By Heiko Haupt Oct 15, 2006, 6:03 GMT
Langen, Germany - As online gaming has grown into a mass phenomenon through the wildly successful World of Warcraft title, countless people have started using fantasy worlds as a kind of second home. Some get thrills from conjuring up mighty fireballs or communicating with dragons and becomes part of the daily routine.
Others draw out their fantasies in another direction: their genders. Beyond cheating, few things seem to draw a quicker reaction than male gamers circulating in the virtual landscape using female characters.
Roughly seven million people play World of Warcraft, reports Blizzard, the game's maker. Innumerable others play other role playing games online as well. When a player first joins any of these worlds, he or she creates a character through which to pursue the adventures. But that character need not necessarily be of the same gender as the person controlling the mouse and keyboard:
'It's believed that roughly 30 per cent of all female game characters are played by men,' says Professor Juergen Fritz from the Technical University of Cologne, which is researching the effect of virtual worlds, among other topics.
Yet something that draws a mere shrug from some people is a major problem for others. This was exemplified by the recent multi-day discussion in the official German World of Warcraft forum on the topic 'Why do so many men take on female characters?' The heated discussion eventually attracted hundreds of posts.
'We all think differently, so there are entirely individual reasons why someone would join a game,' says Michael Roeder, spokesman for gamemaker Atari's Frankfurt offices. Prof. Fritz notes that online role-playing games in particular open up a variety of possibilities:
'Humans have very broad visions of which they might want to be, yet many people cannot them in real life,' Roeder says. So one person comes upon the idea of slashing through the virtual world as an evil orc, while another becomes a diminutive elf chanting magic spells.
Friction is generated when these people encounter the many people who seek to make contact through the games-including with the opposite gender. 'Certain patterns emerge in us based upon the gender of the other person,' Juergen Fritz explains. 'People get confused if they don't really know any more who's standing across from them.'
'It is particularly the kind of people who try to make contact through games that can quickly become disappointed,' Michael Roeder feels. Prof. Fritz therefore encourages players to maintain a positive attitude about the entire affair: 'What's important is the ability to see the gaming world as precisely that.' | Tanja Hohmann, spokeswoman for the game publisher Vivendi Universal Games, points to another factor: namely that titles like World of Warcraft or Everquest2 are called role-playing games. 'Ultimately the key thing about a role-playing game is that I slip into a role.'
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