20th May, 2004
I’m Just a Girl
Since my previous dilemma has been resolved, I’ve been able to spend some time playing Final Fantasy XI. In all, I find it to be a well-balanced game with few wanks and actually more than quite a few nice people playing. Cheers to Squeenix for coming out with such a great game.
One thing I’d like to take a minute to talk about is my character selection. The game features five races of peoples, one of which a character can only be male, another, only female and the remaining three races can be either sex. During the character creation process, and more or less on a whim, I decided to make my character a female. This has been an interesting and enlightening experience so far and I think I’m getting some insight as to why there aren’t more online female gamers out there.
The first thing that I noticed when I started my character, and this has held true for almost all the different arrays of clothing/armor that I can choose from, is that the tops of my character’s thighs are invariably exposed. While this looks sexy from a heterosexual male’s point of view, it seems a little impractical, especially if one is doing battle with pointy-toothed, weapon-wielding baddies. In contrast, male characters wearing the same clothing/armor don’t suffer from this exposure at all. Despite this shortcoming, I do applaud Squeenix for giving female characters a realistic body structure – not one with wasp-like waists and exaggerated breasts that tend to be so prevalent in the gaming world.
The other, more irritating thing that I have noticed while playing a female character is this: Apparently since I picked a female character from a race that allows either male or female, a large majority of other players, who are presumably male in real life, make the assumption that, in real life, I must be female as well (I have not noticed this behavior being directed towards those who are playing the female only race). I have been flirted with, given gifts, subjected to and the subject of all sorts of innuendo and even outright ogling (on one instance, I actually wished I could reach through my TV and punch the asshole on the other end). At times, I’ve felt pretty uncomfortable or even angry and I’m just a guy. I can’t imagine how a female would feel like in situations like this, but I bet that it is anything but warm and fuzzy.
Maybe this behavior is due to the anonymity of the Internet, maybe it’s because most of the people playing this game are hormone ravaged boys and young men, maybe it’s because of something else or a combination of all three. Regardless, if I were female and I was subjected to this, I probably wouldn’t stick around for very long. After all, the idea of a game is to have fun, right? I think both the gaming industry as well as the players have a responsibility to help clean things up. A little respect can go a long way.
Posted at 2:31 pm | Comment (0)
