Why I Play a Male Gnome

"Why do you play opposite your gender?" was the question of the day yesterday at Massively, and since it's one I've been asked many, many times by both men and women since I started playing WoW, I figured I'd address it here.

I'm distinctly not an RPer (I loved Ego's comparison of roleplaying to pumpkin pie, and feel much the same way about both the pie and the pastime), but I do like playing a toon that appears to have some personality.

When I created my first character, I envisioned him as young blood-and-guts loving dwarf setting out into the wilds with a faithful wolf at his side. (Please ignore the fact that the wolf ran away ten minutes later. I've already gone over my shortfalls as a hunter.)

When I rolled my current main, I was looking to try something new and different, less guns and grinding and skinning animals in the woods, and more... well, wizard-y.

"I wonder if I can make a mage that looks like Gandalf?" I thought. A quick perusal of the male human options eliminated that possibility due to lack of proper beards. "Well... what about a really short Gandalf?" And thus my mage was born.

I don't exclusively play male characters ― my shadow priest is female ― but I am pretty particular about them, which has led to me rolling a lot more male characters than the average girl. My guild has a lot of other women in it, and with basically no exceptions they all play female characters. One thing I hear a lot from girl gamers is that they roll same-gender toons because a) they want to identify with their character, or b) the male options are all ugly.

I can sort of understand the first reason, although the lack of true kick-ass female role models in my childhood reading (The Girl Who Owned a City aside) made me eminently able to identify with boys from an early age. Even today, I find guys much more... well, straight-forward. (They don't do crazy things like invite each other to go to the bathroom, for one thing.)

Making small talk with the average guy is easy for me. With girls, I feel expected to care about all kinds of social niceties to a degree that feels fake, if that makes sense. So when I look at some of the female models in WoW, I'm not moved by some kind of kindred "I'm a girl, you're a girl" spirit. Instead, I catch myself thinking how I'd probably find them really annoying in real life.

(Thankfully, this doesn't apply to girl gamers. Most of them are pretty awesome, my blogging colleagues included.)

Oh, and as for the argument that Blizzard made all the female models pretty and the male models ugly? I present to you Exhibit A, the settings that came up at random when I rolled a level 1 female human last week:


Purple eyes, a nose ring, angry eyebrows, and a scowl to send every kobold in the area running for cover. I rest my case.