Role Playing
In class on Thursday I started a female orc character on a role-playing server with the intention of trying on different hats and roleplaying gender and personality types. After about two hours of gaming, and trying to get people started in something that was closely resembling "in character" dialogue, I gave up. Luckily, my primary character (Elivira, a dwarf priest) is female, and that has given me many opportunities to play with people's expectations and gauge their responses. I will sometimes even intentionally present myself as a woman in order to gauge people's responses (and you'd be surprised how many people will think you're a woman if you just add a "!" to the end of each sentence... girls, fight the stereotype!).

The mixture of dialogue in the Roleplaying server was ultimately what turned me off. In the same two minute span that someone wished me "safe travels in my journeys", the same person started dancing and someone else told him to "get down, MC Warhammer!". Whenever I attempted to stumble through guttural or olde english, to try to get into character, the other person seemed unfazed by my difference in speech. One example:

Me: "Will you do me the honor of battle?"
*duel begins, and I win*
Him (her?): "Can u heal? Wat quest r u on?"

I had also chosen a warrior female, something that kind of contradicted my attempts to pass myself off as an adult female gamer; instead, I probably appeared to be a 13 year old n00b who didn't know enough to avoid the warrior class like the plague.

With Elivira, I often get people making comments about my gender without even having to actively engage them in conversation. Whenever I seek out a group to do an elite mission, it is only a matter of time that someone makes a comment about the attractiveness of female dwarves. For a long time, the standard statement would be something like "dude, dwarf chicks are ugly", but recently I've had a couple of people comment that dwarf chicks aren't too bad looking. For one quest in particular, the guy I had teamed with took an active interest in figuring out my gender.

"So, Elivira, are you a he or a she?"
"What do you think? ;)" (notice the excellent roleplaying of mine)
"I'm picturing a short little fat girl myself..."
*after a somewhat stunned pause* "Well, as long as I keep healing you, what do you care?"
"Touche."

While I would not have offered an assumption in quite such an insensitive way, his guess that I was a female player was not surprising. In my opinion, the dwarf and night elf characters are excellent options for the female gamer. I don't profess to know anything about the female mind (I only learned a week ago that telling a girl that she looks tired is a capital offense), but it seems to me that dwarves and elves in the game give female gamers an opportunity to maintain their femininity without giving into the pressures placed on women to be beautiful (IE the oversexed supermodel human female). If a girl was interested in playing as someone of her own gender, these two characters give them a chance to be female and attractive in a non-mainstream kind of way (and I happen to think my dwarf is quite cute, thank you very much).

Since I did not get very far in this roleplaying assignment, and had instead been playing with roleplaying with my primary character over several weeks, I didn't learn too much over the weekend that I hadn't already been discovering. The biggest lesson to learn is that there's no way to know if someone is male or female, or their age, just by briefly talking with them. For a week I quested with a friend of my roommate without realizing that "she" (a human female priest) was actually a she... shorthand conversation in RPGs is rather asexual and sometimes difficult to decipher. Unless you are in a guild and conversing with the people there on a regular basis, it is difficult to identify gender from "what quest are you on?". Unfortunately, more often than not, I assume that everyone around me is male, which is a form of sexism I didn't intend to inherit with the game. Since video games have the reputation as being a male dominated medium, and most of the people I have run into are male, somewhere along the line I began to assume that everyone was male. Like the real world, the virtual world of Warcraft is seemingly dominated by men. And unlike the real world, but even scarier, even the women you meet are likely to be men.

I'm one of them.