Comments on: Don’t wanna be a boy

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 20:14:33 +0000

All I can say is the floor of your cutting room must be a really interesting place. :)

By: Esther

Esther — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:42:49 +0000

Hehe, caught by my own cutting room floor! I did have a section on this, but although there are modules where you do need certain characters to be adopted, it was too difficult for me to prove/explain, whereas the game example were all concrete examples. In tabletop, characters are usually generated in a more freeform manner; simply because you can be a 7ft wolf person and get away with it! Of course the game master also assumes multiple identities of all sorts of different people throughout the game. From personal experience, I played a very long tabletop campaign for several years where two of the men were female characters, and a separate one where I was male. Similarly, I can also remember people playing asexual and gay characters. Sadly in the end however, there just wasn’t enough room for this, which usually needs a whole raft of further explaination added to it…

E x

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:12:45 +0000

That’s a really good point that I hadn’t thought of. I spent loads of time playing tabletop RPGs as a teenager and although I don’t think I ever played a female character, some of my male friends did, and I don’t remember thinking it was strange. This does link to what Esther was saying about online RPGs: gender is just one of several choices you can make about your character, along with race and class. In tabletop there’s also alignment, which is likely to have a bigger effect on how you play the character than gender.

With RPGs there tends to be more identification between player and character. The boundary between player and avatar is maybe not so fuzzy in 2D 3rd person computer games. Did players generally think of the witch in Cauldron as themselves, or just a thing on the screen?

By: Brett

Brett — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:54:34 +0000

Valkyrie needs food … badly! That game sucked up my twenty-cent pieces like no other.

I can’t think of many games where you could play a female character, which probably says more about my predilection back then for shoot ‘em ups and wargames than anything else! But it seems to me that a more relevant precursor to MMORPGs, which Esther doesn’t seem to mention (based on: hasty inspection) is simply the good old tabletop RPG. (It’s role-playing, for one thing, so there’s the imagination aspect that you might not get while manipulating 16×16 sprites on a CRT; more importantly, a character’s gender was a matter of choice.) I’d often play female characters (though I’m not sure if they predominated), and thinking back, I think it was teenaged hormones … ie, if I was going to be spending a fair bit of time visualising another person in my head, why not make it an attractive female? For that matter, I often still do this when playing CRPGs. Which would all to seem to fit in with Esther’s findings.