Play time: 2:30- 4:15pm

I ran into my first female human character today while I was completing my last few quests. Maybe it was the escape element for my perspective as a player, but I did not even consider playing as a human. Most of the characters I have come across have been elves, so to come across a human character was quite the experience.

That experience was somewhat disconcerting. I previously had reflected on how I felt my avatar performs gender and realized that I had focused on gesture and movement rather than material evidence. And coming across the female human reminded to consider material items as a way of performing gender as well. My blood elf was not bare by any means, she actually was fairly covered in comparison to some of the avatars from other games I have seen. But the human character was considerably less clothed. And this reminded me of another Feminist Frequency video (because I did a little more digging) called “Lingerie is not Armor”. If Williams et al. provided data implying that to represent more women in video games there needs to be more women game designers, then ideally women should feel more comfortable with how their avatars appear. And if the avatars are overly sexualized because of choices a majority of male designers make, I really do feel like we are stuck in a wormhole. Women could have a harder time identifying as gamers because the representations of women in games are so limited and sexualized. And then I remind myself, I wasn’t considering any of this while I was playing because my personal avatar was not overly sexualized. Yes, she physically presents as female and performs certain tasks in a feminine way. But none of that hindered my achievements as a female player. So why am I, all of a sudden, so caught up in this idea of female avatars after seeing a character run past me for less than 2 seconds?

On the upside, I will be able to push this out of my mind for at least a little while as this is technically the end of my play blog for WoW. On the downside of that thought, I no longer have my number one procrastination tool for completing chapter drafts for my final thesis…

Butler, J. (2009). Performative acts and gender constitution: An Essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), pp. 3- 26.

FeministFrequency. (2016, June 06). Lingerie is not Armor – Tropes vs Women in Video Games. Retrieved February 24, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jko06dA_x88