[...] has a thorough examination of that crossgender play paper that came out a few days ago and is getting widely reprinted.  It’s not pretty. This [...]

[...] is an incoherent rant prompted by posts from Jeff Freeman via Raph Koster and Richard Bartle and by way of Joystiq via The Inquirer. Each of those has something to do with [...]

[...] Raph Koster, a rant by Richard Bartle, provoked by the misinformative descriptions of ’slapdash and [...]

In the case of WoW it is safe to assume that the differences between the races and sexes are as near enough as makes no difference.

How about EverQuest II, where client-side optimization of everything possible is necessary for smooth gameplay on just about every system configuration? I’m pretty sure hair and cloth rendering are performance beasts, too, so if you have a larger character, there would be more hair and cloth to render, right?

As to whether one character would preform better on your PC than another, this would come down purely to the detail in the construction (number of polygons, number of bones, sizes of textures, etc). In the case of WoW it is safe to assume that the differences between the races and sexes are as near enough as makes no difference. Even the relative polycount difference between a massive Tauran and a little Gnome would be totaly unnoticeable. And in fact once you start equipping gear or riding mounts you’ll quickly be displaying far more detail on your character than a level 1 Tauran.

So that would mean you tend to attack female enemies more often than male enemies, right?

Wait, enemy characters have gender!? In most games, I can’t tell one goblin from the next. Non-player character diversity is usually trivial. I’ve played few games in which the monsters of any particular class differed in physique and appearance. (I usually take out the smallest enemies first and work my way up to the largest.)

As for size affecting performance, why would reducing the dimensions of a model have any effect on the time taken to render it? It’s not as if it has fewer polygons…

I would assume that a bigger object uses more pixels, which equates to more data being transferred to and from the client. Players don’t usually move static objects, so the position of the pixels for those objects doesn’t need to be reported back to the server when the client moves the character. As I’m not a programmer, I could be completely wrong, but that’s the assertion I’m positing. The performance improvement could well be negligible, but whether there is an improvement isn’t necessarily the point. Motivations don’t have to withstand scrutiny to be motivations.

The concept of gender in most games lacks depth anyway. Gender in games seems to only refer to the stereotypical appearance of a character (e.g., strongmen and barmaids.) I guess that’s what happens when people are fearful of making gender meaningful.

Well, that would depend on the game. If you were in WoW, for example, the female gnomes are the same size as the male gnomes (and both are significantly shorter than anything else).

>more elegant in their animations, giving the impression of smoother gameplay;

So that would mean you tend to attack female enemies more often than male enemies, right?

>models of female characters might be smaller in size and thus increase visual and overall performance by consuming less computing power and bandwidth.

It has scant effect on bandwidth, because the client constructs the images from records that are the same size for every character. Well, unless it’s Second Life and you’re wearing hoochie hair or something, but then you most certainly would not want a female character if bandwith were an issue… As for size affecting performance, why would reducing the dimensions of a model have any effect on the time taken to render it? It’s not as if it has fewer polygons, and if the model is small then those pixels it would have occupied if it were large still have to come from somewhere.

Richard

(If possible, I also try to choose the smallest character race and decrease the body size to the minimum.)

Since character selection is so incredibly politically correct, the gameplay differences between genders is effectively reduced to trivial interactions with specific NPCs; therefore, I see gender in games more as a matter of software performance than anything worthwhile for deeper consideration… I also prefer to look at a female Erudite’s rear-end over a male Ogre’s.

A male player spends a good deal of his time looking at a horse’s backside rather than his character’s…

Get a magic carpet. ;p