I'm celebrating WoW's 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.
The following was originally posted on December 19th, 2006 under the title "Gender-Bender":
In my WoW guild there's been a trend to create alternate characters1 lately and I decided to join in...2 and do something different for a change by creating a male warlock called Wilson. I had read this interesting study about gender-bending in MMORPGs in the past, and while that was about EverQuest I figured that the basic principles would apply to WoW too.
Playing as a male did feel different right from the start...3 no random people hitting on you for example, and I automatically found myself trying to restrain my use of emotes and such - too girly.4 Still, I'm afraid I can't really report more interesting experiences yet since I soon switched to questing with guild mates who knew my real sex anyway and now I'm mostly spending my time cracking jokes about my manliness. "There's nothing as unmanly as failing to pick a flower." (Herbalism for the win!) "Let me give you a manly hug!" "Just look at my manly ponytail sway in the wind!" etc. ;-)5
Of course Wilson's current outfit doesn't help me take the experience of being a male more seriously:6
Let's just say that I wasn't the only one who was in stitches when I put this on... just goes to show that the makers of the game don't discriminate against either sex as far as ridiculous outfits are concerned!7
1 I'll be honest, until reading this, I'd kind of forgotten what "alt" is actually meant to be an abbreviation of.
2 This series is approaching its end, and it's worth noting that after this post about alts, there are no more entries about me levelling my main. In the previous installment it sounded like my priest was approaching 50, and then I just didn't mention anything I did on her ever again (or at least not for a while, until after Burning Crusade had come out). This is interesting to me because it seems to match my vague recollection that I didn't particularly enjoy what counted as endgame in Vanilla. Obviously I was still invested enough to finish levelling and keep playing, but I remember finding the zones unbearably dreary and the dungeons increasingly difficult (I think the last instance of which I saw the final boss was Sunken Temple. I did join runs for places like BRD, Stratholme and Scholomance several times, but didn't see much success in any of those places at the time.)
3 Eighteen years later... I did write a longer post about my strange struggles with playing a male character in Star Wars: The Old Republic, which you can find here.
4 The "emotes=feminine" idea is something I haven't thought about in a long time, but I suppose I still see it as true to some extent. It depends a bit on the type of emote I guess... I don't tend to think that anyone who uses a friendly smiley face in chat is a woman these days, but I do remember it still feels a little strange to me to be more openly friendly to strangers while playing a male character, because there's some deeply tainted part of my brain that thinks males aren't "supposed" to behave that way for some reason.
5 I've got to admit this whole paragraph makes me cringe heavily nowadays. Not so much because of the bad jokes themselves, but because I clearly thought I was being incredibly clever and hilarious making them.
6 I believe I've identified the main pieces that make up his ensemble as a Barbaric Linen Vest paired with Ancestral Woolies.
7 I was at least partially wrong about that in the sense that these particular pieces were the exception rather than the rule for looking equally ridiculous on both female and male characters. A lot of other armour pieces that looked like normal shirts or vests on males actually turned into tank tops with exposed belly buttons on female characters (or worse).
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