We (me and friends) have been discussing a lot lately about why some race/gender-combinations are badly underrepresentated in WoW (Female dwarfs pops to mind fairly quick). We have also been arguing a lot about why a lot of male players play female chars, while the opposite is very seldom seen.

My own personal theories for the first are fairly obvious - people want to play pretty races, and since a lot of female chars are played by guys they want a sexy ass to look at while playing. This leaves female tauren and dwarfs far behind. Do you think that this is true or are there other things behind this as well?

On the second question I'm at a loss, though. I am myself a female gamer, playing a female char, and the thought of playing a male char hadn't even occurred to me until someone brought up the subject. Lots of males plays female chars though. Why am I, and many girly gamers with me, so reluctant to play male characters? I would be very happy for some intelligent input on the subject.

Do you watch Coupling? I think there is a partial reply to this in the show.

The same reason why 99% of commercials have pretty young women advertising the product, and not pretty young men.

I play a female char and male player. When I created this char I wanted to have an orginal combination of class, race and gender so I could feel unique. I also made her look as ugly as possible.

I never liked it when I saw another female undead mage who also looked ugly. My feel of uniqueness dissapeared.

Those of us with any brains have long been left to wonder what the hell is up with such flagrant disproportion. 1% is far too great an amount to commit to pretty young men at the cost of the alternative.

Anyway, http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewt...hp?id=7720&p=1 gets into some of this in the later pages.

My hunter is female tauren. Only reason being that I wanted hunter to be tauren and I already had 60 male tauren druid.

I used to resort to that "I'm male and I don't want to look at a males ass for months" argument. That was before wow even existed, now I just pick race by racials and gender by what looks good. If I made rogue it would be female undead, because nothing beats ud female evisc animation. ;) Orcs always male because of /dance, etc.

I would never play my tauren warrior in instances if it wasn't for sweet sweet deviate delight :(

I have not one, but two female dwarves, and that's not counting bank alts.

A little birdie is telling me I'm weird.

Half of our guild's rogues are female orcs, I think.

dont tell anyone, but secret sources tell me that guys are more visual, as a rule, then girls. If you put a picture of a well (or better than well) proportioned lady in front of them, they will want to look at it.

It's a visual sexually driven thing.

Hypothesis:
A higher % of men who play nightelves and humans play female toons than men playing dwarves and taurens play female toons.

if it's not the case that the % of guys playing females increases with the (subjective, but w/e) beauty of the female toons in that race, then I'll be wrong. but i bet i'm right...

Also, I think only one of our female Tauren is female IRL. As compared to, I think, 3 or 4 men playing ladycows.

Maybe we're weird. Pono's a bull, though.

My main in WoW is male, but pretty much all of my alts are female and my main in EQ was female. For me it's not necessarily about wanting something nice to look at. I've never played as though I am my character. To me my character is closer to a character I'm watching in a movie, if that makes sense, and female characters can be just as 'cool' as male characters. For example, Uma Thurman's role as The Bride in Kill Bill. That character is simply badass regardless of gender and how good looking Uma Thurman is.

Dude, Uma Thurman would not rock in Kill Bill if she was fat and had one leg. The same is not necessarily true of male characters (see: OldBoy, Zatoichi, Toxic Avenger, etc)

I'm male and play a female char. For me it was more of finding a good match to the badass charname I had come up with. Oh that and of course the once overpowered racial WotF.

I didn't make my char extremly ugly though, which would have made more sense roleplaying-wise for the name. But, I'm not a horny teenage boy or something like that. In fact, undead can only be so sexy if you know what I mean. I guess I just like to be pretty.

Plus the girls I've met ingame get much more involved with their character, so picking male for them just wouldn't make sense.

I've given this some more thought and come up with a new theory:

Even if the number of gamer girls are increasing, we are still an anomaly. Being a gamernerd girl in a world filled with gamer nerds opens for lots and lots of flirting options, obviously. Hence the women playing WoW wants to show their femininity as much as possible since it draws a lot of attention.

Agreed, but how would they be differentiated from the N! "gamer nerds" playing the same female avatars?

Let me ask you this: why do magazines who are solely targetted at a female audience still have female beauties on their front page? I mean, if you'd target a male audience it makes sense, sex sells and all. But why are editors all over the world using the same options when it comes to a female audience, too?

Has anyone else, mainly hordeside people, noticed that most female gamers play Female Orc Hunters, or is that just on my server?

As a female, I actually played two male characters in EQ as my first characters. Not sure why I picked them, but I looked over the females and picked a male high elf x2 for my cleric and paladin.

It got annoying when people would make abnormally sexual jokes thinking I was a guy or say things like, Yo bro, snap me off a piece of that sweet sweet Heroism man!

Eventually because of this I swapped to a human female enchantress. But I still kept the old chars around; they were for the most part considered my sugar daddies. /laugh

You give a little to get a little. I no longer got told horrendously sexist jokes, but I did get told ones meant to entice me (sorry guys you struck out) and instead of being asked for Heroism I got Hey baby, why don't you dance over here and give me a little of that clarity, I think you know what I am saying!

In WoW all of my characters are female because I think a large portion of male characters either look retarded (Note: Male Night Elves) or have weird attack animations. (Male tauren honestly look like some fat kid playing whack-a-mole when they have a giant mallet -.-)

With that said, I consider dwarves an abomination but I have made several female tauren, undead, orcs and trolls, so I wouldn't say it's really a "pretty" thing, it just seems most of the female graphics were done much better. (This is not a surprise.)

Out of all the characters I probably like my female tauren druid or tauren hunter the best. I tried to name them appropriately cute female tauren sounding names and seemed to succeed. (Lunaberry and Juniperseed, respectively)

Why is my druid female?

Because by the time I hit 60 I had received about 250 gold worth of goodies from lamers who really believed I was female. It's all about the exploitation.

We have a female who plays a male warlock and her husband who plays a female ... weird i know :P
I personally have a mix of male and female characters, no really odd combinations though.

Heh.. My wife has a male mage that she plays -- says she likes the way robes look on the human male better.

I was surprised to discover as a class lead in my old guild that one of our male hunters was played by a female. Orc male, no less, facial hair and everything =P

I think most people ultimately play a character that has a "cool" factor to it. Thus it's not attractiveness per se (i.e. males don't play "hot" characters) but rather the association between how attractive characters are cool. As the point was made with Uma Thurman; she is cool, but a part of that comes from her looks. Most people who break this mould seem to do so because they want a character who is explicitly unique/quirky.