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MMO Gamers Love Gender Swapping
Girls Who Love Boys Who Love Boys Who Love Girls Who Love....
At their best, MMO’s appeal to our sense of fantasy and escapism. They allow 110 lb. anemic social malcontents to live out their fantasies as dark elf wizards, musclebound warriors and stealthy rogue assassins. According to a study by Nottingham Trent University, most MMO players have another fantasy the games allow them to live out; gender swapping.
According to the study, 54% of male MMO gamers choose to play with female avatars in games like World of Warcraft, Lineage II and City of Heroes. The number jumps to 70% when looking at the female statistics. Why is this, you ask? Chief researcher Zaheer Hussain explains:
“It seems that women gender swap for a variety of reasons, such as to avoid unsolicited male approaches on their female characters, or because they felt male characters were treated better by other males during the course of the game”
Okay, that explains why almost ¾ of female gamers play “in drag”, but what about the men? Well, that’s pretty simple, really. MMO’s require you to spend countless hours looking at your character from the back. I don’t know about you, but if given the option between ogling Werner Stormtooth, Nordic Barbarian Lord, and Shiala Windwhisper, half-nekkid tree elf, I’m going with the latter 10 times out of 10.
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Comments
The most frequent excuse for the gender swap is because women are treated better in-game by other players, such as receiving free items or getting into a group easier. As that may be true in some cases I normally call bullshit on those players.
I was in a guild on WoW and there was this one player (female character) who would frequently cyber with the guild officers and leaders. It was later uncovered that this character was in fact a man in real life.