One thing I've noticed about Guild Wars thats different from other online games

When I play Guild Wars (or any online game), I normally refer to my friends or party members as a 'he', even if it is a female character, because I keep thinking that it is a male playing as a female. However, sometimes people say to me "I am not a he I am a she!", in fact this happened in Guild Wars like 4 times just last week.

I used to play games like Counter Strike and Diablo 2 online, and a lot of fans for those games are males. I don't think I've come accross many female gamers in any of those 2 games. Guild Wars on the other hand has alot of female gamers, since now I have to refer to people as "he/she" instead of simply "he". More on female gamers, me and my little sister have our own seperate GW accounts, and she plays A LOT more than me.

I think that Guild wars has a lot of female gamers due to its more friendly atmosphere. Diablo 2 on the other hand is just plain silly, gorey, violent, gothic etc, which does not interest female gamers as much as Guild Wars does. My sister does not like Diablo 2 at all but she is in love with Guild Wars.

Yeah very true, I encounter many people in GW who i assumed where male, only to be corrected. When they correct me i just tell them - girl/guy same thing, all that matters is how well you play your role

I'm guessing many other females out there didn't announce their sex, so nobody would have ever guessed

but i loved D2..........

well, GW is more relaxed, "do your own thing if u don't want to fight everything that's moving" kind of game.

and its pretty

and yes im a female

PS- actually sometimes i say im a guy to get away with some comments
just for fun

yeah..i have about 5 or so females in my guild but they mostly have a guy friend/boyfriend/husband that plays it.

its pretty funny when you say 'hey man' and they get offended, but you can get away with 'hey guys.'

Actually it annoys me to no end being called a he. The assuption is often made that most gamers are male, which is the rp industry is actually wrong though most women don't or won't generally announce the fact ingame. Nonetheless if you don't know there are ways that you can avoid using he/she, or simply use the gender of the character.

I see people as their characters, if you play a female character, I'll call you a 'her' if you play a male character, I'll call you a 'him'.

I'm hapy with the concept that there are no female gamers/females online. I'm female (though, according to my previous sentence, that's not possible).

Of course, the weirdest thing is to have some type of voice communication, and play a male character.. with a female voice, to me, that sounds wrong. And yet, a female character with a deep male voice doesn't.. I'm weird.

Incidentally, I play because my b/f got me started on it, and we play together, though.. not as much as we used to... for anyone to say I play because he does would be wrong and strangly offensive to me.

Some of my best friends from GW are female players & it would be really really really shame if GW would be just male dominated game.

I have long believed that gender only makes sense offline. Online, you are all a genderless blob of pixels.

In 6 months of playing i've found many girls on the other side of the screen and one of them was my guild leader o.O

Call me a female, I'll kill you. I'm proud of my gender.

I know many females that play GW.

I call strangers not knowing their gender "shims" .

It's very common in RP games for females to play. I know a lot of females that are into WoW, too.

I usually just refere to people by the sex of their character on default.

Also consider the fact that there are a lot of people who lie online!

I saw spam once for an all-girl guild that required you to "prove" your gender on TeamSpeak.

So get out your falsetto voices and pretend you are one of the girls without having to fuss with all the clothes and other impersonator stuff usually requred.

My hubby got me on this game as something we could 'do' together.....so yep, female here (guilty as charged).
Most of my characters are female only because most of the male character choices are butt ugly. My monk is male cause I liked the tats on the guys better than the girls.

GW has a lot more appeal to women than other games because:

1. Appearance. The scenery is just plain beautiful.
2. Casual. You don't have to grind for 1,000's of hours to play at a competitive level.
3. Pack oriented. Many other games are based on soloability...one of GW's basic tenants is the guild system which, in and of itself, makes the game more "group" or "family" oriented. Most females (generalization warning) tend to gravitate toward activites that are group/pack oriented.
4. Barbie-syndrome. Wealth in PvE is centered upon making your character look its best. Tons of different hairstyles, wardrobe choices, dyes, emotes...it's tailor made for dress up time.

I will call people "He" unless their character name have a girlie name in it... Sometimes it's quite scary that people with a girl name is actually a boy in real life :/

I'm a male but play female ranger, because i were so much used to the Amazon from D2 that i had no idea Rangers could be males aswell :P

I always find it funny, how people, when they find out im female, say how nice it is that women play, and stuff . Should be a matter of course by now, that woman play computer- and onlinegames.
But most people don't notice, I kinda have a teenage- boy voice. Really interesting, what boys talk about, when they think there are no girls around (f**king bears and pubic hair and stuff like that )

I'm a male with all female chars (make of that what you will, don't care). I usually don't care whether someone refers to me as he or she. Usually. Once they start trying to hit on me, however, I (politely) set them straight.

Heh. That was a totally unintentional pun. That's funny. I'll leave it.

Anyway, half the time I can't tell whether or not the hitter is male or female. It hardly matters, though, since I'm already taken.

Oh, on topic...yeah, I've met a fairly high number of females playing this game. A majority of them introduced by/playing with their significant others.

Ive always referred to people by character names rather than saying he/she just because it avoids the awkward " Im a girl..." & "Im a guy" response people get when they assume the wrong thing.

I always call people he/she based on their chars unless they correct me. .-.

Unless they are acting really noobish...then im calling them a he XD

Statistics shows 20% online gamers are female...

You just don't notice them because they kicks ass just like their male counter part

Not only do females play, but my past and present guild leaders are women. They kick ass and are a couple of the best gamers I've played with. I have a feeliing they get a kick out of it when boys are surprised to find out they're women.

I am a woman who bought and started playing GW: Prophecies about a week after it came out in retail. About 1 week later, I bought a second copy and gave it to my husband as a present. Now we're in the same guild and play together lots.
That stands the assumption that women play because their men do on it's head...which is where sexist assumptions belong.

Some of my avatars are female and some are male. My guildies know who I really am, and it doesn't matter if other players do or not.

I usually go He/she, solves the problem :P

Well that's so not true The character is a blob of pixels, not the person playing

Anyhow, it's true GW has alot more females than usual, and someone else already posted pretty much all the reasons i had in mind, so no need for me to repeat it.

I also think that alot more girls are into cooperative play, and hardly any in competitive. I guess competitive is more of a guys thing girls are more into snuggling than thinking of better ways to smack some team/guild/player :P

That's the best policy.

Isn't 'Gaile' at anet female? As a 3D artist I know that more people in 3D are women than men, but that is on the art end. In San Francisco and the Silicon Valley in the graphic arts women are a slight majority as well. But Programming is still male dominated, outside of web programming, which is just slightly female dominated. That all is my way of saying 'gaming' programmers might have more women than other areas of programming based on the connected skills - but that I don't know for sure.

In the game, it is polite to refer to people as they label themselves. Likewise anywhere online. The first way to get me on your bad side is to find my real name and use it somewhere I dentify myself as 'arcady'. Not that that I have anything against my real name, but it is not the handle I used here, and not the identity I have here.

If I play a male character, I expect to be referred to as a he. If I play a female character, I expect to be referred to as a she. If this bothers you, then stop trying to use GW as a dating service...

The nature of GW might be more attractive to less 'hardcore' gamers - and that might be a reason why a lot of women hesitant to get into MMOs in past are willing to use this one to see if the concept is worth it. No monthly fees means GW is a great way to find out if you like what MMO is all about.

The ability to play alone or in groups through most of the content at your leisure also helps with transition players. The visuals of the game are very appealing. It is very 'artsy' within the game. Sometimes I just stop walking and spin the mouse around for a few minutes. Other times I'll seek the high ground just to capture a view. Its probably a bit sexist to make a gender claim on that - beyond that the arts seem to attrach more women - but I think it can also attract more men who are not hardcore gamers.

The female characters in GW are not secondaries. Both the NPCs and PCs have major roles, no less than men. This I feel is a big helper for the game. So often in fantasy and science fiction done by men the women are reduced to 'candy on a stick' - use them, enjoy them, move on. In so much of fantasy the only female NPC is the barmaid, the farmer's wife, adult versions of 'Gwen' that act like the child version, and people needing rescue (Of course if you read fantasy lit done by many women, it is often just as bad in the opposite direction).

GW has major and minor female NPCs of power, like Devonna, Munne, the Xunlai, Aziure, Kasha, Artemis, etc...

GW female PCs can be beautiful and powerful. Women often complain that any woman who is attractive is sexism against women just by existing - but, just like men want to be a 'strapping heroic Conan or Aragon' when they imagine themselves a hero, women want to be both powerful and beautiful. They want to imagine themselves as an ideal. And a game that allows that is naturally going to pull them in even while they object to the very thing pulling them in. We have been trained in this culture to not see appreciation of 'Fabio' or 'George Clooney', or 'Richard Gere' as sexist, but the reverse, appreciation of a like woman, as sexist. And yet it is a universal human truth that with any such figure people of that gender want to be them, and people of the other gender want to know them.



It has never been that women do not like video games as much as men, just that the industry has refused to market to them for the past 20-odd years. GW doesn't specially market to them (and a lot of past games have failed on women because their idea of marketing to women was to theme around games girls at age 6-8 play), but it doesn't make it hard for them to get into either.

I'm male playing female characters...I just prefer them. Given the choice of watching a hulking over-sized warrior vs. a petite ranger running around...let's just say I'm comfortable enough in my own skin not to need the "moster truck" of the GW world. I often let it go if I'm refered to as "she" unless it gets personal. I usually role-play so getting mistaken for a female is just par for the course. I have a tendency to refer to others by name or profession...eliminates those unnecissarily embarassing converations: "Dude, I'm a dude, dude." I have a female role-playing buddy that refers to me as "sister" in game...she knows I'm male IRL, but neither of us mind the ambiguity. She belongs to an all female guild and they invited me knowing I'm male...terribly flattering...my wife (of 13 years) laughed at me and said she always knew I was the "girl" in our family...I am an art teacher, do the cooking, cleaning and laundry...but you know something? Girls dig that.

I still get a chuckle out of when I was playing my female warrior, one of the players said that I was hot, I just had to tell him that he wouldn't say that I he say me in RL.

If 20% of the players are women, then I would say that only 10% of the female character are really female, although I am probably way off.

What I would like to see is a census to determine what percentage of men and women play GW and what percentage of each plays their gender. Just for fun, so we know what percentage of men avatars are really men and what percentage of women avatars are really women.

GW should market itself to women more, I think that this is an ideal game for women. I once interviewed a woman game writer and asked her what women wanted in games. She said that for women it was more about an emotional aspect, which I think GW does quite nicely. I think that the story part of PvE will appeal to women more than the combat part of PvP.

Disclaimer: I am guy, so what do I know?

some of my guildies tell others that theyre female so that they can get free stuff off guys.. lmao, i wouldnt fall for that and some of them get plenty cash just from that.

Hehe, well, my sister plays Diablo II LoD all the time, and likes it a lot. Not sure if she still plays, because I don't live with her, but she did. I've actually known quite a few female players through other games, even some of the FPS games.

I'm always suspicious of girl players because in Ragnarok Online, the first MMO I ever played, guys would play as girls and then become peoples fake e-girlfriends to get money and items then transfer to their real account. :S

Yeah it's scary but people do that in MMOs. A guy in one of my classes did that...he would play only female characters because "Lonely guys give you free gold and stuff." Don't know which was more pathetic...the guys giving you free make-believe stuff because they thought you were a girl or pretending to be a girl to get aforementioned stuff.

I refer to people by their character gender even though I know that, statistically, the person playing a girl character is probably a guy.

I wasn't that surprised to find a lot of real life girls playing GW, however.

LF some1 to bear my GW babies, will pay lots of plat. Pst Offer.








Note: this is not a serious request.