Possible Prolonged Absense

See, here's the thing.

The new World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, was released yesterday. And I bought a copy.

And I'm going to play it.

A lot.

Which means I might not be reading, writing, eating, or sleeping for an indeterminate amount of time, probably starting tomorrow since today is my last day of work (from which I post most of my entries).

And not only that, classes start soon. Which means I need to get as much leveling out of the way as I can before then (I'm half way through 75, so it should be no sweat to hit 80 before December 1). Though my last two quarters at RIT will be lighter than usual, I make no promises.

Not that anyone's here reading my stuff anyway. Oh well.

WoW Sexism: New and Improved

As you might have heard, the new World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, was released a couple of days ago. While questing, I ran into these two charming characters:


Meet Olga the Scalawag Wench and Gerald Green. Olga is a pirate wench that serves booze (hence the wine bottle in her hand) off the coast of the Howling Fjord. Gerald is a farmer whose settlement on the Borean Tundra is under attack (hence the mace). Both character models are new; if we've seen them before, we haven't since Warcraft III, which was released some years ago.

Your interaction with Olga begins when you accept a quest to get some information out of a very drunk pirate, who is dancing on the table of Olga's establishment. When he refuses to talk to you, you go to Olga. She offers to sweet talk the guy into talking to you. So she walks over, flirts a little with him, gives him some free booze, and then you ask him what you need to know. He spills it, and that's it. While brief, I think there are some interesting things to take out of this.

While I could get in to the misogyny of Olga's profession, I think it's self-explanatory. What is important to mention though is that Olga is certainly not the first and only pirate wench in the game; there are plenty of thinner ones. She comes across as confident and sturdy. While I thank Blizzard for including a fat woman as part of their non-playable character set, I wonder if she couldn't have been placed in a better profession. I think being a pirate wench and flirting successfully with the drunk man reinforces some ugly stereotypes about fat women, including but not limited to "fat women are easy" and "you need to be drunk to find fat women attractive."

Gerald gives you many quests that involve the saving of his settlement. He is surrounded by two, thinner characters, a man and woman, both wielding weapons and looking determined. Gerald is impassioned about the saving of their lands. "If Farshire is wiped off the face of Azeroth, then at least let us be remembered as the first ones to defend our land and the last ones to give up," he tells you for one quest. What's great about Gerald is that he challenges the "fat people are lazy" stereotype. Not only is he not running in fear, he is leading the defense against the Scourge invasion. And, as a farmer, you know he couldn't be lazy anyway.

It's too bad that Gerald challenges the ugly stereotypes and Olga enforces them. But at least we have Olga in the first place. In fact, the only commenter on Olga's Wowhead entry says, "OMG! Could it be? A female character that doesn't haver a size zero waist?" Indeed.

And gosh, I do love her bra tan lines.

WoW Sexism: One More Thing

I recently wrote about sexisim in World of Warcraft, but having done so, I realized I forgot a very personal moment that seems silly for me to have forgotten. (This story probably does deserve its own post anyway, I suspect. The old one was long enough.)

First, a little background. Generally speaking, guilds that participate at least semi-regularly in raids have a Ventrilo ("vent" for short) or TeamSpeak server for voice communication during raids (and off-times, for social interaction). Since our raid leaders are overwhelmingly male, you tend to hear mostly male voices.

I don't tend to speak very much in vent. I raided before the expansion, when the largest and most common raids were taken on by 40 people. So our raid leaders at the time were pretty strict about vent use - no chatter, no off-topic conversations. Only information that all 40 people needed to hear was allowed. So I learned to be pretty silent, since I'm not a raid leader. And that's stuck with me. Even though the largest raids nowadays max out at only 25 people, crosstalk is still a problem.

And so, when one of our female members spoke (who has been in the guild for some time, I believe), she was mistaken for one of the other female members. The officer was lightly ridiculed (by his fellow male officers), and he responded by stating that he has a hard time telling us women apart. I stated in a matter-of-fact-but-lighthearted-manner, "Sexist prick." There was laughter, followed by, "I'm guessing that was Casp." Yes, it was Casp.

I do not have a hard time telling the males from the other males, nor the females from the other females. The only exception I can think of - and it's a rather obvious one - is in the case of new people: it merely takes time to learn their voice and manner of speaking, particularly if they don't speak often. But this was not the case this time.

Usually, there isn't a terrible problem with our male players confusing women's voices. It has happened more than once though, in current and past guilds, with different men each time. This time stands out to me mostly because it's the most recent, and - importantly - because of his response to me. With the way the exchange progressed, it felt as if the word "bitch" was on the tip of his brain when he correctly guessed my identity. I believe I have a reputation for calling people out. Does speaking up make me a bitch? According to the co-founder of Bitch Magazine, yes. Is that a bad thing? According to the co-founder of Bitch Magazine, no. And I agree. Calling people out on sexism is never a bad thing.

There is another woman in the guild that I have great respect for, who has an even greater and more infamous reputation for being a bitch. Nanika calls out ignorance, untruth, whining, illogic, and bullshit in general. Some men unseriously state that they're afraid of her. I admire her.

Sexism in the World of Warcraft

Okay, okay. Yes, I play the damn game. ("Oooh oooh what do you play, what do you play?") I play a night elf ("awwwwwww :(") holy priest named Casperne on the Kul Tiras sever, with a bunch of nerds that line up under the banner of Lexington.

There is quite a bit of sexism floating around the world. Of Warcraft. (Sorry, had to do it.) Not only are the users themselves rather sexist, but the designers, at least, are too.

The foremost thing to discuss is, of course, the playerbase. Due to WoW's infamy, its playerbase could not be contained to a single demographic: rich and poor, young and old (12-70, I'd guess, averaging around 20), male and female, gay and straight, mature and immature, introverted and extroverted, educated and uneducated, right and left (-winged and -handed). Thus, you often have the pleasure of playing with really idiotic, immature people. Conclusion: no wonder there's misogyny abound. The best example is probably the oft-declared, "Girls don't play WoW!" or "There aren't any girls on the Internet!" Obviously, this is incorrect, and, in fact, most people say it knowing that it is, and I guess that's supposed to make it funny. Similar to "Oooh, don't hurt me, feminist-man-hating lady!" It's just not funny anymore.

There is, however, one good thing regarding gender that WoW embraces: you can play whatever gender you want. There are a lot of men that play female characters, and they aren't ashamed of it. (Compare to Ragnarok Online, where, when you create an account to start playing, you choose your gender, and then you can only play characters of the matching gender.) There are only two major reasons for this that I know of so far. Some of these players admit that they just like to see their female character's boobs jiggle when they run (and similar reasons), while others simply don't like the male character models. There is one other reason, and I've only heard my boyfriend give this reason so far: some identify better with females in real life, thus find it natural to play a female character. I have no idea how common this reason is. Only a handful of times have I ever heard someone use the choice to play the opposite gender as ammunition in an argument. It's generally a pretty accepted thing to do.

But when the developers themselves program misogyny right into the game, I tend to get a little annoyed. For example, this is my human female paladin:



Pretty skimpy, huh? Here's what this outfit looks like on a human male:



Surprised? I'm not either. The guy doesn't even have to have an uncomfortable wedgie all the time. It would have been pretty simple to just have the armor cover up the same amount of skin. This lends more to the sexist idea that the female body is community property and that women exist as eye candy.

Character models' body types deserve to be pointed out. The female human body is fairly proportioned, in my opinion. Her waist isn't itty-bitty, her thighs are healthy, and her boobs are, though ample, not enormous. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the male body is the truly unfair one: he really is packing, to an unrealistic degree. (And I just noticed that his legs appear to be shaved! Nutty.) When the blood elf race was announced as the new horde race for the expansion, I was ecstatic to find out that the male blood elf was not packing huge muscles. He was skinny, almost frail, and certainly feminine. Personally, I find such a body type to be extremely attractive. But Blizzard's average player doesn't, and after a lot of homophobic clamoring, Blizzard beefed up the model to the same levels as the male human, and it hasn't changed since.

As far as being a woman playing the game among males goes, I've been pretty pleased. I have never been talked down to because I'm a female and I don't know anything. No one has ever apparently disagreed with me because I'm female. My knowledge of how to play my class has never been questioned because of the fact that I'm female. In fact, I get a lot more respect for playing my class well in this game than I do for getting good grades in my tech classes at school. Men appreciate my work in the game more than they do in class. I can't begin to theorize why this might be true. In fact, this is merely anecdotal; it might not be true. It might simply be easier for my teammates to communicate respect to me over the Internet than it is in real life.

You might be surprised that those are the only examples I came up with. I chose to leave out the more "mundane" examples of misogyny (instances are divided into "5-man" and "25-man" dungeons, for example, instead of "5-person" and "25-person"), because they mostly come from the playerbase, not the developers themselves. And again, there really shouldn't be much surprise about the playerbase being misogynist. On top of that, the truth is that I play this game for much the same reason others do: to escape. I tend to try very hard to ignore misogyny in WoW because I'm trying to have fun here. And, as Shakes has wisely said, if I were dedicated to purposefully finding and calling out misogyny everywhere, I would be a very unhappy woman indeed.

Doubt not that I will continue to post examples of misogyny in WoW as I come accross them, even the mundane ones.