I never said that was my opinion. I made two male Shepards, and one female.

I made more male Hawkes than female Hawkes.

I was merely bringing up a possible argument, because it is fairly common for people to like female VAs more than male VAs. But, still, no competition for Wes Johnson.

"Living in a world with Wes Johnson Guards almost makes you wish for an arrest."

I can't be bothered to chose a female, except in ME2, better voice acting , but then again I only had 1 FemShep while I have 4 MaleShep .
In DA2 I only played as Female Hawke once, Don't really like her voice, I prefer Male Hawke's voice way more.

In WoW, Again I only chose male characters, but that was because female characters just look like they are about to break with all that armor on, male characters look way more threatening and awesome in endgame gear.

I RP, but I only RP as males, more in common with them, also, Eyecandy.

.

Honestly, I can't particularly "identify" with the male characters in most videogames either - they're much more athletic, or witty, or hulking, or brave, or (etc, etc, etc) than I am. The whole swaggering macho jerkass toughguy thing that 90% of male characters in games are, has pretty much no connection.... I've never been that kind of person, never wanted to be a fratguy, or a jock, or a monosyllabic neanderthal.

So yeah - I don't really "identify" with the female characters I play. But I don't "identify" with the male characters either. I don't do the "immersion" or "first person is seeing through MY eyes" thing - I just play games with the fancy dress-up actionfigures they give us. :shrug:

I sorry I ass'u'me'd.

And I think the fact goes that men are not meant to look (pretty) for the most part. Not talking society wise. Women are meant to be the more appealing six. Oddly as mammals we are the males who do not have some sort of flashy kind of attraction feature (granted looks can apply to that). The fact that there are more women then men in the world also points to nature and how male mammals usually have more than one mate. Looking better on a female side would help the ranking among other females. Obviously this is my personal speculation and we are not grunting cavemen (well.. mostly).

Anyhow it comes down to which gender is more Aesthetically pleasing, it tends to be women being said by most everyone I know. Male, Female, Straight, Etc it seems to not matter, most women agree other women are pretty and men just have a different quality. I am pretty much non-biased so I prefer to be my own gender do to the fact I play as the character, even in the back of my mind and it's easier to relate to/immerse into a character which shares my gender.

Edit: I have no clue where my space travels took me for a second there..

i play as both, just depends on wat character i am going for that time around

Don't writers pretty much do it all the time with even less?

This brings up another point. I find it a bit odd that Skyrim society is so completely without common gender roles, even to the extent of guards seeming to have a high percentage of women, if not actually 50% women. Yes, I know this isn't medieval Earth, it's fantasy, but as I said elsewhere, it's a fantasy world that draws from the mythology and folklore of ancient and medieval Earth - so the very idea that the soldiery will be as much female as male is a bit absurd. Ditto with work that has traditionally been extremely male-dominated, like blacksmithing. In Tamriel it's all gender-neutral, and that's just odd. In a world without artificial powered machinery that relies on animal and human power to do work, heavier work will be done by the men. That started all the way millennia ago when all of mankind were hunter-gatherers. The women gathered wild fruits and vegetables and nuts and I suppose sometimes found things like honey and birds' eggs, while the men went off to spear some honking big mammoth or wild horse or boar or buffalo for food, because the men are on average considerably stronger than the women, and going to kill a one-ton animal with a pointy stick is something that might well require some brute strength. It continued with the spread of agriculture; women do tons and tons of work on farms, but in a day where you had to hitch a heavy plow to a (possibly stubborn) draft animal like a horse or donkey or ox, the man's strength would be an advantage, causing some division of labor.

And soldiering in a time when your ability to use a heavy-pull bow or heft a heavy sword or axe and cleave a skull would not at all be work where 50% of the workers were women. If a thousand men went to fight a similarly equipped, trained and led force of 500 men and 500 women, the thousand men would likely crush the mixed-gender force.

So in short, while of course the player should be perfectly free to make a female sword-swinging warrior running around cleaving bandit skulls, it feels rather forced when you see that Tamrielian society seems to be that way. Like Demonhoopa said, it would make more sense and possibly be more rewarding for some if, when they created a female warrior-type, the men around them hooted and hollered a little bit and gave them the old "You sure do look cute all dressed up like you think you're a warrior, sugarpants. Why don't you put that sword down and come sit on my lap?" Then the player could give 'em a good punch in the nose. Perfect opportunity for a brawl right there, wouldn't you say? But no, instead we have a society where apparently women do all the same things men do, despite the fact that pre-industrial societies simply don't work that way and never have, and basically can't.

Ha ha. May be true to some degree. But I think first person just looks stupid. I live my life in first person and that crap in the video games is NOT what it looks like. Two verical swords bouncing up and down on the screen? I look down and can't see my legs? The magic is even better, your spell hand sitting ther like some prop suffering from a bizarre rigor morits.

Yeah, I just can't do it. Plus I can't see my female nord's a$$. Ha ha ha. Kidding.......I think

I find it easier playing with a female character all day..

Men look better than women, so I usually always play as a guy.

^^THIS^^

I also play as a male, with my actual name and I'm always around females and this char is my main, but yeah I tend to play with female chars a lot

and If as a male you don't find that reason valid or don't react to the "pixels/poligons" of the female model, then I got bad news for you hehehe

2 reasons first people see women as weak and only good to look at, so i play a female and kick their ass. second i was just like everyone else a big burly muscle bound man swinging a 2 handed wep then figured if im gonna look at somthings ass all day i prefer a womens...... on side note you CAN rp a female just most think six when they do, others see opportunity for more scenarios.

Well, don't misinterpret what I mean. I don't mean that they "identify" in any sort of personal sense; I don't "relate to" my Nord warrior, because there's nothing there really to relate to. What I meant by "identify" was that people refer to that character as "me" in the game in the same way they would refer to their car and driver as "me" in a driving game. I.e., if somebody in the driving game runs their car off the track, the player would say "that @%*#(#$ drove me off the road". Similarly, if I am playing Skyrim and a dragon is constantly killing my character and a nearby person watching me play the game said "You look irritated" I would as shorthand say "Yeah, this dragon is handing my ass to me over and over again" rather than "this dragon is handing my character's ass to him". That's all I mean by "identify with", not any sort of relating to their experiences.

I always play characters the same six I am, I do not understand why people choose to play as the opposite six, it has no appeal to me. I actually avoid games where I am forced to play as the other six, I find it hard to `identify′ with as Gram put it.

I also do not buy the `because of the view′ answer which is often used, a character is to play as not to ogle at for hours on end. I barely look at my character, even in third person view (Which is rarely) I am too busy playing the game.

Still, it is not wrong and people can do as they wish, it should not matter what people prefer to play as.

STANDING OVATION my friend. Exactly!

One of my favorite parts in ME2 was when a Mercenary said to Femshep "strippers quarters are that way honey".

I couldn't agree with you more.

I have yet to make one on this game. The reason I did it in the past was to play from a different perspective. People treat you differently in the game world.

Plus I created a story for this nord woman who was a princess(maybe high kings daughter or something) from skyrim who was kidnapped and was brought to cyrodill and imprisoned. Short version, she ended the oblivion threat then departed for home. Maybe I'll bring her back sometime soon.

I second that.

Playing a male or a female character should not a mere question of cosmetics. I'd have loved to have to punch a few whistling smartasses. :lmao: And, yeah : this is a grim burly society, right. Gender neutrality there, I don't know. Not what you expect.

I don't know. Were they afraid that the game should have been deemed misogynistic ? But what if gender inequality, or misogyny *does* make more sense in the game ?

A few months back we had http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1190227-1st-person-vs-3rd-person-and-male-vs-female/ poll and thread on this very issue. The poll results were interesting, particularly the correlation between gender and preferred perspective.

I have two male characters and two female - the two latter (a sneaky archer and a cloth wearing mage) were mostly chosen for aesthetic reasons. The archer for instance is the only character I've played almost exclusively in 3rd person view.

As for roleplaying a character of a different gender than my own - I'm not. I'm a controlling a character on my screen, not pretending to be her - or him for that matter in the case of the males.
I also play (as in control a virtual character) FemShep in ME - although in that case it's mainly for the voice rather than the looks (I'm a svcker for a sixy female voice).

Well, I'm not saying the game needs to be inundated with misogyny any more than it should be saturated with in-your-face racism on the parts of the characters - I'm just saying that even people who aren't misogynist would consider a woman with a sword and armor to be a bit of an anomaly, for the same reasons it was an anomaly in our own past.

But racism itself brings up another point. After all, Oblivion for the most part seemed a little excessively racially cosmopolitan, so to speak. Yes, I understand that big cities even in medieval Europe could be rather cosmopolitan, but Cyrodil in Oblivion seemed excessively so. Skyrim seems to have a bit more ofa plausible mix, to me. Skyrim is mostly human, and mostly Nord, with a healthy sprinkling of other human ethnicities, especially Imperials/Cyrodilians, but also with the occasional Breton and Redguard. Then there are the Dunmer, who seem to be more common than the other nonhumans because of their mass migration into Skyrim years ago, then there seem to be somewhat smaller numbers of Bosmer and Altmer, and (as far as I can tell) very few Khajit or Argonians. Far better than trying to have them exist in equal numbers in Skyrim and coming up with some tortured rationalization for how this came to be.

So if we're going to accept that Skyrim society is not "equal" in terms of ethnic representation in the population, why should we pretend that Tamrielian society lacks gender roles?

Bull****. I can RP with my character just fine, and so can thousands of other players of this series.

Now, Bethesda could do a much better job giving us better tools for role-play, yes, but to say that it's impossible simply because you don't do it is, again, bull****.



Congratulations, you remembered some Latin, no doubt from other Internet arguments where that term was leveled at you. In spite of your attempt to distract us from the muck you crawled out of, however, the substance of your statements still reveal you as nothing but a troglodyte.

Your argument against my statements that you are claiming other people can't role-play simply because you can't role-play are proven true by your statements. Your argument is still nothing but that nobody can see women as anything but a six object simply because you see women only as a six object.

What really sets you apart, though, is you use a comic strip drawn as a joke as an expression of "what you really feel" completely without irony. That's Poe's Law material, right there. Yes, that's really what we need in the game community: Someone who calls people who enjoy playing as argonians or can say they are "hot" is a freak to be shunned.

I mentioned Furries and whatnot as a joke.

I will take the blame, I lol'd at some of the comments here.

You know nothing about history.

You don't understand why the gender divisions formed in our society.

Just go back to your cave.

fixed your post, OP, you're welcome

I have a female Nord as my second character because I had a male Orc as my first. I like to see what, if any, the game makes based on six/race. Other than that, I play males because ofthe archetypical big burly warrior.