KasperHviid: When a game give me the choice between a male and a female avatar, I always choses the female. For some reason, a female avatar feels more natural to me. Which is kind of wierd, with me being a guy.
Now, the strange thing is that I don't feel any inclination towards having titties or wearing frilly dresses in real life. I mean, if I had some overarching desire to be a chick, it would kind of explain it.
I think it has something to do with the distance the player has to the avatar in 3rd person perspective. I wouldn't choose a female avatar in a 1st person shooter. Another perspective is that players always take the role of radically different personas. Theres a world of distance between the psychopath killer in
Hotline Miami, the macho hero in
Duke Nukem and the naive boy in
Little Inferno. Yet, as a player, I can effortlessly swap between those roles. Since there is such great distance between who the player are and the role he plays in the game, it might not be all that mysterious if some player prefer avatars of the opposite sex.
But generally, I prefer games that doesn't let the player choose between different avatars. I think the strength of games such as
Duke Nuk'em 3D,
Portal and
They Bleed Pixels is that the games creators has decided on a single main character, created specifically for the games universe.
If you've got a female character and it isn't first person then you can see her on the screen. Games like Tomb Raider or X-Blades or Blades of Time for example. Now, in those games you don't actually get to choose your character or their gender of course but you're playing a female character nonetheless. I'd rather stare at a hot babe on the screen for the 70 hours or whatever it takes to solve a game like that than some sweaty Conan type character. I mean that's why they call it boobraider right? IMHO, these types of games are specifically targeted for heterosexual males to presumably drool over the game character, or at least appreciate that they put a hot babe character in the game.
I think similar can be said for games where you get to choose from many characters male or female. Female characters in video games are most often made purposefully to have sex appeal to the player in some manner or another, and sometimes even very creepy in some ways. Some players will get that out of it also and others wont even care.
In other games, one might choose a character for their unique abilities or skills regardless of their gender as well. A game like Mortal Kombat for example is fun to play as any of the characters and to try them all, and they certainly put a good balance of scantily clad female characters in there. I think a lot if not most male players who play a female character in a game like that are doing it because they want to look at titties etc. rather than from fantasizing about actually being the character.
In online multiplayer many male gamers choose female characters and in some cases pretend to be female to other gamers believing that this gives them an advantage because there is a perception that female gamers will get treated better in games, get free items from males drooling over their avatar picture and similar. There's probably some truth to that too.
The games are getting more and more realistic looking too, and the CGI humans in games are starting to look more and more like real people. I think people will find virtual characters attractive in-game as they would if they were real life people and may be consciously or unconsciously drawn to play as a character just to see them more.
Some people may have sexual fantasies/fetishes or similar about being or acting as their game characters but that's probably uncommon in practice.
