Research on MMORPG players and their characters

[MadBlueWinnie]

When I was younger, I would always make an idealised version of myself. A Male Human, with the best looks (although that wasn't always possible back then with the graphical quality), and with qualities and skills that I myself wanted, etc etc.

However when I grew into my young adult years, I began to use games as a more of an escapism and fantasy, rather than for idealism and empowerment.

I make characters usually biased more toward Female, but gender is not the main focus. The focus is making a completely unique character and living in their shoes and mind, almost to the point of role playing (although I do not role play in strict MMO sense). I will ALWAYS pick a strange or foreign species if available, for example in Guild Wars 2, I play a female Azura and a male Charr, with a male Sylvari side character.

The reason for making these choices in Gender, Species and Skills is that I don't want to be me in a game. I'm me in real life everyday, games are where I can be someone or something else.



As a side note, I do not use any of my female characters to extort RL males. This practice, to me at least, feels wrong and dishonest.

 

[Nepukadnezzar]

I usually play female (human) avatars although I am a guy. Maybe it is chauvinistic, don't judge me.
(Insert the old "If I stare at an ass the whole time, it might as well be a fine one")
It is odd, but I only do so in games where the females are not over-sexualised (GW2, TSW) or where I at least have the ability to dress them with an armor that may be called an armor.
In games like TERA I prefer otherworldly characters like Aman, which are male (not by default, I choose male characters), but do not look like humans. I think chainmail bikinis are ridiculous and the male human counterparts in those games look like Ken or Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Sounds weird now that I write it ...

EDIT: If I play games that make a difference in gender (I think fallout does this sometimes) I still prefer male characters, I get an uncanny feeling otherwise. In games where both genders have the same storyline I do not care about this detail.

 

[Hagi]

Self-identifying with your MMO character is just plain bad in my opinion.

If done outside RPing it just leads to silly awkward situations where stupid assumptions are made about players based on their character.

Inside RPing it generally leads to godmodding and drama since the players that do that are incapable of distinguishing between actions against their character and against themselves.

 

[Mycroft Holmes]

Several of these questions are really horribly written.

"I dislike interacting with over-sexualized characters."

Is very subjective. People have complained that Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite is oversexualized. You should give a baseline scale of 5-10 different pictures of characters you think have been oversexualized. From least sexualized to most and say 'at what point do you think sexualization has done to far.'

"Other players refer to me as they would refer to my character when interacting with me."

Is pretty vague. Do you mean "other players call me by my character name instead of my real name when interacting with me?" Or do you mean they literally act like I am Mycroft Holmes; like they are super aggressive roleplayers that refuse to break immersion?

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

I make multiple characters.

Welp, there goes that survey.

I'm doing it anyway, but I'm not sure "I agree" and "I completely agree" is the clearest distinction to make.

EDIT: This survey is ridiculous for people who have a variety of characters and who do not exclusively either roleplay or not.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Mmm some of the questions is something I don't really know (which genders talked to me or prefer to talked to the most seeing how when I chat to a player, I don't always get to see his/ her character as I am not stupid to bluntly asked their gender when communicating with them. It would of been better if you had added an "unkown"/ "N/A" or "indifferent" or something netural for some of the questions.

Anyway, I tend to make a human character that is somewhat resemble me well when it come to ethnic apperance and apperance (Asain guy) and sometime the same hairsytle but not all the time.

Also no I don't communicate as if I was that character (the whole rp thing) and no, I talked as the real me even when using the game character that resemble me the most (it wouldn't be rp using that character seeing how that character is in the game world is not the real world so that character wouldn't know about PC and etc. Sorry if that didn't make sense to read).

I just like to visual that character is "me" in the game but again to a certain extent (I'm fully aware that I am nowhere that fit nor handsome looking in the game!).

As for class or race, I just picked the one I liked the most and depending on the available character slots, I tend to make all classes/ races if possible that is if I liked the game enough to make them all (I bought three more character slots in Guild Wars 2 just to played all 8 professions which mean I had to played a few races twice since there are 5 races in the game).

Granted if the character slots are limited, I tend to just choose an median weight melee character as I prefer to use a blace over range and magic but I don't usually like the bulky and beefy looking warriors in the game most of the time.

 

[freaper]

Interesting questions, but the pre-defined answers are... Odd. You really need a "Don't know/care." answer.
"Q. I prefer communicating with characters of the opposite gender."
^^This question, in particular, needs a "Wtf does the gender of another character matter."

It does to prepubescent boys, particularly in Runescape.

OT: Although I've played many MMO's only Guild Wars (1) ever stuck with me. There my main character was female.
I have to say the survey was rather short, hope it helped you, though.

 

[DementedSheep]

You need a neutral option especially for theses ones:

"I prefer interacting with player characters of my gender/ of the opposite gender." I don't care, I barely even notice what gender their character is.

"Players who's character's gender is the opposite gender to my character tend to interact with me." What? I don't really think its any more than that of players with the same gender.

I'm a hetro female, I mostly play female characters. I admit if a person has a badly over sexualized character I think less of them (unless its an mmo where you can't really avoid that). I tend to give characters backgrounds and proper names (a habit I got into with GW1) but I don't RP them. If I'm talking to another player I'm talking to them as me not as whatever character I'm playing.

"Other players refer to me as they would refer to my character when interacting with me."
I assume you mean people who actually know me and don't just have my characters name to refer to me as? cause in that case no, they use my name.