Rolling Pretty: Size and color and ageism in MMORPG
(Note: Unlike Mighty Ponygirl’s April 1st post, this is for real).
I have been playing RPGs and role playing games since oh, forever, (or nearly 30 years, take your pick) and have found two categories of characters that just don’t exist. Old characters, and fat characters. Male or female, for that matter. Even in World of Warcraft, where it is possible to create old looking gnomes and humans, and even dwarves, and both dwarven women and men are “stout”, these options largely go unused in favor of thin and young humans and elves. Gnomes, like that Tarutaru of FFXI, are played for “cute” and rarely for “old”. The designers of WoW specifically created a “pretty” race for the Horde in Burning Crusade because people didn’t want to play “ugly” troll and undead and orc women. In addition, though all of the MMORPG games I have played have had options for people of color, these characters also appear to be rare. The fact that the options are there, and not utilized, tells me something about my fellow role players and myself that is more than a little uncomfortable.
Back when I was a “pen and paper” role player, I always cheated on my charisma roll so that it was at least a 15 (out of 18). This was pre- “conscious feminism” on my part, and I was terribly vain, and really didn’t understand the difference between charisma and prettiness. I didn’t consider myself a racist (far from it), but the issues of race weren’t on my radar.
I valued prettiness, and youth. Then I hit thirty, and had a (second) child, in the same year. My metabolic rate slowed to a crawl, and I went from an easy to maintain and unappreciated 125 lbs to a struggling to lose and failing 175. Over the years I have stabilized at 10-15 lbs under that high weight, but despite sometimes tremendous effort on my part, I have never gotten back to my pre-pregnancy weight and only waved at it briefly from the 140 lb range. It has become a fact of my life that I am no longer easily and unworriedly thin, but am now “thick” and curvy.
FFXI had no character options for either old or fat, though it did have a dark option, complete with a “natural” short afro. Tarutaru were round, but infantilized to the point where it was impossible to identify with them as “adult” characters who were short and pudgy. Likewise Guild Wars. WoW, on the other hand, has several options for unconventional beauty. Orcs make me think of Queen Latifah with green skin. Big and muscular and absolutely stunningly beautiful. The gnomes, despite their petiteness, are grownups for the most part, and a pleasant surprise. There is even one face option which is clearly elderly. The dwarven women are unabashedly thick and curvy, just like me. Several races in WoW have options that resemble people of colorof many shades and shapes, and others are in exotic colors not found in the human spectrum, though none of the hair options could be considered culturally African American.
When I got into WoW, I went to a server where a very old friend was playing, which was not an RP server, and rolled four characters. The one I ended up with as my main was a purple- skinned and haired night elf druid named after one of my dogs. Tall, thin, beautiful, but with somewhat exotic skin and features, and a facial tattoo. The other three characters languished, I moved to another server, and made a bunch more, with a few more on scattered servers. All of my characters are female, of various shapes, sizes, colors, and ages. In my “fembot army”, I have a gnome who was specifically designed to look old and “hip” (she has short, punked out pink hair), another who looks no-nonsense and ready to rumble, two dwarves, one who looks like a little Irish maiden, and the other who looks like she might be Native American or maybe Northern African, a night elf (the original) three humans: one named Taarna who is silver haired, of course, another who looks just like I did in my pre-30 days, and one who is dark skinned, two dranei, one with dark (purplish) skin and what appear to be dreads, and the other almost ethereally white (like Nicole Kidman) with very pale bluish hair.
I learned to avoid RP servers. I got a NE hunter to 30 something once, and deleted her after I got thoroughly sick of dealing with whispered requests to “do it”. I tried with several other characters, both horde and alliance (I have tried to roll horde several times, but with no luck in finding a good group to play with, and that is one of the draws for me), and the closest to success I had was an Orc Warlock with a long red braid down her back, who I portrayed as being in her late middle age, and taking the path of the warlock because her sons had been killed in Silithus and she wanted to investigate how and why. Found a guild, they liked the story… and I stopped playing with them when I found a post on the guild forum where one of the guild members had put suggestive pictures of girls he knew in real life on the forum explicitly without their consent, and absolutely no one in the guild had a problem with it.
My observations of the characters I see in the big cities, and the results of the Census add on, are that people almost exclusively roll “pretty” characters, mostly with Caucasian features and light skin tones. Very few women roll male characters (I can’t do it, I tried), but lots of guys roll female characters. Theseare consistently very pretty, or cute. And the guys that roll “cute” are a very small minority. My dwarven females are almost alone on the server I’m on. This isn’t any kind of scientific study, and my observations are limited to three games.
Some questions for discussion: How much of this bias is developer bias, and how much user bias? Would you rather have more choices even if they’re not utilized, or do you stick to the pretty and conventional options because they fulfill some fantasy need? What do you think is really going on here?
April 7th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
When I used to play WoW I only had one character, which was an undead holy priest. I didnt take into account much with character creation like I would on a single player rpg. It was perhaps more like choosing my armour colour on Halo 2. Whatever I felt looked cool, despite being Horde because all my friends were, I would choose. I actually went for an undead male face with barely any features. No discernible eyes, and a pretty much gaunt and blank face. I didnt really care much about the character at all, especially in the looks area, as it was really little more than my puppet for competing with others. (This is all probably biased by the fact that I dont play MMO’s at the moment, and I dont play them for long when I do as I quickly get bored)
When I play single player games, its quite a different matter. Normally I just use a sort of standard blueprint for what I want in most other games, depending on how much the story drags me in. I always play young characters when given the choice. I always play slim characters, and the two main attributes I concentrate on are intelligence (because I always choose a mage) and charisma (something I always took as more of how well you communicated with others, like how persuasive you were.) And if at all possible, a Dark Elf/Drow type (something I know many D&D fans find annoying, though I cant fathom why? Not that I have ever played a PnP game, mainly just Forgotten Realms games) The last choice I cant quite understand however, as I think it just happened one time on a whim, and I took it from there.
Anyway, my thoughts on the whole thing are despite whatever society thinks people should aim for (slim, pretty, lighter skinned etc) people should have as much freedom to choose what they want for their character. When you arent playing a game with a rigid story, when players are given freedom to play in their own manner, its wrong to sell it short in any way. Give people a blank canvas to work on however they want, because I think in that kind of situation the more freedom the better. Nothing pisses me off more in games than people offering freedom to choose, and then taking it away. Like The Elder Scrolls race/gender defined attributes, or Fable’s ageing as you level up (not to mention the atrocious path that youre always stuck to).
“Would you rather have more choices even if they’re not utilized” sums up my view pretty well. I want to know that the options I dont utilise are there for others who DO want to use them, because if I can make my own character precisely how I want to, why shouldnt others be able to do exactly the same?
April 7th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
My WoW playing has dwindled down to practically zero. I’m pretty much only still giving Blizzard my money out of pure sloth at this point. I should really cancel. *sigh*
In fact, given that in actuality my native temprement leads towards being an extreme antisocial git, I’m completely the wrong audience for a MMORPG at all, and really shouldn’t subscribe to any of them. Unfortunately, it just so happens that MMORPGs have big worlds with lots of explory stuff and twiddly bits they don’t tend to put in other games very often these days. Also playing as part of a really tight and skilled group in a well designed mission/instance is the purest of pure crack. Such a pity that every bit of social activity and scheduling and commitment and being around people that leads up to being in such group I hate and despise with all my heart
My biggest problem with character creation in WoW is that my ideal character to play would probably an Orc Druid, who would start out in the current Dwaft/Gnome newbie area because she *really* likes snow, and after finishing it would teleport over to the area the Night-Elves go after they’ve gotten off their island.
Unfortunately when they made the game they put all those stupid class/race/horde/alliance restrictions in. And because WoW is the biggest thing there is, I’m betting that this sort of silliness will be the pattern for new mmorpgs coming out from here on forward *sigh*.
Randomly, did you know that female Dwarves can pick a hairstyle with a braid that *rotates* when they cast a spell? This is such a cool visual effect that every Dwarf I’ve ever made has that hairstyle. My Dwarves always look sorta Hindu Goddessy to me in their multicoloured chainmail and as such I would really appreciate a bindi option, and the sudden appearance of a many arms in animation when making combat moves.
I don’t think I’ve ever picked one of the ‘old’ faces in WoW. They look too much like they’re scowling at me on the character creation screen.
My default *human* look in all games where you get to define your look, tends toward brown skinned with grey or white hair. This also happens to be the look of the highest level WoW character I have.
All the characters in games that I ever make are female unless I have a very strong role-playing reason to make them male, or the game forces me to play a male. In other words, I once made a male character in City of Heroes, but only because the backstory I laboriously typed out in the then buggy dialog box for backstories, and it didn’t have enough space to fit it all in without extreme and cunning editing either, was stone cold brilliant when matched up with his sex, body type, name, class and battlecry — at least in my tiny mind — it just wouldn’t have been the same if he wasn’t male.
In Real Life(tm) I’m a short dumpy, white guy with a beard, who at any given party you care to throw will be the one giving off the strongest vibes of not wanting be there, whilst feeling stupidly guilty about it.
Make of all that what you will
April 8th, 2007 at 11:42 am
While everybody in Guild Wars is ridiculously stylish, there has always been the option of having dark-skinned characters; their most recent expansion is set in a North-Africa-esque world where everybody is brown or black.
In WoW, I had to wear my guild tabard all the time just so my paladin had something covering her belly.
Dark Age of Camelot, interestingly, had a lot of room for ‘unconventional’ characters; you could play a female firbolg or troll, and they definitely weren’t “prettified”.
The only game I’ve seen where it’s possible to make a genuinely fat female avatar is Second Life.
April 8th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
I’m very, very tempted to join WoW so that I can have a short, plump dwarf magic user who whips her braid around when she casts a spell.
OK, so, we have to consider the “fantasy” factor in creating alts of yourself online. Of course, we want to be strong, and fast, and smart, but since the Internet is supposed to liberate us of our appearance as well, we might as well be “pretty” too. Besides, we tell ourselves, if the hero is “healthy” they have to be thin… because you’re not going to be in good enough shape when you’re fat to be able to save the world. Except that in places that don’t have gymnasiums and vitamins and body building contests (like, say, a fantastic realm), being strong and powerful generally meant you were a little “meaty” because you weren’t trying to sculpt your body, you were trying to build muscle and strength. (Try looking at your average strength trainer sometimes — they aren’t the same guys strutting around in speedos making their pecs dance).
We undermine ourselves when we try to pretty up the characters too much–either simply by lessening our self-opinion through subtle reinforcement of who we “sometimes” are versus who we “usually are,” but in an MMO, we also reinforce the lie that beautiful, svelt women are everywhere, and that the fat, ugly ones are uncommon. So if you’re a fifteen-year-old boy playing WoW, and it’s in fact one of your primary social interactive forums, you’re surrounded by gorgeous little elves and nymphs. This becomes the social pallete in which you operate, which makes it easier to hate on women who don’t conform to the standard. Not that fat, ugly women have ever had the life of Riley out there, but if you aren’t necessarily a comeliness of 18 IRL, you’ll find it that much harder to gain the attention of men if they have a skewed impression of the general attractiveness of the population. See Why I Hate Beauty for more on that one.
I don’t really think the answer is to flood MMOs with zaftig women, because really so much of this is wrapped up in the problem of online harrassment, and women shouldn’t feel bullied into playing avatars that they don’t want just to stop people from whispering Strip Plz to them, and it’s not like the goal should be that all women online need to be harrassed, regardless of the heftiness of their avatar. I think the answer is to make sure that harrassment and quid pro quo in MMOs stops.
April 9th, 2007 at 10:19 am
My main (Nila, Serious Business, Mug’thol) is a lvl 70 human warlock and she looks vaguely Indian. Pale video game skin looks creepy to me so I always make dark characters. My other major character is a Tauren shaman. I can’t play male characters either, mostly because they are so clumsy looking. Yeah, there is some fairly blatent misogyny in WoW, but it’s called /leave general, or just stick them on ignore. That way you don’t have to suffer through Barrens chat or listen to nub guilds chatter in Karazhan.
Yeah, avoid RP servers at all costs, the main dialect there is nubtard.
BTW, Drow are annoying because of Drizzt Drourdan (or however you spell it). I always tease my husband that I’m going to make a Drow and she’s going to be a ranger and I’m going to name her Drizzeta. And then he tells me all the encounters are going to be out in the sun at noon.
April 9th, 2007 at 11:02 am
*uh oh* Okay, I’m guilty of only playing “pretty” characters (including fudging my die rolls on charisma *not below 16 - couldn’t stand not to get that bonus pt) Although I tried, once, to play a male character… a gnome or halfling or dwarf maybe named “Pun Ishment” (I made the C as a joke but he was actually a pretty kick-butt C) but I couldn’t really get the hang of playing a guy. Mostly cause I didn’t want to play a stereotype but I didn’t know anything else. As a male (oh right it was a dwarf.. a dwarf cleric *which if I remember correctly wasn’t exactly allowed in the rules we were playing by, but my older brother was the GM so I could get away with sh*t like that *grin*) dwarf, I was supposed to be a beer guzzling, womanizing warrior type… and it was hard to resist playing that because that’s what everyone expects from male dwarves right? Sigh. Heck the whole “dwarves can’t be clerics” (usually people went with monks instead, I think) rule was in-and-of-itself indicative of the fact that I was playing a C that wasn’t meant to exist… so trying to define him was difficult.. and being young without much knowledge about males in general, I didn’t really suceed.
So basically, my one attempt to play something polar opposite of me, failed (even if he was pretty kewl despite my failure), so I basically stick with what I know. Pretty & Strong women. /sigh
Though I have NO problem playing other races, species and skin-colors (be kinda hard to play other races/species if I had a problem with skin-color I would think…. then again maybe the divorce from reality would buffer…hmmm).
And I much prefer having the “option” of playing “not-conventionally-pretty&young” characters, not because I’m inclined to play them, but because… I appreciate the thought, I guess. It makes me feel… more at ease that the game designers would consider other types (though I do wish WoW offered different body shape/height/etc) I mean their idea of a beautiful body isn’t exactly the same as mine and I’d like it if my C’s didn’t all have the same body type… plus I might be more intrigued to play males, if they all didn’t basically look alike. What’s up with that? Anyone ever notice that in WoW? Same jawbones! All of them! I don’t see that problem with the females. It’s bad enough to have the same body types as every other human/bloodelf/etc, but the same facial structure too?? C’mon!
April 9th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
I’m used to playing with RPers in MMOs, so I see as wide a variety of looks as the game allows, be it Lineage II, Guild Wars, or WoW.
I’d say when it comes to game developers forcing a certain look, Lineage II was the absolute worst culprit. There were two races that didn’t conform to “conventional” beauty, the dwarves and the orcs. Dwarven females were like cute little girls, giggly and small. Dwarven males were old bearded men. I don’t even want to consider how that race procreates, because it’s just… gah.
Orcs were well toned males and females, taller and stronger than the other races, like body builders.
The rest were relatively conventional in their looks. Human caster classes were shorter and slimmer than human warrior classes, but that’s about all the variation you had.
Guild Wars allows only human characters for players, and has the same sort of restrictions, the majority of your physical variation based on what class you picked, and what height.
From a technical perspective, I can understand how limiting the body model choices of characters in an MMO makes sense. If you have a wide variety of possibilities, it uses up a lot of resources to render everyone within a player’s view. And rendering armor on only a limited number of body types is easier. Adding, like, a fat or thin body type is still severely limited, as in Neverwinter Nights, where there was only stocky or slim.
As for players themselves, how many of them actually are lithe, long-haired, beautiful women? Even the females I know will tend to pick the “pretty” ones. When they have characters they want to RP, they’ll change it up, but that doesn’t happen often.
April 9th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Some questions for discussion: How much of this bias is developer bias, and how much user bias?
Both. Even when there are a lot of options, people still tend to take slim and pale.
April 10th, 2007 at 10:55 am
This is true — it’s rare to see someone pick one of the darker skin colours for a Warcraft toon. It’s odd, though — when I’ve rolled dark-skinned humans, I got many more comments about how pretty I was.
Which RP servers? I’ve been playing on RP servers pretty much exclusively, and haven’t run into the harassment you describe. Of course, that might have something to do with my habit of avoiding cities whenever possible — my computer chokes down to about three frames a minute when I fly into Ironforge. I’m pretty antisocial on Warcraft. A friend of mine is more sociable, and I kind of let her screen most people before I talk with them.
April 11th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
[...] Rolling Pretty: Size and color and ageism in MMORPG [...]
April 12th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Actually as a male playing mostly male characters; last summer I was part of a little practical joke played on an RPing NWN server. For this we’d all created alternate accounts, rather silly names, and made a horde of female gnomes to rampage about (in the same vein as an article we’d read in PC Gamer about doing so for WoW). Well, we had our fun doing that, and played the chars a bit here and there after the fact.
Honestly, I was *shocked* by some of the tells I was getting out of the blue from people; some of whom I knew but didn’t know it was me on an alternate account. Just straight out vulgar propositions, “do u cyber?”, etc.
I must say, I lost a lot of respect for a number of my fellow players after that.
April 13th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Most the guys I know, have played females… some almost exclusively. They like to “roll pretty” too. They want their characters to “kick*ss and look good doing it”.
Just thought I’d add that in.
April 13th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Obviously you know what to do when you get tells like that… “ooh, you’re hot. Tell me, do you like… animals?”