It's a trap!
According to GamePolitics.com, Chinese MMORPG company Aurora Technology has begun to ban the accounts of male customers playing as female characters in their products.
The article, as always, speaks for itself, but if you’re too lazy to click the link then there are only a couple of bullet points that need reproducing here. The first is that Aurora Technology, a subsidiary of Shanda, is applying this action to their MMO King of the World and ascertains the gender of its players through the use of their webcams. According to GamePolitics’ source, this is done in order to “reign in transsexuals in games.” Significantly, there is no word of the same treatment given to female players using male characters.
This is probably a good place to point out that there seems to be some confusion on GamePolitics’ part on the relevancy of this particular story, given that the vast majority of the sources dug up on the topic seem to come from September of 2007 as opposed to 2009. The GamePolitics article does not clarify as to whether this particular action is the culmination of two years of work on AT’s part, but I have yet to see anything that makes it clear that GamePolitics believes that it has made a mistake.
Adding to the doubt studious readers should harbor is this article from Joystiq (again, published in 2007, five days after the attached date of the “editorial summary” GamePolitics is working off of), which doubts the validity of both the source for the story as well as the practicality of AT using webcams to ascertain a player’s gender. The blog post linked to in the GamePolitics article, for lack of a better term, sounds fishy as well: though it raises interesting and widely-held-to-be-true points, it also does not cite any sources for its claims and seems suspicious in its advertising itself to be posted to other blog sites.
Playing as characters of the opposite gender in online games has a long and much-looked-into history, given the percieved strangeness of the situation. If this particular presentation is any indication, the practice has existed since the earliest days of internet gaming, when MUDs (“multi-user dungeons,” essentially the precoursers to modern MMORPGs) were the only options available to individuals who wanted to play long-distance with other human beings instead of their computers. It also touches upon the reason why the act of masking your true gender online has opposition–it just feels weird to interact with an individual whose sex you cannot identify by interacting with them, even when it’s 1993 and you’re talking to a mass of letters as opposed to a three dimensional rendering of a Night Elf.
Reasons to strap on a pair of virtual high heels or experiment with wearing a mustache vary as well. According to this article, a study done on “virtual transvetism” says that women played as male characters in order to be treated more humanely by other players, as opposed to being constantly hit on by male avatars or otherwise harassed. Men playing as women say they did so in order to obtain money or weapons as gifts from other players, or because staring at a female character’s backside for hours on end was more pleasant than doing the same for a same-sex avatar. The second linked article was a bit more forgiving in this regard, as it also says that–assumingly for both male and female players– players chose to use a character of the opposite gender as a means of furthering the role playing experience and experience the game world in a different manner than they would if they played as a thinly vieled version of themselves.
Notably, the study explored by both articles says that 54 percent of the men interviewed played as women, while a staggering 70 percent of female players used male characters.
