have a female Blood Elf hunter character that I really enjoy playing in player-vs-player (PvP) battlegrounds. As any WoW player knows, hunters absolutely destroy in battlegrounds. If you're dominating the kill list as a female player, male players really get upset and tend to spend the rest of the match focusing on killing you. If you're in a world PvP situation and you kill a male player and laugh at him, the gloves come off and the fury is truly unleashed.

Maybe this is part of the traditional male and female roles point I made above -- that women aren't supposed to do more damage or be more physically powerful than men. It might also be that the female Blood Elf laugh emote sound is unusually derisive and evokes an elevated emotional response in male players. No matter what the reason is, the fact of the matter is that most men get really pissed off when a woman laughs at them, even moreso if said woman has just beaten him in a video game.

Men are creepy

Most of the points I've made so far are generally positive things, at least from a female character's frame of reference. But there's a dark side, too. I've had several people ask me how old I am and where I live. A lot of male characters follow me around, and stand close to me when I stop moving, presumably so they can get a closer look at my toon. Some have even asked me if I would take my armor off (characters are equipped with bikini-style undergarments, so you can't be totally naked, but you can certainly reveal more if you unequip your gear).

Isn't there enough porn on the Web to satisfy these men? Furthermore, do they think I actually look like my character toon? I mean, all of the characters in WoW are smokin' hot -- even the rotting undead female characters are thin and have have nice boobs, even if there are green exposed rib bones below them. Reality says, however, that most women do not look like this in real life, no matter where you live. Not only am I male, but for all these online guys who hit on my toon know, I could be some fat, hairy, slob. Honestly, why risk it?

Boys are petulant

Recently I was in a 4-person group for Ragefire Chasm. Just as we were running toward the instance gate, a Tauren druid who had been waiting nearby sent me a whisper, asking if he could join my group. I wasn't the group leader, so I told him to send a whisper to the leader to ask him. He repeated his question, and I clarified that I was not the group leader and could not add him. Guessing that he might be too young, stupid, or drunk to figure out what to do, I mentioned in the party chat channel that this druid wanted to join our group, so the leader invited him. We figured out our group roles based on level and spec; I was the designated tank because I had the most armor and hit points.

After 4 or 5 battles, the Tauren druid sent me a whisper. I can't recall exactly what he said because at the time I did not understand what he was asking me -- it didn't make any sense, so I said, "What?" He replied by asking how old I was. When I did not reply (being a tank requires that you pay close attention to the fight), he told me that he was 16 and asked my age again. Over the next 15 minutes, he asked me my age several more times, all of which I did not reply to. At the same time, he kept attacking enemies when the rest of us weren't ready, which caused the healer and I to work harder to keep him alive and get the attackers off of him. When we got to the first dungeon boss, I began re-issuing magic buffs for the other party members to prepare us for the battle, when suddenly, in true Leeroy Jenkins style, the druid went charging forward into the boss. "Stay back!" he exclaimed heroically, apparently trying to prove his worth by getting creamed by an elite monster. We leaped into action to save him, and ended up pulling through without any serious trouble. As we rested to regain our health and mana, our 16 year-old hero asked me one more time how old I was. This time I put him on my ignore list, figuring that he'd get the hint without a confrontation. Soon after, he left the party and logged out. All I saw were the other 3 party members asking what happened. I told them that he'd been repeatedly asking me my age, and because of that, I'd put him on ignore. The group healer told me that the druid left because he said he didn't want to be in a party that hated him. We all had a good laugh about it, then easily finished the dungeon without him.

If any parents are reading this, please take my advice: Do not teach your children that being annoying and repeatedly making demands will get them what they want. Make "no" mean "no," -- not "no" meaning "ask me 50 times and I will give up and say yes just so you'll stop bothering me." The rest of us human beings, who are forced to interact with your unruly brat, will be ever grateful.

Is being female right for you?

I'm sure I've made female MMORPG characters sound like a good option to you, but it's not all it's cracked up to be. Your guy friends will certainly tease you about it, for one. And for every free item you get and group you find, some high school boy or creepy old man annoys or bothers you about personal details. I have not yet had a real-life female unload a bunch of girl talk on me yet, but I'm sure that given enough time, it will happen. And what will I do when I get to the maximum level and am more or less forced to use voice chat to participate in raids? I guess I'll have to come clean about my gender at some point, if I'm going to raid with a guild. It's not that big a deal, though -- I've played the game with a lot of guys who had female characters, and nobody really cares so long as you don't try to role-play a different gender. After all, you are not an Orc, Tauren, Troll, Draenei, Undead, Elf, Gnome, or Dwarf anyway, so in essence you're already creating a character that is clearly not representative of your real life appearance and persona. If you're going to choose a different race, why is it such a stretch to choose a different gender? Creating a female character when you're male in real life doesn't mean you're confused about your gender or sexuality any more than creating an Orc means that you're confused about your race.

Playing a girl character in a computer role-playing game is not remotely a new concept; Roberta Williams thought of it back in the 1980s when she developed King's Quest 4: The Perils of Rosella. In a brief incarnation of the first Warcraft-like MMORPG, Quest For Glory V Online, one of the three character choices was Elsa von Spielberg, a female warrior (that game never made it out of beta; it's a shame, considering how World of Warcraft-like it was, and predating the latter by several years). The majority of the Final Fantasy games have had main characters who were female.

World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs are not virtual hook-up services -- they're not Second Life -- they're adventure games. The point of playing is to virtually destroy the virtual forces of evil, not to find virtual love with someone you've never met. At the core of the issue, this really is just an online game and it should have no bearing on your real life activity, so roll whatever character race, class, and gender you think will be the most fun to play.

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Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.