Stolen Pixels #8: Just Between us Girls

In this installment of Stolen Pixels, Shamus Young's milkshake brings all the boys to the World of Warcraft, but he's just not that kind of girl.

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Aww, c'mon Shamus, why you gotta play hard to get? :)

Seriously, though, great comic as usual. Especially love the, "So... You're a gay man pretending to be a woman so you can hook up with straight men pretending to be lesbians?" HA!

I'm just tired of the trite excuse "if I'm going to be staring at an ass..." excuse. I'm fine with having reasons to play a chick, but at some point there are just excuses. If you want to look at a scantily clad female the whole time, just say it. "I have a massive libido that I cannot shut off!". That's not an excuse, that's a reason.

I mean, seriously, you didn't play with Barbie as a child because "if I'm going to be staring at a plastic model, it may as well have big boobs". I mean, come on.

Some people want to look at something hot. Some people want to experiment in a fantasy environment. Some people just want to explore role-playing (which can get creepy if taken too far). But, for the most part, most people just have a wild libido and feel the need to justify it with a trite term that sounds retarded.

Well done again, Shamus. I groaned when the link on Twenty-Sided said you were making the guys playing girls joke, but it was still pretty funny.

My wife has told me I'm not allowed to refer to *anything* as a milkshake any more, so I was especially amused to see that line.

@ccesarano: There are probably some people like that. There are some people that feel like the character models look better/more appropriate on other genders sometimes. Have you *looked* at male trolls in WoW, f'r instance? At least now they have the tribal art on their faces, which is more interesting, but seriously.... I have some males, some females. Mostly males. At some point, I've made just about every Tauren combination I can, so I switch over to the other gender. Or sometimes, I have a horribly punny name that just won't work on a male. Anything with "udderly" in the name has to go on a female tauren.

And for me, it's inevitable that if I make 10 characters, and one is female, the one that's female will be the one I enjoy playing. Just seems to be a fact of life.

I got into the habit of playing as girls for purely functional reasons - my best characters in Street Fighter and Virtua Fighter were the buxom babes, Chun Li and Sarah. Now it's a bit of a habit to gender-balance the characters I make. I am so bored of space marines / WW2 marines that it's good to hear a voice that doesn't sound like Christian Bale's Batman once in a while. The only person to complain? An ex-girlfriend, because SHE wanted to be the girl.

Also, recently the female content has been better than the male content anyway. Think Mass Effect's lady voice actor, or Rock Band's sweet outfits.

@ccesarano: People who do the "if I'm going to be staring at an ass..." excuse usually do that because they have been attacked with the "a guy who plays a girl, that's so gay!" line.

To get back to the main subject, I'm not insecure in my sexuality. I play an equal mix of male and female characters, just like I have one character for every race, and for every class. I just like the diversity, I don't project myself into the characters I play.

This has always been an interesting debate. Back in my elder days on the Compuserve RPG forum one of my best friends actually told me that he didn't want me to use his real name because it limited his ability to play both genders. He was strictly "gender neutral" in game and nobody really seemed to mind all that much.

When evolving into table top gaming, there would simply be times when we would have character concepts that screamed "female". I've had other P&P gamers look at me oddly when I say I've one of my all time favorite characters was a female, especially when my wife is next to me and I'm holding my one year old.

MMOs are the next big Roleplaying venue, so it's only natural that it follows through. Male or female, a character is a character. If you are going to do them justice, you have to keep yourself independant of the character and play them as they exists.

Jhereg42 brings up a good point: In a tabletop game, one person plays all the NPCs. So either everyone in the whole world is the same gender, or you have to be comfortable with a little cross-gender RP.

Tabletop gamers are fine with this, but players in a computer game sometimes freak out for whatever reason.

After seing (read: becoming obsessed) Kill Bill I want to model all my characters after Beatrix kiddo.

When I played WoW I played on a roleplaying server, so for me, gender swas more than asthetics. My response when smeone asked "Why would a guy play a female character?" was "Why would a human play an elf character?", it seems like, according to the one I asked "that's not the same thing".

The "if I'm going to stare at an ass" argument doesn't work to me, because that's not where I look when playing, neither with male nor female characters.

Ok, fine, call me a geek for this, but this comic clearly doesn't take place in Goldshire. I'm just saying.

"When I play as a Dwarf nobody thinks I secretly want to be a four-foot alcoholic with enough facial hair to stuff a matress."

As a fan of dwarves, I have to say that this characterization was both (a) hilarious and (b) spot-on. A definite coffee through the nose event, there.

"Some people play as Tauren, but that doesn't mean they want to have sex with cows."

That's the only reason I made my Tauren character.

Shamus Young:
Jhereg42 brings up a good point: In a tabletop game, one person plays all the NPCs. So either everyone in the whole world is the same gender, or you have to be comfortable with a little cross-gender RP.

Tabletop gamers are fine with this, but players in a computer game sometimes freak out for whatever reason.

That depends on the maturity of the group, to be honest. A group of 13 year old kids experimenting with their first game of D&D are going to have different expectations than a group of 30 year olds playing a WoD mixed rules game. The former will more than likely lack the maturity to play a game where a character is not of the same gender because they are still defining their sexuality. It makes them uncomfortable, but because they are all playing together the group dynamic stays the same. The 30 year olds are likely far more self defined and as such have no problem diving into a character of the other gender. By that time, your sexual orientation should be a well defined part of your self image. This reflects itself in the group dynamic.

This is where the on-line realm runs into it's issues. People of all age ranges play on the same server, and thus the experiences are all mixed. A 26 year old who likes playing a hot and sassy night elf healer is running with a warrior who is 14 and cannot imagine a guy playing the sassy hot chick.

The "if I'm going to look" arguement is really an arguement geared toward that mindset. P&P may still be the "nerd" group of RPG fanatics, but when interacting through MMOs a good background in tabletop gaming can really make the experience far more engrossing.

DrDrizzew:
Ok, fine, call me a geek for this, but this comic clearly doesn't take place in Goldshire. I'm just saying.

I no rite?! There are no columns like that in Goldshire.

/Nerdsigh

Very funny comic. I laughed at the dwarf thing, too, Samrobb.

Guilty. To the point of claiming to be female in RL, too. When I bump into the flirty ones, I just mutter something about my "husband," and if they don't get the point I /ignore and walk away.

I'm not that kind of girl.

And the ultimate irony?

The person playing the human character in this comic strip is ACTUALLY A WOMAN (yes, me).

I used to belong to an all-female guild on Bronzebeard, called Daughters of the Alliance. Occasionally we would get guys who would pretend to be women in an effort to join our guild. I really don't know what they were expecting, but most of the time guild chat consisted of someone complaining about their jerky boss, lamenting yesterday's chem lab quiz or describing the latest cuteness of their kitten.

What, exactly, do you guys THINK we talk about when you're not around?

Excellent comic, Shamus. But I never, EVER, want to see a mattress filled with dwarf hair!

lesterley:

Excellent comic, Shamus. But I never, EVER, want to see a mattress filled with dwarf hair!

Fine. But now I have NO IDEA what to get you for your birthday.

Shamus Young:

lesterley:

Excellent comic, Shamus. But I never, EVER, want to see a mattress filled with dwarf hair!

Fine. But now I have NO IDEA what to get you for your birthday.

Tauren hair?

Absolutely brilliant. I registered here just so I could tell you that each comic here is better than the one previous (and they've all been pretty good).

As a guy whose first character in WoW was female... I approve. But I don't hide the fact that I'm male at all - in fact, I even purposely gave that character a rather male name. I just wanted to play a night elves, and male night elves are ugly. I didn't feel like looking at the back of one for hours, and the solution was obvious enough.

It's funny, though - I meet a lot of other female characters who thought like me... haven't met any (at least to my knowledge) who were trying to actually be female. Course, what would I know... they could just not suck at it.

Lorechaser:
My wife has told me I'm not allowed to refer to *anything* as a milkshake any more, so I was especially amused to see that line.

What, not even actual milkshakes?

Heh, the comments at the side were even funnier than the actual comic.

Whilst I think Shamus is mostly right, I think there's a little bit of a power trip from having a hot avatar that might tilt the balance slightly.

Andraste:

DrDrizzew:
Ok, fine, call me a geek for this, but this comic clearly doesn't take place in Goldshire. I'm just saying.

I no rite?! There are no columns like that in Goldshire.

/Nerdsigh

I don't think it's supposed to be set in Goldshire. It's evidenced by the line "and that one time when we went to Goldshire and... OMG why?" Shamus just has to explain the place reference to all of us who don't play a certain bright and colorful RTS-turned-RPG.

Not all female toons have RL guys steering them. I'm quite sure that around 5% have legitimate 13yr old girls driving them. Or so their mastery of the English language leads me to believe. To me, that is even scarier than getting it on with another bloke, mostly because it can land you in prison.

Ha! Loved it!

If I want to be an Alliance Druid, I have to be a Nelf. Male Night Elves just look silly.

Hence, female Nelf Druid. To bring the sexy along with my male Troll Mage.

Trolls are just made of win.