MMO Weekly: My Life As An Undesirable Girl

09 Mar 2010 at 00:00:00 by Jeff Hollis

Hello there, my fellow MMORPG addicts, and welcome to the very latest, most cutting edge edition of MMO Weekly.  In this week's edition, I want to talk about one thing, and one thing only:  my gender reassignment procedure.

Yeah, that's right.  I've gone from burly man to effeminate, adorable young woman.  And I'm kinda hot, too. 

Now, as you may have guessed, I'm not talking about real life.  My real life wife would not, for one real life minute, put up with me becoming a real life woman.  In fact, she once made very clear that gender reassignment is just not negotiable (not that I was trying to negotiate in favor of that). To be fair, I also made clear that were she to get her gender reassigned, the level of affection we currently enjoy would similarly have to be, um, curtailed.  Plus, we have a son that would probably become very confused when daddy became mommy, and mommy was suddenly daddy.  I once read that confusion of that kind isn't good, developmentally, for kids.  And I read it on the internet, so it must be true.

No, no, no, I'm talking about my online life.  First, a bit of background:  in every RPG (both online and table top) I've ever played, I've basically played one kind of character.  I am consistently a large, strong orc-like character, and I like to melee people into mincemeat. There are a lot of warriors (and variants thereof) in my MMO history.  In fact, there has been little variety.

Currently bored with the genre, I decided that I would switch things up a bit.  I'd read some anecdotes over the years, of guys who played female toons, and how they suddenly got a lot of attention, numerous free gifts, near-instant guild-invites, lots of offers to power-level them, etc, just because they played a female toon.  Well, since I had nothing better to do (except hang some real life curtains in our newly painted real life bedroom, which is boring) I thought I would give the whole online gender-switching thing a try.  

First up:  Global Agenda

I decided to create a Roboticist (or “robo”, as the cool kids now call them), since I've been playing an Assault character for the past couple of months.  And to answer your question, yes, my Assault is a big strong male tank, just like I always play.  So anyway, I made myself a robo, and I decked her out pretty good.  Big red lips, a huge bouffant hair-do, and big blue eyes.  She's hot, in a 1950s bombshell kind of way.  Guys were going to fall all over themselves to be my friend, yessirree.

So I logged in, got into a mission, and started to play.  I was grouped with three guys.  This was going to be hilarious. 

First guy:  “What kind of a name is Pigg for a girl?  Are you a guy IRL?”

I had been playing for all of 30 seconds, and I realized that I had forgotten a critical detail.  In Global Agenda, all of your characters have the same name.  Since I named my assault character “Pigg”, all my alts are also named Pigg.  Pigg is not an attractive name for a cutesy girl toon like me.  The name “Pigg” does not make male players suddenly want to power level me, give me gifts, or treat me like a princess.

“Um, no, this is my brother's account,” I replied.

“Whatever.”

We ran through the first set of minion androids, and immediately one of my group mates starts saying, very condescendingly, “You know, dropping a med crate would be a good idea.”  The others all chimed in.  Mind you, I'm totally pulling my weight in this group.  It didn't matter.  Quite suddenly, I'm surrounded by guys who don't care about how good my marksmanship is, or how adroitly I drop my forcewall or turrets.  I'm the woman.  That means I'm the healer. 

“I don't get med crates until next level,” I said.

“Well, crap,” said one.

“Yeah, that sucks,” said another.

“Can you at least make me a sandwich?” said the third.  And they all laughed at me, those sexist bastards.

Pffft.  I played a couple of more missions, but no one was particularly nice to me.  Since it was dinner time at home anyway, I logged off, my career as a female toon apparently going nowhere fast.

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