So anyway, anyone here identify with that at all? Find it interesting, etc.?
I do because I know I actively do it (shut up). While I haven’t played Croft, I do play in RPGs and I’m, without fail, a female. Same goes for fighting games. Partly because I prefer speed over strength, but it’s just… I don’t know how to explain it, it just seems right.
“I feel like I’m sort of in charge of protecting her – which is to say, protecting me,” as one gamer told me back then. “Both at once. It’s really unusual.” I’ve noticed it myself. When I control my avatar in almost any game, I’m pretty engaged. But when I play as Croft, the game is an order of magnitude more intense: I find myself sucking in my breath, involuntarily ducking at virtual obstacles.
Personally, I won’t play as anyone who doesn’t spew acid testosterone from their mouths to kill their enemies. My favourite shows are Dragonball Z and Walker Texas Ranger, and my favourite game is FFVI, but only when my party is Edgar, Sabin, Umaro, and Shadow. I can’t stand the female characters because their pixels don’t pump me up. I also refuse to use weapons. I pump Sabin’s vigor to 255, equip him with a genji glove and an offering, and punch my enemies 8 times for 9999. I also don’t let Umaro use his blizzard orb skill because magic is for pussies, but I like when he headbutts. With shadow I make sure he has a high block rate so that he counterattacks with interceptor more often. The only skills Edgar is allowed to use are chainsaw and drill because they’re power tools that you’d find in a manly man’s workshop. You might be thinking, “why FFVI? There are manly characters in other games!!!” True, but in what other games do you hunt down and kill a homosexual transvestite as the main villain?
I also killed Velius with 5 unarmed squires. After that, I only used Orlandu in battle because he made all my other characters look like women.
But ya know what? I’ve never actually played Tomb Raider, or DoA outside of game demos at EB Games, and I think there’s something to this article. I remember once reading somewhere that someone was complaining that there aren’t enough hot evil chicks you can play as in WoW (he said that he picks a female character because if he’s going to spend the whole game staring at someone’s ass, it might as well be a hot ass).
If the characters play differently, such as in fighting games, I play as whichever character I can play best (like in DoA3 I played as Ayane but in Tekken I used Heihachi, a.k.a. “diaper-grandpa” ^^) and if they play the same regardless of gender I just use whichever I like better
(Currently playing a lot of WoW so I’ll use that as an example. I’m mostly playing a female undead (rogue, if anyone cares), just because females the only undead who can have some sort of cool hair, but e.g. my tauren (hunter, I created it when I was sort of bored) is male because I think the female tauren look way too much like a cow walking on it’s hind legs. I know, they basically are cows walking on their hind legs, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like it.)
So no. I don’t really play female characters because I want to “identify with them” or anything. I play female characters becasue they either:
A. Fit my playing style better in the case where it does any difference.
B. The male characters look stupid.
Of course there can be other reasons too, but that is the two main reasons for me.
Also, I’m too lazy to copy the quote BlueMageOne used, but I’ve got something to say about that:
Which gamer can honestly say that he/she hasn’t leaned to the side in a tight curve in a racing game, or waved the controller around when trying to jump over a hole in a platform game? (Or any other similar involuntary movement just like the ducking at virtual objects mentioned in the text?)
I’d say it is definately not because one “identifies with a ‘last girl’ character”. It’s just because you play the game intensely and your body tags along with whatever your brain is thinking about.
I’ve hurt my hand smacking it into the table when waving the controller around, trying to make a little red boat shoot a giant crab while avoiding it’s claws and the little bullet things it spits.
Now I don’t know enough of the anatomy of boats to tell if it was a male or female boat, but I still sat there waving the controller around at bosses and leaning to the side when rounding corners on the race stages.
So yeah, the author of that text does have a point, but some of the things just sounds stupid.
(And I wonder if anyone thought about “the glazed expression of concentration” mentioned and that it might be just that. Concentration.
You can’t exactly play games like that while doing your taxes or something.)