If it's a third person game, I'd rather be looking at her ass throughout the playthrough than his.

My honest answer:🥚

No one has said this one yet:

I play a mix and generally want to create a distance between me and the character. I'm not thinking "what would I do?" I'm thinking "what would this person do?"

Having said that, if I pick a girl I won't pick a heterosexual romance option. Romance in games is strange.

There's an absurd gender dimorphism in most games where every guy is a mountain of muscles by default. I don't enjoy that body type - for myself, as a 5'5 dude, or even romantically - and women are usually on the softer, thinner side, so I tend to pick them at first.

If its a game where I can easily change genders, I'll flip around to my tastes, depending on which clothing looks better on whatnot. - Aliens:Fireteam Elite and Dragon Quest Builders 2 come to mind as examples that did that. Also games with intricate character creators, like Saint's Row (RIP) are welcome, but rare.

Eastern games tend to have softer men, so those tend to be exceptions. I recall picking male options in both Genshin and Path To Nowhere, and I usually enjoy the male leads in jRPGs.

I just want you to know there are pills which are fairly easy to get your hands on which if you take will make your skin softer and cause you to grow breasts.

If that sounds intriguing to you, I further inform you there exist many people who happily take these pills for the entirety of their lives and the kind of person who would want to take such a substance is in no way a freak.

But yeah, girl avatars can do sick acrobatics, huh?

I play a dude IRL so why would I do the exact same thing when I'm trying to escape from reality?

I dunno doesn't everyone wanna be a girl?

Girls pretty

But, if there's an option to be a robot, I'll pick that over a male or a female character. For example, PSO2

I don't really like looking at men. Yeah, the Witcher games are pretty alright but Geralt is kind of boring for me to watch. Given a choice between watching a buff dude throw a goblin at another goblin in bg3, or a buff woman do the same? Probably want to see the woman. Maybe it's just low grade ambient horniness.

I never think of the character in a game as "me". I had a friend who would always make himself. White guy with short hair and a short beard. That's not for me. I don't want to watch myself get blown up, stabbed, eaten by a dragon, whatever.

I don't like when games feel like they're just giving me eye candy or lazy titillation, though.The whole bikini armor thing I'm not into. Someone else mentioned they hate heels. Same.

I like boob physics.

Female outfits are typically more interesting, like in GTA maybe it's not as bad but I'm tired of every endgame male armor in rpgs of MMOs being a guy in a giant mountain of metal. It doesn't look "badass" it looks stupid and bland. (On the flip side bikini armor is also stupid)

That and female voices are just more... appealing? Idk the science behind it but there's a reason AI assistants are like 95% female voices.

Because catboy isn't an option yet.

But really it's because in fps they have abilities that make them quicker and it's more my style of gameplay. I rush to a choke point and try to make it look like there are many players there to push them towards my teammates.

Pretty shallow and lame reason: I vastly prefer staring at a woman's ass all day over a man's. I'm already a man 24/7 of the day, might as well mix it up.

That, or if I have to follow the internet I don't realize I'm trans?

I don't relate with masculine characters at all. No idea why as I don't identify as a woman. I have very little association or ownership of my gender.

Also character creators traditionally don't have a ton of options beyond the binary. Hair, pronoun options tend to be most of the extent.

Also feminine bodies tend to be more interesting. More curves and interesting shapes while a lot of masculine bodies are rendered as blocky.

Why not? I have to roleplay as myself all the rest of the time.

Why not? I also play races other than human too

Honestly I just pick whichever option looks cooler. Most games that ask me to pick play in third person, and if I'm gonna have to stare at this thing the rest of the campaign it might as well be something I think looks cool

Anyone else always annoyed at "girl armor" in games? Always looking like a two piece bathing suit and always either the stomach showing or an open V on the bust? Maybe you get some stupid armored skirt and bare legs too.

It isn't that I don't like playing heroines/villainess because I think they can definitely be bad ass and look cool as shit kicking ass but it is terribly done in the vast majority of games, in my opinion.

I don't judge anyone for their own thing but I think it sucks personally.

Mainly cause I find women aesthetically superior to men (maybe cause I like women) so I find my character nicer if it is a girl. Also thats cause I dont tend to identify with the main character

I like girls, mostly

Preface: the things I'll mention have, for the most part, improved a lot in more recent games.

I default to women nowadays in almost every game I play. A lot of it is because back when I was a kid male characters were basically hulking hairy ogres with your choices of hairstyles being short, spiked punk and bald. For example: one of my favorite games from my youth is KOTOR, and the male faces are incredibly forgetful. It's all white guy, white guy with a scar, white blond guy and so on. And that doesn't appeal to me in anyway. On the other hand women got many different options for hairstyles and faces that were cute, which is something I like to be able to be in games. Granted there are a ton of games where the women were just eye candy, and yet that was still more interesting than generic white guy #555.

There's something very appealing to me in being able to be a cute girl that still kicks ass in the same way as any buff guy in that world.

Well, my thinking was that I wasn't sure, actually. I just liked their proportion better. They were nice looking. It was almost a running gag for me and my friends that I would always play women.

There were exceptions, like if it was a character that was speaking it would depend on the voice, for example in Far Cry 6. I picked the male model because I preferred his voice over her. Or if the female model is like overly sexualized with over the top sized ass, ridiculous sized boobs, a distinct lack of clothing compared to men... No thanks. I want to play as a woman, not play as a "made for horny 14 years old by horny men-children" version of women. No thanks. That kinda thing. But that's about the only exceptions.

If I have the option in an RPG, it will be female. I'm gonna play Cyberpunk soon, you can bet your ass it will be a feminine type character. I played Mass Effect, Fem Shepard all the way. That GTA 6, for as little as I am excited by it for many reasons, I'm still very excited that one of the main characters is a woman.

I've always had a preference for playing women. I don't have a problem playing any character at all. I can always immerse myself in them. It's rarely an issue. But if I can, I like to play something that I identify myself with more, qnd that's always been more the case with characters that are fem coded.

They are usually smaller. Usually thinner than male models. They have a more rounded face. And they tend to have long hair. All of this always fitted much more with who and what I was. I never had much muscle. I was never that tall. My voice, even as I grew into an adult, was never the typical male voice. It always had a bit of femininity in it. I have long hair. I have a more rounded face compared to most men. It always clicked more with me.

So yeah, there have always been lots of reasons, but it's always been kind of nebulous as to why I just preferred it, you know? But then I figured out I was trans, so...

I like looking at women.

1. I like looking at women.

2. Having a female character and trying out a variety of cool outfits, dresses and make-up is fun. Especially as most games allow you to do a lot of customisation for female characters. Barbie in Night City, Barbie in Skyrim, Barbie in the post-Apocalypse. I can happily spend far too much time getting their outfit and make-up just right, before I even get down to kicking ass.

3. Female bad-asses are far more interesting than the boring male action hero stereotype.

4. Games are escapist fun. I'm a man. I'm tall, I do weight lifting. Why would I play as a man who looks like me, when I can play as a woman, something I would otherwise not get to experience?

It's hard to explain more concretely than "I just like women more". In multiplayer (and actual roleplay) games (and even emojis in WhatsApp) I tend to play women as well and won't correct someone when they use "she/her".

Now that I read it here from a couple other people, I would also agree that the female options are usually more interesting and grounded in all aspects (Voice acting, looks, skills).

I don't think I'm an unhatched trans (learned that term in the comments here hah), because I really don't mind being a guy. But I also wouldn't mind if I had been born a woman?

I don't go deep into role play stuff. My character is a character, not me. In games where it's "pick a man or a woman" only I'll tend to pick women because the voice actors are often better and you can better "play barbie" with character customization, plus of course the cliche reason.

With games that allow full customization I'll often make androgynous/non-binary characters with various dials at either extreme trying to break the character builder.

There are a few things I consider when picking gender in a game.

• Is the character voice acted? Which voice actor do I think performs better?
• is the game third person? Which gender has the better look in armor/clothing in the game?
• Does the game feature romance? If so, then I almost always pick my own gender for a first playthrough at least.
• Which gender do I think the plot of the game will be more compelling for?

In tabletop D&D, gender tends to be the last thing I choose in a character (as opposed to video games that usually want it to be your first choice), and I basically just look at the made character including personality and backstory and realize that it's more interesting or fun to play as one gender or the other.

Why not?

As far as I can remember, that's been the reason. All the characters I'd played as (Lara Croft and Aloy excluded) were male. Why not a girl?

So really, it's just been for the novelty.

I used to just make myself in games, but then someone suggested "make a character you think looks good since you're staring at them the whole game" so I did, and then I ended up giving them a personality after playing that game for several hundred hours. Now they're just my oc I always play as. It sucks though because my character uses a "boy" hairstyle so any game that gender locks hair (stupid) can't properly make her.

I basically coin flip. In games like Mass Effect, I'll play a male character and then years later play a female character -- just to encounter new conversation trees.

In D&D or something like that, it is somewhat harder, due to pronoun hell at the table (I sympathize with anyone having to deal with this on a larger scale -- it's insane on a small scale, and I can barely imagine being trans and having to deal with that...)

I like looking at female characters more than male characters. I enjoy the female form.

My favorite reason is seeing women in roles not explicitly written for women. Either it helps me reframe what women can be (reframing being a great reason to read stories anyway) or it points out how hilariously coded those roles are.

My second favorite reason is about playing something I am not, and examining how that changes my outlook and decisions. It's the same reason I want to play as a robot, or an alien, or a golem, or a dwarf, or whatever else.

Lastly, but maybe most poignantly, is women tend to have more varied depictions than men. There are far too many depictions of men that are brutish, boisterous, and warlike, which I am extremely not, and usually don't have any want to play as. Games that give you a character creator are way better in this respect, and I'm much closer to 50/50 male/female characters in those.