Poll: Which gender in a game do you prefer to play as?

[acosn]

Depends on the role, but more so how good the models look.


In WoW my alliance characters are almost exclusively female, excluding gnomes and dwarves which I don't even play. Horde side? Well, it's all males except the Blood Elves. They don't have males to begin with.


And it's purely on how the characters look. The male humans and night elves just make my skin crawl. Females? Not so much. Draenei it's even cut- I can make both sexes look good. Horde females? Nuh uh.

 

[Keava]

Depends on mood. I'll usually have both male and female characters, for singleplayer and MMOs alike. My main usually be my own gender tho, but i will sooner or later make a male, especially if it's dwarf, can't not love those chubby hairy balls of rage and ale stench.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

This doesn't extend to avatars in first-person shooters and stuff though, this is RPG stuff! Like in Left 4 Dead I always pick Zoey if she's not taken, if available I use a female avatar like in CSS or whatever.

Also this extends through to like, playing as a female or male in games where it's tethered to the story, like Tomb Raider you have no choice... I feel like I've been tricked into talking about RPGs! The nerve of some people!

 

[ksn0va]

I choose female for almost all the games that allow you to choose the gender you want to play as. Been playing as dudes all my life it's boring now. Besides dressing up dudes feels gay.

 

[Buizel91]

Male usually.

Although i will do female characters occasionally when the planets align

 

[webzu]

I go female simply because if your gonna stare at something for hours on end, might as well stare at female characters

 

[the sandman]

i usually play a female, because... well, because I like females.

errr, except for L4D2, dunnow why either but guys in a zombie apocalypse somehow remind me of a monday morning at work.

yap, my boss tends to hire males. *grml*

 

[vxicepickxv]

Depends on the case.

If, say, the female characters have much better animations or something, I'll go female, but naturally I go male...

It really does depend on the case. In Oblivion, it depends on which benefits I'm trying to get because the stat-lines are different. I've played both in Fallout 3, simply because of the conversations, and the perks, and the achievements.

In MMOs, it depends on exactly what I'm playing and why. In FFXI, I played a female, simply because they don't have any male Mithra. In Neverwinter Nights, it really depends on the class. Yeah, I'm generally pretty sexist and stereotypical when it comes to how I play. I play the big dumb fighter guy, or the lithe little thief girl, or the badass chica spellcaster. I can't explain why I do this, but I do.

 

[Vrach]

On my first, usually female.

Not sure why.

^This. Although it slightly sucks when there are no lesbian relationships as I miss the romance options. God bless BioWare for choice though

 

[gellert1984]

Usually female, its sort of my lucky charm.

The first game I remember playing with a choice of lead character was Fallout I initially played as a custom male char and kept getting killed by the rats in the cave at the start. I gave up and tried playing as a custom female char and didn't die up until I reached the mariposa military base (iirc).

Played as female chars when given the choice ever since.

 

[rockyoumonkeys]

Always female, in a small part due to the "If I'm going to stare at my characters ass all day, it might as well be a nice ass."-thing.
But mostly because 95% of the times you can't choose gender your character is a male.
And You can't have Jennifer Hale voicing your main character if you pick male

Those were my original reasons anyway, nowdays I just pick female out of habit.

Pretty much that. But also I just find I enjoy some stories more if the main character is a woman.

Perfect example: Saints Row 2. With a male character, it's just another generic gang story with foul language and bad behavior. With a female character, it suddenly becomes really awesome, because she's so badass.

Sometimes it doesn't really matter, but I still end up picking female all the time anyway.

One notable exception had been Borderlands...the first time I played I picked one of the guys because I didn't understand what the point was of the woman's powers. Now I'm playing it again and I'm trying her, and she's actually not bad.

 

[Asdalan08]

I either play the guy who dresses like a girl or the girl who has the incredibly deep voice

 

[Cazza]

Don't really care. I go with withever gender is canon. If non I go what feels right with the story. If both feel right and it's a custom protagonist (Mass effect). Whatever I can edit better. I could make an intresting male Shepard but when it came to female Shepard they always looked default. so for my Mass Effect example I always went male.

 

[tahrey]

I've not clicked a poll choice for this because there's no "no preference", "depends", "alternates" or similar option. You have, basically, made the kind of application form that the genderqueer and "why does it matter?" community hate.

I'm not in the GQ camp myself, but I like playing both sides where offered, to see how it may change the story or game experience, or just for something different (nicer?) to look at as we play through. I think the craziest example being the Facebook-based game "Battle Stations" (which eventually got boring, in a massive case of They Changed It, Now It Sucks). It let you freely change your character's non-game-relevant stats, including gender, completely at will. So I flicked it back and forth at random, whenever I got tired of looking at the current avatar or wanted to see what a new classes' clothes were like on the other body (often quite a stark difference - despite this apparent nod to equality, the outfits were pretty stereotyped).

Though often it's just for eyecandy. I think I've made the point before about the lack of female characters who actually seem to be women rather than tarts or transsexuals...
(exception to all the above: various jRPGs that will at times have you forced into one character or the other (typically the guy - here's looking at you, chronotrigger and FFs 4, 5, 7-10...) out of the whole, generally mixed cast, and have reasonably believable characterisations. FF6 would probably be my main example of this?)

 

[Mathak]

As a male, if I get to choose i usually go female nowadays. First, because in almost every game where you can't choose you play a male, so choosing females evens things out a bit. Second, because male customisation usually varies from rather-ugly to really-ugly (especially back with KotOR..talk about an ugly-stick...) and you always end up looking like you could be Master Chief.

 

[NewYork_Comedian]

Well, for the character sex, I choose female.
I don't think we can yet decide the character gender... although it could make things interesting, if you made them gender dysphoric...

0_0 never thought about that before...

 

[Brutal Peanut]

I love character creators and really making a character my own, but, I find the male options are usually crap. In Mass Effect/2 I spent so much time just trying to make a passable male character that wasn't Shepard, and I just gave up.

So I just pick female, use their seemingly better options, and head out to start.

(And no, I can't just pick the characters that are given to me. So, *raspberry*)

 

[NewYork_Comedian]

Usually male the first time through (I am male), although it can vary. It often depends on what gender I was in the last major rpg I've played. I was male in Dragon Age and ME, but I played a female on my first playthrough of KOTOR. Good, good game.

Same for KOTOR, played as a female the first time, then you find out [you know what im talking about if you've played the game], and i thought a male lead would be better on my second playthrough.

 

[erbkaiser]

Francis: Yeah, of course I'm a chick. If I'm gonna be staring at an ass in tights all day, it might as well be a nice ass!
? PvP, June 1st, 2004 [http://www.pvponline.com/2004/06/01/tue-jun-01/]

I see no reason to disagree.

 

[Carnage95]

My first playthrough is always a male character. Unless it's canon that the main character is female, I go with that.

My second playthrough is either gender I guess.