I tend to like the character designs and aesthetic of female characters better. I usually joke about how, if I have to stare at an ass for 100 hours, it may as well be an attractive one, but even that is simplifying, and not really accurate.
I find a lot of the gaming industry's trumped-up machismo to be overpowering, and the depiction of males as super-masculine steriod-fueld apes to be ridiculous - in a game like wow - where the sexual dimorphism between male and female avatars is extreme, my preference is usually for the female genders because they more closely resemble an actual human form.
This preference for less charicaturized avatars works both ways though - I'm averse to hyper-feminine, and overly sexualized female characters as well. I don't want to play a woman in short shorts, with a giant rack, an hourglass figure, and legs until tuesday, either. I don't find those characters appealing at all.
So it basically just comes down to my having a preference for the character types that most closeley resemble an actual human being. In games with ultra-macho men, that means looking to a female character, and in games with over-sexualized "male-ideal" women,that means looking back to men. Given the male dominated industry though, and the tendency for game characters to be an expression of a male power fantasy, I tend to select female characters (even if the game's design doesn't lean to ultra-machismo) simply to level the gender bias back out.
I play a feale character in Fallout and Mass Effect, becuase I consider male characters to be clichee and expected in those roles - and taking a female character, building her to look like a normal human being, and placing her in a scenario that was designed for men by men helps to neutralize the inherent gender bias.
Does that make any sense?
Playing a girl helps take the male-dominated gender bias out of the equation?
-m
That is to say, when I play a female character it feels less like an expression of gender?
