In First-Person Shooters/Action Games:
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- 21% (7 subjects) reported that there is NO DIFFERENCE in how they are treated when they play female vs. male models in Action games. Says Sudsaroo: "most players don’t care, in FPS's there are quite a lot of female characters. I’ve found no-one pays much attention to it."
Similarly, JC comments, "In first-person shooters, whether you’re female or male does not seem to matter. You are there to demolish and be demolished by other players and they won’t think twice whether your character is male or female."
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- 6% (2 subjects) reported that female models are treated BETTER than male models in Action games. Parakeet writes, "for whatever reason people don’t seem to expect a female character to have that competitive spirit or something, so they generally aren’t as hard on you if you don’t feel like playing 100%."
In that same vein, Lemming recounted one notable occasion when a male player didn’t try as hard to beat him in Quake 2, until he found out Lemming was not really a female: "…a player seemed unable to beat me to the trigger….after a while the player started a conversation with me, and eventually got round to asking ‘are you really female?’ I told him I wasn’t…and that was the end of the conversation- and my good frag count J "
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- 3% (1 subject) reported that female models are treated WORSE than male models in Action games. [CYA]wolf comments on the abuse and harassment that female gamers, and thus, males playing female models, suffer in action games: "Name calling across the screen and out and out bigotry. I’ve been called many things in my time by male players who have had no idea that I was a man."
Are Males Ridiculed for Gender Bending?
Subjects were asked whether they are ridiculed, teased, or insulted by others when they choose to play female characters in games. 30 subjects responded.
- 60% (18 subjects) report that they are NOT ridiculed or insulted. In part, they hypothesize that this is because no one knows they are actually males playing as females.
- 40%, or 12 subjects, report that YES, they are ridiculed at times. The severity ranges from teasing "in good fun," to outright insults. Cruciform: "oh yes, if only their mothers knew the language their little boys were using to describe women on the internet. Apparently getting your ass kicked by a female is an acceptable reason to experiment in four and five letter words that would get them spanked at home."
Dennis F. Heffernan states, "when some (usually) adolescent male finds out that the female he’s been drooling over is actually a guy in drag, and goes into homophobic shock."
Slacker: "I get a lot of trash talk at the LAN parties."
DavPilky: "my friends find it very curious that I always pick female characters, and regard me suspiciously when it comes up."
Jasper: "I got teased for answering this survey…but it’s o.k. since I just tease them back and ask them why they enjoy looking at guys in their games all day? ;-) "
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